The Vergecast - AI Drake, AI friends, AI everything

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

Today, things got a little loose in the studio of The Vergecast. Switched on Pop's Charlie Harding joins Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce to make their own version of Drake's AI summer classic. We're not saying a laser bong was involved, but we're not not saying that either. Then deputy editor Alex Heath stops by to tell us about Snaps latest announcements and give us an update on the latest round of layoffs at Meta. Finally, a lightning round with all the big headlines in tech from this week. Further reading: AI Drake just set an impossible legal trap for Google Google employees label AI chatbot Bard ‘worse than useless’ and ‘a pathological liar’: report What’s really going on with ‘Ghostwriter’ and the AI Drake song? Family of F1 legend Michael Schumacher plans legal action over fake AI interview Snapchat releases My AI chatbot to all users for free Google’s big AI push will combine Brain and DeepMind into one team Netflix is shutting down its original DVD business after 25 years Netflix is out of the DVD business because streaming won – now, can Netflix still win? Twitter begins removing blue checkmarks from all legacy users It’s a laser bong SpaceX’s Starship successfully takes off before bursting into flames BuzzFeed News is being shut down Social media is doomed to die Google Fi has a new name and expanded connectivity support for smartwatches Leak: Google will announce the Pixel Fold at I/O and beat Samsung on battery Everything spy movies get right (and wrong) about smart glasses Microsoft is reportedly working on a smaller Surface Pro and Arm-powered Surface Go 4 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

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

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. Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Drake. But not really Drake,

or maybe it's Drake, or maybe it's just a crypto scam. That's the Vergecast. I'm your friend, Nelai. Alex Cranz is here. Like, it has to be Drake. If it sounds like Drake, it's Drake, right?

What a can of worms Alex is open. It's like a 1950s game show. We've heard a great time. David Pierce is here. Hi. I'm the other. Or other Drake. That's what a lot of my friends call me. Yeah. Whenever I look at you, David, I think, boy, what an excellent substitute for Drake.

Really loved you in DeGrosi. Our friend Charlie Harding from Switch on Pop is here. Hey, Charlie. Hello. I am going to clone my voice as Drake today. Yeah. Yes. I'm very excited. All I want to talk about is AI Drake is poor Alex and David, no. I have not shut up about AI Drake all week. Yeah. Like immediately. I think Monday, you're just like, it's Drake. We're talking about Drake.

The whole Vergecast. We have comments on my story about Google and copyright law, and one of the comments is, boy, this is going to be a long verge cast. You're right. So we got to talk about AI Drake and what's going on. There's just layers upon layers. Charlie is here to help us make some fake Drake tunes. Yes.

Very good. And talk about how the technology works, which I think will be really interesting. There's other stuff going on. It's the Blue Czech Apocalypse on Twitter. Snapchat is doing chat bots. David wants to talk about DVDs for some reason. Good reasons. I support David.

I support you, David. I'm surprised do you support. Listen, I have like five months left to rent DVDs. I have so many DVDs to rent. I'm just surprised that it's DVDs and not Blu-rays. I figured Alex would be like, kill the DVDs. I mean, I'm kind of okay with that, but I think they're killing all discs, right? It's not just the DVDs.

Yeah, I like to think of DVD as an umbrella term. It's really, it's like a spiritual DVD. It means whatever you want it to mean. Yeah. laser disks. And there's a little bit of sad you should talk about today, which is BuzzFeed news is shutting down. And I don't know I dwell on it, but we've been talking a lot about the end of this era of the internet. And I think we should talk about that a little bit at the end is a preview for the entire episode about Activity Pub that David has put on my calendar already.

Can't wait. Okay. Let's start with fake trick. I can't. It's like I'm too excited to start this conversation. Do you want to tell us all about how this happened, Nilai? Because you were on, You were on this from the beginning, fake Drake. Yeah, I'm curious for Charlie's take. Charlie hosts an actual music podcast. So over the weekend, there's a track posted on TikTok by an artist named Ghostwriter 977, who is a person in white sheet and glasses. The track is called Heart of My Sleeve, and the voices are Drake and the weekend.

And it's like a pretty good track. Is it pitched that way? Like, it's very obvious that way to see it. I was trying to remember when this first came out was this like, this is a... It's hashtag Drake in the weekend. So the title is not say it's then, but it also is hashtag AI. And importantly, this will be very important later. At the beginning of it, there's a producer called Metro Boomin.

He's now also an artist. He's got a famous producer tag by future. If Young Metro don't trust you, I'm going to shoot you. That's the tag. And that is at the beginning of the song. So the implication here is that Metro Booman has produced a track with Drake in the weekend. Two artists that have not appeared together for five-ish years. This is a real thing.

But it's obviously AI. Yeah. So it like blows up in an uncanny way over the weekend. Like the TikTok account is brand new. No one's ever heard of this person. It instantly has millions of streams. Charlie, like there are lots of AI tracks out there. This one just blew up in a weird way.

Do people just love Drake that much? I think, frankly, it's a it is a serviceable song. Yeah. So it passes the actually sounds like it was made by a huge. human. And when we think about what part of it was made by AI, I think it's probably actually just one very small piece, which is the creation of their voices. Yeah. Very likely the beat is made by a human. Very likely the lyrics, if made by chat GPT, feel edited by a human. You know how AI's, the large language models have this problem of hallucinating the longer they go into something.

They're not great at doing music composition yet because they don't get. the right balance of repetition and novelty. It kind of just like, the beats get weird. Yeah. They don't. Did they just get more chaotic as time goes on? Yeah. And they just like,

six seconds is great, but six minutes is like a total disaster. Exactly. They don't stop referencing themselves. It works great for like ambient music, which doesn't need to ever have any reference to an earlier part. It just keeps on blending and moving. And that's why there's a lot of background AI music and like content music that

that music is fine. But this is a real beat. So it sounds like someone got a beat. I don't know if they made it or if they just ripped it off of YouTube. There's a lot of beats available. Yeah. And they wrote some lyrics.

And the implication throughout is they sang or performed the song and then they ran it through an AI to have Drake recreate that performance. That would be my assumption. There are some tools out there right now that are open source, easy to use, where you can pretty easily just grab a piece of text,

run it through a thing, and it will spit out a Drake-like voice. Now, the open-source ones that I have access to, they kind of sound like you're talking through a bad Zoom phone call. It's a little artifact-y and weird. But there's something coming out in like the next literally couple of weeks that are in pre-release. I'm sure people have access to betas that sound uncanny,

where you can even live redo your voice and sound akin to the president, Drake, kind of whoever you want, as long as there's some training data in there. So my hunch is that this person probably has some access to. One of the better tools that I don't have access to yet that makes the voice sound really good. Yeah. But what surprised me is that it's not a new thing that has occurred. Like, there is a very charming version of AI Kanye West performing Hey There, Delilah that I'm just obsessed with.

It's just like, it's adorable. Yeah. And I think Kanye should take a note and be like, here's what I'm doing. But like there's a lot of this stuff. There's burgeoning artistic communities using these tools. It's just fishy that this one appeared and blew up. It's, I think it has a lot to do with timing. Yeah.

I have a bunch of things, right? There's so many AI stories happening right now. The whole world has woken up and paying attention to large language models and people are experimenting in chat GPT and, you know, all of the various tools. And so I think they're just grabbing this perfect moment of the zeit guys to do something in music, which hasn't been done yet. Like we've been obsessed with Dolly 2 for a minute. That fad is probably, right?

fading. We've been really obsessed with writing college essays from chat GPT. There hasn't been a good, there's been some fun ones in the past, but it wasn't in the same news cycle that we've been in right now. So I think it's kind of just kind of writing this AI news cycle perfectly. And it's also at a moment when the music labels are expressing a lot of anxiety to the distributors and trying to figure out what they're going to do about their future copyright, not just of issues of making sure that Drake owns Drake's voice, but also the issue. that AI music writ large could just come in such large volumes

in the future that even if you are making original music, it might even get noticed because what we're already at hundreds of thousands of tracks per day being uploaded, imagine when we're getting to tens of millions. This is what I'm saying about it. We're already in that environment in this brand new TikTok account

that no one's ever heard of before posted this thing that is maybe 5% better than the other AI songs that have existed before. And it blew. I'm just telling you that crypto scam vibes

in my heart are off the charts. There's just something, like a lot of crypto people who became AI, people started tweeting about it. There's a link to download the full track to a company called Lalo that wants your phone number. No, don't do that. That's crypto adjacent in some weird way. Do you see what I'm saying?

It's Kanye. It's Kanye. So my first thought was like, this is Drake himself. This is a real Drake track. And they're doing some stunt with it and he'll pull off the sheet and reveal himself to be Drake. Controlling. In character for Drake.

And then the weekend part of it doesn't sound quite so realistic. No. And then UMG freaked out, which we can get to. So maybe that's not real. And then it's like, maybe it's Kanye West who hates Drake. And this would be like actually very in character for Kanye. That seems weird too. There's just something fishy about.

