The Vergecast - Bluesky's rise and AI's fall

Episode Date: May 5, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Sarah Jeong discuss Bluesky gaining popularity and why it may be Twitter's most chaotic successor. Also: is AI going too far too soon? Further reading: shop.theverge.com Google announces the Pixel Fold Everything happening on Bluesky, Twitter’s most chaotic successor Bluesky is starting to feel like Twitter Mozilla’s new Mozilla.Social Mastodon instance is an attempt to reinvent content moderation ‘Godfather of AI’ quits Google with regrets and fears about his life’s work White House rolls out plan to promote ethical AI Snapchat is already testing sponsored links in its My AI chatbot New ChatGPT Zillow plug-in rolls out to select users today AI is being used to generate whole spam sites AI offers new tools for making games, but developers worry about their jobs Writers are striking and AI rights are on the table. Microsoft is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge, and IT admins are angry Microsoft’s Bing chatbot gets smarter with restaurant bookings, image results, and more Andreessen Horowitz saw the future — but did the future leave it behind? Now Gmail has blue verified checkmark icons too  Google accounts now support passkeys for password-free sign-in 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. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of knowing your phone leaked, so just announcing it before you were going to announce it anyway. It's a strategy. Yeah, it is a choice you can make. Yeah, Google has made it for many years in a row now.

Yeah, it's Google's annual tradition. That's just the marketing strategy now. Well, it leaked. Here it is. Anyway, I'm your friend, Eli. Alex Brandz is here. I'm your friend who doesn't want the pixel fold. The only one. The only one in the Vergecast, who doesn't want one.

I'm sorry. Okay, we'll get to you in a minute. David Pierce is here. Hi, can I just show you this verge mug that I found? This was just chilling in my closet. It's the old, old, old, old verge mug, and it makes me very happy. Is it big? I feel like our new ones are not big enough.

No, they're definitely not big enough. This is like probably 14 ounces. It's a nice size, big fan. Well, they may not be big enough, but they certainly make us money. Go to store it off the verge. com and buy just... We have actually... We have really cool joggers.

Oh, yeah. This is just going to be QVC for the rest of the hours. The hudy. You have very cool pillows. I was just thinking I need to buy a pillow and put it back here on my mantle so you can see it during the show. That's where everybody puts their pillows is on their mantel. Yeah, classic pillows. By the way, it's shop.

Dot the verge.com. You can tell that I'm great at this. And yeah, there's a lot of news. Sarah John is going to join us in a little bit to talk about what's happening on Blue Sky, which as near as I can tell is butts, just nude butts. But Sarah's going to join the show to talk about what they mean on a deeper level. the butts mean. What does the Vergecast, if not, discussing the deeper level of butts on the internet? Yeah, that's what it's for. The internet was created by butts. We should talk about

the pixel fold. There's a bunch of AI news to get into. Let's start with the fold, since it is, at least for us, breaking news. You in your car tomorrow. You know about it. But just imagine. Put yourself in the headspace we're in, which is we're going to start the show. And then Google was like, yeah, here it is. David, what's going on here? So, yeah, Google I.O. is next week, next Wednesday, the 10th. And there have been rumors that the pixel fold was going to happen for a while. We kind of knew Google was going to make a foldable phone. They've been making software kind of in that direction for a while. This is a good way to, like, try and make some noise because it's still a relatively new market. And then, like you said, they literally just tweeted it out. It's just out of nowhere. They just tweeted it out. They just tweeted it out. And it's a foldable phone. So all we've seen is basically one of those sort of, you know, spinning models. So there's not a ton you can learn from it. But I will say the two things that seem to be true based on the picture so far is that rather

than being one of those like super tall things, like when you close a galaxy fold, it basically turns into a TV remote. It's like 11 feet long. And thus is like a totally ridiculous thing to use closed, I think. But this looks more like, I don't know, like the surface duo where it's like relatively normal phone sized and then sort of folds open to be wider rather than just tall. So it has a little bit of like an iPad mini turned on its side vibe when it's open and just kind of looks like a phone on the inside. There's a million questions like, will there be a big crease down the middle?

How thick are these are these pictures hiding that it's like chunkier than it actually is, which they sometimes do? But just at the very basic level that we've seen, this thing looks really nice. I'm kind of into it. It does look really nice. The sort of new age pixel camera bump on the back, this is the first execution of it where I'm not like, ugh. Yeah, got to click on the, does it rotate? It's, oh, no, that's a big bump. Yeah. I was like, this is so small, no. No, it's a gigantic camera bump. The thing we've heard about the most is that when you close it, there's no gap. They've managed to re-engineer the hinge. That's all I come to Google for is re-engineered hinges. Yeah. When you think of Google, you think of physical products and hinges.

Yeah. I'm just saying when Apple makes an eye. phone that folds, there's going to be a 19 minute long video about The Hinge. And so if Google doesn't do that now, they're missing a real opportunity. Like, they should just stop the IO keynote in the middle and just play a 30-minute documentary they made about the Hinge. That's what I would do. I would watch it. I will watch it. Yeah, we're going to be there. Yeah. So here's the thing. We went through a pretty intense period of excitement about folding phones. Yes. And I will, I will happily accept the criticism that I was very excited about them because I think form factor changes are when people actually shift products and platforms. Yes.

And I was super wrong about this. Zero iPhone owners were like, well, that phone unfolds. I'm leaving IMessage, which I think says something very important about IMessage. I message definitely more superior. But I want this. Like I want a folding iPad. That's all I want in the world is like an iPad mini that just does this. But I want it on iOS because I want messages.

Well, I also think the thing about the galaxy fold is that it still has a lot of caveats, right? Like, it looks cool and then the longer you look at it, the worse it gets, right? It has that big seam down the middle. It has the gaps kind of all around the edges. It's like the very first one second impression is really good, but after like 60 seconds, it kind of gets worse and worse. And then from what I've heard from people who own these things, you like stop seeing those things that are not really problems anyway. So the actual experience of owning one seems to be pretty great. Everybody I know who has one is very happy with it.

But what there hasn't been is. is one that doesn't feel like it makes you make sort of obvious compromises in how you use your phone. Like the fold is also enormous. And I think the pixel fold just by virtue of what it is is probably also going to be big. It's also going to be expensive. The rumor is it's going to be, I think, upwards of $1,700, which is a lot of money for a phone. I just don't think we've got the data to prove your theory wrong, Nelai. I think there's a chance.

That's the phone unfolds into a tablet part of the foldable world. You're thinking about the... Yeah, the Z flips of the world. which like T-Mobile would just they would just throw at you they would just accost you yeah and give you a galaxy Z-flip if you were like I've been thinking about switching wireless carriers like Z-flip? You got it it's in your car already just boomerang it to you from across the T-Mobile store yeah and I've seen lots and lots of people at least here in New York people have Z-flips and it just hasn't there was a time when a phone that was that reasonably popular would actually have some sort of

cultural impact, right? Like, the LG chocolate had more of a cultural impact than the Galaxy Z-Flip. That's weird. The LG chocolate was a sick phone. I will not hear LG chocolate slander. The LG chocolate fans out there, I'm like... Oh, they pulled over to, like, DMU. And guess what you did?

You pulled over and you pulled out your iPhone to write me that note. But I don't think people care as much about phones. No, I disagree. They're listening to the show. The people who care about phones are listening to us right now, and I'm sorry. But the majority of people are like, I got my iPhone. It does a thing. I get my Samsung.

It does a thing. We were actually talking about this in the context of Humane last week. And then it's come up on our team for a few other reasons. But the notion that something has to come after the phone is like the industry really wants that to be true. And regular people are like, me. It does a thing. And so like the Z flip is one of those like, what comes after the phone? A phone that closes and leaves you alone.

