The Vergecast - Humane Pins and your own ChatGPT

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Alex Heath discuss the debut of Humane's AI Pin, OpenAI's DevDay, GPT-4 updates, and more. Further reading: Exclusive leak: all the details about Humane's AI Pin, which costs $699 and has OpenAI integration  Humane officially launches the AI Pin, its OpenAI-powered wearable  All the news from OpenAI’s DevDay conference OpenAI is letting anyone create their own version of ChatGPT OpenAI wants to be the App Store of AI  ChatGPT subscribers may get a ‘GPT builder’ option soon OpenAI turbocharges GPT-4 and makes it cheaper OpenAI’s GPT builder interface is dead simple to use. Valve reveals the Steam Deck OLED: $549 buys better screen, battery, and more Steam Deck OLED review: better, not faster This smart garage door controller is no longer very smart YouTube pages are getting a TikTok-like For You feed  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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Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Vox Media. I'm just taking it back, baby. Yeah, I love that. That's 2024. Just open mutiny.

Bring it on sports website. I'm your friend, Neal. Alex Cranz is here. I'm your friend who, I just got to say it. My brother went on Michelin Star. It's pretty good. And I didn't even want to try to put that in neatly. I just want to brag.

Yeah. So that was me bragging. That's it. It happened. The flagship podcast is being related to Michelin Stars. Yeah. There we go. He's my brother, too.

Yeah. He's all our brothers. Everyone's family. Everyone earned this with them. If you're listening to this show, you can tell people, you know, a Michelin Star. Yeah, you can. The star, not the person. Just the star.

David Pierce is in San Francisco. We're like 85 seconds in, and I'm like, this is going to be a three and a half hour long verge cast. It's not going to make any sense to anyone. And this might be the end of the verge cast. Yeah. Like this, for a lot of reasons, today might be the last verge cast ever, I think. It's going to be a day.

If you're going to go, go with a bang. Alex Heath is here from Los Angeles. Hi, I'm really just an AI agent, but I'm here. I will say that some people in the YouTube comments openly wondered if I was interviewing an AI Barack Obama. You got trolled by AI Barack Obama. And maybe I did. All right. So, David, you're in San Francisco.

Yep. Because you were supposed to attend the launch of the humane AI. pin. That's correct. Which when David says the energy of this podcast is a little, I would say that that is the thing that we are going to talk about. It is, it's a lot. There's a lot to unpack with the fact that David is in San Francisco and did not go to

that event. And then earlier this week, Alex, you did attend the Open AI Dev Day. That's right. Which is probably like a pivotal moment in the history of that company because they're headed towards app stores. So there's quite a lot of news. And then I got a lightning round. But we should start with the fact that I'm using Samsung decks.

Well, first, I should say we should actually start with an apology, which is that I made certain promises on this show two weeks ago to hold you to a standard of using Dex on the podcast. And I did not do that. I abdicated my responsibility in bullying you into using this insane setup that you have going on. And on YouTube, there were several people who were very upset with us. And so I just want to preface. whatever Nealai is about to say, as the 30 minutes before we started recording this podcast were spent

with Neelai and Liam, our producer, attempting to make this thing that is happening now work. So if you're listening, if you're in your car, just close your eyes. Pull over, close your eyes. I want to just imagine my setup. Dell monitor, pretty nice, Del monitor, actually. We just stole it from a desk. Liam just wandered the office and took the nicest one he could find. It's connected to a USBC hub. which is connected to a dead Bluetooth keyboard that is now charging by being plugged into the hub and a wired mouse and the tracking speed of this mouse is out of control.

This computer is almost unusable because the tracking speed of this mouse is set at warp 20. It's out of control. And then that's all plugged into a Galaxy Fold 5 with a Dbrandskin on it. It's our custom Dbrandskin. You can go to store.org.com.

Put that plug in there. And I'm in it, man. I'm just running multi-windows. Yeah. My dream, Alex, is to know any of this. My dream, Alex, is that I would commute with nothing. No bag, no laptop. I would just have the fold.

I would do phone stuff on the train. I would tell David that his humane leak was clunky just from my folding tablet. Then I would get to the office and I would use decks. And this would be my computer at work. And Alex, I just want you to tell the people what you said immediately upon seeing this setup. just that looks stupid? I actually don't remember exactly what I said. That was it.

Yeah. The only thing that could possibly be stupider is like a screenless thing on your lapel, I think, that you're using, but you're not using it. I wish I had one, but we never will. That seems clear. All right. So I'm using decks. We're going to get through the show notes with decks. It's not unusable, I would say.

Well, the monitor's gorgeous. The Dell display that we, again, just boosted from the working space in this office without asking anyone. That's great. And it's basically just a Chromebook that sucks. Eli has the exact energy of the person who brings an IMAQ to Starbucks and plugs it in. Like, that's the vibe that I'm getting from you in the studio right now. Yeah, you got to bring this whole setup to Starbucks. That's one we'll really appreciate it.

All right. We're going to try to get through the rundown with this. So let's start with Humane. We're going to take the first ad break in the show. My laptop is 100% coming back. I just want you all to know this. Also, just to remind everyone, I truly dislike using this phone because of the jolly scrolling. Nothing about this plan was a good idea.

I like that I don't need my laptop open because the screen is so large. I see the whole rundown. Yeah, this is a good case for having a big screen. Yeah. Not a folding phone that runs text. All right, let's start with Humane. There's a lot of drama with Humane right now. We do a lot of big splashy launch features.

David has written a billion of them. I have written half a billion of them. They're fun to do. I appreciate the people do them. It's great. They're great. This company, just from the jump, has communicated about itself in the weirdest ways possible. And then they, I'm just going to say it, David.

They invited you to California and then ghosted you. and you are not at the, they disinvited you from the invent, which is crazy. And we know a lot of other reporters and reviewers who are not there either. Yeah, this is a weird situation that I still am trying to wrap my head around.

Because on the one hand, like, I think a majority of people who work at Humane used to work at Apple. So there's a real Apple, like, aesthetic and ethos and way of thinking about the world. And Apple is a famously secretive company that has weird ideas about how to sort of bring people in on what it wants to do. And that's all fine and good, right?

Like Apple, Apple does things its own way and that works fine. But then also, Humane has been doing this thing where I think for eight months now, it has been sort of slowly trickling out information about the device. And one of the things, we're going to get into this, but one of the most fascinating things about this launch to me was that it's functionally the same thing that in Ron Chowdry, the co-founder, did on the TED stage, like six months ago. Like, the features are the same. The device is the same. Like, my guy just launched it then.

And it has really not changed all that much since then, which is really fascinating. But, yeah, so there was supposed to be a kind of launch thing ahead of the event, and then that got changed to being after the event, and then a bunch of people got disinvited from that. And what seems very clear is that Humane is not interested in product reviewers. getting their hands on this thing at this time. Even the people they gave these sort of big splashy stories to, like Wired had a good story,

the Times had a big giant profiling thing. The Wall Street Journal got a story ahead of time. They weren't allowed to photograph the thing. They weren't allowed to talk that much about how to use it. No one is really trying this thing. It's a strange thing that is happening right now where it is both a launched product that they've been talking about for many months

and also seems to be not close to being finished or ready for public consumption. It's very strange. Yeah, a lot of the features were just, they'd be like, they're coming soon. They're coming soon. Yeah, like recording video

is coming in a software. It's like, that's a pretty basic thing to get right on your camera. So we have obviously talked a lot about Humane. David was invited to the event, got disinvited. And then last night,

totally separate from all of that. And the other reviewers we know who didn't get to cover the thing, it was all leaked to us. Yeah. Which is what happens. That's life. I'll take the leak every time.

So we know a lot about this thing, and there are no surprises. I think most of the leaks we got, all of the leaks we got were dead on accurate today. Yep. So the basics are pretty, they're understandable, and then what's not understandable is this device at all. So the basics are, it's a smartphone. Right? It's a Qualcomm 8-core Qualcomm processor. They didn't say which one, but whatever.

It's got a camera. It has a personic speaker that creates a bubble of sound, which no one has experienced. It has the laser projector, which we've seen. It needs wireless service, obviously. They've partnered with T-Mobile, which is really interesting. And it's not just T-Mobile. It's like they have their own wireless network, like an MV&O. So you're not how visible is Verizon.

They've got that, but it's humane. And so you get a phone number. You can get text. You're a green bubble. We need to talk about that. You get data and you get cloud storage. You get access to OpenAI and Microsoft. models, and then their slides

they had Google and Slack, importantly, title. And it's weighs about the same as a tennis ball. Okay. That's the part that's really I'm hanging up on because, like, my mom gave me this beautiful pen earlier this year that also

weighs about the same as a tennis ball. And I'm like, oh, I want to wear this really pretty pen. It's this big gold pen. It's cool. I'm like, I want to wear it. I can't wear it with anything because fabrics like just crumple under it. And you can see it. What's wild is you can see it in the video. You can see it in the New York Times piece, too, where it's just like the fabric around the pin is just crumpling around the weight of the pin. And I'm like, okay, so this won't work with a T-shirt because it's going to drag the whole side down. Like you can watch him and he's wearing a shirt. His whole side, it's like one side of the collar is dragging down from this thing. I'm like, why would you? No. Like who wants that? I don't want that. Well, you haven't gotten to the battery boosters. Oh, sorry, sorry. I think it's a tennis ball without the battery. And so I would say a huge part of the humane story is what you might call self-seriousness.

There are other words you could use. But self-seriousness, I think, really captures it. Because I think they're sincere. Yes. And I think that means they're blinded by some of the inherent absurdities of the product. And I'll just give you this example, which has made me giggle all day. And this is very clever. Again, I think they're sincere.

I think they came up with a solution's very clever. The thing obviously chews through battery. Yeah. Because it's small. And it has an always-on wireless connection, and it's running GPT, and it's got around the mics. It has a laser projector in it. So instead of making it big, they're doing an inductive battery that is the clip. Yeah.

So the back of the magnetized clip contains the battery or more battery. And you can swap them. So the computer part has a battery in it, and then the back of the thing is called the battery booster, then you can hot swap them because the computer part has a battery. Yeah. This is very clever. I don't want to take one ounce.

If you were to solve this problem, this is very clever. They're doing this cool inductive thing. Many questions. If the fabric is really thick, does that lower the transfer power, like all this stuff? But whatever, it's very clever. Humane, just watch this video. They're like, this is a perpetual power system. And it's like, my guys, it's a battery.

Is my anchor USBC battery pack a perpetual power system? Yeah. And I think the answer is yes. The Apple MagSafe battery attachment is a perpetual battery. Like, what are we doing? Like, the over-talking of the product is out of control. Well, didn't David say that most of the people at Humane used to work at Apple? So doesn't that explain the branding?

