The Vergecast - Here's what an AI-first phone might look like

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

Some of the biggest players in AI — in particular OpenAI, SpaceX, and Amazon — are heavily invested in creating a world after smartphones. They're also all rumored to be building devices that sound a lot like smartphones. Verge contributor David Imel helps us figure out what these companies might actually be building, what an AI smartphone looks like, and whether anyone can unseat Apple and Google. Links: Elon Musk denies a report about SpaceX’s AI phone prototype OpenAI is reportedly launching a phone for ChatGPT Amazon is making an Alexa phone 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

Hello and welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcast, 5G connections. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show we're going to talk about phones. Kind of. We're going to talk about this new set of AI devices that appear to be coming for us that are not phones. At least the companies who are making them claim that they're not phones, but they seem to be a lot like phones. They're AI-centric. They are in some cases made by companies who want you to use their AI products. And they're trying desperately to unseat the smartphone while seemingly discovering that

the only way to do that is to make a smartphone. David Amel, who's with The Verge this summer, is going to come on, and we're going to talk through what OpenAI, SpaceX, and Amazon, and potentially many others are up to, and whether any of them can build anything that isn't a smartphone that actually makes you replace your smartphone. All that's coming in just a second, but first, here's what else is happening on The Verge today. This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Monday, July 27, 2026.

A bunch of big AI companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, SpaceX, IBM, and a whole host of others are creating a new group called the Open Secure AI Alliance. It comes after Nvidia CEO Jensen Wong shared an open letter last week, arguing in favor of open models in general. It became a whole thing over the weekend who signed that letter and who didn't. That particular drama isn't all that interesting. But the U.S. AI industry is clearly concerned with how fast China's AI is improving, and in part it's improving that fast because its models are so much more open.

That means some big questions are left to answer about how we build and share AI going forward. Meanwhile, it appears Amazon is gearing up to start competing for real with Starlink for satellite internet supremacy. It filed an FCC application over the weekend to deploy 5,105 new satellites starting in 2028 and said it plans to partner with mobile carriers to offer direct-to-satellite service, kind of like Starlink does with T-Mobile right now. Right now, Amazon's Leo service is way behind Starlink, way behind. But the company bought Global Stars Network earlier this year and has said it intends to offer its own service going forward. There's a even been a rumor recently that Amazon might be building a phone again. I wonder if those things

are connected. And finally, the Virges Antonio de Benedetto just dropped his review of the framework laptop 13 Pro, which is frankly one of the most exciting things to happen to Windows PCs this year. It's modular, it's repairable, it has good battery life and performance and almost everything else you would want. It is also, thanks to the ongoing RAM shortage, $3,100. That's up $800 since it was announced just in April. Ramageddon comes for us all. You can read more about all this at Theverger.com. That is 90 Seconds in the Verge for Monday, July 27th. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. AI-assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever.

But if your data layer is still a bottleneck, what's the point? Instead of wrestling with rigid schemas or translating data formats, MongoDB's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak. It ships at the speed of AI is acid-compliant and scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. Developers have a word for that kind of reliability. Actually, five words. It's a great fricking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash AI. Recommendations can't be amazing. I mean, maybe someone recommended that TV show you've been obsessed with lately. But when it comes to home projects, it's different. If you don't like a show, you might lose a few minutes. If you hire a friend of a friend,

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Hire the right pro today. All right, let's talk phones that aren't phones. David Amel is here. Hey, buddy. Hello. The Verges David Amel. Waveform's Davidamel. Davidamil.com's Davidamel. That's right. Just the David Amel. He's here. Good to have you back.