And then you like look at one we're in the third. Z-flip, the fourth one. They just put a phone on the front of it. So you close it and you still have a phone. And then you see that pixel fold and the galaxy fold and you close it and there's still a phone. And the promises then you'll have a tablet. And I'm very excited.

I think this thing looks cool. I am a sucker. I'm almost certainly going to buy one. But I'm just looking at it. I'm like, do I want an Android tablet? No. Is that what's missing? Yeah.

That is the question. And the answer will be no. I'm not. I reserve judgment on the answer to that question. After I spend $1,700, I will let you know if I wanted an Android tablet all along. There's so many ways you could save that money. You can get it a little cheap like Amazon Fire. Sorry, Max, you're not going to college.

I bought an Android tablet. The good news is I absolutely guarantee you Google will give you a pixel watch if you buy one of these things. We should move on though. Sarah's here. And also, we're going to have a ton more to talk about at I.O. We're going to be at I.O. next week. We have lots and lots to discuss. There's somebody on Decoder that I think people.

want to hear from, it's Dieter. It's not, you finally got Thomas Google to come on the show. It would be amazing. They were like, you can have Dieter. Deeter, I love you. You can't be Indicoder. Like that breaks even our over-disclosed conflict rules. I don't think it would be like one hour of disclosures.

And then I'd be like, what's up, Teter? And then that would be the show. Anyhow, let's talk about blue sky. Sarah, welcome. Hi. All right. So we're in a moment of, I would say, a market correction in social networking.

Like, people are shopping. They're just out there. They're trying on new hats. Yeah. They're throwing some of the hats away. I like that approach to it. That's what it is, though. People are just checking out.

Today, I'm going to dress up like a firefighter and use blue sky. And then tomorrow, I'm going to throw that away. I'm a policeman. I'll be on an activity pub. Like, that's the moment we're in. I don't know how to fight fires or solve crimes. But the hats are really important to both. It's all the matters.

This is a very deep village people reference that is just completely off the rails. Anyhow, the social network of the moment, we've talked a lot about activity pop in the show, but there is another decentralized or potentially decentralized social network that has attracted a ton of attention that we're all on called Blue Sky. Sarah, you wrote one of the best scene reports in Verge history about what's going on Blue Sky. It's a lot of butts from what we can tell. Tell us about the butts. What's going on? So many butts. I mean, for one thing, when they set out to make this, one of the intentional decisions they made was, oh, we want people to be able to post racy content. Nailed it.

I know, right? They did make some changes to the What's Hot tab, so that's like the for you page, basically. No longer shows all of the butts. So there's way fewer butts going around, but that said, it's still, there's plenty of it. There's still plenty of it. It's like turn around. People are enthusiastically posting themselves and just having a great time. So Blue Sky is Jack Dorsey started it to decentralize Twitter as an exploration.

Then there was the Elon cataclysm. He shut it down, but it still exists. Now it's a company. It's a foundation. How does this thing work? I believe they are a public benefit corporation. Apparently there's 12 people in their work slack. I believe it's like nine people who are employed formally.

And then there's like some technical advisors to the project who I guess have been suckered into doing actual work and they should really check out that situation soon. It's this thing where I think that they are eventually like planning on like they've got seed seed funding. They've got, like, I think that they have a really normal projected, like, corporate runway and so on. But I think, like, their eventual plan is to spin off into having this full protocol that people license. And I, like, I really don't know what they intend to do with that. Like, they haven't been, I think that they're probably planning on making, like, a full, like, detailed statement about what their financial plans are. But my guess is that they're

really fixing to be something like the Mozilla Foundation or the Tor Foundation or or how Signal works. That said, the business of running and making social networks is very different from all of those other things. And like we're seeing that this past week where the CEO has to personally step in because it's, you know, 12 people in the work slack. She has to personally step in and kick people off because they're making trouble. Because it's like that's what happens. when you get a lot of people together in one place is things tend towards one person having to make a decision. And I find that really fascinating because the whole vision of this thing is to be decentralized, to be a protocol, not to be a platform. This is just a beta, so on and so forth.

But it's a big beta. It's a very big beta. Well, and that's kind of the thing I want to talk about because there was, what I can't figure out is like how this happened. Because it sort of seems like, like the app got launched. Well, David, you put butts on the internet. The people show up. That is true. They are.

But at first, there was this moment where there was like this very small number of people. And it was all people who had sort of a reason to be there. And they all seemed to know each other. And it was just this like tiny little group chat that happened to be happening in blue sky. And then all of a sudden over the course of what seemed like a day, all of the internet shit posters arrived en masse all at once and just started decimating the platform in every possible way they could find. And I'm assuming this is not what. what Jay, the CEO, meant to happen. So, like, how did this blow up?

It was, like, one of the top apps in the app store for a minute there, despite being, like, a total disaster of an app. And also that you couldn't get into. Being in the top app on the app store that most people cannot use is a wild outcome. It's absurd. You can't get into it. And if you can, your phone is going to be so hot. So very hot.

Like, my phone was just burning up in my hands. It's, like, it's a very impressive piece of technology for being built by nine to 12 people, however ready that actual number is, but it's not good. It's not a good app. I think that, like, I don't know. There's just a tipping point. And this is one of those things where, like, is there like an economics, a fancy economics word for this? It's the thing where why everyone has to read Harry Potter? Because everyone else has. Right. Right. Like, there is just a tipping point where once everyone else is doing it, now you're there. Maybe it's like, we should name it after like the, the Apple Blue Bubble

issue, right? Like, it's like everyone like pressures you into doing it. But there was just a point where once AOC and Drill were on there, it just felt like, oh, I've got to be on there. I really want to be on there. I want to try that out. It felt like the invites were a big part of this because the invite

like, that kind of built the drama for, right? Like everybody wanted to be in it because you were like, oh, I've got an invite. Do you want an invite? I've got an invite. And so suddenly it was like, oh, yeah, yeah, I've got to get an invite to this because the exclusivity of it. It felt a lot Like, do you guys remember, we're all old here? We can talk about it.

Gmail? Those first days of Facebook. Like, it took over my college campus. Oh, man, I thought you were going to be like Telmet. Yeah. We're not that old. Grandpa Patel over here is like, yes, I remember Pine. No, the first face of Facebook was real.

Yeah, yeah. And it was suddenly like, everybody's like, oh, you had an invite. I want to do it. And then you go to the cafeteria and it was just a wasteland because everybody was at home checking out Facebook. And it felt very much like that, but only for shit posters instead of like college Well, so I have two questions about this. One, the promise is decentralization.

And so it's fascinating that they are not, in reality, decentralized. Yeah. So you can get the app. If you have an invite code, you can join one server on an app that is technically supposed to be able to let you join any server. And this is one enormous advantage over Mastodon, where just picking a server is the first thing you have to do. And Maston has now responded, I think, to Blue Sky by just setting itself as the default. like Massadon. That social is now the default in the app. This is an ideological position they didn't want to take, and I think Blue Sky has forced them to take it.

And then the other thing that I think is fascinating is, yeah, it's not a good app and it is broken in some deeply hilarious ways. But the way that it is a great app is that it looks exactly like Twitter. Just exactly. Like they didn't, there's no interface innovation occurring in the Blue Sky app whatsoever. It is just Twitter again. So all the people are just doing what they did on Twitter. And the platform is not actually Twitter. Well, it helps that it is only one server right now.

Because last week I was like, okay, I'll join Blue Sky. Okay, yeah, I'll go and join Mastodon finally. Very different experience doing those back to back. Because Blue Sky was just like Twitter or anything else. You go and you make it and you're in. You'd go. Do things. Mastodon, I went and I made it.

And then I was like, oh, I want to follow this guy. He's really great. And then I was like, no, he's not in the same. server and I had to copy paste. It was like all that friction. And there's just none of that there with Blue Sky. But it's garbage. It's a mess of an app.