Yeah. It kind of reminded me of a lot of times you'll get a really good writer. out there in the world, like writing like a TV show. And they go and they write this really cool TV show. And you're like, oh, man, I wish they ran that show. That would be so cool. Instead of just being like a writer, I want them to run it. And then they go and they run it.

And no one's there to say, hey, that's a bad idea. And so you just get unfiltered writer. And it's the same way. In fact, Alex, I would suggest that the exact opposite happened. Oh. With humane. Okay. You think these are the bad writers.

No, I think that, I mean, I'meron and Bethany, the two leaders of the company, worked at Apple, they have a long history, they've built some amazing things. Their names are on some very important technologies. I'm going to just read you this section from the Times profile, which I encourage everyone to read. And again, I began the podcast. I mean, I can already see it. By saying we have written a lot of access-based launch features.

I love them. I love doing them. I love reading them. They're some of the most fun things you can do. I have no qualms against it. But you add the self-seriousness of humane. to the institutional self-seriousness of the times. And it's gold.

Like every line of this is gold. So, you know, like the writer, no one told them to stop. In fact, the exact opposite happened. A Buddhist monk named Brother Spirit led them to humane. Mr. Chaudhry and Ms. Onjiorno had developed concepts for two AI products, a women's health device in the pin. Brother Spirit, whom they had met through their acupuncturist. recommended that they share these ideas with his friend, Mark Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.

Sitting beneath a palm tree on a cliff above the ocean at Mr. Benioff's Hawaiian home, they explained both devices. This one, Mr. Benioff said, pointing at the pin, as dolphins breached to the surf below, is huge. It's going to be a massive company, he said. He was right about one thing. It is huge. want to know if the Dolphins thing passed the Times fact check. Do you have three sources on the dolphins? Incredible. The best part about that whole thing, by the way, is that Bening off owns Time magazine, and then Time magazine just like immediately named the AIPen Best Invention of 2023,

like before it for minutes. Yeah. It's good. All that's great. That's what I mean by self-seriousness. Like, maybe this thing is really cool. Maybe having a voice assistant that talks to chat, GBT is a really good idea. It's $700. It costs $24 a month. I don't know about that. I think the very basic thing, like, if you describe it the way you just described it, which is a voice assistant for talking to chat GPD, I think that is like a real thing

that a lot of people are going to have at some point in the very near future. That makes perfect sense to me. Like, I have talked to a lot of people who think that there is a really interesting set of hardware to be made around some of these. AI things, right? We heard about Sam Altman and Johnny Ive working on some of this stuff together. Like, how do you access these language models from an interface is super interesting? What this feels like to me is like, do you remember that period of Samsung where they never said no to anything? That it was like any engineer and product manager who was like, I have an idea about how

something should work and where a button should go. They just said yes. So there were 40,000 ways to do everything. And none of it actually made any sort of coherent sense. That's what this seems like to me is they built a bunch of tech demos and then we're just like yes, this is it. Well, no, it's yes to anything but a screen, right? Right. Because there's one

really easy way to interact with AI chatbots. And it's the chat GPT app on the iPhone. You can just get it. Yeah. Which is, it works pretty well. Also has really good voice assistance stuff now. And I was going to say, Alex, do you and I have both used the Raybans?

Yes. From meta. I like them. I was wearing them on the way to work today. They were great. I infinitely prefer that to this. What about you? As a way for accessing voice.

For accessing voice, it helps to have something that can sit on your body that isn't dependent on the clothes you wear, I would say. Yeah. And, you know, speaking of Sam Altman, Nilai, what did Sam Altman say about Humane in that Times piece? That's how she's so good. So Sam Altman is a large investor in Humane. And in seemingly every other AI thing happening right now. Like anybody who's making hardware, it's like, yep, Sam's there. Right.

So I was talking to our friend Joanna Stern at the journal. She also did not get to interact with the AI pin. But when I say they didn't want reviewers there, people who are going to ask technical questions about how things work, they got reporters there. And very good reporters went to this. I don't mean that. It's just a different skill set, a different mindset, whatever. No reviewers have seen this thing. Tech reporters have seen it, and they wrote, that's great.

And many newsrooms have a split between news and reviews. We kind of don't. It's where a tech publication is different. But Joanna didn't get to go and see it. And so she and I were just talking about all of this, and she pointed out that Sam Altman, an investor in Humane, was on stage with her at her conference last month. And she asked him if he was going to make a phone.

And he said, no, phones are great. There's no point in competing with phone. and then there's these rumors he's working at Johnny Ive. And he said, I, like, demurred. And he said, I think there's something great to do in AI hardware, but I don't know what it is yet. Which is like... A month ago. Do you think it's the company you invested in?

Maybe he's just taking shots. And then today, in the Times, he's an investor, so the Times talked to him. Sam, I would say, waffled. No guarantee of success. That will be up to customers to decide. maybe it's a bridge too far, or maybe people are like, this is better than my phone. And then he says to the times, plenty of technology, it looks like a sure bet, ends up selling for 90% off at Best Buy, which is brutal.

The Zoon. Seriously, the Zoon looked like a sure bet. We'll talk more about this later, but I was with Sam on Monday at OpenAI. He talked about consumer hardware. He didn't mention Humane. And this was days ahead of the public. Everyone knew Humane was about to launch. He didn't acknowledge it, but he got asked about this.

We can talk more about this later. But, yeah, there is this very interesting pressure happening where people are talking about how can Open AI intersect with a consumer device. And Sam does not seem to think humane is that device. Because he's invested in this and also like there was a necklace too, like an AI powered necklace. Yeah. And it's like the Rewinder. Yeah, the Rewind something.

Yeah, the Rewind pendant. Yeah. Oh, this is great. And what they're all trying to run away from is the phone. Yeah. Because the second you put a screen on it, you've made a little phone. And then once you've made a little phone, and we've seen this with every other little phone, you've got to have Instagram. Right. Bank apps have to be there.

All the stuff that people expect from phones just come for the package. You have to deal with whatever Epic and Google are doing in their trial this week. You can't. Like, it's too hard. The mountain is too high to climb. So you take the screen off it and you're like, and again, in the Times Feast and in all the marketing for the PIN, they're like, this is to solve your relationship with your phone. And they are very clear that you should not need a phone, right, that you're $700, that's the cost of a phone, $24 a month, that's a cost of a data plan. If you've got this and your phone in your pocket, you're doing something wrong.

They sent mixed messages there because in the New York Times piece, they end it with saying, oh, we're still using our phones. We use them differently, yeah, but we're still using them. I mean, I guess you were also still using a phone just different. So they did answer some questions in the presentation today that I've had for a long time. How does it know your contacts if you want to make a call? Where do your photos go? All this stuff. When you set up, when you go to order one, you import all your contacts, and then it arrives with your contacts preloaded.

this is this is what they want you to do then there's a website called Humane Center where your photos are and your videos are well your videos when video recording is released they haven't what happens if I meet someone and I add their contact how do I do that how does that then get on the pen

chest bump I don't know man these are all these are all questions that like phones have solved really well and I think this is why when people ask Altman about it he knows that whatever AI device arrives is going to sit right next to your phone.

Yeah. And also, what is a phone? This thing comes with a phone number. It makes calls. It is a phone. It is a phone. It's a screenless phone. They made a screenless phone.

So let's stop calling it anything else but that. That's fair. I don't think the idea that you have to have this and your phone is like a huge strike against humane. I think we're in this phase now where I think every gadget maker is out there trying to sort of disintermediate the phone. With the recognition that like you're going to. keep having your phone in your pocket, what can we give you that is better and faster? And, like, it's certainly true that if you want to ask chat GPT a question, the pin is going to be a faster way to do it than your phone.

And that's meaningful. That's real. You don't have to fish a thing out of your pocket. You don't have to unlock a thing. You don't have to open an app. Like, that's a better system. Right until that thing is built into your AirPods. It already is.

You can already, with shortcuts on iOS, you can already ask chat GPT things through your AirPods. No, Alex, the minute a sentence starts with shortcuts on iOS, like, I'm out. Sure. Like, oh, so that's harder for you than buying an $800 pin that you have to sink on the web and pay a monthly. No, Alex, you can listen to Title on it. I forgot about title. Yeah, the personic speakers. But no, but I think the problem with a thing like this and a problem with a lot of these LLMs is they don't do anything.

They're really good, like, information retrieval systems, and they're useful for generating text and images. But, like, I want to add to my contacts. That is not a thing chat GPT is capable of. And Humane is going to try to be the platform for all of that in the same way that OpenAI is trying to be the platform for that. The, like, the real race underlying all of this is to be the AI App Store. Like, that is the fight here. And everybody wants to do it. And until someone wins that battle, the list of things you can actually.

do by interacting with an LLM is pretty small. We're going to get that because that's the open AI story, right? Yes, but David, what David is hitting on is very important here, which is that, you know, you're saying chat GPT is a good information retrieval system. I would argue that it's not. And the problem with this humane product is that it's core tech, which is like talk to open AI. Guess what?

ChatGPT makes shit up all the time. Like, and they know this. And Sam talked about this. with me and other reporters on Monday, and he doesn't think this problem will be solved for like three years. So this is a device you're buying where the primary interface information retrieval system, the people who designed it know that it has still a huge accuracy problem. I was using chat GPT to try to do some earnings coverage. It just made the financials up for the company.

So imagine walking around, and this is your only device on you, and you ask it something, and it's like, yeah, take a left to go here. and you end up, like, walking into oncoming traffic, right? So this raises another important point, which is we still don't know how it works. Like, even in all the coverage you can read and in their demos, we don't know. Like, is it open AI underneath it? In the press release, it just says Microsoft and OpenAI models. Doesn't say which ones.

They said in a couple of the stories that it's chat GPT primarily. So I think we can fairly safely assume it's a chat GPU interface. They're using the API. API. Yeah. Right. But then there's the Google logo sitting right in their press release, and I don't know why. Then they claim they have their own platform called MyAI.

Maybe it is all just chatGBT. And it's all cloud-based, right? Yeah, which I think is also why it burns through batteries. Yeah, well, it burns through batteries, and it also, that just cuts off a huge user base. There's a ton of people who can't have ready access to the cloud all the time, right? Like, Internet is inconsistent. They weren't going to buy it anyway. Yeah.

Do you think the people in rural America are... Are you saying they were not watching the Keperni show to see it? Like, oh, my God. It's running on the T-Mobile network. Those people are already left out. It's just like even that stuff, right? Primarily the ChatGBT API. That's what we think it is.

