The Vergecast - God will be declared by a panel of experts

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

 If you want to understand the full spectrum of AI software, from "straightforward problem-solving tool" to "never-ending slop machine," all you need to do is pay attention to everything Adobe launched at its conference this week. David and Nilay run through the news, which will change how people use Photoshop but also maybe change our social feeds forever. After that, they talk about OpenAI's conversion to a for-profit business, and specifically the truly wild way OpenAI and Microsoft talk about the future of AGI. Finally, in the lightning round, they discuss Brendan Carr, Cybertrucks, the Trump Phone, Ghost Posts, and more. Help us improve The Verge: Take our quick survey at theverge.com/survey. Further reading: ⁠Photoshop and Premiere Pro’s new AI tools can instantly edit your work ⁠ ⁠You can tell Adobe Express’s new AI assistant to edit designs for you⁠ ⁠Adobe’s AI social media admin is here with ‘Project Moonlight’ ⁠ ⁠Mark Zuckerberg is excited to add more AI content to all your social feeds⁠ ⁠Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg defends AI spend: 'We're seeing the returns'⁠ ⁠OpenAI completed its for-profit restructuring — and struck a new deal with Microsoft ⁠  ⁠The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership⁠ ⁠OpenAI lays groundwork for juggernaut IPO at up to $1 trillion valuation | Reuters⁠ ⁠OpenAI has an AGI problem — and Microsoft just made it worse ⁠ ⁠OpenAI made ChatGPT better at sifting through your work information ⁠ ⁠Sam, Jakub, and Wojciech on the future of OpenAI with audience Q&A⁠ ⁠The Kingmaker | WIRED⁠ ⁠Congratulations to the Tesla Cybertruck on its 10th recall.⁠ ⁠Trump℠ Mobile | All-American Performance. Everyday Price. $47.45/Month⁠ ⁠Threads is getting disappearing posts ⁠ ⁠Ads will arrive on Samsung Family Hub smart fridges next month. ⁠ ⁠The FCC is going after broadband nutrition labels. ⁠ ⁠Brendan Carr is a Dummy⁠ ⁠Bending Spoons is buying AOL for some reason ⁠ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WNBA 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, unexplained to me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics.

New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Will America recover its political decency after Trump leaves office? I think the bigger concern I have than Trump's staying power is, let's say he's cratering. He has had an effect on the civic mind that is not going to go away. I'm Preet Bharara, and this week, George Packer of the Atlantic joins me

to discuss Trump's lasting effect on the American mind. The episode is out now. Search and follow. Stay tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Birdcast, flagship podcast of Generative Phil. We're going to make 25 minutes of this podcast, and then we're going to click a button,

and it's going to be three hours of his podcast. And that's what we're doing here. What you've all been asking for the whole time. I'm your friend David Pierce, Neil I Patel is here. Hey, buddy. Hey, man. We got to do one together,

and then I was gone, and now we're back. And then my house live on fire. You can never leave again. Yeah, I really, like, I learned about this from a, like, a blue sky post and then a social video that has been everywhere on my feeds from you being like, PSA, throw your serve protectors away. I learned a lot about what happens when, my face goes viral from that video.

So, you know, search protectors expire. This is just a thing. All the manufacturers will tell you after three to five years, like get rid of them. Some are even shorter. If you are the type of person who knows you have the kind of search protector that doesn't expire, don't leave comments. Like, you are one of one. Like, if you know your search protector is a serious search protector that doesn't expire,

that means you know that. Everyone else despise the regular kind. But the comments on the search protector video was like, throw them away, were like, this guy's paid off by big surge. It was very good. And they're like, you just trust me because you had a bad experience. Like, no, you just read the other comments or everyone's agreeing with me. It was very good.

Again, I learned a lot about what virality can accomplish. If one person got rid of some old search protectors that expire, we've met our goal. I'm now looking at the search protector that is like all my stuff is plugged into one search protector down here. And it is like old and dusty. and I'm just like, I always thought the space heater was going to be the thing that eventually burned my house down and now I'm like it's probably the Surge Protector. I heard a story from another person. Again, you know, the people on TikTok and YouTube shorts are going to say this all conspiracy. But another person that we know that Becky and I know was like, oh, my search protector also exploded, but it did significantly more damage to my home.

Yikes. So the stories are out there, man. It's not just me. This is not just chem trails. If you do work for Big Surge and you want a whistleblow on Big Surge. Get at us. Firstcast to theverse.com. It's just, like, people see, like, exactly what they want to see in all things.

And this one was, like, a perfect inkblot test for, like, my search protectors are made in the USA 20 years ago. I'm never going bad. I'm like, I don't know, man. Good for you, I guess. Congratulations. That's really not the point I was trying to make. Yeah, fair enough. All right.

Well, we have a bunch of stuff to do today. It's, like, it's basically just a week full of AI stuff. This is, like, the world we live in. We have AI business to talk. about Adobe Max's this week, which is like all about AI. But first, I should mention right up top, Decoder is now a video podcast. This is the only time I will mention Decoder. And it's very good on video, actually, and you should watch it because you get to watch Neelai make a lot of faces at Rick people, which is the thing I enjoy most about it. Actually, it's the other people's

faces that are very good. I mean, there are faces in both directions, for sure. Just there's a version of Decoder that is just the reaction shots that might be a more compelling podcast. Yeah, no, we should definitely start super cutting. Just no, I... In particular, there's a slight look off camera at the PR people and they have in the room. And when I see that, I know it's time. Like, Decoder is always Nilai versus Media Training. But when I see that slight off-axis worry, it's like...

Stead up in the chair a little bit. Yeah, exactly. Also, thank you to everybody who's reached out about ad-free podcasts. We keep talking about this because people keep discovering it and it is like... The emails that I've gotten, the social posts from people who, my favorite is I keep hearing from people who are like, I keep instinctively skipping ahead to get through ads when you say, we'll be right back. And then there's no ads, so I have to go back. Oh, that's really good. It's very funny.

But go get the ad-free podcast. If you're a Verge subscriber, if you're a Verge subscriber, fernage.com slash subscribe. It's good website. Make us ungovernable. And also, before we get into it, it's Halloween as you're listening to this. If you're listening to this on Friday. and Nilai, I need to tell you my Halloween story, but I want to know what you're doing for Halloween.

Well, I'm taking a K-pop demon hunter around town. I assume that's going to be like the number one, like five to 15 Halloween costume this year. Oh, yeah. My town is full of seven-year-old K-pop team hunters. So is our staff, by the way. Hayden Field is dressing up as a K-Pop demon hunter. She told me.

I sent her a picture of Max's costume. She's like, me too. Yeah, that's what we're doing. We already, and we already had like the Halloween in Funron and da-da-da-da in this town. It was very cute. That's awesome. So we're doing, my whole family is doing Toy Story. I've talked about the Toy Story obsession recently. So, uh, our, our youngest is going to be Rex, the dinosaur. Arthur's going to be Buzz. I'm Woody and Anna. My wife is Jesse. And I just want to tell you a very short story. So Anna bought all these costumes for us because

she's wonderful. And, uh, basically went on Amazon searched, you know, the name costume and bought the first thing that came up that had good reviews. And it turns out that Amazon is a tricky thing to buy clothing on. And so what Anna accidentally bought is what I can only describe as a sexy Jesse costume. Yes. And so Anna got duped by a confusing Amazon listing into essentially buying Jesse-themed lingerie. That just came to our house and she gets like four seconds into trying on the first part of her Jesse costume. And she's just like, I don't think this is.

We're not going to the preschool Halloween party like this. I have a 10 a.m. Halloween party on Friday. I don't think we're going to be doing that. So it's a PSA to everybody. Like, look at all the pictures before you buy your Halloween costumes. I was really hoping that you were the one who ended up with the sexy costume. I knew this was going to end with sexy costume. Yeah.

And I'm disappointed. It's not David got the sexy costume. Sexy Woody is just like, it's just sitting right there. You know what I mean? We've just been waiting for this. Toy Story 6 is like sexy Woody all the way down. That's very good. We needed to dress up for the fun run.

So Max 1 is a really. Rainbow, which was like her thing that she can run in, which is the thing. Becky always goes as hot 80s lady, because she can just wear her workout clothes and those are hot lady. And I was like, I didn't get anything. So I was like, I'll be like hot 80s guy. And then I also just put on most of my own clothes. And I just had like slightly bigger hair. And I was like, this works. Pop the collar. Let's call it a day. That's the Patel commitment I'm looking for. All right. Let's get into the news. So the first thing we should talk about is basically like what Adobe did because I think there's there's this fascinating sliding scale of what is going on

in the AI world and what AI is for that you can kind of chart the whole spectrum from what I would call like interesting tools to do interesting stuff using new infrastructure technology all the way down to like disastrous slop what if it ended the world yeah that whole story was at Adobe Max So let's start at one end of the spectrum and just sort of work our way down. Does that sound good? Yeah, that seems right. Okay. So which means we should probably start with Photoshop and Premiere Pro.

And the big news, I would say, I'm particularly, Chris, you're a big Lightroom user, right? And you've been kind of convinced by some of the AI stuff that Adobe is doing. More than convinced. Yeah? Totally integrated in a workflow. Don't know how to use my cameras without some of the AI features in lightroom. Okay. So there's a lot of that kind of all over Photoshop and Premiere Pro now, right?

There's the, there was a big update to generative Phil, which people love. It's the like, just sort of assume what's going on around the edges of whatever you're, people love it. There's a new thing that you can basically use all of Photoshop's features and menus just with AI prompts. Like you can just sort of tell it what you want to do rather than going and finding the button for it, which I think is like just straightforwardly genius. Like, go use the app for me because I don't want to figure out how to find this one.

tool hidden three menus down. Terrific idea. There's a thing called assisted culling that is, it's a lightroom feature, and it's supposedly going to just go through all the photos that you took and find the ones that are like the sharpest and then the right color range and sort of whittle the giant library down to just the ones

you should actually pay attention to. Again, interesting, like simple feature stuff. There's a thing called layered image editing that is basically like when you do some of the other AI stuff, it tries to solve for the sort of downstream effects of it. Like one of the examples that Jess Bytherbed gave in a story, she wrote for us is if you move an object in a photo, which you can now do in Photoshop,

just pick it up and move it pretty easily, it'll automatically reshape the shadows to make it make sense in the new place. So it's this like contextual awareness of the whole thing that makes AI just kind of work around it. As far as I can tell, this is the kind of stuff that is like, if not universally beloved and popular

among the creative community, like pretty close to it. If you were, if we didn't live in a world poisoned by generative AI and Adobe just announced some of these tools in the context of Photoshop, the way they used to announce some of these tools, we would be writing stories that people would universally be excited about. But we've done it before. Like when Adobe first started showing off variations of generative film, years and years ago, people were like, that's amazing.

contextual object removal when they first started showing off years and years ago. People were like, that's amazing. Yes, we wrote all the stuff about the nature of reality and what is a photo, but the professionals using these tools for work, they were just generally excited that their work and particularly tedious parts of their work were getting more exciting. When I say Lightroom is totally baked in my workflow. What I mean is that my old cameras have taken on new life because the AI-based noise reduction in Lightroom is so good.

that I can shoot my Nikon D-7500, which has the most expensive lenses I've ever bought for a camera. I can shoot it at its highest ISOs, which were all but unusable before, and Lightroom just fixes it. It's incredible.

