The Vergecast - ChatGPT has a Scarlett Johansson problem

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss announcements from Microsoft Build, the OpenAI's trouble with Scarlett Johansson, new Sonos headphones, and more. Further reading: Microsoft’s big bet on building a new type of AI computer  Recall is Microsoft’s key to unlocking the future of PCs  https://www.theverge.com › microsoft-surface-pro-pric... Here’s the eight-inch Snapdragon PC for your Windows on Arm experiments  How does the Microsoft Surface Laptop stack up to the MacBook Air?  Microsoft Build 2024: everything announced Windows now has AI-powered copy and paste Microsoft is making File Explorer more powerful with version control and 7z compression Here’s the eight-inch Snapdragon PC for your Windows on Arm experiments Microsoft Edge will translate and dub YouTube videos as you’re watching them Microsoft brings out a small language model that can look at pictures  Microsoft’s new Copilot AI agents act like virtual employees to automate tasks  Microsoft outage took down Copilot, DuckDuckGo, and ChatGPT search features OpenAI is ‘in conversations’ with Scarlett Johansson over the ChatGPT voice that sounds just like her OpenAI pulls its Scarlett Johansson-like voice for ChatGPT Lawyers say OpenAI could be in real trouble with Scarlett Johansson Scarlett Johansson told OpenAI not to use her voice — and she’s not happy they might have anyway OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game OpenAI’s News Corp deal licenses content from WSJ, New York Post, and more OpenAI strikes Reddit deal to train its AI on your posts The US government is trying to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster The Sonos Ace headphones are here, and they’re damn impressive Sonos CEO Patrick Spence addresses the company’s divisive app redesign here’s an electric salt spoon that adds umami flavor  Apple needs to explain that bug that resurfaced deleted photos  Humane is looking for a buyer after the AI Pin’s underwhelming debut  Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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What could possibly go wrong? And then talks to you in a slightly central way. Hi, I'm Eli. I'm your friend. David Pierce is here. Hello. Alex Crenz is. here.

Hey. A lot of, just a weird week. Can I tell you what I think the theme of the week is? Sure. It's probably broken and I don't believe you. Oh, that's good. That's a good theme. That's kind of where we are in the tech landscape right now.

You can make your videos. You can tweet your tweets. And then we're going to get your products. And the truth is going to come out. Right? Like, that's the cycle that we're in. It's great. It's a super great video.

I'm glad you paid all the influencers. I'm going to put your face computer on my face, man. And then we're going to know. I'm going to hold your, I'm going to hold your teenage engineering box, and then we're going to know. I like it because it's one timeline darker than the Is This Anything timeline? And I feel like we were in the Is This Anything timeline for a while. And now it's getting slightly bleaker. Yeah, it's probably broken and I don't believe you.

We're going to put AI in Google search and Google search. and Google Search is going to tell you to put glue in your pizza, which is a real headline. By the time you are listening to this, I think Kylie will have that headline up, which is AI previews in Google Search are overwhelmingly stupid. Mostly because they're reading Reddit, and Reddit is full of jokes,

and people are now willfully trying to, like, Google bombing is back. Yeah. Because you ask Google, like, what mammal has the most bones which is a real thing people are doing, and it goes and finds a Reddit joke from five years ago that's like, it's snakes. And it makes you realize, like,

the running joke on the internet is that sarcasm and jokes are very hard to understand. It turns out that, like, people still better at it than Google, which is real, real bad at it. It's probably broken and I don't believe you. Again, the theme of the week, there's some exciting news this week, like legitimately cool news this week. David, you, talked to Tom

about everything that happened at Microsoft Build and the surface event legitimately cool news. If that stuff

works, the Mac versus PC race is fully back on. The processor wars are back on with a new metric. Right?

Like they have Microsoft has NPUs now with the Qualcomm chips doing AI. Apple has neural engines. That's all really exciting.

Boy, do I want that stuff to worry. Right? Like, it's just a week do you not feel like open

I this week. We're going to talk about open eye and Scrawled Johansson. And it's like, yeah, I don't believe you. What a weird place to be. It is. And it also, you end up in this place of like questioning everybody's intentions all the time too. Like with Microsoft, it's like, oh, Windows on RM, you did it. That's so exciting. Do you remember all the other times that you told me that you did it? That's really interesting. And then with all this open AI stuff, the timelines are weird. everybody is saying things that don't all make sense simultaneously. And it's just you get to the point where it's like, does anyone know what they're talking about? And it's just very strange.

But I agree with you. And the Microsoft stuff in particular, I thought was both substantially nerdier and substantially more exciting than I expected to be. Like, it was a wonky build in like the best way. Yeah, let's start there. We are going to talk about opening eye and Scarlett & Johnson later. We're going to have a lightning round. unsponsored. For now.

We got to start a shoe company that's called unsponsored and then have the LightningRound sponsored by unsponsored. That's pretty good. If you're a shoe investor, call me. Is it all the logos or is it no logos? No logo. On the shoe. I think it might be all the logos.

Oh, right. You're like bringing it all the way back around. Yeah, it's every shoe logo on it and it's called unsponsored. Please. Like somebody at mischief is building that right now. They just heard me. You can have that mischief. Enjoy it.

If you sponsor the LightningRound. If you sponsor the LightningRound. Look, I'm not saying we're a bunch of IP experts on this show. I'm just saying if you give us cash, we'll give you that idea. Okay, let's start with build, because it was a nerdy build, and I think you guys only really scratched the surface with Tom. Who is there? Great job covering it.

The big news is obviously the co-pilot PCs, right? Co-Pilot Plus PCs, which have the NPU, which are running on the new Snapchat and X processors. It should be noted that the team that built those processors at Qualcomm is from a company called Nuvia, which Qualcomm acquired. Nuvia is a bunch of X Apple chip designers. You can see how they caught up.

Yep. It's a pretty straight line, right? You're losing the Apple. The Apple chip designers leave. You buy them. So you're competitive with Apple again. We got to run the benchmarks. We got to get the things.

But Kranz, I mean, you're a chip nerd. Do you buy it right now? I think it's the Nuvia part of it that makes me kind of cautiously optimistic. And also the fact that laptop makers actually want us to try the laptops. Generally speaking, that's a big one. They do not when it sucks.

They're like, are you sure you want this? And they slow roll you, right? Like they wait a while to get it to you. And they end up having to buy it and review it yourself. And this time they're like, when do you want it? We'll get it to you next week. They're really eager about it. And in a way that surprised me.

I took a few briefings on the laptops. And I was like, oh, you guys are like pumped. I'm not used to that. And it reminds me a lot of when AMD, was like coming back when it was making its big comeback, what, in like 2017, where suddenly people were like, do you care about AMD? Like, get excited. And I'm like, oh, oh, this is weird. But yeah, the MPUs is the big deal here. I think like Microsoft said, if you want to take advantage of the most stuff that's going to be in Windows now,

you probably want an MPU in that computer. And MPOs have been around for a while. Like Intel's had them, they're called neural processing units. Everybody's been doing it, you know, Apple calls it a neural engine, whatever. But they've all been doing it. And it's basically just another processor to offload those like tasks that generally you would have put on your GPU or like major CPU kind of brute force. And now it's like, okay, just for this. And it's like when Intel introduced it a couple of years ago, it was one of those things

where you're like, okay, do I care about this? Like I'm not an AI researcher. Why should I care about this? And that's still kind of the question. Unless now I think the big change is that like Adobe's going to be using it and a lot of these like film processing companies and stuff are doing it. So it's like, okay, I guess it makes a little more sense now than it did, you know, six years ago. What do you guys feel about that? Well, I'm curious.

I mean, a lot of what they announced in Windows is fairly interesting. Some of it, I think people have had a really strong reaction to you like recall. But some of it is just straightforwardly cool, right? Like, you can draw stick figures in Microsoft paint, and it will generate more photorealistic images as you draw. That's cool. That's neat. And that's one of the first examples of, like, a cool, local AI workload beyond the lightrooms and premieres of the world that I can think of. Because most of the other AI workloads, like, happen in the cloud.

Yeah. Right? You're, like, you talk to a chatbot and they happen in the cloud. Or you're coding and GitHub and copilot and get. Hub is happening in the cloud. And now you've got some cool stuff that's happening locally. We should talk about Recall, which is the other big thing that's happening on the NPU. But they're not more of those.

I mean, like, they're not more of those. There's the other stuff that's like you're playing Minecraft and the computer is watching with you and talking you through how to play Minecraft. But I suspect there's a little bit of hybrid local cloud happening there. I know it's happening with Pate because there are things. paint won't let you generate because Microsoft's commitment to AI safety, which is weird, because if you turn off the AI, you can draw any kind of dongs you want in paint. Yeah.

So there's like a little bit of push and pull between the cloud and local, right? And just in terms of safety, which is really interesting to think about. Like Google Docs is a cloud application. You can type anything you want in Google Docs. Microsoft Word 365 can be expressed as a cloud application. You can type anything you want in Microsoft Word 360. you turn on AI features in Microsoft Paint. It's like you can't draw some stuff.

Weird. That's just weird. And like I suspect we're going to have a long conversation about those kinds of lines for years to come. But that part, just the other part of it where it's like, where is the AI happening? Is it in the cloud or is it here on the machine? It's kind of interesting that Microsoft's answer is very much like both. Yeah. Well, and I think that's the right answer.

