The Vergecast - AGI is coming and nobody cares

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Nilay and David talk a bit about this week’s launch of the Verge subscription, plus what’s coming next. (There’s still time to send questions for next week! 866-VERGE11 or email [e-mail].) Then they talk about the streaming news of the week, and the ways streaming services are continuing to act like cable companies. Then Kylie Robison joins to talk about the lowering stakes for AGI, shipmas at OpenAI, and more. Finally, in the lighting round, it’s crypto and browsers and Intel. And more crypto. Further reading: Here we go: The Verge now has a subscription ESPN is coming to the Disney Plus app starting today Max is testing always-on HBO channels Max is finally about to start cracking down on password sharing. Walmart bought Vizio  OpenAI’s 12 days of ‘shipmas’ include Sora and new reasoning model Sam Altman says AGI will “matter much less” than people expect Sam Altman on Elon Musk and OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft. ChatGPT’s search results for news are ‘unpredictable’ and frequently inaccurate Stop using generative AI as a search engine Misinformation expert admits ChatGPT added fake details to his anti-deepfake court filing Bitcoin just hit $100,000  Dia is the The Browser Company’s AI-powered follow-up to Arc Threads takes an important baby step toward true fediverse integration Threads’ next update is a search feature that finds the post you’re looking for Meta says it’s mistakenly removing too many posts Intel’s CEO is out after only three years What happened to Intel? Trump picks two nominees who could decide the fate of Big Tech and crypto  Spotify Wrapped 2024 adds an AI podcast to recap your listening habits Apple Music’s yearly recap is finally available in the app Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years,

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients.

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Give it to me. Hi, I'm Nealai, and I would like you to pay us money. I'm also your friend. David Pierce is here. Hi, I want slightly less of your money than Neelai does. I feel like that's my brand. It's like Neelai only less. That's what I'm here for. TV, but not very good.

Exactly. That's what I do here. Big Verchast today, Kylie Robinson's going to join us. There's just a lot of AI stuff and all that boils down to. What if it's not as good as we said it was going to be? And they're all talking this week is the real thing I've noticed. A lot of people are talking. And when they do that, we have to talk about it.

Yeah. So, Kyle's going to join us in a bit. David has put together a package called Cable, a Soback. It's so bad. Which is a threat, really. We have a lightning around with, I want to just say this as directly as I, Ken, a hilariously amazing sponsor, given the topics that we're going to discuss today. All kinds of stuff going on.

But we should start with our own news, because what is the show about, if not being totally self-indulgent about the making of Theverge.com? Right. That's what everybody tunes in for, not tech news, just deep inside baseball about our website. So the news this week, you probably saw it. If you're listening to The Vergecast, it's almost certain you saw our news this week. We launched a subscription on our, our website. on our website.

It's $7 a month or it's $50 a year. If you're in the U.S. in Canada and you give us the $50 a year, we're going to mail you a print zine, which is very fun called Content Goblins. It's very expensive to ship and mail things overseas. So we're figuring out a way to do something for our readers and our listeners overseas. I'm sorry that we didn't figure out right away.

It's our first time, you know, with a subscription product like this. So we're figuring it out. We have some ideas. We'll solve it. But that's the shape of it, right? It's, if you've been listening to us, you've been reading the site, you know that the internet and how we distribute media on the internet is kind of broken.

It's very hard to just make money, giving away things for free, which is just the sort of economic reality that makes sense, and we all just pretended wasn't real for a long time. What if I worked really hard and then gave you the effort for free is that the internet is really founded on this idea? And then it turns out the platforms got to. to make the money and the people who work really hard and give you this stuff for free, mostly burn themselves out or go out of business.

Right. I think just to put a fine point in that, that is a thing we've seen a lot of feedback to, both with our own subscription launch and also just kind of the subscriptionification of everything. Right? Like the subscription fatigue is real. The idea that anything you want, whether it's a website or a calendar app or Netflix, now costs some number of dollars a month

instead of just some number of dollars or nothing and ads. And there's this idea that, okay, why doesn't the ad-supported model work anymore? And the reason is what you just said. The reason is that it does, except it's been completely disintermediated essentially by two companies who just took all of the money. And so that thing where it was like, oh, you put the ads in the newspaper and I look at the ads. And so the ads are how the things.

That is not how it works anymore because of largely Google and Facebook, who are not the only companies that did this, but are mostly the companies that changed that model for everybody. And then you look at how people are making up the gap. And I spend a lot of time thinking about our competitors in the creator economy on YouTube, on TikTok, whatever, and the platforms don't pay them enough money directly. So they've almost universally made the same decision, which is to go take brand deals. And we just won't. Like, I'm allergic and like genetically incompatible with a big company paying me money to tell me what to say. We're just not going to do it. So we just landed it. How do we solve this problem? How to make the gap? And the answer is subscriptions. I am blown away

by how many people immediately sign up for a subscription to the verge. Yeah. Like it blew our estimates and our goals out of the water. We ran out of print zines and we're ordering a second round. Printing stuff is so expensive. Did you know this? I had no idea. Printing stuff is so expensive. And we are totally used to internet economics, which is like, just make a million more page views for more websites. And we can do it on demand, you know, like we just add more servers to the AWS or whatever. Like, making digital products is so easy. And then print is like, we're going to put up a bunch of money and hopefully enough people sign up. And then lots more people did.

So we have to sort out. So I'm just thank you if you subscribed. I really appreciate it. We really appreciate it. The number of people will subscribe just to support our work because you've been reading us for, 13 years is, it's humbling, like truly humbling. Yeah. We have staved off that we have to charge for our work for 13 years.

And that is mostly because we do have a big audience, like a audience of people who visits the site every day. Helen, our publisher pulled this stat. 55,000 people read the verge every single day and have for the past year. That's pretty wild. Every single day for a year, they have hit the site logged in and we can see them. That's not even counting the people who hit us without being logged in and we can't like see that it's that user account.

That is a crazy number, like in the context of digital media, every single day. People who spend the average amount of time on our homepage is six minutes. That is a crazy number, and that's gone up since our redesign, which is a number that almost any other publisher finds impossible to move. So we've made some bets about making our own product really valuable, and now we think it's valuable to pay for. So hopefully more of you pay for us. A lot of you have asked us for an ad-free Vergecast.

David, I don't know if you had the same disconnect in your head, head here that the ad experience on the website and the ad experience on the podcast are the same ad experience for a lot of people. Yeah. And like that's not how that's just not how my brain works because we are so divorced from advertied. Like that's literally not the part of the business that we are in. We just make this stuff and the ads show up. So it didn't even like really occur to me. Like intellectually, like we should do an ad free verge cast. Sure. Like it was on the list. And then the immediate feedback was on paying you make an ad free verge cast. So we'll figure out something. Well, it is cool.

I will say one of the things that I've taken away from it is that like we spend all of our time inside of this thinking about like individual things and individual products and individual sort of pieces of the puzzle. And the idea that to most people it all feels like one thing is very cool. Right. Like I think to me the risk we run at the verge sometimes is we just like do a lot of things and it all becomes disconnected and weird and everybody's like, why is this happening? And I think part of the thing we've gotten away with for 13 years is we do a lot of that. And we have this big audience of people who think it's fun. And so we get to all do that together. But it was very cool to have a bunch of people immediately understand like, oh, here are all the other things that I consume of yours.

We got a ton of people who are like, now that it's a subscription, make everything a social feed. Do all of your quick posts on the activity pub. And I was just like, yes, you get it. This is the thing. Like we're going to do it now. This is, this is all in service of that. and it was very cool to see how many people just like instantly saw the whole size of the whole thing. Ad-free podcasts, very complicated.

Also, allow me to plug. We're going to talk about a lot of this stuff in more depth on Tuesday's show, both with you and with Helen Havlock, our publisher. We got a lot of questions. If you have questions, email us, Virgcast at the verge.com. Call the hotline, 866, version 1-1. You have, I would say, like, a few hours from when you're hearing this to get the questions in. Pull over in your car right now. Yeah, like, do it right now.

because I have to record as Nilai in order to get this all done. But we're going to answer lots more questions in lots more depth. And we've gotten a lot of really good, interesting ones that are like kind of about the verge, but are also just about like, what does it mean to be on the internet in 2024? Which is really interesting. And I, if you're, and the one thing I'll point out is we're always saying we have no idea how the business works. Helen is the business.

Yeah, Helen super knows how the business works. She's the money. And Helen's backstory is really great. She came to us. She was on the Samsung account at Edelman. She joined us as our engagement editor. And my pitch to her was if you can make people watch Samsung's branded content, you can definitely make them watch VERS stuff on these platforms.

That was years ago. And then she was so much better at running our company than me that I just made her my boss, because that was simpler than me asking her what to do and then pretending that was my idea. Other people find very easy, and I find very challenging. So I was like, you're the boss now. Go be the boss. So if you have questions about our business, Helen is a person who will answer them. And a lot of the how do we charge, how much do we charge?

What is the model for this thing? That is Helen and I going back and forth and like, what does it mean to run our website in 2024? The one thing I'll add before we stop talking about ourselves is our approach to this subscription is different than a lot of other publications. So I want our homepage to remain a very useful, free utility to a lot of people. And we have a lot of folks who listen to us who build things. Where does my customer come from is a very hard problem to solve on the internet. Yeah.

And for most people, the answer is like I paid for Facebook ads or something. We just don't want to do that. And for publishers in particular, it's like you are trying to get people to convert into subscribers on one story at a time on social media that went viral. And that I think the incentives that are pretty broken. I want people to become our subscribers because we've just been really useful to them for a long time. So we are very focused on the verge.com is a thing you can come to a bunch of times a day with a lot of news on it, a lot of quick posts, a lot of free stuff. And hopefully that's just useful. And that's fine.

And when we are proven ourselves to be useful and good practitioners of journalism and good stewards of our community, then you'll pay us money. Already, like some people are happy and they think we've done that. We have to earn it for the rest of you. We have some product stuff to do. I think I agree with everybody. We shouldn't get clear what stuff is freed, what stuff is not. That's complicated. We can get into that with Helen.