So I've brought you here to talk about phones, but not actually to talk about phones. I've just become obsessed with this thing that seems to be happening where a bunch of companies are looking for a way to put AI into a device that makes it the most important thing in your life. And basically, if you're not Apple or Google, you can't. You just don't have an option. for a bunch of reasons we should probably get into it here. But what you now have a bunch of other companies doing, I think most reported OpenAI, SpaceX, and Amazon are all believed to be, reported to be,

in the process of making something that they would love you to believe is not a phone, but might have an awful lot in common with a phone. And what I want to try to figure out here is whether A, that's possible, B, what it would be, and like at what point is your not phone just, a phone and what's the line you need to avoid crossing and see whether this could even possibly work. Does this all make sense to you? This seems like a crazy moment that we're in in not phone phone world. You asked me if it makes sense to me. The idea makes sense to me. What would this

even be? It does not really make a lot of sense to me. Yeah. Okay, good. So let's talk this out a little bit because I think if I'm open AI, I assume the thing I want is a chat GPT forward device available to you at all times. Is there anything more to it than that? Do you think I'm missing anything here? It seems like that. I mean, they're going through all the, you know, they make all of these things where they just build the UI on the fly and they just move through intent-based operating. Like the main paradigm ship that I think a lot of these companies are trying to do is that they're trying to move from a tool-based model where you use your phone as a tool. Each individual app is a tool.

You jump to the tools to an intent-based model where you can use natural language and your intent becomes the thing and then the apps become the piping for the thing. But if you make a wholly new device that just tries to ignore all of these apps, what are people actually going to be doing? Right? Because we use chat Djibati and we use Anthropic to like create. things to then put on the tools that we use every day. And this is where I get confused about what exactly are they trying to make.

Yeah. So I think even as a user, I struggle with the question of what this would look like in a way that I find compelling. And I think you're right that the thing they're trying to do is upend the idea that the first thing I do is open an app to do something, right? Every time I want to do anything, the first thing I have to do is open an app and log into that app. And I think there's actually a pretty strong argument to be made that that sucks.

that actually is really inefficient and remembering where everything is is really complicated and doing things that might exist between multiple platforms is vastly too complicated. I am a long-term believer that Apple shortcuts is a terrible solution

to a very real problem. So the idea of saying, okay, we want to flip that on its head and actually just let you worry less about where things are and sort of the individual silos on your phone and more about the thing you want to accomplish. 100%.

Makes some sense to me. But I don't. think I just don't think what I want is for my phone to unlock into a chat window. Right. Is that, is there, is there something else you can imagine that might look like? Oh, that's hard. This probably is like the many billion dollar question that a lot of people are R&Ding their way through right now. Yeah, it probably is.

I assume that they probably have a bunch of ideas in a lab somewhere where you open your phone and they try to just guess your intent based on the things that you've done before. and the secondary model is to open a chat window. You know what I mean? They probably just want to try to predict what you want to do before you want to do it. But my question, again, becomes like, well, if apps don't exist,

then what do you actually do with a device like this? And maybe apps do exist. You know, Open AI, their device is apparently going to be an Android phone. Is that sort of the idea? It's like an Android-based device. That seems to be the running theory. But Android-based device can mean a lot of things, right?

You can run a version of Android that has absolutely nothing in common with what most people perceive to be an Android phone. Like your dishwasher is an Android device at this point. So I think that could mean a lot of things. But I do think there is a case to be made that it might be a regular normal Android phone with a very chat GPT-ish launcher.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I could kind of see that. The hard part about that is like, it feels like the idea of an app and the buttons inside of an app are buttons for, reason, right? Like, if you're typing a prompt, that takes, like, so much longer than just, like, tapping a bunch of buttons to get to the point where you want to be. If you're on, like,

a multi-chain, like, do this with this app and then send it to this person and then edit it this way, I could see it being, you know, based around typing or your voice or something like that. But right now, the, like, input mechanism of buttons is actually quite efficient compared to anything else that they might want to use it for. So it's very true. Yeah. One very simple way I've been trying to think about this is, okay, what if you unlock your phone and the first thing it drops you to is not your home screen of app icons, but the Gemini app? And you can still, you know, you can swipe again and get to your apps. And actually, in theory, they're all there, but we've just sort of flipped the layers, right? The thing on top is the AI system.