We don't know. No one's actually used it to figure out its limits. No one's actually used it to figure out if when you ask it for directions, it falls back to Google Maps or something, like, or Bing Maps or whatever. acquisition like Microsoft made through the Nokia deal 500 years ago that they forgot about that still runs and somehow makes $5 million, which is the true story of many Microsoft acquisitions. And because it doesn't have a screen, you, the user, will never know.

You will ask it a question and it can never tell you how it arrived at the answer, which has been a problem with voice assistance in general for a very long time. It could list sources, but still, like, I don't, we'll talk more about this later. I don't trust chat GPT for, like, information. because it hallucinates. And so if you're thinking, like, tactically, this is my new phone, this is how I'm going to interact with the internet,

the main way that you're doing that, you cannot inherently trust what is being said back to you. How is that a replacement for the devices we already have? It doesn't make sense. Yeah, there's this interesting moment in the demo video that they put out, which everyone should watch it's wild.

Nela's suggestion to me was to watch it at 2x speed, which it seems like normal speed, which is good advice. but there's this one moment in it where he holds up, I think, a book to the pin and says, how much does this cost online? He's, like, demonstrating the shopping features. And he's like, how much does this cost online? And it responds, it costs $28 online.

And he says, buy it. And that's the end of the demo. And it's like, I have a million questions between here and there. Like, there's only one price on the whole internet for this thing. Where did that price come from? Where am I buying it from? How fast is it going to ship? Where's it going to ship?

Which credit card did he use? Like, Amazon has gone through this problem where if you just say to your echo speaker, buy toilet paper, it turns out that actually takes you through a flow that you don't understand and can go wrong in a thousand ways and people don't do it as a result. And the idea that Humane is going for is to abstract even more of that a way and to just say, all you have to do is just describe to this thing what you want to accomplish in the world and it will do it for you. And I think that's a super interesting and completely impossible thesis. The price online is $28. It's like, is it Amazon? Do you think Amazon is the only store? Who knows?

eBay? Right. Who knows? Maybe it's an artisan. And it's like, by doing this, am I signing up for whoever Humane has decided to, like, RevShare, partner with in order to be able to do this? Should I be able to choose? And at that point, if I'm choosing, what are we accomplishing by abstracting all this way? There's just no version of this that feels good in the way that you kind of want it.

And by the way, the book. is an easy example in the sort of medium scheme of things because the book has a barcode and maybe it's scanning the barcode. Maybe you can see the title, right? There's structured data on and around the book. There's another part of that demo where he just holds up a handful of almonds

and he says, how much protein is in these almonds and it just tells him it's 15 grams. And it's like, did it count the almonds? And I pointed out, it must be kind of the almonds. And Liam said, well, technically you'd want to weigh the almonds. Right? Because you're inside of that. Chad GPD is just making up grams per almond average and then spitting out a number, amount of protein.

Using a dubiously data collected source that could be accurate or could not be accurate and you would not know. Yeah. And it's right. All you've made is like a very complicated lose it and you don't know if it's counting the almonds accurately. That's weird. Yeah. It's not good. There's no structured data about the almonds.

There are a million holes you can poke in this thing, and I think we're doing that appropriately. I think the direction humane is trying to go here is really interesting, and I want to have competing visions for where computing is going in the world, because everyone else, meta, et cetera, Apple, they think the future of computing is more visuals in your eyes, right? Like literally augmenting over the world. And Humane is saying, no, we think actually computing should be recess more into the background and you should interact through voice.

And it's more of that Spike Jones' horror future. And I think those different directions need to exist. People need to be building those different directions. It just feels very early. This feels like general magic or magic leap. You know, there's a ton of examples of companies that were just too early to the tech. And I think this is the case here. No, I'll make a big distinction between those things because we now we're old and we know a bunch of

ex-General Magic people. They were very sincere. Tony Fidel, a friend of the show, part of the General Magic story. You finance the documentary. A self-serving documentary, but you will take, because they all come out as heroes,

like in the end. But it's a fun watch, and I encourage you to go watch General Magic documentary. They were nerds, like huge nerds, and they did not think they were cool, and they thought they were inventing the future.

Fine, but at the end of the day, they were, like, silly nerds. They didn't put their pen on, like, fashion models and Paris fashion. They weren't. None of that stuff was happening. No Capriety show.

Magic Leap. Huge nerds, obviously, took themselves so seriously. Well, they blew Beyonce away. They had other people down there for demos. I think David got a demo once. Didn't you go down there at some point, David? I got a demo.

It wasn't. I didn't get the full treatment, but I did get to try it at one point. Yeah. They said things like we're hacking the GPU of the mind, which is just an incredible friend. they promised to reinvent all of entertainment, all of technology. Like this thing was, and they got so far ahead of the technology with the hype and the seriousness

that there was no way the product could have lived up to their own ideas. General Magic was early, but they knew that there was a thing that they were trying to get to that was far away from where they were and they were honest about it. I think, and if that's the spectrum of companies that are too early, like sincere nerds trying to build the future and they're aware of their limitations and kind of silly and honest about it. And we've hyped ourselves so much that nothing we invent can meet the standard. Like, humane is beyond that. Do you think it's beyond magically? I think it's beyond magically.

Wow. But it actually is. Because they're out there. they have their employees, ex-Apple people, in the press today, saying they had retired from Apple and they joined Humane because they were disgusted with having invented the iPhone and destroyed society. And Humane is their chance to like reset. It's like, you guys, I don't even know if it's counting the almonds. You know, it's like, what bookstore? You know, it's like, that's crazy.

And if you're, if you're positioning is that this will rescue us from. from the phone, but you've made a phone. Nothing. There's no product that can fill the hole that they are drawing, right? And that is the issue, I think, with the product itself in many big ways, but also, like, how they're putting it out into market. But this is also, this is just the world we live in now. I mean, I think about, like, Carl Pay and nothing.

Like, he's running around being like, there are no interesting consumer electronics companies left. And it's like, well, that just isn't true. But you have to like, you have to tell this big grand story about yourself and how you're changing the world. And it's like, we still live in the we're making the world a better place thing, which you would think Silicon Valley would have killed like by just being on that TV show. But it didn't. And so I think honestly, like the single worst thing that Apple has done to tech culture is convince everybody that this is the right way to talk about your products, that everything has to be finished. Everything has to appear as if it was inevitable and just sort of rose out of the ground, this perfect finished product, that we

have solved every problem that has ever existed in the world. And there are no companies anymore who are making things being like, we made this, we don't know if it's any good, do you want it? Ironically, Open AI is probably the closest thing to that right now. Yeah. But it's just not, it's just not how this works anymore. And the playbook worked so well for Apple that if you're a company who raised a lot of money and would like to make a lot of money, you just follow the Apple Playbook. And I think the thing we've learned over and over is that it's that. it doesn't work for anybody other than Apple. I don't think this is fair because there are a lot of interesting consumer tech companies that aren't doing this.

They're not based in Silicon Valley. They're not in this weird investor ecosystem, right, where there's almost this demand from their investors to ship something and to change the world at the same time, right? Like, there's plenty of weird tablets in China. China's doing a lot of cool consumer tech gadgets and not promising to change the world with their steam deck. It would be amazing if Apple was like, we made these gamer lights. Yeah. They're awesome. They're just cool.

Yeah. They're never going to do that. But if you go back to like the launch of the original iPhone, Steve Dobbs, he didn't say it's going to change the world. He was like, here are three things it can do at once. He did start with today Apple reinvents the phone. But that's not, but that's different. With his arms outstretched.

I would argue that's different than what Humane's doing, than what Magic Leap did, which is like it's the hubris, right? And Apple has hubris on, you know, they have tons of it. And Steve Jobs was the king of hubris. But like, you go back to that original iPhone, there was like an almost weird humility with the hubris, right? Where it was like, we actually were just focusing on what it does. And what it did was such an aha moment where everybody in the room was like, oh, my God, these three things together in a mobile form factor, yes. You didn't have to over explain it.

Whereas, like, humane, they can't explain it. Like, because it's, it's incomprehensible. There's a, it's an idea in search of a product. And I think that's the key difference here between like the early Apple where Apple is now and humane, I think. So here's a question I have for you, Alex. Just thinking about the cycle Open AI is in. Brother Spirit, the Buddhist monk, introduced them to Mark Benioff in 2018. The connection, by the way, made through their acupuncturists.

This is all very important detail. 2018, that's a long time ago to start working on this pin. Open AI was nowhere in 2018, right? The first glimmers of the thing were happening. They were a research project. Yeah, they were maybe 60 people at that point. Yeah. And they were still kind of focused on not being a commercial company.

So if you're making this product in 2018 and you have this vision, what is the technology that you're basing this on? What have they been working on? Oh, oh, I know what happened. Right. There's a pivot. that's contained in the story of this product where they were like, you're going to talk to ChatGBT, GBT, and that's the thing that's going to sell it, right? Because that's what we're talking about today.

In 2018, you could not begin work on that product. Well, ChatG-It didn't exist. Right, that's what I mean. It barely existed a year ago. This was totally going to be like an Android product until OpenAI popped off, right? Like, that had to have been what happened. They were building their own little Android dumb phone because it's effectively a dumb phone, right? And then Open AAP popped off

And they were like, oh, finally we have something cool To attach this to to ship it So we're not just like, we did a phone But it's a pen and not really a good phone. Yeah, I don't know. There's just, I'm like thinking about this chronology And it's like in 2018 when you set off to make this product, you cannot assume that there will be an LLM explosion in mid-20203

No, but you could assume. It re-contextualizes this whole product. But you could assume Google was doing, Google was doing a lot at that point, right? They were doing a lot about visual identity, like being able to visually ID things with a camera. They were doing a lot about being able to just talk and have those natural conversations with Google Assistant.

All of that was happening in 2018. So that's why I'm fully convinced that at some point we're going to find out that this was originally an Android product. I mean, it's an Android product now. Like the thing runs Android. I think you're exactly right. I think if you rewind five years,

they're looking at voice assistants and Google Lens and some of these other, like, what can we do without putting a screen and a bunch of apps on your smartphone? Which in the abstract, like Heath has been saying, is a really interesting and valuable question. Like, this is stuff we should be talking about. Because the idea that the, like, platonic ideal of how we interact with technology is, like, a grid of icons on a screen is just not true. And we should be exploring all these things. but I do think it's very clear

that at some point along the way they went from we're going to have to cobble together a bunch of different things and probably invent a bunch of technology ourselves to just, this is now, we are an interface company on top of chat GPD, which is functionally what this is.

This is a, it's a revolutionary input device on par with the keyboard and mouse for chat GPT. Like that's what they're trying to build. They make a big song and dance about all their stuff they can do, but this is functionally a way to input things to chat GPT.