Right. again, the where one ends and the other begins is, I think, forever going to be complicated. But everyone I talk to says that the place we have to get to is both because the stuff that you do on device is private and fast in a way that anything that happens off device just can't be. And I think about like the translation stuff Microsoft is trying to do. Like there's a chunk of that that if you don't do it locally, it's going to suck. because real-time translation that has to go to the cloud is by definition not real-time translation. It just breaks.

And so the thing that they launched where, like, you can be an edge and it can translate a YouTube video while you're watching the YouTube video. Very cool, in theory, awful with a half-second delay. It's the sort of thing that I think is that tuning that they're going to have to do to get those two pieces right is actually like the whole ball game.

Yeah. But I think it's very cool that Microsoft is, deep in this idea of we're going to start on your device. And I think that's smart and right. And I think the other interesting part there is, obviously, we're barreling towards WWDC where you expect Apple to announce many, many similar kinds of things, or at least a similar kind of focus on AI. Microsoft has the big AI part.

They've got Azure and the big open AI relationship, and they are integrating all this stuff, and they have their own models that they're running at all sorts of scales. And so I think they're able to just like take more shots across Windows and devices and their suite of applications that runs everywhere. And that to me is like the interesting part. Like there isn't another company that kind of has all the pieces. Whether Microsoft can execute, whether it can deliver finished applications that people like to use, whether it can make people interested in Windows, like consumers interested

in Windows outside of a gaming context again. I think it's broken and I don't believe. Like, that's where I'm at. You know, it's like, you got to, we have to get the machines. It's interesting, Alex, you're saying that the companies are excited. But there's a lot of investment in, like, Intel chips in the world and X86 applications, and that transition is going to be slow and not fast. I think.

They did say something about emulation, right? Intel chips have had MPUs in them for a very long time. They introduced a couple of years ago. So the big difference is now copilot has, like, kind of a minimum amount of what your impu should be able to process. So the deal is that before, you know, an MPU would do it like, what, 18 tops or something, which is like trillion operations per second. So it would do like 18.

And now they're saying, okay, it has to be 40. It has to be 45. And that was one of the things like Apple was bringing up tops in their M4 presentation back with the iPad, where they were like, we can do 38 tops. And you're like, cool, what does that mean? And then Microsoft was like, you got to do 40. and we're like, I love it. Cool.

Tom used to do megapixels in my favorite possible. Yes. This rule. We're back to like the megahertz wars or whatever. It's going to be super goofy. But they're really leaning on that because I guess you'd need, like they're saying, you know, a lot of the stuff that's coming to Windows will work okay on older Windows PCs. But like you're really going to need those, the neuro processors.

Well, but also. But also. Importantly, also your computer. will be good, right? Which is not a small thing, right? The idea of all of these things, like, Alex, you said this before. Like, if you're an AI researcher, it's a nice to have, but it is going to, in other ways, make your computer worse.

And the promise that Microsoft came out with with the co-pilot plus PCs is these computers are going to be fast. They're going to do AI stuff. They're going to have long battery life. And they're going to be good computers. And that is not a small thing in the Windows world right now, in which you've kind of had to choose one or two of those three things for a really long time. And especially with this Qualcomm stuff, if they can get the battery life there to the point where AI is not, like, you don't have

to buy an AI computer the way you buy a gaming computer and you like make a bunch of sacrifices in exchange for this one thing you want to work really well. If they can actually have solved these three things together, that to me is where the stuff gets really powerful. And then when, and then you get the whole scale of Microsoft and the fact that it has. the app store and the browser and the OS and the models and the cloud service. Like, that's when that becomes really powerful if and only if the devices don't suck. And maybe possibly the devices don't suck. Well, if they don't suck and they're affordable enough, right? Like, most people are spending $700 on a laptop and most of these laptops are in the $1,200 range,

which is intentional. They're, they're meant to go after the MacBook Air because MacBook Air sell a lot better than everybody else's laptops. Right. Right. And, What's interesting is, you know, Satchandela, the CEO of Microsoft, talked to Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal, notable for a ex-pat, Joanna Stern, I might add. And basically it was like, yeah, we're going to beat the MacBook Air. Yusuf Medi, who is executive vice president of Microsoft, basically is like a MacBook Air with an M3.

These computers will beat those by 50% on Cinebench. So they're making huge performance claims on these PCs. They're also thin and light. There's some question, I think John Gruber raised, about whether they have fans as though people care. Some of them have fans. Some of them are going to have fans. Yeah.

Fine. But MacBooks have thermal throttling issues, particularly the air, right? They do slow down. So if you want to run these computers really hard with AI workloads, which are essentially a GPU-like piece of the processor, make it hot. But we're expecting good battery life. And then the list of the list of manufacturers here is Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, HP, Acer, Asus. It's everybody.

Microsoft, obviously, has a surface. Pro in the surface. That's the suite, right? There isn't... Alex, you've even taken the briefings. How are they differentiating these? It's just like, are you a Del Fannboy or a Seuss handboy? I mean, yeah, kind of. Like, everybody's, everybody's bringing up their own thing. I took an HP briefing and they rebranded their whole thing, right? Because you had like the HP Spectre and the HP Pavilion and the HP something you've never heard of. Like, it was just a mess. And they redid their whole portfolio into the elite book and the pro book for corporates or corporate stuff.

And then the Omni Book, which is for the rest of us. And the Omni Book is like, I got to play around with one. It was really nice. I didn't get to benchmark it or anything like that. So again, we're going to have to wait and see. But it was like, it was a nice laptop. It felt like exciting and good in a way. It felt kind of like my iPad Pro with the thing on it, the magic keyboard, only lighter

and better. The surface keyboard looks awesome, right? Because it's totally wireless. Yeah, like, that's always kind of the way, right? Like, Microsoft has done this before, where they go and they say, all you oweems, you're going to have to, like, swarm around this. It's going to be the netbook or touch computers or whatever. You're going to have to start making these. They were just like, yeah. You got to touch the screen, right?

And in this case, this is the swarm around the dumbest name alive. But they recognize Apple's coming for us. You know, everybody, to your point, Nilai, you say this all the time. The computer is no longer about the rest of the computer. It's about the browser. And Microsoft has to compete with that. Like, that is an existential crisis for Microsoft, right? If everybody just says, okay, I just need a Chromebook or whatever, or my phone, that's bad for them. So that's why they've put all this AI in. That's why they're really like glomming on to this trend at the moment. And I don't know. These things will be really interesting and really curious to see how fast they are because Qualcomm's made these promises before, but this time we've got this whole new team behind it, which like HP was like, well, you know, because I was like, what's different this time? You guys have released some real dog shit. It's probably broken and I don't believe you. Yeah, and it's like, well, it's a new team over there. So like, we're feeling confident. And I was

like, okay, that's different. I mean, but we'll see, right? You just kind of have to hold your breath. Yeah, look, this is the thing about tech coverage. And I feel like we have said this many, many times, but this is like a new era, and we just need to repeat ourselves. Eventually the product ship. And then there's no hiding. And there's only two kinds of coverage in the world where the truth just outs. It's sports where one team wins and another team loses.

And it's tech where you can hold the thing in your hand. And it works or it doesn't. Yep. And like a lot of things have not worked recently. We are on an all-time run of things not working, and a lot of the reason that things don't work is the underlying AI models are not reliable, which is something Alex you have been pointing out now for a couple weeks. We're making these huge bets, and it's like betting on a toddler. Like, are you going to stand up for a long time? Or you're just going to tip over?

Like, let's build the business around you. What was interesting was like some of the AI stuff that Microsoft was doing is stuff that we've done. already seen before, right? Like, like, HP and a lot of these companies said, okay, you're going to buy one of these AI PCs. What the hell does that actually mean practically? And in HP's case, they're like, we've slapped it. We've like thrown in the chat GPT prompt window so you can talk to chat GPT 3.5 on an HP computer. And I was like, cool, I don't, I don't care about that. That's not the answer. That's not the answer. That's not the answer. But then the other thing they were doing was they were like, okay, well, you can also like, we can learn more about the

computer to better optimize it. And that's something that we've seen from, Nvidia's been doing that for years now with DLSS. And so it's like, okay, well, that's actually useful and like a use of AI that I've seen in practice and seen at work. So I can almost get excited about that. I also think that's where recall comes in and is actually really important to this whole thing. Because what I think Microsoft did well, both at the surface event on Monday and at Build on Tuesday, is give people examples of what AI can do on their computer. And the answer is not a chat bot that you could find at a website.

Like that's nothing. You have accomplished nothing if that's what you've done. But what Microsoft said is they, and it was a lot of little things in spots, right, where they're like AI copy and paste, copy in one language paste than another. Like it's, you kind of have to do a million of those in order to make this case. But I think recall was the big swing where it was like, okay, here is one genuinely new thing you can do on an AI PC that you couldn't. for that is better because of AI.

And like in the whole AI world, we are severely lacking in that type of thing. And I feel like whether recall is any good, whether people want it, what we do with the privacy implications, all that aside, just the fact that Microsoft is like, we found a new thing we can do now because of this felt really good to me. That was like, okay, you understand what this is actually for, which is things. It's for doing things. It's not for talking. talking to a chat bot I can talk to in a web browser.

