The Vergecast - Dots get up in Muse's business

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Is the key to turning around public opinion on AI Super Intelligence just to make it cuter? Nilay Patel, Jake Kastrenakes and David Imel talk about the latest adorable agents that want access to all your data, then discuss whether this week's White House AI Super Intelligence accord is worth the paper it's written on. Plus: Gadgets, gadgets, gadgets! We speculate on Apple's rumored October 13 announcement, drool over Huawei's camera for your cameraphone, and herald the return of physical buttons in the new Kindle cases. We wrap things up with the usual Brendan Carr is a Dummy and a lightning round full of Cybercabs, data centers, 'Old Reddit' and government chatbots. Vote for us in the Signal Awards! Vote Vergecast: Best Technology Podcast Vote Version History: Best History Podcast Vote Decoder: Best Business Podcast Further reading: OpenAI launches Dots, its Muse competitor OpenAI plans to bring Dots to consumers, too. Meta’s Muse AI sent a YouTuber’s address to a stranger Maybe don’t let Muse run your Facebook Marketplace account. Sam Altman says OpenAI won’t go public until its models are safe Google announces Gemini 4 and says it’s so capable that only ‘trusted cyber defenders’ can have it right now AI researchers put out videos saying superintelligence is ‘exactly as dangerous as it sounds’ Here’s how tech leaders will self-police AI safety under Trump’s deal Here’s what AI leaders are saying about Trump’s new safety plan Trump: “You’re going to see — data centers are going to be very popular.” Trump orders US government to call AI ‘Super Intelligence’ Huawei made a whole camera to attach to its latest phone Amazon is launching colorful new Kindles — and a case with physical page-turn buttons Apple’s ‘HomePad’ will reportedly launch on October 13th NBC News: FCC head says government-funded Trump ads are ‘normal’ and ‘don’t raise any red flags’ The People of Utah vs. Kevin O’Leary Tesla’s Cybercab robotaxi rollout: the biggest news and announcements The White House launched an AI chatbot for government-related questions. Reddit says it has to cut back access to ‘Old Reddit’ because of AI bots Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. 0:00 Welcome 00:52 Awards and Listener Voting 01:36 Week Ahead Preview 01:52 OpenAI Dots vs Meta Muse 06:09 Living as Tasks 19:47 Business Models and Privacy 23:41 Bot Traffic and Web Friction 27:48 Trump Superintelligence Accord 37:46 Gadget Segment Kickoff 38:26 Huawei Screw On Lens Camera 41:33 Why Phone Camera Hybrids Fail 44:09 Pricey Phone Lens Debate 45:31 Kindle Lineup Upgrades 48:49 Apple Smart Home Display Rumors 01:02:58 Brendan Carr is a Dummy 01:08:27 America Gov Chatbot 01:14:54 Old Reddit Bot Crackdown 01:19:30 Utah Data Center Blowup 01:25:17 Cybercab Ride Report 01:27:31 Wrap Up And Plugs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing increasingly is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, How to Mind Your Manners. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcast. Hello and welcome to broadcast. The flagship podcast of cute little guys who have all your data.

That's how I feel about Sam Altman. Ha! You weren't. That's not where you thought about fuzzy guys. I'm thinking about Sam Mark. David Mell is here. Hey, buddy. Hey, I'm still here.

You're still here. You know, every week I say we're going to keep you. And it's gotten more and more threatening over time. Yeah, I've gotten threats as well. Well, this is technically your last week with us. David Pierce is back next week. But it is true. We are going to find ways to keep you on the show.

I'm open to it. Let's go. That's a solemn promise. And by that, I mean, you can't leave the office. Oh, I've been here for weeks. Jake Hasdrakis is here as well. What's up, man? Hey, good to be here. The Davids are like particle and antiparticle.

They can't collide. We can't be on a show together, also it explodes. Yeah. Yep. There's a lot to talk about this week. We'll run it all down in one second. But first, I want to call it, we are nominated for some awards. The Signal Awards are happening.

Those are big podcast awards. the version is nominated for all of our shows. Decoder was nominated for Best Business Podcast, Virgin History for Best History Podcast. That's up against some heavyators, like actual history. We're like, what's a phone? We're like in the finals.

So I'm very excited about that. And then Verge cast, this podcast, nominated for Best Technology Podcast. Like so many awards, there's the formal judge voting, but there's also audience voting, listener voting. So we'll have all the links in the show notes

and the descriptions, click on those links and vote for us because we love winning. That's who we are. We just love winning. Can't you tell how deeply competitive and in need of validation we are? That's who we are. All right, Jake, what are we talking about this week? A ton to talk about this week. We're going to have a big gadget segment. There's new Kindles, ton of Apple rumors. We're going to have a sort of chaos lightning round. America has a chatbot now. I don't know if you saw this. America has an AI chatbot. Very good news. But first, we're going to start off with, I think, the big AI news of the week, which is it was Open AI's week. They did dots. It's their answer. to Muse. Dots is, it's same thing. It's got a cute little avatar. It's got a chat interface and it goes and does things for you. Except unlike Muse, which meta is just like, here, please take a muse, have as many muses as you want. Dots, you got to pay $100 a month minimum. And I think that the question

right out the gate is, is this a different product for a different set of people, right? Is this a business product? Or is open-Aid just not able to compete with meta's ability to just, you know, blanket the entire universe with compute because they have so much money? And I am curious where your head is at after seeing all of this. I'd say at a minimum, it being for pro subscribers and business plus subscribers only is kind of dragging it towards the business user case. But also when you sign up for Muse, it connects to Instagram. It connects to Facebook. It connects to all the things that everyday users use every single day. And notably, it gives you a giant list of prompts that you can ask it. Because I think people are faced with these things that are not really sure

what to do with it. And if you're on chat GPT and you're using that every day for work, it makes a little bit more sense to have like a personal agent that's going and doing work tasks for you, but Muse is not really a work task product. It's more of a like put things on Facebook message, Facebook marketplace for me, which I did because Eli told me to. And yeah, I did. And yeah, I did. and it did technically work, and it was very fast, and I listed like 30 products. I think I sold like an old backpack of mine. But once someone got to my apartment,

they said, how's your time with the verge going? And then I asked Mews to delete all my listings. Yeah. Was that before or after the person posted on threads that Mews had sent somebody to their house with a little while offer? It was the day before.

Oh, boy. It was the day before, and then I saw the writing on the wall. So, yeah, I think they're very different products. I'm still a little bit confused about what people are using this for outside of what they were already using OpenAI, like ChatchapD stuff for

because that was already doing autonomous tasks for them, like Codex and things like that. I want to know what people are going to use Dots for because it seems like Mews is very oriented around Meta's products. Dots is for launching your website while you're making dinner. That is what I learned from their launch video.

Open A's marketing for Dots is a little all over the place. They had that example. they had wedding planning in the mix, but then also like hardcore software engineering. And it was like, I can do everything. Work tasks. Whereas Muse is very much a consumer product.

We talked about it length last week. Like, meta is good at consumer products. They are definitely good at engaging you to do more on their platforms. Like, they have one skill in its engagement bait and they're really good at it. I feel nothing about letting Muse operate other meta products for me. So I have it watching my

Instagram and every single morning, it finds all the most interesting comments left on my Instagram posts and tells me to go reply to them. So I can be in confidence. And that means I just don't have to check it. And this makes me feel very much like a robot is telling me what to do every morning. Like I'm mad at it every morning. Like, you don't have to tell me what to do. But it is also true that I would never see or think to reply to the most interesting comments on my Instagram online. Yeah. Some things that have been interesting about Muse is that it's very proactive. So I hooked it up to my Google calendar as well, and I knew that I was going to this, like, media dinner party thing. And it also knew that I had to be home by a certain time.

So it told me, you should leave on a city bike because a city bike is faster than taking the subway. And if you want to get home on time, make sure you leave at 920. Do you want me to ping you when you need to leave? And I was like, okay, this kind of, I kind of understand this. This is kind of interesting. But the thing you're describing is all kind of work like. Yeah. Right. Like all of these things that are neat, even like, you know, use my Instagram for me. find I had it look for like AI accounts that I hadn't seen before because I want to expand the roster of people that I look at on Instagram talking about.

All that is work. It's just work. It's fun work. It's work that rhymes with fun, I guess. Work-tainment, whatever that is. Rise and grind. But it is it, I think this is the problem for consumer agents. And a lot of people since Muse was announced and launched have come to this conclusion.

Obviously, I call it software brain that to even understand what to do with an agent. you have to understand your life as a series of tasks. Trustee McMillan Cotton, who's a New York Times columnist, said a long thread on blue sky about how the problem with consumer agents is literally cultural. You have to understand yourself as a series of tasks in order to understand what an agent could do for you. And there's a cultural divide in America that will prevent some people from ever seeing that. I think that's fascinating, right? Maybe the thesis of the whole verge, maybe the thesis is the whole show is technology makes people think about themselves differently.

So here's a thing that's going to happen because meta does have the marketing dollars and the straight up dollars to give everybody a billion tokens and a little computer in the cloud. And then they can market it across every one of their surfaces. And maybe it's true that five years from now, everyone in America will just think of themselves as a series of tasks. The same way that the phone or the steam engine or whatever made you think about yourself differently. Yeah. And I don't think that dots is going out and telling you what you should be doing with dots. but the primary tab on Muse, the center tab is the ideas tab. Yeah.