That is what this device exists to do. It's a real digital crown moment. You know, any minute Apple is going to do a partnership with one of these companies because they can't build it by themselves because of all the privacy reasons. And they will say, if you want to use chat, GBT, your Apple Watch can do it. And that will be the end of the AI pin. Oh, I will take the opposite side of that. Yeah.

I'll bet money that they will not. Yeah. Because of the privacy reason you cited, they will not do this as a number. external partnership. No, but we're watching this in the trial right now where Tim Cook and Sundarpa Chai are in meetings discussing their search deal. And Apple's like, your services can begin where our limitations end. So they could say.

Well, there's an important fact there, which is that Google is paying Apple on the order of $20 billion a year. So yes, if someone is paying you, you know, 20% of your profit margin, yeah, sure, you can have deep partnership. You don't think Open AI and Microsoft are going to throw that money down? That's what I mean. The second Apple gets over it,

and there's a few ways for them to get over it. They can invent a privacy-focused LLM, very hard, inside your values. You could take the money. It's true. Or you can do shortcuts with David's favorite. Love shortcuts. But all I'm saying is there's a big action button

on the side of my watch, and there's a lot of different ways for that thing to trigger talking. to chat GPT. Yeah. Right. There's many methods by which that button can do the thing. And at that moment, the value of $700 plus another $24 of service fees a month begins to slide.

If I hold my phone just right, I can do the shortcuts method with chat GPT and the Raybans. Yeah. And they're adding, so Cranes, they're adding early next year, Zuckerberg was talking to me about this when I interviewed him ahead of Connect. they're going to do a software update for the Raybans where it's visual recognition. So in the interview, he was like, you'll just look at the camera and say, what is that camera? Where can I buy it? And he didn't say buy it. He said, where can I buy it?

And because that's a much more, I think, compelling because it's on you, right? And cheaper. And cheaper. No subscription. And like, if you go to the beach, you don't have to worry about where you're going to pin it. It turns out your head is on you all the time. Who knew? And you can have stuff on your head all the time, no matter what you're wearing.

It's actually a really cool human feature. Okay, this brings me to the last thing I want to talk about in this sequence, which is a graph that's in my head at all times. Is there a y-axis? There's a y-axis. And I'm going to label the graph for you. So pull over in your car and I want you to imagine X and Y-O axis. And I've worked this out because I was on threads last night and people really helped me figure this out. This is the formula of wearable product success.

Yeah, I saw this on threads. Okay, so it's X and Y axis. It doesn't matter which side's which. The Y axis, let's call it, is amount I have to care about this shit. Right. Times face multiple. Which is up to the... Is it on my face?

Okay, okay. And is it a VR headset? So, like, is it on my face and it's like a cool pair of sunglasses, low face multiple? Is it on my face and it's the meta-quest pro? High. Enormous face multiple. Yeah. If it's not on your face, on your wrist, no face multiple.

Okay. Got me? Got it. See it. Okay. So that's like, that's just one variable. Yeah. It's either, and you've got to decide for yourself in the glasses.

How much you have to care about it is, is this a tiny little computer? Mm-hmm. Do I got a software update, plug it into battery, charge it? Does it beep? Computer stuff. Yeah. And you've got to decide. Is it weird to get the photos off it?

Yeah. All in the first factor. Yeah. So fiddliness, tiny. times is it face? That's one axis. And then the x-axis is how useful is it? Okay.

Okay. So if x is greater than or equal to y, so there's a line at 45 degrees, then it's good. And if it's lower, you're duped. So like regular glasses, right? Alex, you're wearing some glasses? Yeah. You got to think about them never. Right.

Low number times on your face, low number, because you have cool glasses. value very high. So you're like historic success. Oh, okay. See, I didn't do well at math in school, but I think I'm tracking with you. You see what I'm saying? No, Nilai also is describing a graph that has like six or seven different axes. It's just one.

It's just two numbers. There's algebra involved. Fiddily bullshit greater than or less than how useful is this? I'm going to make a GPT for this where you can just. And I'm just saying the only real variable here is face. Okay. It's really just face. Is it on your face?

And then it's got to be super valuable. Right. Right. Apple Watch, a lot of fiddly bits at the beginning, low value. Not on your face. Not on your face, but it still didn't do a lot at the beginning. You could send flirty heartbeats to people who maybe didn't want them, right? And they figured it out and they brought it up above the curve.

And now it's actually kind of less fiddly, too. Yeah. Success. Okay. Meta Quest Pro. Fiddliest product in the world. Gigantic face multiple. No.

No value. Not a success. They won't even talk about it anymore. You see what I'm saying? So humane AI pin, very fiddly. No face multiple. Unclear value. Big question mark.

Vision Pro. Enormous face multiple on the order of they put another face on your face. Right. Yeah. Huge problem there. Very fiddly, we think. Or perhaps not because it's kind of standalone. Unclear fiddliness.

unclear value. X. It's an X. The value is X. Who knows? I'm just telling you this works every time. Wow. Someone's going to animate this graph, and it's going to be amazing, but I promise you, if you just work this out for any product, you get there. So the meta glasses, people like them, right? Yeah.

So you do it. They look cool, low face multiple. Eh, fiddly. Liam complimented mine today before he saw the lenses. Before he knew. So medium face multiple because people are like, oh, you've been watching me, you creep. That's a problem. But they look cool. Yeah.

And then they're fun. Right. Because they have good music. They've got great call mics. You should watch that video with Becca. They're useful. They're useful. Right on the line of success.

Okay. My challenge to any Vergecast listener right now who's playing with Chad GPT's GPT builder is to make a GPT based on what Neelai just said, send it to us. And it's going to be amazing. Fiddliness times face multiple. has to be less than or equal to how useful is it? What is this bot called Nelai's gadget or Nelai's wearable value indicator? This is a horrible name. The theory of wearable bullshit.

Okay, there we go. That's the episode title. Yeah, it needs a name. I'm just telling you, I've been working this out on the show forever, and last night it finally clicked when I looked at the Humane Pin, where I was like, oh, it's not on your face. So that changes the whole equation. But then it is all the other things that it is.

I was disgusted by my work on the iPhone. So instead I made a little laser projector that you have to look at your hand. There's no Instagram. You can't do Instagram with lasers. It just doesn't work. This thing is real silly. They should have let us and other reviewers actually into it. And they should have been less all serious about it, is what I'll say.

I'm excited to play with one. I think we're all excited about new gadgets all the time. I want to see how the speakers work. The Personic speaker. Yeah, I want to see, I want you and I both to have one and see if we can hear each other's. That's going to be the worst episode of the show. The worst episode. I'm so sorry.

Just two people listening to a title four feet apart. I mean, I will say, again, to go back to the meta things on that one, like, I've seen a bunch of people be like, oh, the personic speaker. This is the thing that the smart glasses have been doing for a while. This, like, personal directed audio that you can hear and other people don't is, like, relatively proven technology. The Raybans do that. Yeah. I do this. and I hear so well with the Raybans.

It's the projector. I just sit on the train like this. The projector is what I want to try. I'm going to a concert Friday. I wish I had this so that during the concert I could just hold my hand out and it just like Matrix displays. Are you going to have a concert that sucks? Is anyone else going to be there?

No, I just want to do it to get the reaction around me, you know? It's like, your Alex is in the pit. Just like, yeah. I just assume it's very bright. I brought my only. Yeah, there you go. That would actually be sick. Okay, here's the killer app for the Humane AI pin.

Personal laser show. Oh, yeah. Imagine cold play and instead of the bracelets they give you, it's just the pins. They all, they all. Yeah, this is a good time to note that Yuga Labs had a board an NFT party, and they bought the wrong UV lights and they burned everyone's eyes. Maybe don't do the laser show thing. Just an idea.

All right, we got to take a break. That's a true story, by the way. It's heartbreaking. Check your UV lights. We got to take a break. We'll get back to talk about opening I that day. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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That's upw-w-rk.com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back. Less hardware this time, more software. But the future of software in a very exciting way. Alex, you went to Open AI Dev Day this week. They announced a bunch of stuff. Take us through it.

Yeah, so this was in downtown San Francisco Monday. and this was OpenAI's first big conference. And when I was going to it, like realizing that Chad GPT is not even a year old at this point, like blew my mind. And then you get there, and they have about 1,000 developers there, and it just had this energy of,

I'll get into the announcements, but I think it's important to like contextualize the energy. It felt like the early Apple events. It felt like this buzz that, you know, we had that a little bit. I think, you know, David and Nealai, you were there too for the Vision Pro unveiling. That had a special kind of feel because people had high hopes for Apple finally doing a big new thing.

But like this just felt like something I haven't experienced since like early Mac Worlds. And you get in and I mean, they did a really nice keynote. It was about an hour and a half's worth of content packed into like a tight 45 minutes with like real live demos. There was a moment where they were showing off like a Zapier integration where you could like have a bot you make, you know, text someone or send them a slack based on what you tell it. And like they're doing it on stage live. They're building the thing in like a minute. And then like it sends the ping to Sam and he's on the other side of the stage and he just holds his phone up. And it's like, yeah, got it.

Like I really don't like the direction the industry is going thanks to Apple where it's these highly produced pre-recorded keynotes that are really just like becoming marketing videos. I think we saw that with the last Mac event, especially. So Open A, it felt like this returned to form that was like, wow, this feels good. In terms of what they announced, it was a lot. I mean, I think, like, the most immediate thing that the developers were, like, freaking out about and, like, Sam had to tell everyone to, like, stop clapping because they kept clapping over and over was just, like, making GPT cheaper to use as a developer. So it's, like, three times cheaper. They've got GTP4 turbo, which apparently people really want,

larger context windows, which is the ability to upload more text tokens to these models and do more with them. So I think the limit was around like 20-ish-K max before, and now it's like a hundred and 28-plus K context window. So you could put a book in this thing and have it do all kinds of things. People got really excited about that. And then a bunch of like kind of more developer-focused stuff, right? It's a developer conference. The biggest thing, though, was this new AI platform. I mean, really what Open AI wants to become, and I wrote about this in Command Line this week, is the App Store of AI.

And so they've got this new GPT platform where with no coding required, you can build your own GPT, upload custom knowledge, and do a bunch of what is essentially like abstracting away prompt engineering, right, and making it very like tailored to a specific use case. And do all that in like, honestly, a matter of minutes. I got a live demo of one of these things being made, and you can do it in under five minutes and then just publish it to the web. Eventually, and when I say eventually, I think just in like a few weeks, Open AI is going to have this store, the GPT store. And that's where things get really interesting, I think, because you're seeing Open AI, not only is it becoming a huge developer platform, an external platform that powers other things. They have over two million developers in under a year, which is just like wild. but they've got this massive growing consumer business. They have 100 million weekly users of chat GPT,

which is like for a product that is less than a year old is just absolutely insane. That means their monthlies are probably on the order of half a billion. And so what they're trying to do is like aggregate that audience and also become a consumer internet platform and have people making GPTs, no coding required, that they then surface to people through chat GPT. through the store. And so the store is coming very soon, but they showed a preview of it. And I think that's where things get really interesting. Is that $100 million? Is that GPT plus the paid thing?