It's not for a bunch of random nonsense that doesn't help anybody. Like, it's for things. Yeah, I think Ryan Broderick, who writes the Garbage Day newsletter, has been consistently pointing out that the AI industry has to talk about AGI in destroying the world to make their extremely boring demos have stakes. That's very true. You have to be like, it can see an orange. This will lead to the end of the world.

Like, you just fine. But you're right that Microsoft laid out a particular vision of computing, which is you're using a computer all day. What if you could then interact with a computer in a way that remembered all of the things you were doing? And that became your companion. And we should get into the reaction and the reality of that and how it might work and the privacy implications. I think all those things are really important. I just want to spend one second on Adela saying this is one of the two dreams. people have had for a long time in the keynote,

because he's not wrong, right? The idea that you live your life on the computer and all the things you do on your computer comprise your experiences, and it would be cool if the computer could help you sort those out is in fact a dream. Yeah?

Yes. And it requires, like, one bit of a philosophical shift, which is, I think most people think about that dream in terms of just like walking around the world. Like, what if you had an ambient computer or the AR glasses, and you were just like asking questions and your sort of IRL experiences were that thing. And Microsoft has been like, all right, we're, like,

with Holland's aside, like, actually you live your life on the screen. So we can just build a thing on the screen. And then we'll get to your eyes later. We'll put the computer on your face at a later time. What about the computer that's in front of your face? What if we made that do the thing that everyone wants? And that is a leap. It's actually kind of an interesting leap that might,

Microsoft took first in this way, whereas everyone else has been chasing these glasses. And I just like, it should be, I think noting that he called it one of the two dreams everyone had. And I think people are like, is that the dream? And it's like, oh, actually, we've been talking to air glasses for like a decade. And this is just that, but just digitally. Yeah, for once Microsoft is the company that actually like lives in the real world,

unlike everybody else. Yeah, they're not just showing some weird concept videos of like the Microsoft kin. Exactly. Exactly. Whatever that is. What was it, the papyrus? What was that thing called? The courier.

Oh, the carriest. RIP, the courier. They probably made a thing called the papyrus at one point. I'm sure. They will soon if they haven't. Can I tell you an early story about Nehly Patel's experiences of copier infringement? Nobody remembers the kin. This is like a thing that happened to a small number of us on the internet.

But Microsoft, in the early iPhone days, instead of releasing a smartphone, released a teen-focused feature phone called the Microsoft KIN. This is real. There was a KIN one and a KIN two. They were ban-a-like, I don't know why they did this. And they were not smartphones. They were legitimately feature phones

that could, like, send MSN messages. And their marketing campaign was, like, beautiful young people in hip art districts of cities like skateboarding talking on their feature phones. And I remix their ads to the song, Too Drunk to Fuck by the Dead Kennedys. and Microsoft immediately had YouTube take them down. Amazing.

And I'm like, I'm like, that would just be a great TikTok now. Like, no one would even ask this question now. Anyway, if you're out there, do your thing, TikTok. The kin, by the way, we gave them horrible reviews before they even came out, Microsoft canceled them. This is a real victory of the Engadgett days. Why don't know what we're talking about. Anyway, though the products are real.

That's where we're talking about. Not the Microsoft kin. The products are real. You can, like, use it. And then the reaction to them, is I don't trust this at all. It's probably broken. I don't believe you.

Yeah. Yeah. The reaction to recall in particular was surprising to me because I edited our story on it. And I was like, this is cool. I'm really excited about this. Like, didn't think of the privacy stuff at all because I operate under the assumption if someone physically has your computer, then you're boned. Like you're screwed.

If someone has your computer, you're done. That's the same word. Yeah. They're the same. Just in case people didn't understand what bone was. what means. I want to make sure our entire audience understands. But I just didn't care. I was like, okay, cool. This is, this is really neat. And I'm excited for my computer to be a better archive of things because that's what I use their computer for. And then a friend was like, have you heard about

how pissed people are about recall? And I was like, why? And they're like, because it records everything you do. And I was like, that's literally what a computer does. Yeah. That's like the point of them. And you were looking at the history tab of your browser. I was just about to say, this is one of my favorite things to do to people is like people don't understand the extent to which this stuff is already being recorded. Like go look at the cash files on your computer for what happens in all the apps on your computer. Like they already know. But I think, Kranz, to your point, the thing about privacy, there are a real interesting privacy implications here about like what happens if somebody gets hold of this? What if there are going to be new kinds of malware that can get onto my computer

and chase this stuff down? Like the stakes to that go up slightly. But I do think part of the reaction was just reminding people of how much these devices already know. And just the thing where it's like, I'm doing all of the stuff on here. Like this is in a very real way my life. And just the fact that that's being collected somewhere feels gross to be reminded of.

Like even though sort of intellectually I understand that that's already the case, it's like when you realize that your ISP, has access to every website that you go to on your phone, even if you're on like incognito. Like, no, like Verizon still knows. It's still there. Like, it's just people hate being reminded of that.

And it is just such an unavoidable fact of being alive right now that it is how it is that I think it, every time it comes up again, you're made to feel sort of powerless and helpless against this, like, incredible tide of all these electronics that know too much about me. Well, I think it's also the fact that it's got, it's using AI, right? Like, like, that's a big point. part of it, and people are having this weird moment, especially this week. And we're going to talk about it more with like what's going on with Scarlett Johansson later. But people are just having

this sudden visceral reaction to AI. And so this thing was who's like, yes, computers archive all your data. They have done that since the beginning of time. This is just more efficient at it. They were like, that might have gone over a little easier if they hadn't also said, and we're going to use AI to do it all. Because even though the AI, everything is happening according to Microsoft, you know, security researchers will do their thing. Everything is happening on the computer. It is not going into the cloud. None of this is being shared anywhere.

It's using the NPU to like process this stuff. All of it's happening there. So theoretically, it is no different than just using your computer as normal. Only now if a bad person gets a hold of your computer, they're going to have a little easier time recovering everything you do. That's it. But that you put AI in there and people are like, burn it to the ground. Well, the whole road of that is so fascinating to me because,

I was talking to Dance Roker, the CEO of this company called Rewind, which has been doing a third-party version of this on Max for the last, I think, year or so now. It's another one that it uses basically like screen recording and your device audio to pull out a lot of this same information. And they actually just launched a new version that sinks in the cloud because the overwhelming feedback from people was either hell no or hell yes, the hell no people you're never going to get. And what the hell yes people wanted was for all of this to be available to them in more places. And so it's like we're actually in this bonkers divide where there's a set of

people who like as soon as you present them the beginning of the road are like absolutely not and just like nope their way out of this whole technological transition. And then there are a bunch of people for whom the privacy stuff is actually going to be a hindrance more than anything else. And there are going to be people who are like, well, why can't I access everything that I did on my other computer from my work computer. And then Microsoft is going to be in this horrible position of being like, well, we have to do the less private thing because it's actually what our users want. And it is just, it just like exacerbates that divide further and further. And it just, I don't know, it just feels crazy to me. Like the rewind folks were like, I don't know what you want from us. We tried to do it

as private as we could and the people who used it didn't want that anymore. So there's two things about that that I think are fascinating. And they are expressed sort of in very tangible ways, then I think in very esoteric ways. So the very tangible way, I did the thing when I interviewed Sundar where I handed him my phone to look at Google search results. And we ran that clip.

The clip is like doing bonkers on TikTok. In the clip, as a joke, I say to Sundar Pichai, don't dig through my phone. Like of all the things you were ever going to say to a CEO, like a billionaire CEO of one of the largest guys. Just pull it up picks a Mac.

Literally like, who am I? Of course I said, like, I couldn't resist it, you know? It was just a joke. It's just like a way to be human when you hand someone your phone. And the people in the comments are like, he already knows everything. Like, why would you tell him not to dig through your phone? Like, he's the CEO of Google.

Like, if you want, he can just, he can already dig through your phone. And I think that's nihilism, right? Like, there's an element of nihilism there, which is like, it's already over. Like, you might as well, embrace it and be excited about it. And then there's an element of nihilism that's like, well, I can't stop it. I'm going to live off the grid for the rest of my life. And that's one thing. The more esoteric thing that I think about all the time is as more and more of these companies get more and more into AI content generation, the thing that they are promising the people who pay the money, which is in large part advertisers, is that they will make auto-generated ads on their platforms.

So, like, Google will make auto-generated AI-created ads on YouTube. Meta will do it on Instagram. TikTok will do it on TikTok. TikTok actually announced AI generated ads this week. And Mia Sato is writing with them. You're going to get to a place where you get extremely well-targeted custom content. And the people who are like Facebook is listening to me are going to lose their minds. Yes. Right?

Like the idea that you have privacy then is like out the window. Like right now people think Facebook is listening to them because it can target you based on your Wi-Fi networks, which is the simplest thing. knows what IP address you're on. It knows that your friends have been on that IP address. And it was like serve some ads across based on interest targeting. It's not smart. It's not stupid. It's like somewhere in the middle. It's a pretty blunt instrument. But people are convinced that Facebook is listening to them. You're going to get to a place where it knows a whole lot about you. And then it knows that you're on the same Wi-Fi network as your friend that you talk to about vacations in Mexico. And then it delivers you a video of you in Mexico.

What? Yeah. Like, people are going to lose their minds. And then I think that, well, I don't have any privacy anyway. I might as well just give the cloud provider of recall or rewind everything. I think that might actually change in a dramatic way very quickly at that point. Maybe. Like, it really does seem like either the pendulum is going to swing aggressively at some point soon

or the pendulum is just going to like burst through the side. No, no, you know what's going to happen. Yeah, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory style just like launch through the ceiling and be gone. One thing. Like, like, what's going to happen in the privacy pendulum? It could go into space. One thing I will note you mentioned that the ISPs can see everything.