And underneath it is all of the apps that you maybe want to tap on. Does that do anything for you? You know, okay, I'd say that the new Siri is probably a good way to look at. at this. Now, anytime I want to do basically anything, unless it's literally like texting the first person in my context list, I just pull down from the top and I asked Siri to do it. Interesting. So in a way, that is kind of what you're describing. And that means you actually change that behavior fairly quickly. This is the thing I was going to ask you about is how much inertia there is in smartphones. But if you were able to do that just in the course of a couple

of developer betas, that strikes me as kind of a meaningful change to make very quickly. Yeah, I mean, I will say that I was, at first I was only doing it because I wanted to pressure test Syria as much as I possibly could and see like, can it do this? Can it not do this? I don't think it can do this. Could it do it? But it has actually changed my behavior. And a lot of the time now I am just asking Siri questions. I mean, the biggest question is like, Google search revenue is going to disappear because, you know, I'm just asking Syria all these questions. But Google already knows that. Wait, give me an example. What kinds of things have you discovered you can offload to Siri AI? Okay, so one big thing. I'm like, I was on Instagram yesterday morning, so I guess that's not like the first thing I do when I opened my phone, but I'm on Instagram and I see that my favorite band is going to announce tickets for the show that they're going to have in December.

And it doesn't say anywhere on the screen when they're going to release the tickets. They just announced the show. So I scroll down, I scroll down on the Siri thing and I said, can you remind me to buy tickets to this when they go on sale? So it like searched the web, found when they're going to go on sale. and then it created a reminder to buy the tickets at the exact time that they went on sale, which was this morning. That might be the single most impressive Siri demo if anyone has ever just.

Seriously, that is like, that's the dream. That's like the stuff they put in advertising videos that never actually work the way they're supposed to. That's awesome. It's pretty awesome. The other question, though, becomes like, if it's using an Android phone or if it's using Gemini, like, Google's kind of like paradigm for these AI-based, you know, for Gemini controlling your phone,

is that it's sort of agentically clicking around. So obviously, like, how the phone is controlled is very important. You know, Apple's version of this is we're going to ask developers to put in all of these schemas and pipes to make sure that this actually works, whereas Google's just tapping around. And so if you land on like Gem, a Gemini, you know, you just land in Gemini, is it going to then swipe out of Gemini, enter another app, click on that app? Because the current version of that, as Alison has shown in her article, it like works, but it's very slow.

Yes. And I think it's also going to require a lot of trust. You know, if you just ask the chat GPT app on your phone to order you Starbucks, there's a lot of trust built in there. Is it my red address? Did it get my order correct? Did it remember to do one pump of vanilla instead of two? I don't know. I think it might take a little while longer.

And I'm very curious, like, what these companies are thinking deep down in their labs on how. these interaction paradigms would actually work. Yeah, I tend to agree. And I think what's so funny about the Siri example is, I think you both just described exactly why every company is running at this idea, because if you can do enough things like that for people, it starts to feel like a actually genuine paradigm shift in how we use our phones. And also, Apple is never, ever, ever, ever going to let anyone other than Siri do that thing.

Right? And so if you want to do that thing, you have to build something else. And this is, to be perfectly honest, like, I don't spend a lot of my time feeling sympathy for OpenAI, SpaceX, and Amazon. But I do sort of feel for them in this case because you talk yourself into this long enough and you get to the point where to say, oh, to do that for David Amel, we have to have an Instagram app. And then you've built a smartphone. Like, you just did it. You do that three times and you have made a smartphone. And you can see why everyone talks their way into phones.

Like I remember talking to Carl Pay, the CEO of Nothing, your. ago when they were starting and he was like, I have, you know, giant ideas about the future and we want to build lots of new things. I'm still waiting for any of those to come to fruition. But my question to him was, well, then why make a phone? You think you know what's next. Why make a phone now? Just start going and doing the next thing. And his answer was just essentially, we have to make a phone. If we don't do the phone, we can't do any of the rest of this. We have to make the thing that's in your pocket. We have to figure out how to make all of this work. And their answer has been build the ecosystem with, you know, earbuds and all this other stuff. then try to sort of back that into some stuff that only works on the nothing phone, and then presumably start to try and flip the form factor. So you have to do it in a bunch of steps, but you do kind of have to make a phone first. Right. So do you think it's possible that at the end of this,

OpenAI and Amazon and SpaceX, if they all ship something, it might just be an Android phone or something essentially identical to an Android phone? I think it's essentially going to be an Android phone. I mean, we saw the Rabbit R1, like, try to do something. Now, given that was super early and it didn't work and what they said it did, it couldn't really do.

