The Vergecast - It’s already the year of AI again

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz kick off the new year with a preview of what we're excited to see at CES 2024 next week, but not before a brief discussion on copyright, the open web, and the first movements of a battle between The New York Times and OpenAI. Further reading: The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement Here’s how major media companies are handling OpenAI. Read the lawsuit! For the second year in a row, Sony won’t have new TVs at CES CES 2024: Dell’s XPS laptop lineup is about to look very different Samsung’s new AI-enabled smart fridge can design recipes for you Jony Ive imagined the Vision Pro giving you Zoom eyes and sunglasses Alamo Drafthouse blames ‘nationwide’ theater outage on Sony projector fail Amazon Prime Video will start showing ads on January 29th 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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Now with more AI. Please stop this best by. I'm your friend, Nilai. It's been a minute. The last time we spoke to you was last year. Welcome back. It's good to see again. Alex Tran's here.

I am here in my mom's house. That's why I have a creepy background. You do have a real mom's house vibe. Flowers, graduation photo of someone, guitar from my brother's, like, guitar years. You get the little posable figurine guy. Don't know what that's about. But I got it. Dressmaking, I believe.

That's how they do it. David Pierce is here. What is the age at which you get to have like a chair that is your chair. I'd like to be that person. Like, Alex, you're in a chair that, like, is a person's chair. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's not your chair. That's someone's chair. And I would like a chair that's mine. You're in your own home. At any moment, you can acquire a chair. I know. But it's like, it just feels wrong. Like, if I went and tried to buy a lazy boy right now, they'd be like, get out of here. You're not ready. You've been

earned this yet. That's what you know. When your wife is like, it's okay, get the lazy boy. You'll be like, I hit it. I'm at that age. If that happened, like, this relationship is like, she's, there's someone else. That's how I would know. If she was like, I've given up on you, you may have a lazy boy. I would know some other information that I wouldn't want to know. Anyway, there's a lot of news. It's been a, it's a very slow period of sort of iterative things, but some things happened before the break that we should talk about.

And then we are headed into CES. And the trickle of CES news is, you can see that we're going to have a pretty, noisy CES in Vegas. There might not be a lot of stuff, but there's going to be a lot of news, if that makes any sense. Yeah. Like the trends are converging on CES.

Just for example, I think we're going to hear a lot about Windows laptops with various AI features in them. Based on the fact that Microsoft just announced an AI button on Windows keyboards is coming. Oh, it's here. We're going to talk about that when I talk about the Dell XPS LAPS.

Yeah. It's going to be a very CESC, C.E. CES, I think. Like, I think we've spent the last, I don't know, decade watching it become kind of less and less CESE in the sense that it either was teeny tiny upgrades to mostly mature products or like weird, wacky nonsense from Europe that no one was ever going to buy but seemed potentially interesting. And now we're back in a place where there's like new kinds of gadgets, new ideas about gadgets, new stuff. And there's like, somewhere in there is stuff people are actually going to buy.

And it feels like CES has not been about things that people might actually buy in a while. And I'm kind of excited about it. All right. I'm going to make myself sound like an ancient wizard. Like a man with a chair, basically. Yes. I started writing about gadgets before the iPhone existed. Like 1950.

Yeah. Just what's me like age saying. Yeah. I started writing about those big mechanical typewriters, you know. No, but, you know, sort of like 2006, 2007. There were smartphones, but we parked them on NGadget mobile because our gadget audience

on NGadget was like, what are these weird European smartphones get them out of our face? They were like, notebooks are nothing. That's where we were. So CES every year was basically how gadget stores would get stocked. Like this is where the buyers

from Best Buy would like go and like figure out what would be in their store for the next year. And they were just full of gadgets like av receivers and weird TV lots and lots of weird TV ideas an infinite amount of weird TV ideas and then all that stuff converged into phones and even TVs became basically Android tablets that you hang on the wall like if you think about a modern television they've got an arm processor they're running some Linux variant very often Android sometimes ties in like they're just big tablets you hang on the wall so all the stuff converged to computers

And CS got boring because almost every product involved you having to believe that Panasonic was good at making software. Yeah, it's like, I don't know about that. Someone of Panasonic believes that. Many of these companies fully believed it. Or they, or like, remember there was a year that like Sam, the big announcement CS was that Samsung bought smart things and they're going to like take over home automation. And it's like, oh, we all really believe. Oops. Like, I don't know if you've used smart things lately.