It's just, I've taken the old Nikon image processing pipeline out of the equation. I just shoot raw with an old camera on expensive glass. Wow. And Lightroom is a new image processing pipeline. That is incredible. None of that is like AI, the way that we're talking,

like Sam Altman talks about AI. Right. That is just really advanced machine learning. That is, yep, there are some models in the background. But like the point of that is my old stuff got new life breathed into it. And I'm taking more and better pictures than I was before. Reflection removal in Lightroom. Totally just baked into my workflow.

Like there's just stuff that's really cool. My favorite feature in Photoshop, by the way, is sort of like an straightforward LLN feature. You can make a big, you can look at a big messy list of layers. and then say just rename all these layers the way that I would do it. Oh, that's cool. It just does it. That's incredible. There's a stuff here where it's like,

oh, we can make the task easier and make it more straightforward and make using the things simpler so more people can do it or the people who are really good at it can do it more efficiently. My favorite example of this stuff is always the automatic masking stuff

in Photoshop, which is like it's the sort of thing that theoretically anybody can do but for so many years it involved like diligently and slowly drawing a line around an object, which is like just a bad way to spend your time. And it's not a thing that anybody would argue

is like a useful professional skill to have. It's just a thing you had to do. And now, like there were some updates to that this time where it's just like now these apps are shockingly good at just like, we know what the object is and we can actually just pull it out of the image for you. And then there's new features now, this new feature called Harmonize

that will put it into something else and basically adapt it to its new, surroundings. So it'll change the lighting. It'll change the shadows. It'll change sort of everything about it to make it look like it belongs in its new place. And this is the kind of thing that it's like, if you want to extend that far enough out and be like, okay, what does it mean that you can convincingly put an object in another place? Fine. But this, like you said, this is the kind of stuff people are doing and have been doing professionally for a very long time. And this takes like a very tedious task that didn't need to be tedious and makes it not tedious. And that's very powerful.

I mean, and, you know, your smartphone can, if you take a picture on your smartphone now and open it in photos, Apple photos or Google photos, like both of them, like we cut out the people. Right. Like Apple's own imaging pipeline and Google's own imaging pipeline have semantic awareness. Like, this is the sky and that's the ocean and we'll make all the colors correct. And actually, it's very funny because often when you shoot a pink sky, it's like, that's the sky and it makes it blue anyway. But like semantic understanding what's happening in image and all this compositing, it is happening at the consumer level. and then you can see what Adobe is doing with AI at the professional level.

I think this is all really interesting, but the turn that is happening with Adobe is they're going from, we're going to make the tedious part easier or automate the tedious thing that people are already doing, and they're getting to, we're doing stuff that you could never do.

Like what? Give me an example. I honestly think AI powered noise reduction is just one of those things. Like, you can be as good at Lightroom as anyone has ever been. You can be as good at Photoshop as anyone has ever been. you cannot denoise a noisy raw image.

Like you as a person simply cannot do that. You have to throw an AI model of that problem and it can do it. And like I said, I think it is revolutionized how I think about my cameras. Then in some of their AI audio tools, they're doing stuff that no human can possibly do. This is where I think we, like, if we're on the scale of like tools to slop, we're like, this is where we start to inch, inch down the scale. We're still on the right side of the scale, but we're slowly inching down it. So there's like, like you were talking about, there's a bunch of new stuff.

in the Firefly app in particular that is like you can you can generate a soundtrack out of nothing you can generate speech out of nothing and and crucially you can now like really fine tune audio of all kinds like you can decide the tone of voice that you want someone to have

who did a voiceover you can do unbelievable things with the audio that you've found like this is the thing you're like what was it called project clean take is this the thing you were talking about? Yeah we got to run this audio I mean, this is, you can be as good at an audio engineer has ever existed in the world. You could not just take sounds out of the background the way that Adobe has made it possible with one click to take a sound at the background.

Let's just run the clip. I deliberately have not heard this clip. Travis, can you just play this? This next clip was an interview with my coworker Matt. He was speaking outside of the Adobe Seattle office in front of the Fremont Bridge. And let me just play a few seconds. We're in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, where the Adobe. office is located. And the cool thing about this office is where it's located.

So you can obviously hear that bell. That's because this bridge is a draw bridge that was actually opening while he was talking about it. So what we can do using our new and updated source separation technology is to take the audio from the video and break it up into its individual components directly in the timeline. Well that bell ringing was actually on the sound effects track so I can just mute it. And the cool thing about this is office is where it's located. No way! It's between Lake Union and the Fremont Bridge behind them.

That's just bananas. Okay, then no way is a little much, but that's still really cool. I mean, I like that they had to go outside and shoot that video exactly when the drawbridge was going up. And there's a part of me that says that Adobe rented a boat to go under the bridge exactly when they were shooting that video. Oh, no, I'd like to think of it. It's like the opposite of when you're trying to shoot something. And every time you do it, somebody like fires up the leaf blower in the background. They're like, you just have to, every time they're doing it, they're like, God damn it,

The drawbridge didn't go. We have to do it again. So, you know, contrived and you can't hear it perfectly, and I don't know how much clipping is actually happening because usually when you do some of that AI stem separation, there's like some weird clipping and some weird artifacts that occur. You couldn't do that. No.

You could not do that before to rescue that audio. And there's a part of me that says those are the capabilities of the next generation of creators we'll lean into. There's stuff we simply could not do before that we can do now. I can take an old camera and make it new again. I can take unusable audio that I shot anywhere on location with all kinds of stuff happening in the background and make it usable. Even on our podcast here at The Verge, like I know our audio engineers get horrible audio from some of our sources. Yes.

For the number of tech CEOs, I know around Dakota, the number of tech companies that cannot make a podcast recording work. Like the number of voice memos on your iPhone backup recordings we have published coming from CEOs is much higher than you think. and we just kind of rescue them with these tools. That is incredible. Like I honestly think that stuff is incredible. It makes me more excited about just AI in general than the slot factory. But the slot factory just keeps coming for the ride. It does.

And you can see it like in their earnings this quarter. Like the slot factory is winning. The slot factory is where everybody very clearly thinks the money is. And this is a good way into the, again, we're just. running down this scale with with Adobe products. The next thing, which I think is like dead center of this scale, and I'm curious how it makes you feel, is the new AI assistant in Adobe Express,

which is basically it's Adobe's simpler image editing tool. It's like Photoshop for babies. It's like, yeah, it's their canvas. And essentially what it is now is it's this public beta of a new assistant that you just tell it what you want to do to your image and it will do it. And you can be very specific. You can be like, you know, change this color, remove this thing over here.

Or I think one of the examples they gave was like, give it a jungle theme and it'll just do that. And so like on the one hand, this is not out of no, this is still in the realm of like this is an editing tool, right? And this is like a thing that you made that you're doing stuff too, that you are deciding what to do. But at the same time, like make it a jungle theme,

it hands a lot of work off to this AI. assistant. And I think this is where we start to tip into, like, is this, is this a useful tool that you're giving to people who need it? Or are we starting to make things that maybe we shouldn't need to make here? Well, you know, I would say that you can prompt Photoshop to do stuff for you is right in the same zone. Right? You open a file in Photoshop. You're like, I just, can you just mask the stuff and do this stuff? And you can just type it in prompt and Photoshop will do it. That is, you know, as close to the same vision as everyone else has. That's an agent. Yeah. And she's using Photoshop for you. You get all the way to, we'll democratize that, we'll take away the Photoshop of it, and you just say make it a jungle theme.

You haven't, it's still an agent, right? It just might not have any taste. I think it's really interesting. Canva doesn't get as much crap for AI as Adobe gets. They're very differently situated companies that the CEO of Canva, Melanie, she's been on to Coder. She's like very charming in her way. But Canva is explicitly for not artists. Right.

It is explicitly to democratize design and art and particularly marketing design for like everyone else in a company. And so when they automate stuff and when they make it easier to use AI to prompt Canva, like they don't face the same backlash because their audience is already not doing it. They all compete and maybe they're going to run into each other. But Adobe's audience, like, that's who it's for. Right. And so I think this stuff just feels more threatening. Well, yeah, and I think what's strange for Adobe is, like, its audience actually large, like Express is not sort of an Adobe class leading product. Like, that's where Adobe is playing ketchup to this other generation of things that came along, whereas, like, there are people who have been using Photoshop professionally for literal decades, right?

And so that's where you're going to find people with much stronger opinions about everything, whereas Express, you get the sense Adobe feels just utterly free to do whatever it wants. It does. I just, I think, again, we're on, we're on this, like, spectrum of slop. And like, oh, no, the marketing people will make more Twitter ads more quickly with an AI tool. It's just like doesn't, whatever, man. You know, like, that's, to me, it's not the problem. The problem is when you start automating both the production and the distribution of it. And then the platforms are like, this is the future, which is very much the sort of next two turns we're going to talk about here. Yep. Let's, I mean, yeah, you, we just. I've headlong into that with this thing called Project Moonlight. And if I'm understanding Project Moonlight correctly, it basically, it is a sort of holistic social planner for you, in that it will look at your various assets that you have in Creative Cloud. It will look at your existing social channels,

and then it will just make things for you. You just say, like, here is what I have done in the past. Here's some stuff. and it will just design a whole slop factory of social media stuff for you. I think we have a clip of them explaining this too. Let's just play this real fast. Here's a sneak peek at something we call Project Moonlight

is an AI assistant that acts like a social strategist for you. I'm going to go ahead and ask Project Moonlight to help me brainstorm some fun post ideas that I can do with these images of my dog Bosco. So you can see those idea cards coming in super quick. Let's take a look. So I have three different ideas from Bosco's birthday bash to Life with Asheba and Sunbeam snoozer. You can even see in the Bosco birthday bash it's suggesting an Instagram carousel, the content and caption.