I talked to somebody well placed to know. And they were like, look, it's bizarre. And things that are this bizarre are. accidents on the internet anymore. Yeah. But no one quite knows what's going on. There's a marketing agency behind it. Something's going on.

It's getting very conspiratorial. I don't know, man. Like, there's definitely an Occam's Razor version of this that says, like, TikTok is incredibly well-placed to make things popular that would not otherwise have a platform on which to be popular. If you can do a passably good impression of Drake, you're going to be very popular on the internet. It's just like a thing that is true.

And this has that, like, we talked a lot about the swaggy pope on the show. like this has a lot of that same vibe where it's just good enough that you initially don't catch it and you like think it's an alright song and then you catch it and you're like, oh my God, this is what blows your mind in several stages, which is like a perfect

recipe for something like this to blow up way beyond what it would ordinarily do. Right, I'm just saying all the earned media that it got is legit. Like we're talking about it because it's impressive. It's worth talking about it. The first wave of that media was this is blowing up on TikTok.

And I think that that turn of it in particular is you can just pay TikTok money to promote this. And there were also a bunch of people like tweeting and stuff who were like, oh, this is really blowing up and it had like 25,000 views. And it's like, I don't know that this is blowing up. Yeah. And so we'll come to the fishy part and the takedowns and all that stuff because I think that's the next turn of the story and I'm obsessed with what Google will do.

But I just want to stay focused on the tool itself here. So, Charlie, you have made this stuff. I was talking to you about it earlier this week and you're like, I just made one of these in two minutes and you sent it to me. And it was like, you were taking the text of me talking out Ticketmaster and you made Drake Rappit. And I was like, I just come on the show and do that. So walk us through how you actually go about doing this.

Okay. So literally just before coming and sitting down with you all, I was like, oh, I've got to make one of these really fast. So here's how I went about it. The first thing I did is I went to, first need a beat, right? You can make some AI beats. I don't think they're that great. I don't like them.

So you can make a very easy beat by using. open or very affordable sample library. So I was like, okay, let's go find like a high hat loop. Okay. So I found some like little loops. Oh my God. You're doing like a full Charlie Puth impression. What if there was a light switch.

I'll never do that. I should say I am an amateur beatmaker. Yeah. And I am not a rapper. But I could grab some samples. So I grabbed some samples. I dropped them into Ableton, my music software, and I did this. This was like two minutes.

All right. Just existing samples that are out there. Drake-type beat. Drake would for sure wrap on top of that. No, no, that beat is like slightly too interesting for modern Drake. If you play that in a Banana Republic, they'd be like, ah, this is too hardcore, and that's the current Drake threshold. Banana Republic. Like, he makes Gacky Pants music, right?

Okay, so then I have the issue, as I said, not rapper, but I need some lyrics. And I figure what I could do is I could just go to Theverge.com. And the first thing that I saw, let's see, it's no longer on the front page right now. But what was on the front page was, it's a laser bong. Yes. Beautiful. And I just, I'm so happy. I literally felt like, here are the lyrics to our song.

I'm so happy. So here's what it. The laser bong is the gift that keeps getting growling. It really does. What a beautiful 420. So I record myself just stating the first couple lines of your article in The Verge. It's a laser bong. It's a bong. There are lasers. I could not be clear about what it is. It's got some flow. Weed and lasers just seem to go together.

Like weed in black light velour paintings or weed and peanut butter. Good. That's good. Together seem to go together. Peanut butter. A little slant rhyme. I was like, all right, those are our lyrics. So record myself. I go and find this website Uberduck. Uberduck. A.I. Not affiliated.

No idea. They have trained a bunch of wrapper AI data sets that are, as I said, they're like, they're okay. They're not amazing. So I enter, I upload my voice saying that thing. Okay. And then I type in the text, it needs to match them. And I hit synthesize and outputs this with my.

beat. I'm so excited. This is the most exciting thing it's ever happened. Yes. It's a laser bomb. It's a bomb. They're all lasers. Oh my God. It's a laser bomb.

We need of lasers just seem to go to the middle. Yes. Black, black they'll go paint. There's a weed and peanut butter bomb. Oh my God. So that's, it's a laser bong by the verge. Yes. That's going out on Spotify tonight.

Tonight. Who has a CD baby account? Andrew Marino Do you have a CD baby account? Yep, that's a thumbs up. It's going out tonight. But really, this was like, it took me a few minutes to put this together.

And like, if we didn't like the Drake, who else do we like? Let's grab Eminem. Let's see what he gives us. Oh my God. So let's do Eminem freestyle as the model. I'll hit synthesize.

It takes a minute because this is like a... Yeah, the real time is like an important piece here. And I get a nice picture of I feel like this isn't enough lyrics to give Eminem. That's really what I'm worried about. He's going to be very fast. Yeah, this is free. They have a paid version.

UberDoc.AI. Yeah. All right. This night is getting shut down. Like Eminem's lawyers are listening to this right now. But you're listening to this. Pull the car over and synthesize as much rap music as you can. Do it now.

Because it's not going to last for very long. And David got in trouble for using a M&M AI voice at a live show. And so I don't want to. Eminem coming for the Verge cast, but here he is singing laser ball or rapping Lasar ball. Those are my lyrics Eminem. It's a laser ball for latins. It should not be clearer now, but this is

weed and lace is just in to go together like weed and black like velliped paintings. We need and peanut. Hold on. Just starts hallucinating. Beautiful Eminem. I think I understood four of those words. And that was just like, you know, each one of these models is clearly being trained by a user. Clearly, the company is not wanting to upload these datasets.

They don't know how this information is getting in there. And probably why they sound bad is that there's probably not enough training data for each of these artists. And if you want to separate the voice from the music to get the acapella, you have to do so with an AI separation tool. Oh, wow. Which are pretty good. But they still are going to have some digital artifacting. So that's going to get into the training data.

So these things are not perfect yet, but they're pretty good. Here's another version of Drake by another era. This is M&M all era. So people are doing different trading sets. Oh, interesting. You can try different M&Ms. Let's see what this one sounds like. It's a bomb that by lasers.

I'd not be clear about what this is weeded ladies to go together. We need a black like fellow pains. We have to stop giving Eminem a seizure on the show. You know, I'm telling you, but doesn't it kind of feel like he's just with us over Zoom and there's a bad connection and you're like, wait, Eminem, what was that? Can you try that again? Yeah, it just sounds just a little off there. Yeah, all of that and also he's having a stroke as we do this.

Liam has requested ice spice. Can we make this say whatever we want? We can make it say whatever we want. All right. So I have an email from a listener here. Okay. It's beautiful. And for disclosure, I've already sent Charlie the text to this email so you can begin

this process. I'm going to read you this email. It's from Joe Lemoth. I hope I'm pronouncing that Joe. Okay, guys, I'm late to the party in the last two podcasts, but here goes. I can venture with you all on a lot of stuff, even some of the super weird crap Dieter used to come up with. That said,

however, Neelai could not be more wrong on the CarPlay stuff. Let's go. Perfect. I drive at 2021 F150, Wireless CarPlay works flawlessly for me. Also, look at these picks, two apps running, or at least kind of like the iPad's version of it. But look, CarPlay on the left and on the right, I have my podcast

running. In the second shot, I even went full. I'm Neelai and I burn money on satellite radio elitist mode and I'm listening to Sirius XM to show it. You do not need my phone screen. It's It's down out of the way and I forget it's there. This implementation of CarPlay is the best I've seen. Can we make Drake wrap Joe's email?

You want Drake? You don't want Jay-Z? I would like it to be Jay-Z. I think we want both. I think you want to. Jay-C. I just feel like I want to hear another one. Jay-Z, this model is different. With this one, I don't quite know how to do it,

but you can change its pitch and all kinds of things, but we're just going to do the basic Jay-Z. And it might take a second because this is a longer passage. Charlie, I have a question for you while it goes. Yeah. Is there a reason this is something? that would be easier with rap than with other genres of music. I feel like we've seen it more with hip-hop than other genres.

Is there a reason for that? Well, certainly with rap, you don't have to, pitch is not a big of a consideration, right? So you don't have to worry about getting pitch. Rhythm is challenging. In fact, the reason why I recorded myself saying the lines originally was because I wanted them to be decently in time again, not a rapper. But if you just do what we're doing here, it's going to put them in some kind of random order. it's not going to hit the beat where it needs to.

But here is Jay-Z. Let's see how he does with car play. Oh, guys, I'm late to the party on the last two podcasts. When it goes, I can venture with you all on a lot of stuff. He'll submit a super weird crap dad that is to come up with. That said, however, Millie could not be moron on the car play stuff. I drive for 2020. Well, this car play works flawlessly for me.