There's reasons why that's complicated just based on how the paywall works. It's not some conspiracy. It's just like literally exposing that logic to people might be more confusing than not. So we'll just like walk through it. But that's the goal that we have is to make the heart of the thing a really useful free service to people. Where you're like, I would like to go somewhere on the internet where smart human beings are curating the news. and explaining how things work, not AI slop. Right.

And I feel like that, we should just make that a big, useful, free website. And then our reporting and analysis and reviews and all that other stuff, if that is useful to you, if that is interesting to you, you can pay to support us. So that's the plan. It has been two days. Right. So it's a little messy. So parts of it. Oh, and we cut down the ads.

By the way, when we ask people what they want to pay for, when we've done surveys in the past years, turn off the ads or give me fewer ads. It's such, it's so by far the first answer that we take it off of the charts. Like it's so overwhelmingly the thing that people wanted to pay for that we had to remove it from the charts to see all the other stuff. So we, I was, if I was a brat about anything, I was a huge brat about that. And that is a new system. It's a new like ads service that we had to build. It's a little buggy.

Just give us a little bit of grace. We're going to figure it all out. But those are the things that we really wanted to do, and that's the model we really want to have. Give us your feedback. Yeah. Yeah, we talked a lot about not wanting to just, like, throw a wall up in front of the verge,

but build software. And I feel like we have a lot of work to do on that front, but that feels still like the right goal, as I think about all this stuff. Yeah. And again, the thing that I'm just thinking about is, like, how do we earn your money? Like, I think we have to earn.

it and honestly get to earn it once a month or once a year. And I just want to make sure that the core service we provide continues to be useful and fun and high quality and like people made it. People with points of view and beliefs, not just AI that honestly, as we will discover later in the show, mostly it doesn't know what it's talking about. But it's doing stuff. Yeah. So that's the plan. We'll see how it works. And by the way, the activity above stuff, can we integrate with at protocol and blue sky? It's just so high on. our list now. Now that you're not to figure out how to monetize that, like, inside of itself, and I can just be like, this is for subscribers. It's going to get way easier to just be like,

here's some stuff to try out, let us know how it works. So we're very excited about that. Yeah, it's going to be good. Now let's talk about cable because I realize I just have subscriptions on the brand. This is the next thing that we're doing. Cable network, 24-7 cable news. Listen, it could work. We're going to buy Spincoe from whatever company that is. Comcast. Disclosure. Disclosure.

NBC Universal is a minority investor in Vox Media. Hey, you did it. I have Peacock. Yeah. The Day of the Jackal is pretty good on Peacock. This has nothing to do with NBC Universal. Just TV shows. And I wrote one up.

I'm watching Landman on Paramount Plus. Okay. You're like the eighth person who has told me. This show's horrible. Now that I'm like in it, I'm like, they just, Taylor Sheridan just wrote a show where he was like, here's all of my worst instincts

as a writer, but like they're pretty fun. Okay. You know what I mean? Yeah. Just do cowboy stuff, but with explosion. It's like when they let Aaron Sorkin direct a movie and you're like, this isn't a good movie, but it's, it's you and I appreciate that. Yeah.

Yeah, it's good. And it's like if more TV shows were just that, like compelling character actor, just fast talking, I'd be like, I should pay for cable again. But most TV shows are like, this is fine if you're on your phone. So that's a big setup for, uh, the TV industry is desperately trying to reinvent the TV industry of, what, the late 90s, early 2000s? Thereabouts, yeah, like right before it became easy to do things on the internet is kind of what we're going back to. Like, in those days where, like, many of our listeners will not remember this, but like a web page would literally load line by line as it would go.

Like, that's what we're headed back to. That's what these companies are trying to get again. the two big pieces of news this week along those lines were that Disney announced it's adding ESPN into the Disney Plus app. They did this with Hulu earlier this year and just basically stuck Hulu as a tab and also all of the Hulu content inside of Disney Plus. And then at the same time, Max is getting these always on HBO channels, which I think are fascinating and it's doing them exactly wrong. and we should talk about that. But there is this like incredible amount of bundling, A, happening, and B, we're just going back to something should be playing when you open the app again,

which is the thing I've been saying about streaming for forever. It's like, why do I turn on my TV to a grid of icons and then click into one of the icons and I'm presented with another grid of icons? And then I click into that and I'm presented with a big picture. and then I press play and I'm watching something. Like, just show me something. And it's like you hear all the people who kept cable for forever. That is the reason.

It's because you turn the TV on and it shows you television. There are things happening when I turn my TV on. It's pretty compelling. And like the fast channels, the two Bs and Pluto's of the world have done a good job of replicating some of that, where you can just, you don't have to log in, you just flip it on and pick a thing and it starts playing. And we're now starting to see that roll back into the, these premium services in a really big way, which I find totally fascinating. But between those two, it's like, this is just cable.

Those are the main two tenants of cable television. So let's start with Disney Plus, because they added Hulu and now they're adding ESPN, and ESPN's their big bet. There's just a lot of weirdness there because the ESPN app has a lot of live sports in it. I watch NFL Primetime on ESPN Plus every week. It's like the only reason to have ESPN Plus, in my opinion. But it's like hard to understand.

what is coming to Disney Plus from ESPN because it's like select live events and that includes the Simpsons Fun Day football animated Monday night football game. And it's like, I don't, do I want that? Is that what I want? And then you look at what's on ESPN Plus and it's like 30,000 live events. And it's like, okay, so in Disney Plus I get the cartoon NFL

and on regular ESPN I get every sport they have. It's like a weird cut down. version of ESPN lives inside of Disney Plus. Even their studio shows, which presumably you can do whatever they want, it's only select studio shows. And I, by the way, I've never really looked at the full list of ESPN studio shows. So the full list, you know, it's college game day NFL matchup that Pat Maccalf show, everybody knows about part of the interruption, which I think Vergecast listeners

may not know what part of the interruption is, but every time David and I talk about what the Vergecast should be, we're like, what was just part of the interruption? It's real. Yeah. And then what I think is the ultimate distillation of what every single ESPN studio show is. And I didn't realize they had a show called this. It's just good guy, bad guy. I'm so glad you noticed this, too.

I've never heard of the show in my life. And it's like, oh, that's every ESPN show. It's just good guy, bad guy. But good guy, bad guy is not on Disney Plus. No, good guy bad guy. It might just be a fake one. They might have just thrown that in the list. Like the way that Van Halen used to do the Brown M&M's thing,

just to see if you were paying attention. It's perfect. It's perfect. It's an MMA show. But so, like, this idea that you have the Disney Plus app. And we should talk about the fact that it's Disney Plus, it's the app, right? Yeah. And now Disney Plus, that Plus is almost more important than the Disney part.

Yeah. Because you're full of Hulu. You got all the ESPN stuff except for the most important ESPN show. Well, good guy, bad guy. I'm not even going to look up. I don't even want to know. It's better in my imagination. It's weird, right?

That is your new cable box. Yeah. Like the idea is you open Disney Plus and you're having like a cable like experience in there with content from all of these networks shoveled through Hulu or shoveled through sports with ESPN or on the different Disney tiles. Like they're very quickly getting back to this is just a cable box that happens to run the Apple TV. And then Max is coming at it from the other direction, which is you open it up.

and there's some channels in here that you can just start with. Peacock has a version of this going on inside the app. Paramount Plus has CBS inside the app. At some point, don't the Roku's and Apple TVs and the Samsung Tysen team

have to just say, stop it? Like, just give us the content directly. Not everybody wants 10 different cable box apps on their cable box. I think that's what all of those platforms would be thrilled to do and are somewhat desperate to do.

And, I mean, that's the animating principle behind, like, Amazon channels and the thing that Apple is trying to do where they're like, don't subscribe to Macs, just subscribe to Macs through Apple TV and you'll get all the content just natively built into the system. That has like UI upsides and it's easy to do in a way that sort of makes sense. But it's also that gives this like precious user data and branding stuff and content to those companies. And so all of the streamers have absolutely no interest in doing it. Yeah. Also, you often get a degradation in video quality when you do it that way. That's true, too,

which I notice on my television. I for sure see the difference every single time that happens. I'd say if you buy the, if you stream on Max, like you usually get the highest quality in the first party service. I actually don't know this is true because Max has forgotten that I got it for free from AT&T during that ill-fated period. And so I just haven't been paying for it because is just part of my AT&T's subscription. And even in the fact that I'm saying it out loud, I don't think there's anybody at AT&T or Max who can identify my account and undo this.

I challenge you right now to stop giving me free. The owner of that spreadsheet for sure does not work at any of those companies. Oh yeah, they're gone. Nobody even knows where this data lives. Go ahead. Turn off my free Mac subscription. Disclosure. I haven't paid for that shit in you.

But it's only in 1080P because I can't upgrade to 4K. Just to torture you specifically. Right. Anyway, I'm just saying like you notice that the first party app often has the best quality. Yeah. Because they're not giving the best quality to some partner. And so like, it's like, I don't want to do that because I'm the one person in America who cares about this. David is like, I buy everything through Amazon. Yeah, it's fine. I just feel like my passcode is very recognizable and easy to remember and it works out. I will just point out. The cable era was not a great era for user choice or sane pricing or user experience. right? You got a cable box. It had a bad grid guide. You got a bunch of channels you didn't want, right? Like none of that was great. But one, you turned on your TV. It just worked and everything was there. Yep. And two, and this to me is the most important thing, the industry was making a lot of money and a lot of people were employed and a lot of good TV was getting made. And that is because they controlled their distribution, right? The cable companies in the world is evil. they were. And the Verge has published a story called Comcast the worst company in America

that like, like, disclosure, Comcast is an investor. We have called out Com, I personally have spent a lot of my career calling out Comcast for not being a great company and for having bad user experience and overbuilding people, all the stuff. Cable companies and ISPs, down the line, right? But there was a thing that they made where they owned their distribution and we sent video programming over that distribution, and everyone paid high rates and the prices were too high. Yes. But you didn't know that you were paying a bunch of money for ESPN, whether you wanted or not. It just was a part of your cable bundle. And everyone was like, fine, I've got cable. Here's all this stuff I can watch. And then we moved our distribution to the internet where everything is free. No one's making money. The Hollywood's like eating itself alive. And instead, it's like a bunch of burned out 25-year-old influencers. And it just feels like all of this stuff is an attempt to regain the glory years of owning their distribution. over here in some way. I'm not sure any of it will work, but you can see exactly what these companies are trying to do.