I love this idea. Let's dive a little deeper. So I'm going to go ahead and ask Project Moonlight for some more suggestions. I want to make this Instagram carousel a little bit more visually interesting. So we have ideas from speech bubbles saying another year closer to world domination coming from Bosco's mouth. That's super funny. Or even getting this kind of best strategy to incorporate this Bosco post, like keeping it authentic and fun. Maybe mention how Bosco fits into your creative life. You know, he definitely sleeps in my design studio when I'm designing.

And the doodle overlay openers would be perfect. This sucks. Like, I just, there's something that just dies inside of me when she laughs at another year closer to world domination, which is just objectively not funny. Yeah, we've trained our AI model on a millennial cringe. It can do that as much as anyone has ever done it. Here's what I'll say. There's a reason I wanted to start with Adobe. I think Adobe is a criminally undercovered company.

And so we spend a lot of time covering Adobe, just Weatherbed, on our team in particular, spends a lot of time covering Adobe. The reason I say it's undercovered is that everyone thinks of Adobe is the Photoshop company. And what Adobe figured out ages ago is that just having advertisers make the images in Photoshop was not enough. They wanted to own that.

that image or own what happened to that image all the way down to you, the consumer, see it, and then maybe buy something. So Adobe owns a giant ad network. Like, bizarrely, at the end of every Prime Day, we get reports from Adobe. Adobe sends out the press release that's like, here's how Prime Day went, because they own this huge advertising tracking system. And what they have really figured out is if you make images commercially or videos commercially, right, if you're in the business of making money by being a creative,

it's not just making the asset that matters. It's like the whole life of the asset that matters. This is a big deal. And it's sort of like underreported and undercovered about Adobe. So Adobe's saying, oh, shit, we can just have the AI do that whole thing. Beginning to 10, we're going to take the data from the end about how the thing performed on Instagram and feed that back into Photoshop so that you just give us a photo and we make a million little ads or Instagram captions or whatever.

and then we publish variations that to Instagram. We track it and we make another one. Yeah, dude, that is, that's the slot machine. That slot machine, by the way, is what everyone else sees is the opportunity. Yeah, I was just about to say this, what you just described is the exact business plan of a number of other very large companies that we cover. Like, that's what meta is doing with ads, especially,

but increasingly also with just content all over Facebook. It's what YouTube seems to be running rapidly towards. Like, this idea of, oh, we can own, the whole stack and then we can just do it for you. And all you do is press the, I don't know, the do it button and just assume that this stuff will happen at such scale that it'll work anyway. I think the underpinning theory of so much of this is like the internet is so big and there is so much opportunity that your stuff doesn't have to be that good.

We will just spray it so efficiently around the internet that the volume will outweigh the quality and you will get paid. And because you don't see any of it, you'll never see any of your ads. You'll never see how they look in context. It all just happens in the background and money pours into your account. And what a perfect, terrific, creative outcome that would be. There's a quote from Zuckerberg a few months ago where he's like, The Future of Meta is you give us some money and we generate you some business results.

Yeah. And what he means by that is you give us some money and maybe a picture of your product and we will just generate ads until you sell as many products as you told us you want to sell. Yeah. And that is fine. Like, in one sense, it's already Meta's business bottle, right? Like, you pay them to target some ads and then you make some money and you can direct sell as much stuff as you want. Sure.

The part where you take all the creatives out of the loop and meta is just generating infinite creative to the point where Nvidia gives demos of just, we'll just 3D model the shampoo for you. We'll never even take a photo of the shampoo bottle. We'll just generate the shampoo bottle and then generate the ads around it. That stuff is wild. And I look at Adobe here and I'm like, oh, it's very cool that you do the denoise in light iron. Very cool. But their business model is create the image, distribute the image, track the image, help you make money. And they're like, we're going to automate that.

And things like Project Moonlight are as clear of a statement of how they want it to go. Is anyone? I think the challenge, and I think they're really interesting next turn of the social internet, is all the social platforms are like, we don't need Adobe for that. We'll just do it ourselves. Right. And then that leads us directly into, boy, a bunch of these companies had gigantic earnings this quarter. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know how. I don't really care about earnings, but boy, does that make me worry that the slot factory is just cranked to high. Yeah. I mean, the two that really jumped out to me on this front were meta, which had like a weird earnings call because they took some giant stock hit that I'm not interested in or care about. but I mean Mark Zuckerberg just like got on the earnings call and was basically like we think the next era of Facebook is AI generated content like just in as many words that's what it is and I think I keep wanting to draw this line between like it's fine if we're going to do this for

ads right like a perfectly efficient advertising system that doesn't involve good creative is like fine right like I don't know that that affects me in a huge way and and the fact that all these me spent all this time saying perfectly targeted really great ads are actually good for users and are now onto this is just like thank you for admitting the thing you told me for 20 years was a lie Mark Zuckerberg but it's like I'm tempted to leave that to the side and be like the actual problem is when we're pointing these tools at like people doing creative expression sort of for its own sake but then I look at TikTok and all of that is the same thing right like half the TikTok videos I see are ads.

And so it's like all of this stuff is just running directly at each other. And it's like, okay, if everybody is trying to sell me something, what is the difference? And does that line between somebody doing art and somebody doing ads even exist on these platforms anymore? And I think the platforms think it doesn't. All right. Well, you know my hottest tick is that the creator economy is about to implode. And the pressure on any individual creator is so high that I have nothing but sympathy for individual creators. you thought you were going to run a business on YouTube.

And at any moment, YouTube can take your business away from you. Right? My joke is that every YouTuber gets their wings when they make the video about how pissed off they are at YouTube. Because they realize that they have no power in that relationship whatsoever, and YouTube can just destroy them on a win. And that's been true for years and years and years. And what's coming now is the platforms are going to destroy the creators. It is just coming.

The pressure on any individual creator to do brand deals to pay the rent because the platforms don't pay them enough money is so high that, and I mean this with a lot of love towards all the creators that we are friends with. Most creators, if you look at their business, they're just ad agencies. Yeah. You're just running a bunch of single person ad agencies across the internet and you are starting to, you know, cut off your, like, authentic relationship with your audience because the ad agencies. and the brands are telling you what to say. And because the platforms aren't paying enough money, that's the revenue you rely on. And you're going to start making compromises

to preserve that revenue. That's bad. And increasingly, there's no other move. And there's no other move. Right. And we hear it from creators over and over and over again. And the brands and the companies are so aggressive that they are starting to turn the screws over tighter.

Like I have heard a million stories that are like, we'll give you this product in exchange for a good review. and that's how you're going to get your brand deal. Millions of these stories everywhere. Again, I have nothing but sympathy for the individual creators. I just see the pressure across that market broadly. So that's bad.

Then you add in the pressure of, well, what if you don't need a creator? What if YouTube can just make a synthetic creator who will say whatever you want and generate millions of clips of this fake creator saying that your camera is the best? And then you can just pay to put that at everyone's feet.

Right. Which is the promise that these companies are making to these companies about their AI advertising tools. We will make you infinite, creative, infinitely targeted, and deliver you business results. Well, that sucks. The pressure on the creator rates is going to be incredible once that happens. Yeah. So that's one more pressure. Well, and then as a creator, you're forced to play that exact same game, right? Because you're like, well, now what I need to do is run a perfectly efficient content targeting business or else literally no one's ever going to see my videos.

Or, yeah, or I need to play to the algorithm even more to build a channel big enough so I can generate these results, which means I'm going to be even less authentic and do whatever the algorithm. Mr. Beasts. But then the algorithm is now flooded with AI content made by the platforms at massive scale because they think that that will keep people more engaged than their creator content. So you see the pressure from the individual creator standpoint is the platforms have never paid enough money. Your standard purview rate on YouTube or TikTok or whatever has never been. worth the dam. The pressure to cave to like marketer demands for your sponsorship deals is higher than ever, but those rates are going to drop because the AI influencers are coming for those dollars. And then to get a big enough audience, you have to compete in the algorithm with AI content

sharing by the platforms itself. That is all a mess. And I just see that pressure on the whole creator economy and it feels very bad. And again, I've not, on an individual basis, every creator is making the right choices. They're rationally responding to a bunch of pressure that they face. But we are not part of that economy. We don't do that stuff. And so we can just step outside of it and say, boy, the creator economy as it is currently composed is about to implode under the, like the triple pressures of AI.

Yeah. Like, Zuckerberg is not being shy about it. We have a clip from him from the earnings call where he's just straight up like, I'm going to dump a bunch of AI slop on you. We should just run the clip. Social media has gone through two eras so far. First was when all content was from friends,

family, and accounts that you followed directly. The second was when we added all of the creator content. Now, as AI makes it easier to create and remix content, we're going to add yet another huge corpus of content on top of those. The thing he says, essentially over and over, that he doesn't say there, but clearly believes is that that third thing will just wipe out all of the first and second

and that that's okay. Well, here's, I mean, like, there's only so many people in the world, Mark, and they only have so much time in the day. So just supply and demand dictates that you add much more content to the feeds, the attention will be taken from something else. Yeah.

I know where the attention will be taken from because you're not paying friends, family, and, you know, the elementary school parents group. You're paying the creators. You're going to take the money away from the creators with your, you know, universe of your corpus. You're going to take the money away from the creators with your corpus of AI content.

By the way, whenever anybody opens Instagram, I know what they're thinking is. I can't wait to access a third corpus of content. I've been meaning to get a new corpus. But what I think is interesting about that, and this is like, we should talk about this big YouTube reorganization that I think you're really interested in, too, is the platform bet is that it won't cost the platform anything, right? Like, I think there's a certain feeling that I have as a user that, like, at the end of the process you just described, not only is

there nothing left on those platforms for creators, there's nothing left for me except, like, AI generated ads. And you don't get any sense. that any of these platforms fear that outcome at all. In fact, they're organizing themselves around making it happen more quickly. Yeah. And I can't tell if that's just because they don't have any taste. Like, I can tell it's because Mark Zuckerberg does have any taste. You can look at Zuck's, like, T-shirts and his, like, UFC phase and his haircut.

And you can be like, I can maybe identify taste here. But you can't actually, you can't tell me what Zuck likes. Right? He doesn't have this. like forward taste that dictates what's good and what's bad. Zuck's taste is that he wants to win. That's it. He just doesn't want to miss another era and he wants to win whatever he thinks.

Even his t-shirts often communicate that fact. Yeah. That that is what he wants to do is win. YouTube's taste. We can talk about YouTube. YouTube actively tries not to have taste. Like they describe themselves as infrastructure and pipes. Right.

