The Vergecast - Get ready to meet your AI best friend

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Nilay, Alex, and David discuss Microsoft's new Copilot announcements, and the friendlier face the company is trying to put on its chatbot. They also wonder: what, exactly, is an AI companion supposed to do for you, and how is it supposed to do it? They then dive into OpenAI's huge funding round, before exploring all the new gadgets of the week and some deep drama in the WordPress universe. Finally, it's time for a lightning round of news about Dish and DirecTV, Progressive Web Apps, and Nintendo's fight against emulation. We also send off Alex, our sadly departing co-host, with cake and Plex servers. Further reading: Microsoft gives Copilot a voice and vision in its biggest redesign yet Read Microsoft’s optimistic memo about the future of AI companions Shh, ChatGPT. That’s a Secret. - The Atlantic College students used Meta’s smart glasses to dox people in real time Sonos has a plan to earn back your trust, and here it is Chromebooks are getting a new button dedicated to Google’s AI Microsoft is discontinuing its HoloLens headsets Google’s Pixel Buds are now fully supported on Windows and macOS. Automattic demanded a cut of WP Engine’s revenue before starting WordPress battle DirecTV and Dish are merging Nintendo has reportedly shut down Ryujinx, the Switch emulator that was supposedly immune Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938.

This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome in the Verchcast, the flagship podcast of wondering whether you're wearing the same jacket as last week. I'm your friend, Neelai, and I don't know the answer to that question. Alex Trans is here. I'm your friend who just know the answer to that question. I put my wallet in the same pocket, and I was like, wait, I think I did that last week.

It's fine. It's a radio show. This is the problem with video. Yeah. Don't watch the video. David Pierce is here. Hi. I for many months just wore gray t-shirts on every episode of the Vergecast and I legitimately do own many gray t-shirts. I'm like the old Mark Zuckerberg who just opens a closet and I have like 15 identical things

and that's what I wear every day. Dude knew what he was doing. I envy you. This new thing he's doing wrong idea. Go back to the gray t-shirts, Mark. Yeah, every day he's got to pick a new Latin phrase. Yeah. That's a lot.

No one needs that. It's just going to be like, I'm tired. In line. At the very end, he's like, I've been defeated. Latin. Yeah, by the way, also the flagship podcast of our GameCube, the Heinecube. Thanks to my friend Gabe, who really thought I was going to send that back to him. Oh, poor Gabe.

The now multi-podcast, multi-platform, potentially award-winning podcast adjacent. Yeah, GameCube. Because they read as on the studio and we put our GameCube in the corner and then all the other Vox Media podcasts are in here and they don't take it down. So now every podcast is sponsored by Heineken. It's fine. I'm sure Megan Rapino and Sue Bird don't have thoughts about that at all. Anyway, please watch the rest of the shows on Box Media Podcast Network, of which the Vergeast remains the flagship. All right, there's a lot.

Let's not edit that out, but if you work at Box Media, just pretend you edited that out in your mind. There's a lot to talk about this week. A lot. Yeah. Some controversies. I think we might break a little news on this show. AI announcements, funding deals, and then we got a lightning round, which remains unsponsored. That's your fault.

because some of you control ad budgets. And then there's someone here at this company that you should talk to who is not me that you should spend that money on. That's how it works here. Or you can Venmo us. We can Venmo Alex directly. Venmo me. I'll take it. See if you can cop the number of sneaky ad reads Alex does throughout the show.

All right. So I've got a run down here. We've got to talk about co-pilot. There's opening eyes, big funding round. Gavin Newsom vetoed a major AI safety bill, but on the rundown, David has written in bold letters, but first, David has a question.

David has a question. David, what's your question? So you two are display nerds. I would say I am not a display nerd. So I have a thing that I would like to present you with that surprised me greatly, and I would like you to react and tell me how to feel. So I bought a new iPhone.

I bought a blue iPhone 16. I decided instead of going pro, I was going to go regular because it's like a little lighter. The blue is hot. That's the one. That's the one this year. This is the best looking phone Apple has made in a very long time. I think this color is awesome.

Like, it's great. And moving the cameras really did a thing there. It really did. It's really nice. So I bought this one, brought it home. And I think on the same day that I bought it, Federico Vitechi at MacStories wrote a thing about how he had gone from a pro to a regular iPhone.

And it turns out this is like a bit of a trend, especially because of the colors. There are a lot of people I've heard from like the nerd pro users. who have gone to the iPhone 16. Michael Fisher, Mr. Mobile is one of them. He made a great video about it. I would say in shocking numbers, both to me and to all of those other people, the overwhelming response from people is what?

How are you going to live without promotion? What's wrong with you? Do you not have eyes? How refresh rates? How do you survive? And if I'm going to be completely honest with you, I have not noticed. I could not tell you the difference

in my phone experience between one and the other. But I am also not a display nerd. I have a 42-inch junkie TCL TV behind me that will attest to that. So I bring to you the display nerds. How big a deal is it that I lost promotion and all the people who are worried about losing promotion on the iPhone should they be worried? If you're worried about losing promotion, then yeah, you should be worried because you care that much.

But 90% of people aren't going to notice the difference. We see this all the time with refresh rate stuff. Like once you hit 30, most people aren't going to notice. But then some people are. Like, Nilai will definitely notice. I can see him noticing right now and thinking like, no, Cranz is wrong. I think Cranz is moving at too low of a refresh rate right now. R.R.L.

Speed it up. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. I just got to. I don't know how to do a fast refresh rate. You know, my feeling on this is the things you can see, you can see, and the things you can't. And that is just like pretty much that simple.

And I think a lot of people are very sensitive to motion. Like more than we suspect. So if you are the sort of person who can see tearing on a screen or the jelly effect, you're going to really see it. You're just going to see it. And a lot of people can't. The jelly effect is when the screen controller, the electronics that controls the screen is on one side.

and so that side refreshes a little bit faster than the right side and you can see the thing just warp as you scroll. I can see that every time. Every time. It's a curse. 99% of people I don't think can see it and you shouldn't worry about it. And that's why most screens have that effect because you can minimize it to the point where it doesn't bother most people.

So you're 100% confident that if I handed you two identical devices, one at 120 hertz and one at 60, you could immediately tell the difference. I could. So promotion makes sense. it hard, right? Because it's always changing. Right. So I don't know. I think on scroll, if I started scrolling them, I could. But if they're both playing videos, and the promotion one has fallen back to 24 and the other one is interpolating frames to get to 60, no, on a phone, no. But on scroll, I can probably see it. Okay. It doesn't bother me. I'm actually not that

sensitive to it. But what I am sensitive to is like all those motion artifacts. Like the weird screen tearing and all that stuff and promotion minimizes it. So yeah, you know, there's like videos on there of like people with that weird app that puts the frame counter in front of the display.

And they're like, it's only at eight. It's like you guys are all crazy. I think you're right though. If you can see it, then you can see it. And yeah, you should probably spend a little more money. And if you can't see it, Enjoy having cheaper devices. Yeah, like a lot of people own Toyotas.

And then some people have Lexuses. And if you take a real hard look at the cheapest Lexus and the most expensive Toyota, they're the same car. You know? Yeah. It's like on the finest edge of difference there, right? And that's really what I think for a lot of people at promotion represents, except for the people who are like, nope, I can see it. I see. Okay.

So it's a little bit like, like I always tell people one of the dumbest financial decisions you can make is developing a taste for good wine. Because if you think $6 wine tastes good, you're going to live such a happy, easy, simple life of delicious wine. And then when you discover that actually $60 and $600 wine tastes much better, you're screwed. So like, don't ever learn that. Just enjoy, enjoy your crappy $6 wine. And life is fine. You're like, you could just smoke cigarettes and then it will all taste the same and you're fine. I don't know if my mom's listening to this episode.

No further comment, mom. I don't, I mean, you should have some taste. I recommend finding the things that make you happy and spending money on those things. But chasing a display spec, if you can't see it in motion is one of those things where I think people can see it or they can't. I can't teach you to see motion. I can teach you to see motion smoothing and then I will have ruined your life. Yes, agreed.

Right? Yes. And so that's like one of those things. Right. Okay, now I can see it. I just need to turn this off. Or if you have a Roku TV, they're going to lie to you and not let you turn it off,

which is still an ongoing scandal. But like the refresh rate of the screen is like, how do you see or you don't? I think it's the same with them. There's like ultra crazy high refresh rates on monitors now. and I asked Tom Warren like does anyone even can anyone see this and he was just very conflict like PC gamers can and I was like okay only some it's it's I'm out like I'm not fighting that fight it's counter strike right like it's the people who play the twitchiest twitchiest games yeah

and they can see it because they're they're like yeah that one millisecond means I can get a headshot or not yeah no one else can because none of us are trading our brains that way yeah if if this if the refresh rate is a difference between you and a rewarding career in e-sports God bless you. Yeah. It's not for me. I don't care. But yeah, I think the promotion one on the iPhone, the thing that you will actually see, and you have a kid, and I would just, I mean, it's blue and it's a beautiful phone, and it's probably fine.

The camera on the pro is substantially better. Yes. The main camera is substantially better on the pro. But it doesn't matter because they all just kind of HDR to hell and back, and fine. Like, spend your money in a good camera and the regular iPhone 16. Terrific compromise. Yeah. That's kind of where I'm landing.

I'm like, I bought this phone at the beginning of a year in which I am going to try to do fewer things on my phone, including, like, chase my child around. So I'm going to figure out new ways to take pictures. You're going to get a flip cam in like a beautiful RICO camera, like for stills. There you go. I love it. I can't wait for you to have just a full dad utility belt. A little fanny pat. Just like, you know how like the dominance rate in technology is convergence to the phone?

David has the divergence belt. Just like 60 gadgets. Except it's definitely going to be like a diaper bag just full of gadgets. People would be like, do you have any snacks in there? I'll be like, no, just cameras. All right. Good question, David. Thank you.

I would say that was a lot of people. The promotion fanboys, if there are such a thing as variable refresh rate fanboys, you're out there. We appreciate you. Oh, for sure. I think it's totally valid. And I was just, the thing that surprised me most was, that the overwhelming feedback I got and others got was not, what are you going to do without

the extra screen size, what are you going to do without the extra screen size, what are you going to do without the bigger battery? It was pro-motion. Like, overwhelmingly, that was the feature people said they couldn't live without, and I was just very surprised by that. You just have a lot of counterstrike players that-evidently. Yeah, that's awesome. And again, God bless all of you. But I'm also saying the people who can see it, can really see it. I think there's more people who can see it than you think. I buy it. I totally do. I'm just not one of those people. All right, let's talk about Microsoft. They had a lot of announcements this week. would you call it a new version of co-pilot?