They do not want to put everything, like HBO does not want to put its content on YouTube. They want you to go somewhere else and say, it's worth more money because it's over here. And I don't know if that's like a winnable fight, but you can see what they're trying to do. Yeah, and I think the thing that's going to suck for users in this world is you're going to,

you're going to go into Disney Plus as a Disney Plus subscriber, right? And in the world we lived in before, you're right. You were just paying for ESPN whether you wanted to or not. You weren't paying what ESPN is actually worth to people who want to watch it because that was being sort of spread across everyone, whether you wanted it or not. So the price was relatively lower. Now what's going to happen is you're going to get a teeny tiny sliver of ESPN content in your Disney Plus, like the stuff you're talking about. You're not going to get good guy back. guy, but you're going to get game day. You're going to get a, you're going to get the Simpsons football. And then you are going to be relentlessly upsold on getting everything else

in order to pull it all into this app. And so what they're doing is they're saying not only, like imagine if you had cable, but every single time you went to a channel, the first thing it tried to get you to do was buy more of that channel. Like that's, that's where we're headed. And that's the thing that feels bad. And I, this is clearly the thing Disney is setting itself up to do is just be able to do the upselling all in one place. And to a certain extent, that makes sense. And if you're somebody who wants the bundle, which is what Disney is trying hard to sell you,

that makes sense. But then we're just back to, you're paying for the bundle and you're subsidizing ESPN for all the people who want to watch it. So I'm kind of reaching a point where it's like, if you just add up the amount of content available to you for what you used to pay for cable, it feels like the deal we had for cable

is looking better and better over time. And that's remarkable to say. Yeah, it really is. Like it feels crazy, but I honestly am starting to feel that way. And all of that is up against YouTube, TikTok, whatever, whose economics are a bunch of kids show up and make the work for free. And then we pay them not enough money to run sustainable businesses. And then we collect the ad dollars in the back of that. And that, I honestly don't know how much longer that has in it.

Like, I mean, there's an infinite supply of kids who want to be famous who will work for YouTube for free. That's the thing. Yeah. But it feels like some bubble will pop there because the rates aren't high enough. Like, more and more people are watching YouTube and TikTok and whatever, and advertisers are putting more money into it. But then the number of creators who want a piece of that pie is also going up. And I don't think the amount of money going into the system is keeping up with the amount of people who are taking money out of the system on the creator rates. And so they're all getting paid less money.

and like something will reconcile itself there. But none of that, like Mr. Beast did not make his like labor law violation squid games. He made that for Netflix. Right. Because Netflix can pay him the rates to do it. And there's just something there that is like, if you want to make that next turn, you have to go to a place where the distribution is more valuable or like people perceive it. It's worth real money, not just free stuff on YouTube.

But that is still the thing they're all competing with. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And the challenge is it feels like it's not obvious where the people who turn out of that turn to, right? It's back to the like, where are you going to go? And I think the Netflix's and Disney's of the world are increasingly content to sort of skim off the top, right? And give Mr. Beast more money to go do the shiny things for Netflix. But for everybody else who is just in the grind, there aren't that many moves and the platforms know it.

Yeah. But this brings up the last thing on our list here of Reasons Cable is back, which is Walmart bought Vizio. Yes. Which is weird. Vizio, we've covered Vizio a lot. If you're an old school verge person, you know that Vizio like burst onto the scene. I don't think most people know this. They're an American company.

They're in California. Like, I've been to their offices. I met their old CEO like ages ago. I met their old CTO Matt McCray, who's now, I believe the CEO of Arlo, the video camera company. But their business is they make really, really. cheap TVs. They put a bunch of ad tracking software on them and they subsidize the cheap TV with the lifetime value of the advertising, which is not great. I think most people just don't like this. They've gotten in trouble for before because it's intrusive. They don't serve as

surveillance stuff. The TVs are of fine quality. Like Vizio is like, you know, their bread and butter now is it's the Super Bowl. We're going to sell you a hundred inch TV for $5. Right. Right. And people just buy it because you're then going to hang it on your wall for a decade and we'll make a lot of money off your ads. Yep. And they will just serve ads to you. All of this really depends on them owning the interface, right? Or charging money for you to run software and sell ads in that software.

This is Roku's model as well. Roku will give you a Roku box for $15 or no dollars depending. And then if you want to sell ads, the Pekok on Roku, Roku takes 30%. It's the App Store model. They're all doing this thing. I think Walmart realizes like connected TV is where a bunch of money is going. That's what advertising people called running ads on smart TVs is connected TV. It's like, dude, it's the TVs were always connected to something.

I don't know what you're talking. They're just connected to you now. So CTV, which is what the industry calls it, is where a bunch of ad money is going. They're excited about it. And Walmart, if Walmart is where a bunch of transactions get processed at the end. Right? You're like, you see a bunch of ads for Procter and Gamble products. Where are you going to buy them?

Walmart is almost always the answer for like a bunch of categories you just end up buying this stuff at Walmart. So Walmart's like, great, now we own the ad network on the TVs and we can do all the data tracking and you're like, listen to how they talk about it. You know, like, guys, this isn't as cool

as you think it is. But it is also in a certain way, like a perfectly efficient system. Like the argument they're making works. That plan is going to work. And they're talking about like they're going to run ads on the TVs in the stores as a revenue stream now that they own Vizzii?

Like, it's just wild the set of things that suddenly become available when you're Walmart and you can just show people ads on their televisions. It's like Amazon had to build a whole, you know, division of its company out of Fire TV to do this. Walmart just walked over and bought Vizio. So Vizio's Platform Plus, which is its advertising business, now accounts for all of the company's gross profit. So that's just one. line from the press release. How does Vizio make money? All of its profit comes from this connected TV

advertising business. The quote from Walmart's chief growth officer, Seth Delaire, Vizio has expertly changed their business over time, like building and quickly scaling a profitable advertising business, pairing it with Walmart Kinnack, which is their advertising business, will be impactful and it allows us to invest our business even further on behalf of our customers. And it's like, I don't think your customers want you to invest in advertising on their behalf. I don't think so be there, but also it's going to work. I mean, this is the thing, right? And I think the reason I continue to find companies like,

Telly so fascinating is they're the ones just saying the quiet part out loud, right? Like, we don't make money on TVs because it's a big-ass screen we can put in your living room that you're going to look at. And it turns out that's actually pretty valuable. And everybody now is just making their TVs cheaper and cheaper. Telly was the one who's just like, screw this. We're just going to make it free. Telly also, I don't think it shipped anything yet.

So no, people have tellies. Do people have teleies? Do the TV with the TV under it? Yeah. Oh yeah, people got those. Okay. Where's mine? You should, I mean, you should get yours.

But I've seen, like, Reddit threads of, like, I have a TV with the TV under it. Okay. And then if you try to, like, hack the TV under the TV, like, Tully CEO will arrest you personally. Right. He comes to her house and just holds ads in front of you while you look at the TV. Yeah. I would just say, this is all the mix, right? Like, the, the distribution of all of this content is where the money is.

It is not the content. like more than anything video on the internet is now defined by its distribution and everyone is competing against the best business model of all time which is what if a bunch of 20 year olds make the content for free right and then we distribute with ads around it it it's like an unbeatable business model and so you have Walmart being like well we want to sell ads for Walmart stuff we're going to buy Vizio and that will quote allow us to serve our customers in new ways to enhance their shopping journeys and it's like I don't know what that means But it sounds like you're going to track the shit out of me. Well, I just, I think a lot about the, the thing Netflix keeps saying where it's, it's not trying to compete with YouTube. It's basically pitting itself against YouTube as like a higher end thing. It's like, oh, do you want to be next to like, you know, crummy cat videos on YouTube? Knock yourself out, but come here and get the high end stuff.

And I, the big question for this entire industry is how compelling that case turns out to be to advertisers. because what is true is that there are billions and billions and billions of dollars of cable and broadcast TV advertising that are going to become available to somebody else very quickly, much faster than anybody thought. And that money has to go somewhere. And the question is going to be, do they want to plug it into YouTube because that's where the audience is or do they want to plug it into the most sort of similarly shiny thing to what this once was? And I don't think anybody knows yet, at least at the scale we're talking about. But that is the, it's the same bet all of these folks are making. Like, they want you to subscribe, they want you to, but mostly they want you to look at ads. And the thing they want you to do the most, especially in the next couple of years, when all of this money has to move somewhere is look at ads.

And I think you can feel about ad supported streaming however you want. I mostly think it's fine, to be totally honest. I am, I am less annoyed by it every day than I expect that I'm going to be. but that is coming. It just is. That is the thing. I'm just going to say this one time, and then we can move on. It is still way easier to watch an NFL game and what you might call the stormy sees than this to pay for.

Yeah. And that is the real thing that they are all, they are all truly competing against is the user experience of their business models are getting away the user experience to the point where it. it is deeply it's like confusing and bad and people are like whatever I'll just take it well if you remember the thing that happened

right after the glory days of the late 90s in the early internet was piracy and Hollywood basically just fell all over itself

because of it who knows we'll see by the way if you have a telly the TV with the TV under it or you work at teley

you want to arrest David Pierce let us know I look at the ads Eli don't come from me I think the greatest episode of this podcast would be David Pierce gets arrested by the CEO of Telly. Like that, a little sudden a camera crew out for that.

All right, we got to take break. We're going to be back with Kylie to talk about what on earth is going on with artificial intelligence. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought.

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com. And check out Claude. Which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude. We are back. Kylie Robinson is here. Hey, Collie. Hello.

There's a lot of stuff on your beat. You're your senior AI reporter, and that means every week, just a number of people say things about our robot overlords. Yes. And this week, they just all at the same time decided that AGI was coming. That's what that feels like to me, is like, we're just going to say this is happening, and then people can interpret that to mean whatever they want. Do you think there's a group chat? Like, I remember in like the early days of the pandemic, there were a bunch of tech CEOs who were like,

in a WhatsApp together trying to figure out what to do and how to manage things and all that stuff. And I'm like, is there now just like an AGI when WhatsApp chat where it's just like Sundar and Sam being like, did we do it? Should we say it now? Is this the one? I hope so. I mean, there should be. By the way, the who's in, who's out of that group chat is, uh, that's a good one. That's a, that's a good one. Maybe that's the problem. Just let Elon back in all the lawsuits go. You know how the New York Times is a subscription product, but mostly for video games? Like, We should transition our subscription to just being who's in or who's out of the AI group chat. Like a MySpace top 10 for each.