And I think organizing themselves around distributing AI is very much just in keeping with Google. but also in keeping with the sense that this is happening and we had better make sure our infrastructure can support it. And there's a lot to say about YouTube in that way, but like,

that's YouTube's self-conception. So whether or not the people who run YouTube have a whole bunch of like individual taste, sort of secondary effect that they constantly describe themselves as infrastructure. I think YouTube wants you to believe

it's infrastructure. I think the experience of being a viewer or creator on YouTube suggests that it is far from infrastructure. Like it is not a dumb pipe in any, way, shape, or form. But it desperately wants you to think that it is. And I think, like,

you talk about Adobe as a company that gets undercovered. I think YouTube gets vastly undercovered for that reason, because YouTube is like, we're just, we're just a website people post videos on. Like, what do you mean? But now I think- The only website people post videos. Right. But now, especially with this AI stuff, YouTube is getting so much more proactive and involved, like you said, in this whole process. Like, there's a, there's a whole new thing in Adobe Premiere that just lets you one-click publish directly to YouTube shorts. Like, they've just, they had built a partnership, they built this pipeline and it is like, YouTube has gone from being a place you upload a video you already made to like, they're

increasingly taking that whole pipeline you just described and pulling it into YouTube. And that changes what that platform is. And when it's AI, you can just do it because there's nothing, there's nothing else there. You just, you make whatever you want inside of the YouTube studio app and you're good to go. Why do I keep saying the creator economy is going to implode? Because there's some analysis of Google's earnings this quarter that suggests YouTube shorts now makes more money than YouTube proper. That's bad news for the creator economy, right?

The way YouTube shorts is monetized vastly different than the way traditional YouTube is monetized. Second, YouTube shorts, just like TikTok or Instagram Reels, not built on a follow model. So to the extent that any creator owned an audience on YouTube by having lots of followers and notifications, all that goes out the window when it's just algorithmic. swiping content and maybe you'll get some followers, probably you won't. Like the vast majority of people who see your stuff are not going to be your followers. This is a huge problem. Yep.

And then you're like, and then we can flood that algorithm with AI content generated directly by marketers and Adobe Premiere. All that's bad. Like it is just, it's bad in the sense that I think aesthetically it will be a disaster. I think we're all just going to look at a lot of weird slop. And I think it's just bad for the creator economy. It's bad for all the creators that people actually like on these platforms. And to your point, I don't think the platforms have thought through what happens when they kill the creators.

I really don't. I think they think that people are going to just open Instagram no matter what's there. I think that's right. There is a real sense among all of these apps that they are too big to delete, right? That like the muscle memory of opening Instagram is so big 25 times a day that you're going to keep doing it even if there's nothing there for you. And it might be true. Like, it honestly, it might be true. I still go on TikTok a lot, even though the TikTok shop is 60% of the videos I see and I don't like that.

I still open TikTok more often than I'm like. The inertia is super, super strong. But it feels like eventually, eventually it's going to break. Except all of them are reacting to Sora being the number one app in the app store. And it's full of nothing but slop. Yes, which suggests that there is a version of it. I actually give Sora a lot of credit because it is the most, interesting idea in this space that anyone has had by a mile. Like the cameo thing, feel however

you want to feel about it in like grand terms. The idea of like I can upload a video and then put myself in other videos, fabulous idea. It's such a good growth hack. Like it's it's the, the whole thing where like what everybody wanted when Instagram came around was to take pictures of themselves, right? And then when we made videos, it's people made videos of themselves. And being able to post that thing becomes very sticky and very valuable. valuable and very important. I think anecdotally the sense I get is the soil novelty is already kind of wearing

off because the like, I can make myself an astronaut thing is like fun once and then not anymore because it's like not that fun to be a fake astronaut. I don't know. But I can do disinformation at massive scale. Very

useful to all people. Pretty fun. I will say the videos of Mr. Rogers talking shit with Tupac Chouar are incredible. I feel very bad about All of your feeds are so much more fun than mine. It's, I mean, listening to Mr. Rogers just do D's nuts joke after D's not stroke with two punch core is very wrong.

I want to be clear. I feel bad when I consume this content. I also laugh my ass off every single time. It is bad for the world and very funny. I don't know. You know when you don't know because you're a goody two shoes. You know when you smoke your first cigarette in like eighth grade? Eighth grade

God Racine Wisconsin What are they doing up there We had more bars per capita than anywhere else in the country That's that's my town's claim Fair enough Congrats

It's like exactly that feeling Like I know this is bad I know my parents will be mad I should feel ashamed Also this rules And whatever that swirl of emotions is is Mr. Roderison Tupac Deep face

Yeah that sounds right You will go find him Let me know what you think about If you If you're a person who made those videos, make another one where Neely is just ripping a SIG in the background and send it to me. That's all I want in the whole world. Every round again, someone asked me, like, did you play sports in high school? I'm like, no, I smoke cigarettes. That's what I did. That's, you were too cool for sports. That's what everybody

says about Nelai. If you want to link to Nelai's band on YouTube, get at me. I'll happily send it to you at any time. All right. Well, so the reason underneath all of this, is money. Yeah. And at least, at least at this moment, there is a whole lot of money in saying AI out loud on earnings calls. And there's a particular version of the money story

that I think we should tell here. But first, I think we should take a break. And then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about Open AI and the swirling trillions of dollars in all of this. We'll be right back. Hey, I'm Matt Bouchel.

Comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your 4U page. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, wait, don't swipe away. It's called That Sounds Like a Lot, as in that feeling when you check your phone in the morning, you read three headlines and you immediately think, oh, that sounds like a lot. I can't deal with all this. But guess what?

I can deal with it. And I'm going to get into it every Friday. I'll break down whatever chaos is happening in the world. Then I'll sit down with a comedian. You can be progressive and not be, like, fucking annoying. Maybe an actor. They go, feminism has gone too far. You go, why?

Because the Sadie Hawkins dance happened? Maybe a filmmaker. Since leaving that show, I'm challenged sparing. I just got to hang out and try. You're the one with a charmed life. Could be a politician. Basically anyone who responds to my cold DMs. We're recording the whole thing in a beautiful studio, so yes, you can watch it on YouTube,

or you can listen wherever you get your podcast. This is not the place to get the news, but it is the place to feel a little better about it. That sounds like a lot, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. 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. 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 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. What I want you to know upon return is that I played a number of Mr. Andrus and Tupaclips for David.

And now David is broken. This is, how am I supposed to podcast now? Oh, God. That was, this is really something. I'm just, I'm going to end up just like word vomiting the things from that video in the middle here. Okay. From Mr. Rogers to Open AI, this is what we do on the first cast. This is open AI's entire evaluation is Mr. Rogers doing D's not strokes with EZE and Tupac Shakor.

That's real. So the big like business. news of the week was that Open AI finished its restructuring into a for-profit company. This has been, what, 18 months in the works and had a pretty hard deadline of the end of this year. It's been a big controversial thing. Elon Musk is suing everybody's mad. The details are whatever, but essentially now Open AI is a for-profit company sort of theoretically controlled by a nonprofit called the Open A.I. Foundation. The Open A.I. Foundation owns 26%, which, according to Open AI, is worth about $130 billion. All the numbers are fake and they're about to get much bigger, as we

will talk about. But that's what the Open AI Foundation has. Microsoft has a little more, about 27%. And then the rest is basically split between existing investors and Open AI employees. It's a lot of money. But the reason we have brought this up is because, NELI, I would say this announcement elicited your favorite press release of 2025? Easily. Would you say that's fair? Easily. I want to, but can I start by just laying some validation here?

Walt Mossberg is close to like a mentor as I've ever had. And there's a story about Walt in his heyday's reviewer that I think about maybe every single day. It is a profile of Walt in Wired magazine from years and years and years ago. And it opens with him walking through the Consumer Electronics show, CS in Vegas, and the CEO of Sirius XM is screaming at Walt in the trade show about how a bad review of the latest Sirius XM radio tanked their stock price. And he's like screaming at Walt and Walt's not paying attention.

He's screaming at Walt. And finally, Walt, and this is literally in the story. It's in the wired story. So it's the last sentence of the first paragraph of the wired story. Walt screams back at the CEO of Sirius XM. I don't give a fuck about your stock price. Ironic. Ironic moment for Walt Mossberg.

You know, I say a lot of things are the mission statement of the verge, but I don't. give a fuck about your stock price is like as close to being the beating heart of our, of our mission here. And I bring this up because it's so easy to get lost in the numbers. It's so easy to get lost in India that any given quarter is the win or the loss. It's so easy to treat the entire economy gambling. We don't, you know, we, like, our ethics policy forbids us from having investments in these companies. Like, whatever. We're just not tied up in their financial returns. We are very focused on are these. these products good? And in many ways, are these press releases written by a rational brain

that is not on drugs? You know, like, I don't care about your stock price. I don't care what you're saying about the diluted value on an as convert. Who cares? It's interesting in the sense that it affects your products and who builds them and who's winning. Fine. But I actually care about that. The reason I bring it up, I just, the only frame I would add to this is the reason I bring this up in this way is that I think you can explain a vast amount of the AI focus of the tech industry just by the fact that there is so much money in it. Like if you open your mouth in downtown San Francisco and say AI technologies, somebody just hands you a billion dollars. Right. And it's been a long time since we have had that specific thing. And so I think the money

is all fake. The money is all insane. I continue to be on the record that I think Open AI is like a house of cards that is going to tear itself and the economy down with it. But the money is the thing. And the money in so many ways is the story of this thing that they've dressed up in the funniest press release of 2025. Right. And the gap is that the products can't do what the money suggested. That's what I'm trying to point out. Like everyone is so focused on the money and the stock prices and that da-da-da-da-da, but the heart of I don't give a fuck about your stock prices, but your product was bad. Right. Great. Okay. I'm bringing this up to just like set this stage four. I read this press release, which is just about the conversion of open AI from one

structure to another and Microsoft's new deal terms of open AI. And I was like, did anyone sane read this press release? Because it sounds like the rantings of someone who is fully high and drunk. Yeah, I mean, it does. But in like a very lawyerly way. You know what I mean? It's like a high and drunk lawyer. Well, that's most lawyers. It's not a sober profession. Should we just dramatically read this press release together? I want to, but what I want to say is, yes, we should. And the thing to know as we read it is that the heart of the disagreement between Microsoft and opening in the past was that OpenAI had a get out of jail free card where when they developed AGI, the exclusivity of Microsoft was over.

