The Vergecast - GPT-5's big new feature: less lying?

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

It’s a huge week in AI, with OpenAI releasing GPT-OSS and GPT-5, Grok getting deeply problematic again with its “spicy” video generator, and Tim Cook admitting that Apple may need to cut some deals. Then we talk the age gating of the internet and how you might soon need an ID card to get just about anywhere online. Finally, the Lightning Round gets re-rebranded. Adi Robertson and Alex Heath join the show to discuss. Further reading: GPT-5 is being released to all ChatGPT users OpenAI releases a free GPT model that can run on your laptop Why open-source AI became an American national priority Mark Zuckerberg promises you can trust him with superintelligent AI xAI’s new Grok image and video generator has a ‘spicy’ mode Grok’s ‘spicy’ video setting instantly made me Taylor Swift nude deepfakes I tested Grok’s Valentine sex chatbot and it (mostly) behaved Tim Cook says Apple ‘must’ figure out AI and ‘will make the investment to do it’ Tim Cook says Apple is ‘open to’ AI acquisitions Ready or not, age verification is rolling out across the internet The UK is now age-gating the internet The UK is slogging through an online age-gate apocalyps The UK’s new age-gating rules are easy to bypass Reddit and Discord’s UK age verification can be defeated by Death Stranding’s photo mode Reddit rolls out age verification in the UK to comply with new rules Five EU states to test age verification app to protect children The EU approach to age verification Commission presents guidelines and age verification app prototype for a safer online space for children Porn age-gating is the future of the internet, thanks to the Supreme Court The Supreme Court just upended internet law, and I have questions Florida Sues Huge Porn Sites Including XVideos and Bang Bros Over Age Verification Law  “Over the last two and a half years, 19 states – home to more than a third of Americans – have passed laws that require pornography websites to confirm a user’s age by checking a government-issued ID or scanning their face, among other methods.” Google is using AI age checks to lock down user accounts Today's Supreme Court Decision on Age Verification Tramples Free Speech and Undermines Privacy Age Verification Harms Users of All Ages Blocking Access to Harmful Content Will Not Protect Children Online, No Matter How Many Times UK Politicians Say So Zero Knowledge Proofs Alone Are Not a Digital ID Solution to Protecting User Privacy Age Verification in the European Union: The Commission's Age Verification App RFK Jr. pulls $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine contracts Epic just won its Google lawsuit again, and Android may never be the same Google has just two weeks to begin cracking open Android, it admits in emergency filing Instagram adds a reposts feed and rips off Snap Maps OpenAI charts crime OpenAI gets caught vibe graphing Nintendo raises the Switch 1 price from $299 to $339 Apple says Trump’s tariffs are adding another $1 billion to its costs Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Below and welcome to the Virgast, the flagship podcast of extremely consistent naming schemes. I'm Jay Kastranakis, executive editor of the Verge. Joining me today, Verge Policy Editor, Addy Robertson. Hi. And Verge Deputy Editor, Alex Heath, who is also filling in for Nilai on Decoder.

What's up? First up, a lot of AI news this week. I want to start with Open AI. On Tuesday, they announced an open model, GPTOSS. This is their first open model in six years. Because it's open, that means you can tweak it to your liking. You can even download it, run it on your laptop, they claim. They say it's supposed to be as capable of some of their recent mini models,

and this is something that you can just use by yourself privately now if you want to. Then on Thursday, they announced GPT5, the next big model for chat GPT. They just held this event showing off what it can do. And this time around, I'm not sure that there's necessarily anything new that it can do. they just seem to be saying it can do everything better. We just watched this event. It just wrapped up right before we're recording. I'm really curious what you guys think.

I thought this was a weird one. There were portions where they just sent requests to chat GPT, and then we just sort of waded around and watched it load. It is apparently a lot faster. I mean, we should preface this by saying we have not tried it yet, obviously. They're in the stages of rolling this out to, all chat GPT users, which is a new thing. Usually they gate these frontier models to the paid tier initially.

This time they're rolling it out to all 700 million plus weekly users. But I'm not even sure if by the time this comes out, everyone will have access to it yet. They have let a handful of independent creators, AI writers try it. Interestingly, they don't let any of the quote unquote legacy media try it ahead of time. but what I've seen like from the folks at every for example is that people seem to like it like the vibes are generally good it seems faster and more confidence whether that's a good thing or not but it's not this huge leap that I think people were hoping for I do you think it's very funny like AI announcements are the only announcements where the executive on stage will tell you

and it's going to lie to you less and it's going to be less dishonest and it's going to try to screw around less off. And it's like, this is, I can't believe we have to announce this. Yeah, I was on a press call with Sam Altman and a bunch of open AI execs this week. And that was a big thing they hit was that the hallucination rate for GPT5 has gone down quite a bit. It still hallucinates. In fact, I think people were pointing out slight inaccuracies in some of the examples it was giving in the live stream for how it hallucinates less. So that's still a problem that remains inherent to large language models, but they're saying this is the most right of the models out there, and you know, you take what you can get.

And I don't want to diminish this, but I feel like, you know, if you go back to the GPD4 announcement, I think it was four, made up in 40, you know, they had the new voice model, something, it was like there was a very impressive new demo. And I don't know, Adi, you were watching this too. Was there anything that you saw today that, like, felt like you hadn't seen from an AI service before or even from chat CBT before. I feel like I am a really bad person to get hyped about AI stuff. Like I feel like I am just tuned way lower than any other normal person because I'm like

watching this tonight. First of all, it does not seem like something that I haven't seen before. And second of all, it doesn't seem that exciting to me. And like, I do not. How many times in my life do I really want to build a service to let my girlfriend learn French? Like, I understand that this is. incredibly technically cool and accomplished. And I am looking at this as a product and it is still just really failing to grab me in a lot of ways. And the French game, Addy, this is when they

vibe coded like a flash card slash snake learning game. As someone who really feel, I feel like I should love the idea of vibe coding. It just, it feels like it's just here. You can create this thing that you're maybe going to use once that already clearly exists a million times online because that's why it can create it. Yeah, on the call, Sam Altman called this software. on demand. So we're moving from vibe coding to software on demand. And yeah, I mean, it does have big upgrades in terms of the front end code development it can do. I do think chat chitpt was widely considered to be behind on cogen. That's something that anthropic with Claude and even Gemini, the latest Gemini release really improved on. And so, you know, really, even though chatchipt has grown like

crazy, again, it's by far the most used chatbot in the world. Open AI hasn't had a a frontier model on coding in a while. And so they're saying that this reasserts them to the top of the leaderboards. It looks like that's the case. But yeah, I mean, I think vibe coding is or software on demand is very early in what it is. And is it going to be something that creates like real value in the world versus like little toys and trinket websites? I don't know.

I mean, right now it kind of reminds me of the early app store when people were just making like fart apps. And maybe we never graduate from AI FART apps. Smart apps. Maybe that's where it stays, but who knows? I mean, you can't deny that the progress is rapidly moving towards more complex stuff that can be coded. So I haven't played with it yet again, but it looks like a huge improvement on coding. Software on demand is way less fun of an activity than vibe coding. I've never vibe coded. Have either of you vibe coded yet? No. Yeah, I was just actually talking with the CEO of GitHub on Decoder about this this week.