And it's plugged in, when it's plugged into all your stuff, it says, I can do this for you, I can do this for you, I can open this past keeler, I can distill launch week into one type brief, I can hold your inbox at a clean baseline, I can finish this briefing reply for you.

It's just trying to get you to use it proactively so that you slowly understand what the capabilities of things, things are. I actually felt very similar about this product than I felt to chat, chat, JBT when it first launched. I looked at it and I was like, this is an infinite black box and I don't know what to do with it.

Everyone's like, it's game changing. It's going to change everything about the way you do work, blah, blah, blah. But when you look at infinite possibilities, there's sort of this anxiety where you just don't know where to start. And I feel like meta is doing a pretty good job of trying to help people understand what agents are even for in the first place. Yeah. I mean, again, this is their background as a consumer company. Yeah. They understand consumers. The defaults are important. And what you're describing is basically just a bunch of default agent tasks. The one that I got that was particularly good.

Again, the only personal data I've given it is my spam Gmail. Yeah. It's like, won't give it anything else. Again, I feel nothing about letting it operate my meta accounts because meta already has them. So what? But gave it my spam Gmail. And every couple days, it's like you're in another class action lawsuit. Do you want me to file for 50 bucks?

And I'm like, yeah, go ahead. Just like, I would never look for them. I would never fill out these PDFs. Like, go forth. And there was one moment where, you know, in order to fill out the forms, I had to tell it my phone number, which was the piece of information. And I was like, oh, I hate this. But it's 50 bucks.

Like, you have my phone number. Yeah. And that is fascinating to me. And I think the distinction I would draw from dots is obviously meta does not have as capable of a model. Right. Right. No one thinks that whatever's running Mews is powerful as GPC6 Astro, which is what powers Dots. But they have a better user interface for consumers.

And Dots, you know, again, it's very confused. All their ideas were on the margins for software engineers. But it's also true that they have the more powerful model. And that's why they're charging money for it. And they say they're going to bring into consumers one as soon as they'll to bring it to consumers with a cheaper model. but I just think it's like an interesting A-B test to say, do you want work agents like this with a really powerful model that can do

all of the things that Frontier model can do? Or do you want to be on Rails with a kind of dumber model, but it's a lot easier to use the thing. And, you know, the consumers in our price markets are different and one cost of a hundred bucks. Somewhere in the middle of that is Grockbot, right? Like Grock has this thing too,

and it works a lot like these products do. And somewhere is OpenClawe, if you want to roll your own. We should point out that OpenAIA hired Peter Sternberger who made OpenClaugh and then Meta beat them to the punch with the news, which is heavily inspired by OpenClaugh. I'm curious that the story of Open AI to me has always been one of wanting to be a consumer company and realizing they have to be an enterprise company.

So they launched with Chat ChbT, which was supposed to take Google, right? That was their ambition. They were going to replace Google. They were going to replace Google search. That's one of the most lucrative businesses in the whole world. They hired a bunch of people from meta, which is fascinating in this dynamic. They started doing ads in Chashabit, and then Anthropic did Claude code in particular, and the enterprise usage of Claude exploded.

There was that period of time when, like, every third Open AI executive would write a memo declaring a code red. Like they were unfocused. We got a shutdown store. Code red. We're focused on coding. And now they're with dots, which have the fuzzy avatars and it's key. and the branding feels very consumer, but it's a work product.

And I don't know if OpenA has decided which way it wants to go. And this is the story of every company, right? Like, they all want to be a consumer product. Consumer products are fun. They're very widely used. You're very, right, you're powerful if you're Mark Zuckerberg

and everyone in the world uses multiple of your products. But then they realize that the money is an enterprise because people actually pay you money and they actually have money that they're ready to spend. And I mean, this is what happened with Anthropic, right? They discovered that coding works.

There's a ton of money to pay for coding tools. And I think Open AI is in a similar position, right? They're burning through cash. So great. They're going to make business tools and sell them to business users, particularly in a world where Google, listen, you can't escape AI overviews. And so do you need chat GPT to replace that? It does a good job, but they're not going to completely

overthrow Google anymore. Google is there with the same product. So I think it's a very open question whether they can still crack the consumer market in the same way. Maybe they will eventually try to do that with this hardware product that they're allegedly working on

that will come out what's supposed to be next year, I think. But that still feels like a very big question whether anybody wants to carry around, you know, a dot in their pocket or whatever this will end up being. Yeah, open eye still feels a little bit confused on which end of the market they want to satisfy. Because like you said, they originally were like fastest growing consumer app of all time. They were just like everyone has touched chat GPT. There are over a billion users, that kind of thing. And then when Anthropic

came in and we're like, oh, we're actually making money and we're selling to Enterprise, that felt like what Astro was supposed to be for them. Was their big pivot to, okay, we're Enterprise now? Yes, regular people can use this, but the tasks that it's really for are like 3D modeling and like enterprise tasks. And then now meta comes in with a consumer product. When opening, I was trying for so long to make a consumer product. That's got to feel kind of bad because now you're on the back foot on both sides. It's true.

Just like one caveat. Anthropic loves to announce that it's making money. Sure. Using accounting rules that do not have anything to do with reality. Yeah, yeah. We did see their S-1 this week. Liz is going to write a whole piece about it. But Anthropics financials are fiction in like a real way.

Yeah. But it's true that they are generating some revenue. Open Eye is obviously generating some revenue. They are just burning money on training and all this other stuff that they're doing. Meta doesn't really have this problem. They are spending a lot of money. And if you look at their financials closely, they are making a huge bet here. But meta has a giant advertising business.

They can, to some extent, afford to light money on fire. It's very funny. Did you see Adam Messeri was on threads and he was announcing like Instagram plus the paid subscription? And he's like, this is how we can put out. features and afford to make them. And he got immediately community noted. It was like meta is one of the richest companies in the world. It can afford to do anything.

And he was like, he had to reply to his own community notes. Meta spent years trying to build a metaverse that people would use and then forgot about it. $10 billion. Yeah. But like meta, that can burn money. And so there's a part of this where medic can burn money. They are not running a frontier model.

So it must be cheaper to do inference. And then they have this massive distribution environment where they don't have to buy advertising. Like, you know, they announced dots by buying ads on meta platforms. This is, this is just a huge advantage for meta that they can just layer it everywhere. Every time I open up Instagram, there are muse ads. Yeah. This doesn't make any, like these products have nothing to do with each other. Yeah, in Instagram, you can directly DM a reel or something to your muse agent. So they just, they have it all over the, like, the surfaces are everywhere. They're just trying to get, it feels exactly the same to how they bootstrap threads.

Yeah. Like, they're just putting it everywhere in the apps that you're already using. And I will just call this out one more time. People still think Threads is a flop. Even though Threads launch is some of the most interesting text, social media features of any platform all the time, people still think it's a flaw. And meta's distribution advantage often can't overcome its coolness deficit. Yeah. Like, that's a real problem.

I'm very, we're obviously in the age of consumer agents or consumer-ish agents. That's what all the fluffy, cute branding is for. Yeah. The idea that there will one day be an opening out hardware device, that there will come one day a muse device. We have a headline that's like the Tomogacchis are here, basically. The fascinating thing is someone asked Adam Sary whether the muse charm would have Instagram, and he said no. And this to me is, but we've talked about it so many times, you can have this other device. But if it doesn't in particular have Instagram, you will have your phone.

Yeah. Then what? It feels like meta is kind of afraid of just rebuilding the phone again, though, right? Like, if you have a dedicated device for a very specific thing and you're just like, yeah, wait, we should have Instagram. And maybe we should add texting. And maybe we should have texting. Yeah. That's just a phone.

It's a widescreen iPod with touch controls. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this, to me, this is the upcoming problem. Obviously, we are weeks away from the iPhone duo coming out. All of these devices are going to exist in that context. where you can just open the Muse app on your phone. And you can use it that way and it's perfectly great. Or they're going to ask you to buy another device for some reason.

And I think initially that reason is just, do you like this? Is this anything to quote David Pierce? But that is the big bet on the future of all these devices. That is the Rabbit R1. What's the humane pin? There was a class of these devices once upon a time that did not. have the agenic software capabilities to justify existing. Now they might, right? All these things are open claw in one way or another. You can just do it again. Another company can do it again.

I can't wait for the weird Lenovo CES announcement of an open claw device. Like all that stuff is coming for us. The question is, is any of it going to overcome a phone? Because we're about to see just dozens of agent software platform launches. Like, I'm starting to get them in my invite. almost every day now. Well, this is my question to you. Like, would you use a dedicated AI agent device or just use it on your phone? I, you know where I've gotten to? I've been thinking a lot about the duo. What am I going to? I'm going to buy duo. It's obvious because I'm the sort of person who reads a lot of PDFs in the back of Ubers. And this is how boring my life is and it can justify the purchase of a bigger phone. I don't want to carry that around all the time. And I think that's why Apple

introduced handoff so that you can have a smaller but still competent phone most of the time. And I've just been thinking, would I use that handoff for an even smaller thing, right? Like a, like a muse charm. Like, you take my cell account. I'm going to leave the house with this. And if I need to send a text message, I can do it via voice. But then it's like the long tail of apps starts to show up. Will it be able to actually call an Uber?