That was just chat GPT users. They didn't give a plus number. Very important for the custom GPs. You have to be a plus subscriber to access and build the custom GPTs. So this is all feeding that loop of like open eye. I think the information reported they're already on like a $1 billion a year revenue run rate with the consumer subscription. business, they really want to have more reasons to pay for chat GPT and an app store and custom GPTs. And again, abstracting away all that prompt engineering, they think is going to be a key unlock there. So, like, some of the examples were like, and it's multimodal. So you can use Dolly. So it's like an interior design GPT that's like specifically for helping you figure out how to design your home or

a cooking one. Or, you know, theoretically here at the verge, we could upload all Verge content ever made into a GPT, and it could replace search on our website. That's an idea, right? And Open AI, which we should get into this next, Open Eye will be compensating creators of these GPs based on their usage, which I think is a very interesting distinction from other platforms. I think two things that kind of – I read your piece, and it was great. The two things that stuck out to me were, one, the compensation and how they're planning

to do that, because that seems like a whole mess. Yeah. And also just how quickly he seemed to gloss over the hallucination problem. Yeah. Just like any normal store. You're releasing an enormous app store. You go into a Walmart or a target. You're like, most of these products are like.

Like an enormous lying, enormous lie store, basically. Yeah. You go into a Walmart. Well, yes. But the difference with the custom GPs is you can upload custom knowledge. So like on stage, Sam made a bot. He used to be the head of Y Combinator, the startup incubator. And he was like, I have.

wanted to have a bot that just tells people what I would tell startup founders, the advice I would give them for like a decade. He just built it on stage in like three minutes. And he uploaded transcripts of every talk he's given on these topics. Right. So yes, it's still a problem. Like hallucination obviously is still a problem. He talked about this more after the keynote and a press thing I went to. But the fact that you can augment it with custom knowledge makes it more domain specific. And so it's hopefully going to alleviate. a lot of that. Doesn't that kind of just make it like,

I think the no-code part is probably the coolest part of this, but doesn't this just make it like no-code chatbots like you had on AIM 20 years ago? Like if you can upload it like for the same Altman one in particular, okay, that's really, really cool. Somebody could have done that 20 years ago.

It just would have taken them quite a bit of time and now it should take you. You have the sort of like Eliza problem. Right. Right. Where it's like there's some canned responses. This one is like going to talk to you. It's going to be.

fidelity of the conversation is higher. The thing that's really interesting to me is what you're saying, Alex, the compensation model. Yeah. So Open AI is, what, 20 bucks a month for a plus? And then they're probably going to, what, just share out some of that to the bot builders. That's the Spotify model, which is historically doesn't make anyone rich except Spotify. Well, Spotify important distinction, there's this whole thing called the labels, right,

that Open AI doesn't have to deal with because they don't pay for a lot of their content, which is something that Sam did not really want to talk about. But, yes, I actually think it's closer to YouTube, because the way they're going to do it initially is they're going to share some percentage. We don't know. We don't know if it's fixed. We don't know if it fluctuates based on the category. But they're going to share a percentage of the companies.

So OpenAI's Chad GPT subscription revenue with GPT creators. And it's based on usage. And Altman was very kind of high level about this on stage. I think they're going to share more in the next few weeks. But at this press Q&A I went to with after, and I wrote about this in command line, he elaborated and said there's going to be category-specific bonuses and that down the road they're open to actually letting you subscribe directly to custom GPs, letting GPT creators charge one-off fees for them. But it sounds like a lot of it is going to get figured out in like the first few months of the store. They're rolling out with this initial kind of mushy rev share thing. But it is YouTube-esque.

It's not Apple-esque because there isn't going to be like a transactional piece to this. Have they asked ChatGPT itself how it thinks it should handle the Red models? I'm sure they have. I mean. Analogies are difficult because it's weird and it's mushy. YouTube, most YouTubers are getting a cut of the ads. Right. There's a sort of like infinite amount of money coming into YouTube, or at least an uncapped amount of advertising money coming into YouTube.

and that goes out. Right. Spotify is like you pay Spotify premium, and I know my ever-increasing amount of money I pay for Spotify premium. I listen to a song. There's some formula and that goes to the label and the artist, and it's pennies. And this feels more like that, right? I pay chat GPT 20 bucks a month.

I go use a bunch of GPs. My usage gets divvied up into fractions and goes to those creators. And that they got it. The reason I'm harping on this is because of what David said earlier, which is the entire game is the app store for AI. And you cannot distribute this anywhere because the second you start doing a better revenue model, which is just pay for the apps or pay for a subscription

or have transactions, Apple is going to sit there and take 30% away from you. And Google is going to take 30% away from you. Apple already is taking 30% of chat GPT plus revenue on iOS, right? Because it's a subscription. If you sign up on the phone. Right, if you sign up on the phone. So, yeah, and this is where I kind of like ended with Command Line this week is like, I would love to know what Apple thinks about all this because Apple, they don't like stores within apps. You can ask Mark Zuckerberg about that one.

You can ask a lot of people about that one, actually. A lot of people have tried versions of this. The only one that's gotten it through for reasons that are too complex to get into is WeChat in China. But I think they're going to run into a massive wall there eventually, which is Apple's take rate and their historical hatred of an app trying to recreate an app trying to recreate. kind of a digital store experience. And potentially having their own AI, right? Right. And wanting their own AI to be their primary AI in the device.

Because once the AI is looking at books and just buying them for you, that's a whole other world of transactions that Apple can take money out of. And they're going to want to be the primary AI there. So just to bring this together, you can see why people want to build a not phone, when Sam Altman is investing in 45 different attempts at this and might be working with Johnny Ive at some attempt at this. There's a massive blocker to mobile innovation here, which is that 30% cut.

And I just don't have any sense of how anyone will actually get around it because building the humane AI pin or the rewind pendant or whatever Johnny Ive comes up with on the side, the phone is still going to be the primary device. Yeah. Well, the other part of it is like this is not all that different from what Amazon and Google were trying to do with skills for their voice assistant. Like we've been down this road where Amazon was like, okay, you're going to interact with Alexa, but we're also going to offer you lots of ways to interact with other data and other services. Skills is going to be a huge business. That got past Apple. It was fine. It just turns out nobody wanted that because it has this heinous discovery problem. The interface is actually not that. good for it in most ways because the thing where you have to essentially say a wake word to get to the thing and then

another wake word to get to the app that you want and then talk to it in a very specific way, all to route right back to you. Like that flow sucks. And so I think what ChatGPT is going to have to figure out is how to like again, we're talking about abstracting all of this away. And by virtue of

making you choose things, you lose that abstraction in a really helpful way. Like ChatGPT already has these plugins. The plugin system sucks. Those are replacing. It's a perfectly useful thing. Right. But I think that is one way to go down that road that doesn't work because you can't find

the stuff. You have to like turn it on every time you want to use it. It just doesn't work. And I think figuring out how to do this thing they're trying to do in a way that doesn't cause those exact same problems is going to be really hard, especially because OpenAI is trying to have its cake and eat it too because it also wants to be the interface to all of it. It does. It wants to be the underlying infrastructure and the most powerful, important product.

And at some point, doing both of those becomes really, really, really hard to do. This is what Altman said in the Q&A I was at after his keynote. I thought it was really interesting because it gets at that tension, David, that you talk about, where OpenAI is building a platform very clearly. They're continuing to add things into chat, GPT, add different modalities, different data sets. At the same time, they're saying, come build on our platform. we'll share revenue with you, come make your own GPTs, etc. And he got asked about this, and he said very clearly, he was like,

don't build a thin wrapper on top of Open AI. We are planning to build the obvious features that you would expect for a robust platform over time, and there's enormous value to build. So that's him just being straight up, like, we will probably Sherlock you. Yeah. And I'm going to see a lot of parallels here to the early App Store. We're going to build the app. And I think that's okay.

Like, you know, the early Astor had a bunch of flashlight apps, right? Eventually, that just became a feature on the phone. And it's a better feature as a result. You can go in the App Store right now and download a home interior app that is a thin wrapper on Dolly. Yeah. Like, we're painting our house and I wanted an app that would just, like, put paint colors on a wall, and, like, half of them are now just doll wrappers. And they're bananas. It's like, don't do this.

I don't recommend them. Like, your house starts to look real wild after a minute. But there's obviously a market for that thing to occur right now. And maybe one day opening out will build that exact thing because that's a useful case for Dolly. But in the meantime, like, they're just watching a bunch of these companies try and fail. And that's useful to them. And in the short term, useful of companies are making some money. I just keep thinking about all the scummy apps that are going to come to this thing, right?

Like there's the obvious ones where I as an adult call it scummy. A lot of our younger listeners would probably love it is like one that will just write your papers for you, right? That's the thing chat GPD can already do. Somebody will probably make a really, really good version of it using this. And a lot of people will probably be very upset about that and demand for it to be pulled down because it's helping a bunch of kids cheat. There's ones where like, okay, you can have an, you know, input some actress that you really want to talk to. And then everybody's like, oh, yeah, I can go talk to that hot actress. And it's like, oh, no.

You can already do that, Alex. I mean, there's like replica character AI. But that's going to happen now on open AI's form, right? Like, they're going to have to deal with that. Oh, someone's going to build that GPT. Right. If you build a GPT of me, it's over. So that is like...

The law will come down. So, Nilai, like, we are, we, there's a lot of stuff on the internet that could, like, be used to inform a chatbot about us because we write on the internet. Like, that is a perfect example. Someone could just make a Nelai bot, and it's everything Nelai's written on the verge. and you ask Nelai questions about copyright, you know, forever, right? Yeah, and the Nelai bot is like, this is copyright infringement. But you, but you, but I want to, this is a little bit of a tangent, but like they, another thing opening I announced this week is a copyright shield, which is a program

where they will pay for any legal fees incurred by their developers for copyright claims of use of the technology. So theoretically, someone builds a Nelai bot, they scrape the verge for all Nelai's stories, they put it in the bot, Vox Media goes, hey, you stole our IP and you're making money off of this because Open AI is paying you. We're going to sue you. And Open AI is saying now we will fight all those legal things that happen. So like, what do you think about that, Nilai?