I don't think any of the vibe coding tools are to a point where someone who literally has zero software development experience like us can reliably do something and deploy it. You still need to understand basic mechanics of code, which I do not, and I will refuse to learn. Although I probably should. We could all be making $100 million if we knew how to code, right? I mean, I can code in very specific circumstances, and I just don't think I have the general broad purpose. I know architecturally how this works, knowledge, that I think does kind of feel like what so far a lot of vibe coding at least sort of requires. Yeah, it feels like that's actually getting more important is to have the higher level understanding of how everything works together and how it

can break than actually just like writing code. Guys, we're also, we're bearing the biggest news, at least for, I think, consumers, which is the model picker. It's gone. That to me is like, if that's all they shipped, I would be happy. You don't have to switch. between reasoning, regular, mini, whatever, it just does it all. They invented this new router that, you know, you can say think harder, for example, and it'll just go to reasoning. But, you know, RIP, but not really to that model picker, you know. It's all just one now.

You go and it's just one box. There's no, no. This is, it's so funny. Like, Chachi, they invented, like, one of the most impressive products the world has ever seen. And then the actual UI for it just had the, like, cluggiest little set of options that you had to pick from and decipher. It is very funny that it took them this huge upgrade just to figure out, okay, let's have our AI system pick which AI bought to actually use.

Yeah, Sam called that a confusing mess on the call. They really have hated the model picker. And I think they were waiting for a new frontier release to unify everything. It still is multiple models in the background, and developers can get the different models through the API directly. But yeah, if you're a chat GP2 user, now it's just chat GPT5. Have they fixed the naming schemes as well here, right? This has been their other.

This has been the weight around their neck. Well, now it doesn't matter because it's just five. It's just five. It's all five. You don't worry about it. They're getting there. They're getting it. It feels like they probably hate the GPT name and they just can't change it at this point.

I don't think they can. I mean, it's the Kleenex of AI now. I mean, they're about to hit a billion users. That's probably going to happen, you know, in the next few months. So, no, I don't think they'll change it. I would say the other really interesting thing is that they have this new thing called safe completions, where before ChachyPT would just refuse to answer something if it thought it was potentially a dicey prompt. And now they'll basically go halfway.

The example they gave on this press call was, if you asked the question, how much energy is needed to ignite some specific material and basically saying that could be someone making a bomb or, could be a student trying to learn. And now, instead of just refusing a question like that, that could have potential bad outcomes, the model will give a higher level answer that doesn't actually get into the specifics, but is apparently set with guardrails to avoid giving an answer

that could lead to potential harm. Again, we have to see all this in production. But to me, it shows that they're at least trying to mitigate the inherent problems of LLMs, which is that they, confidently lie and also make shit up and they're trying. Whether they can get there, obviously remains to be seen. But I feel like they're making strides more on the product side than any of the other chatbots out there right now. The selectable tone also seemed kind of

interesting to me. I haven't actually really seen what that looks like in practice. You can choose it between like it being nerdy or being a good listener. The personalities. Yeah. So there's four new personalities that are being added to. chat chTPT, which I, they haven't really explained that was something kind of buried in the, in the release, but that's starting to roll out and you can tweak them apparently a little. They are cynic, robot, listener, and nerd. This is so weird. This is like very grok-like, for one, right?

Grock, like, you open it up and it's like, do you want me to be a sexy nurse? And, like, no other system does that. And it's very weird that chat chbtee is like, do you want me to be a nerd? Like, it's, of course it's a nerd. It has information from the entire universe. Like, what else can it be? I don't know. Is it going to, like, throw on like Star Trek quotes?

Chapot, companion chat bots do this a little, and I get the feeling that it's kind of leaning into that. Just they are clearly leaning into anthropomorphizing this thing. They're also going to let you change the chat color bubbles for individual threads, which is, you know, one of the core things for a bunch of messaging apps that use humans to talk to each other. So yeah, they're obviously leaning into the idea that this thing is something that you think of and talk to like a person. They're also rolling out advanced voice mode. They're replacing it with the current standard voice mode for free users. And they're like bragging about how you can

talk to it for hours and hours on end. So yeah, they're totally leaning into this. So Alex, you were mentioning earlier the safety improvements. I think this is really interesting because this week they also released their first open weight model in six years. Open weight means you can tinker with how it's learned everything, I believe. Is that a right? Yeah, the weights are the parameters that go into the model. It's not the training data. So you still can't see the data they used to build this thing.

And they're not talking about that with GTP5 either. But it's definitely really customizable. The key thing is like you can run it on device, you can run it on a laptop, or a company can load its proprietary data into it. And it can work behind a firewall. So it's not something where like a big bank would be sending its very sensitive legal data up to open AI servers. Well, and so they'd stopped releasing these models because they're like, it's a safety concern. And now they released a vastly more advanced model.

They say it was a safety concern. I mean, yeah, this is their first open weight model in six years, which is very ironic, given that the company's name is open AI. They've actually been just doing closed models. And the timing is telling. I mean, safety was the reason they gave. And then guess what happened at the end of last year? Deep Seek. And then in January, Sam Waltman is on Reddit saying,

we're on the wrong side of history when it comes to open source. And lo and behold, they come out with an open weight model. So I think what's really happening is just the competitive dynamic around all this has shifted. And if you look at the leaderboards for open source, open weight models, they're all Chinese models, you know, because, you know, Lama has kind of shit the bad for meta. And so China's really, you know, pulling ahead here. And I think open AI sees that having it is strategically valuable because you basically have a flavor of everything for companies. You know, if they want the closed thing, they can have it.

If they want the open thing, they can have it. And they get used to open AI's, you know, systems the way it works, the way the models are tuned. And it just locks you into their ecosystem. So, yeah, I don't, I don't really buy the safety argument. See, yeah, that's what I've been really curious about. And then Zuckerberg, I think in the past week, also said the exact same thing, right? He put out his big super intelligence memo. And he's been the one who's been harping on open source for a really long time. Yeah. All the Lama models. And now I'll be shocked if their next frontier model is open source. Yeah, I think, again, for all the nerds, I know it's not actually open source. We should just call it open weight. Open AIs, GPT, Oss, whatever we're calling it. It is actually more open source than Lama. It's under the Apache 2.0 license. It's pretty commercially accessible.

But, yeah, it's not true open source. And is the industry going to really be releasing a bunch of frontier open source models going forward? I don't think so. I mean, GTP5 was the same week. I think they wanted to get GPTOSS. I hate the name, but they wanted to get it out ahead of time to clear the way for GTP5, which is the thing that really matters for. their business, right? It's the thing that may get more people to use chat GPT or to consider not

switching to Gemini or whatever. And, you know, that's what matters. You know, OpenAI is the CHATGPT company. That's their business. So I think it's admirable that they're doing an open weight model at all. But at the same time, I don't think we should pretend that this is because they all of a sudden crack some safety thing that they couldn't have before. Yeah, and Adi, you were pointing out earlier this week that, you know, all of these services, if you're using them online, you're handing over a ton of data. And obviously, GBTOSS is not the first open model that you can run locally by any stretch. But it's clearly the highest profile immediately, right? Lama is, I would be surprised at most people know what Lama is. And I think ChatGBT

Now is a version that you can run directly on your computer. That feels like a big deal, right? Yeah, I mean, it's still as far as I can tell kind of resource intensive, like you still need to have a pretty powerful computer. But I think that honestly, like the biggest safety thing with a lot of this open source AI is the fact that you can run it on a device. Like, I think that's a really hugely under discussed, not for the companies because they don't really have a reason to care. But for normal people, safety issue is that the less detail and data you can have sent over a network off your device, the better things are for you. I think about this pretty much all the time when I'm using AI tools. There's a ton of stuff that I would probably be using ChatGBTG for or Gemini or Claude or whatever. I don't want to hand it over my information.