Not really. I think so. It's a new vibe for co-pilot. It's like, yeah, it feels different in a way that I actually think is really important. Like, co-pilot was headed down this road of being just a tool inside of office that was like very businessy and very focused on helping you write emails and get stuff done. And they made this shift now to something that like looks and feels and wants. to be very different, which is different for Microsoft,

sort of odd strategically given like what the company is and what they've been pushing towards. But I think it's really different. I do. So I want to talk about what is different and new about actual co-pilot, the Microsoft product that has been redesigned. You know, they quote unquote bought inflection by hiring all of its employees and the CEO

and making the CEO inflection, the CEO of Microsoft AI, but they didn't actually buy the company. Yeah. There's probably like one guy still working. in there? Like the, the,

the Lena con loophole. That's what they, that's like, call it down in the Silicon Valley. You just like, don't buy the domain name. And you're good. So he did all that.

And then, you know, this new product looks a lot like inflection. We should come to that. I want to take one step back. David, you and I have been

talking about this moment in AI kind of broadly. And it feels like every company has realized the models are whatever. They're all kind of the same. And we have to build a set of products.

And all of the products are the same idea. we're going to go do stuff for you. And this feels like part of that. I know you've talked to a bunch of people. You've seen a bunch of these products now. Is that just the shape of it? Like, we have to build a product

and the only product anybody can think of as an agent? Basically. Yeah, I think we're at a moment now where these things have to be more than just novelties. And the quickest way to get there is to make them actually live out the idea of being assistance. Right? So we're seeing like Rabbit, which did a lot of work

to actually like popularize this idea earlier this year with the large action model thing launched the large action model a beta of a beta of a beta of a thing pretending to be the large action like we can litigate that if you want to but uh but the idea is essentially like these are things that can go accomplish things on your behalf right and those things are not just write an email or make a deck for you like the thing everyone always talks about is travel everyone Like, I should say, I need to be in San Francisco next Tuesday to Thursday. And it should, in theory, be able to go, like, book my flights and get my hotel and put together an itinerary for me and tell me fun stuff to do while I'm there. And restaurants, I should try it.

And, like, that's what everyone is building towards. It's that and it's multimodal search. Those are the two things. And multimodal search, I think, is going to come faster because it's a lot more achievable with the technology that we have. but like everyone is pushing on this idea that instead of like opening a bunch of tabs or doing a bunch of Google searches or flipping between a bunch of apps, you should just be able to ask your AI to do something. And it will go do all of those things for you. Yeah. But like with travel specifically, we already have TripAdvisor and stuff, which will always put me in Bothel instead of Seattle.

It's like you don't want to be in Seattle proper. You want to be in Baffle. And I like I just struggle to trust these things every single time because. baffle. That's what I think of. Every time one of these things is like, we're going to do all of these steps for this really finicky thing for you. And we're going to just magically know how to do it. And I'll be like,

but you've never done that before. In the history of computers, it has never successfully happened. Instead, I get baffled. I have a lot to say about those. Two things. One, I interviewed Rabbit CEO, Jesse Lou, for Decoder. That's going on on Monday. I don't want to give too much away about that conversation, except to say it was

bananas. And the thing you're describing, which is I can have the computer go use the computer for me and then that's a little brittle. Yeah. That's Rabbit. That's the thing they want to build.

That's the beta, the beta of the beta of the beta. Literally, Rabbit is best thought of as a VNC client. Right. The Rabbit device is a VNC client to a Chrome browser in the sky. And I can just open Chrome on my computer.

So this is the challenge. So I won't spoil too much of that, but I spent a lot of time being like, what is it? What is the thing that you've made? and the answer is a VNC client to a Chrome browser in the sky that an AI is running for you.

Which is fascinating. But that's pretty brittle. Yeah. And I think that's all of these agents are... The answer is we built an incredible enabling technology that lets us see and interact with the world and sort of natural language

or, to David's point, multimodal and voice and images. Great. So now we have this like interaction back and forth. What are we going to build with... This is like if I was like, I invented Bluetooth, it's $20 a month. Like, that's kind of where we are with the AI chatbots. And now everyone has skipped all the way of the head to the final vision, which is you will talk to the computer and everything will happen exactly as you desire.

And it doesn't seem like any of the middle steps have been filled in. And then the vision is pretty, the enabling technology, the LLM is still pretty brittle when it tries to go use the computer for you. Yeah. So it's like, okay. doesn't seem like you guys have actually done the thing. I see the vision, but also where's the execution? Or am I staying in Bofle? And the big question that I have is,

is that just because they have to pay off all the investment or because there's nothing in the middle? Like, generative fill is very cool. Microsoft announced that Paint. Microsoft Paint is getting generative fill. That's sick. That's awesome. Is that worth the money that they've invested in the second?

I don't know. Probably not. But, hey, there's an AI agent that you can talk that we'll go do things on your behalf and that will cost a lot of money, that seems like it's worth the money. Yeah. Well, and I think, I think the middle step is actually the only thing that's interesting, right? Because the middle step is pointless if you think we're going to get to God-level AGI in 2027. I do not believe that is going to happen. And so I think all the interesting stuff is, is in the middle. And like, it's very much on both sides. There's the there's the underlying technology of it all, which is can basically, can the VNCs get better and more

useful and more powerful? Or are we going to build like an API ecosystem of things so that data providers can plug into each other and this becomes powerful over time? Like, there are a bunch of ways this could go that are really interesting. Like Delta Airlines has lots of good reasons to want every AI service to be able to tap into all of its data because then I will book fly. lights. Like, there's a way in which these things can be put together that doesn't require magical AI, but the magical AI is also, like, definitely continuing to improve. But then the other question of, like, do I want to just say, I need to be in San Francisco next Tuesday, and everything just magically happens? Is that the right outcome? I don't think so. I really don't. And I think

the question is, like, am I going to get to a point where I trust the AI such that I just roll up to the airport on Tuesday? And I'm like, all right, chat, GPT, what do we got? And I think, the question is, like, am I going to for me, let's go. Or is there like a really interesting UI question in like, okay, how does it present that data back to me? How do we make choices together? How does it ask me questions without being annoying? And how far can you go down that road before I'm just doing as much work as it would have been to go on kayak.com and book the flight myself? We're at the very beginning of exploring all of that. And it's actually why I think the new co-pilot is really interesting because it is a really different UI on this stuff. Like the co-pilot app now is not just a chatbot. You don't open it up

but it's an empty sex box. It's like full of prompts. You go on and like the screenshot they have, it says, good afternoon at the top. And it's this in this like beautiful sort of warm beigey colors. It looks like a meditation app. It also looks like inflection to be very clear.

Sure. The company they did not buy. Yeah, right. And inflection, I think one of the reasons people have been interested in inflection for a long time is because they've been doing smart UX stuff on top of AI, which is very hard to do when you also have to build your own models, but makes a lot of sense to do inside of a company like Microsoft,

which has all the other resources. But anyway, you go in and it says, like, the screenshot they keep sharing says, good afternoon. And then it offers you a bunch of things to do, right? You can go to, it says, explore skills you can learn in a month. And presumably you click on that and it will essentially engage the co-pilot model in, like, leading you to do a bunch of things that you can learn how to do in a month. It says, tips for meditating, which is another one that, like, that quickly turns into a text conversation,

but it's like a different way into that interface. And I just think this is really smart and clever for Microsoft to say basically like, AI is such a discovery problem in terms of like you open this thing up and it's a chat bot. And what do I what do I do? How do I ask these questions? How do I talk to this? What's available to me? What's going to work?

How like what is the actual correct interface for this? And Microsoft is like starting to abstract away the text box a little bit. And I think we're starting to see bits and pieces of like, what this new interface might look like. But even this feels like the very beginning of that. So I want to just read the quote from Mustafa Suleiman, who was the CEO of Infliction and it was now the CEO of Microsoft AI. But reminder, Microsoft did not buy Infliction. Yeah.

Makes sense. They just hired everybody from Infliction and gave them an equivalent amount of equity in Microsoft stock because they would have had inflection. Had they bought inflection. But they didn't buy it. That's the old con two step. Yeah. And this is how they describe it in the bars down the valley. All right, here's a quote from Mustafa Sliven,

as a CEO of Microsoft AI. And again, this redesign of co-pilots, first big project. At Microsoft AI, we are creating an AI companion for everyone, he says, I truly believe we can create a calmer, more helpful, and more supportive era of technology, quite unlike anything we've seen before. I should note here that Mustafa has a delightful British accent, and so when he says quite unlike anything we've seen before,

you have to imagine that in the accent. Ooh, I bet sounds nice. So this is like the notion here, is that they've made you a friend. Right. Everyone has this vision of the great executive assistant. And I can't tell if they're thinking of Jarvis or Pepper Potts. And I think Microsoft would much rather have you think of Jarvis,

given that they're pretty like Bing tried to bang Kevin Roos. I don't know what else to say about that. Yeah. Like friendly, but not trying to bang you is very much the vibe they're trying to get at. Like not horny. That's the dream. That's where I aspire piece. They're trying to abstract it.

from being human-like and thus bangable. Well, I don't know. There's some people out there who do not make a connection between human and bangable. This is true. I think of the lady in the roller coaster all the time. We kind of see a replica on the coder, and she was like, yeah, there. It doesn't matter. But this notion that yours is like very calm, like, space tree to be in,

where you're going to ask for help with everything from your, your mental wellness to getting work done to booking flights and you've got this assistant character. That is what everybody wants. My question is the reason chat GPT took off and the whole industry is sort of like reorganized around itself is because the wide open text box is such a powerful thing. Right? Like I don't know. I just want to just talk to it. It's going to talk back to me. I'm going to ask it whatever question. It's going to answer correctly. That is the enabling technology, right? It is and it isn't, right? Like, it's powerful in the same way that the command line is powerful, that if you know how to operate it, you are unstoppable.

But isn't the point that you don't need to know how to operate this thing, you just talk to it? Sure, that's a great idea that isn't remotely congruent with technology. People have to think about what they're going to say, right? Like, I've run into this every time I try to use a chatbot. I'm like, what the hell do I use this for? What do I need this for? And then I feel really weird talking to it because I can think of her and all these. other things where you've seen that happen and you're like, that person's kind of a loser.

Can I bang you? Like, what are you doing later tonight? Copilot's like, please leave me alone. And I do think there's a big chunk of people who show up to something like chat GPT knowing what they want and will do stuff, right? Like that's, there are lots of people who work like that. Most people don't. Most people are not like that is not baked into their brain that like, I'm tired.