I have it on my frame TV. It's a weird, weird product all the way around. Anyway, the point of this is we're just back at a place where there's a little bit of what you might call it deconvergence happening. And I say this every year about CS because you're always sketched, but you can just see that there's interest in things outside of the phone. And AI is like the thing that is not totally dependent on Apple letting it exist. So it's just like happening in more and more places. And I think that's just like fundamentally interesting. But for the most part, CS is like where sales people go to do sales stuff.

Yeah. And where tech reporters go to be like, what's happening here? And it's like maybe this year after several pandemic years and with the emergence of AI, maybe this year the balance will shift a little bit back towards interesting things. We'll have to see. It's at least weird stuff from companies with resources to make that weird stuff and sell it to you. I feel like Samsung for so long has just made slightly better versions of all of its stuff and then been like, look at this refrigerator.

That's where our innovation lies. And now we're coming back to, and I think this is a trend of this whole year. And it goes to your point about the co-pilot button on Windows computers. Like we are coming back to these incredibly mature devices that I think are going to start to change faster and in bigger ways than they have in a while, largely because of the AI. But everybody is kind of like ground up reimagining all of their devices, including the ones that haven't been touched in a while for this next phase. It's going to get weird and a lot of it's going to get much worse. But just from a pure like I like covering gadgets perspective,

it's going to be so fun. Yeah. I'm excited. I haven't gone in years. I'm excited to go and have a conversation on something other than whether a huge dependency on the smartphone will kill whatever product I'm looking at. Totally. Which is basically what we can do. Before we get into it, that, which we will get into. We should talk about the big news that happened while we are on break that is deeply related to whether the AI industry can continue the way it is currently going. The New York Times has sued Open AI for copyright infringement. They are far from the first to sue Open AI for copyright infringement. Sarah Silverman, other famous authors have sued Open AI. George R.R. Martin, in a different case, sued Open AI. But in classic Times fashion,

now that they have sued OpenAI, they're covering it as though this is the watershed moment. As though this is the one that's something in a brain. They're like, the pivotal moment for AI has arrived now that we have sued, have sued Open AI. You can believe about that way you will. I just think it's- In reality, aren't all of these cases destined to kind of merge together into one,

the people versus AI kind of case? Yeah, so they, I think it's the Sarah Silverman. case filed in the same court, they've assigned the Times case to the same judge because they've been deemed related. A lot of the fundamental legal questions are just the same here. So you should go read the Times as complaint. It is well written. Very often we point this out, but a lot of these filings are written for the public to read in their relationship to the actual questions that are determined in the court are potentially quite fuzzy. Like this thing is a piece of And like, that's what a good complaint is supposed to be.

But that means also it is very readable. It is not like a technical document or a technical legal argument. It's just a list of problems. For example, you can just ask ChatsyBT to tell you to recite a Times article at you. And it will just do it, which implies a number of things. First, that Open AI has a database of New York Times articles that it is made, which you need permission to make. Like that's just a very straightforward. Did you have permission to make all of these copies of Times articles?

Okay, but wait. Can we pause on that immediately? Because that is like the thing you have beaten into my head over the many years that I've known you, Neelai, is copyright law is about copies, right? Like fundamentally it is about things that can copy. No one believes me, but you do. I do. I have learned this.

I've known you a long time and I have finally learned this. And a lot of the talking that I've seen about this case, which like fundamentally, the Times makes a lot of allegations and we should talk about them because I think they're really interesting in ways that some of the other cases have not been as straightforward about that thing you're describing where like you can tell that chat GPT knows New York Times articles because it will tell you about them. But I think what I have not figured out and what everybody has been sort of talking in circles about in this is, is this actually a copyright thing at all? Like, is it against the law for OpenAI and ChatGPT to know the contents of a New York Times article?