I was on. Look at these pics. You watch running on list. Can't like that best rich in a bit. Look, car players, they're on the left and on the right. I have my podcast running. For the second shot, I have been full of a million. I just burn money for sick.

I like radio, and let this mood. And actually listen to the seriousness to show it. I do not need my phone screen. It sits down out of the way, and I forget it. It's there. This implementation, a couple of years. The best I have seen is always. Let us show.

I'm going to my podcast, funny. It's been never, you know, and then. So let to the interstate six. Misage. And I'm paying a sperm. I'm not paid enemy and Google. I'm back to the party. I think it's been doing jippers.

There were some decent flow in there. There was no, da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Really getting the flow towards the end and then... If I chop that up and let me put auto tune on that, you give me... There could be a... There's a thing there, too. Who knew Jay-Z was so in Carplay?

Jay-Z saying I have my podcast running needs to go into the Vergecast theme song. Well, one, Jay-Z is also running about Carplay, as is Joe. That's the other hour of the show. So let's talk about... This is incredible. Let's just feed more text into AI rappers

for the rest of the hour. It's incredible that it's easy. It's incredible that it's incredible that you were able to synthesize it against your own voice and make something that is quite honestly great. And I think will be our legacy. But it's also the layers of complication here are like out of control. Yeah. So you will recall that I said hard of my sleeve of the fake Drake song had the Metro Boomin tag in it. I don't know if that's AI or not.

I really doubt it. Right. It doesn't make any sense. Based off of your whole feeling that this is... What is Metro Boom? Oh, Metro Boom is a producer. So in the world of hip-hop, it's very common that you put a audio tag at the beginning of your beat so that people can identify it as yours. That's a way of producers really building a name for themselves when historically producers, you know, are not usually named artists.

So it's a way to, you know, all right, Metrobo. I start recognizing that. So that tag, I think that someone just copied that tag. Sure. I mean, it makes it easier. Very easy to isolate. it, take it apart. You can do that with existing AI tools that separate tracks. That's a whole other

technology. So maybe some AI was used in the process of separating it from its underlying track or maybe Metro Booman has that tag somewhere on the internet that is isolated. Very easy to crop, boom, it's in your track. Again, this song, the song is good enough that it works as a song that could chart on the Hot 100,

largely, I think, mostly from interest of the sort of the excitement of it all, it being AI. But no, that does not sound like it's AI. I really think the main AI element here is likely to just be the voice transposition, voice synthesis model. Again, maybe the lyrics were somehow generated with AI. We don't know.

I think we're going to find out. Like, someone's simply, that sheet is going to come off. Okay, but it's important that the Metro Boomin tag, we think is a sample. It's like a real sample. Yeah. A future actually saying that on a track and Metro use that over and again. Universal has this like strong statement, which is very long that I won't read here, but Universal Music comes out and says,

we have to work with our streaming service providers. We think generative AI like this infringes our copyrights and other agreements. And that, honestly, if you were like Universal's marketing team or legal team, you might release this track just to release that statement. Right. Again, the layers of potential stunt here are very high.

I love that idea. The statement notably didn't say, we don't know anything about this or where it came from or anything like that. It just says AI is bad. we love our artists. Yeah. Plausible deniability.

Yeah. So we're down in the weeds now of this thing. So they start issuing takedowns. We don't know if they're the ones who took it off of Apple Music and Spotify and title and the rest. I've heard that that wasn't them, that the streamers just did it. Right. Because you did a little reporting on this.

Yeah. Every now and again, old man puts up his old fedora and starts reporting the little notebook. Yeah, I start calling around and seeing what's gone. So the streamers pull it down. And what's difficult is on YouTube and TikTok, you can't just call up and say, take it down, right? Because they're user-generated content platforms. So you have to file a DMCA takedown. This is all very complicated.

Anybody who's ever watched any amount of YouTube has run into a creator being like, I don't have the copyright. Like the YouTube take-down system is real. YouTube takes it down. And they put up a cover-in-noticing. Universe Lasses take this down. So then I start digging around for real, because that's really weird to me because the song is a new song. Universal doesn't own the song and the law around

do the you own Drake's voice doesn't really exist Universal definitely doesn't own Drake's voice Oh yeah right right So it wouldn't be universal It would be Drake or the weekend And then as you're saying The law doesn't exist

So I dug around reported out Google on the record said to us We took it down because of a sample And I have learned the sample is the Metro Boomin tag So we escaped this like legal nightmare

It's not even a story about AI It's just this is a really old story about getting copyright clearances for samples. Yep. And it's like the escape hatch, like saved by the bell of this tag. So now Universal can claim this song contains an unauthorized sample that we own. And if we hear this song and that sample is in it, take it down. That's copyright infringement.

We own this sample. If that sample wasn't there, this is a nightmare. I wish it wasn't there. It's a good nightmare. I put it in as like a giant pull quote in our story that's like, if you upload this song without the Metro Boomin tag because I desperately want this to happen. So the thing that you're talking about,

the training data, someone's out there uploading a bunch of Jay-Z songs or a bunch of M&M songs or whatever to uberduck.a.i. They don't own the rights to train the AI on those songs. Of course, either just like open AI or any company which is scraping the internet

for everything and doing the exact same thing. Are those actual rights though? Like is it or because that's, I think, the big question right now, right? is who owns the rights to train AI? Is that something that you have to own the rights to? Because everybody's kind of saying, no, it isn't. If it's available, I can do whatever I want with that.

This is the big debate. Right. Right. So right now, you write a song. I did. I did. Part two. Right.

You as the owner of the cop, right? You wrote the song, you recorded it, or in this case, you had Drake recorded for you. Yes. That's your song. Right. have a bunch of exclusive rights that are listed in the law. There's a bunch of stuff you're allowed to do. One of the things you're allowed to do is sell copies of the song. And that's most people will buy copies of a song for you. They get from you the right to like play the song in public or perform it. That like there are organizations that run around suing bars and restaurants because they don't have the appropriate public performance licenses. And this is just like a big system that has existed for decades. One right you definitely don't have is the right to make if you just buy a song. You go to the store and buy. LaserBong.

A laser pong. Beautiful. On CD, and you come back and play it, you don't have the right to remix it or make a sample of it because that's a derivative work, right? That's you as the artist, hold on to that right. Right. I can't sell.

I mean, I can make that. I just can't sell it. No, you're really not even supposed to make it. Really? Yeah. I'm learning all sorts of new things today. I mean, it's just copy. You're making copies.

And so copyright law very narrowly regulates the act of making copies. Okay. And it says you cannot remix this. Is that in any meaningful way different from what's happening with like search engines right now? Like to Charlie's point, the open AI and everybody is just pulling everything it can find on the internet, making training data out of it. And now you're starting to see publishers and other companies start to get mad. Is this just exactly the same thing? It's exactly the same thing.

So Getty is suing stability and News Corp is making a lot of noise about doing Google. News Corp loves talking shit about Google. Like every Hollywood studio is going to start doing this. the idea that there are things you are allowed to make copies for and things you are not allowed to make copies for is there it is that's copy your law so here they're saying hey making copies of our work into your computer for the purpose of training in AI is those are unauthorized copies but no one knows if that is a valid thing to say out loud this has never happened before in the history of the world and then they're saying once you've trained your AI on those unauthorized copies the songs you are making are now unauthorized derivative works of our songs or unauthorized derivative works of Getty photos or whatever it is. Yes, Charlie's going to jail. I mean, probably because you all can sue me because I stole it.

I stole your copyright. I stole the text from the verge. I will be suing, yes. I mean, nothing, there's nothing that could be better for this show than Universal suing us for. Laser pawn. Blazer pawn. So I very welcome the lawyers.

Parity really gets you out of anything. Parity is a great excuse. I welcome that letter from your lawyers, and we will post it so fast. So you just have this problem, right, where, okay, this step of, we're going to train AI by copying all the data onto the computer, that might not be fair use.

And fair use of Liam will kill me if I go into this. It's a four-factor test, whatever. It's like as political as anything, right? It's like as random as any court decision in the country. case-by-case-fair use determination. So that, all the creative companies are like, wait, this is not fair use. This is unauthorized copying to make training data. And Microsoft and Google and stability and whoever else are all saying, nope, this is fair use.

Alex Heath was at a conference with the CEO of Stability AI where he said, I hired the lawyer who wrote the book on fair use. Oh, okay. And Sarah Chong and I're like, who? This doesn't make any sense. Sundar Pichai. In search, there's a string of cases from the, early 2000s were at Google and search where they found Ferry Sovereignigan. The most famous is called Perfect 10 versus Amazon and Google. Perfect 10 is a porn publisher.

And their images were showing up in Google Image Search and Amazon Image Church. And the court had to feel like, yeah, Google is going to win this one. But you've just got this like ancient body of law that allows these things to happen that doesn't apply one to one to this. Right. And now you're like, what are they going to do? What's Google going to do? Google has to run YouTube where if you take that Metro Boom and tag out, the decision on whether or not this song is fair use or not is wide open.