Let me talk to it. chatbot about it. Right. And so like maybe someday we'll get there. I think it's not crazy to imagine that that becomes a much more normal behavior for a much larger number of people. But we're nowhere near that yet. And so right now it's the chatbot is both very powerful and like the ultimate cold start

problem. And so I think even you're starting to see chat GPT and others like offer you prompts and ideas and just like little things that it's like here's the kind of stuff I can do just to get you over that hump of like what am I supposed to type into this box? Yeah. Because I think the more you use it, the more you get it and the more natural it feels. But those first few are really challenging. But I just want to mention one thing.

There was a really great piece in the Atlantic this week about a bunch of researchers who got a huge data set of people's transcripts with chat GPT and basically went through it and found people are willing and able to reveal so much about themselves to a chat bot in this incredibly like deep personal way and it just keeps reinforcing this idea for me that like the bar for people to pour their lives and souls and hearts and minds into these things and treat them like people is so low like we're way past that bar all of these models past whatever turing test there is in real life at this point right and and so now the question is basically like what products are we supposed to make out of that and the first one is just it's fun to talk to right and

that's where we are with so much of this and like now that the that that that's the that That doesn't get Microsoft anywhere. It just costs Microsoft a lot of money, right? Like being fun to talk to is not how Microsoft makes money over time. They've got to figure out this other stuff. And I think you're starting to see co-pilot push towards that. Yeah. So what's fascinating about this is on the flip side of this.

Let me say again. So I agree with all that. What is deeply fascinating to me is the flip side of the new copilot, which is the voice mode, which is inherently open-ended. You just talk to it. It doesn't wake up and say, hey, would you like to meditate? Right. You just like push the button and start talking and then it talks back to you and you can interrupt it like all the new multimodal voice modes can do.

And that it seems like you don't have to prompt people. Like they will just start talking to the AI and the AI will just talk to them and that feels very natural. And then the other one is copilot vision where it can do all the things that all them can do now, which is like look at the web for you and like do searches. And that also doesn't have prompting. It's just the text box where we're like we need to show people what they can type. everything else is kind of wide open. And I think that's really, I think that split is just going to keep going.

It's just going to keep getting wider and wider and wider where when you want to do it in, where when you want to interact with a computer in ways that feel more human like talking, we don't think we need to prompt you because you're just going to start talking. And then mice and keyboards and typing still feel like computer stuff,

and people still need instructions or training wheels or whatever metaphor you want to use. It's like get up and running. Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. It's why everybody is pushing toward both voice and vision, right? Like, the camera is very much the same way. Like, in the way that sitting down at a text box to accomplish a goal is not a thing that comes naturally for a lot of people,

taking a picture of a thing, super is. That's just the world now. And so, like, Google just rolled out the Gemini search with a video in Lens, which I think is going to be very successful. everybody's doing this multimodal search. Part of co-pilot is now that it has the same voice mode and it will do the video search stuff. And like those, I totally agree. Those are the things that are gonna like immediately click

in people's brains. And I wrote this feature for Wired when I was there like in 2016 being like the voice revolution is coming. And for years I looked at that piece being like, boy, did I whiff on that one. Because it was like the thesis then was that it was Alexa and it was Syrian, it was Google Assistant. And it was like, this is going to change how we interact with our computers.

And yeah, like Microsoft, I wasn't wrong. I was just way too early. Well, the enabling technology was in there. I want to keep coming back to this point. Yeah. Everybody had this idea. And then the first problem everybody had was the computers can't actually understand what you are saying.

And if they do, set a timer for five minutes, that gets filtered into some pretty static algorithms. Like, I will set a timer or in the case of Siri, only one at a time. God help us two timers. It took them like five years. Or I can play some music, or I can go do a Google search, or I can look at Wolfram Alpha. Like these very pre-planned routes. And now you have an enabling technology, which is I can just understand anything you're saying.

And I can go look at stuff with a multimodal search, find it, understand it, and spit it back out to your natural language. That is a very powerful set of enabling technology. Like you just, everybody had the right ideas, but literally the core bits and bobs weren't there. you when I was a child that cell phones would exist. I could not make an LCD screen. Like that is the thing, right? It's just in the middle is all of the, I think the word everyone uses is agentic. Like an agent?

Oh. It's good. Yeah. I was like, what does that even mean? The first time I heard, I was like, what? Agentic. Okay. You're going to hear it a lot.

That sounds like a consulting firm. Yeah. Sounds like the name you come up with when you pay a consulting firm. We would make so much more money than what I would. It's unsponsored lightning round. Or like a medication of like that doesn't, you're not sure if it works. It's like, ask your doctor about agentic today. Yeah.

Yikes. Ask your doctor if you're ready for agentic. Well, if you're AI curious, the verge cast and agentic are here for you. Okay. So you've got all these ideas, which are, okay, now can understand you can go do stuff for you. And in the middle, the actually doing stuff for you, unclear how those tasks will be accomplished. Is it a bunch of APIs? Will Delta provide a bunch of flight booking APIs to all AI products?

Delta can't even manage to get their flight attention to the planes on time with their software. Very tense relationship right now, I would point out. Is everyone just going to allow AI bots to set up VNC clients in the cloud and click around on their websites? That is very slow and very brittle. And computationally expensive. Probably computationally expensive, right? being like, they could be rendering them in black and white. I don't know. There's probably some way, you know, who knows. But that is such a hack. Like, a pure hack to say the way the

AI agents are going to work is we're going to light up Chrome on AWS on a Linux instance for every individual user, take your credentials to the cloud, and then click around on websites to accomplish the tasks for you because what you really, want to do is speak to your phone. Maybe you could do it locally, right? Apple's going to do it with intents in Siri. So you talk to Siri, presumably, whenever Apple intelligence ships, a bunch of app developers will have had to allow Siri to access their services. And Siri locally will fire off a bunch of API calls and do stuff on your phone. The middle part is totally up for grabs. I don't know if anybody has an answer. I don't know if anybody has a fallback that is better than

we're going to light up a Chrome instance in the sky. And I don't know if anybody has a solution for what happens when Kayak or DoorDash or Delta don't have the ability to show you their user interface. They will, like, if you run DoorDash and suddenly people can order stuff without ever looking at the DoorDash interface, you don't actually run much of a company anymore. All of your revenue opportunities go away because you're built in advertising. The thing where they try to get you to order more stuff the second you've ordered, something. I'm convinced this is DoorDash's entire business. Yeah, they're always like,

don't you want a soda with this soda? You already want to do. No, they're like double dash. The counter comes up and you're like, that's just more stuff. But that's the business. Uber is like, would you like Uber eats? If you just, if you commoditize all of those services and the things that AIs can do, those companies are going to be like, actually no. Like Uber and Lyft want to be different companies, not just commodity providers of taxis to AI services. services. Dumb pipes. You create a lot of dumb pipes.

You commoditize a lot of businesses right away. And I just don't know. That middle part is where I think all of these companies are going to run into the reality of, well, everybody else doesn't want to be a commodity for your AI. Yeah. And I truly, right now, it seems like the fallback answer is, well, we're just going to click around on your website. Like, what are you going to do?

Not have a website. And it lately, it seems like the answer is not have a website. Yeah. Or like a terms of service battle about you have to be a human to use our website. Well, it also sounds like in the conversations I've had with folks, that part of this is also, they don't necessarily want to do that. They just want it to be like, this companion you talk to. It doesn't necessarily, it's not your executive assistant. It's not ordering you flights or anything like that.

It's there to help with math. It's there to like do the very basic things. And then I think with all of it, you still run into this cultural, like culturally are we prepared for this? Are we prepared to make these things our friends? And I don't think people are. Well, so the new co-pilot, because it has Open Eye 01 in it, has a feature called Think Deeper, which allows it to supply step-by-step answers to complex questions like, should I move to New York or San Francisco? Which is definitely something you just want to ask.

That's what I want to ask a computer. That is the thing. Right? Like it's trying to replicate friends. and I don't know how to tell it. Computers are not friends. They're computers. They don't have souls.

They don't have the ability to reason. But this is what David is saying. Once you let people talk to a computer, they just start talking about computers. Right, because they like to talk. Once you let somebody on the internet, they love to put everything on the internet, right? Like there's no, we all love to just,

not everyone, a lot of people just love to put themselves out there in all these forms. And generally speaking, culturally, we think it's weird when someone talks to a computer. Over and over again, we see a TV and film. That's like the example of that person is cut off from everything they know. That person is profoundly lonely.

I think was it Mr. Robot where the woman would every episode have a conversation with Alexa? And it was meant to show you how sad and pathetic she was. And now we're like, actually, that isn't sad and pathetic. It's cool with co-pilot. We should do a remix of Mr. Robot as a co-pilot ad? Yes. 100% would want it's a very good idea i actually don't know i want i i don't know if the answer well i know the answer to the question is should you move to new york san francisco it's obviously

new york um just putting that out there straight out um everything no that's true yeah i was going to fight that for it it's true it's just so true sorry to everyone in san francisco sorry in particular collie robinson our reporter or a reporter in sara who loves reporter but i'm right it's new york um but the the idea that you can have some like big life decision and you're asking a computer in a low-stakes way to help you think through it? Fine. Does that make you better talking to other people?

Unclear. That's what the replica people will say. People practice having social interactions with their robots and then they go off into the world and they're confident. I'm really of the mind that we should spend more time wondering if actually those two things have nothing to do with each other. Right? Because I think the alarmist's side of that argument is

people are talking to computers and thus not talking to other people. And you hear the stories about like the women in Asia who are dating men who are AIs instead of men in the world. And there's like this big moral crisis about it. And like there's probably lots of interesting research being done on those fronts. But I think to me the question of is it a good and healthy thing to have a relationship like this with a computer is interesting and important in its own right? Can I read you the quote from Suleiman that directly responds to you? Yeah, sure. We are not creating a reminder, beautiful accent, musical.

Did not get acquired by Microsoft. Did not get acquired by Microsoft. Quote, we are not creating a static tool so much as establishing a dynamic, emergent, and evolving interaction. It will accompany you to that doctor's appointment, taking notes and following up at the right time. It'll share the load of planning and preparing for your child's birthday party, and it will be there at the end of the day to help you think through a chance. tricky life decision. This is just a friend. What he's, what he is describing as a friend who's going to come, do all the thing.

And then you can just take advantage of the friend. Like, plan this birthday party. And I, that is a huge vision. And again, I'm just pointing out, okay, planning and preparing for a child's birthday party requires doing a bunch of stuff. And how it does this stuff is not a technical problem. It is a legal problem. And it is a set of business problems.