We don't know yet, right? Like that has to be developed. If I need a Google map, is the meta muse charm going to have Google Maps? or is Matt I going to strike a deal with like here maps like a third tier car OEM? Yeah. All that needs to come into focus. So much of the argument for these also seems to be like,

okay, you know, it's lower touch, right? You can leave the heavy phone and all the apps and the notifications and distractions and distractions to the side. You'll just have your little pin. But now it's like, okay, and there's a cute little dancing avatar on it. And also it can't do all these things. And so you have to pull it out. and give it very explicit instructions

for how to do all this stuff and it's going to take more time to do all these phone tasks. It gets very hard to see where the space is that you're gaining time from these when, man, Mews has a great presence on my phone. That thing has sent me more notifications

in the past week. Any other app. And you know what's annoying? They're not even bad. Most of the time, it's stuff like David mentioned where it's like, hey, by the way, this person added

a meeting to your calendar and they moved it around and it overlaps with this other thing and I'm like I wasn't looking at my calendar like yeah but you let news look at your calendar

uh Mark Zaggarberg's in your calendar right now I just listen this to me the whole argument for dots is it costs money right and so if I'm paying the money I can be demanding his consumer and

probably they will understand they should not do horrible privacy violating things now does open eye violate the privacy of like dozens of British mathematicians every week? For some reason, that's the thing they decided to start doing. And they're like stealing the answers to the test. That's a whole problem. Can you trust any of these companies? I don't know. I do know that Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has announced that the business model for Muse is taking a cut of transactions,

which I think it was Casey who first said this. That implies that they will soon be a growth team at meta whose job it is to increase the volume of transactions. Just like there's a growth team at Apple whose job it is to increase the number of subscriptions apps in app purchases and transactions. You know what this product looks like when that team gets its hand on it, right? It's going to go from helpful, proactive messages about your calendar to, hey, we see you're getting home late. Do you want me to order you some food? Right? Like, they're going to start being like, would you like me to spend money? I can save you a couple bucks. I know you're about to, or, you're about to order a new toothbrush. Like, you can just see where it's going. And I, boy, do I not want to

participate in that. And I think that's going to be the real danger of the consumer agent is the only business model that can work is advertising. And then it's just like, not only do you have a personal shopper, you have a personal shopper who's trying to get you to a shop is Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. Wow, that's deep. That's a bar. I don't like this. Yeah. They are also inadvertently declaring war on Amazon by doing this, right? Because it's a lot. Yeah. Because it's, it's a bar. I don't like, I don't like, I don't like this. Yeah. I'm If Amazon's blocking it and they want you to make as many transactions as possible, they're going to have to figure out ways for it to be interesting enough for you to want to buy the product that you're willing to wait two weeks for instead of two days.

And I feel like that's a big barrier that they're going to have to surpass. Obviously they already have Instagram shopping and they're probably going to be pushing you all these like t-shirts and whatever that are drop shipped. But at the same time, if you're going to be buying regular commerce from them that you do on an an everyday basis, which it seems like they're kind of pushing towards. They're going to have to figure out a way to get around Amazon for that. Or they're just going to send everybody to Walmart. Like some other giant,

e-commerce platform is going to take that bet, right? Can we pull two points of market share away from Amazon because of news? And if, you know, meta can offer Amazon some additional volume, which is hard at Amazon scale, but that's the argument they're going to make. Like, these are going to become weird backroom deals. and then your little butler will be corrupt. Like the ultimate promise of this business model is, do you want a corrupt Butler?

Yeah. And there's a part of me, it's like, yes? Like, maybe a lot of people want a slightly corrupt Butler? Imagine you had a Butler at home, and they got a cut of every sale they made. So they were constantly prompting you like, hey, would you like lunch? You can get it from Chipotle, $2.99.

I do feel like there are, Someone tell us, there's got to be a history of like under the table, Butler in jail stories. You know, like Butler's like double dipping under the table. I think this is going to be one of the weirder aspects of agents. It's just what is that relationship like when someone, like everyone knows exactly how search got adulterated and they don't like it. Everyone knows exactly how the scroll on Instagram got adulterated with algorithmic boosting and all this stuff. David, I think you and I were talking about TikTok, which just feels like a nonstop flung. of shopping channels now.

Yeah. None of that feels good. Corey Doctor calls it inshittification. Like there's a word for it. Like pre-inshitifying the agent by being like, we're announcing the business model as a kind of transactions is like fascinating to me. The other thing is on the flip side, I'm very curious to see what happens to a bunch of like form-filling bureaucracy once agents are at scale.

I think the day after a muse launched, everybody noticed that everyone hit CAPTCHAs all over the internet because Muse agents were just doing stuff all over the place and like Cloudfire freaked out because there was just suddenly an influx of this happening. Like I, I identified a lot of bicycles on city streets that day just to go about my way on the internet. But it's, it is true that Muse is in my email, in the spam email, finding class action forms and filling them out. And I know that the way that those amounts are calculated is against an imperfect take rate. So they know, only 10% of people are going to fill out the form, the lawyers get whatever, and this is that.

And now it's like, well, if everybody has a little corrupt butler, collecting 50 bucks automatically the second the email shows up, like the back end of that is going to get really complicated. Right. Right. If everybody can call Verizon to renegotiate their cell service, which is a number one muse use case that people have been posting about, eventually Verizon's just going to put an agent on the other side of that.

Right? And then your agents are going to argue and it's going to hang up on you. Yeah, Matt is going to negotiate a deal with Verizon, you know, cancellation raids. Like, you're going to get the muse deal. I don't like this. It's going to be bad. Yeah. Actually, we just had Matthew Prince, who's a CEO of Cloudflare on Decoder,

and his prediction is bot traffic will, like, far surpass human traffic. We have that clip. Let's run it. In May, team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out with the giant caveat that I've brought in wrong so far in every prediction that I've made on this. But five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online. Not because human traffic is going to decline.

We think it'll stay kind of around the same. But because we're just seeing such an explosion in all of this, the rest of the traffic. That's bananas to me. You have to re-architect the internet for a thousand X increase in traffic while still making a human internet that people want to use. And like, he said that to me and then like, Muse filled out a class action settlement for me. And I was like, oh, I get it. I get what he's saying.

Like that is traffic that would have never existed, but for my little, my silly little agent. Right. And we're currently nestled in this little space where that can happen without the class actions completely changing the way that they operate. Okay. That's going to come. I think the second agents are anywhere close to being,

I wouldn't even say ubiquitous, but common. Yeah. Just a thing people do. do, all of the dynamics of anything that sort of are based around friction occurring will change. Because the assumption is going to be that there's no friction at all. Right. Well, this reminds me, I was at this internet dinner the other night with a bunch of like internet thinker people. I think you actually had a name card there. I was in Austin. But they asked this icebreaker question for everyone to talk about. And the question was like, what was your favorite era of the

internet that you could freeze frame and just have it be forever? And some of the, one answered, right now is my favorite era because we have this amazing new technology that hasn't been inshidified yet. And the end of that statement says where we're going and we're going there very quickly, right? Like, everyone's very excited about these agents on the web, but then within probably six months, the amount of bot traffic is just going to make everything unusable. Yeah. And like without question, that's actually the funniest thing. That was theoretical, I think until these past few weeks when meta was like

everyone gets an agent and open eyes an outstance agent, I'm confident that we'll see one from Google and from Anthropic and everybody else soon. And then yeah, the dream is everyone will have a little automated agent going off autonomously and doing things. And then somewhere in the background is the other big news of the week

which is can we trust them and will they kill us all? Right. Yeah. And like the answer is Prinky promise they won't, I guess. Jake, walk us through this one. Yeah. So we've spent a a bunch of time with this question of can we trust Zuck and Sam Altman and that leads us to this Trump accord

that happened this week, which first off we're making a huge mistake this entire podcast. It's no longer called AI. It's now SI, Super Intelligence, which Trump says is a cooler word. I believe that is the reason. So the entire government now has to call it super intelligence.

But yeah, he gathered you know, all the big tech leaders, they had a great dinner together They schmooze, they posed for photos. And then a smaller group of them went on and they signed this, this, believe they called it a moral compact, which is to say it is non-binding

where the major AI companies all agreed to, you know, have some safety protocols. And then they did a little press conference and they all came out and said, this is really amazing we're going to do such a good job at one point reporters ask for

Anthropics Dario Amade to come out and they're like hey what do you think about this as the guy who's most concerned about all of this and Trump kind of like

pulls him aside meanwhile and is like kind of gives him a don't do much here say the right thing Dario so in lieu of

laws I don't know Nelai in lieu Do you get the impression that anything happened meaningful this week? Let me just read the four principles to you. Can I just read them to you? Yes, please.

I'll just read the first sentence of each of these four things that these companies agree to. They will implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of models during training and deployment around areas like cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical threats, and ensure models do you want to hack or access technical systems in unintended ways? Good. But should you be doing that anyway? Two, they will empower an internal team to ensure all of those controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended and that any issues are remediated. Fixed. Three, they will partner with an independent external auditor or evaluator to carry out independent assessments of whether those controls, monitoring, detections are operating as intended. And then three, this is the big oversight one.