Like, you would think that there would be a federal privacy bill, which there is not. One of the first things that the Republican Congress, in Trump's first term did. Literally one of the first things was they threw out a privacy bill that would have kept your data private from ISPs. Yep. It was just like, hey, we're here.

What should we do? We should make it so AT&T can read all your shit. Like, immediate. It was an outrage. And we have just not fixed that in years. I tend to feel like that that tension is only going to be resolved when Congress actually knows what a computer is,

how it works. how to like use it. Like when they finally... Well, here's what a computer is. It is an AI powered device that if you say the right words, we'll bang you. Yeah. And I think Congress will react to that idea very powerful. But it will also, if you say the wrong words, share all the photos of you banging it to your enemies.

Look, if you want to get something done in this United States Congress. It's blackmail and booty. Those are your choices. It's real. So honestly, this is a great thing. Right? I think this tension has been there for a very long time. And I think you're right that we are coming to a point where like something's going to have to give. These companies like Microsoft are really pushing for stuff that is just completely counter to what we understand of privacy and security. And what we want. And the only way that's going to change is if someone else says, hey, you can't do that. Yeah. I think the recall stuff is really interesting. I think it's to your point, David, it can't see what you're doing on your phone. Right. So this promise. that you have this companion

that is sort of living your digital life with you except for what you do on your phone, that's weird, right? And then you get into should this be a cloud service?

Are you running a background app on an Android phone? Like Apple's not going to let them do it, right? No. Maybe Apple does it on its own in iOS in a couple weeks. Like we're, they're going to have to bridge that gap,

I think, for this to be truly successful. But then there's the piece where, yeah, we're going to have to hold them accountable to this thing being totally local. And a bunch of other AI stuff on this device is hybridized, right? Like, the paint example is hybridized. Like, I don't know.

And that's why I don't want to seem overly skeptical. I really, I can see the jump that Microsoft made from AR glasses are too hard. We have a bunch of AI. We can basically do AR on Windows. Like, AR is not the right word, but like this sort of augmented experience in Windows for your digital life. Multimodal, you mean? Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, there's something there. Copilot's like almost exactly the right word, right? Like, you're just doing stuff on a computer and you're asking questions about the experiences you're having. A lot of people have thought that would happen first in glasses on your face. And Microsoft is like, what if it happens on the screen in front of, like, great. I just want to point out you said co-pilot is a right word. Where do you stand on co-pilot plus PCs?

Awful. Awful. Awful. Awful. Even Microsoft has trouble saying the phrase, co-pilot plus PCs. Like if you go back and watch, there are a bunch of people who clearly practiced very hard who still occasionally struggle to say the phrase co-pilot plus PCs.

It's terrible. Cool product, bad name. I just want to figure out... Why didn't they just call them AI PCs? Like, did HP... Just call them co-pilot PCs. The hell is the plus doing there? It's not a streaming service.

What are we doing here? Do any of these features on Windows have a monthly fee? No. I don't think so. Not as far as we know. I don't think. Some of it requires an open AI API API key, which you have to pay for.

Like some of the copy and paste stuff you can only do if you have the, I think, the like GPT4 key or something. But most of this stuff seems like it's going to come baked into Windows, which itself is rapidly becoming a subscription service. So I think that's where you end up getting charged for it as a Microsoft's 365 thing, rather than a specific AI thing. I do love the mental image of like three to five years from now, the extremely cheap ACER PC in a Walmart with like the dented cardboard sign.

It's like copy and paste in multiple languages. And it's just like sitting in Racine, Wisconsin. And that's like, why? And that costs a monthly fee. And they're like, why aren't these computers selling? Like that's going to be great for everybody. We should take a break. That's just build.

There's more. There's yet more AI news this week. We'll come back. We'll talk about Scarlet-Hansson. It's really what we're going to do here on the Vurchase. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell to start selling. sell. Whatnot.com slash sell. Okay, we're back. There are two things I forgot to say about Build. One of which was the only

reason I wanted to talk about Build. So I'll get to it. The second, though, I should just point out in the scheme of it's probably broken I don't believe you. There was a Microsoft

Services outage that took down copilot, chatGBT search, and Duck, Duck Go. Yeah. Because it did rely on the Bing

Index. Well, Bing and Chat Gbt CBT search or the same, right? There's like a Bing. There was like a Bing outage. Like the Bing API went down and everything else next to it went down. It's like when AWS goes down and all of a sudden all the apps that everyone uses just disappear off the internet. Like it's, it's nice to be reminded that the internet basically only exists in like four places. Yeah. I'm sure the Bing team was like people noticed Bing was down.

Just because Doug Doug Doug Go was down. So that's good. The second thing I want to note, and again, I think this is the most important use of the week is, yes, many of the traditional PC companies announced copilot plus PCs, including Samsung. And if you have been tracking Samsung, you will know that Samsung recently instituted six-day work weeks for its executives to, quote, inject a sense of crisis into the company. They did not institute six-day work weeks for their engineers or products for the executives. You get a bunch of executives working on Saturdays.

You get crazy ideas, which I have taken to calling Saturday Samsung. So Samsung's co-pilot PC, this is a real thing. So if you buy the new Galaxy Book 4-Edge, by the way, there's no space between book and 4, but a space between 4 and Edge. All right? Do you realize that the name of that is the Samsung Galaxy Book 4-Ege co-pilot plus PC? That makes me want to throw things. I'm saying you had the extra day on Saturday.

You could have gotten rid of a couple words. All right? But the people hit Samsung in their quest to inject a sense of crisis into the company have decided that their single best idea is to just give away TVs. Yeah. So the previous one of these we covered, the previous iteration of Saturday, Samsung, was that if you bought a frame TV, you got another TV, which is perfect. if you buy a Galaxy Book 4 Edge, again, there's no space between Book and 4, but a space between 4 in Edge, a Galaxy Book 4-Eged, Copilot Plus PC, you do receive a 50-inch crystal UHD 4K TV.

Sick. This is the plan. What's the MSRP on that? It's $379. They're just throwing you a $300 TV. I'm sure it looks like absolute trash. I'm sure it's the same panel as a frame TV. I was supposed to say.

Just a single element. backlight, just shining gray in the dark. But I just love that Samsung, they've got all the executives that are there on Saturday. Just how are we going to, it's a crisis, you guys. How are we going to bring the stock price back up? And I'm like, here's what we're going to do. Everybody gets a 50-inch TV number one.

Well, you know that before that, somebody was like, what if we made them cheaper? It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Just get rid of them. We're going to go the other way. But you also get a television. We're going to find the $380 of margin in every other product. And you know what everybody loves is a free garbage 50-inch TV.

If you buy a TV, you get another TV. You buy a Chromebook, you get a TV. You buy a brand new state-of-the-art copilot plus laptop free TV. That'll do it. You're considering a surface? Does a surface come with a free TV? It's great. This year of Saturdays is going to be amazing.

Okay. Sorry. I just literally I said to David and Alex before he started the show, the only thing I wanted to talk about was Saturday Samsung, and we forgot. It's my fault. Just excited. I could keep going another hour on Saturday Samsung.

All right, we should talk about Open AI, who I would say did not have as successful of a week in AI is Microsoft. That's fair, right? Even though Microsoft's big partner, Sam Altman was on stage at Build. but I would I would characterize OpenAAS week as definite. Yeah. Own goal was the phrase I heard used a lot.

And it really is like a record week for don't tweet as advice to give on the internet. Really one of the all time, what if you just didn't tweet moments from Sam Walton in this week? All right, let's run through it. It's not a complicated story. It is getting more and more complicated. is more people talk, which is bad. That is a bad sign. If a seemingly simple story starts to get more and more complicated, lawyers are going to get money.

I will remind you what my contracts professor in law school used to say, Stuart McCauley, why did this case get filed? And we'd all say some idealistic first year law school bullshit. And he would say, no, the lawyers wanted a BMW. A lot of lawyers are getting BMWs at the end of this rainbow. Charlotte Johansson's lawyer is going to be driving a really nice car. He bought it from Disney. Yeah, he's like pre-courgis to BMW. He's getting a Rivian this time.

He's like, just put a standing tab at the BMW dealership. Just whatever M is coming out next, just give me one of those. Although I've heard the XM is not great. Anyway, okay, so here's the basic rundown. They announced GPT-40, which in classic, I think it's broken, I don't believe you, appears to hallucinate more than GPT4. Great. But the headline feature of 4-0 is it's multimodal.

O is for Omni. It can look at stuff. It can talk to you. You can talk to it. And it has these, because it's multimodal, a lot of the demos are people chatting to it. And then it opened. I had these voices. They already had them.

One of them was called Sky, which was a woman. But because of these demos, which were very, very, very. voice-heavy and very personality-driven, because that's the other big feature of 4-0, a lot of people noticed that the Sky voice sounded a lot like Scarletcher Hansen, and that Sky in particular made a lot of people feel flirtatious. Right, Alex? I would say that's like the... I think that's an accurate assessment of things.