So this is really what they've been negotiating the whole time. Yeah. Opening I was like, you have to get, we are beholden to you until we do AGI. and that was like vague and complicated. And Sam Altman has spent the last couple of years like kind of rapidly bringing down the bar for what qualified as AGI. But it's still, they all still call it the thing.

Like the world will change when we get to AGI. So anyway, let's do this press release. So why don't you read the press release and I'll just read it another way that you can interpret it? Just line by line. Let's start with what has evolved. Stop me when you'd like to. Okay.

Yeah. So they talk about the money. And then here's a bulleted list of, what has evolved. Once AGI is declared by Open A.I. That declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. Once Jesus has been developed by Open AI, that declaration will not be verified by an independent expert panel. Right. What are you talking about? Once we develop digital God, and a verified panel of experts will be like, yep, there he is. That's God. That's the first bullet. Who's on your panel?

Other gods Is it the Pope? What are you talking about? Once AGI is developed, it will bring several religious leaders. It doesn't even say it up. It says declared. Declared, you're right. I just keep seeing that picture from the office of Steve Krell saying, I declare bankruptcy. Like, what are you talking about?

This is the first bowl. Wait, oh man, okay. So it's Sam Altman standing up saying, I declare AGI.I. And then Satya and Adela just off to the side going, you can't just say that and expect something to happen. Right. He's like, okay, call the Pope and the Dalai Lama, you know, like who else is cool? Should we invite Bella Hadee?

What are you talking? Like, how is this the first bullet? And I know that this is the first bullet because in the minds of the people who crafted this press release, the verification by an independent expert panel is the win. Right. because they didn't have that before. That's the thing they've clawed back from OpenAI. Right.

You can't just declare AI. All right, that's the first one. That's the first one. Okay. Number two, Microsoft's IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now include models post-AGI with appropriate safety guardrails. Microsoft's IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now include models post-Jesus with appropriate safety guardrails.

What? Like, oh, good. I'm glad that we have appropriate safety guardrails after we've invented digital god. Once technology has subsumed us all. What are the appropriate safety guardrails for the post AGI models? Are you just going to be like,

no, you know, you're very powerful, Vishnu, but I don't think you should destroy the world. There's just a button that says, please don't do that. This is the second bullet point. And you just look at it. You're like, this is nonsense. Like, what are, true? what are the appropriate safety guardrails. Also, through 2032 and now models post-AGI.

So you've already sort of said, we don't think there's going to be AGI by 2032. Right? Our IP rights for models and products extended through 2032 and now include models post-AGI. So somewhere in this time frame is Sam Altman's standing up and saying, I declare we've made digital gun. I think Microsoft thinks that's about to happen really soon. and they're like, he thinks that's his get out of jail free card and we're going to make sure that it's not. I'm just like these are the first two bullets and both of them require open AI to say that they've achieved the singularity, like in a real way. Here's an even better version of the timeline. Microsoft's IP rates to research defined as the confidential methods used in the development of models and systems will remain until either the expert panel verifies AGI or through 2030, whichever is first.

So not only are we doing God, we're doing God in the next five years. Yeah, whichever is first. Whichever's first. By the way, the expert panel has to get called in and verify AGI on this timeline. So let's say Sam Altman declares that he's developed digital God in, I don't know, mid-2020. You got to get the Pope, the Dalai Lama, you know, whoever else, Melania, whoever you're going to to throw on your panel and be like, is this digital God? You've got six months to decide. Who of the two of us do you think would be a fairer panelist on the AGI verification panel?

I mean, your dad's a minister. I feel like, you know, you've got, you can, you can phone a friend. What does that God think of, is it, is it, did they do the same? Do you know him? Does this seem familiar? Yeah, exactly. He's making a lot of AI slop. That doesn't, you know, W. W.J. It's just, okay, fine.

Here's a free idea. Somebody make W. W. W. W. W. Like a Live-Styd.

Like a Livestrong bracelet. Yeah. Like a sort of rope-braided bracelet. Yeah, this is, you're going to kill on the streets of San Francisco. Okay.

And then there's a bunch of stuff about research IP and it's essentially like all, Microsoft gets to do whatever it wants. It's the two. The ones you show you are, Microsoft can independently pursue AGI and Microsoft uses IP develop AGI. Yeah.

So, okay, well, one we have to do is Microsoft's IP rights now exclude OpenAI's consumer hardware. Sure. Johnny Ives. I'm going to guess Microsoft gave that one up pretty easily. It's the one where you're just like, sure, you can have this win so that I can get all the stuff that I actually want. Like, yeah.

Also, Microsoft is like, when we do consumer hardware, everyone around it dies. Yeah. Like, that's just a, that's just a barren wasteland. of ideas. Okay, let's see. Except for the mice. The mice are very good. Couple more here that we should get to.

Oh, here's one. This is maybe the most matter of fact, delightful one of all of them. Microsoft can now independently pursue AGI alone or in partnership with third parties. Microsoft can now independently pursue Jesus alone or in partnership with third parties. Sure.

Sure. Microsoft's Walk with Christ is now its own. It's fine. I hope everyone is pursuing the singularity. do. And we're going to come out on the other side. And, you know, the real AGI is the partnership with third parties we made along the way. Yeah. Okay. And then very next, if Microsoft uses opening eyes IP to develop AGI, prior to to AGI being declared, you want to just take that one before I even finish the sentence?

What are you talking about? Like, no normal person like going about their day in America, is like, man, I'm happy Microsoft's an open-eye clarified what happens that they invented digital God. But yes, if Microsoft uses Open AI's IP developed digital God prior to digital cod being declared, the models will be subject to compute thresholds. Yes, a very important term. Digital God only gets one GPU. Can't wait. Can't wait for the meeting after the Dalai Lama declares Sam Altman has developed digital God being like,

all right, we've got to subject everyone to compute threshold. how many Nvidia racks do you get for digital God? Okay, and then two associated ones here, the revenue share agreement remains until the expert panel

verifies AGI, though payments will be made over a longer period of time, which is Microsoft's way of saying you are going to continue to give us a tremendous amount of money no matter what happens. And then another way of saying exactly that, opening I has contracted

to purchase an incremental $250 billion of Azure services, and Microsoft will no longer have a right of first refusal to be Open AIS compute provider, which is to say, Open AI wrote a say, $250 billion IOU

in exchange, it can go write other people IOUs for digital God. Sure. Like, all of this is fine. Like, they needed to restructure the company. And I, you know, if I'm doing like,

the business analyst stuff, I'm like, Microsoft got a bunch of commitments that they will preserve the agreement in a way that makes the money until open AI decides that it's achieved its mission, which is to develop H.E.I. Right. And then you're like, okay, but if I look at what they're saying, it's we will invent digital God. And the revenue share will take place over a longer period. And like, you're just,

what? I mean, I think the, you're right that there's one way to read this that is a high and drunk lawyer. There's also another way to read this that is like so deeply, spectacularly, like, eye-rollingly cynical about this whole thing where they're like, this is a Microsoft person being like, these clowns think they know what they're doing. And we're just like, oh, AGI. Like, great job. We're so proud of you and your AGI. That's so cool. Oh, yeah. Nadella totally took Alvin for a ride here. Like, again, if you want to do winners and losers and stock prices, yes, right? Like, that's how I would read this. That I don't think LLM technology is a presently deployed. You can do it.

But then you actually, these are some of the richest companies in the world. And they put out this press release, totally straightforwardly, totally seriously to be like, we've done it. We've run this by the attorneys general of both California and Delaware. And they approved our plan that is all basically like this deal until Sam Alman declares AGI. And an expert panel verifies that it's true. And you're like, I don't, that really turns on what Sam Altman thinks AGI is, first of all. But second of all, it depends on him convincing that his definition is the one this expert panel should use. And no one has told us who's on this panel or who gets to appoint them.

Right. This is all just silly. This is just silly talk to pump up these valuations. It is kind of just nothing. Like everything you just said amounts to essentially nothing. And I think even Sam Altman is out here undercutting that. And I think like for a long time, he was at the forefront of like we are building God. Like, the thing that we are making will be the thing that when we declare AGI, everything immediately will change.

Like, he was out here talking about universal basic income, right? Like, the economy is going to change. The day-to-day ways that we live our lives will change when we do AGI. And he has just walked that back in the biggest ways that he possibly can't. He did actually, he did a live stream this week alongside this announcement and actually talked about this. Can we just play this one short clip where he talks about AGI? Yeah. I would say I think it's the AGI term has become hugely overloaded.

I think it's much more useful to say our intention, our goal is by March of 2028 to have a true automated AI researcher and define what that means than it is to sort of try to, you know, satisfy everyone with a definition of AGI. What? So he said this like maybe an hour after Microsoft released that press release, saying that their deal terms change when Sam Altman declares AGI and the timeline of that is 2030. So who do you think has overloaded the term AGI, Sam? Yeah, right. It's not me. I mean, but I think the difference between artificial general intelligence and truly automated AI researcher is so vast. And he says, even in the sentence, he says a true automated AI researcher and define what that means.

So even we're in this phase of like, oh, I've come up with a much less interesting word, for what this thing is that we're building. And also, we're not going to define that yet until 2028. Like, the meaningless buzzword count is just absolutely off the charts with all of this stuff. Right. But again, just this bonkers press release, Microsoft has the IP rights to research that will remain until either the expert panel verifies AGI or through 2030, whichever is first. And Sam is saying, in 2028,

We'll have an automated researcher. So that gives him another two-year window to have a panel verify that he's made digital gun. A panel that no one has ever met and no one knows who will be appointed to or how they will get. Like, what are you talking about? I'm imagining this, this panel is like the American Idol judges. And Satina Dadella is going to make sure that like he is the Simon Cowell who is just like sitting there leaning back in his chair. And he's always just like, no. What's the Bojack Horseman celebrities?

do they know anything? What do they know? Let's find out. Like, that's the AGI panel. Yes. Yeah. And as long as you have the one person who Sotis is going to just like slip him 100 every time to just be like, no, that's not it. Yeah, you're not very smart at all, actually. I don't think that's it. The answer is not 42. Doesn't seem like God.

I'm just saying like this press release until the expert panel verifies AGI or through 2030, whichever is first. Those are words in a press release that OpenA and Microsoft put out together. an hour later, Sam Altman is saying our goal is by March 2828 to have a truly automated AI researcher and define what that means than to sort of satisfy everyone with the definition of AGI. So he's already lost, right? I mean, the implication is that an expert panel could potentially validate the existence of AGI before 23rd.