Yeah, we just get to crowdsource that every day. And then that happens in real life. Perfect. You know, like today, the audience of the version decided Sam's out of the group chat. And he like wakes up. He's like, I'm not in the group chat. I feel like we need to ship this immediately. Yeah, this is very good.

That's worth $7 a month. Let me tell you. All right. Let's start with Sam Altwin was on stage at the Dealbook conference. he announced something that I think we had as a scoop and then he announced it and so we just ran it but let's start with this open eye is going to do the 12 days of what they're calling shipmiss yeah get it david i don't like it so no i don't get it explain it to me it's hell no all right there's a there's a man who comes into your house ostensibly to give you gifts

and i really eat all your cookies and we celebrate him uh anyway so shipmiss uh that's going to include SORA, the video generator, a new reasoning model. And then Kylie, today, they announced that the first thing that they were announcing as part of shitness is a $200 a month open AI plan. What is going on here? Yeah. And you talked about us having the scoop. I made probably a dozen calls the day before. And people are like, shit miss. And I'm like, no, no, like shipping something. I'm sorry, can we do this quickly? Yeah. So they just released a $200 a month plan for like a new special 01 model and I got this heads up like you know not a lot of time before so I'm still processing it and my first gut reaction is um that feels like such a joke like give us $200 and you get something

so special just trust us uh so yeah it's like a special oh one model it's supposed to be better at coding better at like you know aggressive research if that's what you're into um yeah is that like the you know when I did the Apple Watch shania it was like this one's made of diamonds, $5,000. And it just kind of didn't matter because some people just wanted to pay $5,000 for Apple Watch. Is that what's going on here? Is it actually more capable?

Do we just not know? They have internal testing that they released. I am always skeptical of internal testing, whether that's fair or not. It's just like my natural response is like I would like a lot more testing and proof. And of course, I want to try it myself and see how I feel. And I want to hear from engineers who use it for coding. They're like, oh, I do actually feel a difference.

So until I see some of these markers, I'm not entirely sure myself. But they say that, yes, it is better. But being an SF and being an AI reporter, I'm imagining all the dudes in Hayes Valley who are like, oh, my God, I'm going to pay $200 a month. I would be so cool. Like, yes, it is like that diamond Apple Watch. It's just to have it. I would just recently did an interview with the head of Chat Jubit, Nick Turley,

and he was telling me that some people have multiple, like, paid accounts because they, like, they, it's interesting. So some people, I don't know. They're really into it, I guess, paying more money. There's such a, like, FOMO fake arms race thing to all of this that I think this is just part of, right? It's like everybody's out here talking about the number of invidia chips that they're buying as like a badge of honor for how cool your startup is. And like, we're going to get to the point now where come work at our startup and we'll give you chat GPT Pro for $200 a month to do work instead of going to that other startup that only gives you plus, I guess what it's called. By the way, Open AI, remember that moment where you were like, we're going to get better at branding and our names are going to make more sense.

Whoops. You lost that real fast. But anyway, like, it really does, again, I think it's possible that this will be like meaningfully better, but it really feels to me like Open AI is just like, we can do this thing where everybody is looking for any kind of tiny edge and there are a lot of people with a lot of money who will pay for that edge. Let's just see what happens. Like the price, what's the word for when you try to figure out how much people are willing to pay for something? Elasticity. Yes. The price elasticity test is very much on in the AI world right now.

Yeah. And I think the New York Times had reported they wanted to, you know, make tens of billions of dollars in revenue. And like now we kind of see what their plan was. They're like, $200. It's Apple Watch editions. Exactly. Carl Lagerfeld is going to buy this model and never set it up, and he's just going to wear around his unset-up Apple Watch as a status symbol for a while and then move on.

That's really interesting. Like, I just want to put that, I wanted to start there, right? They're going to ship a bunch of new products over the next 10 days, 12 days. The first one is this, like, outrageously expensive model, and we have to see how well it works. That is in the context of, hey, a bunch of people are saying the models aren't scaling in capability the way they were last year, right? It's been two years since Chatshachibout came out. They did 3.5 and 40 and now 01. These names are all horrible.

And like they're plateauing, right? And there's a report that Gemini is sort of plateauing. And actually the new Gemini is not as good as the old Gemini. Like there's a sense that, okay, like a lot of hype happened because of the first big step-up in capability. But it's not just like a linear increase in capability over time. And it feels like open eyes just kind of like running at that. And being like, no, this one's so good. It's worth 10x more money.

And I can't quite square those things. Right. I mean, that's how I read the deal book story that Heath did about, you know, AGI is actually not going to be that big of a deal. I just feel like they have drummed up so much hype, like an unnecessary amount of hype. And now they all have to reckon with that. So like that's the state. Is it plateauing a lot of AI leaders right now?

Like their common thing to say is like, we've just gotten used to it. And now like companies can't keep up with like the hype. and the progress they've had in the past. But scaling laws have brought us to this point, and they should take us more, you know, take us further. But that remains to be seen. I think, yeah, they are experiencing some plateauing. That's why we're seeing some incremental developments

and why we're not getting like GPD5 right now as much as they probably want to release it right now. It's clearly not ready. I just want to read you that quote that he threw it up. So Sam Almond is on stage of the dealbook conference this week with Andrew Sorkin. And he says, my guess is that we will hit AGI sooner than most people in the world think, and it will matter much less,

which is an incredible quote, right? Because he said on, like, Reddit, we're going to hit AGI on current hardware, which is a remarkable claim. Because if that's what you think we should just, again, I think we should just stop all other work and get to that. But then he's like, and also it will suck. Like, we're going to make this,

we're going to make AGI, artificial general intelligence isn't going to do any tasks as well as a person, and it will not be as good as you think it is. And it's like, so you're going to make a dumb person? Is that? What are you saying is going to happen here? They said human intelligence, not, you know. Super intelligence.

Sure, fair. But, you know, they throw around human intelligence a lot, you know, we're getting there. It's right now they're saying like a smart college student, right? I don't know. I feel like they have just like, they've screwed themselves on this hype. And that's why, that's what I read when I saw that deal book line. I'm like, well, you know. you've got to temper some expectations now

before you say that the next thing is AGI and everyone's like, this is AGI. You know, it feels like he's like, well, it's actually not going to be that big. And then some bigger context there is there's reporting that opening I can get out of its deal with Microsoft if it decides all by itself that it's achieved AGI, which I think was related to its like old structure

where it was like a nonprofit board and all that board was there to do was decide whether to achieve AGI safely. and or fire Sam Altman, and they did one and not the other, and Sam Alman got rid of them all. And now they're going to turn into a for-profit company. So Microsoft is saddled with this weird clause in their deal, where if Sam Altman decides it's AGI, he gets to leave the Microsoft deal, which is weird, right? That's a weird set of incentives. I will, by the way, I will preview that on Monday, Decoder is with Mustafa Suleiman, who is the ex-co-founder.

Well, he is he's not the ex-co-founder, who co-founded Deep Mind, which is now Google Deep Mind. And he left and started inflection and then like weird reverse aqua hired his way. And now as the CEO of Microsoft AI. And I asked him, the first question I asked him was, are we going to hit AGI and current hardware? And he did not agree. Yeah. Hmm. I want to preview the whole episode.

But he was kind of like, yeah, no. I mean, maybe someday what, he was like, what do you think current hardware means? Which is an incredible response to that question. And then he was like, what do you think AGI means? And I was like, I am the interview. Yeah. Good questions. It was a good decoder. He's fun to talk to. We like each other. We like challenging each other. That's all fine. But like, I don't think he agreed to Sam. But I do think he was also moving the goalpost for AGI. He very clearly. I was like, if we're going to build the singularity, like, shouldn't we just stop and work on that? And he's like, AGI is not the singularity. Which is not the hype that we've all been experiencing for a minute, right? The hype was we have to stop this because if we make it before we're ready, we'll destroy the world. That's, remember, that's Elon Musk.

That is why all the people are leaving Open AI to start literally the company called Safer Super Intelligence. Yeah. Ilya Sutskiver, who was a big part of this whole process, in June of this year, described AGII in the context of the Open AI Charter, which presumably Sam Altman was part of and would agree with, as a computer system which can automate the great majority of intellectual labor. He called that one useful definition. It is so, we cannot let Sam Altman off the hook for doing this. We just can't. This is ridiculous. Like, my man has spent a decade.

He made AGI a thing. Like, the fact that we all use the term AGI is Sam Altman's fault. And to now just come and try to just sort of offhandedly sit with Andrew Rossarck and be like, ah, it's not that big a deal is bullshit. And we should not let him do this. It is. It's a bunch of like political maneuvering because it's going to make his life easier to just declare. an AGI and move on. You're right that it'll help with the hype because they're, I think it's very clear that whatever this moment where AI wins is not going to happen soon if it happens ever.

It also lets them get out of the Microsoft deal. So like, I can see why you do this if you're Sam. We just all have to keep saying out loud that this is what he's doing and it's bullshit. Totally. I agree. He also, Andrew Sorkin asked him about open AI and Microsoft disentangling. He actually quoted Alex Heath, which Keith was very excited about this. Immediate text from Alex when this happened live in the room. And Sam said,

I don't think we're disentangling from Microsoft, which again, I asked Ms. off of the same thing. And he was like, we'll see how it goes. And he said that three times

until I said, we'll see how it goes three times now. And he's like, oh, it's fine. So. And his real, like, Chris Martin and Gwenneth Paltrow being like,

we didn't break up, we consciously uncoupled. Like, that's how this will go with Microsoft. Can I add my own tinfoil hat that today, because I've been so wrapped up in Open AI News. They obviously had this huge launch and a live stream, and I have all of these

CEOs notifications turned on on Twitter, of course. And so I get my own little feed of them. And Satya reposted a bunch of Microsoft announcements that came today as well. I think Tom Warren, he scooped some of those. And like no repost from Sam, no, like this is my favorite boy, succession style. Like it's like just, I was like, that's really weird timing that they're doing this And Satya is like, it seems like he's ignoring the whole opening I lunch. Out of the group chat, man. Seven dollars a month. You can kick Sam Alman out of the group chat. These things are not accidents.