And I don't know if anything. anybody actually has the answers to those problems right now. Can this robot go use a website on my behalf? Well, I can, someone can just write a terms of service agreement that prohibits that. Yeah. Yeah. And now we have to have a lot. And Microsoft can pay the money. They got money. But like they, it's going to get fought out before this vision happens. And I think there's, as always with the tech industry, they're like, huh, permission. It's still really weird that a couple of years ago, Google fired a dude and part of the the reason they fired him, not the entire reason, part of it, was that he insisted the AI was,

like, human enough now. Oh, yeah. And then now we're back, now we've gone all the way around to look at how human our AI is. Yeah. Yeah, it's a feature or not a bug now. Yeah, and that's just, that's a weird turn that I'm having trouble making along with all of the tech companies. They did it, and I'm like, hello, I'm still back here.

Like, it's kind of weird. Google's like, you've planned too many birthday parties. Get out of here. Can I just say, by the way, tech companies. stop using children in your marketing for AI chat. It's just a bad idea. Yeah. Like, stop having them write letters to Olympians with it.

Stop having their birthday parties planned with AI. Like, please, please leave children out of it. It's just not a good look. It makes everything feel very dystopian and bad. Let's just not do that. Also, most parents of young children are deep in an extraordinarily controversial discussion about whether the kids should have phones at all. Yeah.

Just what are you doing? Also, if you're going to spend your time doing anything, it's planning your kid's birthday party. All of the rest of the time, she gets freed up so you can do that thing. Yeah, right. Well, yeah, but they can't do that because all of that other stuff is business stuff. And you get into what is legal at your company going to say

if you're using this to plan all of your meetings? They might have problems. You know, like you run into that thing of, okay, this has to be in the personal space because we're not yet ready to put this. And who can sue us? Kids. Yep, kids can't sue.

Get more money, little kids. Loser. What would be a good ad for AI is me sending my stupid AI note taker to all of my meetings so that I can go play on my kids' birthday party. What if I'm outside with my children while my AI is in a meeting? Now I'm in on AI. I just want to point out that Eric Yon, the CEO's Zoom, came on to Coder and said, soon all meetings will be AI avatars talking to each other. And you will have thousands of AI avatars going to thousands of meetings. Somebody posted something on threads the other day.

if it was true or not, but they posted a screenshot of a Google meet with several people in a meeting, and all of them had just sent their AI notakers. That's the scene from the greatest movie of all time, Real Genius with Falcimer, where in the 80s, everybody puts their boombox into record the lecture, then the professor comes and plays the lecture out of the boombox. This is one of the most underrated movies all time. This is Valcomer's greatest performance. Real Genius. Go watch this movie. Everything you need to know about my personality comes from this movie. I'm just letting you know. This sounds like a special episode we need to do. I'm sort of serious.

We just watch Real Genius. Yeah. Incredible final scene. Okay. Speaking of AI companies that don't ask anyone for permission to do anything, opening high just raised $6.6 billion to build God. That seems fine. That's cheap.

Yeah. Everyone works there still, right? There are now more founders of opening I who work at Anthropic than work at Open AI. This is a real step. It's pretty fantastic. Who knows they're going to do that money? Sam Hulman has consolidated ever more power. I think one of the big questions here with all this Microsoft news is it feels like Microsoft is pulling farther and farther away from Open AI.

I mean, for Microsoft, this is just, it's just a really great way to get a lot of computing money. I forget who the author was, but somebody at the information wrote a very good story, basically being like, here's why all these investors would do this. And you just go down the list and it's like, oh, Nvidia is in this because Nvidia is actually just giving Open AI money that it will get back for all of its technology. Microsoft, same. thrive is like in too deep now. They've just, they've pinned their whole thing on being, yeah, on like being bros with founders and with Sam Altman in particular.

You could make a case that this is not the like vast bet that Open AI is the greatest company in the history of ever that it appears to be on its face. But it also is, it puts Open AI in a pretty wild position, which is, I think the money hinges on the company becoming a for-profit company within two years, which is, a big deal that we've kind of known was coming. The thing I thought was the wildest was that Open AI apparently asked all of its investors not to invest in other basically similar companies, not to invest in Open AI competitors, which is just a wild thing to be able to ask your investors.

Like I watched Silicon Valley. I know that you're supposed to have multiple plays in every sector of the market. And so for Open AI to just be like, no, you can't touch anybody else if you want part of this is pretty nuts. Also, SoftBank is in this, which is not great. Yeah, that's usually. It's not what you want. Like, money is good, but the vibes are bad.

Yeah. All this also hinges on, I've mentioned the phrase enabling technology a bunch of times. There's a difference between the engineering you need to make the technology and then the product work you need to make the products. And all this hinges on Open Eye going from a research in engineering company to a products company. And right now they have but one product, which is trash. Or there being some vast leap left to do in the engineering side. But all those people have left. Well, right.

But I mean, but Open AI's case is God, right? Like, they, they, if, if Open AI is right about that, there are several gigantic leaps left here. And there are an increasing number of people out there who say, maybe there aren't and maybe it doesn't matter, that maybe the technology now is good enough to do most of the plausible stuff that we want to do. and actually, to your point, all the interesting stuff left is product. Right? Like, we've built the internet. Now, what are we going to do with it?

It's like, that's one moment we're in. There's another moment that we're in that says all of this is about to get 100,000 times better at like a foundational level. And that will change everything all over again. And I hear an increasing number of people who don't believe that second thing is true, but that's Open AI's entire pitch for why it's worth all of this money. And that pitch comes down to we will run an even larger model. We'll train an even larger model with an even larger amount. of data. Which they are running out of data, so they're made their own. They're going to make synthetic data to do it. Which is great. And then they'll use all of the power in Saudi Arabia to build the data center.

Like, legitimately, this is how they are talking. This is how they spend their money. And that's just a big bet. You got to do a lot of things. I believe that people at TSMC referred to Sam Altman as a podcast bro when they heard his ideas to build 36 more chip fabs to make him chips. Like, that's just a big idea. And maybe he'll get the money.

Maybe he'll do it. Who knows? It's just in the meantime. while you're busy building 36 fabs to build the world's largest data center to train the world's largest model on synthetic data that your current models have produced, everyone else is going to go build products. And like, maybe that's fine. You know, like I just, there's a weirdness here.

You know, we're covering it. We're all over it. But I would just zoom out of like the day-to-day Sam Altman drama. And you're like, what are the products? There's also the third one, which is that AI is a bubble. and it's about to pop, right? Like that a lot of this stuff is just built on dreams and ambition, and there's nothing actually to back it up.

Because if you don't have those products, if you don't build God in the next five years, shareholders are going to be like, yo, where's God? Yep. I gave you a billion dollars. This is, look, I'm a capitalist. I often do capitalist critiques, but I would say shareholders will get mad if you don't build God in the next five years

is the perfect summation of where we are in technology. There's a very verge cast sentence right there, and I just want everyone to hold on to it as tightly as they can. Well, we have the title of the show, so that's good. All right, we've got to take a break. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about gadgets, and I might mention real genius three or four more times. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer.

Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at Framer.com slash verge for 30% off of Framer pro annual plan.

That's framer.com slash verge for 30% off. Framer.com slash verge. rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all, all by yourself, are over. There's no romance and burning out while you're trying to scale. Instead, you can check out Upwork. Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialize talent across more than 125 categories,

so you can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale without committing to full-time headcount. And finding the right talent is easy. You can browse profiles, review past work, and get help scoping the role so you can get started quickly. Seriously, you could connect with the right freelancer in just a few hours, especially when you sign up with Business Plus. Their AI-powered shortlisting pairs you with the top 1% of talent in under six hours. No endless searcher required. You can visit upwork.com right now to post your job for free.

That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upwork.com. Upwork.com. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster.

That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hires find a candidate to interview within a week. With hiring pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire.

Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. We're back with the real genius radio hour. That movie is great. Actually, to be 100% on the nose, that movie is about a group of scientists to invent a laser that gets productized into a weapon. And at one point, one of the main characters says, that's for the engineers to figure out. It's a real thing. Woof.

It is great. It's truly one of the finest movies all times. Apparently to prepare for it, they did a lot of research into the CIA and lasers. Really found it in a... They didn't do that much research. Months. Wikipedia says months of research. Like, this is a movie in which the breakthrough is about Gilbert screaming,

ICE is nice. Oh, excuse me, the director did the research. Not the writers. It's not that much research. They did a lot of research into like MIT and Caltech secret societies. Okay. This movie is great. It's a tremendous.

movie and you have to watch it like five times to catch all the jokes it's great all right a lot of gadget stuff going on should we start with the the meta glasses yeah this is like nilai's dream came true when it's horrible and we have to talk about it so so many people have pinged me with this story an email on threads just i ping you in slack in the comments of unrelated stories on slack in a group of college students i believe at harvard they took the meta raybans and they just hacked it together. So with the Meta-Rabands, you can just stream live to Instagram.

So they set up a private Instagram account. They started streaming live from the Meta-Rabans. And then they set up facial recognition watching their computers live stream to just tell them who they were looking at. And you should watch this video. It's great.

You know, it's like everyone's a video editor and ass and the videos edited all snappy. There's like moments of discovery and despair. It's like the whole thing's great. But like dudes on the subway and he's just looking at someone and it tells him who they are because they've done facial recognition

and then he walks up to them and he's like, hey, are you this person where did I meet you at this place? And everyone falls for it. And it is maybe it put on like maybe this only worked half the time. It's a video, right? We don't know.

But the proof of concept is there. Like that chain of things all exist. Streaming live to Instagram exists. Worldwide facial recognition systems exist. Text messaging. exists. You can make this product today out of the things that exist. Yeah. You can go do this. And it is terrifying. It is 100% the product they want. I want to be very clear about this. I've said this so many times in the show that if you could give me

AR glasses that just tell me who people are, tell me people's names. That is a killer app for this product. It always has been. It always will be in the cost of it, which I have said every single time I have said this is a killer app, is that you need to build a worldwide facial recognition database and that is terrifying. And the second someone built even this hacked together prototype, it's obviously terrifying. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, meta, we asked them about it and they just sent a block quote of their terms of service to us. Yeah, I mean, it makes so plain that the only reason this isn't happening is because everyone is slightly skeved out by it, except for you, apparently. I would be the greatest politician in American history if I could just remember people's names.

I do not want to shy away from that. That is my claim. I will stick to it. It is unprovable, but I know in my heart that it is true. I feel like everyone should have this when they have to go to like CES or something like that, like really big events. I would be totally fine with that. You wearing it on the street? No, stop. I don't even like wearing the NFC tag built into the badges at C.