But that was also just an Android phone, you know what I mean? It was like, we made it a different shape. And, you know, it's like, are there models embedded enough into your life for your daily interaction paradigms that you are going to want to use that model to interact with those things that you do every single day? I don't know. I mean, Google has the best shot with Gemini. Apple has a very good shot. You talked about the earbuds with the cameras. I don't know what their interaction paradigm with those cameras is going to be. But they already, like, if Carl Pace said, we have to make the phone first and then we can make the smart things that attached to the nothing phone later, that's exactly what Apple is doing. A third party coming in and doing that, is anybody that invested in grok that they want a grok device? Like, I don't, I don't, I I just, you know, I don't like being pessimistic and being like there is a duopoly, but there is a duopoly. Support for the show comes from MongoDB.

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I think more people should buy the pixel. People don't buy the pixel. People buy Samsung phones and they buy iPhones. Yeah. Is it even conceivable to you that OpenAI could show, up with a pretty good Android phone and make a meaningful number of people switch. What was the positivity rate around AI in the United States again? Like lower than the Democratic Party.

Real, real, real, real bad. I don't think they can do that. They might get like a quarter of San Francisco, maybe. Yeah. But they're not going to get anybody else. And also, you know, the problem that puts you into as well is that if you buy a device made by a model maker, it's inherently, if not only, going to work with that model maker or works best with that model maker. And it doesn't really feel like

a lot of people have allegiance to any particular model. I guess there's a little bit of allegiance to Claude, but that's because they're supposedly the company that's trying to do the right thing. Ironically, I think the allegiance to Claude is as much a referendum on people don't like open AI as it is anything else. Yeah. That is also very true. That is also very true. But either, I mean, as soon as I'm, I don't know. I'm a big believer in like these open source models are starting to get crazy. And as soon as RAM gets cheaper again, I think people are going to start running their own, especially at business scale. You know, if you can if you can buy RAM cheaply again, a lot of these open source models are almost as good. And you just really don't need to use any of these model providers. So I don't know, a device for me makes no sense. I think a smartphone running what these companies want you to use makes sense. And it is the most basic thing that we've always had. But disrupting that that interaction paradigm is like, I don't see how you do it. It's like you were saying, you either open up to a chat box, which is kind of annoying to open up to every single time you unlock your phone, or you have to talk to it.

And the reason that things that you have to talk to in order to interact with them don't work is because we live in a society. So, you know, the Vision Pro, very isolated. everything's isolating. Isolating things don't work. I will say I am extremely bullish on doing more things on your phone with voice and fewer with a keyboard. Good dictation on a smartphone is life-changing.

I did this big experiment earlier this year where I tried desperately to get rid of my iPhone, tried all the other Android phones, and then came back to the iPhone because I'm a deeply broken person. But the biggest thing I discovered, my absolute favorite thing about the data to day experience of Android is how much better dictation was.

Oh, my God. Gemini is better. Voice recognition in general is vastly better on Android. But my ability to successfully type text messages on an Android phone leaps and bounds beyond what I've ever experienced on an iPhone. And it was wonderful. Yeah. And I think in general, I've been testing all these dictation apps on the Mac too and

the idea that they're starting to understand which app you're in and actually communicate and transcribe differently based on the apps. I think that's, A, that's pure AI. and that's very powerful and is going to be very exciting. That is open AI showing up and being like, we have a better dictation model on our phone. You should buy our phone instead. Is not going to work.

No. But Amazon is the one of these that I'm the most stuck on. Because, right, Amazon 2014, tried the fire phone. Obviously it didn't work. And it was full of bad ideas. I think the most bad idea being that what people mostly want is a closer connection to Amazon.com all the time. That is just not correct.

And then there's been this reporting that Amazon is building a phone again. It's internally known as Transformer, which is a rad name for a phone. They should just call it that. But let me just read you two quotes. This is from a Reuters story about this phone. Okay, I'm ready.