People got a little horny for Sky there. Yeah, a lot of people thought they could bang an iPad last week. Yeah, it was uncomfortable for everyone. That's just, I mean, I don't know how else to characterize the way people feel about AI right now, Except an awful lot of people want to bang an iPad. It's fine. You know, it's like some people want to give all their privacy away to a cloud. Other people, they have a particular dream.

Okay, that's fine. That was the other dream, Satchaneda-O was talking about. Dream number two. Yeah. What if you could tag an iPad? All right. So there's a lot of conversation about this voice, whether it sounds like so hard chance or not. And there's like a reasonable debate.

Some people are like absolutely not. Some people like it does. people have asked open-eye executives very directly. Our own Kylie Robison asked Miramara directly, and she said, no, it was not our intention, no thought of this whatsoever. And then Sam Altman tweets the word her, which is the movie from Spike Jones

at stars Scarlett-Hanson. Which he says is one of his favorite movies of all time and an inspiration. Yeah, great. So now he's undone his poor executive who was saying this was not the point. And then a very strange thing happens. opening eyes sort of out of nowhere publishes a blog post it's like here's how we selected our voices

that's a weird time to do it and they it's just a very anodyne corporate blog post it's like we had a process we did casting directors blah blah blah blah then they had our mia david our AI reporter mea david talked to one of their executives to go through it uh they would not say that no they pulled it first they pulled it before they explained it yeah okay so it's like a very normal corporate and an eye and blog post. Then they pull the voice, like almost immediately after that. They pull the voice. Sky.

Yeah. And say, based on concerns we've heard, we're pulling this voice, which is interesting, because there's only one person's concern that matters. And she is a very powerful actress in Hollywood who was married to the headwriter of Saturday Night. So can I just pause you on that moment? I'm curious if you guys had the same reaction that I did in that moment. which is obviously Scarlett Johansson is mad. Yep.

I just couldn't think of any other, because this happened on Sunday night or like overnight into Monday morning. I could not imagine a world in which they pulled this voice and put up this long blog post, which essentially amounted to one of those like, my we didn't copy Scarlett Johansson t-shirt is raising a lot of questions answered by my we didn't copy

Scarlet Johansson t-shirt. One of those moments. And we were covering this thing like, okay, they were, they say they're just trying to allay confusion. Like, I couldn't think of another plausible reason other than Scarlett is yelling. Yes. Like, was that your reaction? It's the only thing that would be happening here.

Yeah. Okay. Then they called Mia David, one of our reporters. And so we have an interview with our executive. They would not tell Mia the timeline. The only question is, did Scarlett call you? And then you pulled the voice. Right.

Legitimately the only question here. And they're like, we heard these concerns. We want to get at it. We pulled the voice. And they just like wouldn't say the timeline. Weird. So we run the story. They sit,

here's a headline. Our headline is like pretty anodyne. Right. It's also just like more open-a-eye talking. We pulled this voice out of concerns. Here's some more color on that. Except they won't say what the timeline is. Hours later,

Scarleth Hansen has a statement out. First to Bobby Allen at NPR and then widely to everyone that says basically like, Sam Altman called me to be the voice. of chat, GBT, and I said no. And then, you know, several weeks later, I'm listening to these demos, and it sounds like my voice, I, like, lawyered up. And I want to know exactly how this happened. Well, he called her, like, two days before the launch. Like, he called her initially, her timeline that she outlines is like, they talked, they chatted a while ago about it.

And she thought about it. And then she said, no, I don't want to do the voice. And he's like, cool. Didn't hear from him for a while. Two days before the demo, Sam Altman calls her. like, hey, you reconsidered? And she's like, no, I don't want to do it. And he's like, cool.

And then she hears a voice that sounds like her. Yeah. That was a perfect Sam Waltman impression, by the way, Alex. Like, I know you were working on that for a while. It's really good. It sounded like it was in all lowercase. Then there's just one last piece of reporting from Natasha Tiku, another former rich reporter at the Washington Post.

She has talked to the agent of the voice actress that Open Eye cast for the Sky Voice, both the actress and the agent wished her to remain anonymous. I have a lot of feelings about that, but they wish she remained anonymous. And she's seen some documents that lay out a version of the timeline that says opening actually recorded all this and never said to this actress sound like Charlton Johnson. So maybe there's some blurriness here. There's some old case law in the mix here. We did a story where we talked to some lawyers. There's a very famous case with Tom Waits, who has a very distinctive voice.

By the way, Heath Ledger was basically doing Tom Waits impression in the dark night. She's very funny. But that's the voice. If you think about Heath Ledger in the Dark Night, like Tom Waits has this very distinctive voice. There's a very famous commercial where they asked the singer to sound like Tom Waits. Tom Waits sued. One, there are other cases like this where people's likeness get used without their permission. My favorite one of this is Van Nu White v. Samsung.

Maybe the best of these cases that exists. Samsung ran a commercial that looked like Wheel of Fortune where a robot was turning the letters. And Van Nu White said, that robot is me. And one. Wow. Yeah. It's a very good. It is, with all of the cases I ever read in law school, I was like, this is why I came here.

V. Sampson, Autronics. So there's like a lot of these weird cases. Like, you are not allowed to trade in particular in New York and California, which is where most of the celebrities are. The state law does not allow you to trade an electance of celebrities to sell your products. That's just a thing. We have not gotten to, we cloned a voice. using another actress and everyone got confused, that's new.

That's a new problem for our court system that I'm very much looking forward to seeing litigated. But we're in this place where we've expanded the boundary of what you can take, right? And the AI companies are really just taking a lot of stuff without asking for a lot of permission. And I think this one with Carl Johansson and Sam Altman in this completely insane timeline that is getting complicated, the more anyone talks is, I think really, you know, we talked about in the earlier segment, people have really, really, like, antagonistic feelings

towards AI because it feels like it's taking stuff from us. And a famous actress who was in a bunch of Marvel movies, she's not the right adversary for O'Brien. Who sued Disney. Who sued Disney, right? Like, I don't know, man. That's not the person you want to, like, mess with. Yeah, it was just kind of gobsmacked by this because, you know, I think, like, Lake Bell, does a really good Scarlett Johansson impression on an animated show where she's playing Black Widow. And she sounds a lot like her. It's great.

But also she's playing Black Widow. And there's a whole, there's like agreements in place. And that's why it's allowed. This is she, this person sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson. And then Sam Altman tweeted her clearly referencing this. He's talked about how much affection he has for that voice for that concept. it's just like, oh, you really just kept walking into rakes on this one, dude. Like, just stop.

Stand still for a moment because, yeah, they probably did hire this woman. And she probably didn't know that she sounded a lot like Scarlet Johansson. Or that's why they hired her, right? Like, there are so many weird twists and turns of all of this, right? Because then there's the question of, was this voice made to sound like Samantha from her? Or does it sound like Scarlett Johansson? and is there a distinction between those two things and is that meaningful

and how much do people associate the voice of Samantha and the role of Samantha with Scarlett Johansson that's just like all of this is unprecedented in such bizarre ways? But the thing that keeps jumping out to me is that the immediate response was that of course OpenAI is wrong.

Because of course OpenAI would have just gone and ingested the movie and use that. I mean, we've seen the technology. now that you can use five minutes of somebody's voice and spit out a pretty passable version of that voice. Like, just the immediate assumption

that that's what OpenAI did was either find a person and tell them to do a Scarlet Johansson impression or screw all that. Just train your model on Samantha in her and call it a day. That, like, this company has so aggressively lost the benefit of the doubt.

It made me think of the iPad crush commercial in the same way. It's just like, this is a company that people do not trust and people think the worst of now and believe that their intentions are bad. And I think the thing with the Open AI, I think is I think the answer is probably some weird, middle, sketchy thing. And it seems like the Open AI version of the story is that Open AI ran a pretty normal process.

And then Sam Altman, who is the CEO of Open AI, just like weird, went rogue and started calling Scarlett Johansson. And now there are all these things out there about how Sam just desperately wants to be famous and it's making him make mistakes. And like, we've gone in all. all of these weird directions. Wait, hold on. Can I just say, I hate it when companies pretend their CEOs are idiots?

Totally fair. Sam Altman is a billionaire. He is the founder of Open AI. He is so much in charge of Open AI that when the board of OpenAI fired him for being reckless and manipulative, the employees all staged a reverse coup and brought him back. That's real. And it's like, yeah, that's a real thing that happened just a little bit ago. was the board of directors was like,

we don't trust Sam Altman and fired him. And he got his way back in the company. He has a new board of directors. And now a bunch of employees are quitting because opening eye is generally abandoning its safety culture. And he's doing this reckless stuff. And I just don't buy it that the company is like,

yeah, we are running responsibly. There's just this hothead that we reverse cooed back into the CEO role that we can't control. Like, you can't. Like, it's just a full, like, lie on their. part to be like, we have no control over him. It's like, well, he runs the company. So I agree with that. And yet, I also find it absolutely plausible that the billionaire

CEO who is kind of feeling himself would call Scarlett Johansson on the side and trying to get a great. Oh, yeah, no, if I had a billion dollars and I was like, my robot can plausibly make Kevin Rist thinks that it's in love with him, like, I would call Scarlet Jansen. Yes. And you don't tell the people, you don't tell the people who are doing the casting process, who then you are happy to throw to the wolves after the fact. but like the bones of that version of the story do not seem implausible to me at all.

But it also doesn't matter. He's the CEO of the company. It doesn't matter. Right. The part where they ultimately shipped the voice that sounded like her in every sense of that word. And he knew about it. And those were the demos. And I'm confident that he watched every second of those demos.