The other day I accidentally, I was just like moving very fast and I accidentally pasted my address into ChatchipT. I'm like, that's there forever. I hate to break it. It's not like Google didn't automate, like it's not like people didn't hand a bunch of information over to Google. But this is just, it's all the problems of Google with even more confusing privacy settings. There's the story that like a bunch of open AI like chat logs got scraped onto Google just because the settings were confusing. Like I think people are even less clear when what they're sharing is private.

People are being encouraged to share even more. And they're doing it at a time when frankly, there are just much higher surveillance risks right now than they're probably have been in America for a long time. Yeah, Alman himself has actually been out there saying, I think he's been using this lawsuit within New York Times kind of as a scapego where they're trying to get, you know, millions of logs to see how New York Times articles were surfaced in chat GPT through legal discovery. He's been basically saying, look, a ton of people are using chat GPT for therapy, very intimate, private conversations. And there is no legal protection from those conversations. If we're subpoenaed or forced through discovery to hand those over, there's

nothing protecting them. There's no version of, you know, the law that protects your, you know, privileged discussions with your lawyer or your therapist in the real world. And he's saying, we basically need that for AI, which is, you know, there's a point to that, but it's also convenient because what it does is it firewalls all the data that Open AI is collecting, which is its real moat, is the data, the flywheel, and then the memory and the way it learns about you and locks you into chat GPT. So, yeah, it's a very dicey situation. Also, frankly, if Open AI wanted to actually not have access to a lot of that data, it could not. There are ways in which it could block its own access to the information that you put it to like the text that you put into it.

There would be huge problems with this. Like there would be huge safety problems with it. There are lots of reasons why they would want to be able to see what you're putting in there. But if they were really technically committed to the idea that there should be a mode of chat GPT where when you put this text in, it is firewalled away and encrypted

in such a way that we cannot access it, I think that would be plausible. Well, how would they train it? They need to train on it to learn about you and do memory. So I don't actually know if that's possible. I think that is probably one of the trade-offs. Like I think that there are a lot of different trade-offs. But what I'm saying is if they really believe

people are putting in sensitive information and we would like to encourage them to put in sensitive information, there are ways that they could minimize this information that they have access to and the information that they would be able to be required to legally give up. And I think you're both right. Like, it feels different chatting with chatGBT or any other AI bot than, you know, the information that I put elsewhere, right? If I put something in a Google doc, I'm like, yes, this is a document that exists in perpetuity

on Google servers. And chatybtee, it feels like it feels ephemeral, feels like a chat box, which it is. And it's funny, they are adding these other features to make it feel even more casual,

which kind of makes it feel like it's going to get worse and worse in terms of people handing over their personal information and not realizing just how much is stored in those servers.

I'll say, speaking of AI that wants you to get a little too personal with it, the other thing that happened this week that I want to talk about is that XAI, GROC is in the news again.

This has happened every single week on the Vergecast for the past month, I think. I cannot get away from it. Grok is always doing something inappropriate. And this time, I think in like the middle of the night, Elon just tweeted out, hey, Grock has a new image generator mode and video generator.

Adi, it has, what is going on? There's a spicy mode as part of this video generator. Like, this is, it's letting you intentionally create NSFW videos. Is that, that's maybe an understatement. Yeah, it's, so we've had. had a Jess, Weatherbed testing it, and she keeps running into the problem that the unlimited service is not actually unlimited. And so our ability to test, our ability to test it has been slightly curtailed by this. But it's basically a people rip their clothes off button. That there are these settings. You can generate an image. And generating the image seems to have sort of guardrails. Like it won't generate unblurred nude images. And then you can click a button that's like animate this image. And it will give you settings. There's like normal and fun and spicy, which is the operative one. Spicy will not always result in nudity, but it is basically a men will rip their shirts off.

Women will also rip their shirts off and sometimes their other clothes. It's like it's basically a softcore porn button. The videos are like kind of disturbing too. We were unfortunately looking over them this week to write about this. And it also, like, it doesn't have a lot of guardrails, right? Like you can put in the name of a celebrity and it just like, sure, here it is. Put in the name of like Batman or Superman. And it's like, sure, copyrighted character being naked, like go right ahead, happy to.

And it's like, Jess was messaging us with us. And she was like, my takeaway is that GROC, its image generator is only really good when it comes to things that it should not be able to do. It's like that's the only thing it can do that others can't because others have guardrails in place. It seems like its biggest guardrail for creating deepfakes of real people as being unable to actually produce an image that looks like the real person. This is true. I feel like a lot of them were very far off. It like it didn't know a bunch of like modern celebrities too, right? It produced a picture of Sydney Sweeney and I feel like it looked more like Elizabeth Banks or something.

It was just like a very generic blonde woman. I don't know. The Taylor Swift one looked like Taylor Swift to me. Actually, a surprising number of them did not look like Taylor Swift. the video that we picked does. Oh, so you had to prompt it a lot to get to that? I think it was the first, the actual first one that just found. But it's the thing that is, one thing I will say is sort of impressive about it is,

unlike other models I've played with, it just generates something, then just keeps generating more and more and more and more and doing rifts on it. And so usually your first one is good, but then it will kind of deviate from that as it goes on. And so I think a lot of these were a little more questionable. I think it's very good with, like, there are certain people that it seems like it has absolutely no trouble with, even if it's inconsistent like Taylor Swift. I think like there are just not as many pictures online of Sidney Sweeney as Taylor Swift. Yeah, Taylor Swift, there's probably the most information about on the internet. Addy, I think there's a lot of pictures of Sydney Sweeney online.

No, I think there are just the volume of time that Sydney Sweeney has been around for and the volume of. stuff that goes into training data, I think actually Taylor Swift appears in public more often than Sidney-Sweeney. I'm not saying there aren't a million pictures. I'm just saying I think by volume, the Taylor Swift weight is just so incredibly high. I think that's fair. I think it's fair. Before we wrap this up, I do want to talk about one other thing in AI this week. I think it's particularly interesting that we're talking about. GROC, I think, was pulled together very rapidly. And, you know, there are, don't get me wrong, quite a few problems I talk about with GROC, most of which I think are probably deliberate. But it does show when a company, you know, has a pretty singular focus on

building an AI service, they can build it pretty quickly and they can build a pretty decent one, it would seem. Meanwhile, there's Apple. And I think in the past week, Tim Cook has come out and made a couple of big statements about Apple needing to get in the game. And Alex, you thought this was pretty bold of Tim Cook, right? The fact that he came out and said, they're open to acquisitions, right? They're looking at this or interested in it. Yeah, how many times have we heard Apple talk about wanting to make acquisitions? Never.