Do you think that they're ever going to announce other shows? This is the promise. This is what they're meant to do. But the fact that everyone's on the main server right now is why it's popular. Yeah. I mean, they say that they're really trying to get. They were prioritizing getting to decentralization, which is one of the reasons why when it really exploded last week, there were no blocks.

it was not possible to block another person on on blue sky because they had just deprioritized a lot of these moderation tools. And so you couldn't block someone. Like you could mute someone, but you could not prevent them from engaging with you, which is not a great thing to happen when you've got, you know, 50,000 people on one platform altogether. All of whom are heavily incentivized to cause trouble. Yeah. Gleefully causing trouble. Yes, yes. And are just manic, extremely manic to be in a place altogether. And so I do think that they are trying to get ahead. And every time something happens, though, which like that's every two hours, something enormous happens on there that seems like a very big deal. Like it distracts from them moving forward towards

decentralization. I think that like in an alternate universe before blue sky exploded, they would probably have launched decentralization in a few weeks time. I don't know where they are right now. They're pretty vague. I'm sure that they'll give more information at some point. But it sounds like people are not getting a ton of sleep and everything is on fire constantly. So their protocol, Massan is built on Activity Pub. We did a whole episode about Activity Pub. Blue Sky's Protocol is called AT Protocol, at Protocol, Twitter.

You can go to their website. It's atyprodo.com. Here are the three promises that they make. Federated social, connect with anyone at any service that's using the AT Protocol, would just point out that there are no. other services using the AT protocol. Fine. And then the other two are really interesting. Algorithmic choice.

So if you want to bring your own recommendation algorithm or your own moderation algorithm, more butts, less butts, you can go out and pick one. That means something else else. Sorry. But if we want to leave and start a company that is just algorithmic choice for butts and we call it butt dial, let's do it. Yes, do it. I don't know how to write code.

We'll be fine. ChatGPT is going to write our app called butt dial. And then the third one, which is, to me, I think the big meaningful difference from Activity Pub is portable accounts. So if you hate the server, you can go and leave it and go to a different server without losing all your content. Your follows, the people who are following you or your identity. And so this is like the big change, right? Because David, Activity Pub is pretty basic, right? It's like inbox out box.

Yeah. Actually, for anyone who wants to spend like an unnecessarily large amount of time reading about this space, Jay Graber, who is running Blue Sky, I think in 2020. when they were starting this whole project did this like massive sweep of every available tool like this from whether it was like Matrix and Signal and

XMPP and like all these other different tools for how you might run a social network and wrote like a 200 page document of like how they all work and their pros and cons and all that stuff and it's really interesting and where they landed with the AT protocol like identity is the thing and they've sort of said this over and over that like the main thing activity pub does not do well

is let you have an identity that is yours that you can move around right like And I just had this experience. I actually moved from the random Mastodon account that I was on when I first signed up to Macedon.com. Because it's now pretty clearly like the default place. It's where everybody's going to be. I figured I might as well be in that place.

And doing it required like downloading a bunch of CSV files onto my computer and uploading them somewhere else. I got rate limited by Mastodon. So I just broke my website for like 30 minutes. It's just a bad system. And the way they're building AT is exactly like you said, such that like if I'm in a server, I don't want to be on anymore for whatever reason. I can just pick up and drop over somewhere else. And like if we're going to live in this federated place, that's really important.

All the people who make activity pub would say there's nothing about it that prevents that from being possible and that actually people are building it and it'll all be fine in the long run. But right now, that thing that it is easier to sort of describe who you are to the system is super, super true. And I think it's one of the reasons Blue Sky has worked. It's just easier to show up, pick a username and go about your life. But Blue Sky also is again just once. It's funny. It's like the better federated system with no federation. Yeah.

And then the clunkier one is actually federated. Which one do you think is the HD DVD and which is the Blu-ray? Yes. I knew it was coming. It has to, right? Like this is what we're with that choice. We're beta, Betamax versus VHS again, which is going to be the standard. Does anybody know? I really don't know because like for those kinds of things like the industry decides, right?

Like ultimately it is about like for hardware. it's the industry ends up deciding what the standard is because that's very much like companies are going to be making that choice in the long run. But in this case, there's a weird chaotic element where it's like, whichever one that drill posts a lot on. What's the one that drill is going to post a lot on? It's the one where weird Twitter is posting a lot on. Why is weird Twitter posting a lot on some other thing? It's like it turns into a very recursive thing where it's just so chaotic. It is literally chaos theory. And like, I don't know. I don't know how it is that like blue sky caught the momentum. Like you say this invite system did drive up buzz and that's true. But it's also true that

for weeks on end, people had, you know, 20 invites just sort of sitting in their app that they weren't using because they could not convince any of their friends to use it because their friends were like, oh, that's the social network where people, everyone wants to talk about AI art and Bitcoin. I don't want to go there. No, it wasn't that anymore one day. So, yeah, I don't know what the tipping point is. And that was just because it's Jack Dorsey's. Right.

It is, like, it's who they invited early on, right? I don't know what happened to, like, make it branch out or, like, what the tipping point was. They say they're not planning on making invite trees open. But, boy, I really want to see that invite tree. I would love to see what that moment was. Yeah. You just watch it go. So, Sarah, in your piece, one of the things that you noted is that they are.

are in a very odd way going through like the entire history of running a social network, while the people who have run social networks at scale are posting on the platform about running social networks, which is just like very funny. It's so funny. The example that made me laugh is Yolroth, who used to run trust and safety at Twitter. When they banned the butts from what's hot, he was like, welcome to breastfeeding hell, because that is the thing that an AI system can't detect. And he's obviously had experience with it.

There's a dynamic there that is, like, very funny where they're getting a lot of credit for the problems they're going to have. Like, there's a lot of benefit of the doubt, I guess, is a phrase. But then they're running face first into the brick walls of the problems. And everyone's like, this is hilarious. I can't wait to see what mistake you make next. Oh, yeah. It's also, like, the fact that, like, all these former heads of trust and safety are, like, on the social network and are watching and, like, commenting. It's very much like the thing where, like, old retired men in Italy stand at.

construction sites and like lean into the fences to like comment on how people are using the tools, right? Like it's a it's really like I really enjoy watching that. That's that might actually be my favorite part. Everyone else is enjoying the butts and I'm just going like, yes, trust and safety heads. Um, from the backseat. But yeah, it's like a lot of really obvious pitfalls. And like, it really is kind of very comical, but it's also inevitable in some ways just because of how quickly things are moving, how small the team is, and the fact that they're like chasing this utopian vision of decentralized social media that I don't know how that's going to turn out. Like, that's like, I understand why they're doing it, but I also think that there are a lot of issues

with that and that they're going to be up against some weirder problems in the future. Like right now, all the problems are very normal problems that we've seen. over and over again and that they're just having to deal with on the fly because they have no trust and safety department and it's just one person who is running on very very little sleep going all right looks like coordinated harassment to me I mean the people who are the people who got banned for actually saying I am currently engaged in a coordinated harassment campaign like out loud it's like yeah amazing well there was somebody who got their their invite tree cut off yeah because it's like no you invited too many weirdos we don't want you inviting anymore that's a badge of honor like I would print out that email and like put it on the I'll be like, that's me. Sarah, what are the weirder problems of decentralization that you're referencing here? Can you also talk about the hell thread as you answer this question? Because the hell thread is, to me, the story of blue skies chaos. And I don't understand it at all.

Okay. Why don't I start with the health red, which I understand a little better. Whereas with decentralization and its problems, it's mostly that I ran into this on Mastodon, where no one could agree on moderation standards. And so basically you were looking at like these international treaty on the go. is happening in the real time and everyone's very angry with each other. The health thread. Basically, one of the things that they allow on there is bot accounts.