He was in the- He was in the audience. Yeah. Those are his choices. Yeah. He tweeted the word her. It's so hard to undo that. By the way, your question about whether it's the movie her or Scarlett-Jansson,

I will offer you the 1995 case Metro Goldwyn-Meyer v. American Honda Company, where Honda made an ad for the Civic Del Sol that looked a little bit too much like a James Bond movie and lost to MGM. Yes. It was not James Bond. They made too good a commercial. It was a guy in a suit jumping out. I don't remember the Civic Del Sol. Not a high watermark in civic design, but it was a civic with a top that you could like take off.

And so the ad was like he's driving James, a James Bond like character is driving a Honda Civic, very plausible. And he blows the top off and jumps out of the car and does some James Bond stuff. And MGM said that that is James Bond. You made James Bond. Wow. You can't have it and they won. Yes. That's so dumb.

I'm excited for us to go to court. against opening I and say, your robot, the precedent by which we are suing you is MGM versus American. Have you seen the Civic Del Sol judge? MGM, by the way, also now owned by Amazon, just one of those things, just a weird moment in time. Because, again, most of these cases took place in New York and California ages ago. Most of them are about pretty normal ads, right?

Like, that's why you appropriate a celebrity's likeness to try to see. sell something, those days are over. Like, TikTok is full of weird, deep fake celebrities and just, like, pure copy art infringement. The number of companies, right now if you run a regular company and you want to buy a regular ad, and you're like, I'd like to use Taylor Swift to sell my towels. You can't. But that's too expensive. If you're a super shady distributor of Alibaba towels and you're on TikTok, it's all Taylor Swift

all day long. Deepfakes, baby. It's crazy. And like, there's a gap here that's happening where the law has absolutely not caught up to reality. Because most of these cases are about big ad agencies and big companies with big budgets running at, right? I don't know that we're just going to, we're just in for a moment of chaos because the reality of what's happening on the ground is people do not care about the law as particularly IP law. And the big companies, Google Open AI, they are the next generation of their technology is just founded on taking. stuff, which is why open AI does not have the benefit of the doubt.

Everyone believes they took whatever they want. And if they wanted to, they would just make a clone of Scarlett Hanson's voice. Whether or not they cast an actress who sounded just like her, it doesn't matter because if the technology exists for them to just do it. And no one thinks they have the control to not do it. Weird. Yeah. A weird moment for them.

Yeah. And I, at least from what I've heard so far the last couple of days, I'm curious if you'll have heard anything different, is that this, there's no, indication so far that Scarlett Johansson is actually going to like take real legal action here. She put out that one statement and we don't know what's going to happen next. But that if she did, this would have a real chance of going somewhere and being pretty important and precedent setting in terms of like it just feels like in so many ways we're itching for like the one weird AI lawsuit.

And like maybe it's the New York Times one. But it would be frankly a lot like wilder and weirder. more fun if it was Scarlet Joannsen. Well, I think they're probably kind of different cases. Like, they're targeting different things, but they get at the same thrust of things, which is, can you just take shit? Yeah, like, what are you

allowed to do in the name of their eye? Ultimately, can you just do stuff? Yeah. Right. I mean, like, if I do it with a computer, it's fine, right? It's like, that's the answer. And look, there are very meaningful differences between what you can do at a computer, or why can do in my life. Like, for example, Alex,

if I came to your house and took one of your Blurays away, that would be a crime for many reasons. One, just a crime against our friendship, you know. Right. I'd be very upset. But importantly, you would not have the Blu-ray anymore, whereas if I came to your house and copied a file off your Plex server and left, I think you'd be like, one, our friendship is strengthened.

Yeah. And you would also have the original copy, your very legal copy of whatever content. I would have the Blu-ray still in my closet, yes, that's correct. This is like a meaningful thing in copyright law, whereas, you know, it was all, it's all founded on physical scarcity. It has not translated to the world of, like, digital very well. On the other hand, I can just do whatever

I want because it's a computer is not a workable strategy either. You know, like, there's some middle ground here that no one has ever really thought through, and I think that AI conversations, you know, this is a conversation I had with Sundar. Like, do you feel great about open AI training on YouTube?

Okay, the web doesn't feel that way about you. And he was like, that's weird. You know, like, everyone has to wrestle with those two ideas at the same time, while we're saying, hey, some of this technology is, like, really cool. Like, you want some of this technology. Some of this stuff is really great for people

who are differently abled, right? Like, how are we going to solve these problems? And Alex, I think you're definitely right that, like, the training lawsuit is a copyright lawsuit. And this other stuff is like a likeness lawsuit, a right of publicity lawsuit. There are different bodies of law

that are very hard to distinguish for normal people. Normal people can't tell you their interest in a copyright and a trademark in a patent, right? Like, this is even more esoteric than that. And on top of it, sort of the inherent nature of it is that these are celebrities. Like, you can't, you don't have a right of publicity. You don't have publicity. Right. And like all of the law is built around celebrity. And so you're just going to get a sequence of people, of plaintiffs who are just the most sympathetic because they are going to be celebrities. Yep. And at some point, point, you know, like we did an episode, Sarah, Zhang and I did an episode of Decoder where we talked about the copyright law and like that feels like a time bomb waiting to go off.

Something's going to happen with copyright law and training data. It is inevitable that one of those cases goes the wrong way because there's so many of them now. It feels inevitable that particularly these companies want to trade on famous voices. Even if it's not this case, I don't know, man. Kevin Hart is going to be like, that sounds too much like me. sue Amazon. It's like one of those kinds of things is going to happen. I mean, it's the music thing, right?

Like this, it's all of the, like, copyright trolls coming after anyone who writes a song with power chords in guitars now. Like, we're going to do that again at a crazy scale. I feel it's a little almost simpler than that. Because it's kind of straightforward to that if Amazon had gone and released an Alexa voice, that was Kevin Hart, and it wasn't actually Kevin Hart, he would have sued. But Amazon went and said, hey, Kevin Hart or Samuel, or Samuel, O'Don Jackson or whoever, do you want to be a voice?

No. But they have done that. Seaminaloa Jackson is a voice on Alexa. Yeah, no, yeah. They paid him. And so, like, I think in this case, there's a lot of precedent of, like, everybody else knew how to do this business. And Open AI was like, Yolo.

Yeah. By the way, I don't know what's wrong with me that I had to immediately think of a, that I had to quickly think of a very distinctive voice in my mind went immediately to Kevin Hart. I wasn't going to comment on it, but. That's just what I had. I was going to comment on it to you later in Slack. It's a very distinctive voice.

I just don't. I just don't know. I often think of you as the Kevin Hart of the Vergecast. It's time to take a break, David. And we'll see if you're back when we can back for the lightning round. Weird time. It's kind of broken, and I don't know if I believe you. We'll be right back.

Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations, And architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, asset compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code.

Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so much. many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean?

For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of. lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think, that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it

means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary, third. Like, that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin.

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

and we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Sponsored by Kevin Hart. Kevin, if you're listening, you can send your lawyers at us,

and we'll just ask you to sponsor the lightning round. That would be great content, actually. I'm confident you can afford it, Kevin. Two people on totally different planets. Me and Kevin Hart's lawyer. Sir, you've been lying about Kevin Hart sponsoring your podcast and you saying, would you like to? Let's make it true.

These lives can be real between me and you. It's beautiful. Dreams do come true. All right, lightning around. We've got to start with this one. it's maybe the most important lightning around item. The United States government, the Department of Justice, has sued Ticketmaster, Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster.

They want to break it up. This has been a long time coming, I would say. This is Taylor Swift's lawsuit. It feels fully like Taylor Swift's lawsuit. Yeah. It really is. And this has been, I think, kind of in the wind ever since the merger happened. I mean, in 2010, right, was when the merger was.

And even then, if I remember right, there was real, this should not be allowed energy. Oh, this was fully, if you want to ever make the case that Barack Obama was kind of like a bad president, his competition policy where he just let this stuff slide, like his DOJ and his FTC just let this stuff slide all over the place, like full rigging. Like this is the core of that argument. Like when people make it, like Obama presided over the great recession and all this other stuff in their recovery. Part of it was we are just going to let these mergers slide.

to bring the economy back, and now we're on the other side of it. You can also blame Ronald Reagan. I prefer to blame Ronald Reagan. We made an entire decoder video blaming Ronald Reagan for Ticketmaster. You can watch that video. But basically the heart of the argument is Ticketmaster Live Nation owns ticket sales, obviously promotion, artist management. They own all the venues.

They own 60 of the top 100 venues in the United States. And so you just have this vertically integrated monopoly. And if an artist tries to screw with it, Ticketmaster crushes them. which means prices go up because there's no competition. It's actually, in a very funny way, it is sort of perfect textbook monopoly stuff. Like, the allegations are so simple to understand. I actually encourage people to go read the lawsuit because it really is, like, if you want to understand what a monopoly looks like,

it is what these allegations say, Live Nation and Ticketmaster does, which is own everything and just use that to beat the hell out of anybody who tries to own anything and come at you. Yeah. And, like, the threats that they are. are alleged to make against artists and venues who don't work with them, the ways that they like raise fees to keep everybody out and like self-deal to each other. Like it's, it is pure monopoly stuff if all of these allegations are true.