Yeah. Just sit it out. No, I want to know who everyone is at CES. I want to be like, okay, I did meet you five years ago and I'm so sorry I forgot. That seems great. This has made me think so much about the U.S. of all of this. Like, what if you could wear these glasses, but it wouldn't show you somebody these names unless the glasses had seen them before. So in theory, your first encounter with somebody

wouldn't just tell you their name. But if this was a person you knew somehow, you had a picture of them in your Google photos or you were friends with them on some social network. Like, again, a series of very queriable databases. Then it could be like, oh, you know this person. Like, does that get less sketchy? No, because then your spouse puts on your glasses and finds out you've been having an affair for five years. I just went straight there. Right? That's going to happen because you put them on. And then there's like, wait, why does it recognize this person? Because they were banging them. Wow.

You look at your phone. It's like he's been banging the assistant this whole time. No. Not co-pilot. Just parts all over your own. It'd be rule. Look, someone's going to actually do this. Whether whether or whether or not it's this hacky product or another one of these companies, once the display technology is available.

Some will instantly build a product like this. I mean, Medica could go build this right now, but then we would not be talking about his shirts as much. We'd be talking about that. Well, I don't, so the U.S. of this, as David is saying, is the thing. Yeah. Because you need the glasses and I have to show you the name over the person. I think if it's just saying the name. No, this is why it's a hack.

Right now, it's like texting you the name. I mean, I'd still, I'd be fine with that. But I think it's like as a consumer product that's a little challenging. Yeah. Or on my watch, you just post. pops up on your watch, you're like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, Phil. It's an exchange. Like, I think that'd be great.

I'm going to start doing this to people. Just call it everyone, Phil. Be like, so you're Phil. Yeah. I'm saying once the, right, meta could build this with Orion, presumably, because they have the display technology, but that's vaporware.

Yes. I'm saying once, on some timeline, once the display technology to put images on glasses that let you just see the real world exists, this technology, this thing is inevitable. No, AirPods solves this problem.

Like, did either of you watch Veep? Yes. You know how Gary and Veep is just forever behind her going, no, that's what I want. This is Senator Doyle. He is an idiot. This is Gary. Like, call this product Gary.

And it just, whenever someone is like clearly walking towards you, it just tells you who they are. And it's just Tony Hale's voice in your ear. It's just Tony Hale. Give Tony Hale millions of dollars to do this. And I will subscribe tomorrow. 100%. It is funny how obvious the tradeoff is.

to everyone once they see it. Oh, yeah. Because, again, for years, I've been saying, I would buy this product in a heartbeat, but you have to build a worldwide facial recognition database to do it. And I run some rar around.

That's fine. And then you see it, you're like, boop. Never mind, don't want that. Don't want that. There is a worldwide facial recognition database. It's just the internet. Anyway, I want one.

If you're these college students, call us, we'll do a whole. I want to know everything about this project and how it works. Give us a call. other gadget news Sonos announced a plan to fix the app we haven't covered this too much

on the Verchast I don't think in bits and pieces Chris Welch has been covering the story top to bottom on the site so obviously Sonos put out the app it was not a hit people hated it yeah that's how they felt about it

I think that's it's safe to say people hated it missing a bunch of functionality the the ongoing narrative is that they needed to rush out the headphones. I don't want to say conspiracy theory because I think it is correct. They needed to rush out the headphones. They needed to put out the new version of the app to support the mobility of the headphones. And the app was mentioning a bunch of functionality, very buggy, missing core functionality. People at the company were upset that they were releasing it.

And so now they're like, okay, what if we listen more? Why are you guys being so nice to Sonos? This is like weird to listen. Sonos released a horrible app that everyone hated, and it has basically tanked the company. Like, it's just that simple. Yeah, they've had to have layoffs because of it. Yeah, but, you know, like, the reason that it happened was because they weren't listening. No, it's because Sonos released a horrible app that everyone hated.

Here's what I'm trying to not to do. I'm trying not to just repeat, like, Reddit conspiracy theories and say only what I actually know, because the Reddit conspiracy theories are in fact out of control. Yes. At this point, the company is, so tanked its reputation, they can't do anything right. So what they have done is they took Eddie Lazarus, who is their chief legal officer, and they assigned him the project to figure out what happened, and he's not right to

report. So he did that. Eddie's been on the show before. We've talked to him. And they released their plan. The plan is charitably fairly vague. The plan contains things like unwavering focus on the customer experience. To ensure that we deliver the highest levels of customer experience, we will always

establish ambitious quality benchmarks at the outside of product development. It's like, is that the plan? The plan is like, it just makes me think of the people who are like, no one holds me to a higher standard than I hold myself. So to everyone I've disappointed, please no, I've disappointed myself even more. It's like, no, you still did bad. Yeah. One of the other pieces of the plan is demonstrate humility when introducing changes.

In contrast, the all at once automated app release, we should make any major change in the bonus app will be released gradually. I would just point out, this is how every other company has done everything forever. So I think there, yes, we should have some humility, but also just like, do it good is one of those.

And in the last one, which I think is oddly backfired and pissed people off the most, is the executives are foregoing their bonuses. See? They know they did the bad, just like David said. No one knows more than they do. So they're in their advisory, assembly and customer advisory board to get feedback and insights. I think people are going to be like finished the app, make app good. Yeah. There are two real things,

I will say, in addition to all of those not real things that you just said. They're, they're extending the warranty, the manufacturer warranty on a bunch of stuff, which is good. Kudos to Sonos for being like, okay, this is going to take us a minute. We'll keep supporting your stuff throughout it. And the other one they're doing, which actually, to some extent confirms some of the conspiracy theories, is they appointed, I believe they're calling it an ombudsman to basically help internally figure out what people think and deliver that opinion to the people who are in charge. Because one of the stories we've heard is that people inside of Sonos were freaking out about how bad the app was and that they were sort of resoundingly ignored in favor of just shipping

the app. And so there were people inside of the company who were like, we can't do this. This is a disaster. Which made me think of like the folks at Humane who were trying the thing before it shipped, who were like, this thing sucks. And they were just like, well, ship it. And so Sonos is at least it seems taking steps to make sure that particular thing doesn't happen again, which seems good. Yeah. Yeah, if they listen to that person.

I think at this point, Sonos is very worried that a lot of people are realizing that AirPlay 2 exists. I never use the app anymore. I just use AirPlay 2. Yeah. Like, a lot of people have realized that AirPlay 2 exists and can group speakers from a variety of manufacturers together as kind of. and Chromecast audio, like a lot of people have discovered that their phones have stuff in them.

They're betting on the Arc 2 and a bunch of new products that are coming out. But if your app doesn't work, it doesn't matter. Yeah. By the way, I got it wrong, Eddie Lazarus, no longer the chief legal officer, it says. And his strategy is making it good. Yeah. David, what's going on these new Chromebooks?

So they found the G button. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. It's the Gemini button. They found the Gemini button. But they're not calling it the Gemini button. This is the thing that throws me.

It's called the quick insert button. Oh, good. What? It's basically, so one of the hacks for years on Chromebooks has been to reuse the caps lock button. A lot of people do it. You can use it to like invoke the menu button. A lot of people do that. you can do it for like a search.

The caps lock button is a sort of endlessly mutable thing in the Chromebook universe. And a lot of people do it. So what Google is doing now is replacing the caps lock button, which is also sometimes the search or launcher button, with what's called the quick insert button. And I think the idea is that it's just going to be the like way to do all of the help me write or turn this into different kind of Google Doc or whatever inside of any product. right? The idea is to like AI your way through the internet with this one. Yeah, it's like this little sparkle you see in Android now.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But it's a little button and it's got a G on it. Yeah, and I think that's fine. It's fine. I mean, that's the same thing that we saw with copilot, right? Like it's like the co-pilot button on Windows. This is Google's version and it's like, yeah, they had to do this. Windows did it. It makes sense. Right. I do think this is like a statement of AI as important to us more than it is like an actually useful user feature, but it is something. It will remind people to use it, which I think counts for

something. I don't know. I've spent a long time, like, waiting for Chromebooks to be like cool, exciting, good computers. And I'm kind of, I'm just over it now. This just makes me tired. This is just like a bunch of students who are going to like use AI to write their papers now and now it's easier. Great. But isn't Samsung saying this is, this is like one of their thinnest laptops ever? Sure. Samsung says that about every Chromebook they ever made. Yeah. But they're running out of, they're running out of Chromebook. Yeah. No room last. Also, they're all talking now about like 13 and 12 hours of battery life. I think with the number on the two here. And they're like $600 and then there's a Lenovo one that's

cheaper. But like, these are not impressive numbers anymore. Like we're, we're in a new phase of laptops, y'all like Chromebooks come come do something new and interesting again. Or be cheap. The fact that Nilai, I bet, still has not replaced his mom's Chromebook pixel should be a real problem for everyone on the Chromebook team at Google, and I super don't think it is. Yeah. So if you don't know, this is ancient history now. I bought my mom a Chromebook. Do you remember the Chromebook pixel?

Oh, yeah. It was a thousand dollar Chromebook. It's nice. Still maybe the sexiest laptop of all time. Yeah. Is it all yellowed now? No, it's fine. Oh, that's fine.

It was aluminum mostly. I bought that for my mom instead of an Apple. You're thinking of the pixel book, Kranz, the one that got weird on the palm rest. the Chromebook pixel was the one that was like metal and chrome and gorgeous. It was squared off. It was great. It was a USBC computer back when that was like a thing, not every computer. But my mom needed a new Mac and I was just like there's too many interface metaphors here.

And that was before all the ones that exist now on top of everything else. And I was like, she just wants the browser. I like she doesn't give a shit. And so I bought her a Chromebook pixel, which was a $1,000 Chromebook with an I-7 in it. It's ridiculous. She's still using it because there's one's Chrome. Yeah. And she just, I don't know, she's so banging around the web all day.

I would love to get her a new one, but there's, I can't think of a reason to. Yeah. She hasn't complained. And there's not one that is as cool looking as the Chromebook pixel. Yeah. Because, again, that was a $1,000 computer. And that's one with a little light bar on it. Yeah, at the very top.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's great. And every now and again, I check on it, and it continues to run Chrome, which is all anyone really needs. And I think Google just hasn't chased that idea all the way to ground. right like what most people they're just cheap and like students get them to cheat on their homework with now with AI I'm spending more time in the pixel line pro and Google's just like AI clipy is everywhere every time you pick up that phone just like more AI stuff and it's just fun yeah and if google can bring that to a Chromebook maybe that will be fun but I don't think they think of the

Chromebook the same way as think of the pixel no I agree yeah and as a layer on top of stuff Google is like the quick insert button where you can just like put it anywhere kind of makes sense right and you're invoking like system software instead of just doing inside of Google docs but I don't know I don't see it hard to get excited about it it's interesting that we didn't talk about this next one in the context of Microsoft doing copilot because Microsoft was way ahead on air glasses with HoloLens and in the same breath that they are doing this new co-pilot they are discontinuing HoloLens and everyone's idea is that you'll have an AI assistant and just looking at stuff with you.