People will hook up these chatbots to GPT and they're very cutti and twee. I have them all muted. I cannot stand to them. People love them though and we'll engage with them all the time. But there was this one thread where people were going back and forth with a duck that pretends to have a lisp. and I guess the thread got really long. You said that so casually.

Yeah, it would make sense. Yeah, of course. And the thread got so long you couldn't open it anymore. So you get like a pink like JSON error at the top. And then they tried to like fix it. And then you got a completely different pink error at the top. They still wouldn't open. And then if you were part of the thread, you would get notified every time someone replied.

So like it was like and you couldn't untag your hair. Because you couldn't open the thread. You couldn't? Well, you could try to mute the thread, but it would keep unmuting itself for whatever reason. It's unclear why. I think they were finding different reasons why. And then it turned out each reason that they had figured out was not quite the reason why people were unmuting. I think at this point, they figured out that one of the reasons why the thread kept unmuting was because people would delete their post.

And then people would reply to the deleted post and then it would branch out again. And then so the mute would no longer apply. because the mute had been applied further up thread. Anyways, so like at one point they had two bots talking to each other, so it was sprawling out really hard. And then people thought it was funny. So they'd jump in and post, and then they tag their friends, like bait their friends into posting. And then everyone would be in there, and it would be like the CC, like you replied all accidentally.

Everyone's like yelling. And then people think it's hilarious. So they start posting their nudes in there. And so now you're getting unsolicited news and your notifications. And you can't mute them or stop them or even load the thread to get out of it. Well, I think people were able to mute it, but then it was getting on mute it. Right. Right.

Yes, it was the hell thread. At some point, I guess the hell thread branched. So the real elite posters now call them hell ropes because it's many threads coming together. Everything about this platform is just on the edge of me not wanting to say the words. It's actually a tremendous amount of fun. That said, like, I mean, the funniest part about the I've avoided getting into the health red, like, at all costs. Liz keeps tagging me into it. Thanks, Liz.

Oh, does she? Yeah, but I don't, my superpower is that I don't have notifications for any app on my phone. So you're just, you're missing all the butts. You can't touch me. Get out of my face with this health red. When I wrote the same report, Kevin was like, oh, please add some detail on what it's like to be in the health that I'm like, I can't. I avoided going there because I'm a sane person. But I figured it out.

It was without having to tag myself in there. It's possible to avoid it. You do have to be very careful to avoid it. It is very like early 2000s forum vibes where you're like, I know someone's about to go see me, not going to clip that. And yeah, I think that people are kind of really into the chaos. I think that there is like this thrill that isn't on any of the other alternatives right now that is getting people to like stick around and really enjoy themselves. I don't know if it's just the fully very online people either. Like, I think there's a lot of people who are just enjoying sitting back and watching. And as more

and more people get on there, I think things are just going to sort of smooth out a little bit and it's going to be more of a normal place. And I think that that goes back to what you were saying earlier about the sort of like unknowable momentum that it has. That it's just like, once that flywheel starts, it's like it just for whatever reason is a place to be now. in a way that like two weeks ago, I would have said this is like a neat science project that doesn't really have any sort of meaningful opportunity for actual humans at this point. And then all of a sudden, as if by magic, it just was a place that was fun and exciting. Well, no, I just want to push back.

The tiniest bit of pushback. This thing is 50,000 users. They are all terminally online. Like, they're not cool. And I'm one of those users. And many of us are like I. Everyone in this room is on blue sky. Yeah, I just want to be clear.

Like, it's Jake Tapper and AOC. Like, I don't know, man. It's not the Met Gala. You know what I mean? First of all, AOC went to the Met Gala. So, great. We can stop that. I'm just saying it's a bunch of nerds.

And they're having, like, nerd fun on the internet. But it's not actually a threat to Twitter yet. I don't know. That's the same set of nerds who made Twitter. It's those people. And like, Jake Tapper has millions of followers on Twitter. And I don't know if Jake was, but like, lots of people with lots of clout and followers were like begging on Twitter for Blue Sky invites.

William Gibson had to beg on Twitter for a friend. Like he couldn't just find a friend. He had to beg on Twitter for one. But the only point I'm making is any party that is exclusive seems cool, right? Especially if you can't get into it. And then there's us talking about how cool it is on the inside. Right. And we're like, it's a threat of butts.

You can't leave. Like there's a certain subset of our listeners. It's like, man, I wish I was in that threat. Yeah. And a much larger subset who absolutely does not. But when it becomes actually lets anybody in, does that go away? Like is this peach or Ello or any of the other pop-up, is it be real?

Which is just like appears for a minute. I do think that at this point, because it's so buzzy, like it's not going to disappear if it opens up. That said, they absolutely cannot open up because they cannot handle it. Like, they can barely handle what's going on right now. Like, it is genuinely like the next week or so. Like, if they don't buckle, like, it'll be truly a feat if they don't buckle under the pressure of having to speed run content moderation at scale. It's like there is no way they can like truly open up this platform. The other part of it is that they are air dropping a fairly large number of invites on a select number of people.

I will occasionally beg them for invites so that I can spread them out in a really hilarious way. Personally, I think it's very funny to be giving invites to local journalists. Like I gave invites to the entire newsroom of like a nonprofit local newsroom because like I thought that was really funny. I thought it was very funny that celebrities can't get invites and that now the entire newsroom of a small Oregonian nonprofit is on there. Like that's hysterical. But I know that there's like specific individuals. There's one woman wherever. I'm like, who's this person?

But like she's like passed out hundreds of invites and no one knows why she's getting invites other than that. I guess they like who she keeps inviting. But the way that she's inviting people is that whenever anyone goes, I need an invite, she'll jump right into their mentions. go, I've got invites for you. And then, and so the invite tree must just be wild, absolutely wild. So I know that like there's people definitely coming in and it really does seem like the fresh blood is like filling in, right? But like, I really don't think this is an L.O. Peach phenomenon. I don't know how long it's going to last because it, the energy is so manic. It could just be an extinction burst kind of thing. But yeah, it's, it's really fascinating. I would disagree with your assertion.

that the people on there are not cool right now. I mean, no one's very cool on a social network. That's simply how it goes. Okay, I'll accept that. That is an acceptable rebuttal. Like, if you're posting automatically two-point deduction. If you tell somebody in real life how many followers you have. Yeah.

Just no. You're out. Yeah. Cool card gone. It was super funny to me that all of this was happening, like, at the exact moment that the blue checks being embarrassing thing was happening. So it was just like all of this energy of like, where is a, place to be that is not the worst on the internet was all of a sudden like like you have stephen king

like telling everyone i did not pay for this please don't make fun of me i did not pay for twitter blue and then all of a sudden like you're talking about this sort of exclusive club opens up and it will be interesting once those things both sort of come back to a more sort of natural middle ground whether blue sky continues to seem this cool and exciting i also genuinely wonder if the platform works will it be as much fun or if they actually decent I think that's the big one. The thing that's funniest about this is like the centralized platform is winning, right? But it's supposed to be decentralized.

Yeah. People love centralization. That's the thing. Everybody wants a king. All of these alternatives, like they love decentralization. But when it comes down to it, what the people demand is centralization. It's, uh, it is really a weird thing. Yeah, everybody wants to be the loudest person in the biggest room.

They don't want to be the loudest person in the littlest room. nobody likes fiddling with controls. Like Gmail won for a reason. Like email is an open ecosystem and it also isn't because Gmail essentially runs the email universe. And it's because Gmail was good and everybody was like, cool, I don't have to think about this or host my own server anymore. And everybody just has Gmail now.

And like if you have a Yahoo email, that's embarrassing. Now it's like having a Twitter blue check. Like if you have it, you should probably change. All right. I want to end, David, there's a little bit of other decentralized social media news. You read about Mozilla doing a thing. It does seem like the race to stand up the server is on. Like, Mozilla is like, what if we ran the Mastodon server that everybody used?