And at the end of it, at the very bottom of it, yep, prices are high, but service quality is low, right? Like they don't have to invest in the ticketing platform or the app or the website because who cares? Right. Which is why ticket master broke. Yeah, which is why there's a crush of demand for Taylor Swift tickets. even after she told them there will be a crush of demand,

can you handle it? And it's still crashed. And they didn't have to do anything. Because where are you going to go, Taylor? And I think once the United States government is like, where are you going to go, Taylor? She doesn't have choices. If Taylor Swift doesn't have options,

there's a monopoly happening here. Yeah, then maybe we'll do something. But anyway, you can go read the lawsuit. And like I said, we'll drop the link. We made a long decoder about the whole buildup of this with a lot of great interviews. is one of our, it was a, it was a pot, you know, we do two episodes now, it was a pilot of our explainer episode. So it was a fun one. All right, that was my, we got to say that one. Alex,

what's your lightning round? Salt spoon. Totally different move. Totally different. Totally different. I actually have two, and I feel this one is almost more important. That's not true. Salt spoon is the new Mad Max movie, right? Yeah. That's what that's called. Okay. That's exactly what it's called. But I know we've done, we've talked before on the Vergecast about how you can like use electricity to make people taste things a little. differently. Andrew Marino did a really good podcast, Vergecast on it. Somebody else was like,

what if we put those electrodes into a spoon? And so we could take things that aren't salty and make them more salty. And as someone who grew up low sodium because of their mom, hell yes. I am so excited for this. I didn't know what salt tasted like until I was like 16. Like, this is incredible. I'm so excited. But they're only selling like 200 of them. And it doesn't work if you have like heart problems, which if you, most people on low sodium diets, that's why they're on them. It doesn't work if you're like pregnant. So a lot of the people who might want to be on low sodium diets, this won't actually work for, but it's a salt spoon and that's cool. Yeah. When I read this, I thought it was a spoon that just dumped salt.

No, that's, I've got one of those in my, my kitchen right now. That's just called a spoon. Yeah. No, but that's just a real CES local news gadget. Yeah. Like, here's a spoon that precisely delivers her. No, this one just shocks you into believing. There's salt, a different approach. I love that for them. And it's from the people who do, like, soy sauce.

It's currant. Oh, nice. Very good. They know salt. They should make a surracha spoon. Oh, my God. They should just continue electrocuting my brain into flavor. Just trick my brain constantly, please.

Yeah. All right, Dave, what you got? We have to talk about humane, right? Everyone's favorite startup. There was a Bloomberg report this week that Humane is now looking for a buyer, and I believe the price that's looking for is somewhere between $750 million and a billion. Also was in that story that the company has raised $230 million. So it wants a 4x valuation?

Yeah. At the top end. And I would remind you that it is, it's that humane. It's the one we've talked about. It's not a different, like, B to B humane. that is very successful. Truly bold strategy to come out and say, I'm not surprised this company is looking for a buyer, right?

Like, I think the thing you hope for with your first product is that it gets you money to get to the second product. And then the second product is the one where you start to win and that's where you go. Like, that's the strategy. But if you flop on the first one and holy God, does it look like they flopped on the first one, it's very hard to get out of that. So I'm not shocked that Humane is looking for a way out. I think A, it's going to have a lot of trouble finding a buyer because this company is not full of people who are like beloved in the tech industry, I would say.

At the top. Yeah, at the top. Like, Imran Chaudhry in particular, I would say left Apple not beloved by people still at Apple. That's about as much as I can report on that, but that I feel pretty good saying that. the rest of it is just it is truly wild for this company to come out and say we think we should get 4x what we phrase and everyone who works here should get rich because of this terrible product that we've made okay so two things one it's probably broken and i don't believe you real theme i'm just telling you well that one's definitely broken yeah it's super broken and i don't believe like i'm just saying we caught a lot of heat for being at the TED talk. Here we are.

Second, let's go through the list. Right. So Apple is out. They're not going to pay them the money. And I concur with your reporting. And that is also about as much as I can say. Yeah. But like if you're out in the mix,

it's just out there. That's just information. Apple's not going to buy this company. Especially because their entire pitch was we're going to obsolete the iPhone. Right. Doesn't seem like this sort of thing Apple's going to invest in. No. Apple has the Apple Watch.

They're going to be fine. they have Siri which is a little shaky but they got the Apple Walk. Google, no, right? That feels like no. They're still struggling to integrate Fitbit and they don't need a laser projector. More hardware, both like more hardware chops

and more hardware issues than it can deal with. Google, for example, I'll just do this. They just merged Android and the Pixel Team under Rick Austerlo, who formerly ran the Pixel Team and all of hardware. And now he runs all the platforms too. So Rick has to like keep Samsung happy, right? Like he's, he now manages the whole ecosystem, which is really interesting, right?

But can you, and he's got to figure out the rest of Fitbit, which is still messy from what I understand from V. You can't just like throw a bunch of X Apple designers who thought they're going, right, running not your AI platform. Right. And a big part of what Humane, I suspect, is trying to sell is the operating system, right? Like, they've always said we are not just about the AI pin. Like, they want to be a platform. And this is a picture you hear from everybody. But I suspect if you're going to pay anything like the price that they want,

you think you're buying what has the potential to be a winning platform, not a bunch of hardware engineers. Like, Google doesn't actually need more hardware engineers at this moment at time. Is it not just them trying to be like, everybody's really hot for AI right now? We shipped an AI thing by our AI thing. But their AI thing is open AI. Yeah.

But Samsung's got Saturdays. If they wanted to do that, they should have sold four months ago, right? Like if you're just trying to capitalize, you sell before you ship and not after. Yeah. Unless you're greedy and you think you actually like. Or they thought they were going to win. Yeah, they thought they were going to win. Which is fine.

Companies are all to work hard. Like, there's, how do I put this? There's no lack of sincerity. the humane ecosystem, right? Like, no. That's, there might be some confusion, uh,

some delusion, but not, but they're not kidding. They're not insincere, right? Yeah. Right. Um,

okay, Google's out, right? I think Google's out just because the, the stuff runs an open AI's stack and Google doesn't run that. And they don't need more complication. Google, if anything is trying to streamline,

right? Yeah. Uh, Microsoft is interesting. Microsoft runs a bunch of opening eye stuff. They don't have mobile, right? There's lots of rumors.

Mm-hmm. I think Satchianadella is smarter than this. that's frankly just my belief there. I don't think he's like, yeah, we'll take a flyer in this nonsense. He's, they're winning. He's like, I'm going to take on the MacBook air. Yeah. Yeah. But of all the possibles, Microsoft at the top, I just think

Nadella is smarter than this distraction. Samsung loves that unfocused ideas. Yeah. They're in the mix. Love goofy hardware. A bunch of executives sitting around on Saturdays with nothing to do except do M&AD. They're going to see that, that story on Saturday and be like, got it. Can you imagine the humane team just being given Bali?

Yeah, right, Bali? Go figure out Bali. Yeah, just this, now the laser projector rolls around. Huh? Is that something? I could actually see it. And Samsung, like, Smart Things is always an interesting version of that. Samsung actually is, is.

The Humaneen running smart things is like a pure nightmare. Just a pure, absolute. absolute nightmare. Yeah, agreed. But Samsung is, has a history of actually following through on pretty big acquisitions

in a way that I think could be interesting. I suspect the humane team would not be psyched about working for Samsung. I don't think most of them would. But that is maybe the funniest possible outcome. I'm just stuck on Samsung as a history of following her app.

Have you used smart things, sir? It's still there. That's not true. It's there. And I will say for as much as much as I talk about the frame TV, the people who run the services are the boxy people because Samsung bought them a lot of box. Oh, yeah. Oh, boxy. All right, P.

I'm not saying this is great. I'm just saying it's true that Samsung buys things and then the people continue working there. Yeah. All right. So LG, I think, is the same. Right. If LG gets a whiff. But they're not doing Saturdays.

Right. But yeah, Samsung's ahead because they're. on the office on Saturday. But if LG gets a whiff that Samsung might do it, LG might buy it. LG famously bought WebOS. So a history of betting

on doomed platforms and then turning them into television operating systems. You could see the humane. Cosmos. What if your TV had a laser projector in it that projected under your hand?

Pretty good. Amazon feels like a hard no. Right? Yeah. That company is bringing, it's like getting smaller, not bigger. Panos is running all of hardware now.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, Panos is there. Yeah, Panos is there. Panos Panas, yeah, in charge of Amazon devices and services. He's not going to go and be like, yeah, let's buy that and integrate that into Amazon's tech stack. If your question was which of these companies is most likely to ship something that resembles the AI pin in the next three years, I think it might be Amazon. I would agree. But I don't think Amazon would get to that point by acquiring huge.

Humane. No, my question is who will spend a billion dollars on Humane? The answer to that is like Steve Mnuchin or something. Like some true social, not wrongs the AI. Exactly. I'm just saying my list is Samsung, LG if they get a whiff of Saturday Samsung. And then like distant 5,000th place third Microsoft. Yeah. I think that's probably right. Who else has a billion dollars? Costco. It's Walmart. I'm just thinking of like to be working on Oracle. Who thought about buying TikTok but would buy Humane instead?

It'll end up being like Verizon or Comcast who's just like really excited about a new. They're going to be like, this is your TV remote on your lapel. And everybody's going to be like, no, thank you. We're going to, the idea of the humane design team bringing that energy to launching like the next Fios remote. It's beautiful. That's compelling. It's like on stage at TED being like, you can turn the volume up and down. Yeah.