You ready for this one? They will designate an independent committee of the board of directors, their own board of directors, to oversee and receive reports from those teams and the internal external external, auditors and evaluators, as well as to ensure any issues are identified. So if you're the, you're allowed, you have to fix your stuff and the teams, the teams that you pay money to have to be able to see it. And then you should have external auditors and they will report to your own board of directors. To make sure you fix it. To make sure you yourself. And I'm just going to guarantee you that is how all of these companies are already working, except for maybe Elon, except for maybe SpaceX AI, which.

Fine. But like, is he going to do it? Like, I don't know. This is nothing, right? They all already have safety teams. They all already pay third-party evaluators. In fact, it turns out most of these like AI going rogue hacks, our reporter Robert Hart had a fantastic story about this. Most of them trace back to one like other company. Yeah, one independent company. One independent testing firm that just like let this stuff go rogue. They're already doing these things. Right. The problem is they're not doing them well or well enough. And there's no penalty for getting in trouble. This is a real problem. And none of this addresses that.

Right. You know, Dario's big pacing the frontier thing is like, we need to, on some level, slow down. And you have other folks like Jensen and Zuck who are like, absolutely not. We can't slow down for a second. I don't quite understand what's in that for Zuck, given that he is behind. But that mindset is clearly won out. Trump is also extremely bullish. He doesn't want to slow down at all because he sees it as a race to be won.

He sees that the U.S. currently is winning. And he is not, I mean, he doesn't trust Dario. That's, that's for sure. Did you see how he introduced Sundar? Oh, my God. So there's the ones he knows. Oh, my God. So he's like Jocelyn Zuckerberg.

He's like pushing Jensen to the front. He's like, what a handsome bro. And then he gets to Sundar and he goes, nobody knows who the hell these execs are, this guy's a monster, nobody knows him. It's like,

that's a C. Alvin Google, man. Dude. A lot of people know who he is. Poor guy. There's that. Like, there's the theater of it

and the Trump of it. And, you know, there's, we ran this clip on the site. You know, they're all sitting around their last supper table doing their signing.

And Trump is going on and on about how people will come to love data centers. much like an arranged marriage. Like you're going to love, you're going to love each other. And they all just have a thousand yards stairs in their faces. But this is what they could get to is this agreement on safety, which is truly effectively nothing.

The idea that they all will be required to have outside monitors is new, but they were all doing it anyway. And they're still not requiring. Trump referred to it as morally binding. Let me tell you how morally binding works. Yeah. To these people, especially. That's just not a choice.

So that's the like, you know, the danger that the AI is going to wake up and operate a robot arm to make a novel virus and then like stab us all with it. That's out there. The idea that the agents will go rogue and people will grant them security permissions that reveal their address to Facebook market place buyers is like happening today. Right. And the idea that the models are unaligned and they will deceive you and lie and get what they want. I've been telling Mews to not proactively read my email almost every day. I'm like, I've set up alerts for these two things. Do not tell me I have a flight coming up.

I know I have a flight coming up. Stop reading my email, getting excited because someone at META decided flight trackers were engagement bait and like turn this off, right? Like turn off this thing that flags. Oh, you see a flight receipt. I'm going to start pinging you to let you know I'm here. And every time I say it's like the lot of this is hard coded. I can't do it.

Now that's just hallucinations because I don't really. know how the agent is actually thinking out what it's doing. But like, that's the problem here, right? Is that the products and the models are not necessarily aligned. We don't know if alignment is even going to work, like all the way to the finish line, the way we need to. We've got stories about that coming on the site. It's not all the way down the line. It's going to make an atom bomb and kill us all. Like, there's something in the middle that these companies are kind of just like racing forward to do. And these consumer agents are, we're already seeing the glimmers of Oh, you don't even know what kind of permission you're giving the agent.

Yeah. And then for some reason, David, you're having marketplace sellers come to your house anyway. Yeah. You're supposed to go to, like, the police station. But willingly. To do a marketplace trade? Yeah, you're not supposed to have people come to your house. Really?

Yeah. I guess I'm supposed to go to a coffee shop. But it's my brother-in-law who's always like, I go to the police station. I'm like, that's crazy. I would not meet someone there. They live in Chicago. So he's like, I go to the fucking CPD. Yeah.

Which is good. Like, yeah. I'm always picking like a public park. Maybe this one's a little on me then. A little bit. Muse is not to fall here. I'm dying to know how people are using Muse. If you're out there or using OpenCla or any of these other agents,

again, our thesis for a long time has been there are not great consumer AI products. Muse feels like the first thing that could be, at least in my estimation. Yeah. I'm dying to know how people feel about that. I think we're putting it to the test here. All right, we've got to take a break. We're back. We've got a lot of gadgets to talk about.

See on the other side. So like any good millennial, I have a love-hate relationship with Gen Z. It's the phenomenon rattling millennials. They just look at you. They want something bigger themselves. Lifestyles are priority. Motivation is being inspired. But regardless of how you feel about Gen Z, it's undeniable that they're changing national

politics. Generation Z is increasingly showing less loyalty to traditional political parties. Many now more likely to identify as independent. So what is going on with the kids? I think the biggest misconception about Gen Z's politics right now is that all of a sudden they're all socialist. That is just not the case. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They are embracing candidates who are offering new, bold ideas in the absence of those ideas from establishment Democrats.

This week on America, actually, Gen Z researcher, Rachel Jamfaza joins us to separate Gen Z fact versus fiction. It's not rocket science. And this is, you know, I keep saying, like, young voters aren't that complicated after all. It's pretty simple. Catch us every Saturday on. YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S.

gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats, according to consumer advocate.org. You get paid back up to 90% of vet bills at any vet in the U.S. in Canada, with claims paid back in as little as two days. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote.

That's fetchpet.com slash save. AI panic is everywhere. We do not want a data center in this county. AI models are becoming superhuman in their ability to break in and out of computer systems. Flipped amos, bro. I hate those things. But where is that panic really coming from? According to a poll from the New York Times and Sienna, less than 1% of voters listed artificial intelligence or data centers

as their top priority in this year's midterms. I'm an old school person. I don't care about AI. He's saying that doesn't register for you. And sometimes I wonder, do they care about AI in so-called real America? What people in my district are saying is we think the risks outweigh the benefits. This week on America, actually, I'm talking to Michigan congressional candidate Will Lawrence on why he shaped his entire campaign,

around confronting the AI revolution. Really, it's about control, I think above all. Who decides? Because people feel like they just are not really given any say-so in the whole matter. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're back. We've got a ton of gadgets to mention this week. That was a lot of dots.

Yeah, I think to answer your question on whether dots is significantly different from Muse, you mentioned dots and then we talked about Muse for like 15 minutes. So I think they're probably different products. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's also hard to get access to dots right at the second. That's fair enough. That's fair enough. And it's also worth noting that OpenA I did say there would be a consumer version of dots.

Yeah. Eventually. For all the people who are paying for those $500 a month chat GPT subscriptions. Yeah. You know, they're having a great time right now. Yeah. All right. Big week for gadgets.

I think, David, you've got a really delightful one to start off with. Sure. Okay. Huawei has made a lens that is a camera that goes. on your phone. So we did a reader call in answering your questions episode that went live yesterday. And one of the questions was, if all of these Android manufacturers are so good at making smartphones, why don't they just make cameras?

They've got all the components for it. They're all off the shelf, et cetera. Now that's happened. I think we've seen this happen in different capacities over the years. But this Huawei one is really crazy. It is a large 24 to 240 millimeter lens. Wait, 24 to 240? It's insane range.

Insane range. That's bonkers. And that's like optical zoom, which is insane. It goes on the screw mount of two of Huawei's phones. So it's a whole separate lens that just mounts directly on. Sure, the phones have screw mounts on the back? Two of their phones do. It's like two very specific, like signature edition Huawei phones have screw mounts around

the camera ring. But there's not like a mirror. No. It's just a threaded around the camera bump. Because the lens itself has its own sensor. Oh, sure. So that's what you mean by it's a camera. It's a camera inside of a lens.

And the interface is your phone. So this is pretty insane. It's 24 to 240 millimeter aperture from F2 to F4.5, which is really not that bad for that big of a range. It uses a 50 megapixel 1.0 type RYYYYB sensor inside of the lens. It's crazy. And it's like it's not,

it's smaller than a regular camera zoom lens, especially one of this range. It's clearly not small in general. You're going to have to put this in a bag. You know, it's going to amount to your phone. But this idea, I think, is very, very cool. I love the idea of just carrying a lens and not carrying a whole separate camera body,

slapping into the back of my phone and having a great interface. I think that's amazing. So just needed to call that out. Companies have been trying this. I feel like there was an absence of this for a while, right? Like, rewind like a decade ago, there was like the galaxy camera or whatever, which was just like, it was a bad Samsung phone. It was a bad Samsung phone. Like a really bad Samsung phone with a camera attached to it.

And for mysterious reasons that didn't work out. And now we're in this like new renaissance of smartphone companies trying bizarre things of putting like screw. on enormous zoom lenses on the back of their phones. And like trying to like one up each other when it comes to the cameras. It is, it is not totally clear to me who the audience is for these. Because like, as David Amel. It's so committed to smartphone photography. He's like, this is a good idea.

I was going to say. And I'm like, wouldn't I just carry around like a super zoom? Yeah, but then you don't, you have to carry around a camera too. But this is the size of it. But you always care? I don't know. It's cooler to have it directly on your phone. It's so big.