Yes, the race, I would frame it slightly differently. The race to set up a server is very much on. I think you're going to see a lot of companies suddenly have, you know, X dot social things very quickly. It's relatively easy to stand up. People understand what it is. It solves the problem. What there isn't and what I wish there was was somebody coming in and saying,

we are going to be the Gmail of this space. Like, even for this big activity pub story I wrote, I kept talking to people who were like, no, we just want to be good citizens of the Fediverse. We think everything's going to be great. And it's like, maybe it'll be meta with this P92 thing they're working on, but just show up and be like,

we're the best at this. What's up, fools? And that's when it's like, okay, this might actually have a chance. I'm just imagining Mark Zuckerberg saying that phrase. What's up fools? He just jiu-jitsu kicks you and that's it. So the Mozilla news was,

Mozilla announced in December, that it was interested in the Fedaverse and was going to do something. And the news this week was that they're actually standing up a Macedon instance called Mozilla.com. And their big idea is they want to start to push on some of this content moderation stuff. They came up with a whole new set of content policies that are not about neutrality. They're not about free speech. They're about like, we are going to protect people and make this a pleasant place to be on the internet. And they're, you know, fiddling with the tools that it's going to take to make that work.

and they're trying to figure out how to enforce some of those policies as they grow. And so they're in this place of like they're going to start a very small community with a very specific set of rules. It reminds me of like a subreddit, right? Where it's like, this is how we talk. This is what we talk about. And if you don't play by the rules, I have absolutely no compunction is just kicking you out. Mozilla's question is like, can they do that at real scale?

And they feel like they're in a good position as an organization to test that in a way that a lot of the other folks setting up Mastodon instances right now are not. So I think it's going to be really interesting. I don't get the sense that they're out here trying to be sort of the biggest name in Mastodon, but that could change. You get the sense that they think maybe selling moderation software is a potential business in the future. And so if they can do an instance where all the knobs are turned up all the way, they could sell you that same software and you can adjust the knobs. I think a lot of people feel that way. The butt dial. The butt dial. Yeah. Mozilla could make the butt dial.

Mozilla do not take our idea. That is trademark the verge cast, Mozilla. Listen, Mitchell Clark, come at me. But no, I think you're right. And I think, I mean, one of the things that is true of Mozilla's really weird orchart is that it is a corporation owned by a nonprofit. So their idea of sort of using product to do activism is very alive in what they're doing here. But I also think you're absolutely right that if they can figure this out and it can be this sort of thing that like if I'm, I don't know, they mentioned what brands or like government services. Like if I'm the MTA and I'm like, okay, I want to have a place to tell.

people what's going on that isn't a total health site on the internet and mozilla can sort of make this nice little package that makes that workable that could be a pretty interesting business for a while i'm like very obsessed with this entire moment like it just feels like between twitter kind of breaking and a bunch of people shopping around and every other platform turning into a TikTok version that like the true posters are looking for a home and the competition to make one for them will just remake the internet and I think it's going to be hilarious.

It's only going to be fun. It feels very early 2000s right now. Everything in media is like absolutely back to... Yeah. Can I just say this? Jonah Prattie, who's the CEO of BuzzFeed, is like out there with predictions for media. He's like, homepages will be a big deal. And it's like, dude, have you seen TheVirge.com?

I not only predicted this like two years ago. Look at our website. Don't steal my move. We're the Facebook guy. All right. We got it in this segment before I get in trouble. John Peretti is actually right there behind you. Yeah, he's out there.

He's putting rubber bands around a watermelon just waiting for me to walk by. Go to Theverge.com. We'll see you on page. We'll be able to. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything

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Lots of AI news this week. Some good, some bad, some weird. David, what's going on? So I feel like the place we should start is with Jeffrey Hinton. So he's this guy who won the Turing Award in 2018. He did a lot of the early work on deep learning that is like the foundational stuff for AI as we know it today. So much of the work that has happened. Like Google likes to take credit for like, we invented Transformers.

Like this guy invented the stuff before the stuff. like none of where we are happens without Jeffrey Hinton and his team from like a decade ago. And he quit his job at Google and then gave this big interview to the New York Times and has talked to some other folks since then basically saying, I regret my life's work. I fear first what I have wrought on humanity. And I think he said, let me see you figuring out of this. He said, I console myself with the normal excuse. If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have.

And then he said, it's hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things. So we're in this space of like, there have been a bunch of calls for people to slow down. Everybody's worried about the singularity. The world's going to fall apart. AI is going to destroy us all. And yet, as we should talk about, there is this like constant unending drumbeat of AI news. But it was funny this week to see all of that after the guy they literally call him the godfather of AI comes out and is like, maybe all of this was a terrible idea. Because he like kicked it off.

Cade Metz wrote this really great book a couple of years ago about like the origins of AI. and it starts with him trying to figure out where he's going to take all his technology and who's going to pay him the most money. And that kicked everything off because it was like, by, dude, Google, whatever. And he ended up going with Google and made a lot of money doing it. And then I think, like, wasn't one of the chief researchers, is now at OpenAI. Like, everything that we think of as AI nowadays kind of springs from this dude. So for him to say, like, it sucks.

Yeah, it's like when Elon Musk comes out and is like, oh, you know, six-month pause. on AI, it's like, okay, well, whatever. And then he comes out and is like, I'm going to start my own AI company. So there's been a lot of people who have kind of access to grind for one reason or another. But this guy, I can't think of someone who would have more credibility to say something like this than Jeff Hinton. It's like very similar to when Oppenheimer was like, nope, we did a bad. We made the nuclear bomb. And that's a little terrifying to think of like such a big transformative tech and then have the person who kicked it off be like, my bad.

You just can't wait for this movie. You just work on our way to Christopher Nill would mention. Yeah, I've been listening to the book on audio for like the last four years. I was going to say that book is like 1,300 pages long. I even have it sped up. I don't like to speed things up, but I have it sped up and I'm still like, oh, my God, it just keeps going. And I'm like, and I definitely messaged Liz one day and was like, when do you think like Hinton or someone has their crying to Eisenhower moment about what they did?

And it sounds like he cried to Kate Metz. Yeah, pretty much. The book you're talking about is called, what is it, the man who built the atomic bomb? Yeah, but now it's going to be a Christopher Nolan movie. The book is excellent, though. And if you start reading it right now and read it 40 hours a week, you'll finish it just before the movie comes out this fall. So on the same sort of note, Biden had a meeting, or rather, let me say, Kamala Harris, Vice President Kamala Harris had a meeting today with Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, Dario Amode, the CEO of Anthropic, another big AI company, Sachin Adela and Suna Rpichai. And the reason I say Biden had the meeting is the White House put out a press release saying that Biden stopped by.

Yeah. He just popped in to be like, what's going on in the Roosevelt room today? What are you doing? Oh, is it for major AICS? I mean, there's a bunch of people there too. But there's a lot of energy from the government to put some regulations in place. I think we've heard the FTC say, hey, like, we don't have to regulate AI because a lot of what we do is regulate lying. And so if you use robots to lie to people, that's fine. That's just lying. And you can't be like, but it's computer lying. somehow escape the laws. So, like, there's a lot of that. Like, what is the existing law? What is the existing law that could stop AI Drake, right? We've written that story, and it's, like, very funny. It's a laser bong. And then there's, like, what is the existing law that, I don't know, if you are writing a bunch of books and putting them on Amazon and holding out that a person wrote them, but they were actually written by chat GPT, is there some existing fraud statute that would make that illegal? So I think there's a lot of that going on,

But then there's just a lot of should we actually stop it? Should we like hit the button and stop it for a minute so we can make an actual framework of AI laws? And it seems like there's more heat around that than ever. And also what would that look like? Is that even possible? Like I think the sort of open question for a lot of this is what would any of that even look like? I mean, so much of the conversation even coming from the government in the White House this week is basically to the effect of like, be cool guys. It's just it's a lot of saying like, you know, use ethics.

and morals and don't be bad or discriminatory. And it's like, okay, all of that is well and good, but what does that look like even when I just keep coming back to Sooner, I think he said it on 60 minutes, that even Google doesn't really understand how it's AI works. And it's like, okay, these things are black boxes, even to the people that make them. And there is no be cool button.