I do want to know, though, by the way, if you're listening and you have an idea of a company that either might or should buy Humane, tell us. Exxon. Vergecast at theverge.com. Call the hotline. 866, Verge11. I genuinely want to know because I bet there is an interesting match or two that we're not thinking of. Ford.

And I'd like to know what they are. Ford. Ford. There you go. Drive your car with. With your, oh, no, it's going to be Elon Musk and it's going to be GROC and it's just going to be the GROC hardware. Don't summon that. Rough.

All right. Grockbuss. We'll see what happens. Again, it's just a Bloomberg report. Humane itself has not said anything. But I strongly suspect that they need to get out the game. I also suspect Rabbit's going to end up in the same spot very soon. All right.

I got to do one more. I got to do one more. Apple, uh, you know, sometimes you get photos on your phone and you're like, that's a terrible photo. You can delete it. Or you're like, oh, that's too spicy to keep here in case my mom sees my photos and you delete it. And there was an unfortunate bug where those photos just popped back up into people's things, into their phones. And Apple said nothing, but they corrected it just with the latest OS update. So you should no longer have reappearing nudes or whatever else.

And Apple has said nothing about that, too. Yeah, it's weird to confirm a bug like this by issuing an IOS update. OS update and then saying nothing else. Yeah. And they were like old. My understanding is it's like not just, oh, a photo you deleted last night. It's like. People are getting like years old photos, right?

Yeah. So, so that's, that's terrifying. But at the same time with recall, I would have loved that. So I don't know where I stand on this, but I do stand on like, yeah, if I delete something, I generally want it deleted. Do you believe it's deleted, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I want to believe it's deleted. I want to know where they're. that data goes when I make a choice about it. And I think that's the difference between recall and this. Like, recall, you will know where the data, theoretically, where the data goes once the security researchers actually figure that out. This, we don't know. Big caveat.

Yeah, this is weird. I think, you know, we are part of our job is holding big companies accountable. And it is truly irresponsible for Apple to not say why this happened and what they did to fix it. There's a bunch of people on Reddit who love to argue with me on Thread. who are like, we figured it out and you're overhyping this. And it doesn't matter because we didn't cause the bug. We didn't fix the bug. It's great that you have a theory about why it happened.

The theory sounds wonderfully plausible. I love it. I don't know what happened. Right. There's one party that knows what happened and they should be accountable for their mistake because this is a big mistake. And it's weird that we give them a pass. Yep.

And so, you know, we can't force them to, all we can do is send emails. That's the sheriff Nealiener. has got MIMstream and he pushes that button every day. Yep. That's all we can do. And we just can tell you they have not responded to any of our emails or any of our phone calls about this. And I think that's fundamentally responsible. Because you're playing with people's, like some of the most personally that exists.

Yeah. Hopefully they say something soon. If not, I'll just keep sending emails. What else is there to do? Yeah. In my administration, they would go straight to jail. Vote for tell. Last one.

I'm actually excited about this. Sonos Ace headphones are out. Shout out to Chris Welch, who covers every square inch of the Sonos beat to the point where I think Sonos, like the Sonos Reddit, like waits for Chris to come around. And then like Sonos itself is just like,

oh no, Chris is here. It's great. He scooped the headphones, obviously. They look great. They're like a cross between like the Sony vibe and an AirPods Max vibe. The $450 is expensive. The headline feature is if you're watching TV on a son of soundbar, you can push a button and the audio will come to your headphones.

I want this to be compelling to me, and it's not my use case for these things. I think that's really compelling if you are married and you live in a small home and you want to stay up late playing video games or you want to stay up late watching TV. Yeah, Nelai and his cavernous mansion wouldn't understand. Yeah, your house is just too big to fully appreciate it. How often you need to... No, it's not... It's the real-time switching. I understand that sometimes you want to watch TV and listen to headphones.

I got you. Yeah. But the part where you're like, well, I started with the sound bar. Because they walk out of the room. They say, I'm going to bed. And now you're just like, boop. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I can see it.

But that's the headline feature. By the way, that feature, oddly, is iOS only right now. Soon coming to Android. Weird. Special audio, APTX, if you have Android as well, no high-res anywhere else. No, it's Bluetooth everywhere, except if you're doing the weird TV thing. Mm-hmm. Probably for battery life.

And then obviously this all comes on the heels of the disastrous app launch, which Sonos won't come out and say, but it feels very obvious that they set the timing of the headphone launch. They needed the app for the headphones. And so then the app came out before it was ready. If any other sequence of events occurred to make the app come out, before it was ready. I would be shocked. I wish Sonos would just say it. Like, Chris talked to Patrick Spence, CEO of Sonos, and he was like, well, the app was just ready. And it's like, why don't you just

say we put out the app because the headphones are coming out? That would be fine. Or give people a choice. Don't update the app yet. Right. Yeah. Ship it as if you buy the headphones, here's the new version of our app. It's going to be rolled out to everybody before long. Like, that's, it's not a hard sequence of events to do. But instead, Sonos was like, oh, this doesn't have queue management, which is what everyone wants. Let's ship it anyway. So I don't actually, I have no problems with this app. I'm the only person in America who has no problems with this app. Because we don't use the queue. We use playlists. Our playlists are in Spotify and Apple Music. And so like, whatever. I just don't use the Sonos app.

Right. That's what I mean. Like Becky just uses Airplay. Yeah. For our Sonos. It's fine. It is a little bit faster. I know other people have wild problems. Like Casey Newton is like, I can't even set the volume on my speakers anymore. It's really bad if you have a local music collection that you care about a lot too, which is like, and Chris and I talked about this a couple weeks ago that like those are the core Sonos people and have been for two decades. And Sonos just continues to try to drive them away in very strange ways. Yeah.

The headphones look sick though. Because they're sick. Yeah. Right. This is the classic story. The company is chasing the bigger consumer market. where the money is and the growth is. And then you've got these

very passionate users who are like, my entire life is one button in an app from 2004. And we are the people on the Reddit. Yeah. Well, you know, like you,

there's a dynamic there that I'm, as a person who redesigned our website. I'm aware of the people who are mad. Yeah. They've released apps before concurrently. They had, they had the two versions of the last of them. No,

that was a disaster. It was horrible, but they had two. No, that's a disaster. It's all bad. So, now,

Patrick has been on the show a bunch of times. We've talked to him about a lot of things. Everything from spatial audio and, like, how they design speakers all the way to, like, antitrust. Like, he's been on the show. They have mismanaged, in particular, these apps and what the apps do and how the apps work. Like, the S1 to S2 transition disaster. The Sonos, like, we're going to trade in your old speakers ever. And then, like, we're going to brick the old ones and they undid it.

That was bad. Like, there's this thing that they're in particular not good at. Which is wild because they should get better at it. The magic of Sonos is how it works with all your stuff and it just talks to each other. It's supposed to be super smart and yet the app continues to be kind of dumb. Yeah. Again, I have not, because I don't use some of these features, like, what was it, timers and alarm clocks are broken in this app? And the idea that I would set my alarm clock using the Sonos app is just what?

But like if you are the person But a lot of people do. Yeah. Yeah. If you're the person who's alarm clock broke, like you are mad. Yeah. That's a problem. Like you should find a way to be like, okay, these core features, there's some of these

core features where people just like build their lives. Like alarm clocks or people build their lives around it. You have to respect it. And like in this case, I think Senna says they've gotten more and more consumer. They've sort of like gotten away from it. And they should just recalibrate that a little bit. That's that. I have like 9,000 son of speakers.

Like, I'm trapped in this ecosystem. Like, what are you going to do? It's fine. All right. I think that's it. That's it. David, do you have another one? Nope.

That's it. We're done. We got to wrap this thing. Spotify has a font. Spotify has a font. That's all, that's all the information I have for you. Yeah. They might,

Amazon might make you pay for Alexa once they add AI too. It's like that's kind of stuff. Yeah. The big thing is that I'm going to go try to call Scarlet Johansson now and see if she, She will voice Virges AI. Yeah. It's revenge.

Do you like AI calling Jost to call her? Yeah. I will say a friend of mine was like Google should just take this voice. They should just pay her whatever amount of money she wants now. Yeah. If there's like an arms race for celebrity AI voices, I would be, that would be very entertaining. All right, that's it. Also, my voice is available for cheaper than Scarlett Johansans in case you're wondering.

It's hard to reproduce. Is she the most expensive? Like, who do you, is it like, I feel like it's either like Scarlet, Johansson or Ryan Reynolds. This is a whole other hour of the verge cast we could do. No way. In terms of like, no, James Earl Jones. James Earl Jones, Mufasa and Darth Vader. It's important to everyone that I remind you that Alex Cranes is 66 years old. And if you've never heard of any of those words that she just said, don't worry. Name all know who that is. I mean, aren't there, there's like Amazon, hasn't Amazon set the market? I guess the rates are gone higher.

But this is a thing that exists. You can just buy other voices from Amazon, right? Yep. You can. All right, send us your notes with who you think the most expensive voice would be. I don't want to, I don't, we'll read, we'll read your ideas. Everyone's going to agree with me. It's David at theverge.com. All right, that's it. That's the Vergecast.

Rock and all. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Verge cast is a production of the Verge and box media podcast network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.