There's no thing like the DMCA for names and likenesses, right? You can't issue a that's my likeness take down to Google. There's no mechanism. There's no law for it. It's all state law. It's not federal law. And then Google also is doing a bunch of AI stuff. So like what you've got YouTube, which as David keeps writing about,

turns more and more into the cable company every day. Yep. So it needs rights holders to be happy. It needs the NFL to be happy. happy. It needs Drake to be happy. Whoever's going to play at the next half-time show should be happy with YouTube. It's worth mentioning that the entire content

ID system exists more or less because of multi-billion dollar lawsuits that many of these content companies went after YouTube when they were a much smaller company. Yeah. And so Google's highly aware of how vulnerable it could be to huge litigation. And so all that stuff

that the content idea happened because of Viacom and Google basically at that time and YouTube at that time were new. And they were like, this is the cost of doing business. There's a famous scene at the end of like the social network where Mark Zuckerberg's lawyers are like, this is the price of being a success, pay the money, settle the lawsuit and walk away. Like that is very much how Google and YouTube thought about those cases. Now they're giants.

Yeah. Like they're the incumbents. They're the infrastructure. They're the cable company with the deal with the NFL. And Open AI is not. Stability AI is not. And it's worth noting that content ID is not the law. It's just an agreement between some companies.

Yep. The way that content is treated there is very different than it is in other platforms. Yeah. Your choices basically are like you upload a song or a video and say, this is my video, and Google trusts you that you're not lying. And you're like, take all the videos that match this video down or monetize them and send them money to me. If you don't own the song, you can't say that. So like Drake can't show up and say all uses of my voice I own, even if they're made by a robot, monetize them or take them down. that that system doesn't exist and there's also just like

I hope it does exist I hope this is how it exists but only for Drake but only for Drake I find it really interesting that you're having to go at length to explain how unusual this is but underneath all of it

it just doesn't pass the smell test like I think any human is going to be like that sounds like Drake can you do that with Drake that doesn't seem right like initially it's just like oh yeah you can't do that

is that can you do that oh, maybe we can is where we're at. But the law is just not prepared for it because the law is all based on making copies of existing things. And we just have never had a robot that can take your voice away from you and then talk about car. Well, and that's the thing. And if you take, if you sort of take that out, like what Charlie is saying, and you say, okay, this doesn't have the smell test. Let's not allow it.

You've just kneecapped all of the generative AI stuff that Google has basically poured its future into. And like you either say this is allowed and piss off. music industry or you say everything we think is the future of our company and the internet is illegal. And I don't, it's a total losing game. And I like, it doesn't seem like there's a middle ground here either. It really doesn't. Everyone's going to fight. No, I don't know what Google's going to do. I mean, there's one middle ground and I got an email from a longtime Burchcast listener who said, I agree with you. I think Google's going to solve it with money. I mean, fair. Okay. Sure. And maybe that's what Universal is gesturing towards. But you're not going to stop Uber

duck AI, demanding money. Right? And the models are just going to run on people's computers, and the training data is going to get copied. And trying to regulate the copy of Drake's catalog onto your laptop to train a program on your laptop is a ridiculous exercise. But that is like what copier at law can do. It can be like, you made a copy here.

And that one is illegal. But I think we are going to see some precedent because we have seen this in film and TV, where they go and they take somebody's like this and they slap it on to a model. like all the Star Wars movies are like, you know what, Princess Leia is alive again and young. And so, and they signed contracts. Like there's a bunch of- Will Smith, I think famously signed his like, whatever. What was that horrible movie they made?

I am legend? Was it I am legend? No, no, no. It was the one where he's like the younger version of him. He's real bad. But yeah, like a bunch of contracts have been written. A bunch of people have kind of agreed on this. So there's stuff there.

Like, people have figured this out. And there are those smell tests. And I think it's just going to be up to the courts. One decade. This is my prediction. Yeah. It'll be one decade. We got to wrap this up.

Alex Heath is waiting and come talk to us about Snapchat and their chat bots. Charlie, I'm curious just on the broader picture. You know a lot of artists. You know a lot of songwriters. You know a lot of musicians. Switch shop is great. You should go listen to it. Is there the flip side of excitement?

Like, look at these tools are so fun. Yeah. That was really fun. I just made LaserBond. It was the best. there's so many things that are happening in AI and music from how to mix and master your music more quickly so you can get it up on Spotify faster

to make more interesting beats there's endless I think creative tools that people are doing with this and there's also people who are creating open source AIs that they are giving explicit permission that you can use their voice and that's totally awesome people are going to do some very creative stuff with it I haven't seen a track break through like this sort of gag one

yet, though. It's fishy. It's fishy because it's a crypto scam. Totally. It's all a crypto scam. Don't invest in anything. The future of our nation's copyright law is going to happen because of a crypto scheme. And that seems about right.

There is something. There's definitely excitement. People are already using AI tools in small and interesting ways. But in terms of writing whole tracks for us, I have been saying, since people have asked me this question, is AI going to write whole songs for us? When it's happening, there's just way bigger issues to be working. worried about. I mean, obviously, I don't mean to diminish the, you know, the music industry. It's a big industry. But when we're writing really good songs and replacing

excellently done composition and all the human creativity and the tens of thousands of choices that go into writing a song, I mean, we have what? The AIs are doing much more important things, power, military. Like, I'm just, I'm a whole, when that happens, I'm being, I'm paying attention to something else. All right. Well, hit us with some laser bong and let you get out one more time. Ride again with laser bomb. Run it back. It's a laser bomb.

It's a bomb. They are lasers. I could not be clearer about what this is. It's a laser bomb. We and lasers just seem to go together like we and black. Black they'll do paintings of wheat and peanut butter. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder,

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That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-R-K-com. Upwork.com. We're back. It's a laser bong. It's a laser bong. It's catchy. I can't tell you how often we're going to play laser bong on this show.

I'm really excited for the rest of attorney. We're going to play that song. Thank you to Charlie. Charlie's gone now. But Alex Heath is here. Hey, Alex. Hey, guys. Good to be here.

Quite a lot going on in what I would call the Alex Heath World, the world social platforms, Snapchat and event. They talked about some AI stuff. Google is reorganizing a little bit. There's some meta layoffs. There's some Reddit API access stuff happening around like training these models, which we were just talking about at length. Let's start with Snapchat.

It seems like their event was pretty fun. Like they're a weird company. They're always having a good time no matter how badly things are going. Yeah. That's actually what I was going to. The weird was the word I was going to use. Tech events are back, baby. Yeah.

I was earlier this week, they had this pretty cool event at this airport in Santa Monica where Harrison Ford Parks is planes. So there's like little planes flying above us as we're as we're outside mingling. And Snapjust is like it's this weird creative company that continues to befuddle people, but manages to also do interesting creative things. And like you get there and they give you like a 3D bit moji of yourself and like a little like award trophy case that you can just like set on your desk. And like they just have all these creative, interesting, weird things that they do. But yeah, I mean, the big news.

at that event was this my AI thing that they're doing, this chat bot that I interviewed Evan Spiegel on the site for about. And they're really betting big on it. And they're the, I think, the biggest social media company to fully embrace generative AI. And now they're opening up access to the chat bot to all of their users. And like for everyone listening, I always, every time I feel like I talk about Snap, I hear people still use Snap. And they get a stat that they have 750 million and monthly active users. So they continue to grow users, despite people continuing not to understand them

or what they do, and now they're betting big on AI. New people turn 13 every day, man. And that's like, that's what happens when you turn 13. It's like, you just get snap. It's a strategy. And like to just kind of like summarize how weird this company is, they spent three years developing this AI selfie mirror that I tried at the event that they're not even shipping.

It's just R&D. And the camera is inside the mirror. And it's like lenses and AR shopping stuff when you walk up to it. And you can see its applications and stores. I have no idea if they're actually going to do that. But they're a SaaS company now. They're selling AR shopping software to companies.

They're going to have some of these mirrors as like tests in men's warehouse. They're doing tests with Nike where you can try on a Nike shoe on your foot with like a mirror. Can we just back up to men's warehouse? I've shopped at a men's warehouse in my life. I'm just saying men's clothing is the least. A.R. necessary clothing. Yeah. You're like, you're going to wear a jacket.

What if the jacket was blue? It's like you don't know. It just doesn't seem like. You just precisely exactly described the promotional gift for the men's wearout's AR mirror. It's a guy trying on what looks to be like a prom tux. And the one, the AR one he's wearing is blue. And then he like dramatically presses a button and then it's black.

That's the whole thing. All right. Fair enough. I just, it's men's clothing. like I'm wearing a new black jacket you guys. Looks great. It just doesn't seem like that's what you, whatever, good luck to everyone of your men's warehouse SaaS business.