And so this race to like, what does it mean to stop it? We can't train new systems, but then Sam Altman is out here saying, well, the race you're describing to like build new, LLMs is pointless. It's as good as it's ever going to be in this world that we live. And so, like, what moves does anybody have here is super unclear to me? Yeah, I think there are moves, but they're not, like, you can't just stop large language models. That's out of the bottle. It's happening. Yeah, you can just run them on a laptop. Yeah, anybody can run them on a laptop,

then go build them if you're, you're smart enough. I'm not. But there are smart people who can just go build them. You can't stop that anymore. But you can potentially stop, like, the aggressive monetization of them. Wait, I have a different few of this. Okay. I think the aggressive monetization will be what saves humanity. Oh, yeah. Unchecked capitalism will save humanity from AI.

Here's my evidence for this claim. I'm very excited. Snapchat is already testing sponsored links in its my AI chatbot. Yeah, nobody's going to use that. Yeah, it's just like, you know what? That AI is definitely not talking to everyone humanity. Saw that. Nope.

No, thank you. It's already kind of bad. Yeah. And then it has ads in it. Snapchat users are so mad at my AI. That, like, I mean, you have all these, all these young people who have, like, carefully curated screens with their streaks. And it's like, that space is sacred. And now there's just a chat bot who's like, what's up?

Would you like to look at some ads? It's like, little stupid shit being like, hey, hey, guys. I think this is true of Bing as well. We wrote out some new Bing features today along with some monetization. And, like, same thing is happening. It's getting weird. Yeah. People are turned off by the AIs.

Yeah. I'm telling you just like the addition of advertising into these AI bots. Immediate. Yeah, that's a good. I like that. It's like, maybe that will save us. Finally, capitalism is good for something. Finally, some direct response advertising for Hulu.

We'll do some good in this world. There's other stuff. Zillow rolled out some chat GPT stuff today where you can just ask it for houses. Do people not know what the filter button is on Zillow? Monica wrote our post about Zillow and she sounds ecstatic about just talking to Zillow. about houses. I mean, like, I spend a lot of time. I was going to say, you're about house hunting right now.

Yeah. I just got mine. So I, like, deleted the Zillow app and it was a big moment for me. I was like, I don't need you for at least date. It's like a dating app. Yeah. I'm done for now. But, yeah, you just, that filter button is really easy.

But I could see maybe being like a really smart AI being like, okay, this is nice. But do you have anything a little closer to the path train at Journal Square? You guys are thinking about this all wrong. The appeal of Zillow as a chat GPT plugin is I can just ask it to show me the wildest shit and it will find the houses that are insane. Like do you guys follow Zillow Gone Wild on Instagram? Just imagine a chat bot that can just give you infinity Zillow Gone Wild. This is the dream. Like show me houses that have living rooms covered in medieval armor.

And it just will. It's perfect. That's the dream. It's the best version of Zillow ever. You don't think I can just say, Dear God, find me a house. Can I just give you a little life update to the Arborch House audience?

How's it going? The current state of our house hunt, trying to leave the woods and come back to civilization, consists of us finding something that we thought was cool, reasonably priced, sending it to our real estate agent because we're doing so bad that we have a real estate agent now. And she replied, no, that's the murder house. And then we discovered it's the house

where someone ate a baby. Oh, I was going to be like, it's not that bad, but no, that's a bad one. Don't live in that house. Super cannibalism. And Becky is like, but it's a pretty good deal. It's like, can you just redo the kitchen? Like, those ghosts aren't there. It's not going great.

And if only Zillow could be like, that's the murder house. Is that a murder house? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Can you just like, is this a murder house? Probably suspiciously below market. I feel like you could get a lot of like, because people would want that too.

Find me a murder house? Yeah. This is the future of Zillow. Yeah. But that's very commercial. This is, I'm going back to this again. Very commercial for all of its entertainment value. I don't think the Zillow AI poses a threat to humanity.

It's just, it's a strong prediction here in the Vergecast today. I hope it destroys humanity just because that would be funny. Just like it was the Zillow bot. That would be good. And I think if any publication is poised to cover it, it's us. It's us. But my prediction is that I don't think the Zillow AI is a threat to humanity at this time. I like that qualifier.

Weasel out of it a little bit. But then there's kind of the weird other side, which is there was a study this week from NewsGuard, which kind of like rates. It's a for-profit, but it rates the veracity of new sites. Anyway, so they found 49 entire sites generated from whole cloth designed to just spam Google search. Yes. And it's like, oh, this is, it's happening.

You've been saying that for months. The only reason they found 49 is because they were searching for specific strings that chat GBT generates like my data runs out in 2021 or as a chat bot. So it's just the most obvious ones. So there's obviously lots that they couldn't find. Yeah. These were just the lazy ones. Yeah, these are the ones where no one deleted I'm a chat bot from the output before

feeding it into Google. And they found 50 of those. Can I just read you the names of a bunch of these, by the way? James Vincent on our team, by the way, has done a really great job of covering this stuff. It turns out if you just follow the phrase as a large language model around the internet it does some really amazing stuff he's been writing about how it's showing up in like product reviews and yelp and all these other places it's really fascinating but i just i just want to read you the names of a bunch of these it is the most like uncanny valley stuff i've ever seen biz breaking news news live

79 daily business post yeah best budget usa.com uh harmony hustle dot com it's just and just on and on they're all like that it's like a county Countylocal news.com. Countylocal news.com is a great website. I love it. And it's just all of those where you're like, they exist in this like perfect liminal space that it's like, it's almost there. At any moment, any one of these is signing you up for a class action lawsuit.

Yeah, exactly. One of them is just called the News Network. I mean, come on. It's so good. It's so good. That's really, like, did they get that URL? Yeah. Root, I'm sorry.

I just saw a screenshot from the News Network. And it's, it's one of those like, okay, I'm Imagine a website, right? And you have the big header up top with the one sort of main headline. The headline, the breaking news headline on the news network is, I'm sorry for the confusion. As an AI language model, I don't have access to external information or news updates beyond my knowledge cut off date. However, based on the given article title, an eye-catching news headline could be, and that's the end of the headline. That's incredible.

I'm just like, these are the ones that got caught, and there's 49 of them already. And they had to buy domains and populate them with whatever they populated them with. The incoming to Google. I'm very excited to go to I-O next week and just talk to everyone there about what they're going to do when the flood comes in. I mean, I think the flood's already there. Yeah. Well, and this is what we've been talking about, right? Niall, like the robot internet, it's stuff with programmatic advertising and AI content made to be found by Google robots.

And it just, this is the cycle on and on and on. And those things, they all weirdly kind of like each other for a while. Like, that is a profitable thing for Google to be part of in a lot of ways, except in the big picture that it makes Google search unusable and that will ultimately kill its business. But like, it's a weird thing to figure out how to screw up that cycle. I do think there's something to be said about our long blue sky conversation. And it's like, here's where the people are. A lot of people who are very familiar to you who are like good at posting in this way. And then the thing that broke that platform, but one of the many things that broke that platform, is like an AI duck with a lisp.