It says, The phone is seen as a potential mobile personalization device that can sync with home voice assistant Alexa and serve as a conduit to Amazon customers throughout the day, the people said. Quote number two. As envisioned, the new phone's personalization features would make buying from Amazon.com

watching Prime Video, listening to Prime Music, or ordering food from partners like Grubhub, easier than ever, people said. Amazon has learned nothing, David. They're just doing it again. Does anyone really want capitalism OS? That's basically what that is. Truly.

Oh, my God. I don't watch TV really at all, but I was over at a friend's place and they had a Prime TV show on. I think they were watching Fallout or something. I did not know that there are literal buttons on the ads that you can just buy an ad to your Amazon cart while you're watching the TV show. Oh, yeah. And I really feel like that's so black me. And I just don't, does anybody, nobody actually

wants that. Like, nobody wants to have their escapism and just inject consumerism into their escapism. I don't see that working. You know who wants that? Every ad executive in the world. They want you to want that so very badly. But yeah, this to me is Amazon, and they're, There's even a line in that Reuter story that says Amazon understands that putting AI front and center in this way is actually not what people are looking for. So they decided to put Prime Video there. What? This to me is just like this whole idea is just completely doomed on its face to me. I've only come up with one theory about what might work here and why all these companies might be doing this.

And I just want to run this by you and I want to know what you think. Let's see. I think there's a world in which a few years from now, most of the job of our phones, or if not most of the job, a lot of the job of our phones is essentially to be a brick of compute and network connectivity

and that actually trying to put a lot of, a lot of LLM stuff and a lot of battery and a lot of processing into your headphones or your watch or whatever else is a bad idea. But if you can just have a brick full of battery

and LTE in your pocket at all times, you don't need that. You can do all the stuff you want to do with your nifty headphones through the phone. And that's actually, no one will feel like that's weird because that's how we've been doing it for a very long time. Yeah. So maybe if I'm open AI, what I'm trying to do is not sell you a thing that makes phone calls and sends text messages and open Instagram at all. What I'm trying to sell you is literally just a box of chat GPT, but that's not even the point. The point is just to be compute, battery, network.

connectivity and that if they can figure out a way to do that that is slim and good looking and does give you some kind of readout when chat chbt pt needs to show you something that maybe that can work this is the only theory i've come up with that makes any sense to me i want to know yeah my question becomes why didn't they just move forward with the earbuds that leaked that were fake with score niverson or whoever that guy was it's fair yeah you know that makes a lot more sense i think making earbuds that are specially tuned to work with chat GBT in some way and having them like connect to your phone and work really well with the chat GPT app. And when you set it up, it recommends that you change your default model to chat GPT.

Like, why do they need to work into building the actual box themselves? Like that is the hardest part. Building the box and getting people to buy the box is by far the hardest part. It's easy to just build an accessory. Like an accessory is like lower cost, easier to get people to buy, easier for people to use, change their, changing their paradigms with, you know, if you already have to buy earbuds, just buy the open AI earbuds if you're really into chat GPT. I don't, I don't know. I don't see any sort of acceleration mechanism in a dedicated device. You know, Google made the tensor chip specifically because it really wanted to accelerate AI workflows. And that was before generative AI. It was when they were just doing all the, you know, machine learning stuff. And that, that's, That has worked out well for them. Part of the reason that the voice dictation you're talking about is better is because Tensor is very good at voice dictation.

So it's like, I don't know. I still don't understand this hardware. They might be thinking something that I just am not even aware of, but it makes no sense to me. I think they should all make accessories. I would love to see, you know, Anthropic Ring or Open AI earbuds or mini-max shoes or something. I don't know. Anything, anything, anything that you're normally going to use is an idea whose time has come. Yeah. You know, it will happen. It will happen. I mean, I do think the problem

with that theory, again, especially in the U.S., is that a lot of people use iPhones and you just can't get that kind of access to an iPhone, especially for free, right? Apple, Apple is happy to give you lots of things for 30%. And I think the obvious, like, the animating principle at right now. I earnestly believe this in my bones. The main thing meta is working on is ways around the Apple tax. That is like the leading product at meta is how do we get around the Apple tax? And I think there's a lot of that going on at these other companies too, where there is a sense that if we give, you know, if we build an accessory to the iPhone, actually what we're doing is that we're inviting Apple to just Sherlock us with AirPods. And that what we need to do is we need

to get around it entirely. And many have tried for 15 years. This was the idea behind the Metaverse. There was some of this in all of the blockchain stuff. This is part of the animating principle behind smart glasses. We've been at this a long time. And it's kind of why I think this question of what are these non-phone phones is so interesting. Because I do think if there is a way around them, it is not to invent some completely new thing. It's to make better phones.