Like, that is definitely a tinfoil hat theory. But like when you're Satya and Adela, you do not do that stuff. Right. Without thought behind it. Yeah. The only person who tweets without thinking is Elon Musk. Most other tech CEOs are doing stuff on purpose. Right.

That's actually a very good point. Okay. So this is like, we're like laying up the context, right? Open AI is going to announce 12 days where the stuff, including a model that they think is so good that's worth $200 a year. Sam Altman is moving the AGI goalposts to like tomorrow, right? He's like, I can do this. I can do this on a Nvidia 4060 for 20 bucks. Like, it doesn't matter.

Like he's like, you give me an Xbox and enough gasoline. I'll give you AGI. Like that's where his head's at. And then the reality of the products right now is that they're nowhere near good enough. Yeah. So the Columbia at Tao Center for Digital Journalism released a report this week. And it basically asked Chatsyp's to identify the source of 200 quotes from 20 publications. And it just couldn't do it.

Like, it just hallucinated its way through that. It produced partially or entirely incorrect responses on 153 occasions. And it only acknowledged an ability to accurately respond, an inability to accurately respond seven times. It asked it just, just to say it again. Again, it asked it 200 questions, and it got 153 of them wrong. Yeah. And it only admitted that it might be wrong seven times. Right.

Didn't admit that it was wrong? It admitted, like, the possibility that potentially maybe, it could be seven times. And then in the culture, people are using these tools without a second thought. So Liz Lapato, this is just a Liz banger. Like, I think she turned this around in five minutes. I think there's all just poured out of her head in one stream of consciousness, because I didn't know she was writing the story. It just went up today. But it's very good because I get to say the following phrase.

On CNN, Anna Navarro Cardenas, cited a list of presidential family members who have been pardoned by presidents. And she said, President Woodrow Wilson pardoned his brother-in-law, Hunter de Butts. Which, it's like, I know the internet made the robots say Hunter to Butts. Like, you say there's a hundred to butts. I'm like, that's not real. When the internet produces the words hunter debuts, I'm like, I know what happened here. A hundred of a hundred times. Like, there's a Reddit threads.

It's like hunter to butts. There's a full, there's like lore. It's like all that happened. Oh, yeah. And the robots are confused. So Liz went through this exhaustively to figure out where this came from. And she found out that like Chatsype basically doesn't, can't answer the question which presidents have pardoned their family members. Like you just read the piece.

Anna Navarra Cardenas says, take it up. chat GPT. I said this thing, wrong thing on cable news, about the words Hunter de Butts. Wow. And she's like, take it up with chat GPT. And it's like, that's not correct, first of all. No. So she tweeted it and then she got it wrong and then she just taken up with chat CBT. I'm just saying that is crazy. We are racing towards replacing all of our search engines with these tools, answer engines, which is what Google has long wanted to think of it, Google as. Google as a search engine, the 10 blue links was like, here are sources. Go read these sources. You can trust them or not. And now it's, here's an answer. And they're out is here are some links to footnotes. And it's like no one's ever going to click the links. They're just going to tweet the words hunter to butts. I click the links. I have to defend myself. But you are a professional journalist. I went on the verge on our YouTube and I said, I really like AI search because I think it helps me get my answers quickly. But I'm not, I'm not, I'm not.

I don't think I'm even really paying close attention to what it's saying. I'm clicking the relevant links because Google is so bad at just telling me who said what, who reported what, and then I can just go and look, I guess I'm never really paying attention to the answers. And that's, and that's important with what we saw with that report. I had, again, I had just talked to the head of chat JBT, and I'm writing about this story of how they started and how they started. They were like, no one's going to like this product because it is wrong and so confidently wrong. They're like, We shouldn't release this. No one's going to like this.

They're going to hate it, actually, because it hallucinates so often. And they decided to go for it and release it as a research preview to see how people would use it. And people really loved it. And two years later, it is still confidently wrong. And it is making billions of dollars in revenue. Obviously, it's not profitable, but still. All of that besides the point, it still hallucinates like crazy. And people still love it.

And I can't really figure out why that's the case. If you'll recall a year ago, everyone was like, we'll solve hallucinations. Right. Oh, yeah. It was waved away. Yeah. Like, we got this under control. We know what to do.

And it's like, no, you super don't have this under control because the words hunter to butts have now appeared on the internet. And it's a totally sincere way. Which is, you know, like, if anybody had any sense, I'm like, okay, we should hit pause before we declare that this thing is AGI. Right? And I think this to me is just the fundamental question of all of these tools. Can this technology actually do the things that the people say it can do?

And right now, it can't even like deduce. what is true and what is fake and what is just a pure hallucination. Right. Right. Well, and I think this is why the search piece of this is so interesting to me because if you just take chat GPT as a whole, right, and you say, okay, the idea that it gives you the incorrect answer to this one specific question is a bummer, but it is so sort of ancillary to what most people are using chat GPT for, fine.

I don't necessarily buy that argument, but it is an argument, right? That it's like, and this is what we hear. a lot of AI stuff. People do a test with it and they're like, well, real users aren't doing that, so we're not actually that concerned with it. Feel about that however you want, but that is a thing you can say. When it comes to search, the whole damn job is to find relevant and true information on the internet. And so the fact that they've pivoted from like, this is a good tool for writing code, which is a real thing that is true. And it makes mistakes, but it also writes good fast code. And that seems to be a trade worth making for a lot of people who write code for a living.

When the whole job is correct information retrieval and you are presenting it as I have answered your question about the web, then the stakes are different. And the idea that like this this thing sometimes makes mistakes, I think just no longer becomes acceptable. Because you've now built a product on the idea that it can do this thing that it just demonstrably can't do. I don't think it's acceptable, but it's like, also the people who are coding and using it want it to produce correct code. And then like I've been told junior engineers shouldn't be using it, but senior engineers can because they know what's wrong and they can fix it and the output that it's given. So as like a senior reporter, I'm like, I know all of this. I just need to find this information quickly.

And Google is just absolute garbage at this. So I mean, I don't know. It just takes like knowing that. And that's something I'm going to keep referencing this one interview, the head of Chatchipti said. He was like, you know, the users at the beginning. knew that they were going to have to check this information. They knew how to prompt around things, and they're fine with that. So, like, that's the people using chatGBT to be clear.

But I agree. I don't think it's acceptable to be like, we have the answers. And we literally, like, 90% of the time don't actually have an accurate answer. I think that's also unacceptable. Like, forget all the, like, bigger philosophical stakes. That's just a bad product. Like, what if you went to Google and it just gave you a bunch of links that had nothing to do with your search? That would just be a bad product.

Doesn't it already kind of do that? Moral feelings about it aside. links that make you feel good about yourself. It's just like slightly nicer to you than it should be. Let me just give you an example of bad product. This also happened this week. And I just want to put us all in the context of we're defining AGI down so we can say it happened, right?

Yeah. And we're going to charge $200 a month for some of our models. The same week, a misinformation researcher, the founder of the Stanford Social Media Lab, got in trouble because he wrote an affidavit in support of an anti-deep fake law in Minnesota that is being challenged by court. So, like, there's a law in Minnesota that says you can't deep fake politicians or any political campaign. It seems reasonable.

There's a lot of, like, First Amendment-y stuff, whatever. It's being challenged in court by a bunch of conservatives. And this guy, founder of Stanford Social Media Lab, wrote an affidavit in support of this law to the court. And it turns out, he used chat, Chbitty to help him organize the citations. And it's like, what are you doing? You, of all people, know. Right.

Right? You know that the duals hallucinate, but they're so confident. And you're like, screw it. Here it is. Here's the quote. I wrote and reviewed the substance of the declaration, and I stand firmly behind each of the claims of the main in all which are supported by the most recent scholarly research in the field and reflect my opinion as an expert regarding the impact of AI technology and misinformation and societal effects.

Oh, God. And then he goes on to say that he used Google Scholar and Chat, ChpD 4O to quote, identify articles that were likely to be relevant to declaration so I could merge that which I already knew with new scholarship. And it's like the new scholarship was made up. Right. First of all, why? I asked a robot to hallucinate, and then I added my ideas to it. It's like, you know that's not correct.

Yeah, I also just, I'm convinced, like, somewhat sincerely that this is just a bit. Like, it's all too perfect for this to have earnestly happened to this person. Like, not only it's, it's like he hit it at the bottom just to see if anybody would notice, and somebody noticed. Brown M&Ms. This is the real theme of the Verchast, when Halen shows up and says, don't put Brown Eminem's the dressing room to see if you're paying attention so that you know the pyro's right and everything in the world is explained by brown m&Ms honestly potentially i hallucinate these citations were you reading that did you read my affidavit judge but also i will say my my wife is currently in grad school and is

spending an enormous amount of time doing things like putting together perfectly formatted citations and actually got knocked off points on a paper she turned in because everything was right but she like put the page number and the source in the wrong order and so long And so she, I've had like a year and a half now of her just like raging against citation systems. And so I'm like, listen, if AI just wants to cite some stuff for me and I don't even have to worry about it, great. Done. Lock it in. The David Pierce.

Does it have to be real? Probably not. Nobody's going to check anyway. No one cares. Last, well, last couple ones I want to put in the context of Sam Altman to find AJ now, but the robots are just drunk. Right. That's right. That's basically the shape of this.

That's right. Google Sundar Patry also on stage of dealbook interview basically is Andrew Osterking will be like, are you doing a good job? And he was like, I'm doing a great job. That's the whole interview. You can watch it. I mean, they're both very chill people.