You wouldn't put in a term that says one or the other, whichever is first, unless you thought they were, either one was likely. And then Sam's like, no, it's not likely. Yeah. I mean, I do think the, the, a lesson he seems to be learning pretty quickly is the dangers of being overhyped, right? And like, even as we've gone through the sort of GPT levels, he has started to be louder and louder about like, you shouldn't expect the leap from four to five to be the same as the leap from three to four was. Like, this stuff is not linear. It's not just magically going to get vastly better forever. And, and yet at the same time, if you're Sam Altman or Dario Amadeh at Anthropic or Sundarpecci or any of these people, you have to be out there in earnings calls talking about how this is going to change everything that you do. And I mean, Amazon goes out and lays off 14,000 people and is blaming AI for doing it. And I think there are lots of reads of that, but one thing that happens when you do that is you fire a bunch of people will say AI is going to change the way that we do everything.

And the stock price goes up. And it's like, again, I don't care about the stock. price. But like the reason these things happen is because the more you talk about AI, the more money there is in it for you at this particular moment in time. And so if you're Sam Altman and you're the you're the face of this movement in a very real way and also running a private company that hasn't already turned into like the unbelievable money fountain you want it to be, uh, it you have to do both things at the same time. Like he has to both sandbag the AI movement and champion it louder than anybody at exactly the same time because otherwise stuff just gets really messy. And I think he's put himself in this really hard and potentially untenable place going forward.

Oh, I mean, I talked to finance people who are like, yep, there's two economies. There's whatever else feels, which is there are layoffs and the economies and tatters and their tariffs have made prices high. And then there's the invidia economy, right? Yep. There are two economies. and they're like the entire AI economy will fall apart if Open AI doesn't pull up. And then I'm like, what does pull it off me?

And they're like, we don't know yet. Well, yeah. And now Open AI is, Reuters had a report this week that Open AI is already starting to talk to people about a trillion dollar IPO, which would be one of the biggest ever. Like, it only works if it keeps getting this much bigger. But ironically, it can only keep getting this much bigger if there isn't some spectacular disappointment coming. Right. Like, if Sam Altman is like, I've made God and it's not God, the bubble burst is like that. Well, we have, again, the expert panel will verify.

If Simon Cowell tells me it's God. I would love to hear it. You tell me, this is like, it's so funny, they said an expert panel will verify it without even a whiff of how you might compose such a panel. Email us. You call us, whatever it is. Tell us, let's say it's five people. Five is a good number, right? That's the number of voice judges, I believe.

that's how I'm going with it Did you tell us who you think those five people should be? Do you think Blake Shelton should be on a panel that verifies CGI? Like, who is it?

Who would you put on it? Because you can't just be other AI researchers. Yeah. That immediately invalidates the claim that an expert panel has verified HGI.

Right? A bunch of the world's best drunk to verify that you made whiskey is like not a thing that you can do. You have to have like people outside of the industry you say, okay, this big claim, the singularity, this is, oh, God, what's the contact when Jerry Foster's, like, should have sent a poet? Like, who's the poet? Right? Like, give me your list.

What's the number? 866, version 1-1, verge cast of the version.com, cast the expert panel for us. I love this idea. Give us one name, give us five names. We're going to, we will come up with the correct answer and we will figure it out. I will point out, you know, somebody who's spent a lot of time in Chicago. The Pope is from Chicago and having Chicago. And having Chicago, Pope verify that Sam Altman made digital cheeses. It's like very funny to me. That's all I want in the world. Listen, there are a lot of people out there with conspiracy theories about who's winning

the World Series because of the Chicago Pope. Like, there's a lot going on right now. It's good stuff. All right. We should take a break and then we should come back. We have like a lot of lightning round to do this week. So we're going to give ourselves lots of time to lightning round. We'll be right back.

This week on Networth and Chill, we're diving into another edition of Am I the Asshole? finance edition. And trust me, these money dilemmas will have you questioning everything. I'm breaking down real stories from real people who are navigating financial situations that range from mildly awkward to absolutely unhinged. And I'm giving you my unfiltered take on who's in the right and who needs a serious reality check. Because let's be real, when it comes to mixing relationships and finances, someone's always asking if they're the asshole. Learn how to set boundaries, protect your wealth, and avoid becoming the villain in your own financial story. Listen wherever you get your pot. or watch on YouTube.com

slash your rich BFF. All right. We're back. Time for the lightning round. The lightning round, just to be clear. Everybody stop emailing me about the Thunder Round. I get it. I've heard all of your complaints.

Tell them to chat, GPT. Leave me alone. What are the complaints? I don't know. There's just some people who I think like Jake better than me is essentially what I'm reading from this. And that's fine. I also fully understand that.

He's very charming. Jake's delightful. It's the lightning round. You and I have a bunch of things each that we're very excited to talk about. So we're going to try to go through this very quickly. Neelai, I'm just going to guess. Is your first one, is it what I think it is? You know what it is.

Okay, it's time, once again, for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brennan Carr is a dummy. We're so bad. He's such a dummy. He's such a dummy. How does he keep doing this? Every week, I'm like, it can't possibly be time for Brennan Carr's a dummy. I will say this week he's a dummy in like classic dummy.

You know, like... Plan hits. I don't have to, like, tie you into metaphysical knots to explain why he's a dummy. This is just straightforward sort of, like, corruption. You know? Like, he's just doing a bad, dumb thing that no one likes because he can't help himself. Okay. He's just a dummy.

He's like, what if I was even less popular? I'm Brendan Carr. So, in the Biden administration, the FCC passed rules that said broadband providers had to put labels. They called them nutrition labels. They modeled them after the labels on food. Just laying out how much things cost. Because, you know, if you've ever paid for

mobile internet access or home internet access, you know that there's just like a litany of weird fees. Yeah. And taxes just glommed on to your bill. And so they will advertise that it's $79.99 a month for a gig. And you're actually end up paying $150.

It's like a universal experience. Because there's like a sidewalk fee. And you're like, what does that mean and they're like, who's to say? Yeah. And they'll blame the government no matter what. Like, that's how they do. So in the Biden administration, the former chair of the FCC under Biden, Jessica Rosemary, so loved the charge, where I put nutrition labels on broadband service. So when you go to buy broadband, there's going to be a standardized label that says how much it costs, what you get, what the maximum speed is, all the extra fees, you've probably seen one because if you bought broadband recently, you have been forced to see a broadband label.

It's hard to find fault with this idea. In the free market, consumers should know how much things cost. And then you can, even in a market is anti-competitive is broadband, where you have very few options. You'll at least be able to compare. Again, I don't know how you can find fault with this idea. This seems like this not only seems fine. It seems like incredibly boring and uninteresting to talk about. This is just like, it's fine.

Yeah. And this is about as much as the Biden FCC was able to accomplish. Right. Like for a variety of reasons, they were not able to accomplish much. They kept their heads down. And they got to, we'll put labels on the prices. We're going to put price tags on the products. That's what Joe Biden did not accomplish a lot in the broadband arena.

He accomplished price tags. Great. Brendan Carr, our man is like, you know what consumers hate is price tags, passed a notice of proposal's realmaking just this week saying they're going away. We're gutting the broadband labels. And his reasoning is that the, service providers find them too onerous and complicated to figure out. It's too hard to write down a list of dollar figures.

We can't possibly find all the fees that we might charge you. We can find them when we bill you for some reason. That's very easy to do. We have no problems with that. But telling you what they are beforehand, oh my God, the broadband. I mean, we just, the letters and the calls, I'm out in the field on the polls, the service workers and they're complaining about these nutrition labels. And he really, like, he truly expects us to believe this.

as if every Comcast employee Disclosure, you know, Comcast is NBC Universal is a minority investor in Vox Media. They're a big fan of ours. As if every Comcast employee has to carry around like huge like Moses on the mountaintop

stone tablets with the nutrition label on it. He's like, this is just cruelty to employees. How could they? Yeah, exactly. No, it's just like on the website and he's like, it's too honors, it's too complicated. We've heard all these complaints.

No mention of the fact that when the broadband providers charge you money, it is not too complicated for them to find all of the taxes and fees that they tack on to your bill. There's not a broadband provider in the world that's ever been like, you know what, our billing system is too complicated. We should simplify it for the benefit of the concern. No, they're like, we can find all of the fees. You whispered at the wrong app on your phone. You're signed up for text killer.

Like, they'll just do it. But telling you beforehand, too onerous. So they pass this. rule during the open commission meeting. The FCC is stacked with Republicans right now. That's way it goes. The only dissent, Anna Gomez, the sole remaining Democratic commissioner on FCC, who is, I would say, pretty fiery in what is usually a very boring, like government open commission meeting. We have a clip. Let's write. This is one of the most anti-consumer proposals I have yet to see. The broadband labels are about empowering consumers. The goal of the label is to inform you,

consumer at home, so that you know clearly what is included on your bill. And what adds insult to injury is that the FCC does not even explain why this proposal is necessary. Make it make sense. The more information is available to consumers, the less there is a need for regulation. Make it make sense. Feels like Anna Gomez's slogan right now. The official notice of proposed rulemaking from Brendan Carr reads,

we believe that itemizing can lead to a proliferation of labels and have labels so lengthy that the fees overwhelm the other important elements of the label. So broadband providers have created so many fees to itemize that they've made the labels too complicated to read. Make it make sense. Listen, Brendan Carr, you're now obligated to go after CVS for having receipts that are too long,

and then we can talk. He's a dummy, Brendan Carr. As always, Brendan, you're willing. Welcome to come on the show. The Google results for your name are polluted by my ranting at you. And I know it's true. And I know you read it. I know you look at it.

So you're welcome. Anytime you want this show, the other show, if you want to just do a live stream on Twitch, mono e mono. Let's go, buddy. Because I don't think you can defend this one. There's not a consumer in the world who thinks more opaque pricing is good. And somehow you're such a dummy that you've convinced yourself that you've done everyone a favor. That's when Brendan Carr is a dummy. his favorite podcast with a podcast.

It's good to be back. For my first one, I'm going to, do you know how when you play beer pong, sometimes you bring in your friend to take a shot for you and just throw the ball in and see if they can do something cool? That's what I'm going to do with our producer, Travis Larchuk, who is going to take one of my lightning round stories. Hi, Travis. Hello.

Travis, you were fired up this week, and I would like to know why. I was so fired up on Monday. This is the most important thing that happened on the internet to me and tens of other people. So do either of you play Connections, The New York Times Puzzle? I probably play like five days a week, I would say. Not enough to have like a streak, but I play a lot. The setup of it, there's a four by four grid of words. The words you need to put them into four separate categories.