I've read a New York Times article. If I tell you about a New York Times article, is that copyright infringement? Is that even remotely the same thing? Like, just like first principles. Yeah. Can you just make sense of this for me? Because I feel like I've read every direction of this, and I have no idea where to land. Okay.

So the most important first principle is that no one knows how fair use cases will get decided. Perfect. ever. The first principle is blurred lines. Anyone making that argument to you is definitely doing it for money. You know what I mean? Like they're all coin flips. David mentioned blurred lines.

I will just say this again. I'm at the point where I'm a soundboard about fairies cases and blurred lines. Like I gave this argument on CNBC and the anchors looked at me like they didn't know what blurred line was and I was like Emily Radikowski and like, oh yeah. So blurred lines. The Robin Thick song with Feral Williams. Marvin Gay's estate is like, hey, that sounds like a Marvin Gaye song. And they sued Marvin Gay's estate preemptively to get a court.

No, that way. They preemptively sued Marvin Gay. So get a court to say, no, this is a copyright infringement. Because they hadn't used a note. They hadn't used a chord. They just used like a vibe. I did a Decoder episode with Charlie Harding about this we can link to. It's just a vibe.

Like he's a musicologist. He's like, this is just a vibe. And they lost. The jury was like, no. Like, you, Robin Thick, are kind of like an unsympathetic defending. Like, this song's kind of weird. There's like, whatever, for whatever reason, they lost. They'd pay the money.

Years later, just recently, Marvin Gay's estate emboldened by this, sues Ed Shearin, because Shape of View has the chords of a Marvin Gay song in it. It's so much so that he, like, plays them all together in concert. Like, he, like, transitions from once on a year. And Ed Sheeran, vastly more sympathetic defendant. Old floppy hair is like, you need codes. And he wins.

Just objectively, he has used more of the Marvin Gaye song, or what you might consider is the Marvin Gayean. And he wins. That is a total coin flip. Just dead ahead coin flip. You do not know. And you shouldn't have that permissioning based on whether you think Robin Thick is more or less sympathetic

than Ed Shearer. Like, that's a bad place to live. So if the only approach here, like, total nihilism, nobody knows anything, nothing matters. That's what I'm saying right now? Like, people have asked me, what do you think will happen? What do you think should happen? And I just keep reminding everyone that fair use law is literal coin flips every time. They are legally supposed to be coin flips. They're all supposed to be evaluated on case-by-case basis, so that one thing is not supposed to be precedent for the next thing. So even if you think, okay, Robin Thick, or lost, that doesn't give Ed Sheeran a rule to follow, which is how he ended up back in court. And then he won.

And now no one has a rule. Like, you just move on to the next song and try again. Right. So this is a really weird, murky area of the law. So that's like just the first, when you talk about first principles, the only, like the thing that I will just put in everyone's brain is that no one knows what's going to happen. The first principle is that there are no principles. In fair use law, there is just chaos. Like it is supposed to be chaos because times change or attitudes about remixing and copying change.

The specifics of each use and reuse are totally different. And the law is sort of designed to make you fight it out. Like that's very much where they want it to be. I mean, artistically that sounds right. Whether that's where it should be is like a different question, especially at Internet scale. Like, again, this law was written in 1976. many things have happened between smartphones, for example, just recently. The Internet, not contemplated.

So, like, there's just something that's disconnected there. But more specifically to your point, David, now that I've answered your question with everything is chaos. The first thing you look at is, like, did you make a copy? Even if you want to make a fair use argument, a fair use argument is what they call an affirmative defense. So it is, but you're like, you did copyright infringement. And you're like, yes, I did do it. But let me tell you, it's fine. And here's why it's fine.