So even that was like five ticks more hostile than the actual interview was. But that's basically the shape. Are you doing a good job? I'm doing a great job. Okay. And then he says, Sundar says, I would love to do a side-by-side comparison

of Microsoft's own models and our models any day, any time, they're using someone else's models, which is very catty. And what he means is Microsoft's own models suck and they have to use open-hats models. The girls are fighting. But it also means that if Sam Altman thinks

Open AI models are about to be AGI, sort of definitionally, so are Googles. I think they've all admitted that they're going to, like Elon said, like if we were to hit AGI, like we're all hitting AGI at the same time, someone asked, like, are you going to get it to it first? He's like, probably not.

We're probably like all in lockstep going to get to it at the same time. Yeah, if the last two years are any indication, they're all within like four weeks of each other. Right. Every development. Truly, like, it just keeps happening. Like, opening eye does something and then Anthropic does something that's, you know, 10% better on benchmarks. And then meta does something that's 10% better on benchmarks. And then Google's like, what's up, Gemini?

And then we just start the cycle over again. And Apple's like, there's 10 people at your front door. Front door, back door. outside. Yeah, and this is just like it, this stuff is both the most competitive and the most rapidly commoditizing thing I can remember. It's very strange. And so I think this is where you get to all of these companies are desperately trying to convince you that they either have some thing in the works that is so much bigger and better that it's going to change it or that they're going to productize it so much faster. And I think for Google,

their whole move here is we can build these products faster than everybody else. Right? Like it's Sundari is out here just being like, our models are great. They're going to ship more stuff this year, we think. But they're like, he's like, whatever, we're Google. I built it into Gmail and Google Drive. Like, what do you got, Sam? Totally.

I think it's interesting, these incumbents. Like Amazon has its own, like, new set of models. And like, there is reports about Open AI trying to, you know, bake, you know, make chat chbtee, you know, a customizable enterprise product for people to use. So it's like they're competing in this way. And the incumbents have a huge advantage, obviously. But in terms of like this hype cycle, this constant hype cycle, that's like the only thing I've learned as an AI journalist is like just do not trust a single thing.

Just don't trust a single thing. They're going to tell you, you know, we're not going to raise prices. We're close to AGI. We're like all of these things. and I just only trust what is released and you can use in front of you at the very least. If Sam Waltman really wanted to be cool, the thing he should have said is like,

oh yeah, we hit AGI like two years ago. Chat GPT was AGI. Like, who's going to stop him? And people believe that it is. I honestly think they're very much trading on a bunch of people who just love smooth talkers. You know what I mean? Like, if you can talk real fast and real confidently,

you can get pretty far in America, And chat TV is like, how fast and how smooth. You know? Like, it can just do it. And people just buy it. My niece just, by the way, refers to it just as chat. So it's home for Thanksgiving. And she just kept saying, let me ask chat.

And I'm like, you know, it's just lying to you. She's like, whatever. Like, close enough. Which is terrifying. But it's also just like that's the relationship people have with this product. And at some point, they're trading on it hasn't done enough damage yet. Right. Something will happen. Another researcher will get caught. Another lawyer will, you know, show up with a fake citation.

Enough people are getting in trouble that the markets that have the money to spend will stop spending the money until they can guarantee reliability or accuracy or even just efficacy. And I think what we've made is a bunch of like natural language tools that feel like the next wave of interfaces. But we haven't actually made products. Right. Right. Which is why, Kylie, to your point, I think we're about to see this huge, like, cloud provider fight really take off. Amazon launched the Nova stuff this week like you're talking about. That's where all the money is for the foreseeable future and maybe forever is being the cloud provider of AI tools. And it's the familiar faces, right? It's Google against Amazon, against Microsoft, against, like, kind of open AI, even though it's sort of weird because it's relationship with Microsoft.

But, like, that's the fight. And in many ways, it's less sexy, but that is, like, the actual business of AI is wrapped up in those companies competing with each other. Totally. As someone whose first beat in journalism was on the cloud and enterprise team, I love it. I love what comes up. You're just back at it now. It's all roads lead back to SaaS is where it is. Yeah, I mean, like, that's the fight.

That's where all of the money is. And if they want to make tens and billions of dollars and train their $100 billion models, they're going to need some big, big. chumps to pay up for these enterprise contracts. Seriously. I guess so, let me just end here. One, I feel like we should go back and find all the quotes of CSing that would solve hallucinations. We're like, did this happen? Right.

And then two, when whatever, however we define AGI, we should be like, if you made a somewhat smart college student that just made shit up 40% of the time, 153 times out of 200, just lied to you. Would you be like, you drive a submarine? Right. Like there's something there. There's a disconnect there that still feels like the most important thing. As much fun as these tools are, there's just a meaningful disconnect where they don't actually know anything. We'll see. Totally. What's your sense on like 12 days of shit mess are coming? What's your sense on the next turn here? Is it just open eye barrels towards being a for profit next year? Oh, yes. That's it? Like that's the main thing. This whole time, my mind has just been screaming about defense contracts and how if these AIs are consistently wrong.

And now they're like signing like deals with Androl. It's like, oh my God. Like that's coming. That's coming. And it's, you know, like the stakes are getting higher. And I don't know if the models are ready for the stakes that are coming. And that's really stressful. I mean, if they want to throw agents onto the payroll of major companies and, yeah, get even deeper into defense and then build all these data centers.

I mean, 2025, yeah, the stakes are just going to keep getting higher and these people are going to keep making money. And I think we are going to see, as you said, some of these serious consequences that I don't think. I mean, obviously, we have seen a lot of serious consequences, but I don't think it's really snapped anyone in the industry out of what they're building, if that makes sense. By the way, Andrews, this is nothing with Andrew. It's more Palmer Lucky. Palm or Lucky made a Game Boy. Do you know about this Game Boy? And Sean Hollster has the Game Boy.

He put up a video of it on like our TikTok or something. and he was like writing a review of this Game Boy and Jake Castrancas for executive that you realize that your story is Lockheed Martin made a Game Boy right? It's a very verge story but you just take another run at it from that angle so soon we'll run like it's a real art versus artist story you know it's like can you listen to Ignition Remix anymore

Lockheed Martin made a Game Boy like they're the same those are the same ideas so we'll soon publish it I don't know if you call it a review we'll what if it's like a really pretty Gameboy. It's a really pretty game game of this game play in some point. As soon as we wrestle with the essential nature of art versus the artist. All right, we got to wrap it up here. The AI is telling me our time has come to a close. Kylie, this is great. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right back with Lighting Around and wait until you hear who the sponsor is.

Complex and unprecedented the Spanish authorities are calling it. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual.

They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse.

And then second, being progressive is essentially a hope for. enterprise that you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that.

That's like secondary. Third. That's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. This week on Networth and Chill, we're diving into another edition of Am I the asshole finance edition. And trust me, these money dilemmas will have you questioning everything. I'm breaking down real stories from real people who are navigating financial situations that

range from mildly awkward to absolutely unhinged. And I'm giving you my unfiltered take on who's in the right and who needs a serious reality check. Because let's be real, when it comes to mixing relationships and finances, someone's always asking if they're the asshole. Learn how to set boundaries, protect your wealth, and avoid becoming the villain in your own financial story. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash you are rich BFF. We're back with the lightning round. Liam, tell the people

who sponsored the Lightning Round this week. This week's Lightning Round is presented by Amazon Q, the new generative AI assistant from AWS. Feels just as good the second time. It does. It does. It has not lost its shine. Say it again, Liam.

This week's Lightning Round is presented by Amazon Q, the new generative AI assistant from AWS. I don't even think we get more money for that. It just feels so good. It just feels so good. I don't care. We're going to find ways as part of the subscription to let you, the people, sponsor the Lightning Round.

This is one of the ideas we have. But that's pretty good. Do you think people would like our ads more if they were all read by Vergecast listeners every time? It's like, you can come perform the ads on our podcast. Right, because I, David, I won't do it. Right. You got that pesky journalism.

Which will I make Liam do it. It's pretty good. But readers can do whatever they want. Yeah. I guess I did just like steal an idea from every NPR show ever. So I probably shouldn't be as proud of myself for that as I am. NPR, let's the listeners read the ads. Yeah, like Radio Lab like does the credits at the end.

And it's like the, it's a thing. People do it. Like whatever. They're brought to you by the somebody Sloan Foundation. That's like. And they let listeners do it? Yeah. And people like it.

We could do this. Sure. I'm just saying the lighting around sponsored we got a subscription going the lighting around sponsored we spend this money by the way on making journalism

it's you know this is who we are but one day I'm going to skim a little off the top and we're going to get a boat I'm going to turn this into a real basketball hoop

one day it's going to blow minds you're going to be the guy who buys Michael Jordan's house in Chicago it's just been on sale that's the new Vergecast studio

in the suburbs of Chicago for years so you go to Highland Park you just drive by the gates. And part of the problem is the gates say 23 on this. Nobody wants to buy this house. It's like too much house for Highland Park, you know, because no one else there is Michael Jordan.

It's true. It's just been on sale for years. You can look at the pictures. You also have to commit to living in Michael Jordan's house, which does, by the way, David, have a basketball court in it. And also a room where Michael Jordan definitely got drunk and smoked cigars and played poker. But then the price keeps going down.

You just keep saying good things. I don't understand the problem. Look, when we were looking for our house, when it was time to leave the woods, you know, and get Max in the school, I was like, what if we lived in Michael Jordan's house? And that idea was quickly rejected.

That's worth of that. It wasn't on the table for a variety of reasons. All right, it's the lighting round. Again, sponsored by whoever Liam said it was sponsored about because I'm too precious to say it. But think about it. Rewind it and listen to it one more time. Okay, so here's the thing.

We got a lot of feedback that our other segment, which, who is the name was, show and tell was too much like the lightning round. So to separate these... Good solid feedback, by the way. Yeah. It was fundamentally correct. So our idea here is the lightning round.

We're just going to run through headlines as fast as we can. Lightning style. And hopefully that is perceptually different than everything else we do on the show. Yeah. Which is we talk about headlines. All right. So here's number one. Bitcoin just hit $100,000.

I have nothing to say. I cannot describe to you how little I have to say about this. I will just, I will say the two things I've always said about Bitcoin. I've said them on CNBC to an audience of people who did not want to hear them for me. One, the only reason people care about Bitcoin is dollars, which is why this headline is Bitcoin is now worth $100,000. Not it's useful. Right. Not more transactions are taking place in Bitcoin.