So you need to figure out like what the categories are and the groups of the four words that belong to them. So this was Monday's Connections puzzle. I'm going to share it with you. The first row. only connect Olive Branch. That is a secret message to a very specific subset of people who play New York Times connections and are also fans of a British quiz show that premiered in 2008 and still runs today. And I just want to play you this first clip from the show and see if it sounds familiar to you. Time now for the connecting wall. 16 jumbled up clues that need sorting into four.

connected groups of four. There are red herrings. There are clues that might fit into more than one category. But there is only one correct solution. That's just a British person describing connections. So this has been a round of this British quiz show called Only Connect since 2008. 2008 has been essentially the same game that the New York Times launched in 2023 with no credit, no acknowledgement. and they have been very sure to say that this was developed independently.

Meanwhile, the day after it launched, the host of this show, who we just heard from Victoria Corrin Mitchell, tweeted at the puzzle editor, do you know that this has been a TV show in the UK since 2008? It's so similar, I guess you must. So I believe that what this message on Monday, this olive branch, is responding to, was that about a month, ago on Only Connect, they finally acknowledged the existence of connections on the show,

and Victoria said this. Have you played Connections, the New York Times game? I mean, I must say. Obviously, I would say this, because it's just our format. Do you not find it annoyingly weak? Like, the connections don't really hold. I'm good at it now because I figured out where they cheat and when they go, that'll do. Do you not find that frustrating?

Yeah, it's definitely inferior. It is inferior. You can say any shit you want if you have a British accent. Yes. I believe her 100%. I reached out to the New York Times for comment. They have not responded to my email. I just love it.

You can dunk on someone. They made our thing for stupid people, but if you have a British accent, you're like, it's inferior. And it's like, fine. No wonder these people had an empire. It's homesite. It's very good. I love that for you, Travis. Thank you.

Thank you. Did you get connections that day? Oh, for sure. I did not. And it was very upsetting. And I assumed, so I was first alerted to this because Travis posted something on blue sky like being mad at connections. It turns out it was about this and that the New York Times is finally tacitly acknowledging that it ripped off this superior British game. I then went and just failed connections because all of the connections were weak and stupid and didn't make any sense.

and raged to Travis, assuming that he had also failed connections, but I guess he didn't. I've failed connections one time, and my stats are still 99% success rate. I just love that, I mean, that she's like, it's like our show, but it's stupider, and I had to make myself dumber to be good at it. It's such a thunderous dunk that came off so politely. It's very good. Yeah, and so the times only connect to Olive Branch. Was that the connection?

It was not. Okay. It should have been. but it was not. All right. That's all I have. Thank you for, Travis.

Thank you for hearing me out. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, Neelai, what's your second one? I'm cursed to update the audience on the fact that AOL, my former employer,

has been once again purchased. Yeah, does it even count as your former, like how many owners has AOL had since you worked there? It's, I believe it's at least five. And that's counting all the random private equity groups. Verizon was one of them for a hot minute in a,

organization called Oath, you might recall. Very confusing. That was the AOL Yahoo! combination, right? AOL Yahoo were combined by Verizon into a unit called Oath. Their strategy was that they were going to bundle AOL Yahoo Oath content onto mid-range Android phones.

A plan that everyone has. Everyone goes through a year. What if we just shove this shit onto mid-range Android phones? And that we're just doomed. You know, another generation of wireless executives is going to grow up one day, and they're going to have the same plan. And we're just doomed to see it. But AOL spun off from Oath with Yahoo. They went to another private equity company.

Who knows what's going on. They were owned by Apollo Global Management as of 2021. And then Apollo has now sold it. AOL, not Yahoo. They've held on to Yahoo. Can't let go of Yahoo. They've sold AOL to bending spoons. The company which buys everything and ruins it.

I don't know how else to describe bending spoons. Bending spoons is the most confusing and fascinating. So Benning Spoons recently bought Evernote. It recently bought Vimeo. It bought We Transfer. It now owns AOL. It apparently raised a bunch of debt to buy AOL, which seems like a real bold choice. It owns a bunch of other brands that I would say out loud and you would go, oh, I haven't thought about that in a while.

Like, that's who bending spoons buys. Right. It buys these things. It weighs off most of the employees and it raises prices, and that's the strategy. It's a move. Great. And they claim. So Richard Lawler and I worked at Engadgett together.

There's a deep, meaningful bond between the two of us because we went through that experience together. And so we were reading the press release. And we got to this line. Bending Spoons has never sold an acquired business and will continue to serve AOL's large, loyal customer base for many years to come. And it's like, you guys, you're going to sell AOL. I'm like three years. Like, you don't, you don't like buy the cursed amulet and then like break the curse. Like the amulet wins every time.

I mean, somebody has to be the one to fully run it into the ground, right? Like, I read that as Benning Spoons being like, no, we're going to kill it for good this time. It's going to be full dead by the time we're finished with it. God bless AOL, man. You know, we talked about Warner last week, and, you know, buying Warner Brothers is also a cursed amulet that every media company apparently has to go through. AOL was the other side of that. They were the original zombie owner of Time Warner. Yeah, that's right.

And it just hasn't been great since that happened. Good luck. No, sure hasn't. But the CEO of Benny's tunes is named Luca Ferrari, which is objectively the best name in history. Good luck, Luca. That's a real person's name. Cio Beniswinsu's, Luca. Sorry.

Never mind. I'm in. AOL is going to be a huge success. This is going to go super great. I love this for everybody. It's just a lot, man. Can I interest you in a Trump phone update? Yes.

I don't have one for you. Interesting. No, I don't have... I've been in the market for several years. So it is now, as you're listening to this or watching it, it is the last day of October. The Trump phone does not exist. Trump Mobile first launched in June with big promise.

about service launching and then a phone, the T1 phone, which we had a lot of questions about at the time because all it appeared to be was a bad, ugly render of a gold phone with camera lenses that were weirdly spaced. And it was supposed to be coming in September. September comes and goes. And between June and September, the only thing that happens is all mentions of September were just removed from the website. It was like later this year. It still says later this year. what phone the Trump phone is has changed. Now you can get several other Trump phones, including a refurbished iPhone 14 or 15,

which the Trump mobile folks will happily tell you is brought to life right here in the USA. Oh, I see. So if you refurbish a two-year-old phone that was originally made in China, it's not made in the United States. I like to think of it as like they fished it out of a lake and just like dried it off of the hairdryer,

put it in some rice, and it came back to life. And they're like, we did it. right here in the USA. Only $629. But yeah, so it is now the end of October, which means we are now a full month late on the Trump phone. And there has been just absolutely no sign of the thing. The second Trump administration is full of a lot of bombastic promises that don't come to anything.

There's a ceasefire in the Middle East. Did you know that? It's a lot of that. No one learned from doing this the first time that this is how it goes. like we covered Foxcon every day because he said there was going to be an LCD factory in my hometown and it just never was going to happen

and we were like it's not happening and we did it every day if Virtchast listeners will remember he announced randomly at the beginning of COVID that Google was going to build a website to let people find testing. I think he said thousands of engineers were working on it. Yeah. Google did not know that they were doing this

until Donald Trump announced and then we tracked it Every single week, like it just didn't occur. And we're doing it again at scale with him. And the Trump phone is like a little example of this or a bigger ones. The Trump phone is particularly, like I ended up on CNBC the day the Trump phone was announced to discuss whether or not phone manufacturing could return to the United States. And I was just like, guys, what are you talking about? You can't and it won't.

And there was like, you know, some conversation about whether I was to. But like, here we are and we're refurbishing the iPhone 14 here in the good old US of A. And it's like, yeah, you can just hold them to their promises. You can just say, did you make a phone? And so now every week, David, I believe we're going to just ask the question, does the Trump phone exist? Because it is as clear of an example of what the Trump administration, both the first one and this one are like. Yep. They just say stuff.

Yep. Dominic Preston on our team and I have both willingly signed up to send the same email basically every seven days to, an email address that I'm confident no one checks that's basically just like, eh, do we have a, is there a phone? I do know a lot of people pre-ordered the phone. Well, I know some people, at least one person pre-order to the phone.

Many of those people, presumably as a bit. But Trump Mobile took their money. Like, it's not like this is a fake website. Like, people have paid money for this thing. And so despite all of the deep insanity of it. Like, they owe people a product. They owe the world a product. And a poorly refurbished old iPhone, A, doesn't count. And B, also doesn't exist right now. Like, you can't buy anything from Trump Mobile. And this thing, we're going to keep tracking it. And we continue to get a mix of silence

and no comments. And I will be bringing those to you once a week, presumably, until it kills me. It is very funny that you have your own Fox condom here in Trump too, David. I'm excited about it. It's very rare that I am perfectly willing to call my shot on something being bullshit four minutes after it's announced. But I did that on our website, and I am very much enjoying how correct I have been in this whole thing. Nothing would make me happier than for me to be proven wrong on this. Like, as a journalist, as a tech enthusiast, as somebody. who has reviewed many smartphones in the past,

I want nothing more than to hold the Trump T1 phone in my hand and try to figure out what the hell it is and if it's any good. It existing is so much more fun than it not existing, but it doesn't exist. And so here we are. Yeah. Okay. I've got one more.

I was going to do the wonky metadata story that just wrote about C2PA and SORA. But the answer is that meta doesn't care to tell you whether or not anything is AI. And I think we've run that to ground here on this episode There are lots of standards no one is interested in any of them. Yeah, meta doesn't want to tell you it's AI. They want to feed you slop until you die.

Yep. Mark Zuckerberg experience. So I'm just going to read this headline from Andy Hawkins. Congratulations to the Tesla Cyber Truck on its 10th recall in two years. That's a really good headline. It's very good. I will say we have a lot of debates at the verge about headlines, and I don't think we always write the best headline. That's a great headline.

It's very good. Great job, Andy Hawkins. It's, you know, this one is just for the light bar that can detect. while driving, which doesn't seem great. I will note that some of them have been for the wiper, the singular engineering achievement of the cyber truck. But oh, man, what a disaster that thing has been. I know some cyber truck owners, they love it.

Again, I will point you to Verge Expat Zoe Schiffer's article in Wired recently, just interviewing cyber truck owners, one of whom was a convicted Jan 6 guy. Oh, cool. Choice. All of its choice. another one who's like, yeah, the car does not attract women. Like, just straightforwardly set it to a wired reporter.

It's very good. What was the recall this time? It's the light bar. The off-road light bar can detach while driving. Seems bad. So if you're behind a cyber truck, just be careful. Because either the wiper or the light bar might be flying at you. Congratulations, Tesla.