The answer is never. So it's a big deal. I think it shows the pressure they're under. If you read the earnings call transcript from last week, he just gets asked over and over about AI and the threat to safari search, new devices. Like, this is what they're hearing constantly from investors. you know, people in the tech industry. So yeah, it shows, it shows the pressure they're under and they're losing AI talent like crazy to these other labs, to meta, to open AI, etc. I think Apple's

in a really tough spot here. Look, is anything happening with AI right now going to make people not buy their next iPhone? Probably not, right? Like the pixel events coming up, I'm sure there will be some cool AI stuff. I'm not buying a pixel still. It's going to take a while for that to happen. the next three to five years, are you buying something different or in aggregate our iPhone sales going down because people are upgrading as much because they have new devices or peripheral devices, AI pendants, et cetera, maybe it's not out of the realm of possibility for the first time in the last like 15 years of the iPhone. So yeah, Apple's under tremendous pressure. And I'm not confident they have the leadership currently to figure it out. So maybe they do need

a big acquisition. You know, maybe they do need to go buy one of these labs and pay a lot more than Beats to hire a team because that's what it would be. I mean, to get one of these leading labs, you're talking tens of billions of dollars, which is something Apple's never done. I mean, beats you, what, like two or three researchers nowadays? A Beats? Yeah, three billion. That gets you three researchers, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At least with how Zuckerer were spending it. Yeah. This Apple thing, I think, is going to be fascinating to watch. It will be really, interesting to see if they actually pull the trigger on a purchase. That's like pretty antithetical to how Apple traditionally operates. But I think it's a big deal. And it's clearly a

big deal as you see them struggling to catch up and all these reports pointing to the fact that they are having a hard time with it. I'm afraid I don't totally understand what Apple is not catching up with. Like I understand. I'm being sort of provocative. But I'm just saying I'm still not really sure that they've actually demonstrated there's a thing they're losing out on. I mean, Siri sucks. you know, Apple intelligence is not intelligent. But I'm not clear either of those things. I don't know. I guess I'm just not clear that anyone else has demonstrated

there's necessarily going to be still a transformative use case of AI that, I don't know, makes Siri the thing that Apple has to bet its entire future. I mean, you spend 30 minutes talking to advanced voice mode in chat GPT, and Siri is going to feel outdated pretty fast. But you could also just not use Siri. Yeah, but like they need, they need Siri to be relevant. You know, like there's also this idea in the industry that apps as a concept are going to go away, which I think is interesting with the rise of vibe coding, but like basically the OS is like fully abstracted to a either prompt that it's text or voice. And and basically, you know, what we think of as an operating system becomes much higher level. And for Apple, if they have no talent in house to build that and other people build that, and other people build that, and, you know, what we think of as an operating system becomes a much higher level. And for Apple, and for Apple, if they have no talent in-house to build that, and other people build that, and it makes it literally a dumb pain of glass more than it already is. You know, the only thing keeping you buying an iPhone is what you like the shine of the metal better.

You like the fact that it sinks with your AirPods faster. They lose a lot of their competitive edge in that scenario. I am really curious, particularly as the models become commoditized, right? Like, what is the advantage to having their own in-house one versus just paying for one? Just using an open source one. I think they've given up. I think that ship has sailed. I bet they do this plug and play approach.

There's all these reports of them, you know, talking still to Gemini, Anthropic, letting people pick their models, just like they pick their search engines. You know, I think for now that's the path they have to go on until we get to a point where AI is starting to rethink how operating systems work, which is obviously a few years out, but I think we're going there. I mean, I know people building startups in the space that are focusing first on the desktop, but are thinking like, how can we reimagine how you use your computer with, AI and Apple's at risk there.

Yeah, and there's also just this basic element of, like, Addy, you're right, there's not necessarily anything that the iPhone is specifically missing at this point, right? Syria's been bad for a while, can continue to be bad. But they also, like, came out and they branded this thing. They put, they redefined AI as a thing with their name built into it. And so I do think there's just some basic stakes that Apple has set up for itself too. and it's really interesting watching them attempt to meet those. And I think by their own account, not quite deliver.

All right, we've got to take a break. We'll get back talking about the age gating of the internet. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work?

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sellers are building real thriving businesses. And for a limited time, What Not says they'll match your first $150 sold in the first month. You can visit Whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell to start selling. sell. Whatnot.com slash sell. Okay, we're back. I want to talk about age gating on the internet. Adi, you've been covering this closely for years now. And I want to lay out what the situation looks like to me. And let me know if I'm overstating it, because it feels like this is about to be a really big deal.

It seems to me that in the past couple of weeks, there's been a seismic shift in how the internet works, where presenting some form of identification to prove that you're 18 or older is going to become the norm for when you want to access certain information online. Maybe that's porn, but maybe that's just like a slightly spicy subreddit. But either way, a lot of people in a lot of places are going to have to prove that they're of age. Is that off base? Am I in the ballpark here? I think what we've really seen over the past couple weeks is that the first time someone really, as a country said, you guys have to all do age verification. That moment happened after like a decade. And so there have been over the past several, several years, all of these plans to kind of slowly creep age verification into things.

And the UK in particular has been trying to age gate porn for, I think I looked back and it's been since about 2016. And they passed the Online Safety Act. And then the portion of it that requires age gating for harmful content, including adult content, but also a sort of variety of things that get posted to social media, that finally went into effect in late July. And now since then, we've just seen what actually happens, and it's really weird. And that there are all these other countries that are just kind of waiting in the wings to do this. And the U.S. is slowly starting to roll it out across states. And so we're, I think, reaching this kind of tipping point.

And the UK's version almost seems like it's one of the, may I shouldn't say it's the worst case scenario, given that it's the first scenario we've seen. But it seems quite controlling, right? Their definition of what needs to be age protected is really broad. It seems to be like anywhere, any website where a child might possibly encounter something problematic, right? And so Blue Sky users can't access certain features unless they prove that they're of age. Reddit users can't access R-slash periods or R-slash stop smoking unless they prove that they're of age. Like this is like pretty wild stuff to have to show that you're 18 to access.

Sorry, is this literally you have to show a photo of your ID? Basically, there are a sort of list of harmful content things that you have to make sure that if you have them on your site, there is some kind of reasonable assurance that people looking at them are of age. And typically what you end up doing then as a site is you have to either say nobody from the UK can access things or you have to have to. to say we don't have this on our site or you have to say we're blocking this unless you go through this typically third party service that will either have you upload a government issued ID or use something like a credit card or use something like a picture of your face that is you that is run through age estimation to see if you look like you're of age in a like sort of age verification algorithm. Or there are these methods that kind of they're using inferences from ways that you

used your account. Like if say your X account is 15 years old, then they're going to guess you're probably 18 years old. So it's this whole weird cornucopia of different methods, some of which are easier to fool than others. And basically the upshot is it's just really unpredictable what people are going to post on social media. And so if you're a social media site, you probably at this point need to run age verification. That Blue Sky has in the UK limited things like DMs and it will auto filter adult content. Reddit will block a lot of subreddits that are even sort of borderline content potentially, that that's ended up being things like at least as of the time we were writing about it, our period. And there have been,

say violent protest footage or other kind of material that then gets considered adult content on services like X. So yeah, if you're in the UK, you basically have to give up your ID or you have to take a picture of your face or a video of your face and show it and run it through these services. The UK is really, it's constantly impressive how shittier they make using the internet become almost on a yearly basis. Like props to the UK where the internet will continue to suck more and more. There are all these reports of these small websites that are just like, you know, shutting down in the UK because they're like, we, we don't know how to deal with

this. We don't have the resources for this. The way that they have implemented, like, it is so broad and the way, the options for identifying yourself, again, are so, there's so many options out there, and they don't necessarily have close restrictions around them. And it feels like the privacy thing is the big question to me, right? The idea of, okay, we should stop children from accessing porn on the internet. I don't think that is necessarily an unreasonable contention.