Right. You only care about this because of dollars. So at some point, you're, you've just given up the game that Bitcoin is worth any, like a Bitcoin qua Bitcoin means nothing. because you only care about how many dollars it's worth. Second, if you have a Bitcoin, your incentive to spend it is effectively zero. Why would you ever spend a Bitcoin if the number is just going to go up? It's an asset class.

And like, that's fine, right? And I think the thing that I have come to appreciate over the last couple of years is that the number of people who want to talk to me about how this is the future of the Internet has gone way down. And the number of people who just want to talk about how much money they're making has gone way up. And to me, like, I'm fine with that, right? Like, we should talk about the price of Bitcoin the way that we talk about the price of baseball cards.

Like, it's a, it's a thing that you have. A fake idea for children. It's a, I wouldn't going to say quite those words, but basically, yeah. And like, congrats to everybody who has made a lot of money on Bitcoin, sincerely. Like, great job. I'm happy for all of you. I am increasingly unconvinced that there is any kind of tech story in Bitcoin, and I am more suspicious every day of people who tell me that there is. Because there's no reason to spend one.

Right. It is a fundamentally untransactable thing because you are just wasting money because all you care about is dollars. The only good stories about Bitcoin are the people who like spent a bunch of stuff on one 12 years ago. And now it's like, we are those people. I also want to be very clear. You can assign us a disclosure.

We might be bitter because one time Adrian and Jeffries bought pizza with Bitcoin. Oh, that's right. I forgot that. You know, look up that story. It was a great story. It's tough. Adrian was one of our best reporters. She's a great writer and she went to a bar and bought pizza Bitcoin.

And every day I think, boy, we could have sponsored our own lightning rounds. We could have afforded the lightning around if we just held on those bitcoins. I'd just say, and even like it weren't, you know, I think then Trump, too, is going to, there's going to be a lot of crypto talk. And infinite, the crypto lobby is all very excited. And fundamentally, it's all because of dollars. They're just excited about how many dollars they will be, they will, the things will be worth. We'll see what that means.

this one David I need you to explain to me okay DIA is the browser company's AI powered follow up to arc yeah so the browser company made a browser called arc it's very good and very cool and a lot of people liked it so of course the browser company decided to stop making it that's that's that entire story and now they're on to their second product

which they are trying to make into something that is like thoroughly everyday mainstream and they just put up a video this week that was like half recruiting video, half kind of vision video, released the name of the thing, showed off a little bit about what they're talking about, but it is like this thing is still in its very early days, but basically they're making a browser that is like mostly AI. And there's some neat stuff in here like you can anywhere there's a text box and this is the thing you can do when you're building a browser, right? is you just have access to the whole web

as long as somebody has loaded it in a tab, which is a very powerful thing to be able to do. And so they're doing a thing where you can click on the cursor in any text box to bring up like a contextual AI menu. And it'll do stuff inside of that page on that text box, like whatever you want. And the big idea here again is to like reimagine

the way that you do all of the things that you want to do online with AI. I will say the reaction to this launch has not been super positive. The two threads that I've seen most are, why couldn't you build this into Arc, the browser that lots of people already like? And no, thank you. I am not interested in having more AI things pop up every time I go to a web page. I have to say I find both of those arguments very compelling.

Yeah. I mean, this is a hint at we're going to do agents, right? You're going to say, order me a sandwich, and then something is going to go browse the web and order a sandwich on the behalf. Yeah, and you can make a pretty good argument that the best way to do that is with a web browser, right? Because it's like... Right, because you have the web. Right.

But only like you have the web and also you have me to work with you, right? Like you can open up a tab and show it to me. That's like, is this the thing that you want? And I say, yeah. And it orders the thing for me. So like, there's a useful feedback loop inside of the browser that can actually really work. It's also just a way to get access to everything without having to build APIs, right? Like, we've talked about the things that the rabbits and humanes of the world are having to jump through to get access to DoorDash.

My browser can just go to DoorDash.com. It just can do it. And so I think I have always thought the browser company is like directionally interested in the right things. But I am, I'm, I don't know, somewhere between curious and skeptical that branching off to build this whole other thing that is just like an AI bot on top of your browser is actually. actually the thing that they think it is. Yeah. And it's funny, Josh Miller was just on Decoder. He's the CEO of Browser Company. He's like, our goal is to make an operating system for the web that runs your web apps in it, which is a big idea. Yeah. Right. Most of my apps are web apps anyway. The browser will be

more operating system-y and connect all those apps. And this is like a totally different idea. Right. And this is what they've been saying, like, you could sort of push this towards that thing you're describing. And that vision you're describing has been their vision all along, right? And in a way, Ark became like a diversion on that. It's like a power user redesign of a browser, which is not an operating system for the internet. Yeah. So we don't know a ton about what this browser is actually going to be.

They didn't show that much. It was just a lot of like high-minded talk about the internet. So we'll see. But I will say the large number of people out there who are not psyched about what is happening to Arc did not seem to be satisfied by what DIA looks like so far. All right. Next one. Threads continues to respond to

blue sky in a variety of ways. But then also, just on their own pace, another big step towards Fediverse integration. Now you can follow people from MassDon servers. Kind of. Fediverse servers, which is 99% activity hub servers, 99% masson. Yeah. So they won't, the post won't show in your feeds, but their profile and posts do appear on threads and you can get notifications and they publish. This one is so funny to me, because it is genuine, I think I've been hard on the threads team for not doing this better and faster. But like credit where credits do, they continue to do the work. And I believe sincerely that this is a thing that they want to do right and well. But the middle phases are so weird. Yeah. It's so complicated. It's like you can follow somebody

on the Fedover's but you'll never see it unless you go to their profile page like it's like 2006 era of Facebook is just a very weird solution to a problem. And you get the sense they only announced this publicly because somebody would have noticed it and it would have been a confusing thing otherwise. You know what I mean? But again, like this is a signal that they've done the hardest part, right, which is pull that stuff into threads. How to co-mingle it with everything else that's being posted to threads is a difficult problem, but that's like a thread specific problem. It's a big sign that they've done a lot of the like really important protocol work that it shows up in threads at all.

So I think that's really exciting. Yeah. And so, you know, we want to federate quick posts. We're figuring out how to do that. I actually don't want to favorite tools. I don't know how we're doing any of that. And our people,

they call what you're describing the inbox. So outbox is easy. Right. Like everyone has solved RSS. That's outbox. It's when somebody hits likes and it comes to you where you're pulling in posts from other sites. Right.

To the inbox is really hard. And they've obviously gotten there. And meta has like big data regulatory problems as well. Right. So I'm excited for them to do it. A big question. question I have is whether they will find a way to bridge activity pub with app protocol such that threads can interoperate with blue sky because once you build that bridge it kind of doesn't matter

like all bets are off you know and you got to figure if threads is truly threatened by the rise of blue sky that is one way to uh if not me cap blue sky to at least like enrich yourself on its gains yeah if you're meta like why do you care about what protocol you've chosen to support yeah I think that that work gets done either way, right? Like, there are already people bridging app protocol and activity pub in some interesting ways, but it would be interesting to see meta just try to eat the whole thing all at once. Yeah. They also announced a search feature with filters, but like whatever.

This is like baby steps. We made search usable. It was literally that announcement. Like, great. I am happy to be able to finally find a thing I was looking for on threads. Yeah. Also on threads, Meta, Nick Clegg came out. and said they're moderating too much.

I don't want to say about that. He's like, we mistakenly moderated too much, which is true. Threads is like a notoriously over-moderated place. He says, too often harmless content gets taken down or restricted and too many people will get penalized unfairly.

This is a true, like many people have had this experience, particularly on threads. At the same time, Donald Trump is president, Marks-Irug is at Mar-Lago. Elon Musk probably also just skulking her on Mar-Lago as he is want to do,

talking about free speech while suing his critics. as he has want to do. If you're Mark Zuckerberg, you're like, oh, we're going to moderate a little less. Donald, like free speech for everybody. There's also a really interesting pandemic era apology in this,

in this stuff from Nick Clegg talking about, I think Facebook in particular was really aggressive about moderating what was perceived for one reason or another to be incorrect information about the pandemic, in the early days of the pandemic. And it was super controversial. It wasn't that long ago that

Zuckerberg basically said the Biden administration told him to do that or pressured him. Yeah, I mean, again. I just give a thumbs down. You're in your car. Just imagine you're giving a thumbs down. Yeah. That is a pure sop to this administration. So that's what I mean, right? But this is like, it's pretty clear what this push is. It is like, we take no responsibility for what happened during COVID. And there is like a giant strain of the right wing that is like furious about how. how information was shared during the early days of the pandemic and radicalized a lot of people in a lot of directions.

Hey, just a quick question, David. Remind me, who was president in 2020? Who's to say? Who can remember? So long ago. Biden made him to it is, I think, what was learned. He showed up. He's like, come to Delaware. There's a real flattening.

I don't want to get, it's the lightning round. You know, it's like, hey, this is a good. time. We got a sponsor today. I don't want to get into it. It's painful to relitigate, but there's there's some real smashing of ideas down into stories that don't make sense. Correct. And all of these platforms in the early part of the pandemic all took the same steps and you can love them or hate them, but they Biden was not the president at that time. And that is the thing that they're apologizing for is their early steps, not the later ones.

But it is also very clear that Facebook is not the only company that is essentially just going to walk away from caring about content moderation. Yeah. That's just where we're headed. And what's funny about that is the blue sky, right? They moderate pretty aggressively, I would say, but they're out is that if you want just the full fire hose, you can have it and you can experience an unmoderated blue sky. Right.

Or if you want an even more moderate blue sky, you can have it. And that is a very powerful out that I think is ultimately going to be the future. And part of the reason I think they're doing activity pop. Right. So you can leave, but people here can still find you over there. Right. All right. We should talk about Intel for one second.