That's a bad answer to this problem. We should all just like, I just want to acknowledge that is a bad answer. That's how Open AI goes bankrupt. Real fast. Well, no, there are also, there are so many interesting ways of thinking about this content. Like, Alex, your paper example is a really interesting one. like you put together all the announcements that came out this week. And what's going to happen now is you're going to be able to upload your history textbook

to a GPT and you're going to be able to write papers from it. That is that, it now has a big enough context window. And it, like, they're using this thing. It's like the AI term for it is rag, which is basically like by doing this custom knowledge, you're able to reduce it all the way down just to the stuff that you know that it knows, which means it hallucinates less, which is actually a really important part of this. It's going to write you. you a good paper based on your history textbook. And that is just, it's all sitting there. And that's

a mess in so many ways. And for Open AI to just be like, don't worry about it, we have lawyers, is not a good answer to the problem. So Sam was Sam's exact wording on this issue was we don't like to do things that are illegal. Congratulations, Sam. Cool. Sam. Same Sam. But like, I mean, they clearly think all this is under fair use. And there's a lot, you know, you all have talked about on the show a lot of, you know, there's a lot of lawsuits right now that are trying, you know, they are going to figure this out, whether this is fair use. This is happening while all this is going on. Can I color that in for you?

Yeah. So the copyright office took comments about whether it's fair use. And all the big companies filed comments. Oh, yeah. That's good. We have some of them on site. And the one that just stuck out was Andrewsson Horowitz, big Silicon Valley firm. Their comment was, look, companies have invested billions and billions of dollars into this

technology, assuming it's fair use. So it's fair use. No, I mean, they were clear. They were like, if this is not fair use, like these investments go to zero, basically. It was like the whole structure of all this is predicated on the idea that we can have this for free. Yeah. I know a lot of media executives. They don't agree without you.

Yeah. Not a little bit. We had Barack Obama on Decoder this week. I asked him this question, like, you're an author. do you think this is for use? Because he really wants to talk about AI. And he was like, he's a politician. He's very good at this.

He's like, leave me out of it. I've sold enough books. Like you watch him do it. He's like, no, no, no, no. I refuse to engage this question. And then he said, this is a speed bump. The revenue will get figured out. And so I think there's a real tension in the industry.

There's an expectation from the people who make the IP that this is, yep, a speed bump, that the money will sort itself out, the creators will get paid. and there's the expectation from the tech industry that they're going to get to do a Google and just take it. And like Google's history is built on taking it and they were the scrappy upstart when they did that. When Google scraped all the books on the internet

and made Google books, they got sued, but they showed up with their big colorful logo and their propeller hats. Literally that image of Google protected it from these lawsuits. When Viacom sued Google over YouTube for, just ingesting huge amounts of Viacom television shows onto YouTube. YouTube was like, but it's so cool. Like, everyone loves it.

You can just watch South Park for free. And Viacom was like, yeah, that's the problem. They won. And they won running away because Viacom was perceived as evil. And Google, again, stupid logo slides in the office, beanie hat. And it was really useful. That's part of the story. The rest of the story is that Google had a reasonable defense,

which was to say, We're not the ones uploading it. And it turns out there's like a large part of tech policy that is based on that specific idea. No, they, they, I mean, their other defense was, and we built you content ID. We built you a private copyright enforcement system that is unaccountable to everyone and pisses everybody off every day. Right. That's the actual, that's the thing that they did to get out of that jam. Google got so much out of this in a lot of ways by returning value to people.

Like, Google made the case to Viacom that more people are watching. Viacom stuff because they're finding it on YouTube. And whether that's true or not, it's a case to make. And it's done the same thing with websites, right? Like there have been all these issues for years about, like, media organizations being like, how are we supposed to feel about the fact that there is a constantly updated version of our entire website sitting on Google's servers? And that's what they're crawling and serving, not our website.

And what Google says is we send you traffic. And there's like, there is some set of trades that you're willing to make there. And chat GPT so far has not. returned any value to the people whose stuff that it is taking. It's not directing traffic. They're not getting money. It's just like a nifty thing that other people get to do. And I think if it can't figure out how to make that turn back to like here is what it's worth for you, I think it's much bigger than a speed bump. Yeah, no, it will bring the whole thing down. Like it is the end of the industry if this isn't fair use. And the thing for all these companies

is you cannot rely in the court system to be reliable when it comes to fair use. Right. Like it is not a stable decision-making framework. It is a coin flip. Like, every time. It is a coin flip even in just like recent memory. Like, I bring up this example all the time,

but I'll do it again because it's useful. The estate of Marvin Gay was not happy. No, it just comes up. Drink. Somebody owes me $10. I'm just telling you, the Blurred Lines case is going to go down is like the thing that upends maybe all of technology. It did bring Assembly Radikaski.

Many things happened because of the song. They Robin Thick and Frell sued Marvin Gay's estate preemptively because they thought it was so clear cut. They hadn't stolen a note. It was just a vibe. And they lost. That is a totally unpredictable result. And then the estate of Marvin Gay in Bolden goes and sues Ed Shearin.

Ed Shearin shows up in court all floppy hair and says, Oh, just the music. And he wins. And he actually took the chords. You play guitar in court. Incredible edge here at impression, by the way. You could use some accent work, but yeah, it was all right. He's just a floppy guy.

He's just a floppy guy. But that is a straight coin flip. If I gave you the facts of that outside of the actual characters and said these two didn't take any of the chords or the music. They took a vibe. And this guy took the actual chords. Who should win and who should lose, right? and it's the exact opposite of what you expect.

And if you are OpenAI or Google or any one of these other folks, you're staring at a problem where it is so unpredictable that you should go and make some deals just to bring some semblance of order to this marketplace. But to what David's point is, no one knows what that deal is worth. The second you make one deal, everyone else is going to want a deal.

The second you make a deal, you have communicated to the world, you think deals might be necessary and everyone shows up with their hands out. This is classic rocked in a hard place situation for all these companies. And if they end up going to court and fighting this out,

no knows if they're going to get to the right answer on either side. A couple weeks ago, on Decoder, we had a record label executive and she said, look, the music industry is like this. You sue each other in the morning and you go to dinner at night.

And that's how it works. And you're just going to have to deal with it. And they're going to have to get good at that too because that's how we do this. And I don't think Sam is ready for that. They are not thinking about it at all. It didn't come up on like the stage. It didn't really come up afterwards in the conversations I was hearing.

They're very focused on what is the value we can give to developers and users. And the data that is powering all of this is like something they do not want to talk about because of what we've all been saying. But I mean, I do want to just like to take devil's advocate here, like yes, like there's a huge copyright question here. generally I feel like with these new things, the Viacom YouTube example is a great example, where better product experiences tend to win in the long run, right? And if I'm thinking about a GPT for The Verge, unless I'm in kind of like discovery mode where I just want to literally, you know, surf our beautiful site and look at things and I have no idea what I'm wanting, I actually would love the idea of just going, what should I know about the new iPhone? is it good or not? And a bot just, it surfaces our article, it tells me, it says this is, this is the score, this is the history of our coverage, here's a link to the video, or just watch the video there.

Like, that's a pretty good experience. There's a lot of, like, finding things on the internet that, like, that time collapses immediately when you're using an interface like this. And that's going to, I think, provide value. Yeah. And so if you believe that that's valuable, and I think a lot of people will, and I think we're going to start seeing a lot of really interesting GPs that are doing very dubious, you know, fair use things, but are showing like, hey, this interface is actually

better for just finding information. I do think that idea may win out in the long run regardless of what happens in the short term with the legal system. It just feels like they're moving way too fast. They are. Yeah. Between the lying thing and the fact that they haven't figured out whether or not they're wholesale ripping off a whole bunch of creators, like, what are you doing?

What do you mean ripping off? What do you mean? What we just talked about? Like the payout structure? A lot of people, yeah, a lot of people straight up accused them. If they're ingesting their stuff without paying them, that's ripping them off. Oh, here, I'll just give you just another example of this. Outside of Chashypity, I think about this with TikTok all the time.

I keep a list of TikToks that I think should be media PhDs. It's great. One day I'll publish the whole list. And there's one I keep coming back to. Haggerty Media, which is a great car YouTube channel. I love it. They did a stop motion video of an engine being disassembled. Cool.

This took forever. Like just making a video of an engine being disassembled, such as anyone can understand what's happening, takes a long time with people. To do it in stop motion is like a map. Just obviously massive investment. And so it instantly got cut up into 10,000 different TikTok channels that repost it into 10,000 different clips because it looks cool as hell.

And if you're running one of these TikTok channels, just trying to get views so you can send people their TikTok shop, this is great. Should any of that exist? Media PhD. Okay, here's the real thing that I think about all the time. The comments on all of the TikToks

that have freebooted this video are, this took so long. This must have been so hard to do. This is so cool. I'm so glad you spent all this time doing this. And it's like, not, like everyone can see the value and the difficulty of the work.

And no one, not a cent of that value, is going back to the person. that made the video. Right. And no, like, no one's confused

that this was, like, a hard thing to do. TikTok is making the most money in that. The freebooting channel is making some money in that. The users are getting a ton of value, right?

Because they're seeing a video they wouldn't have other seen. And the poor person who, like, had to move the bolt, like a 16th of an inch and then take another frame, gets nothing.

Yeah. Yeah. And, like, I came up as a guy who, when I was my short, Stinn as a lawyer. I defended the kids who used Kazah. And I'm sitting here and being like, am I the bad guy now? What is going on here? Like that's like one step too far. And that's just with video and everybody can understand, everyone can see it. If you make a GPT and you ingest

all of some YouTube creators videos and you're like, now you can talk to Doug Demiro and he doesn't get a cent, like at some point you have to say this is not like fair. Oh, it's not even Like not fair use or whatever. Right. It's just like outrageous. It's not even that the creator doesn't get a cent. It's that in that case, YouTube doesn't get a set. And guess who has a lot of lawyers who is comfortable suing is Google, right?

So like, I think Open Eye is entering a world of hurt here. Like I saw, again, I got a demo of the builder. And you would think that the ability to upload custom knowledge, they would have some pretty stringent guidelines on what you can upload. And maybe they scan it before they let you put it in the GPT to make sure it's, you know, not something that is like very bluepts. very blatantly like paid copyrighted material that is like behind a paywall or something like that. Yeah. It's literally just an upload field. It's just an upload field. You can upload anything. Like there was nothing said about like how they're going to look for this stuff. So I don't think they're ready for what's about to happen, which is that like someone is going to be, it's just obvious. Like you take a paid product online, you pay for it, you scrape it, you put it into a GPT and you make money.

from it. And it's like, in that flow of events, like, the value is just being stolen. Right? And like, an open eye is saying at the same time, guess what? We're going to pay all your legal defenses. Yeah. It's just wild. We should just get opening eye sued. That's the new Verchette challenge. They're being sued. They're being, I mean, they're being, look, I'm throwing out my wearable graph. The next episode is us, just us doing dubious things to get open an eye suit. No, they are getting sued by artists Like Sarah Silver and all these people Yeah

But this next turn Where they're offering revenue to people To build things And then protecting them from the claims I'm gonna make up bot That adjusts all of the Game of Thrones books And writes the final two I think George R or Martin would just pay you for that

Yeah Yeah like that's that's my loophole He should just do that That's my loophole George if you're listening and I know you are I got you George You can do it They've expanded the field

The context Windows bigger, George. I do think this is like a huge problem but I do want to acknowledge like these GPs they're cool. They're going to be cool.