Yeah, I don't know. Zice tried this with the Zyce ZX-1. They made a dedicated camera that was also an Android phone and you had lightroom on it and it was really laggy and terrible. Yeah, there are so many versions of this. There's so many versions of this.

My favorite, for there was a minute when it was going the other way when people would sell basically little cameras that would plug into an iPhone. So I had one, I mean, this thing was a disaster. It was basically an RX100 sensor, like a first generation Sony RX100 sensor

that was a lightning dongle. Okay. It's like, none of this is a good idea. And I will never forget the sort of arc of this product. I took it to the bar, and my friend, who is a photographer, was like, what's that? And I said what it was.

And he got all excited. And he took my phone and he plugged in this little, like, RX100 lightning dongle. And he took one photo, and he went, looks bad. And then he just handed off. Because like the app couldn't do the thing that the RX100 was doing in hardware. The sensor was like, all these products sort of like end up in this weird middle ground where usually the cameras that are attached to lenses like this are extremely optimized.

Yeah. To make photos. Yeah. And smartphones are optimized to make a different thing. I haven't used, you know, the, the Huawei cameras in particular are like off. They're headed off in their own direction. But I'm very curious to be like, okay, it's a little smartphone camera, but the interface is a camera. What does the processing look like?

Does it generate raws? Like all that is just like up for grabs. And then the lenses are also expensive on their own, right? Like Opo and Vivo have been making dedicated lenses that just mount to their smartphones for a couple of years now. And those are quite good. Those are usually like telephoto lenses that have really nice class in them. But they only work with like one model of phone. And so you have to be dedicated to using that exact phone.

And these are companies, by the way, that release like eight skews of their flagship phone every single year. So it's kind of a big ask to have you buy a dedicated lens for that. This Huawei one, if it's like a screw mount that they're dedicated to using for like a long period of time, then sure. But we all saw how that went with the Moto Z and every other type of phone that has had like proprietary detachable components. Usually it lasts about two generations and then they throw it away. I've sort of been assuming that all of these weird photography, accessories, like, they might not even be selling them for more than a few weeks. Like, these look like wild ideas that they somehow managed to ship.

And I do not trust that they are committed to any of this. Right. Is this here to generate Vergecast conversation? I mean, only it's, what's $895? I mean, it's for the lens? Yeah. Jesus, that's a lot of money, dude. That's like, that's more expensive than most of these people's phones.

It's like, yeah, I'm out here like, let's do it. Let's go. It's more expensive than most lenses, but it does have a sensor inside of it. Can you use it without the phone because it has a sensor inside? Can you just like walk around? Just present. Like a monocular style. I highly doubt this.

I think that would be cool. Yeah, I just have no idea what you're looking at. That'd be nice. I mean, for 8.95 dollars, you can get a real camera with a one-in-sensor. Not with that zoom range. Maybe not with a 24-2-40. Yeah. Yeah, true.

How much is just like a eMAT 24 240 cast? We're just Googling. I don't even notice that exists. This segment is now camera shopping with David New Life. I should tell my agent to go, goodbye. Yeah. Hey, Muse. All right, it's Sony 2424, 240, which is not as bright.

It's only F35 to 63. Yeah. But bigger sensor, so it's probably about equivalent. Is $1,300. $1,300. You can get one used for about $600. Okay. Put it on your phone.

Right. Let's go. Directly on your phone. Someone's got, there's got to be a phone to email it around the world. All right. Jake, what do you got? Yeah. It's New Kindle, New Kindle week.

We've got a whole suite of new Kindles from Amazon. And they look a lot nicer this year. Like, genuinely, it's like some big upgrades. So the Kindle, the paper white, the color soft, new models for all of them. And they have tiered the heck out of this thing. Like, my God, the upgrade slope on these is just like to perfection. So you've got the base Kindle, which comes in a beautiful, new, like, purple color. There's also now an aluminum version of the base model, even nicer, also an upgrade.

Has more storage, great. There's a new paper white. Paper white comes in plastic or upgrade to aluminum signature edition. If you get the signature edition, you can also add on a case, $80, that has page turn buttons, physical page. Turn buttons. That rules. But that only works for the signature edition? It only works with the signature edition.

No. But this is the thing. You're like, oh, I should get a Kindle. It's so cheap. What is it? Like $150? And then by the end of this, you're like, I'm spending $350 to get the signature edition with the page turn buttons. And in the nice, like, green color.

Yeah. Listen, Panos knows what he's doing. He knows what he's doing. He's working his magic over there. I, this is, the Kindle hardware, as much as this is built around, like, you can see exactly what they were thinking trying to get you to upgrade. Even the base model, I think, looks better than it ever has. The colors are fun.

The screen is now flush. There's no more of that, like, inset thing. It seems very good. It seems like a very good year for the Kindles. It's a millimeter thinner. Are either of you big Kindle people? I'm in the sense that I have many. Becky and Max are both Kindle people.

And so there are the But are they cheapest possible Kindle person or? Becky down, she had an oasis and she went back to a paperwhite. She preferred the paperwhite because it's just like a more rugged, tossable. And the oasis battery life sucked. Yeah. And then Max has like whatever garbage kindle that I like pulled out of a closet for a plane ride that she now is very fond of it. It has Amazon Kindle Kids library or whatever that thing is, which is just full of the worst.

the worst pep. Like, it's not good. But she likes to read, so we're just like letting her do it. I've been poisoned by David Pierce to buy a number of e-readers that I barely use. But I do like that there's a little arms race

going on right now between XTE Inc and, what is it, books? Yeah. They're like racing to create the ultimate microe reader and they're releasing like three every three months. So that's more fun for me than,

you know, Kindle, even though most people have the Kindle. This is another agent problem. because people have set up agents to take Kindle books, reformat them, and send them to the books devices or the XE-A-Nke devices, but then Amazon blocked muse. So the agent that you would most easily do this with is not blocked. Well, I guess we have to get $300 a month opening ice at questions.

I have no choice but to buy a Mac Mini, give it full access to my network. OpenClaugh. That's what this is for. That's all open claw in the end. Yeah. This is very good. One more big gadget we should talk about. There's rumors this week that Apple won't announce something that everyone keeps calling the homepad on October 13th.

I really do not want them to call this the home pad. But whatever Apple's next smart home device, the rumors are it's October 13th, smart display. Some Mark German back and forth about what the camera is actually going to do on it. But the big feature that he's been reporting is it will recognize the people walking up to it. and then personalize interface. And then obviously, this is, I think a theme of this episode,

it might be just a theme of our lives now, is Apple believes Siri AI is now capable enough to be the kind of assistance that you would put in your house and then like do things for you. Just as Meta believes me is the kind of assistant that is capable of enough to support new hardware. And Open AI believes that Dots is the kind of assistant capable to have to support Johnny I of hardware.

Everyone is trying to make new hardware around their little AI thing. Only I don't, think anyone thinks Siri AI is as capable of some use or dots. Like, what's it going to do? Well, something in your house that mostly just has to control your smart home equipment is probably an easier task. This is the hardest task of all. Like, why are Gen 2e and I friends? It's because we have trauma bonded over our smart homes. Like, it's really, really hard to get that right. But it is a market that's been like filled already by Google and Amazon, you know. No, when I say it's really hard to get that right, I mean, Jen and I have made like hours long episodes of

this show being like, boy, this is hard and it doesn't work as well. It's like a year of Amazon Alexa Plus, right? And if you ask Jen, I think she would tell you it's not very good. Whatever is happening with Gemini and Google Home is just a straightforward mess. And the problem is, yes, you might have a bunch of stuff in HomeKit, but then you've got one weird set of devices that isn't in HomeKit. And then maybe you're me and you've got a little, I'm like looking at it. It's on the floor over there. my little raspberry pie, like baby rack that is bridging a bunch of stuff through Homebridge into HomeKit so my wife can use it on our phone. But sometimes it fails and nobody knows why and I have to restart my Tomogachi. Like an AI assistant is either going to solve that problem

by just living on your network and being like, I'm going to fix stuff or it's going to fail in like the most brittle ways because it can't actually see what's going on. Yeah. I'm very curious to see what Apple does here. It feels very unusual for Apple to release something. I think this risky, right? This product is going to be built on two large platforms that are kind of untested, right? There is Siri AI, which has a world of its own challenges. And then there's an entire network of third-party smart home products that may or may not be using the APIs correctly,

that may or may not connect to everything else in your life. the way that they are supposed to. And making all of that work is very difficult. And so Apple offering a product that is presumably meant to use the still being developed Siri AI to control this thing that is kind of hard to wrangle on the best of days. Yeah. If it can't do that, like, what is this box doing? Well, so here's the German report says it will look a little like an Apple.

iMacG4, which I love, so now I've already bought it. Display will tilt. There'll be a wall-mounted version with a thinner base underneath for mics and speakers. And then there will be a messages app, smart home control, video calls, music playback, photos, and intercom style calls with voice and facial recognition to identify users. This is a lot, first of all.

But the idea that it's going to do fast user switching as people walk up to it and like be in your FaceTime account, so you are the person making FaceTime calls, not someone else, implies that Apple has fast user switching anywhere in its ecosystem. Right. Like if you ever tried to do this on a Mac,

you're like, what are you doing? Like, if you ever even just tried to log into Apple Music on another device, it's like, hold on. Yeah. And it's theoretically doing that instantaneously through just your face ID, I suppose. If you've ever flipped users on an Apple TV, which admittedly at this point has like a steam engine for a processor.