Are they doing all this stuff because Snap is a company, they had apocalypse because of Apple just like everybody else and they need to branch out? Yeah, they want to diversify revenue. I would point people back to, I leaked this Evan Spiegel memo late last year, kind of outlining the plan for all this and all the metrics they want to hit. They're behind on some of it. But yeah, they want to diversify. So they've also got Snapchat Plus, which is their subscription product,

where you basically pay for early access features. So my AI initially was gated to plus. And they've got 3 million paid subs for that, which is a little bit behind what Evan wanted to be the goal, but it's still growing. They want to try to get the 10 million this year. You know, Snap is an actual super app. You know, when we talk about Twitter and Elon's goals to build X and build a super app,

it's already what Snap is. and it's kind of confusing to talk about and understand, and they're still trying to figure out how to make money out of it, because the main reason that people come to SNAP is to chat, and they don't make money off of chat. So that's been their inherent struggle as a company, as they sell ads against stories, which are declining in usage and Discover,

which remains kind of like a tabloid-y-looking thing that hasn't really changed much over the years. And long-term, they think AR advertising is going to be a thing, but I don't think that's going to be a meaningful thing on mobile. I think they're waiting for wearables. So they're in this really weird spot where they're not big enough to get the ad dollars that they think they deserve even with that user base of 750 million monthly users, which is like a huge user base, right?

And that was kind of the background of everything was like the stock is like below the IPO price. Revenue is not growing like they had hoped. But they keep shipping interesting stuff. And they're still kind of the product R&D factory for the rest of social media. And, you know, when I've seen a lot of tech events over the years, I really would put them maybe second to Apple in terms of the kind of polish and creativity that they put into these moments where they announce all this stuff and you could hear it and feel it in the audience there. People were genuinely energized by what they were doing. It's just everyone's also going like, when are they going to make money?

And that's a problem when you're an independent publicly traded company and you're not profitable yet. But you know, you have all these employees. They have like over 5,000 employees. So the Twitter thing kind of hangs over them as an example. of like what could go wrong. Yeah. Do you think there's a chance that Abin cuts half the company like Elon? I think more layoffs could happen. Cariswisher actually interviewed him on their stage at the end of the day and asked him about selling the company and he's never budged on that question. He's always said, we'll never sell. And he did actually kind of hint to that basically if we aren't able to get the company

more efficient and profitable through this tough time, like, you know, it would make sense for us to entertain some kind of discussion, but he acted like they had already done that, even though the stock market does not think that they have. And so I thought that was interesting. It was the first time I've ever heard him not totally dismiss that idea. But, you know, he controls the company fully. I don't see that happening. I don't see who the acquire would be even. But yeah, I could see more layoffs happening. I mean, they are a lot bigger than Twitter. And they have more users, but they're not profitable either. And that's a problem. Yeah, Snap is trying to play this weird game, I feel like. And I was thinking about this watching the Partner Summit this week where Snap's like big long-term bet is on AR, right?

Like they've been saying this for years. That fundamentally everyone's big long-term bet is on AR. But hear me out. This thing that Snap is trying to do, I think, and I can't is get so many people used to AR that it can then sell all of that AR to businesses because all of those businesses will have to give people AR features because customers will demand them when they walk into a men's warehouse so that they will buy them from Snap. You're going to love the way these AR pants look, I guarantee you. And that to me is just like, some of the, I think they are genuinely ahead of everybody else in AR. Like, from what we've seen in the world, like more people use SNAP to do cooler stuff

than any other AR platform that exists. They showed the, like, crying lens in the audience during the keynote where they just like pointed the camera at people in the audience and they were just like crying or they look like Pixar characters. And it's hilarious. It's great. I mean, the lenses, the face lenses still remain the best current mobile consumer application of AR it exists.

The problem is, it's goofy and dumb. And it's funny, but it's not a business, right? And so they're starting to introduce, like, lenses you can transact with using, like, snap tokens and, like, unlock things, like, games. But, like, it all comes back to these, like, tabletop demos that we've seen of, like, pointing your phone at a table or whatever, and there's, like, a game. Like, no one does that in real life. Yeah. It's like iOS, every stylus demo is, like, circling things. Yeah.

For a while, iOS every... I have to say, whatever you just said about AR lenses that you shop with. with Snap Tocans. Like, I rarely feel old on the show. And that made me feel like an ancient wizard who had just stumbled out of a cave. Like, what are you talking? Yeah, I mean, I felt old many times during the day.

Like, they were doing like, they're like, we're going to have a story where it only, you can only post to it at night and then watch it the next day. It's like an after dark story. We got to stop doing this for like this thing where we invent times of day. Let's talk about the chat by itself

because that's actually the news. It is interesting that they're the first social platform that's like you can just talk to a bot in our app in this way. What's the play there? What's the idea? So Evan, I think, remains one of the most thoughtful product thinkers in consumer internet. And he is really bullish on generative AI,

which is interesting. He doesn't usually like quickly jump to these kind of trends. I haven't seen him do that over the years. I've interviewed him a lot. And he's really into this. Like this was his idea. Like I've heard he was like personally writing my AI prompts like responses. Like he's very into it.

Wow. And, you know, he thinks he told me that these LLMs are better suited for creativity than information retrieval and accuracy, which we see, right, when we, as you guys have talked about and we'll talk about, like, we're constantly finding out that these chatbots are actually, they suck at search. They suck at recalling specific information. And so that's accurate that you can count on. And so he's treating it and wanting people to think of it more as like a person, like a

persona. So they're anthropomorphizing it and letting you make a bit. emoji and all of it and then change the name and introduce it into group chats, like at mention the AI. Your chaotic liar friends. Isn't that just the worst? Well, look, if, go ahead. Like, he told me, he was like, how do you use it?

And he was like, well, I used it to help plan my wife Miranda Kerr's, like, birthday weekend in L.A. And he was also like, I use it to tell my kids a bedtime story every time when I get home from work. But wait. So, gender to AI bedtime stories. That's bleak, man. That is bleak. That's horrible. That's not horrible.

I mean, sorry. I'm not saying that I've done it. I'm just saying, abstractly, you often read your child's stories written by something else. You often read your child. I don't know if Dr. Seuss is a robot. He was a dude. He was a real man. Who knows?

History. This is the hill you want to die on us. Who knows who people are? I'm sorry. I just had Drake Rats. acting laser bong on this show. Nothing is real. The future is wide open.

That's very fair. But this turn, right? Okay, you introduce this new chaotic. It's Snapchat, so it must be said. Occasionally corny element into your chat service. This is just clippy. This is the most clippy thing anyone has done yet, including Microsoft, which is running away from doing clipy.

Well, yeah, it is clippy because they're also, so my AI will start recommending lenses, like if you ask it. And where this gets really wild is that, I hear you want to do crying face. Yeah. Exactly. They're doing generative photo snaps back. So they showed on stage, this is just going to be for plus subscribers to start.

Eventually it'll be video too. But like you'll literally have visual like snaps being sent back to you generated based on what you send it, which is wild. Oh yeah. The example was like you send it a picture of a bunch of tomatoes and say like, what should I make for dinner? And it sends back like a beautiful picture of tomato soup. Right.

Right. Yeah, with a recipe or whatever. Right. So there's a couple things here. Snap is they can't really like lose more business. I mean, I guess they can, but like they're kind of at the bottom in terms of like where they can go from a revenue profit perspective. So they don't have a ton to lose. When you look at what meta, meta has all this tech in house.

They could do something like this. They could have done it 18 months ago and they wouldn't even need it open AI. We should also say Snap is using open AI for all this. Google, same thing. We've been talking about how Google's been just like slowly forced to ship stuff because of open AI. These big companies, they have, everything is a reputational disaster for them potentially. So it's like lawyers just saying, you can't ship this, right? Snap is in this spot where they're huge and they have a very young audience, which also is a

even potentially bigger reputational issue for them. But they can ship faster. And so Evan was very clear that like they don't know exactly how my eye is going to be either misused or what's going to happen with it. But they're thinking like the benefits outweigh the risk for. a company at our state. I mean, I just want to like, this is, before you go, Alex, this is a company that right before Evan did the interview with Kara, they had Matt Friend, who's this hilarious creator who does this Trump impersonation. He's like this TikTok or Snapchat star do like a stand-up thing, right?

But I've never seen something like this at a big tech conference where he like impersonated Trump made jokes about like China and TikTok and impersonated Evan, impersonated Tim Cook. Like at a snap event, like sanctioned like right outside of the main stage. I'm like, they, they are just a a different mode where they can like just yellow it a little bit. And so I think that's why they're doing this. And it may, I think it has the risk of being the biggest like potential, you know, reputational disaster for them from a new product they've shipped though. Because this is, no, because you've got, you just said they had the youngest audience, right? So they have all the people who are young and cannot tell, probably have the most difficulty telling reality from fiction.