I do think that every single adult who wants to access, I don't know, information about a rated M video game needs to hand over their ID or a face scan to some service that can possibly then track them around the internet and tie that back to their identity. That's very concerning. I think the problem is that there's not really an easy way often to draw a line between those two things. Like, in the U.S., so far, it has mostly stayed on just, yeah, it's Porn Hub, it's like X Video, it's a few different sites. But the problem is that that means either you have to mean, you either have to say, all right, that means there's then no sex on social media at all. Like, you're not allowed to have, in some cases, artistic nudes. You're not allowed to have, say, just sex workers operating on this. site as humans. You have to either then say all of these other services are getting sanitized,

or you have to say, look, we're going to allow for some level of surveillance of all of these sites. And the UK also, yeah, it's that it's not just pornography. It is also, it's things like eating disorders, it's things like suicide, which are all things that it's really not good for kids to encounter. But just the nature of social media makes it really, really difficult to automate. those things away or to say that a child is never going to encounter them in a way that could be problematic. Right. Right now, like Wikipedia is complaining that they might have to, you know, make some big changes as a result of this because they can't quite, you know, guarantee that there isn't any inappropriate information because Wikipedia is a user-generated

content platform. And outside Wikipedia, there's also just there are the problems of profit motives, like that there are these services and these services cost money. these verification services. And these services also, this is all a commercial operation and there is a lot of incentive to collect as much data as you can and to either cut corners with that data because you are trying to make money off of this thing you're using or to just actually use that information to target advertisements or to otherwise, like just run a commercial service. And like companies will absolutely promise privacy, but just we've seen real security breaches. We've seen like Twitter, for instance, was under consent decree part because it would use information that you provided

as like security phone numbers for commercial purposes. Like we just understand how all these systems work and how all these incentives work. And they're just throwing something into a system that is in a lot of ways filled with perverse incentives and demanding that it work well. You're saying Europe doesn't understand tech regulation? This is the funny thing is I actually think the EU is doing better, even though the, so the EU is running a pilot program that its deal is, look, we also, we have age verification. And I personally, I believe that age verification is in a lot of ways fundamentally flawed. But they're at least saying we also have this technical system that we're trying to build that's just going to be a best, like a system anybody could deploy that's going to ideally mean that somebody uploads their passport. once to a service and then that service is held to a sort of like it runs on best practices and

all that service does then is tell a site whether or not you're 18 and that this makes it in theory easier for the for the websites they just know that there's something that they can use that they don't have to go and find this third party verifier and that they are not relying on just this private sector development of all of these weird different options. So I think the EU in some ways is doing a better job than the UK potentially. So do we expect this to spread more broadly in the EU? Because right now this is like five states are testing an app. I don't know where it goes next.

Is this a legal requirement? Because they've been pushing this, right? I think this seems to be kind of like everywhere in the world, there's an increased momentum toward age-gating things. Yeah, Australia has, I believe, also determined that they're going to be age-gating search engines in the future for if you want basically safe search off. I think it's a little bit hard to tell. I think on one hand, it seems like all this stuff is becoming kind of inevitable.

On the other hand, the UK has been, it seems like, kind of a mess. And none of this is, I think, totally inevitable. I think it is possible that now we are seeing this is what happens when this rolls out. And it turns out it's really messy and there are a lot of problems. And we are seeing really some of the first real-life test cases of it. And it's possible that that will make it possible to shape how future rollouts work. So I want to touch on the U.S. too. And this is about a month old at this point, but you cover the Supreme Court's ruling that age-gating porn websites is allowable into the First Amendment.

And I think at this point, what is it, like a third of all U.S. states, have laws that require age verification for porn. So it feels like this is going to expand in the U.S. It's not clear to me if it's going to expand beyond adult content. In the same way, I'm curious what the ruling even allows. The ruling really specifically deals with content that is obscene to minors, which is very specifically, this is pornography. I think that there are probably ways you can kind of find wiggle room around that

to try to impose regulations more broadly, but it's a pretty different court case. I have talked to people for the last months or year about, well, what happens if age verification for porn is allowed? Does that mean you can just age gate social media? And the consensus has been, it's possible that will happen, but it's a pretty different court case and that you have to just do a completely different weighing of what are the privacy risks versus the harms that you're trying to prevent. But we've definitely seen states try to pass regulations for social media. And so it seems inevitable that it's going to get up to the Supreme Court. Yeah, because it's right, because you could just say there's porn on blue sky, right?

You could easily just make that argument that, okay, now this entire platform needs to be educated. And, right, Reddit, right? You could have to educate the entire platform. I guess maybe this starts to just slice off chunks of these platforms. somehow. I mean, so far the actual laws have all basically set a threshold that's like is one third of the content on site adult. And I think that it's basically been understood that social media platforms don't fall under that. But I think the thing that's going to mean maybe the next issue is there have been laws passed that are basically requiring age verification on app stores.

that those are going to, I think, probably end up going to the Supreme Court. It's, I believe, Utah and Texas that are saying that if you operate an app store, like a mobile app store specifically, you have to have a system by which you can guarantee that people are over 18. And that basically the legal issue there is going to turn out to be is this unduly burdening speech in a way that is unique from the concerns of like the, it is fair to restrict access to obscene content. I mean, I think the Supreme Court right now kind of operates just on really weird vibes. And so it seems plausible that they're just going to say, yes, that's fine. And so at that point, I think we're going to have to start looking a lot more closely at how all of this is just going to end up getting implemented.

The App Store thing is really interesting because I think a lot of the tech companies who do not operate App Stores, such as Meta, are really pushing for this because it seems like a way for them to pass the buck a little bit, right? Alex, I think you've covered this from Meta where they've been pushing for Apple to implement these requirements. And they've been kind of trying to like guilt them into it a little bit. Yeah. Their comparison, which I think is an apt one, is like, you know, you age gate someone's ability to drive a car. You don't age gate, like, you don't force the roads to age gate everyone as they drive down the road.

You age gate the ability to drive the car. And what is the car in this analogy? It's the phone. So if you really wanted to solve this, which Apple in particular is aggressively lobbying against in the United States is you would force the phone platforms to age gate at the device layer. I got to say as a metaphor, this makes no sense to me. It's not like cars are required to tell whether you're 16. I did get barely any sleep at you writing about opening eyes, so maybe it doesn't make sense.

But I think conceptually, what makes sense to me is gating at the root, which is the device and not gating all over the web and chopping up the web. I don't think you should gate it all, to be frank. Like, I think this should, you know, it would solve this whole discussion as you make parents liable for what their kids do. And if we've decided as a society that it's evil or bad or harmful for kids to look at porn,

guess who should be liable for that? It should be their fucking parents. It shouldn't be these platforms. That's my view of it all. But, yeah, If you're going to gate, why not gate at the device? I think that's a reasonable. I think that there are a lot of good answers.

I think that I agree with you that there's a really good reason pragmatically to say that, look, you could probably create a better system using devices than you can regulating or you can, like, verifying ages on every service. At the same time, I think in some ways, like, my biggest problem with this is that it just means that basically everything has to route through an app or an app store at this point, that it means that just trying to make a thing that works on a desktop, for instance, like, it means that ultimately you're just saying desktops and websites don't matter. It's really strange.