It's possible, again, that they're so entrenched that everybody just buys the next iPhone or the next galaxy phone, that none of this matters anyway. but like if I if I sort of galaxy brain my way into this right we're we're doing flip phones again we're doing fold phones again there is more energy than ever for people to get away from their phones so that maybe there is a sliver of saying we have a new way to do it that might be something yeah but then you go back to what you just said people don't like AI I just people don't like I don't know I'm so I'm completely lost here as to what what avenue in these companies could find I understand why they're looking for it And I cannot, I can't find it. I mean, Open AI is trying to build their own chips, right? So, like, maybe in this fab, they're going to build smartphone chips. And maybe those smartphone chips will have accelerators for specific AI-based tasks. Maybe. But then you're still using Android, right?

So, like, if you use, and if you want to use Android and if you want to interact with the apps people use every day, you still have to use the Play Store, which also takes a percentage. It's not like the Apple tax is the only tax on the highway. But, you know, you couldn't just. not use the Google Play Store, but then if chat ShpD is the only app on your phone, what can that even do? I don't, I don't, unless Open AI decides to build, like, a competitive ecosystem for every single thing that you do on your phone every single day, are they going to build a Venmo that,

like, enough people will use that they don't have to think about? Like, I just, I mean, maybe this is Elon Musk's idea with X being the everything app and, like, they made a GROC phone. It next could do your social media and also your payments. I sure. Sure. That's where we're going, apparently. People also don't like Elon Musk. So what's the, you got to get people to like you. This is like, I feel like they've really, I don't even know what the right term is here, but the number one thing they need to do is get people to like their product before they

try to sell a bunch of said product. Yeah, I agree. So to that end, actually, I want you to rank these three companies for me. Let's just say, Amazon, SpaceX, Open AI all ship something that is just a very, very AI-centric smartphone. You define that however you want, but we're going to say they all sort of shit. I want you to rank one to three

how you think they'd do. Oh, God. I think this is actually this exercise is very easy for me. Which is why I'm curious. Okay, okay. I found it, I immediately know the answer for me. Would the SpaceX AI phone

only have X on it? Or would it have other? Good question. That's the question. Ironically, I want to say yes for the purposes of this exercise, but also given the way that Elon Musk has systematically kicked every other platform out of X, I just feel like there's no shot Elon Musk lets you install Instagram on your SpaceX phone. I just don't see it.

But let's just say for the purposes of our exercise, yes, these are sort of feature-wise, functionally the same kinds of devices. Okay. I'm close on OpenAI and SpaceX AI being number one. I think, funny enough, it seems like SpaceX AI being like four to five companies bundled into one, kind of diluted their individual hate for any of the individual companies a little bit. You know what I mean? Like now when you think about Twitter, you're thinking about SpaceX and people don't dislike SpaceX that much, like some people do. But so I would say SpaceX AI would be the most likely to win, in my opinion.

The open A iPhone would be number two. And I just do not see the Amazon phone. Unless it was like on sale on Prime Day for like $20, you know. Yeah, they did that with the fire phone. And it's still nobody wanted it. Yeah. Yeah. This was my list too.

If only because Elon Musk, for all of his flaws, has a long history of being able to just horsepower things like this into existence. And there are enough Elon fans out there that they would buy it. And I think you're exactly right that. about the dilution of branding problems. And I think that is a big, giant part of the reason that all of this has happened. Because you can say whatever you want about this company,

but it is objectively rad that they launch and land rockets. Exactly. It just rules. And so all they need to do is keep that image in your head and don't think so much about the rest and everything will be fine. And I think they can possibly do that successfully enough and tell a story about Starlink. And I think Starlink might end up buying a carrier.

put the phone on that carrier. You can sort of see how that thing works. I don't think it becomes the iPhone, but I can sort of see how it would work. I also think they wouldn't make that thing. They would make a GROC phone, and it would be a disaster. That's what I was about to say.