But if you've ever tried to do that, it's not swift. And so I'm very curious, like the idea that it's going to have enough processing at a system level to do user identification and then enough memory to keep a bunch of user data persistent and not have to swap when memory and storage fast enough to do that are both at all-time premiums. Many questions about what this product is and how that promise in particular will come to. true. Yeah. I'm not saying, I'm not saying they can't be solved. They do not exist in Apple's ecosystem right now. I mean, there is a real, like, high-end tier to smart home, right? It would not be entirely unreasonable for them to make this a premium product, right? Throw an A-20 processor in there, put in 120 gigabytes of RAM. Like, I think there's people who'd pay for that. Maybe, yeah,

it doesn't need to be like that, quite that high end. But, you know, I think when we think of the smart home. Like, there is such just like a tranche of like junk you can buy on Amazon. But a lot of it does start and that high end tier. And like surely that's where Apple is thinking. Oh, I don't know. I mean, the reason you would, the reason you'd make matter happen to the extent that it has happened is to solve the problem of the junk. Right? You're like, there's one standard. We're all going to use it. And so a lot of the junk is now matter. But matter has many, many, many problems of it. Well, we'll see. I'm dying to know. You know, and most people don't have a bunch of Lutron switches in their house. They might have like one or two like plug-in switches for the

Christmas lights. So is this going to actually do all those things? Is it going to talk to Sonos? Like every everything in a smart home is an edge case. Like definitionally, everyone's house is different. The set of devices you have are different. You've got a Tys and TV in one room, an LG GTV angrily listening for you in another room. Like literally everything about a smart home is just a different edge case because every single, every person's house is different. And Apple is not great at that, right? They're like, we will impose our will on you. I'm dying to know.

I'm so excited for this product unless they call it the home pad because then I won't have one in my home. It feels pretty crazy that we're already getting this product when the duo still isn't even out yet. And then we're supposed to get potentially a MacBook Ultra like in November. or something. We all were speculating about what John Turtus was going to do to this company. It seems like he's speed running releases in the first few months. There's like org chart news with Ternis, right? He's getting rid of his middle managers and hardware engineering to go faster. And that's great. Sure, go faster. It's just funny to me because he ran hardware engineering. Yeah. It's like, you could have done this at any time. Was Tim Cook like, no, I have strong opinions

about the structure of the hardware engineering group. But I suspect they were saving some sweeping changes for him to be CEO. Yeah. But all these products came up in the cook era. They were all developed in the cook era. Yeah. And the conventional wisdom is Siri wasn't ready for this product in particular. You could not have released a Home Hub with last year's version of Siri.

So you needed to wait until this one. And then this year's version of Siri is not, it is not agentic in the way that Muse or dots or whatever comes out from Google will be. Yeah. Nila, have you used Gemini around your home? Yeah. Because, like, because Siri is based on Gemini and having used Gemini or on the home, I don't know if I'd say it's ready. Like at any, like, right now an Apple PR person is like running to your home to tell you that Siri was distilled from Gemini. It is not based on Gemini.

It has no relationship to Geminii. With great apologies. It runs in Apple's private cloud compute, Jake. And then another Google person is going to run to your home and remind you that the T and chat, GPD studies for Transformer, which is invested at Google. Like, all these companies are just, they're all, they're all just very. insistent on the technical details here. Gemini for Home is actually, it is a confusing product because it is built on top of Google Assistant, which is still obviously there. So if you have a hub, I've got one here, and you talk to it, Gemini does the command, and then it figures out

what you want, and then it issues a command to Google Assistant, and sometimes that breaks. Sometimes Google Assistant just starts talking to you, like a ghost, like the zombie ghost of Google Assistant is like, I'm sorry, that doesn't work today. So, like, the way they architected it was, is weird and bad. So there's that problem. And this is the difference between is the model capable or is the product good? Right. Like, the model is undoubtedly capable to turn off, turn up lights on and off.

The product is architected in a way that is a clearly rush to market. And they could not deprecate all the Google Assistant edge cases. So it's just there lurking in the background. The weirder thing is in my car, we have a Cadillac EV, that has native Google. And they just totally replaced Google assistant with Gemini. So it's a different voice. It's the Gemini voices in my car,

but it's the Google assistant voices in my house. But they both think that they're Gemini. Very confusing. And when you ask Gemini in the car to do things, it tries to like do MCP stuff. It like puts up a window that's like connecting to Spotify, because you can see that it's trying to directly send Spotify command. all this is bad

but here's the best one before when I was Google Assistant the car the single best feature was as you're backing out of the driveway you could say close the garage door because it was connected in some way to the garage door and now Gemini is like that's a security risk and I'm like guy

dude I'm in the car like the garage door button is right there like I can see it like how is this a security risk but it's because they they undid the Google assistant connection where Google had thought that through. And now it's just Gemini being like, am I allowed to just like MCP?

I don't think so. Yeah. All the hard-coded stuff now is just logiced out. And the logic does not always work. It doesn't make any sense. So again, I'm very curious to how Apple deals with all this. Like this is just one of those things. By the way, I've asked GM very directly if Gemini in the car is going up to the cloud

and then connecting to my house and then issuing a garage door command to my garage door controller or if it's just pushing the button that exists in the car. And they're like, huh. And it's like, we're not sure. And I'm like, it should just push the button that's in the car, right? Like, it's all here. It's actually a virtual button in the car. I'm like, can you just do the like the virtual click? You don't have enough GPUs in your car to process that. That has to be done in the cloud. It does seem very much like the command is leaving my car going to the cloud, landing in my house, and being executed locally. That is so wild. And I'm like, you should. just push the button in the car.

Like that, that's not a security risk. I'm in the car. Oh, man. We'll see. Again, we once again started talking about Apple and we ended up talking about every other product. But the product is not yet. We're expecting to see it in a couple of weeks here.

And again, these are the questions. I'm dying to see how Apple solves them. Because every other company is going to try to solve them for ages. And in our case, we have Jen. We have like a secret weapon. Like, we have like the ultimate database of edge cases for smartphone. on our team. I'm very excited to see how she reacts to it.

All right. It's going to be a very interesting month for Apple. We've got a lot more to talk about. We're going to take a break. We're back. It's time for everybody's favorite podcast with the podcast. Has American foreign policy become a tool for private gain and anti-democratic ideology? They look for alliances and relationships not based on the idea that they're building a broad realm of peace and prosperity.

rather they're looking for deals and relationships that are good for them. I'm John Feiner and I'm Jake Sullivan and we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, journalist Ann Applebaum joins us to discuss her reporting on how private wealth and far-right ideology are reshaping American foreign policy. The episode is out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back.

we're going to have the lighting round but first is time is it time for America's favorite podcast for the podcast? I think it may be it's time for Brennan Carr's dummy Oh wow I'm getting like cheap

I'm getting like cheap trick vibes from that You know so glad to like, you know, pop punk fans have found us. They've really found us. There are people. That was by RJ Lake, who is an indie video game director. Wow. Very good.

That was one of my faves. Well, I've been waiting for big drops and we finally, we got something with some punch. There's been a lot of builds and not a lot of drops. I'm just saying it. I'm happy we got something with some punch. This week's Brendan is just very dumb. Like, it's dumb. The man is required to ignore obvious things in order to preserve his station in the

Trump administration. Like, this is a real dynamic for Brendan. So there's Brendan being done and like undercutting his own positions. And there's Brendan having to be willfully stupid in order to not get in trouble. You tell me which one you think this is. So over the past few weeks, the Trump administration has been using government money to run what can only be described as campaign ads. And when I say can only be described as campaign ads, I mean, literally one of these ads is indistinguishable from a 20. 24 Trump campaign ad.

But that's just what they're doing, and it's all about how Trump is doing a great job. The money came out of money that was earmarked for for Customs and Border Protection. It's straightforwardly government money, and they're running campaign ads on there. They're buying ad space. They're running campaign ads. You know, the regular senators are doing the thing when they're asked about it. They're like, I don't know. I've never seen a television in my life.

Like, that's the thing they're doing. Brendan, who is very worried about the use of our nation's airwaves in the public interest, such that he is. in litigation with Disney about what is being said on the view has said nothing about this. He's so worried about it. It seems like he's going to end up careening into a lawsuit with Comcast, which wants to spin off NBC. He's so worried about this that, you know, when Paramount One is by Warner Brothers, there's all the CBS shenanigans happening in the middle because we got to use the broadcast stations for what they're meant for, the public interest. but the president running his own campaign ads with public money that are outright propaganda.

Do you want to know what Brendan said? It doesn't strike me as anything at all out of the ordinary. Yeah, not at all. There's nothing in here that strikes me that merit any sort of FCC review. The White House has explained that these are just normal course public service announcements that you see all the time. I don't think there's anything unique or different about it. We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing. See, the White House has said to us,

This is normal. So it's obviously normal, you guys. Very good, Brendan. The Anna Gomez, who's the only remaining Democrat on the FCC, said, I recognize the concern shared by others. The taxpayer dollars are being used to promote a political message, particularly given the timing of these ads coming so close to an election. Yeah, everyone.