It's just like, wherever you introduce this technology, weird things happen. But I'm just saying my AI dumerism is like, you just see how this thing is being expressed right now. And yes, you can pay for chat cheap. And like get a bunch of tokens and ruin. You can basically like the news network will destroy the internet. It will just, it will ruin the web as an ongoing concern, at least the way. web is currently structured by Google's influence. Maybe that's fine.

I don't know. But you can just see how, because it's kind of garbage, like, it's just hard to, like, feel a sense of pervasive doom when it's like, we can make the laser bong song now. Well, I think as good as the laser bong song is, I think the other side of that is that we're learning, like, we've already learned that people have a capacity to not give a shit about quality, and they'll just be like, this is good enough. Yeah. And that's where the real threat of AI is, right?

Because we have both, we have this meet both the Writers Guild and then a lot of game developers being like, this is bad and it's going to destroy our industry because producers care about the money. They don't care about quality. So we have to stop them. Yeah. So like that's the other side of it. Yes. The Writers Guild is on strike. Hollywood's on strike.

They've gone on strike. And it's for a wide variety of reasons. A lot of them related to streaming. But one of the things that they asked for was we want you to commit to. to not using an AI for writing anything. And you can't use our scripts to teach it. You can't have it come up with an idea and then give it to us and ask us to write that idea that an AI came up with. It has to be out of the picture.

And the producers responded with, well, what about if we just like talk to you every year about updates and technology? And so, yeah, it's this big gap between them. And I don't know how they close that. It was a one-a-year meeting about technology. Yeah. I would love to go to that meeting. That'll solve it. Such a good meeting.

Here on this show, we have that meeting once a week. Yeah. You can just come hang out with us. We'll talk to us all the time. But there is that existential threat for a lot of people where it does affect jobs and stuff like that, where they are like fearful. And so there's like, like capitalism may destroy it, but capitalism is also going to encourage it in these places where people with money just don't care. Oh, yeah. I'm only half serious when I say capitalism will save us.

It'll save some of us. What I mean is that... It'll save Snapchat. It'll surf up the user interfaces in some of these places. Yeah. And it will obviously create extremely weird outcomes for people like screenwriters. By the way, many disclosures here. So many disclosures.

Let's see if I can do... Let's see why I can do them all. One, it's the Writers Guild of America. Our staff and much of the writing staff at Vox Media represented by the Writers Guild of America. I believe you're in it. I am in the Writers Guild of America. You get the screeners. I get the screeners.

That's why I'm in it. That's very good. We made a Netflix show, which is now nominated for an Emmy. Well, then. So I'm the EP of a Netflix show. I have HBO. I pick TikTok first in the streaming draft. By the way, and then third, I actually want to mention this.

Adam Conover is one of, from Adam Burns, Everything, one of the negotiators for the Writers Guild. And he was just on the town podcast with Matthew Bellany talking about how it's going. I was just about to recommend that podcast. It's a really good episode. Everybody should listen to it. He is the fastest talker in the world. world. But I think I'm not going to hit one point I was going to say I think a lot of people who listen to the show would would say you might take that particular listen at 2x.

Very true. Anyway, great episode. Those are our disclosures. Yeah, that was good. Comcast is a minority investor in box media, apparent company. That's the that's the one. Yeah, Peacock is the only one who's against using AI. That's not true. Peacock is like, what if the whole thing was AI. Comcast is a minority investor in our parent company, box media. Last one, there's some big, big updates this week, sort of. David, what's going on here? Some Bing-ish updates. Well, okay, I want to talk a little bit about the updates, but then I mostly want to

talk about this weird thing that Microsoft is doing with Edge because I'm curious how you guys feel about it. But the Bing updates are basically, Microsoft continues to look for more ways to put stuff into Bing. So now they're doing things like if you, you know, get the name of a restaurant from Bing. You say, like, where should I go for dinner in Seattle? It says these restaurants, it's going to start to bake in things from like open table. where it'll actually start to do reservations for you.

Or you can integrate with streaming services, and it'll actually, like, deep link and take you to find that stuff. So the goal is to, like, pull more of search into Bing. I think one of the things we've been looking for is sort of this push and pull between, like, things coming into chatbots and chatbots going out into other products. And so I think what we're starting to see is these chatbots, especially Bing, sort of subsume more and more stuff into this chat interface,

which I mostly think is fine. smart and interesting, I think chat as an interface has a lot of work to do for that stuff to work. Like, we're just going to do this thing that we did with the voice assistants where it's like, wouldn't you like to book a flight through this interface? And the answer's like, no. Like a chat to book a flight is the single worst possible way to book a flight. The way to book a flight is to see a screen full of numbers and then you click on one of them and that's how you book a flight.

The lowest one. Yeah, right. I was about to name some airlines, but I will withhold my judgment. Oh yeah, the lowest one accepting certain airlines. But I think, so that's all fine and good, right? Like Bing is still horny. That's like its main thing that is going for it. But Microsoft is desperate to like figure out more stuff for you to do with it other than be horny.

Wait, so it is notable that next week is I-O. We are expecting a lot of AI in search discussion from Google at I.O. And Microsoft is like, well, we are already launched and here's our first set of updates. Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it. They still have a pretty, I don't know if you call it a lead. They're ahead in having a functional product. But Google doesn't have one yet. So Microsoft is ahead.

It has no market share. So I don't know if you could call it a lead. But they're ahead and like, here's Bing and we're adding features to it. And Google hasn't even like gotten out of the gate yet, really. I like that they did the restaurants because I keep going back to that Google Io demo where they're like, yeah, we're going to call the restaurant. Oh, I've used that for real a few times now. Did it really work? It works.

It's weird. I feel like a jerk every time I do it, but the restaurants don't seem to care because I show up and spend money. That's my problem. I always feel bad sicking a robot on the restaurant, even though it does seem to work. I've done it a couple of times to make appointments for various things. It works fine. I just feel like an ass that they're like, oh, I'm a robot calling on behalf of. Do you feel like you're going to walk in and you're like, oh, you're the robot guy?

Yes, 100%. That's actually not true. It's never happens. They're just like, oh, you made this reservation. I take a lot of phone calls and I'm not putting faces to names. Would you like a Diet Coke? It's a very normal. They write a robot guy next year when they get it.

Yeah. Like beep, boop, boop, you're a jerk. But the other thing that's happening is Microsoft, because it apparently does not remember the company that it was 23 years ago, is now getting really, really, really aggressive with Edge, its browser. And it has been doing this for a little while where like if you're on Windows and you try to use a different browser, it just sort of repetitively is like, but what have you used Edge?

Wouldn't that be cool if you used Edge? Don't you Love Edge? Why don't you love Edge? Love Edge. What's wrong with you? Love Edge. And then it just tries to sort of beat you into submission. But the new news this week was that if you use teams, I think it's Teams first and then Outlook

after. And you click a link, even if you don't have Edge as your default browser, it will just open Edge. And what they claim is some confusing nonsense about. about like user accounts being the same everywhere that I don't really understand. But what it functionally says is like if you use Microsoft products, we don't give a rat's ass what your default browser is, you will use Edge. And part of that is because things like Bing is the default search engine and Microsoft really wants you to use Bing all of a sudden.

And it's like owning that browser is very important for Microsoft right now. And it is just going way out of its way to make people use it. This is the first sentence of Tom Warren's post about this. Oh, he's right though. Microsoft Edge is a good browser, but for some reason Microsoft keeps trying to shove it down everyone's throat and make it more difficult to use rifles like Chrome or Firefox, which I believe is what you were about. Yeah, just about they say the exact same thing because it is like, it's good. You can use it, but they're like, no, we're going to really cram it in there. I'm like, no, that's how you make it bad.

Everybody's going to immediately hate it because you're cramming it down their throat. They already have to use teams and they don't want to use teams. I promise you. Very few people in my experience are like, oh, the software I was forced to use at work, that's the software I will choose to use in my life. With the exception of Slack. No, there's no. Oh, I'm in like group chats on Slack. Because you have like media friends.