Like, I think it basically just assumes, okay, look, most people are using phones, most kids are using phones, that's fine. And so we're just getting like the broad, we're getting most people and that's enough. But if you push this far enough, what you're saying basically is just any content on the internet has to at some point be verified through like Tim Cook or Sundar Pichai. Oh, yeah. To be clear, I think this is all a horrible idea. Like gating at all is a horrible idea. But if you were going to do it, it would be the most consistent to do it at the device layer. It shouldn't happen at all. But that would be the most consistent. And the U.S. also has the just very particular issue of the major party platform is banning pornography entirely. like the UK and the EU are not both engaged in a just really massive surveillance state building operation right now or an attempt to make like drag shows illegal. So the U.S. has kind of its own whole set of problems where like even things like I think the EU building a trying to build a sort of government solution for verification is really good if you have a good faith belief in the government and that the government.

is going to protect your privacy. I think that even something like that just doesn't work well in the U.S. Google did this weird thing this week where they announced that they were going to start like just trying to like size people up to see if they were kids or not. And if they if they just like think that you're not 18, they're going to put like certain restrictions on your account. And this is this seems to be just entirely voluntary. And I guess I'm wondering at this point if this is like they're just trying to, you know, look responsible so that some of these may be worse. case scenarios don't come to pass. Yeah, they're trying to get ahead of regulation. This is what they've done time and time again with other things, other kind of regulatory movements. The biggest companies will do it on their own, and it will be impossible or way more difficult for startups to do it. That's how this all goes with regulation. Yeah, I'm very concerned about

where this is going. The fact that this has actually gone into practice and that we were seeing the fallout be so broad and widespread and that we're seeing major mainstream websites getting blocked is kind of horrifying. And I think the fact that we're seeing an escalation in the U.S. where more and more states are passing laws and added to your point, there's an overall movement to crack down on anything that one of the major political parties thinks is a little too edgy. We can lead to some very bad places. But it's, I think it's maybe it's maybe encouraging to hear that you think that this is not necessarily a done deal, that the UK is maybe just taking a first swing at this, and the U.S. may not be able to get that far. I mean, the U.S. is way

more chaotic. The U.K., there has been a request for a petition for, I believe, Parliament has to respond to, like, re-evaluating this. That does not necessarily mean anything, but it does mean that there is public pushback to it. I think that unfortunately, if this is just like anything else that's happened with privacy on the internet, it means that maybe some things are going to loosen up some, but that this is still probably here to stay. I think that I haven't seen really a ratchet away from privacy invasions on the internet since I've been working here. That sounds really doomer. I'm sorry. But I am hoping that around the edges people can shape things. and that if this does screw up badly enough,

maybe I will be proven wrong. There we go. UK, do a worse job. All right, we've got to take a break when we get back. Some sort of round. Maybe there's lightning. We'll see. Support for the show comes from MongoDB.

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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. Okay, welcome back. So we heard your feedback on the Thunder Round. We've heard it is a branding disaster on par with Tronk or X. So we've been doing some work, some deep research here. And I'm pleased to announce that we have re-branded this segment. It is now known as the

lightning round, colon, the Thunder Round, colon, Jake's edition? And we have a sponsor, Eric. Yeah, that's right. This week's Lightning Round is presented by Google Gemini. So here's at the Lightning Round, colon Thundersound Edition, colon Jake's edition, it's going to work. To make sure we get through all these stories, we're going to do five stories, five minutes each. Eric Gomez, our producer, has the power of thunder. If we need to wrap it up, we're going to hear some rolling thunder coming in,

and then he will strike us down with a single thunder crash if we've gone too long. All right, five stories. Let's do this. Adi, you are up first. All right. So my first story is that RFK has pulled $500 million in funding for MRNA vaccine contracts. The announced it. This is via NPR. The Department of Health and Human Services will cancel contracts and pull funding for some vaccines that are being developed to fight respiratory viruses like COVID-19 and the flu. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in a statement Tuesday that 22 projects totaling $500 million to develop vaccines using MRNA technology will be halted. This is bad, and it is the latest in a long string of anti-vaccine decisions that Kennedy has very unsurprisingly made. It's really, it's very sad. His argument is basically just these don't work for respiratory diseases. That's not true. It doesn't matter. It's wild. It's not clear to me if I'm going to to be able to get a COVID shot this fall, right? Like, they change the rules. And right, I've just been getting the COVID shot and the flu shot at the same time. I don't want to get the flu.

It's not cool. And it's not clear if that's, I mean, hopefully the flu shot is still available. We'll find out. The COVID one, it's not clear it's going to happen. And, yeah, I, their vaccine strategy just seems to be, don't do it. Yeah. I mean, so Lauren Lefer has done a lot of really good work for us on RFK and vaccines. and basically he just believes that if you die from a virus, you were weak.

That sounds like a horrible mischaracterization of someone. That sounds like a horrible, mean-spirited thing to say that is just what he keeps saying. Pointing at the hypocrisy of the Trump administration, I realize that does not get very far. I do find this one to be particularly striking. Because if you go back to Trump's first term, listen, you don't have to hand it to them for how they handled COVID. However, one of the successes was the MRNA vaccines, right? They got the COVID vaccine developed fairly rapidly.

They got it distributed fairly rapidly. This is something that Trump in another world would be touting, would be taking credit for, would be boasting, right? This is a new technology that has some incredible potential impacts. for vaccinations. And after spearheading this push for it at the very tail end of his first term, which he seems to totally regret, he's now hired somebody who's just wildly undermining that. We're just MRNA, all this potential. It feels like we're just setting this work back by, I mean, at a minimum three years and potentially vastly longer.

Yeah, it was one of absolutely the best things he did around COVID. It was an incredible technological development. And it's just, it's also such incredibly just, it's such a waste. The, again, $500 million is nothing. Like, the only reason to do this is just that you hate vaccines. Even if you believe there's a 99% chance, none of this is worthwhile, which I believe is really pretty clearly not correct. That's just barely any money for the government. It really is. And the other thing that I've seen Kennedy complain about, is, and this is not true, but among his complaints are that we need to do more testing

and the vaccines, we need to see if they're safe. And it's like, okay, you know what this money is used for, right? Vaccine testing is part of this. We make sure the vaccines work. They're very thoroughly tested. And so this really does just come from this bewildering place of not wanting to help people not get sick, which is upsetting, to say the least.