But I think HoloLens just never got there. Well, also, the guy who, like, was the big champion of HoloLens. He was not a great guy. He was not a great guy and left the company. And Panos, I think, oversaw the whole thing. And he also left. Yeah. So you didn't have any advocates within the company with any real power over it.

And it's a shame because, like, HoloLens figured it a lot of it out, straight off the bat. And then just never did anything besides teach us how to change Sparkworks. Did they figure it out? Again, so they solved a display problem. Yeah. Well, I don't think the display. display problem. I think the user interface. I thought the user interface and it really just made sense. And we've seen bits of pieces of that in stuff from meta. We've seen bits and

pieces of that and stuff from Google. Yeah. We've seen from a lot of people like the pinchy pinchy and stuff like that. I saw that there first. But then again, all they did with it was teach you and I how to change spark plugs. And that's not. So to this day, one of the coolest demos I've ever received from tech company. Super, super cool. They set up a full garage. Pull up YouTube. Yeah. There's also that problem. No, they set up a full garage and walked around and was like, there's a spark club. There's where it goes. You can screwed it in. Yeah. It was sick. And I was like, man, if I ever open up an ATV shop with a lot of extra money, I'm ready, and I don't know what I'm doing. This just makes me think that like this coming on

the heels of what we were talking about with meta last week. Like, it's so clear that the only way to do this right now is to have some stakeholder, ideally your CEO, who, who is so hell-bent on the idea that this is the future, that they're going to just pour money down the drain to make it happen. So Tim Cook. I think Tim Cook is one of those people. Like, that man has been a true believer in AR for a long time, like a long time,

and has talked unusually publicly about how much he believes in AR for a really long time. And I don't think Microsoft has that conviction. I don't think Microsoft has that conviction about much, sometimes to its detriment. It did have that conviction for a little bit there, right? Like they were like, this is going to be the future of computing.

We're going to do everything this way. Go get yourself one of these Aster headsets and put it on so you can see the future. And then instead they were like, never mind. Right. Well, I think to your point, the people with that conviction

don't work there anymore. Right. And then they saw AI and they said, that's shiny and that works. That's what we're going to chase now. And it also makes us Azure money. Like, I just, I feel like Microsoft's conviction

is in office and an Azure and everything else, it will just worry about later. And Microsoft has figured out a way to make a lot of money on the AI revolution without winning the AI revolution. And I think is going to be fine with that. Whether that is the right call long term

or whether some next generation of Microsoft leadership is going to be like, dear God, why did we give up on this? In the same way that I think a lot of people feel like Microsoft botched mobile in all of the decisions that it made and has made a lot of wrong decisions about killing products

that turned out to have been the wrong decision over time. Who knows? But I think you're right that like, HoloLens got a lot of things right. And there's no reason to believe that if Microsoft hadn't really, really bought into this idea that it could be very much in this race instead of like kind of a joke inside of it.

Yeah. I don't think they saw the display problem. I just want to be clear. 100%. The thing that is the problem for all these devices is the displays. And I think Microsoft got as far with HoloLens as they could realize they were not getting any farther

and decided to walk. And I will reveal this much. I think the people who worked on hollands have looked at Orion and said, I didn't solve it either. Just a thing that I've heard through the grapevine. All right. Last one. And we're going to try to get through this one very quickly.

Oh, God. I know it's not going to work. It's very complicated, but we can add some reporting to it. Like I said, we might break some news on this episode. there's a lot of drama and open source world about WordPress and if you don't know

WordPress is I don't know why you're listening to the show I think the people listen to the Burge has no WordPress is but WordPress is the most dominant

content management platform on the internet it's the thing that runs all websites famously open source famously the Verge is moving to WordPress sometime next year

I would call this a conflict of interest but we're paying them yeah you know it's like I don't know it's like saying Slack is a conflict of interest because I'm forced to use Slack every day. Like, it's fine.

Whatever that is. Other Vox Media networks are already on WordPress, Polygon, notably on WordPress. Vox.com on WordPress today. Sometimes next year, we're going to move the back end. The front end will look larger the same. It doesn't matter. I'm just letting you know because we disclose everything is, like at this point, force of habit. A lot of drama in WordPress world. David, what is going on? Oh, God. Okay. So the very short version of this story is that I have to explain the structure of the internet too. No, so the very short version of the story is Matt Malinweg, who is one of the co-creators of all things WordPress and is the CEO of Automatic, which is a company that oversees

WordPress.com, which provides a lot of service to WordPress. The simplest way I can explain the difference here is there is WordPress.com, which is a for-profit company that provides a lot of WordPress services and hosts websites and does all kinds of stuff for WordPress. There's also WordPress.org, which is the open source software that's open to everybody. It's like Google's version of Android and open source Android. Technically different things, super messy oversight questions over both of them. Matt Mullenweg is the super messy oversight question over both of them.

Matt Mullenweg got very mad at this company called WP Engine, which is, I think, pretty neatly, a WordPress.com competitor. They provide lots of services to WordPress people. They host WordPress. So WordPress is software you can download and you just host it yourself. Right. We can pay another company to host to manage it for you to just run your website on. WP Engine is a big one.

That's what WP Engine does. It got bought by a private equity company. Matt Mullenweg, like many people, has strong negative feelings about private equity. Pick to fight basically saying you're being a bad citizen of the open source community because you're not giving stuff back to the open source community, even though you're taking things from the open source community. This spiraled into WP Engine essentially calling him an extortionist, which led to a lawsuit, calling him an extortionist after automatic sent them a term sheet, basically demanding a chunk of either their remnant. revenue or their employees' time dedicated back to the open source community. And I think that's a rough sense of where we are.

These two sides are very mad at each other about everything. And Matt Mullenweg would tell you that he is just being a defender of the open source community and the WordPress community at large. WP Engine would tell you that he is trying to bully them out of their money and or out of existence. Right. So along the way, the only mechanism for WordPress.com and automatic to, to get money out of WP Engine

was to claim some amount of intellectual property infringement somewhere, but you can't do that because WordPress because the WordPress code is open source. So what they're claiming is trademark infringement over the WordPress name. And WooCommerce, which is the thing that Automatic owns and is a big, it's like a Shopify competitor inside of WordPress.

And it's very big and very popular. Yeah. So they're claiming this trademark infringement. And to settle it, they're saying you can pay us some percentage of revenue, which might be huge. This is all very messy. And we've been reporting on it. Emma Roth on our team has been an amazing job reporting on it.

By the time you listen to this, she should have a story up because she just talked to Matt Mullenweg. Well, we were podcasting. She was doing reporting. There's a thing here going on that it feels like we're splitting hairs. The Matt is trying to split hairs between the WordPress Foundation, which has like a board of directors. There's three of them. That's one of them. that actually makes decisions.

Automatic and WordPress.com, which is the company that he is the CEO of, and in the middle, WordPress.org, which is just a website that is the most important website in the entire WordPress ecosystem. Because the other way

that you can make life miserable for WP Engine is by blocking access to the repository where all the plugins live on WordPress, which is WordPress.org. Right. Plugins, themes, like all the stuff that isn't

like the very basic infrastructure lives inside of WordPress.org. Yep. So if you set up, if you take open source WordPress code, build it yourself and put up your own website and you want to use a new theme, it's going to go look at WordPress.org, which is where all the plugins and themes are.

Matt Mullenweg just had to MRAOS. WordPress.org just belongs to me personally. Whoa. It's just his website. He's the one who controls the repository of all the plugins and themes. He made his own WordPress site. I think it runs a WordPress. So there's the foundation.

So there's the foundation which controls the open source code. And also notably has the trademark. Automatic gave the trademark to the WordPress Foundation of WordPress. And then WordPress Foundation licensed it back to automatic. So there's that mess where to call yourself WordPress, you need to apparently get the trademark, which is hazy. That's a new idea. And then there's the to use WordPress at any scale. You probably want the repository of plugins and themes and everything, which just means Matt has to

like you because it's just his. Here's the other quote. I happily provide WordPress.org services to literally every other host. We serve over 30,000 requests per second. I can't say the exact numbers, like 40 times the size of WP Engine, websites that pay WordPress.org for updates, for plugin searches, for image searches, for everything. They have every right to the GPL code, and that's perhaps what my PR team is trying to

explain. They have access to all the code, but they don't have any rights to call our services. So he's basically saying, I can just take this away from you. Oh, boy. And that is complicated. Like in the world of open source, the whole point of this is no one gets all the control. And he's saying, well, I have this control. And either they can pay us for the trademark, which will help pay to fund the development,

or they can walk away from everything that I provide on my own. That's a lot of, like, I think a lot of open source people are having a lot of feelings about this. Can I just make the devil's advocate argument here? The thing about open source is your other companies are supposed to do all the take your code and do whatever they want with it. And so I have all the feelings in the world about private equity. We did an entire decoder

about private equity being bad. And so the idea of the private equity company is going to come and free ride in the open source community and provide hosting services and never contribute anything back to the code. Yeah, it's problematic. It probably offends. But the leverage

points in open source are rarely in taking things away. Right. Like, that's against the ideals of the community. Right. And I, there's something there that needs to get sorted out here that I don't understand. Like, if you are on the Chrome team at Google, lots of people are doing all kinds of wacky stuff with the open source chromium engines,

including Microsoft building browsers that compete with you. But they're still open sourcing chromium because that makes the whole ecosystem better. I think the better analogy in this particular case might be with Android, because you have, on the one hand, AOSP, the open source Android, which anyone can take and do whatever they want with, and lots of people do. Like, there is an overwhelming chance that everything in your house that you think is a gadget runs on Android in some way.

Many of them on the open source Android. And then there is what you would call, like, recognizable Android. And Google famously, litigiously, regulatoryly, said, if you want the full experience of Android that feels like it is to people, which means you need things like the Play Store, which means you need things like YouTube, pretty popular, you need Gmail pretty popular. Here is a long set of rules that you have to play by. And it's technically you can have Android. Technically, it is open source. But if you want the thing that is functionally recognizably the Android that people want, here's a long set of Google rules for it.