And now you're giving them a fiction bot that you want them to personify that has already I think told a 13-year-old how to seduce a 31-year-old. And they're saying, we just don't want to move fast and break things. That all seems like a recipe for horrible things to happen. Which gets to a bigger thing about Snap right now, which is, I feel like they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. A lot of the presentation was also about creators and how they're trying to pay creators more and give them more visibility and spotlight, which is their TikTok competitor that is growing, has 350 million MAUs. Hasn't managed to break out into pop culture. You don't see like spotlights on late night or anything like that.

But they have this public thing that they're trying to do because they need to have that consumption and inventory and time spent to make money from ads because ads are not in chat. And then they also have the chat experience. And the same thing goes with AI. They're trying to say this is a creative thing, like don't rely on it. But also like we're going to pin it to the top of your friend list. We're going to let you name it. And it's based on open AI's models, which we continue to see how people are jailbreaking. them. We don't fully understand what they can do, how they can interact with us. And so I've never

seen Snap kind of just rush into something like this. I mean, this literally was like from January to now. They're releasing this thing to everyone. Yeah, this just seems like it has the potential for like catastrophic backlash. Like you've already had it do it once where it had again, a 13, teach a 13 year old how to seduce a 31 year old. Is it a real 13 year old? Yeah, that was something it was a it was somebody, yeah, it was somebody from the Center for Humane Tech Tristan Harris's thing, trying to get it to say bad things. So, but they still, like, that was capable. Yeah, the safeguards aren't there.

And now you're going to unleash it on 750 million people, many of whom are children. And, like, I don't want to be one of those people that says think of the children, because that's usually, like, the worst thing in the world. Think of all of the video games since you ship in the 90s. But also at the same time, that seems just really dangerous. If you've got this untested thing that you don't know what it's going to do. And now you're going to say, okay, 13-year-olds. have fun. And also you're personifying it, which means, like, it'll kill us all one day.

I don't know. I kind of feel like the reputational damage gets lower with every one of these that comes out. And it's now, like, Bing is just right there. Right. Like, you can go make me be real horny if you're 13. Like, it's not that hard. And I don't know that Snap is uniquely. All time, Vergecast quote. I think we might, that might be the end of the show. I think the police are coming to our houses right now. But what is interesting about it to me is this is so completely unlike the way Snap has ever done anything. Like the company has been thoughtful to a fault over the years. It has been really slow and really deliberate. It's like you think about like the speed it has gone with spectacles.

Like Jesus Christ, release something. But they've been very careful to say like we want to get this stuff right. We want to do it well. We want to be thoughtful. We want to make sure the technology is good. And then with this kind of like the whole tech industry's brain. broke when chat GPT launched. It really did.

I want to use that to change the subject, ever so slightly, right? Yes. Snap is like, here's a thing. You can chat with it. We can sign up for the OpenAI API, API, and you can chat with it in our app too. Great. And they're the first big consumer platform, just like out and do it, which is interesting. But it's still just like, you can chat with it and you should be able to talk to it.

And the thing is everywhere. I just want to flip this to Google for one second, which has released approximately nothing. There was a report this week that Google's own employees said don't release Bard. It's horrible. It's a pathological liar. I would not say Bard has inspired the level of fervor. No. The chat GPT is inspired.

Not even Bing. Like when you're getting done by horny Bing, like something really weird has happened to your company. And just today, Google announced Sunrop Chai had a memo out their two rival AI development centers, Google, brain and deep mind are not being merged. Alex, you know what's going on there because it seems like Google for all of its previous perceived leadership is now just way behind. Well, yeah, this is like the opposite side of the coin from Snap where Google has like probably 15 different teams building a version of my in parallel and they don't even know it, right? And the deep mind Google separation is the ultimate example where they bought deep mind many years ago, which is this cutting edge AI research

lab in London. And it's been largely separate from Google doing a lot of. lot of parallel work in terms of AI development. Google has Google brain led by Jeff Dean, who's doing a lot of like the stuff that you see in Google products. What this signals to me is that Google realizes it needs to ship more. And so it's combining all of these, you know, researchers and scientists that it has together so that they're not doing. There's also like the power grab here of like, you know, deep mind is its own company. It's like when Kevin Sistram was still at Instagram and Instagram was like, we're still a separate company within meta, right? And Zuckerberg's like, no, you're not.

And it's a similar thing that Sundar is doing this week, which is like, no, we need to actually be shipping collectively and putting our minds together and not have these fiefdoms, right? And that's the big tech side of it where, like, they're still doing, like, org chart changes to try to just, like, catch up to where the industry is moving. And Snap is like, we're just going to, like, use open AI and put a bot out and figure it out later because we can. And so that's the problem you have when you're that big and you have all the scrutiny is. as Google is that, you know, first we see all these huge org changes before there's even a product. But the funny part of this is like, I would not say deep mind is like famously a great shipper of products.

Like it's, it's been a really impressive research arm for more than a decade. But basically the only thing people would know DeepMind for is that it built like AlphaGo and is like incredible at games, right? And it's like, I think to me what this says is that the work that DeepMind is doing is better and more advanced and more likely to help Google products than what's happening in Google brand. Yeah, and it just doesn't make sense to have them running separately. I mean, it's like, Meta went through this with Instagram. I mean, it's a similar thing. So, yeah, that is the other side of the coin, right? And it's, you know, I think when we see IO here in the next couple of weeks,

you're going to see a lot of all this kind of come to a head. I was going to be fascinating. Yeah. And before we move off Snap quickly, there's a business thing I wanted to touch on that I think, and, you know, I wrote about this in command line, the newsletter this week, is that I think the, the reason Snap is moving so quickly here is that my AI to them is the first time they're getting, and why these interfaces in general are taking over the industry, it's this really high intent interface where you can know exactly what someone's trying to get out of your product. And for Snap, they need that desperately, right, because they're not monetizing chat with friends. They're not monitoring those messages for ad targeting. So you try with a robot and then you can target the ads based on that. Yeah, I mean, the people at Snap are frothing at the mouth about like ad advertised responses in this thing, like tying the data from my eye into ad targeting throughout the app. Now I don't feel old anymore. Now I feel appropriately aged.

So like this all comes around to like ad targeting and business models at the end of the day. They're going to make you a robot friend and then heavily surveil your interactions with the robot friend. And then the robot friend is going to be like, have you thought about the men's warehouse. That's creepy. I mean, I don't know. Like, if I'm asking my eye to help me plan a vacation to Japan and it like then shows me an ad for like a cool hotel in Japan when I'm like in spotlight, I don't mind, you know, it just depends on how they do it. No one's tried this yet. No one, I mean, Bing is trying it, but they haven't really scaled it yet. The thing is like how people interact with these large language models may just be terrible for ads. It may not be at all what you

want and we don't know, but Snap's going to try. She's going to be like, do you love me? Do you love me over and over and over again? This person is desperate for affection. Let's show them dating that ads. I would say that is more likely the outcome than not. Last little pieces I want to end on here. In the previous segment with Charlie, we were talking about training data and that copyright disasters that are associated with it. Reddit started charging for API access because people are training on Reddit, which is fascinating.

Elon threatens to Microsoft for something, which we can. talk about a minute. I'm not quite sure how that would work. In general, the training data problem is real. We're seeing the tech industry react to it from the other side of the coin. What are you hearing? Are people worried about this at all? I think the companies that have these valuable data sets of user-generated, interesting, relevant content that Al also applies to a search type context, which Reddit is probably at the top of that stack, are going to find that they have an incredibly lucrative business of just licensing that data in this new world we're headed and where these models need to train on something. And so the companies that are going to succeed

are either the ones who have all the data in-house, which is actually, by the way, a long-term bullish thing for Snap on the visual side. They probably have more visual data to train on than just about any company their size. But for Reddit, it makes total sense that they would start charge. I'm surprised they haven't already been doing this because you know that OpenAI has used Reddit data to train its models. And if you're Reddit, it's like, it's the same thing with copyright. It's like, you got to pay me for this. You can't just like take this. And, you know, Reddit wants to go public, maybe potentially at the back half of this year. I wouldn't be surprised if this is like a huge part of their going public narrative is that we're this valuable data source

for this new wave of AI companies. I could see also a similar thing for CORA. We don't talk about Cora a lot on the show. But Adam D'Angelo, who's also on the board of Open AI, there's, they're CEO is very smart about this stuff and they've kept their data off of the internet. It's not easily scraped by Google. That kind of data set is valuable as well. Medium's another interesting example. There are some medium, right? We can talk about medium later. But like, I'm just listing these examples of these companies that have all this UGC content that's not easily scraped. It's incredibly valuable. Yeah. The Twitter one is interesting. Microsoft turned off compatibility to Twitter ads. And someone just like posted the headline and Elon replied to it. And it was like, they trained

using Twitter data lawsuit incoming. It's like, whoa, hold on. First of all, Microsoft's not opening high. Well, so we got to like parse the Elon speak here, right? Like he said a substack was downloading part of the Twitter database or whatever, which is like not even possible. I don't know what that even means. But yeah, so like, yeah, the Twitter thing is interesting because