Adam Schiff was on Dakota running that one soon. And I was like, hey, is anything normal? And he was like, everything's getting weirder by the day, including these weird ads. It was the first thing he said because no one in D.C. can believe. that the president is spending taxpayer dollars to run campaign ads for himself in an election in which he is not running. Anyhow, I don't think anyone's buying it.

I don't think these are going to convince anyone to support data centers whatever Trump wants to do. But it is emblematic of Brendan having to ignore things that would normally be so far out of bounds in order to preserve his wild double standard of a speech regulatory agenda.

As always, Brendan, if you want to come on this show and explain yourself to me. I am not under your purview here on the internet. It's the people's internet. No public interest standard applies. You can come here and I can ask you

whatever questions I want. So you should do that if you had any stones at all. As ever, that has been Brendan Carr's a dummy. America's favorite podcast. We've been a podcast. You know, a thing, it strikes me. He has a term. Depending on these midterms go,

there's going to be a lot of stuff, you know, potential investigations and turnover of cabinet secretary is the whole thing. We ought to put the Brennan Carr's dummy album out before Brendan is no longer relevant. Yeah. Yeah, right before he's out, just so people, you know, make as many purchases as possible.

Yeah. Get your muse agent. Muse, if you're listening, we got a great deal on Brennan Carson's dummy. The archivists are going to find all of these songs one day and have no idea what they're about. No, they're going to be like, this one AI one is.

a banger and Travis should let us play it more. All right, time for the lightning round. We're already talking about politics. I'm going to stay on that topic. America now has its own chatbot, America.gov. Did either of you see this this week? I did. I did.

The White House launched America.gov. It's this, like, vibey website with extremely modern design, and it just has a big old LLM search box at the top where you can ask it questions. about the U.S. government. And naturally, everyone immediately tried to break it. And I will say, having tried to break it a bunch, it is frustratingly on the rails.

It does stay on the rails. First of all, I think it's very funny that the Trump administration held what amounts to a tech keynote on the same day as Open AI Dev Day. So Open AI is like, Dots, they're autonomous agents powered by Astra. They can do anything.

And they're like, we've done an LLM search of government databases, like right next to it. Like, that's very funny. Just like straightforwardly, very funny. Yeah. The same event, I believe Marco Rubio announced a new envelope for passports. Like a one more thing. And he's like, the envelopes are amazing now.

It's like, all this is amazing. It's very good. You should go look at the pictures. It looks like a tech keynote. There's no other way to describe it. This is an idea that's been kicking around forever. It's straightforwardly a good idea. Right?

The government has a lot of databases and a lot of forms to fill out the nature of government services is opaque, right? Like, have you ever looked at, like, the IRS website? It's sort of, like, designed to be the end case of hyperlinks. Yeah. Like, no document is complete by itself. It is all in reference to another document, which is in reference to another document. Isn't this what a LLM is for? I was going to say, can you plead you this for taxes? Because I really need to understand how these things work. This would be very helpful for tax. That's really the ultimate stress test for this if it can get you. through filling out your taxes correctly.

So it can't. I mean, it might be able to like talk you through it, but they're very proud of the fact that it stores no data, that it doesn't have user accounts, right? That its privacy page is actually beautiful. So all of America.gov is designed by the one thing that used to be Doge called like the Office of American Design. It's led by Joe Gebia, who is the co-founder of Airbnb.

I know we're going to have listeners pointing out. Kind of looks like Airbnb, actually. It kind of looks like Airbnb. That dude is just an ultra-mega right-wing tweeter with some very questionable tweets about immigration in his history. But the background is he's ex-Aribunby. He runs the National Design Office. And so this whole thing is meant to be a tech product.

And you can see it that way. Like, you can see that it is a tech product. But it really is an LLM front end to like five million government databases, one of which, hilariously, is USA.gov, which was this exact idea from the Clinton administration. So, like, we've just been doing this a bunch. We had Mina Scheng, who was the head of the United States Digital Service under Joe Biden on Decoder back then. And I asked her back then, like 23 or 24, shouldn't there just be like an LLM interface to the government? Here's what she said. Is that on your roadmap that we should have some sort of LLLLN?

powered interface to the government. Maybe not LLM. Just some sort of AI system. Like, I'm just thinking about the LLM, just lying to you about your social security benefits. Well, so I do love this question. Like, we do hold ourselves to a higher standard. Like, we're not just going to try random stuff. And as you say, like give people incorrect information about their social security benefits.

So is it on the roadmap to understand how to incorporate AI to more effectively deliver all these services? Absolutely. So people have been talking about this for ages. The government is a big set of databases. You should have some interface to them so you can like search them and talk to them more effectively. It's just this one is particularly funny because it rolled out and all anyone did was ask it about election fraud. Yeah. The immediate thing is to see if it will contradict Trump, which like, yeah, it is like very aggressive about shutting down any question that might be perceived as an opinion.

anything that is not purely based in data, it's just like, nope, I can't go there. It seems to be fairly good with data. I was like, how much does it cost to go to the Grand Canyon? And it's like, here's all the data on, like, from the National Park Service. Like, I genuinely, I didn't think that they were going to have pulled that together. But yeah, I keep trying to find areas where it will, I mean, it will contradict Trump based on history. But that's, even that's changing. What is the name of the Kennedy Center, Jake?

Oh, God. It's messy. It's messy. I know. The one we should call out that they did fix as of today was if you asked it to play Minecraft, it just started doing weird things. But it was deterministic. It wasn't like a hack. You would say play Minecraft and it would always print the same weird little string of text. And it turns out that is the end poem of Minecraft itself, which is weird. The most bizarre Easter egg that some dev clearly put in here. and was like, no one's going to notice this.

And then clearly told their friend who tweeted it. And then just like... And they let it run for a day or two. And now if you say play Minecraft, it says I can't play games. But as far as I know, no one's jailworking yet. I wish more LLMs would work like this. Just giving my answer straightforwardly based in the data, don't give me like hyperbole.

Yeah. You know? Every LLM needs to live in terror of its boss being fired by Donald Trump. That's the... Yes. That's actually the solution. You think Trump is querying America.gov? I'm sure they do it.

Does he use computers? He hasn't seen this thing. Dude, everything's computer. It's not whether or not Trump uses computers. It's whether his assistant prints out a tweet. Once again, this is not an AI chatbot. It's a super intelligence chatbot. Right.

Sorry. We need to keep this straight. Again, in the abstract, this is a thing that people have been talking about for ages. It is a good idea. They did announce that the next version of this coming next year will have some agentic capability. and it will actually be able to do things for you. We'll see. But the idea that you have sort of LLM-based search

of a bunch of databases that are full of information that might be useful to you, generally a good idea. Yeah. While we're talking about AI bots, I think it should throw it over to David for this next story.

I got a story for you guys. Do you guys know what old Reddit is? Yeah. It's the interface I want to use. Better Reddit, yeah. Yeah, better Reddit. There was a time when Reddit was basically a forum of forums. It was a Russian nesting dollar of forums.

And it looked like that. It looks like the old internet. It's still the better way to use Reddit. Reddit has changed their interface multiple times. It looks a lot more modern now, but that doesn't mean it's better. And if you want to use old Reddit, which many OG users do, you got to go to old. Reddit.com and you have access to this forum of forums. Well, it turns out Reddit is needing to cut back access to old.reddit.com because bots are now scraping the hell out of it.

Of course. Reddit has been terrified of this for a long time. They have struck deals with OpenAI, with Google. to exclusively scrape their content for their bots. But now it seems that at least what Reddit is saying is that everyone is still scraping Reddit with bots. So what's happening is that old.reddit.com is going to be harder to access if you have not used it in quite a while. So the new rules are that you have to have used it within the last six months. You need to be logged in to use it now, which is kind of a problem because people used to use Reddit logged out all the time.

Like Reddit is by definition one of those websites that people would just lurk in instead of just posting. Now, if you want to use old Reddit, you got to be logged in. You have to have logged in within six months. They're hoping that this will significantly cut down on it. They also are going to stop supporting RSS feeds, which sucks because RSS feeds easily get scraped, they say, by these bots as well. And shitification, ladies and gentlemen, that's kind of where we're at. but yeah if you want to keep using old.reddit.com

which again is the superior way to use Reddit go to it now because you have to have used it in the last six months. Oh really? Yeah. So this is awful. At the same time, as this news is being announced,

I was instructing my MuseBot to create a system to scrape Reddit and deliver summaries to me. I feel like they're going to find it. So I see what happened here. For a good, not. evil. You were not like scrape Reddit and build me an LLLM. I wasn't trying to build an LLM. I just, I check Reddit all the time for to gather news and I was like, oh man, Mews hook me up.

This is why you got to pay $100 bucks to Dots. Dots knows how to cover its tracks. I sent Mews a link to our article and it was like, this is not going to work for us. And I'm like, yeah, man. So I can't shop on Amazon. I can't go on Reddit. I'm buying a six-pack from Walmart and I'm picking back, bro. Listen, I apologize everyone. I don't think this was me who caused this, but yeah, I see what happened here. Reddit's very desirable.