And that feels a lot like either the threat or the reality of what's happening here. It's like, sure, knock yourself out. You can have WordPress, but if you want the thing that actually is WordPress, you have to play by my rules. And that feels different. If you want WooCommerce and all of that. But like literally like plugins, like the thing that makes comments work is like that's a separate thing. And if you're going to take away literally everything other than you can have words that render all. on a page and make that part of the,

like if you're in my good graces side of things, you've completely changed the way that people are gonna feel about this. Well, so let me make a tiny distinction here, because it's a small distinction, but it's a big one. So if you're Motorola and you wanna make an Android phone and you're like, I can't sell an Android phone unless I just Google Maps,

that means I gotta take all of play services and sign Google's contracts and all that. At least you're a big company. Right, and there isn't anything other than Android you can run, like, you're not calling Microsoft, being like, so Windows phone. Right, but whatever. But you have some amount of agency because you're a company and it, you can either make a phone or not.

In this case, WP Engine is reselling WordPress hosting to its customers who are now being blocked from going to get plugins. And those customers are kind of being punished for picking a hosting provider that competes with WordPress.com. And I think that's where this just gets really sideways, right? They're trying to punish WP Engine. and maybe they're right. I don't know.

Like dueling lawsuits, who knows. But at the end of the day, it's a bunch of WordPress customers, like people using WordPress to run their businesses who are suddenly getting their access shut off because of a business dispute somewhere above them. And that's pretty weird. And so, like, just in the world of open source,

like the whole point of it is that that stuff, when that happens, you can just walk away. And it turns out the whole WordPress ecosystem is, runs on one guy's website. That's what he's saying. to us. Technically, you can get a lot of those plugins and stuff not through the website, right? Like, I mean, it's been a while since I ran a WordPress website, but you would go and

you'd build it. And then if you wanted just to quickly grab WooCommerce or any of those other things, you'd go to WordPress.org or you'd go through the plugin set up in it, which goes to there's basically an app store. Yeah. Or you could be like, you'd go to, you know, I went to theme forest and got a theme or I'd go, I'd go somewhere else and be like, oh, this, this dude just has a weird plug-ins. on his website, I'm going to take that.

And so you can still do that, but the convenience was you could just go to WordPress.org. Can I just read you a paragraph from this that actually I think neatly describes what you're talking about? So this is Matt Mullenweg wrote this at the beginning of all of this when they first banned WP Engine from WordPress.org, which they then undid, but then that has expired. I honestly don't know where we are at this particular moment.

What he said was if WP Engine wants to control your WordPress experience, they need to run their own user login system, update servers, plug in directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, pingomatic, and showcase. Their servers can no longer access our servers for free. Like, sure, yes, agreed, all of that is buildable and replaceable and doable. It is a hell of a lot of work. Yeah.

Like, you can go build your own YouTube if you want to. Go for it. No thanks. Godspeed. Yeah. I feel like the line all the way to conferences is like a lot there. I mean, sure. Plug-in directories.

You know, it's like a little more reasonable. We'll see. Emma's got a piece coming out. She's doing all the reporting. Those quotes came from her in real time. That was real-time reporting from someone else. Well, we talk shit about holland's here on the verge cast. But that story should be out by the time.

You are listening to this. She's on an amazing job all week pulling this part. It's going to keep going. Much like our show, which will be back after this break. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database.

You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, acid-compliant, enterprise-ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database.

Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. one, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise

that you think, I think, that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the real. root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary, third. Like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin.

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

Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back for the lighting round. I'm going to break some news on the lightning round. The worst sponsor we've ever had than the lighting round. we have some news Alex say your news yeah so the news is

I am leaving the verge today is my last or when you're listening to this it'll be my last day this is my last verge cast it might not be your last verge cast might not be the last verge cast but this is the last one is host

yeah and it is it is a great time I've had a wonderful time working with you guys and doing really cool stuff here and talking about my Plex server

as much as humanly possible subscribe now via Venmo. The house is leading to start a subscription flex server business. Yeah, that definitely won't end in litigation. So, yeah, just going to take a break for a little bit and play as many video games as possible. Hit me up if you've got recommendations.

But it has been a blast. And now we're going to talk about a lightning round. No, first, we have a surprise. Who am I going to talk about you with Alex? Surprise. Yes. Oh, hell yes. Look at this.

We're going to light the studio on fire with this cook. Happy. Do we have a plan for what happens now, Liam? Well, I figured Alex would make a secret wish for her last episode of the Birch cast. Blow out her candles. Liam said Alex, you have to make a secret wish and then blow out your candles. Okay. You have to guess what the wish is.

I don't think this is what we usually do when people leave the show. This is the new tradition? I think Neil I should have to give you his jacket for your last first cast. I take the jacket with me. All right, let me blow him out because then I'll tell you what my secret wish is. Oh my God, we're going to set off this much as our turn here. 100%. This is what IT gets.

They send us our. Wow. We give them ours. My secret wish is we don't get arrested. My secret wish is Amazon fixes the Kindle. Hey. I feel it in my heart. I feel like I'm bringing that into existence.

You're willing. We're willing some new candles into existence. All right. Well, Alex, it has been a delight and a pleasure. It has. I'm glad we got to spend our last few verbiaseds in the studio together. It is this gorgeous studio. Oh my God.

That we have now lit on fire. It smells like burning birthday cake in here so much. It smells very, very good. You know how usually when we sat down in here where it smells like weed? The next people are going to be like, what is that weed? Yeah. And it's cake weed. All right.

Let's do the, let in your end. Let's do it. Alex, you're the person of honor. You go first. Yeah. Yeah. So Nintendo is continuing to find switch emulators and kill them. In this case, it was Riojinks.

I think that's how you say it, Riojinks. Sounds right. And Ryujinks, however you want to say that. But it was another Switch emulator. They actually reached out, Nintendo apparently reached out to the developer. It was like, can you stop? And it's unclear if they reached out via legal channels, via stop and we'll give you money channels. It's not really clear there.

They haven't said a whole lot, but it stopped. A lot of theories for this. Nintendo has famously not gone after emulators in the past, and now it's gone after, this is now two Switch emulators that have been killed. And my favorite theory so far is that the Switch and the Switch 2 have such similar, like they work so similarly that they're trying to just head off Switch 2 emulation by killing the Switch 1 emulators, which we saw the same thing with Wii versus the Wii U. It uses the same thing. So like Dolphin. Oh, interesting.

Yeah, so that's like... Knowing that the Switch 2 is so small of a leap Yeah. That Switch 1 emulators now have to be illegal is... I feel like I know a lot now. Yeah, so definitely play all of your Switch games on your PC. We're a little run better. Which is what we learned this week because of emulators like this.

We saw like, oh, it actually runs better when it's not... The cake smells so good. It smells so much like cake in here. It's so much. It's like a bakery in here. It rules. But yeah, so it sounds like the Switch 2 is, you know, if you still have your copy of this stuff, you might be able to play some Switch 2 games when it comes out.

We'll see. Same thing happened. Again, same thing happened previously, but they didn't go after Dolphin and all of those companies. So something's different this stuff. That is fascinating that they have not pushed the Switch 2 that far ahead. Yeah. Or at least that's what it feels like.

Yeah. The exact same thing. We were all like, why is the Wii U so similar? And they're like, well, because we want your money. And we didn't want to build a bunch of stuff. Alex, wasn't this the one that was supposed to be untouchable? After all the Yuzu stuff, it was like, oh, but there's this other one. People start using it and they won't shut it down.

Yeah, because it was based in Brazil, right? Yeah. So it was based in Brazil. So they thought they would, they're like, there's less litigation, I guess you can do because Brazil's laws around this stuff is a little different. But that's why Nintendo apparently reached out directly to the developer and was like, stop. And unclear if they said stop really, and like, really serious.

or if they said stopped and then slowly pushed over a bag of money in a little Mario suitcase. But something happened there. Yeah. Sean's been on it. He will continue to be on it. I'm sure he will find out the truth. And he better text me first. We asked Sean to write a story about the state of emulation.

And he came back with, I could do a multi-part feature package. And we're like, one story. But he's not wrong. He's not wrong. It's, there's a lot there. All right, David, what's yours? I just want to briefly talk about a web app that I'm very excited about, which is the new Google PixelBuds web app is a web app, an app on the web that you can download on lots of devices and use to manage your pixel buds. You can update your firmware.

You can change the multipoint connection stuff. You can do all the things you would normally do on one device, but you can do it on the web, which means you can do it anywhere. And I'm just like, this to me was one of those moments where it was like, oh, this is why the web is better, right? Like this is an example I will point to to a lot of people. You can you can update the firmware on your Bluetooth headset through a web app. I just want to say that out loud. That is that is a thing that is possible to do. That's good.

And it means you can do it anywhere. And this is very exciting. And this is how it should work everywhere. Wait, the pixel-Bud stuff to talk to your phone to Bluetooth, right? Through Bluetooth, right? Yeah. So the web app can control the Bluetooth on your phone or communicate over Bluetooth. tooth from your phone? It just feels like Tim Cook is standing there being like, you shall not pass.

It's a progressive web app, right? So you, you like have to sort of, you have to like do the home screeny thing. But it has, they're able to have this same kind of access. And to me, it's like, this is a thing Google has pressed on for years, right? They're like, rather than make good native apps, especially for iOS, we're just going to make you use our websites. Sometimes that sucks, like with Google Docs, which I desperately could use a better native app on iOS. But in this case, it's like, oh, it's ridiculous that the only way to manage your headphones is through one single device. And the fact that you can just open up a website and do it on other devices is a good thing. And like speaks to how powerful progressive web apps can be when they're actually like developed and worked on and allowed to be powerful.

And I just think that's very cool. It sounds so normal that I'm like, wait, you can't already do this with a bunch of other products? Well, with other products, historically, they have. have all run tiny web servers in them. Right. So you can control my Sony receiver through a web browser, but you shouldn't. But I'm gonna. Do you know what I mean?

Like there's there's something, there's a, there's a full on web server. Like Apache is running on my. You're gonna be like what's happening in my house next week and you won't know. Yeah, it's just like web server. Yeah. I'm gonna have a great time. Plex server running on my receiver. I know what you're after, Alex.

Oh yeah. Alex's botnet Plex server idea. She's been pitching this. It's going to rule. It's going to rule. Get excited. But you're talking about a web app that is actually just talking to the device directly, not some weird web server idea. Right.

And it's just a more cross-platform way of doing the same kind of stuff. Like if you have a pair of AirPods, right, like you can manage the settings of your AirPods on your phone in a way that you can't anywhere else. Like God help you if you want to like change the way you do stuff. on your AirPods through an Android phone. Sure. Best of luck, friendo. You can, that's not how it should work. And this now works in other places.