Twitter was very, I wouldn't say lazy, but they let people scrape the data and they had to deal with Google where tweets were indexed. and search. I doubt, I don't think they were getting paid much for that. Elon is realizing this is, whether it's, it's increasingly becoming less valuable, but throughout history, it has been a valuable data source and now with these models. And he wants to build his own large language model and woke, and woke, whatever counteract open. Woke, GPD. So it makes sense. Sleepy GPD. Yeah. So sleepy GPD. So he's, that's the opposite of woke, right? Yeah. So he's wielding Twitter's data as a, as a weapon and something to hoard instead of how it was kind of viewed before. But so it's, what's

fascinating about this is he doesn't own the data. Like, you just go look at Twitter's terms of service or X.com's terms of service where another company is called now. Like, the line is like, you own your data and we take a license to it. And so there's just this like more copyright law stuff. Sorry. But it's just weird. Like, there's a whole

thing that's going to happen here where these platforms realize, like, oh, we have a thing that is we take a license from all of our users. But then if someone goes into something bad, we actually have very little recourse. Yeah. Yeah. Right? Because we we don't own the data. The users could retain,

like when you tweet, that is yours. Except when you just get Twitter license to use it. Except when Twitter takes it goes offline suddenly, like when Elon pulls the plug and it's not yours, right? I'm not trying to do an activity pub segue, by the way, with that,

but like that. I'm ready. At any moment. Laser bomb activity pub, the new Verchast hit single. But yeah, that's, that's,

I mean, you're right. There is that interesting copyright question. But, you know, Elon, I remember him tweeting several months ago, that Open AI,

I was crawling Twitter for their model, and he blocked that. So, yeah, I think these sources of data, Twitter, Reddit, Medium, Cora, will just become closed off unless you pay. And that's their long-term strategic value for all these models to train on. I think the one I would add to that is Wikipedia, which I think is the other one along with Reddit and Wikipedia, to me, are, like, by far the two most interesting. Because I think, like, I've been talking to search engines for years who, like, are trying to figure out what to do with the fact that smart people just put Reddit at the end of their search query

because like Reddit is literally like structured data that answers every question anyone has ever had on the internet, right? Like it knows which ones are most liked. It has comments. It's like it is if you can mine Reddit successfully, which is why it's so insane that Reddit is not a better product. You can learn anything about anything. And in the search engine days, you would do all of that and get a bunch of data from Reddit, but you would end up back on Reddit. And the theory was like, we can figure out how to make money as long as we can get you to Reddit, we'll give this data to other people because it eventually accretes back to us because you come to Reddit. And with all of these models, that's no longer the case, right? Like my interaction with Reddit ends in my chatbot now.

It's data from Reddit, it's information from Reddit, from people on Reddit that I am never once touching Reddit or even knowing that it's Reddit. So like, I kind of agree, Alex, that like they should have woken up to this a while ago. And like that paywall should be big and it should be expensive. Yeah, there's just no, it's like hard to wake up to a thing that doesn't exist. You know, it's like, until chat, GBT hit, what are you doing with all this data? Was not making consumer products? It was doing demos to collect venture capital,

which I think is like Google's problem. Like fundamentally Google's problem was like, we don't have to make products. We're just going to baby step our way to AGI. No, I think it's the opposite. Google said we have to make good products or nobody will use them. And Open AI came out and said,

we made a crappy product. Do you want it? And everybody said, yes. People love crap. This is the reputational thing we were talking about earlier with Snap versus big companies. Like Google, meta, they have had all this tech. Like, based on my understanding, like, yes, Open AI has done some innovative stuff on, like,

the foundational research. But really, their innovation was productizing this stuff and not caring if it got stuff wrong and just putting it out in the world. And that shocked everyone in big tech that, oh, wow, like, it doesn't matter if this thing is, like, not perfect. Like, people just want to play with this. But if you're Google and your mission is to index the world's information and make it easily accessible, it's a huge problem if you put a model out that just spits out that information and

your Google. And yet they did it anyway. It's barred, Nelai. It's not Google. But yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. It's garbage. All right. We got to take a break. Alex, you want to stick around for the lightning round? I should probably piece. I need to finish the newsletter. We got to take a break. We're going to run over. I'm just letting you know this is going to happen. Alex, thank you so much. Thanks, guys. We'll wrap back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers.

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start building at MongoDB.com slash build. We're back. It's a bomb. It's a bomb. Now my lasers, I could not be clearer about what this is. It's a laser bomb. It's true. It's very good.

It's very good. We're going to run that for the last 10 minutes of the show, and that'll be the Vergecast, everybody. Drake, if you want to come on the show and try to do better at rapping laser bong, we would love to have you at any time. I'll bring the laser bong in. The thing is, Charlie's like actually very good musicians. So he's like, I did a bad job with this.

It's like, no. You did a very good job. You made a banger. Yeah, like, this is a banger. Listening to this all the way home. We got to do a quick lightning round. David, you are very taken with the fact that Netflix is shutting down its DVD business. Yeah, well, this is a very fun story to me because, yeah, this is, it's going to be the 25th anniversary.

This year is the 25th anniversary of Netflix shipping DVDs. And on this, the 25th anniversary. anniversary, Netflix is going to stop selling DVDs, which is the obviously correct thing to do. It's been a bad business for a really long time. It was so bad that they tried to spin it off and name it Quickster, which was a super bad idea. And then they made it DVD.com, which is fine. And it's existed forever. And now it's gone. And I just, like, I go back to, I had this nostalgia fest with a bunch of people on the internet over the last few days of like, do you remember how awesome it was when you first got Netflix, the DVD thing, and you could just say, I want a DVD, and it just

appeared at your house, and then when you're done, you put it in the mailbox, and it's gone, and then the next one arrives. Like, that was so much better than anything that had ever existed beforehand. I feel like it sounds ridiculous now, like two decades after streaming is a thing, but it was magical. And I just want people to remember. Like, that was the best Netflix ever was. Like, screwhouse and cards. Forget all this other stuff. That was the best thing Netflix ever did. It was when your cue mattered. And so, like sometimes you would maybe have a really fun time in college and then you'd wake up the next day and you'd get some stuff from from Netflix and you'd be like, I feel like I understand now why you said

sometimes you'd have a really fun time in college with a slight amount of hesitation. Yeah. And then you'd be like, I don't remember this. You definitely hit the laser ball and mess with your Netflix queue. And then like you just be like, oh no, the Netflix queue chaos after like Saturday nights. You'd do like your Sunday morning double check. It was a good time. I missed that. I never sent anything back. Let's be honest. You still have all. I have like, I've got the first three in the mail, and I was like, well, I guess these are the only three movies I'll ever own. So, this.

Here's an interesting stat that came out of the same earnings call that I just want to point at. Netflix now makes more money from its ad customers than its premium customers. So here's a quote, our ads plan already has a total annual revenue per member greater than our standard plan. So they're adding features to the ads plan. Right. So if you are Netflix with ads. person. You make Netflix more money than if you're a premium customer. This makes me real twitchy about the ads coming to every other part of Netflix. Oh, it's coming. This is the last phase of

Netflix killing television. They're coming for everybody. They ate the, they ate Blockbuster and now they're eating basic cable. Like, this is what Netflix has always wanted is to be the size of the entertainment business. And this is like the only way you get there is with a really, really, really, really big ads business. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I have written here, it's a laser bong. It's true.

Today is 420. It's true. A national holiday. National holiday. The most important holiday. The most important day on Elon Musk's calendar. Here are the three Elon headlines. The Starship launched after a multi-year delay.

You should actually go watch the documentary Lauren Grush made with our video team while she was still here before she went to Bloomberg about the people who've just been living at Starbase for years waiting for this launch. It's just really good. It's just, it's good. It's like just, it's good. It's like one of the best things we've ever made. Our video team did an incredible job with it. Go watch that on YouTube. But it launched today. Those people are all very happy. And then it promptly exploded. And they were still happy, apparently. They were still happy. And I, if you watch the live stream, they were all cheering when it exploded. And I couldn't for a minute figure out if they were just

instinctively cheering in an explosion the way that I would instinctively cheer at an explosion. It's like, I think, yeah. Like, yes. Like, you're just waiting for a turn where they realized. Like, oh, no, they, SpaceX defined anything as clearing the tower as a success. So they did it. So they did it. The thing went in the air.

All the rock, all the raptor engines fired. Are they going to pick up the mess? They're going to pick up that. Did it like vaporize? It's unclear what happened to cause it explode. There was a phrase that used. David, what was the phrase that used? I can't remember.

I'm going to look this up now. It was super delightful, though. It made me think of conscious uncoupling. like when Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow broke up. Oh, look at that explosion. It's real good. That's a good one.