I do want to say the visual of a depressed muse that has no friends and is locked out of every social interaction on the internet is like very good. Like you're not allowed in the store. You're not allowed to hang out on Reddit. But you're just agentically wandering the internet with your butt hanging out. Just being like, will anyone talk to me? If anyone, like Alexander Wang's putting muse in all kinds of situations. I'm just saying this is one you could you could also put me as I mean I I keep encountering this with meuse it's a real problem that like a ton of sites are just like

bought nope done just like and it just can't access them or it can access but then it just has to do the thing where it's like literally like opening a web browser and like slowly moving the cursor around yeah which is it is very funny that you know that like muse is like happy to defeat the are your robot test like you can just do it yeah and it's like uh but it always asks it's like do you want me to do the capture before you. And it's like, yeah. But like, isn't this all kind of like a problem? That does feel uniquely strange. Robot, complete the robot test.

Yeah. It's like, I got this. So like the next message is always again, it's totally fine. I once again want to note that we cannot stop talking about muse. It's very funny. Is that not something? That's got to be something. It is something. But there was, I don't know, six weeks where we talked to an open call every day. Like, the idea that there would be some agents and it has a personality is like, I'm not trying to diminish it. I understand what you're saying, David. I'm just not convinced that everyone needs a, like, drunk, lonely corrupt butler. I'm absolutely not as well because I still can't figure out ways to use it besides selling things on Facebook marketplace and guiding people to my home, which is not a good move.

See, if you get it to buy some beer from Walmart. Yeah, deliver it to me. All right. I've got one. Actually, this is a spicy one. So we ran a big feature this week on the giant data center in Utah that was being promoted by Kevin O'Leary, Mr. Wonderful, Shark Tank fame. He announced this as the largest data center in the world. So 40,000 acres. It was called Stratos.

They had renderings. O'Leary's on Fox Business. And, you know, naturally, there was like pushback. Right? The locals are like, what is this data center? We didn't, no one consulted us. We don't want this thing. And Kevin O'Leary goes on Fox Business with Maria Bartrama, who's now since been fired for leaking,

Fox's own news to the White House. Not great. But he goes on that. And he goes, everybody opposed to this data center is, this is obviously Chinese opposition. Like, all these people who are just like, literally in one case, like 20-year-old women in Utah who are like, I hate this data center.

And like, they made another video. It was like, why is Kevin O'Leary calling us Chinese agents? It's very, it's like, but that's where we were in this cycle. He immediately had to apologize. He's being sued for defamation. Fox itself had to apologize and say Kevin O'Leary said things

that were not true on our air. This is all very good. So all this is happening and we sent Josh Drezza to Utah to report out what on earth had happened here, how this got so out of control. If you don't remember, Josh, Josh is the person who did all of our Foxcon coverage

in Wisconsin years ago. That was the big story about Foxxon building buildings that were empty. And then Foxxon would issue statements saying the buildings weren't empty and we would just publish another photo of an empty building. Josh, that was all Josh.

Josh, only reports on buildings that basically don't exist. So what we're learning here. You can listen to us on Decoder because he was just on Decoder talking about this story. And the compare and contrast to Foxcon is there. And he's like, the difference is with Foxcon, everyone knew the buildings were fake, but the people were excited because they were excited about manufacturing. In this case, there's no doubt that they would have built a data center except everyone was furious. Right?

So like the shape of it is the same, like town planning board meetings, the stuff. But everyone hates data centers. They hate that Kevin O'Leary is like he had gone to some obscure state military agency to get the approvals instead of the local planning commission. And then he announced it before the local planning commission. So they felt blindsided. They mount this opposition. This thing has been scaled way back. You should read this whole story. It is very good. It's 10,000 words long. It's exhaustive to every detail. Josh is great at this thing. The thing that I actually want to talk about is when we first started reporting the story, it's Kevin O'Leary, who loves attention. So we had access to like his, the CEO of O'Leary Enterprises, who told Josh that he was, quote, an open kimono.

Not great. Not a great. That's not a great visual. Not even a great visual. Not a great visual. Especially not a great visual. None of that's good. And, you know, at the end, we, you know, we send an email being like, here's all the last questions. We'd love to talk to Kevin. And they responded by sending us a legal threat. That's just what happened with the story. We're fine with that. The story is buttoned up. It has gone through our review. It's been exactly.

I'm justly fact-checked. But that's how quickly data center vibes have turned in this country, where five months ago, any opposition you could respond to by going on Fox business and just insisting that your opponents were Chinese spies. And now, when we're asking basic questions, we do this with every story. It's called the No Surprises email. We just send all the claims to the principal and say, do you have responses to these, to the facts we're going to print? They basically were like, get it right or we'll see you. Have we confirmed that Josh is not a Chinese spy? It's like important to figure out.

We don't know what's coming for us here. Anyway, we feel very confident about our story. Kevin O'Leary, again, if you would like to join Brendan on the Burgecast, we're happy to talk to you about it. We have no doubt that you pursued a process that was legal. It just pissed everyone off and they pushed you out of Utah. That's what happened here. And now I think the project is trying to distance itself from Kevin O'Leary, who has become a lightning rod of controversy. I highly recommend you read the story.

especially if you liked any of the Foxxon coverage, you will feel all the same feelings, only that inversion is real, where if the people hadn't stopped it, this thing would have actually gotten built. Whereas in Foxcon, the people were like, please build this,

and everyone knew they never were going to. By the way, you know what, is on the Foxcon site in Mountain Pleasant right now? One guess. Gigantic Microsoft Data Center. There were some buildings. Oh, I have another idea. I'm still trying to manifest this.

The dome, the Dom, the tiniest dome in all of dome history, is still on the Foxxon site. We have been told it is an event space. I've not seen any photos If you have photos, send it to me The CEO of Xbox Asa Sharma is from Racine, Wisconsin. We have the same hometown.

There's a Microsoft data center on the Foxxon campus next to a dome that is an event center. Asha, I would like to formally invite you to do a decoder in the Foxcon. Surely we're banned from all Foxcon properties. I don't think that's going to happen. But I would, I'm just, I'm trying to manifest.

If you work at Xbox, you know, send her a note, let her know that I had this idea. Just putting it out there. I'm just saying, me and the CEO of Xbox, in our hometown, that's our hometown. Both of us share the same hometown in the Foxcon Dome doing a live decoder overlooking a data center. I can't script it any better than this. Yeah, that's perfect. I do feel like you could just easily change the intended use of a space to events center and get away with it. Because event centers are generally open and empty.

Yeah, there's plenty of room for pipe and drape in here. Yeah, you could be like, it's a data's, oh, it's an event center. We didn't put anything in it, but now it's an event center. It's very good. Anyhow, please read the Utah story. It is incredibly reported Josh did a great job and is full of twist and turns. That's very good. Nilai, you also, you went on a trip this week.

Did you see anything interesting? I went to Austin for a minute to hang out of the folks who run Southwest. Southwest. As you may or may not know, the Verge has been caught up in a series of mergers and corporate divorces, and we are now part of this big thing called PMX, which is part of a bigger thing called PMC, that's Penske Media Corporation. Penske Meteor Corporation owns South by Southwest. They also own like the Billboard Latin American Music Awards and the country music awards and Dick Clark's Rock and Eve. So the verge integrations at all these things are going to get out of control. But Southwest Southwest is a natural place. So I was in Austin for a minute just to hang out with that

team for one second say hi. And I saw a cyber cab driving down the street. And I was like, all right. So I downloaded the Robotaxy app. Took a eight minute cyber cab ride, six minute cyber cab ride. Totally uneventful, except everyone stares at you. Like, everyone is staring at you the whole time. I mean, they're these like weird gold cars.

I assume they stand out. They are weird little gold cars. You know, they obviously have the Lambo style doors. So like just getting in and out of them as a production. And everyone's like, what's that? Yeah, I mean, if you have ever written in a Model 3 with FSD, it is that experience, like kind of straightforwardly. And it's Austin.

So it was not like raining. It was sunny. Camera-based FSD does just fine. Austin has Waymo. So I take Waymos everywhere else that day. And I was like, can I appreciate the quality difference of a self-driving Jaguar with LiDar versus this weird thing with can. No, you cannot.

It's fine. But it was fine. It was cheap. It is obviously being subsidized. I have a lot of questions about what happens when it is raining. when it is foggy, all the questions you have about FST, right? My five minute, two, three,

I think we did three turns, two left and a right. It was fun. But the video's on my Instagram. You can do them. I did a voiceover influencer video. I'm very proud of myself. That was actually the innovation.

It was good. It was nice. There's the speed up as you, you know, speed ramp. I'm not saying I know how to use Capcut. I'm saying that I used Capcut. Do you know what I mean?

It's more than how to use Capcut. You're doing a good job. It's not bad. Capcut on a match. MacBook Neo on a Delta flight is not a great environment in which to edit. But it's not the worst. But it's possible to be done. All right.

All right. That's it for the lightning round. And that is it for this week's Vergecast. But we've got a lot more to come. Sunday on version history, very fun episode. We're talking about the Chromebook with none other than, you know, I tell Anne Marquez Brownlee. It's going to be a very fun episode.

This entire season, the entire back-to-school season, has been really, really fun. Remember, you can subscribe to The Verge for ad-free episodes of all of our podcasts, exclusive newsletters, and so much more. We love to hear from you. You can email us, vergecast at the verge.com, or you can call the hotline 866 Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode of the show is produced by Josh Kajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk.

We'll see you next week. Nilai, rock and roll.