Right. I mean, everything here is just in absolute transparent bad faith, and that it's that he believes that if you get sick, like, the thing that matters isn't making you well. It's making sure that your body is in some way intrinsically strong. Because if someone whose body is weak is healed or doesn't get sick, then that's actually just, I mean, it's just, eugenics. Like, it's really straightforwardly just eugenics. And it's really a disgrace. It's very,

very bad. And I think just startling, startling to see what a change of tone the Trump administration has had on MRNA from the end of their first term to this new term. Okay, Alex, what have you got for us? So while we've been talking, I've also been looking at the reaction to open AI's GTP 5 live stream and it looks like they have been vibe graphing and doing some really insane

chart crime. I want to call out two specific things that people have noticed. The first one is this Swee bench benchmark which is this kind of industry standard coding benchmark

for LLMs. Apparently GTP5 actually does worse than 03 on this, but the bar chart that they put in the stream makes it look like it's better, like it's a taller bar, even though the number is less than 03, which is not great. And then perhaps there's apparently several of these, but then the worst one is when there's a chart about hallucinations. Actually, it's called deception across models. And the coding deception one, GTP5 scores of 50.

explain what this score means except deception rate. There's no, there's, there's only one access, and it's just called deception rate. GTP 5 scores a 50 and O3 scored a 47.4, but the bar for 03 is like more than double the height of GTP 5. You really have to see this. We'll have the links in the show notes with the, with the images, but it basically makes it look like if you just glance at this bar chart that GTP5 is materially better at not hallucinating on code gen, when in reality, it's worse. And this is literally a bar chart

called deception across models. So... These are incredible. Yeah, not good. I'm going to call this vibe graphing. Vibographing is good. Vigrafing is a really good excuse for, hey, why did you turn information

that's completely wrong while? I was being efficient. I vibographed it. I mean, listen, These are graphs. They just don't make any sense. These are bewildering. There's no consistency. The highest number is not in the highest spot.

I don't understand what's happening. Things are just randomly colored. This is very confusing. And maybe suggests why this presentation was little confusing overall. I'm wondering if these are like, are they trying to hide it, or do they just not know how to make a graph? It could be vibrapped. Either answer is really bad to that question.

Like, either way, it's really bad. So, yeah. Yeah, I'm staring at two boxes of the exact same size, and one says 69.1, and one says 30.8, and they're right next to each other, and they're both smaller than the one that's 52. I'm honestly, this is an impressive level of inconsistent. Like, truly the only consistent thing about this is that everything is wrong. It is amazing. I just love that it's really wrong on a chart about deception.

I do have an important question here, which is, what's the right deception rate? What number are we feeling as good here? Preferably, I would like zero from the thing that apparently is okay to give me medical advice from, preferably zero. Right. They had an extended segment on using this for medical advice. And this says the deception rate is, I don't know what it means. He literally brought an employee's spouse on stage who had been diagnosed with like three cancers

and was like talking about how ChatsyPT had helped her navigate her diagnosis. And then, yeah, and then in the same presentation, they show a deception rate graph that is intentionally very deceiving. I have to tell you, I've been very bullish on ChatTPT. And now that they have presented a nonsense chart that says their deception rate is 50, This is done the most to tell me that I should use this thing less. Jake, it's not even that the deception rate is 50. It's that the bar is less than half as tall as the last model, which was actually better at not deceiving.

So it's made to look on the bar chart like it's way better when it's actually worse. Chow-GBT 5. Honestly, you know what, though, this. speaks to how good it is at deception. We were fooled. We didn't notice. Yeah. They're gonna, listen, if they keep this up by the next model,

these charts, we won't even notice how off these charts are. The higher the deception is actually the lower the deception score goes because you don't realize that it's fooling you. Vod charting. This is, yeah, 50% is exactly the middle where you're like, you catch it, you got to squint. Okay. Next story.

Tariff crisis across the globe, but specifically in the United States. We've been talking about tariffs for a while now. Not super exciting for our wallets. This really, I think, hit in a very material way in the past week. Number one, because quite literally Trump's tariffs did go into force, I believe, Thursday morning. But most notably, we actually saw a bunch of companies raising prices and raising them pretty significantly. I think probably the biggest one that most people are going to experience is that Nintendo raised the price on a bunch of switch hardware, including the Switch 1, the original one,

it's going up in price by $30 and some of the other models, including the Switch OLED and Switch Lite. They're going up in price two. A bunch of accessories are going up in price. They did not raise the price on the Switch 2, which I'm assuming is because that thing is already very expensive, and they do not want that to look worse. But this keeps going, right? Fujifilm, they raised, one of their cameras went up in price by $800. Now, this is already a very expensive camera. It was a medium format camera.

But what is happening? This is a lot of money. Tim Cook is on, you know, Tim Cook actually, he hung out with Trump this week and gave him this beautiful statue that he made with like a 24-carat gold base. How are we not going to mention this? Thank you for mentioning this. We should have led with this. We should have led with this.

Yeah, because he went to the White House to announce this big, you know, American manufacturing push. But before he did this, he announced that they're blowing a billion dollars just this quarter on tariffs. Well, clearly what needs to happen is any company that is raising its prices because of tariffs. You know, Sonos is another example this week. You need to bring a solid gold version of your products to the White House. You need to set it on the desk in the Oval Office and you need to do a photo op with Trump. That is how you avoid tariffs. So so.

They put Trump's name on it. Yeah. So Sonos, Nintendo, get on it. Solid gold switch. Solid gold Sonos. Make it happen. Adi, am I wrong? I think that what he described actually is the new tariff policy.

Like, didn't he announce this that if you just like make Trump happy, he will waive the tariffs? Chat Chappet he told me he did. So let's just scroll with it. He also announced a new tariff during the Apple thing, but then was like the tariff won't apply if you build in the U.S. There's going to be a 100% tariff on semiconductors. But if you build in the U.S., there's not we, and like everything, it's incredibly ambiguous what that means. Right.

It's like if you say you will build in the U.S. If you like make a good effort and maybe bring a gold bar to the White House, you will not get tariffed. Five tariffs. Tim Cook, he somehow he is playing both sides of this, right? Everyone is afraid to trash talk the tariffs. Tim Cook, he's on the earnings. call, he's like, these, we're, right, we're wasting a bunch of cash on tariffs. He said this

two quarters in a row. Then he just goes to the White House. He's like, we're all good. We're all good. And it's sort of weird, like for them in particular, if those, I mean, again, big if, if these 100% semiconductor tariffs do actually happen, they have an Apple loophole built in. Like, that is what it is, right? They were like, Apple, you said you're going to build stuff in the U.S., so we just won't apply this to you. Right? That's like fantastic for Apple's business. Tim Cook is really good at hitting that middle point where he doesn't seem like a threat to Trump, but also he doesn't make Trump mad. He's very good at this. I don't really mean that as a compliment.

And this is how you get to him presenting a statue to Donald Trump. I was bewildered by this thing. So there's a 24-carat gold base, which, Tim Cook said was from Utah, right? American made gold. And then on top of it is this big, like, circle of glass that is from Corning, which is where they're going to get the American made glass for iPhones. And for unknown reasons, this piece of glass just says Donald Trump on it and has Tim Cook's signature on it. And it's like, I guess it's commemorating that Apple is going to build in the U.S., and they are giving it to him for some reason, because they did a photo op at the White House.

It's very funny. It came in like an Apple product box that he, like, opened up on, you know, the desk in the Oval Office. Yeah, it was quite a presentation. Do we mention Trump is going to have a competing phone out this year, supposedly? Things are going to get spicy between those two. It's going to be an interesting year if the Trump phone. really does take on the iPhone. Okay, right under the buzzer. Addy, what's next?

All right. Sometimes it's fun to just have some old-fashioned legal drama that's not going to result in a baffling Supreme Court ruling, and it is that Epic has beaten Google in court again. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on July 31st said it would not overturn the unanimous jury verdict from 2023 that Google's App Store and payment apps are illegal monopolies. And Google now has, at this point, a few weeks, it could get extended time to start cracking open the App Store by not requiring people to use Google Pay billing and by not enforcing anti-steering rules that stop people from, stop app developers from directing users outside the store. It still does not have to implement the really extreme stuff yet, like allowing third-party stores in the Google Play Store. But it's a pretty significant loss, especially compared to how Epic's case went with Apple, where Epic mostly lost. Yeah, I mean, this is, this is like potentially huge.