And like, because you don't have to write an Android app and an iOS app and a desktop app. Right, you just write web apps. And it works everywhere because it actually has that access. And like, I have a pair of Bose quiet comfort headphones that like theoretically do multi-point, but they never, ever guess correctly which thing I want to connect to. So I like turn it on and it's like connected to these two devices. And then I press play on my phone.

and it's like, you didn't want that. You're trying to play from your computer, which is closed in your backpack. So I have to open up the Bose app and on my phone, turn off the computer one, turn on the phone one, and then it will play in the right place.

And it's like, all of this management is bad, but the idea of just being able to, like, whip open a browser and do it anywhere is good. And I am in favor. So here's my worry about this. The web app still lives on the web,

which means when Google wants to turn it off, which Google often wants to do, it just disappears. Whereas at least if I have the bits on my iOS device or whatever or my Android phone, at least they're still there. The thing I'm specifically thinking about in this week, we ran a story, Juice Box, if you have EV charger or Juice Box. Oh, yeah. That company, NLX, just was like, F it, we're out. Like, we're just leaving North America.

And all of the back-end infrastructure, including the commercial chargers that they have installed, is just going dark. So the thing will still charge your car with whatever settings you have. but if you want to change the amps or you want to connect it to your electric company or whatever, it's gone. Literally, they change their website to just a letter that's like, we out. You can email this email address

that we're not listening to. And like that's always the worry, right? It's like if you're now dependent on Google maintaining an app on the web, let me tell you about Google's history of maintaining apps on the web. Yeah, I should also say it only works in chromium.

Of course. There's a large series of browsers. it won't work inside of, including the iOS ones. It all sucks. But that's better. It just confirms my belief that if we do it right, progressive web apps solve a lot of problems. Somewhere Dieter Bone just did a thumbs up at his headphones.

Hearing me say that. Deeter, I love you. His headphones are paired to the wrong device. It's the real problem here. It's at all. All right, Neelah, what's yours? I'm so sorry for this, but also you're welcome. That's what I have.

Sometimes you introduce what you're about to talk about, and I just immediately know, and I'm like, oh, I can leave for 20 minutes. Like, that's fine. I'll come back. So my lightning round is that direct TV, the satellite TV company, is merging with DISH, the other satellite TV company. It's for a dollar.

Like the, and you look at the transaction price. CNBC is like, Direct TV to buy DISH for a dollar. It's actually they're taking on $9 billion of debt. Sometimes if you have one Titanic and you put it with another Titanic, Like, maybe it won't sink as fast. You're like, you've reduced the debt that I'm taking on by $1 is what you've accomplished here. So they're acquiring this like underwater company for a dollar and a whole bunch of debt. Direct TV is being further spun out of AT&T by a private equity company called TPG management.

And then they're going to merge the whole thing with DISH. And that will be the satellite company. And then Echo Star, the company that currently owns DISH, will be free to pursue It's dream of starting a 5G network in this country called Genesis, which does not exist. So this doesn't kill the possibilities for Gena 5Sys. Gena 5Sys, it still exists. The only phone they have is the 2023 Motorola Edge Plus, which you can get in some markets, and mostly which from at least the Reddit rolls over to 18T's network and sucks on it.

Sure. And I will remind you that this all happened because T-Mobile wanted to buy. Sprint and the Trump administration didn't know how to stop it. So they orchestrated a deal in which T-Mobile was allowed to buy Sprint. A bunch of Sprint spectrum went to DISH Network. So Dish Network could stand up a 5G network using a technology called O-Ran Open Radio Access Network that would become a fourth wireless carrier and provide meaningful competition to AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Competition, which all this can feel every day.

That went great. Through the lower prices and better services that we experience in our nation's wireless system. Yeah, Verizon definitely didn't go down this week for like a lot of people and a large chunk of time. Nope. So that's good. Didn't happen. So that's what's, that's today's news. That's what's happening now.

I just, the thing I want to point out to you is that this merger mania has been going on for 25 fucking years. And Richard Lawler and I have been working together for a long time. And we have covered so many versions of these mergers. between these companies that we just looked at each other. Like, is it over? Is it just beginning? How damaged are we? How much of my brain contains the knowledge of who owns direct TV?

It's so much of it. So Richard and West Davis and I sat down. We made a timeline. By the time you listen to this, our poor designer, Kath Virginia, may have solved how to make this timeline a chart of mergers. I will tell you right now, there's too many mergers on it to make a visually coherent timeline. She's like, can you take stuff out of the timeline? And I'm like, no, those are the mergers.

So let me just read you some of what has happened here to arrive at DirecTV buying dish for a dollar and billions of dollars in debt. While you do this, I'm going to keep a list of the number of companies I forgot existed while you do this. Oh, I've taken some out of this. I've condensed it. I'll put one on there right now. There's a whole company, the whole side show of a company called Skytera that I just removed from this. That goes on the list.

That's just number one. It's not even on my list. The Skytera side show is just, I've removed it. All right. Our story starts in January 2001 when AOL Time Warner is born. In October 2001, General Motors, GM, the car company, tries to sell Hughes electronics. which owns direct TV to EchoStar, the company that owns DISH Network. This is a victory for Echo Star CEO Charlie Ergen who beat out Rupert Murdoch, who wanted to buy Hughes.

The FCC blocks Ergen from buying EchoStar. So Hughes Echo Star deal is blocked. This is a huge defeat for Charlie Ergan. And News Corp, Rupert Murdoch swoops in in December 2000. and wins the bid to buy Hughes Electronics, giving Rupert Murdoch control of DirecTV. March 2004, Hughes Electronics rebrands itself as the DirecTV group.

November 2005, a city in Texas called Clark, Texas, changes its name to Dish, Texas. What? In exchange for 10 years of free TVs and DVRs. That's amazing. This is a real thing that happens. In June of 2006, I graduated from law school. I'm just putting that in there.

Because this is when Richard and I entered the scene and start blogging every one of these deals at Engadget. January 2008, EchoStar officially renamed itself to DISH Network and splits into two companies. One is Dish Network, the provider of satellite services. And the other is certain satellite assets, which are owned by a new company called Echostar. Does it make any sense to you? No. Echo Star renamed itself to Dish and splits off a company that owns a satellites called Echostar. Time Warner in March 2009 spins off Time Warner cable, December 2009 spins off AOL.

Just keep that in mind. June 2011, EchoStar buys Hughes Communications, remember? Which didn't exist anymore. Giving Echo Star and therefore DISH access to those satellites. February 2013, Comcast buys the remainder of NBC Universal from GE, a general electric, not General Motors, a process it had started two years earlier. March 2014, Direct TV and Dish are rumored to be in talks for a merger, which falls through. May 2014, AT&T announces it will buy DirecTV. So now 10 years ago, AT&T has bought DirecTV.

June 2018, AT&T buys Time Warner and renames it Warner Media. I'm just reminding you, this started with General Motors selling Hughes Electronics to Rupert Murdoch, and we end in June 2018 with AT&T buying Time Warner, which I will remind you, result in the 4-3 Grayscale Snyder Club. I'm just putting that up there. 2020, DISH Network suggests merging with DirecTV once again, once again shot down.

August 2021, AT&T spins off DirecTV because the Warner Media deal was a disaster but keeps 70% of the assets of the company. April 2020, spins off Warner Media, which merges with Discovery and Warner Brothers Discovery is born. January 2024,

Echo Star, once again, buys Dish Network. I don't know, man. What? This happened. It's brule. October 2024, 18T will sell the rest of Direct TV to TPG, which will then buy DISH network and merge the two together finally. What a disaster.

That is so many billions of dollars in so many layoffs. I cannot even tell you. Every one of those deals, thousands of people lost their jobs. Every one of those deals, thousands of people lost their jobs. and all of our service declined. All the bankers got rich. All the lawyers got rich. What a disaster.

A bunch of people in Clark, Texas have free TV. The people of Clark, Texas got 10 years of free DVRs. There's only like 400 people that live there. And you can argue that, you know, this is all because satellite distribution went away and now they're streaming. But this all came to nothing. Dish and Echo Star have merged and split and been owned by different companies like eight times in that list. I think Echo Star you just described as like four. completely different entities over the course of that.

And somewhere in there, I'd like to point out that they became the relief valve for the T-Mobile sprint deal, which reduced the amount of competition in wireless, and they have utterly failed to stand up their fourth competitor, which was supposed to solve the problem. What are we doing? Just why have Richard and I thought about this so much? I beg of you, why do I know all this information? Now Echo Star gets to do it.

I just want to say my reaction to this is that the camera that's facing you right now also shows a little bit of Kranz's computer and she was on threads for like 85%. Which I think is a fair. I'm having a great time over here. I was looking at a, I was looking up Dish, Texas. General Motors tries to sell Hughes Electronics in 2001 and somewhere in there. Right? There's a little domino. The big domino, 100% is the 4-3. gray scale Snyder cut. I don't know what to tell you. This is such a waste.

The whole thing was a waste. No one got better service. None of their stupid ideas came true. Remember when AT&T was like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to preload everyone's Android phones with bloatware and then give you many episodes of Game of Thrones.

And that's the future of mobile. I remember because I'm a good reporter. And I sat in the briefing and I tried not to laugh. They're buying it for a dollar. All right. That's it. Well, they'll both be dead in 10 years. This is why Cranes is leaving. She's like, I can't listen to this anymore.

No, Tubey's going to take them all out. It'll be fine. My flex server's coming for them. All right. Cranz, it has been a joy. It has been a joy. Are you excited to eat this cake? I'm excited.

I've been smelling this cake for so well. Honestly, that's why I'm ending the show. It's time to stuff our faces. Sorry, David. It has been a lovely pleasure working with you, but there is cake. I will tell you this. One time David left, and we dressed him up as a pirate. when he was leaving. You can go look that up. That was on video.

And that is back. Yeah. So the doors. He also sang a song. And now there's an HR version of our company that exists. Now we have laws. I will just say two things. One, Paramount Plus is officially dead now that you're leaving the verge. This is it. You were the last one. It's over. Good riddens to Paramount Plus. And also I do have your phone number and I will be texting you about E-ink several times a week. Yeah. So just let me know whatever like, you know, freelance fee you need for that to just yell at... Sounds good. Yell at me about a yink.

I will miss you terribly. I'll miss you too. All right, that's it. That's the Vergecast. We're renaming ourselves to Echo Star as of next week. Rock and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you.

Give us a call at 866, Verge 1-1. The Verge is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poor, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. you next week.