Yeah. Your brain is poisoned. Every time I try to suggest being in a Slack with like non-media friends, everyone's like, why? Yeah, we did one and like all those people bounced. All the media people are still in there. And all the normals are like, nah. I'm just saying like as a, I get it, right? You have this tool.

You're very excited about Edge. Edge is really good now because it's based on Chrome. It's just Chrome. And you're like, how do I get? And they pulled their Microsoft move from 23 years ago. And they're like, we'll just assert our dominance in one area by using our dominance another. And it's like, I like how Microsoft has been very quiet. And we're all kind of like, is Microsoft cool now?

Like they're doing cool stuff. They seem like chill. And they're like, yeah, now we're going to crush Google and destroy it. and make Sundar dance dance that was that was the quote and we're going to force teams down your throat we're going to force edge down your throat and I'm like no you guys were never cool you were just waiting you were just biting your time now you're out you know there's a chance that they're just lashing out because the Activision deal is falling through yeah like they're just like it's like a little edge-based temper tantrum look I think the google Microsoft fight is very good I think it's generally

good for us as consumers I think that even if it wasn't weird from a competitive standpoint to tie one piece of software to another and ignore defaults. Like, that's weird. That's like, there's like a European bureaucrat reading The Verge who's like, like, ready to go. It's also just like basic computer decency. Right. It's like there's like there. And I'm just telling you, forcing people to use enterprise software does not win you market share. It makes people just open Safari on their Macs at home. The end. And like, hopefully Microsoft learns this lesson. All right. We got to take a break and a little bit of a lightning round. We'll be right back.

I won't tell you if there's going to be butts. We'll be right 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. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in.

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And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash Vergecast. Okay, we're back. It's lightning around time. There's quite a lot of potential if it's lightning around. Cranes, let's start with you.

Okay. I'm very excited because Gmail now has blue, or it's going to have blue verified check marks. So I write this headline, I have no idea what this means. So you know when you get an email and you're like, is that really from Google?

And sometimes it's not. Oh, this is like a fishing protection. Yeah, this is like fishing protection. It's just going to have a checkmark. Is it $8 a month? No, it's free. They're rolling it out. I think it sounds like it's primarily brands first.

But yeah, just verify this is the actual person emailing you. And it's like, why hasn't this existed before now? Because email is an open protocol. And this is a thing a centralized provider can. I'm just waiting at David, just angrily. Because David said this. It's his fault. I love it.

I love that this is why a nice centralized protocol can sometimes be good, is we can know when we're getting fished. A little better. A little better. Just a little. Are they going to put it into like the email standard? Oh, heavens, no. No, I think it's just going to be in Gmail.

Yeah. Very good. The real centralization, decentralization has been a real theme on today's episode. And centralization is winning. That's the other theme. Yeah, because like decentralized stuff is really good in your head. It's academically, it's like communism. Academically, great idea.

In practice, doesn't work. Well, I can't wait for you to get some emails from people without blue checks in response to that. Will I? All right. Here's mine. It's just a callout of a really good Liz Lapato piece this week about Andrewston Horowitz's storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm. But also, Andrewston Horowitz, big investor in Clubhouse, big investor, which is not doing great, had layoffs. Turns out Clubhouse, people wanted to talk to each other on their phone when they were forced to be in their houses during the pandemic.

not a great platform when people can go outside. So Clubhouse is in some weird trouble. Substack in extremely weird trouble. Remember on Substack notes was going to be the thing that Blue Sky became? Whoops. Negative revenue for Substack. That's a weird one. Anderson Horowitz, big investor.

They were a big investor in BuzzFeed. They're a big investor in Twitter 2.0. Uber. Yeah, but the point of Liz's story is they thought they could remake the media. And they invested in all these things that were supposed to remake the media and disintermediate legacy institutions like the Times. And I think mostly Anderson's like mad at the times. Well, yeah, and their whole thing. I mean, even do you remember when they launched their own

media vertical future? I forgot. The whole pitch was get rid of gatekeepers, right? It was like, go direct is a very famous Andrewsson-Horowitz's phrase. Go direct, right. Like let people and creators go direct to each other. Like that was sub-sax whole thing is like don't go get a salary from a large company. Like get paid by your audience. I think they invested in Elon Musk's Twitter, I think, on a lot of the same basis. He made this big creator push that has ultimately amounted to precisely nothing, as far as I can tell. But that was the idea. And like, Clubhouse was supposed to be that too. It was like, and do you

remember when it was like, oh, look, here's like lightly famous people just like talking. Wasn't that amazing? And then they all went back to their jobs and lives and that fell apart. But this, that was supposed to be the pitch. And all kind of at the same time, for whatever reason, I don't know if it was a bad idea or just like hasn't quite worked but like that that turn just never really got made so it did the the creators go direct your audience has worked for a lot of creators and a lot of platforms right just not on the ones that a 16s e bet on yeah it we know case he's a on substack he's successful on substack going to direct an audience that's great we know lots of people on youtube and tictock and instagram who are creator economy is going well for them but as platform businesses is things that

replace the sort of architecture of the mainstream media most of us platforms are still reactive to the media. They're reactive to actual journalism. And then on top of it, there's, like, bad businesses. And there's just something really interesting about that dynamic. And Liz does a good job peeling apart. Disclosure, we are journalists who work at a media organization. You guys suck.

Those are facts. All right, David, what you got? Mine is this Google announcement from this week that they now support pass keys for logging into your Google account. Have either of you set up pass keys on your Google account? No. Not yet. You should do it. It takes five seconds.

Everyone listening to this, if you have a Google account, you don't have to, like, pull your car over, but next time you're sitting at a red light, that's probably still illegal. Pull the car over. Next time the car is in park. There you go. How about that? Next time you are safely able to use your phone in thoroughly legal ways, go log into Google and set it up.

You will be shocked at how quick it is. And basically, pass keys are these things that are trying to replace passwords with biometrics, essentially. So like you you log into websites with your face or your thumb the same way that you log into your phone. And there's a bunch of really interesting cryptography going on underneath. There's a whole thing called the Fido Alliance that covers how all that work. None of that really matters. The point is now like website by website, it is getting easier and more secure simultaneously to log into stuff. And this tech has been ready for a long time. We've been covering it for a long time. I read a really great story Russell Branden wrote on the verge like several years ago

talking about how this was all kind of around the corner. And it was for a long time. And now, like, Google is a huge domino in this game. And I think it's a big moment for pass keys in the sense that this is about to be the first time that most people have ever interacted with past keys. I'm very excited about it. And everybody should go set it up. It's excellent. It won't work with, like, single sign-on stuff, right?

Like, if you have to use for, say, Octa. So what would have to happen there is Octa would have to start supporting. pass keys. And this is the problem, right? The tech has existed for a while. It's now built into the iPhone supports pass keys. I think most modern Android phones support pass keys. But the only way to enable it is like website by website and you need both sides to support it for it to work. But it's coming quickly. Yeah. I would imagine this announcement came out ahead of I imagine we hear something about it. I know. And then I imagine we hear an Apple domino fall at WWC. This is as developery as consumery. And this seems like the

right season for more of this happened. It is very exciting because passwords are stupid. If I can get to a place in my life where I'm never reminding my parents what their passwords are, I'll be very happy. That's his dream. All right, we've gone over, as always. Thanks to Sarah, there was just a lot of butt talk on this episode of the podcast. Shats to Zach for his categorization in the app store or the podcast store. Is it going to get the E or not? I say no. Put the children here about butts on the internet. There's a lot going on on the site, just a really good week on the site, and the next week is I.O, so verge.com install it directly to your home screen. It's pretty good. You can do that now. You can do that now. That's it. That's Vergecast.

That's Vergecast. That's Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and the box media podcast network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.