Less people know about the GROC child porn image stuff, than people know about the fact that they dislike Sam Altman. But less people, even less people know that GROC actually exists. So I don't think that they're going to be necessarily swayed by Grog. I think the dilution of Rocket Company makes a phone is probably more interesting to people. And Grock is just a side thing, though, to say, oh, it has AI capabilities. Yeah, I agree with that. Which is sad because GROC is like the worst model in terms of when it's done for the world.

But, you know. Yes. Drac is a horrific disaster that no one should ever interact with ever. That's right. But rockets are cool. And it is possible to hold both of those ideas in your head at the same time. And this is what we have to. to do here. Yeah. And then I agree. I had Open AI second because I actually think if OpenAI had made

a chat GPT-centric phone in like 2023, it might have had a real chance because the adoption was so huge. It seemed so exciting. There was so much enthusiasm about what was going on. Yeah. We hadn't really had time for A, people who are going to develop these workflows who already develop these workflows. I think even if they ship this thing, there are going to be a lot of people who say, well, I have chat GPT voice mode wired to the action button on my iPhone, how is this more useful and chat GPT-centric than that? And that's a set of power users who are already starting to learn how they do these things and are going to be hard to get to change. And everyone's opinion about Sam Altman, Open AI, and AI in general has changed in the last three years. And I think

that is a, it is still a hugely successful, very used product that I think people don't like nearly as much as they did a few years ago. And then Amazon, object, disaster. I just don't even know what they're trying. Just don't build the phone. I admire the code name. I admire the effort. Just kill the project. Yeah. I just don't even think that people associate SpaceX AI with data centers, which, you know, they're not, they probably don't have as many built out as Open AI, etc. But they do have the mega data center thing that they're releasing to Anthropic. Yeah. Colossus. Colossus. They are a major data center player, but people don't associate them with it because there's just too many things to associate with that company because it's X and it's a rocket

company and it's an AI company, but nobody thinks about the AI company. So yeah, Open AI is directly, like, people's grievances are directly associated with Open AI. When they think about artificial intelligence, it's like, they're the ones building the data centers in my backyard. They're the reason RAM is so expensive. They're the reason that everyone's getting, you know, noise pollution in small towns. Yep. It's not great for them. It's a big branding hole to get out of if you want to sell somebody a smartphone.

Maybe just merge with forever companies and you'll be okay. It's true. Yeah. McDonald's Taco Bell Open AI. Oh, Taco Bell. Everybody loves Taco Bell. You could never. That's true. That's a great point. That's a great point. That would help a lot, honestly. I think so. It's an idea whose time has come for sure.

All right, David, thank you for being here. If anyone out there has worked on one of these phones, has ideas about how these things should work. If you think you've figured out the next UI paradigm, if it's not a bunch of apps on a screen and it's not a chatbot, what is it? I honestly want to know. Send us concepts.

Send us your ideas. Send us weird things that you've worked on that you think are rad. I want to hear all about it. And then David, as this stuff gets more real, you and I are going to have to talk about this again. Oh, absolutely. We're going to get into it. Good to see, bud.

Thanks for being here. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to David for being here. And thank you, as always, for watching and listening. I was serious, by the way, if you have even thoughts about this. I would love to see ideas, see concepts. If you've built something funky that you think might be the future of AI on a smartphone, how to marry this idea of I want to open apps and look at them with sometimes I want to use an AI agent to go to things on my behalf.

This is the interface question, I think of like the next decade. And if you have thoughts, I would absolutely love to hear all of them. Call the hotline 866 Virge11. Send us an email at verge.com. looking forward to hearing from you. As a reminder, the best thing you can do to support everything the Verge is up to is to subscribe to Theverge. Theverge.com slash subscribe. It gets you all of our podcasts ad-free, including this one.

It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of whatever these weird phones turn out to be whenever they launch. We will be there. And so can you. The Verge.com. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larch, and Aaron Lacasio. We'll see you tomorrow.

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