They're cool as hell. People are going to like using them. The dolly stuff is wild like just having like something that can like generate. And like I have this problem. I don't know about you guys with these chat bots,

these like all in one chat bots is like it's just a text bar. I don't know what to do with it. I don't know all the things it can do. There's this context problem with these bots like Bard and all these where they can do so much that like it's overwhelming, frankly, for me. So having like a cooking bot that has like all the cooking information I would want to like make recipes, I would pay separately for that because like I actually just want that. I don't want the

all of it, right? And so I do think it's a really powerful idea and meta's doing it. They're going to have a bot creation platform next year. There's already character AI, replica. The industry seems this year to have realized that we are moving on from these like one bot to rule. them all concept to like millions of bots everywhere, right? Yeah. And that's a cool idea. It's just, yeah, there's all this like copyright problem. But I think it's an idea it's, it's, it's, it's, there's just existential risk.

Yeah. Actually, the model thing is really interesting. They had touching Adela on stage, Microsoft. They're obviously a huge open-air investor. Yeah. And part of the argument that they're making is they're all just using one big model, but they're learning to segment it into these use cases. Right.

So the big model is getting better. overall while people are doing these specialized things with it. And then on the side, Microsoft Research is trying to figure out if you can take small models that can run locally or on these other places and make them fully useful in like very narrow contexts. So you see this like kind of parallel innovation pathway where like the big model, maybe you can put guardrails around it and make these GPs. Or you could have like the little model that's just good at what it does. And there's something. And the funniest thing about the I think the little model training that Microsoft is doing is one of the prompts they give it is pretend you're the big model,

which is incredible. Right? It's like, don't, it's not impossible. It's like that thing, you know? It's pretty good. It's funny that we've had this whole conversation about voice assistance and AI and all this stuff. And it's like, we've brought up Amazon and Google many times, which have voice assistance, millions of them deployed in homes today and seem not ready for this next turn at all.

Open AI is moving so fast, and that was just the takeaway from being there and like talking to developers there and just, I mean, when you think about the fact that chat GPT is almost a year old and everything they've done in a year and everything they just announced on stage, and like the demand for it, like there was a massive chat GPT outage this week right after they announced all this stuff. Like their servers are melting. So they have clearly like captured lightning in a bottle. It's their game to lose. I really feel that. It's just a matter of the legal ramification. potentially catching up with them and the dicingness of this store concept. And like if you're doing a usage-based system, what's to keep me from buying a bunch of bots to use my bot so that I have the most used bot? Like, how do they know that it's actually real? I guess because it's through the subscription business. So I guess that is a good limiting factor on that. But there's just a lot of like dicey, like who decided, like I'm already imagining like chat GPT is used to like influence the next election and they decide to demonetize news, right? It's like everything old is new again. Yeah. Well, that's like what is, what's going to be the cocoa melon of chatGBT? That's on the good

side, right? That's like the biggest YouTube success story ever. Yeah. Enough so that Disney has listed it not owning cocoa melon as like a risk. Yeah. Because it, and that's just a YouTube success story. And it's like on the other side is like, what is the horrible white noise playlist on Spotify? Yeah. app, right, that is just like zero value delivered and just sucking money out of the ecosystem until Spotify has to shut it down. Yeah. I don't know. Yes.

And the next turn here, really, and this is what Sam was telling us after the keynote, is he imagines that we will all have our own GPT, which I'm really excited about. So a GPT that is trained on all of your stuff, like the rewind idea, the pendant, but like all of your software, all of your, you know, notes. and your GPT engages with other GPs on your behalf. So it's like bots on bots all the way down talking to each other. So it's like you tell your GPT, I want to go to see a concert and have dinner with these friends on this date, line up my ride, my reservation, the tickets, and it all talks to different bots to do that. Sam thinks that's inevitable.

And what really, so Open AI's stated mission is to build AGI, right, artificial general intelligence, which is this like super, it's like Godlike. AI that can think better than all of us combined. People in the AI field that I've talked to over the last year think that this next step where it's GPT's representing us engaging on our behalf unsupervised is the environment that is needed to train the models to become a step function even more intelligent because you need to have this concept called self-supervised learning where these agents are all interacting and training on their own. That's pretty freaky, right? That's like Matrix stuff. Yeah. That's coming in like the next couple of years. I think the world could look a lot different.

It's just we're, I think that, and that was the vibe there was like we are kind of witnessing a very, very exciting but also like very scary next few years here. Yeah. And inside of it is a copyright loss. It's a giant ticking time bomb. It's just Ed Shearin looking mad at you. All right, we've got to take a break. We'll come back. We've got a lightning around.

We've got to get out of here. We'll get right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in.

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actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken

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Hollister has reviewed it. He naturally loves it. I think I called him like the day after he got it. And I was like, tell me everything. And he sure did. He like, he really likes it. The big things that have changed. changed with this one is there's a new processor. They went from the 7 nanometer Aerith processor, named after the character from Final Fantasy 7, to

the 6 nanometer Sephiroth processor. Same's. They've switched to an OLED display. They've switched, the battery license

supposedly increased, which led to an incredible quote from Sean where he said, For example, in 2022, I was able to play the graphically intensive control for just under two hours on my original Steam Deck review unit at 60 frames per second. This week, I played the same game at up to 80 frames for second for two hours and 11 minutes. I mean, more frames. Yeah, yeah.

He saw more frames. He does add more stuff to it. It is a pretty measurably big difference in battery life, especially on. games that don't use as much of the CPU and the GPU. So, like, those lower impact games are going to last a lot, lot longer. The high-impact games, those of us who are making our way through Balders Gate 3 on the thing, we're not going to see as much success. The big shock for me was that there are no Hall Effect joysticks.

I just assumed that was going to happen because there's been so much frustration with the drift on the current joysticks. They didn't do that. That's a big bummer. but they got rid of the 32 gigabyte EEMC version, which was the one that I bought because you could replace the drive really cheap and easy. They got rid of that one now starts at 550 or 549.

I'm resisting buying one, but Sean loves it. Oh, and the power buttons now orange. Hey, that's pretty good. I love it. Yeah, I'm excited. I would put this out as evidence, as we've been saying, there's more action and gadgets than people ever give any credit to and the love that our audience,

and in particular, Sean, has for the Steam Deck, is like off the charts. It's an awesome device, and they don't have to do a bunch of really long infomercials for us to get hyped about it. Yeah, you're like, look, you can play control at 80 frames per second for 11 minutes more. That's all you got to say. Oh, yeah. I just love this thing. They were just like, what are all the things we can do to make this device better? And then they just did all those things, and now here we are.

Like, God forbid, more companies don't just like make their things better all the time. Like, it's just, it just makes me happy. And it was the same thing with the switch OLED where they're like, we got this thing pretty right the first time. But what if we just did a couple of things better, wouldn't that be cool? And it was like, yes. But it's like most companies are like, okay, this is called the Steam Deck 2. And this time it comes in six pieces and you have to like do backflips while you use it.

It's going to be so dope. And Valvin said is just like, no, we like pretty much got this right. We just made it better now. It's cool. It's like, yeah. That's the. way. Just make your things better. Yeah, that's all you need to do. I just really appreciate that one of the headline features of this one is that the fan is both larger and quieter, which is like,

crushed it. No more fan one. This is some video game stuff here. Nailed it. I would know that, but I've been trying to scroll this article using Samsung decks, which is not possible. I didn't realize you were actively scrolling. I thought you were doing, I always do the thing where I like fidget and scroll up and down. No, you're just trying to read it. No, I'm just trying to land on a sentence that I can read because this mouse is sent so fast. Are you just flying top to bottom on the page? Out of control. Love it.

Look, Android as many things as an operating system and Samsung's one UI as many things is a skin on Android. A combination of things that is designed to let you change mouse tracking speed is not on the list of priorities for either of those companies. All right. David, what is your lightning around? Mine's very simple. It's just that YouTube in its relentless quest to be TikTok is now,

adding a for you page to, or a four you carousel to people's channels, which is basically like personalized, recommended videos on people's channels that you land on. A, very smart. B, forever interesting to me that the phrase for you has just completely taken over the internet. Like, we've just decided that that is the term for every personalized everything. For you, just one. And also, YouTube really ought to stop trying to be TikTok. Like just, just stop. I think, Everything is inevitably going to be TikTok. But I opened my YouTube mobile app to the shorts thing, and it was just, it was a, it was little tiles of shorts filling my entire stream when I opened my YouTube app on my phone. Like, no, no.

I still sometimes accidentally scroll it, forgetting I'm not in TikTok. Oh, yeah, that's, it's incredible. That and Instagram, I'm like, oh, that's why it's kind of crummy and weird. Yeah, it's, it's like watching the algorithms grow up. like there are different stages of being toddlers and like TikTok is like running away with the election you know um but like YouTube is just like is this anything will this make you mad will it make you sad horny you know Instagram is like here's a Kardashian you know like back to basics yeah at least in my feed they figured out that I like truck jumps a lot of truck jumps on my Instagram like you know it's

like getting better you know because I engage with it more and then TikTok is just like full crazy I I screwed up on TikTok the other day, and I thought I had broken my algorithm because it just kept showing me bagpipe videos. No, that's what I mean. TikTok is now at the point where it's in the deepest, darkest recesses of your personality. Oh, yeah. If you've been scrolling it for years and years. It's horrible. It's like beyond truck jumps.

It's like deep fried truck memes that, like, I can't explain to anyone else. There's a video I keep seeing of, like, a motorized pizza peel that just picks up a pizza and puts it back down. Cool. It's. It was bagpipes. I'm saying how it's telling you more about yourself than you need to know I never it's in there it's in there five year old Alex thought they were cool I left it at five leave me alone back on TikTok has the reset algorithm button and I think about hitting it all the time oh my God I should hit it I think I have to at this point here's my pitch for this whole thing I've now watched more again we've had a lot of copyright on the show but I've watched more movies that on TikTok recently than anything. And all of these video streaming platforms

are trying to get you to engage again. And it's like, Netflix just make the TikTok. Yeah. Just show me. Just like let me scroll through it. And I'm like, oh, man, yeah, I'll start couples retreat in the middle of it for some reason.