All right, I'm going to do two in very rapid succession. Yeah. One is I am going to say a nice thing about Mark Zuckerberg, which is that threads rolled out ghost posts, which are 24-hour expiring posts on threads. I think it's fabulous. Like, such a good idea. I have been a long-term believer that all social media posts should expire by default. I think, like, the world would be a better place if we were not all held to everything we've ever posted on social media in all of our lives. And this, it looks a little weird because it has like a sort of dotted.

I know. I love the way it looks. It looks like you're whispering onto the platform. Oh, I like that. Okay. Thinking about it that way, I'm okay with it. It just, it stands out in a way that threw me a little bit, but I'm okay with that way of thinking about it. But this idea of like an expiring 24 hour post that if somebody replies to it or likes it, it goes to your DMs is such a like small twist on the way that we communicate on social media that I love. And I think like this idea that actually, if I'm going to post something and if you want to engage with it, we are going to engage with it just the two of us, not in public in front of everybody, is actually such a healthier way to think about social media. And I think this is one of the reasons that stories has been so successful on other platforms is that it's not, I'm doing a thing in public, but we're not doing the whole thing in public forever. And the fact that like the actual engagement and interaction is just between us and not for everyone to see is better.

And we've just never put that in text posts before. And I think it's a great idea. And I like, I hope every other text platform gets something like this soon. Like I love it. Yeah, it's very good. Threads secretly is that his best product. It's huge. No one gives it any credit for being huge because it's not where stuff goes down.

Yeah. Like, no drama goes down on threads. It all goes down on Xer. It all goes down on Blue Sky. Lots of drama goes down on Blue Sky. But Blue Sky's drama is so, like, specific and exhausting. I mean, so is X's. Like, you sort of know exactly the fight you're getting into in both of those places.

I find threads to be handily the most pleasant social. Yeah, because it's a meta product and it's designed to keep you engaged forever. Yeah, it's very milk toast in a way that I think is like fine. But it is huge. Like, it is huge. Like, yeah. I think they're onboarding one blue sky every hour or something.

It's just this massive platform that's taking advantage of the Instagram graph. If you open Instagram, there are threads posts in Instagram now and it kicks you to threads to look at them. And then they have all these products of these which are just great. Yeah.

And so it has, in Instagram, like from Adam is Siri on down, they know that the action on Instagram happens in DMs. So you can see that they're like, how do we get people on threads to slide to DMs and like ghost posts is just a great way to do it. Yeah, I think it's working.

Like the clear goal of threads was to copy that thing that was like the sort of default public chat space on the internet from what Twitter used to be. And I think it is like it is rapidly heading in that direction. I should have ended on that note because that's a happy note. Now I'm going to end on a just sheer rage, which is we talked about Samsung fridges getting ads. And now we know what they look like. Can I show them to you? Do you want to see what the ads coming? And I will describe them to the radio audience.

I assume you have many fridges with screens. I won't have screens on a fridge, man. We're not doing it. No, thank you. That's where you draw the line. No. I don't, I hate and fear computers. I don't know if you've met me.

All right, so I just put a picture in our chat here. Tell me what you see. I see an ad on the bottom of a slow tyson screen for water filters. I mean, the reason I won't have. every computer gets slow. And as many Vergecast listeners know, one of my mottos, in addition to I don't give a fuck about your stock price, is that life's too short for slow

computers. So if you're going to put something in my kitchen, that's hard to get rid of like a refrigerator, and then eventually I know that it will be a slow computer that is just out of bounds. No, thank you. I'd rather just like command strip an iPad to that thing. Yeah. And the idea that they're going to junk it up

with targeted advertising is horrible. And that is a big ad. That is not a small ad. It's like the bottom, it's not quite a third. It's like the bottom fifth of the screen is ad. But it's like a big beige screen. Like if you're, if you imagine a refrigerator with two doors, the whole right door is a screen. And the bottom strip of it is just an ad.

And so that's one version of it. This is called the cover screen, which the fact that you have a cover screen on your fridge is just deeply hilarious. So they call this a widget and it's actually a rotating thing. And the ad is one of four things. the rotation. So there's one that's news, one that I think is your calendar, one that's the weather, and then one that is, they call it curated advertisements, which is just what advertisements are. And it rotates every 10 seconds. So every 40 seconds, this ad is just going to pop up on your screen. And you can remove the widget. So you can PSA go into settings and then advertisements and then

toggle the advertisements off, but it also kills the whole widget, which is very funny. So you either get the good stuff and the bad stuff or you get nothing. Is that count as a dark pattern or is that just like a hostage situation? Right? Like you can it's not like quite, they're not tricking you. They're just like, do you want this to be useful or not? Because then you have to have the ads. But then there's another way to get these that I think is even more offensive, which is this

one here. It's called the Daily Board and it has six tiles. And it's basically one of the things these fridges are supposed to do is be like a hub of your house, right? They show you what's going on where people are. You can do timers. So it's supposed to be the sort of family-centered. And I think that's what this screen is supposed to do.

So it has six square widgets, basically. One is a timer. One is the weather. One is your calendar. One is a memo that just says pizza day, exclamation point in this ad. One says, my house, which is presumably some like smart home controls. And one is an ad. Of course.

And it just, it's just a big ass ad for a water filter. And these are your options. And again, if you want to not see ads, you don't get. any of the other stuff either. So it is a dark pattern in that sense. It's like if you want the good stuff, you have to get the ads for this incredibly expensive refrigerator

that you've already bought. In my mind, this should inspire as much outcry as when BMW try to put heated seats behind a subscription. I agree. I will say that my fridge has a screen is one of the most bougie problems in the world.

So maybe it won't. But I do think this, the advertising bait and switch that is happening in a lot of people's houses is worth being mad at and people are mad. Like the thing that has happened with Alexa devices in recent weeks where they've started just putting ads on the sort of standby screen of people's echo shows all over their house after not having them.

So it's like I bought this thing. I installed it prominently somewhere in my house. And then oops, one day ads is so outrageous to me. That it's like if they wanted to start saying, if everyone that is sold from today on will start to have ads. And there's nothing you can do about it. they just have ads. Fine. Like at least now you're letting people make a wise, wide open decision. Or like what you see Amazon do a lot where they're like, you can buy the cheaper

one with ads or you can pay more money and have no ads. I'm actually fine with all of those tradeoffs, but to install a refrigerator, which is like, I'm moving house and we are taking everything that we own, but we're leaving our refrigerator because who like, that's not an easy thing to remove from your home. It is, it is a like crucial appliance to your life. And Samsung knows that and it knows it essentially has you and can do whatever it wants because what are you going to do about it? And that feels gross. If you are the sort of person who thought to yourself, I should put a giant Tysen screen on an appliance that is essentially immovable in my home. So let us know because I've been dying to know why people have these things.

I'm a huge nerd who can't stop making the home smart. And it has never occurred to me to have one of these screens. You know, you can see inside your fridge without opening the fridge. I can do that with my LG fridge. It has a window. You just knock on it twice and it lights up and you can just see through the door. It's great. Yeah, but that's less exciting. What if I can do it from my phone? My LG fridge does have Wi-Fi for no reason.

Every now and again, it tells me the ice is old. And I'm like, screw you, ice doesn't get old. The ice is old sounds like a code word that you would say to the president when something terrible has happened. You haven't used all the ice in seven days. I've used enough ice. Shut your mouth. It's not a useful app in any sense of the word. Gen 2E reported on the ads on the Tysen screen.

This is Samsung's official explanation. The pilot further explores how a connected appliance can deliver genuinely useful contextual information. The refrigerator is already a daily hub and we're testing a responsible user control way to make that space more helpful. Ads do not make things more helpful. Nope. It's just straightforwardly they don't make things more helpful. Especially when the ad is the water filter and your refrigerator is going bad and we want you to buy a new one from us. It's just not helpful.

I don't know what they're doing. Like that's a bad explanation. The other thing that's very funny about this gen piece was that Samsung doesn't know what its own products are called. So in announcing this pilot, they said it will come to these screens but not AI home screens.

And so technically the fridge is not an AI home screen because only the nine and seven inch screens are AI home screens. And then Jen has this line. And Jen's been on a show a lot. I'm sure you're familiar. She's very dry, very British. and she goes, I've asked numerous Samsung folks about the distinction here, and no one has a straight answer.

I would say she comes to the same conclusion I do, which is that it's safe to say there will eventually be ads everywhere, and this distinction will be meaningless. Yeah, but it's just very funny. I can just imagine Jen being like, do you know what an AI home screen is? And like 10 different Samsung people are like, we don't. We just started calling some stuff that. It's great. Somewhere someone at telly is like, okay, we're going to do a free fridge with a screen full of of advertisements.

And we're going to, we're going to crush. And they will. And I will buy it. I'm just saying as much outcry as BMW is saying heated seats, which to this day, every car company executive I talk to, whether they work at BMW or not, like, burned, completely burned by what happened with BNW and heated seats subscriptions. In the best way, like, that's a good thing.

Yeah. They're not going to do it. That is a cautionary tale inside of the car industry that is such a giant win for consumers as a result. Yeah. Like keep being mad. That's the story of the first case. I will not buy your water filters and this ice never gets old.

It's just water and it's cold. Exactly. All right. We should get out of here. We've gone way over as we are once to do. It's nice to be back. You and I have not gotten to do this this much in like several months. It's fun to do this again.

It's great. Glad to be back with you. All right. We are out of here. This Sunday, we have you and I on an episode of version history about the Microsoft Zune. I'm very excited. I think if memory serves, this was the first episode of version history that we made. So if you watch it or listen to it and you're like, gosh, why is this so bizarre and chaotic and everyone's all over the place?

It was completely deliberate. Don't worry about it. Everything's fine. And then on Tuesday, actually, Jen is coming back on. We're going to do a big mega hotline of smart home questions. We're doing a two episode thing with Jen over the next two Tuesdays all about smart home stuff. It's going to be very fun. In the meantime, remember to subscribe to the Verge.

You can get this podcast and Decoder and Version History. All ad-free. Go find Decoder on YouTube. All of our stuff is increasingly everywhere. Our goal is to make Nelai ubiquitous. Everywhere you go, you should see Nelai's face. This is what we're doing here. I'm very excited about it.

Fine. And if you have questions, email us, Virgcast at the verge.com. Call the hotline 866, Verge11. Tell us who should be on the panel. If you take nothing away from this, tell us who should be on the AGI expert panel. Simon Cowell is my nominee, and you have to beat that. to get on this panel. I was going to say Jennifer Lopez.

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This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back with so much stuff next week. We'll see you then. Eli. Rock and roll.