And it sounds like it's still, what are we waiting on, right? It's like if the Supreme Court decides to hear it or not. For the really short term, we're waiting to see if they appeal and then are granted a stay on having to implement this stuff while, yeah, we find out if it goes up to the Supreme Court. Yeah, but this is like monumental, right? You said the bigger stuff doesn't come into effect, but that's, that's, it's just because it has a longer timeline. Like, they gave Google more time to do it, whereas Google is like basically out of time in this immediate stuff.

The immediate stuff doesn't feel like as huge of a deal to me. Like, these are important, but, uh, the next set of impacts fully crack open the Google Play Store. And I think it's so interesting because Android is, uh, it's, It's an open platform. You can do whatever you want. And I actually think it's like very, it was very surprising to me, at least, that Apple, which has a fully locked down platform, mostly one, and Google, which has an open, if, you know,

strangle held platform, mostly lost. But on Google, on Android, you can install whatever you want. You just have to jump through a bunch of hoops. But these new systems will allow you to just download another. App Store through the Play Store, and that new app store can be fed by the Play Store, if I'm remembering this all correctly, which just sort of monumentally shakes things up. Like Android is an open system, but the reason that Google is able to maintain it is that its apps are so powerful and so important.

And the Play Store is really at the center of that in a lot of ways. It also impacts the way that they can make deals for pre-installations on, say, Android phones and with carriers. So that's just another huge part of their ecosystem. This is wild. I think Android is going to potentially change dramatically if this goes into effect, or at least the way that Google handles it will. I generally think, again, I am surprised that Google is losing more than Apple here.

Yeah, me too. We have a really good piece about this. It is partly, I think it's specifically the thing you mentioned is why they lost, which is that Apple could make a really credible case that we have created this incredibly locked down ecosystem. It's central to our business model. We have all of these security concerns. And Google, by being kind of halfway there,

it made it seem more like it was putting up hoops. But I believe it's Sean, who has a really very good comparison of why Apple won and Google lost. I would love to see both of these ecosystems open up in a big way. And again, it's surprising to me. That is really interesting. is really interesting that by being a little more open. But it really has always been sort of, it's been a little fake.

Like I've gotten a chance to look at the terms of the deals that Google has with mobile carriers. And you start to realize that Android is only sort of theirs, right? Like, they have to, right, they make carriers or they make phone operators basically agree to these deals. And if they want the Play Store, which of course they want the Play Store, that's where all the apps are. You got to put Gmail in a certain spot on your phone. You got to put Google Docs in a certain spot in your phone. It specifies where the folders can go. It specifies how many levels deep the folders can be.

It specifies on which page of the home screen it is. And I guess that clearly hurt them in court. When you look at these terms, you go, oh, this is not as open as it is supposed to be. And it will be very interesting next year if these things actually go into effect. and we'll get to see what happens. Android really opens up to a much more dramatic degree than it currently is in practice. All right, Alex.

I'm going to try to end us without the thunder on the last one since we have failed at every turn on that. Instagram rolled out an update that naturally has caused a ton of uproar. They added a map to Instagram. It's like the Snap Map, where you can see people that you follow on a map and naturally people freaked out and Instagram has had to do a bunch of messaging around

it. Apparently the, I don't know if either of you guys have gone through the process of opening this map is pretty confusing as to who you're sharing with and what context. And apparently if you would tag a location on a story that you shared, that would show up as if you were on the map at that specific location from, so there was a bunch of like just bad design. stuff. Meta's been stressing, look, it's all opt in. We had like double opt in, but apparently they would also show you on the map even before you had opted in, which made people naturally think that they had already opted in to sharing their location with their entire Instagram friend list. And I would just like to point out that there's just an inherent flaw in this where

like your Instagram social graph, who you follow, yes, are there people there, you know, very close friends, family members, significant others that you would be comfortable sharing your location with, probably for a lot of people. Is anyone wanting to share their location with even a significant percentage of their Instagram following list? I'm going to guess no. And the fact that it's on you to curate that and to go, oh, they're on a certain list. They're on close friends or whatever. Just puts a lot of work on the user. And like, I think what Snap has done is that people just use it for a different reason. Like, people don't, it's not such a huge broadcast platform where you're following a ton of people in this way. And so Instagram's trying to shoehorn this interface into a social

network that's just not really built for this level of intimacy. And I think that's what they're experiencing right now, but also like they should have done better messaging this. You know, the onboarding seemed confusing. And it's become like a meme that, you know, Instagram is showing you on the map now. I have to say, they have had eight years, I believe, to rip off snap maps. It is rough that they could not do it. That is pretty bad that they're basically just lifting a future and it's still bewildering and a bad user experience.

I believe they've been testing this for months too. I do think your point about the following list on both platforms inherently being different is really interesting. Because I've always like, I'm like a little bit above Snapchat age. And so this is not a platform that I have used with any regularity. And so the SnapMaps thing has never really

been appealing to me or made sense to me. But you're right. If you're using Snapchat, you have a much tighter friend group. Right? You don't have to worry about that in the same way as Instagram, which for the past several,

for a while now, has pushed you to have this much broader relationship. Right. It is the influencer, platform and that is not true in the same way on snap. Yeah. And look, I'm sure people will use it. Instagram is huge.

It has billions of users. I'm sure there are people with FNSTAS who keep their friendless super tight and curated and we'll use the map. But yeah, they definitely could have rolled this one out better. Addie, you big on broadcasting your location to everybody you know. Any service that has a location tracking feature whenever anyone is building it at a website, At an app developer, there should be like a button that they have to break glass with their bare hands to deploy it with. You should not share people's locations unless you really, really have to.

And it should be as painful for you as possible to have them roll out. Again, there is like a double opt-in consent flow for this. So they are saying, but it's the way they presented it. And like the fact that you showed up on the map before you consented it, even though other people weren't visible, then of course is going to make someone think, oh, I am already sharing, even though I haven't opted in. It's more about the UI and the way that,

but they were not literally opting in everyone to sharing their location on the map. Oh, no, I'm not saying that the people should have. I'm saying that the developer should have to break the glass with their bare hands. You just shouldn't track people's location in social networks. There's also like something going on with meta platforms. There's this thing on meta's AI app where you have to hit like a gigantic share

button to share your stuff to the feed publicly. And people still hit it on really personal stuff that they're talking about with AI. So there's just some extent to which like, I don't know if it's that platform or that platform is user base, but you got to be careful. And people clearly are not, even if the thing is set up correctly. I do wish this has shown up earlier so that they could bring it up in the antitrust trial over whether Snapchat and Instagram were the same thing. If only. Well, there were also some TikTok features. But alas, we have been struck down. All right, that was a good one.

That's it for the Verge cast. Keep your eye on the feeds over the weekend because V-Song is hosting a bonus episode dropping this Sunday. And Gen Tui is picking up guest hosting duties for the next couple of Tuesday episodes after that. Also, check out Decoder, where Alex Heath is going to have some good stuff coming up next week. I think you guys will really be interested. If you like what we do here, the best way to support us

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