Rapid unscheduled disassembly. That's what it was. Yeah. It's very good. It's a very good phrase. So that happened. Congratulations, the SpaceX team. Hopefully we'll launch it again soon.

But then today is also the day that Elon began removing the blue checks from Twitter. Do you still have yours? Mine's gone. I think mine's gone now. There's a period there where they were flickering. Yes.

Which is very good. I've never felt less I just have no feelings. I was like... You want to talk about copyright again? I get it ramped up. Yeah.

It was one of those things which is like, okay, cool. Yeah, it's over. And not to make this about activity pub, this is also the day the BuzzFeed News

shut down. Earlier this week, we ran a post from Ellis Hamburger about the sort of inevitable lifecycle of every social media platform

and while they're all kind of doomed to repeat all the same mistakes, I would say that the Twitter blue check day BuzzFeed shutting down,

BuzzFeed News shutting down, that people David's like, it's all kind of the same story for me, which is this era of the internet has come to a close. How would you name that era? I've been trying to figure this out. The social era.

That's good. Or the social media era. Yeah, the era of the social web has come to a close. Oh, I don't agree with that. No. No, I think if anything, the internet keeps getting more and more social. I think it's like, it's, this is like the era of big social is coming to a platform. Yeah.

Yeah. Sure. I'll be the platform era that I'm good with. Okay. So there's something along that the social platform era, the platform era, this thing that we all talked about where it was all settled for a minute. Yeah. Yeah. Right?

It's like, it's come to a close. I'll just read you this line from Ben Smith, who now runs semifor. He was a former editor of BuzzFeed News. He's got a new book out called Traffic. It's very good. Whatever. Here's his line. He wrote about BuzzFeed never found a new path when the trend turned against us.

When consumers found their Facebook feeds toxic, not delightful. When platforms decided news. was poison, and when Facebook, Twitter, and the rest simply stopped distributing links to websites. You could replace BuzzFeed with a lot of things in that sentence. There's a lot of wreckage in that review. Yeah. And I think the next one to turn is Kugel and all of the SEO farms that exist in this world. It's just a weird moment. And it's like it's the Blue Checks thing is whatever. But you combine that with the BuzzFeed news thing and just sort of this recognition, this sort of like dull recognition that

the platform era has like wound itself to whatever this end is. Yeah. If you run a tech website like we do, you're like, oh, there's a bunch of cool new stuff to write about. But it's worth taking a beat to be like, okay, like this thing is over. Yep. And I think there's just going to be a lot more fallout. Yeah, and I think this next period, I don't know how long it's going to be, but it's going to be really messy. Because there are a lot of people looking for where to go. You also forgot about like the impending possibility of a TikTok ban, which is like an existential crisis to a huge number of creators.

And so we're now in this place where like where do you go? Where do you spend your time on the internet? The verge.com. Yeah, the first question is the best possible answer. Niel, I will be in the comments yelling about car play. I can absolutely guarantee that. Being very wrong. Hey.

But it feels unsettled for the first time in like, I don't know, 10 years, 15 years maybe, that it was like ever since Facebook became sort of the place that everybody was, the common denominators have been there. and now they're gone. And the threat of the rest of them being gone looms just as large as the ones that are going away. And it's weird. This next phase is going to be really, really weird.

Yeah. I'm honestly excited. As somebody who grew up in that first, like, wild web phase, I'm like, yeah, let's get back to some of that. Yeah. But with less of the porn, remember when anytime you would, let me elaborate,

anytime you would go on like a search engine and you type anything in, the first result was always just like triple X. Do you remember that? Again, I feel like you and I had very different collegiate experiences. This is like, Alex was like, here's what I did. I ripped the laser bong. I'd fuck with my Netflix queue and I did some porn searches.

You'd be like game cheats and it'd be like, I'll show you some game cheats. You're like, sir, no. I wanted to know about video games. I think I was the only one. All right. Nobody else used search engines. Can we feed Alex saying, I'll show you some game cheats into the Drake generator. please.

We'll hit up Charlie after that. I don't know how to respond to this without triggering some sort of HR seminar. So we're just going to move on. They just actually appeared in the window. Last few, last few lightning round items, it seems like the pre-Google IOU run-up has begun. Yeah. So the pixel fold is leaking all over the place. It looks nice.

A weird camera bump. Huge camera bump. Yeah, I don't. They're like, what if the camera bump was also a kickstand? Do you know how there's the argument that Google, like Apple makes the phones and they know people do cases so they make the cases, but they design the phones to not have a case. Yeah. Apple fans argue about this all the time.

Google is absolutely designing these phones to be put in cases. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Anytime they don't have it in the case, they're like, oh, something's wrong with this. Yeah. What if it was as ugly as possible? Well, don't worry about it. We're going to stick it.

case. But actually the fold does have, it has a way about it, at least in these photos in the way that the pixel 7 do not. Yeah. I will see. It's supposed to have a great battery life. We'll see how it goes. And then there's this other rumor that we're hearing along the same, I don't know if it's pre-I.O. run-up, but it's just in the mix

is that Samsung's deal to use Google Search as default on its phones is up, and Google's in a panic because Samsung might go with Bing, which is, when I say we're like back to the future, I could have read that headline to you in 2008. Incredible.

You know what I'm saying? Where's Bixby and all this? Bing will be the default on Samsung phones. That is some 2008 information. I take it back. I don't welcome this new era. Welcome it. Abort.

Never mind. You're worried about how dorny search engines. Have you met Bing, my friend? Bing's going to show things. We'll see. But iOS coming, the leaks are out. We've got a story stream with all the weeks. It'll be neat.

We got another story stream about Apple headset rumors. Check that out. And then last one, this is just my favorite one of the entire week. Actually, this story got an unexpectedly huge amount of traffic. Google Fi has been renamed. Yeah. To Google Fi Wireless. And I just want to point out that that is Google Fi.

Why? What do we do? It's the new era, man. It's the new era. Anything goes. Look, I'm one of the last Google Fi subscribers. Although, I will say, again, this story got a wild amount of traffic. Yeah.

So we're out there in a reed a verge.com. People did read it. I have it because you can just turn it off for 90 days at a time. You have it as like an e-sim? Yeah, having an e-sim and like whenever I'm doing the two-phone thing, I like light it up and put that one, it's T-Mobile 5G. It's all fine. And then I turn off. It's great.

I love that. But it's like Google 5. Why? Which is good because they were clearly trying to change it so it didn't sound so much like Google Fiber, but instead they made it sound like Google Wi-Fi, so they solved nothing. They didn't make it better at all. But also a question?

Google FiWi-Why. Why? It's all very good. The thing about Google FiWi that I think is exciting, this is just the official name now. We're just calling it Google FiWi. I will hear no other names. Is that you can now put your smartwatch

or some smart watches on your Google FiWi plan for free, which I think is a good and excellent thing that everyone should do. This thing where it's like $10 a month to add all your ancillary devices to your plan is nonsense, and it should go away. And then, like, Amazon Sidewalk is sort of undoing that a little bit. Google FiWi is sort of undoing that a little bit. Like, we're just going to crack this thing open, and I'm very excited. And Verizon will be furious.

We got an email this week from someone who basically accused us of tricking them into believing that Bixby was actually a dog of shoes. And I truly hope we can do that for Google FiWI as well. We can't. I really, really hope that. Yeah. I think we can. It's good.

And look, I appreciate that you believe that it was a dog with shoes. And I don't apologize because that was my goal all along. And also it was one. Being as horny, Bixby's a dog with shoes, and it's Google Fyeway. You don't stand for much on this show. But there is. Those are our tenets. All right.

Alex, finally, we've talked about the laser pong quite a bit and have tried to actually explain zero what is going on. I think that the song really covers it. What more is there to say? I reviewed a laser bong. I reviewed a laser bong because I got like the request. They're like, do you want to check out our laser bong? And I was like, yes. I free time. Yes. It is it is a very, very expensive bong. 99.9% of people don't need it. But that 0.1% is like, it's a laser bong, of course. That 0.1% is in this podcast studio right now. And if you've ever been like, I want to see weed get heated with a laser, that's what it does. That's It's it. It's a laser bomb. There are lasers.

I could not be clearer about what this is. It's a laser bomb. We and lasers just seem to go together like we. Leave me is so mad at me. This episode has gotten so fully off the rails. That's it. We are way over. Whatever you thought it was going to be.

We're over that. Yeah. That's our chance. The site was incredible this week. It was just a very fun week to work here. We're back to basics. We're just blogging again. never went away, never went out of style.

It's all here. You know what's at theverge.com? Real people talking about their feelings and laser bones. Yes. That's what we sell here every day. That's it. That's a rich cast. Rock and roll. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening.

If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at vergecast at theverge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed. by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Verge cast is a production of The Verge

and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.