And then that'll play on my TV and we'll be done. Yeah. And like... A, I absolutely 100% guarantee you that's kind. Like, there is not one shadow of a doubt in my mind that at some point in the very near future,

the Netflix mobile app will have that thing for you. But I also think part of the reason I picked this one is my lightning round thing is because it's just like, I've gotten totally obsessed with the idea that scrolling is just like the behavior. And it doesn't matter what you're scrolling. It doesn't matter what you're doing. It's just like people want to scroll.

You just like have a moment where you're like, I'm going to get on my phone and just do some scrolling. It's just like a thing people talk about. And the activity is so much more important than what you're doing it with. But it's just like, I now think about that all the time. is it's just like that is a mode of engaging with technology as I'm just going to scroll.

And I think the more that becomes the thing, especially as young people are trained on that as like, I have five minutes, I'm going to do some scrolling. I just, like, I hear more people say that. And you're going to see it absolutely everywhere. And it is going to like completely change the internet because it's like instead of I'm going to go like look at Reddit or whatever. It's just like, I'm just going to do some scrolling.

And it's just the four you feed of scrolls everywhere. Yeah, it's nuts. And it's just a bunch of algorithms. starting at the very beginning of, like, personalities, like, angry, sad, hungry, horny, and then all the way to bagpipes. No. Like, whatever complex. I would love to see the database field of, like, bagpipe emotional reactions that TikTok

thinks it's getting when it gets a bagpipe engagement. You know, like, Netflix has those, like, deeply overconstructed movie categories. Yeah. Backpipes are like. It was all because I liked a friend's video. And for some reason, it was like, I know which book. part of that we need to pull out for you bagpipes. I'm telling you.

One of the things I love about these conversations is it's always just people telling on themselves about the stuff that they watch on social media. It's so fun. You're like, aren't you also on bagpipe TikTok? And it's like, no, no one else is on bagpipes. There are a lot of people on bagpipe TikTok, including me now. All right, here's mine. Great piece by Jen Toewee this week.

If you're a smart home nerd, this really hits you. There's a company called Chamberlain makes all the garage store openers. Like, if you buy a house, the chance. the chance that you have a liftmaster garage door opener made by Chamberlain very, very high. They, like many bad companies, have smart devices, so you can make the garage opener smart. They have a proprietary platform called MyQ, which is long since a disaster. MyQ is monetized through partnerships with car companies. So you've got a car with like a Wi-Fi connection in it.

You can like push the button. Cloud service happens. Your garage door opens. whatever, man. Many, many, many people have hacked into my queue with HomeBridge and Home Assistant, which are really cool things. It's very nerdy. But you can have a little tomogachi of a raspberry pie in your house.

You have to reset every couple months. And it bridges all the things together into HomeKit. That's my HomeBridge. Like my ring cameras show up in HomeKit because of HomeBridge. My queue showed up in HomeKit for a lot of people because of Homebridge. My queue shut off this integration. Not cool. they claim that they're getting DDoS through it,

which is like you could have a real integration with HomeKit, and everyone would shut up. You wouldn't get DDoS. So they, and this is the part that it just rankles. They explain their decision by saying, we've made the decision to prevent unauthorized usage of the MyQE ecosystem to the third-party apps, it's so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience

for our 10 million-plus users. We understand this impacts a small percentage of users, but ultimately this will improve the performance and reliability of MyQ benefiting all of our users. That is the cleanest garage I've ever seen. Yeah, the picture here. So they said this is 2% of people. Uh-huh.

So Jen just did the math. You've got 10 million users. You've broken 200,000 garage doors. Which is just incredible. So now they're freaking out. I will tell you, my Q has always been a disaster. They've always been pretty user hostile. This is not a secret.

It's just what people have. And no one thinks about replacing the garage door opener. So everyone's been hacking around it. You can buy little adapters. I have one called MiRoss. I think the refurbished ones are called Refoss. It's very confusing. They're like anywhere between 30 and 50 bucks depending on sale,

you can just wire them into your garage door opener and put them in HomeKit. They work. There's other ones. Jen has a whole list of other alternatives. If you are the sort of person who wants to open your garage door from your phone, and I am that sort of person. You are. There are many ways to do this that do not involve the MyQ platform.

and our article has irritated them so much that they're issuing corrections and they're trying to explain their decision even more when all they need to do is just either build the home kit integration or let the people do the hacks. Yeah. Just like say, okay, home assistance is fine. I love it when companies are like, it's a tiny percentage of users. You just broke 200,000 garage doors. Only 200. Only 200K. All right. Alex, you had a lightning round? Yeah, it's actually a thing I've been trying. I've been test-stress. driving a Rivian R1S for the last week. Yeah.

So RJ, the CO is at Code, and this is not an ad by any means, but I have had fun in it. A lot. We took it off-roading in Joshua Tree. And an electric, it's my first time in an electric, like, SUV. And the thinking goes zero to 60 in three seconds and has, like, 840 horsepower. And it's just, like, driving a big-ass go-cart through the desert. Yeah. Like, it was just, and I like the, I mean, just a lot of the small decisions they've made in terms of the, you know, the OS and the interior of the car, the moment they do a mid-sized one of these, I think it's going to be a really compelling Tesla alternative.

But right now it's very like outdoorsy, you know, big, big hulking vehicles. But yeah, had a lot of. Next up, cyber truck for you? Yeah. I've heard, yeah, I've heard the Rivian described as the, I can't say it on our air, but the, a version of the cyber. truck that for people who yeah I I yeah anyway

okay can I say my cyber truck thing so I asked for pictures of the wiper and they've been lots of cyber trucks everywhere and people keep sending me not closeups here's another video of the wiper and it's like you're six miles away so I'm going to be more specific

I need a close up of the middle of the wiper the middle not the arm not the part at the bottom of the windshield that turns the middle of the wiper blade, or even better, close-ups all the way up the wiper. Like connecting to the glass?

Yes, and I'll be more specific. I have heard rumors of how the actual blade is constructed that I would like to verify. I will not tell you what they are. Please. Because I don't want to put disinformation in the world, and I know the Tesla people are crazy,

and I don't want clips of me saying a thing that's wrong. I'm just saying, I've heard some information that I cannot verify about the wiper blade, itself. So if you encounter one, just go look at the blade. Take some pictures. Start at the bottom, click, click, click, click, click all the way at the top. See if you notice anything. A thing about the Rivian wipers, they work, and there's two of them. I was about to say, I heard a plural there.

Yeah, there's two of them. They cover the entire windshield and they work. The only thing I don't like is there's not the cleaner fluid. Boring. Right? Like you can't, like, why are we making new cars that cost a lot of money that don't have them? It doesn't have windshield washers? It doesn't have the washer fluid. I'm like, I'm driving this thing through the desert. It's empty or it just doesn't have it. It doesn't exist. No. You guys, we cannot pick the windshield wiper fight again. We can't. We've been, we've been down this road before. Niel is about to say, just put water in it. It'll be fine. And we're going to get emails again. I'm saying it doesn't exist. He's saying there's no tank.

There's no tank. He's saying they've obviated the entire problem. It's bizarre. Someone asked me if I was going to ask Obama what one should wash your fluid. We have picked a lot of dumb battles on the show, and this is easily the dumbest. And do not just put water in your martial food. Anyway. Nil, the one thing I did want to ask you about Obama was how was the Secret Service? So this was our second round with him, and we were in his offices, so they were chill. Okay.

The first round, did you get a pat down? We were already all cleared from before. So when we were at Harvard, there was like intense security in the other protests that day, because he was speaking. We're on a college campus. there are dogs, like the whole thing happened. We hung out with the dogs and we found he wasn't going to be there. So then we, it was cool.

The dogs are cool. They're very friendly. At his offices, we had already been pre-screened and we were on his home turf. So there was a presence. He doesn't not have a presence. And there was some discussion about whether the blinds can be open or closed and whatever. But it was very chill because we were in his space as opposed to when you're not in his. Just moving him around.

is a complicated effort. I would imagine. What we have discovered. Can't go to Sinebond. Actually, can I tell you my one Obama behind the scenes story? We can end this episode. In that episode, we talk a lot about free speech on the Internet and regulating free speech. And one of the things that's really hard to do is you need some constitutional authority to go ahead and regulate speech.

So the one that came up in the episode is the FCC has some authority over broadcast stations. Right? So you swear on ABC or CBS or NBC, people can file complaints to the FCC, the FCC can find them because you're using the public airwaves. This is like a real thing. So like radio stations and broadcast TV, there's some basis for the FCC to regulate the content in there. Yeah. And that is wax and weight. This doesn't exist for cable TV, which is why HBO can exist.

Why cable news is like off the rails, why I can just swear at will on the internet on the show, right? the government has basically no authority because there's no public airwaves. So I asked Obama this question in the episode. He's like, hey, you've seen some hook. So then we get up and we take a group photo because he's an excellent politician and he knows they should take a group photo

so everyone's like happy. And I did the least journalistic thing in my life, which I took a video of him saying hi to Max, which again, I'm just admitting to you disclosure of the least journalistic thing I've heard it in my life, but my daughter has a video of Obama saying hi to her, which... That's awesome. You can't get that on cameo, yeah.

Yeah, it's like hard. And then he's leaving. And I was like that, this like thing, like, this feels like the problem to me. Like everyone wants to do this. Everyone wants to issue some speech regulation, but you got to get over this problem. And he looked at him and he goes, yeah, you just need a hook. You just got to figure it out. We'll figure it out.

And you like, oh, you used to be the most powerful person in the world. Like your brain is just like this problem should be solved. Like figure it out. Yeah. And it was like Kate Cox, the Dakota producer and I both, our minds were just blown. because that's just like not. I don't have the ability to just like order someone

to solve a constitutional law problem. And he was like, yeah, just, I don't know, shut up. Like, left. Just delegate. It was, and it was just like you don't have that experience very often. Yeah, the charisma too.

Yeah. Yeah, it was a lot. Anyhow, that's it. That's a Vergecast. Please, if you see a cyber truck, just all the way up the wiper stock. I'm telling you there's something there. I don't know what it is,

but people tell me something there I should look at. And make the Nelai wearable index GPT. Yeah, the graph. We need the graph. Yeah. I'm telling you, the vision pro.

The whole Vision Pro review is just going to be me doing math. But I want it to be an input. I want it to be a GPT where you can say, is this thing, how does this fit into Nelai's graph of wearable awesomeness? Right.

Fiddliness times face has to be less than or equal to usefulness. That's the whole equation. You just figure that out for you. All right. That's it. Thanks for everybody.

That's a podcast. back on. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge11. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and box media podcast network. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by Xander Adams.

And that's it. We'll see you next week.