Sean has a big explainer what happened about Gelsinger, the Intel CEO out after three years. David, do you buy this conspiracy theory that they were like, you have to spin off the foundry? And he basically was like, no. I mean, I'm a proud Intel man and no. It certainly makes sense. I don't pretend to be like America's most source chip reporter. But the thing that I think is most odd about the way of this is going is that. that if you want something that feels like a stable company and stable transition, this is not

how you get rid of your CEO. It's just not. Like, he, he quote unquote retired, effective immediately. And then a source who pretty clearly was like on or near the board of directors just ran around telling reporters that they fired him. Like, that's just what happened. That's how I'm going to go, by the way. When it's my time, it's going to be exactly. John Legend, board member of Vox Media, is going to go tell people how we fired Eli. But so, and so the conclusion that a lot of people, including Sean, have drawn, is that there must have been a fork in the road somewhere, right? And if you're, if your intel, that is the biggest fork sitting in front of you is we've spent all of Pat Galsinger's 10 years so far, spending, I mean, spending like money is going out of style on becoming a foundry, reshaping the way that we make chips, reshaping the kinds of chips that we make. Like, they've bet on everything simultaneously all at once.

And there is a real case to be made that actually splitting it into two so that you have a company that designs chips and a company that makes them. And having those be separate things can be really useful. And Pat Gessinger has pretty loudly said he thinks Intel needs to be both of those things at the same time. So it certainly holds up to like a logical reasoning that that would be the thing where eventually they're like, well, Intel is running into the ground faster than you can turn it around. we have to make this change and he was like, no, I have to finish the plan. Like, I don't know the answer, but boy, does it make sense. It does feel like he also got caught holding the bag

for a bunch of bad decisions that happened before he showed up. Yeah, I mean, yes. He, I think the mistake he made was he gave himself four years and he should have given himself 10. Seriously, like, he came in guns blazing and was like, we're going to do five nodes in four years, which is like an unprecedented, outrageous pace of chip development. And did pretty well.

Well, also a bunch of the chips had a bunch of bugs in them. Yeah. Right. We made some chips that self-destruct is a thing that happened underpacus. Yeah. Pretty well is pretty well was too kind. He did some things. Right.

Their best chips are, I believe, made by TSM. Yes. And there's a bunch of really interesting history in both Sean's piece, which links to an interview you did on Decoder a while ago with the author of a book called Chip War, which gets into all. of this stuff. And there's like some Intel, TSM history that's really fascinating. We'll put all that stuff in the show notes. People should go see it. But it really, I just keep coming back to the idea that like CEOs of companies where things are going well and they are

stable don't resign effective immediately. Yeah. It just doesn't happen. And then, and then I have more numbers sleep. Right. To everyone who will listen. All right. I'm going to smash these two together. All right. Trump has picked his SEC head and his antitrust enforcement head of the DOJ. SEC head is Paul Atkins. He likes crypto. Everyone's very excited. By the way, I love it when the crypto industry says they oppose regulation by enforcement, which is a great phrase.

If you really unpack it, it means we're doing crimes. They're enforcing the laws against the crimes. And they're like, what if you made real laws that said these weren't crimes? It's very good. And there's more nuance. It's just every time they say it, like the next time I get caught speeding, I'm like, officer, you're doing regulation by enforcement. Like, I don't know what you're talking about.

Anyway, Gail Slater is the more important one. Antitrust person. You know, there's a big case against Google. There's a big case against Apple. There's a lot of antitrust in this world. Microsoft lingering. Yep. Gail Slater was on J.D. Vance's team is pretty well respected.

I have been told that a bunch of the antitrust folks in the world, like the antitrust agitators, are pretty happy about her. The reason I bring up J.D. Vance, he has given... speeches where he's like, Lena Kahn's doing a good job. Google is a threat. So the kinds of companies that I'm aware of in my, his like, you know,

two year fake job as a VC. But, you know, when Trump appointed Gail Slater, long rambly, Trump posts him through social, and he said, Big Tech is out of control

and it's hurting Americans and Little Tech. And Little Tech is word straight out of Mark Andreessen's mouth. Yeah. Andreson Horowitz right now, I think their whole thing is the Little Tech agenda. That's what they branded it as.

So you have, and they're railing against Google and Apple as well. So you just have this person, we don't know her, we're going to try to talk to her, but she's inheriting a very aggressive antitrust program. The people in and around that program, it seems like, are reasonably

happy with this choice. We're doing some more reporting. It's just a vibe. It's not, I'm not going to source that too much. Just a vibe I've caught. And then you have Donald Trump himself using the words of his many, many wealthy benefactors, saying who have long since been critical

of the power of the Apple and Google wield it's going to be weird in large part because it makes it harder for them to fund companies that are hugely successful like just to pull that thought all the way out

I'm not saying any of this is like some good faith dealing I'm saying this is about to be some of the most gangster tech regulation that any of us have ever experienced and the horse trading is out of control right? Like if you one of the

if you are a crypto salesman like what you want to do sell NFTs on the iPhone. That would be a huge market. If you could unlock buying and selling NFTs on mobile, that would be great. Right now Apple's going to take 30%

of every digital transaction. You want that to go away. You know, you can do that? A big antitrust case against Apple. Apple does not want tariffs on every iPhone. Tim Cook needs to go walk up to know. Like, that's just, we're all going to sit around the table at Mar-a-Lago and reshape

the American economy. Yep. Somehow. Like, I don't know. And that, it's not going to be like a process-based, evidence-based agency rulemaking, it's going to be whoever talks to Trump last. Yeah. Like, truly sitting around a table making these decisions is a not particularly like euphemistic way to describe what's about to happen. Like that, that is how it's going to happen

in so many ways. I think the, the, a lot of people assumed that Trump would come in office and you know, pro business, pro big business, especially he would install an antitrust person that what the took all these cases away. And I think there's a greater than even odds that these cases continue and remain as aggressive as there. Yeah, I would say the early signals on this do push more towards that than I would have expected.

And let me just wrap all this together. Let me just bring this together. In Trump's first term, McCann Dollar Team was his antitrust enforcer. And you recall that instead of preventing T-Mobile from buying Sprint, he brokered a deal in which T-Mobile was allowed to buy Sprint, thus reducing the number of national carriers

from four to three in America, and he sold Sprint's assets to DISH Network, America's vibrant fourth carrier, and that has resulted in this week Verizon just raising its prices because there's no competition. A marked turn, I would say. Yeah, all right, well, we're dangerously close to a Snyder cut conversation here. So last one. All right, Gail, what are you going to let Zach Snyder do in your antitrust regime? Yeah, that's the big questions we ask here on the first. cast. How was your Spotify

rap this year? It was mostly full of the Moana soundtrack. Little Enkanto, and more Frozen 2 than anyone has the right to really deal with. My is becoming alarmingly similar to that. There's a straight Peter Satera song on the Frozen 2 song.

I don't know when I get into it. But I listen to it and I was like, that's just Peter Satera. And then, yeah, it turns out they were very inspired by the musical stylings of Chicago. There you go. Mine, my number one artist was The Wiggles, which was pretty exciting. So was my wife's. And between us, we were both top three percent Wiggles listeners.

Very good. Yeah, mine was all kids' music and then one unreleased Broadway show song that I got really obsessed with because I found it on TikTok. And that's been my year in music. But anyway, I bring this up to say two things. One, sincere thank you to every single person who sends us their Spotify wrapped with us on it. Yeah.

It is the best. Every single one of them just rules. And like, we've gotten people who are like, I spent five days listening to the Vergecast last year. And like, I cannot. It's the best. That is like the best feeling every year is when people are like, you're at the top, unless we're second to hard fork and then, how dare you? You're dead to me.

But the second thing is everybody's doing wrapped now. Like Reddit has the thing. The other music services have it. Podcast services have it. Like they're all kind of doing their year-in-view thing. Spotify for its new innovation this. here, partnered with Notebook L.M from Google to do an AI podcast of your rapt. Have you listened to yours? No. They're very funny. Mine is like four and a half minutes long, and it's both awful and

delightful. It's just like, like imagine a sort of bouncy stranger just reading your rap to you who has never met you before. It's so fun and so funny. And you come out of it being like, this is somehow the person that Spotify thinks I am, and I don't know what to do about that. But, like, we're in a real, like, wrapped arms race now, and I'm extremely here for it. It's, like, funny how, like, most of the time people are, like, don't surveil me. At the end of the year, they're like, tell me everything about myself. Yeah. Listen, if you're going to collect all this data on me, at least, like, give it back to me once a year in a funny way. I'm very excited for the Vizio Walmart wrapped.

Here are all the ads you engaged with this year. That's actually a good idea. Here's exactly how much laundry detergent we prodded you into buying. Here's how much you overspent on Amazon this year. Mid-year, you switched car insurance providers. That was us. I mean, you know they do that for their advertisers. You're right?

All the clients are getting wrapped right now. All right. I just looked at my Apple music wrapped in my number one playlist was Taylor Swift Essentials. And my number two playlist was 2000s indie rock. And you can really tell that there's a battle. our house who gets to ask for music. It's very good. Very good.

All right. That's it. We're way over. We're like six hours over. We've been podcasting for a full year now. We're also both sick right now. So I just want to say congratulations to both of us. If you've heard us about sniffling and coughing in my in Max just like screaming in the

hallway. Yeah. She's one of those Virtcast at the end of the year. Once again, I want to say thank you to everybody who has subscribed. Particularly Virtcast listeners who are telling us. They're subscribing just to support us. That means a lot. Like we've been doing this for a long time.

13 years a long time to be doing a thing and to have so many of you say, I can't believe I wasn't thinking of this already, which is a real note we've gotten mind-blowing. So thank you. We're going to keep at it. We're very stubborn. No one can pay to tell us what to do, except for you, apparently.

So we're going to figure that out. Also, send us more questions. Call the line. Send us questions. Yeah, Helen's on next week. So send us questions, we'll answer them. We're going to be as transparent with our business as we can be. We think that's an important part of the whole puzzle here. And then we have a big launch feature for the subscription. Josh Treza wrote about falling in love with AI and the companies to do it and the people that actually fall in love.

Go read that. It is incredible. It is easily worth your $7. Oh, unquestionably. Just straightforwardly reading that stories worth $7. So go check that out. It's good. And the art is amazing. Oh, and you haven't read our magazine content goblins.

Yeah, subscribe for that. It's good. The photos are amazing. All right. All right. That's it. That's Vurchast. Right. 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 Liam James, Will Poor, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.