And you have to accept that you've made some copies without permission, right? That you didn't have a license to copy the entire database of New York Times article or scrape the entire website. You didn't get permission. You don't have a license. But your use of it in the end was fair for X, Y, Z reasons. And there's all these reasons you can go into. To even make a fair use case, I have to forfeit my copyright infringement case because what I then have to say is, yes, I took it, but I'm doing something transformative or, you know, useful or whatever with it such that it's okay. But I have to, I have to say at the beginning, yes, I did make a copy in order to be able to do that. Yeah, you just have to give that up.

Okay. And that is complicated in a lot of cases for a lot of reasons. It is less complicated in the case of computers because, anything a computer does is a copy. Like, merely taking a text file out of memory and putting it on a display involves making several copies along the way. Yeah, there's a copy of the New York Times article that I'm reading right now somewhere in a cache on my computer. And at hundreds of different cache points across the internet.

Yeah. To enable to load fast. And all of those, I will remind everyone over and over again, all of those were litigated. The thing I'm saying about loading bits from memory from one place on a computer to another, straight up that was litigated. You can go read MAI versus Pek Systems, a case that may be like spitting mad in Law School

because it's so stupid, where one company sued another company that was installing its software without permission and said the illegal copy here is when your people copy our bits from a disc to memory to load it on a computer. And they won.

That was copyright. The court was like, yep, that's a copy. And the law was rewritten to protect what are called ephemeral copies that let the internet work because it is obviously a bad policy outcome to say copying things from disk to memory is actionable copyer infringement.

That's just using a computer. So here we have this like total unknown. Can you take make a database of the internet and then do stuff with it such that you can spit back out the internet? I don't know. I think probably there should be some payments in the mix there. Right?

That seems like the thing thing that should happen here, right, is like, yeah, like opening eye has a gigantic valuation. They need this data to train their systems. If you need the data to make your valuation exist, you probably have to trade some of your valuation back to the people that made the data in the first place. Like, that's just abstract. That's not me carrying about journalism or whatever. That's just like, if that is the raw material of your business, you should probably pay for the raw material of your business. Well, and they've made deals too, right? Yeah, they made a big deal with Axel Springer, which publishes Business Insider. I think that's, it's not a very lucrative deal.

It's quoted it like $10 million over a number of years, which is, right? Yeah. $10 million is divided by any number over one over a number of years. It's like you're making a couple million dollars a year, right? Like that's what that sounds like. So like the deals are not very lucrative, but I think a lot of companies rather get paid than spend 10 years in court. And I think the Times is like, no, we're going to spend 10 years in court. I think Sarah Silverman is like, we'll spend 10 years in court. George R. Martin.

That dude, he's got to finish the book. Like, he's happy to litigate this through. He's not going to do it. He doesn't have to now. Yeah. So, like, I just think like this case is a big deal and the Times is going to fight it pretty vociferously. But the argument here from all the companies, from Google, from Open AI, from whoever, is this is fair use. We're going to make the copies.

We're going to do stuff to the copies. And that is fine because we're creating a new product based on those copies, which is basically what sampling in music is supposed to do, even though that is all licensed now. Like, you get to a place where you make the argument about everything being a remix long enough, and then you run out of original work to remix because you've destroyed the market for it, and then you start paying for it. So, like, the music industry, by and large, has sorted this out, right?

There's just a lot of payments going on for publishing, for interpolation, for rewriting, for sample clearance in a way that in the 80s when all this happened, like, you know, the Beastie Boys never cleared a single sample. Like, they just didn't do it. And there's so many in that record that, you know, the argument is you can't now. No major label runs that way anymore. Like, they've built a market for remixing work. And you have to expect that Open AI and the others will have to create a market for remixing the data that they're ingesting. Well, and I do think a huge amount of that market you're talking about comes from nobody wanting to go to court. And I think in this case, what you have, like you said, is a couple of parties that are really, really psyched about going to court and actually hashing this out.

No matter how it goes, it's going to be really interesting. But I think this is one of those things that strikes me as two separate issues. And I feel like we've talked about this a bunch with these companies recently. there is the kind of what feels right as a person in the world case. And then there's the like is this, does this match to what we understand to be our laws in the country, right? Because the thing you're describing about the times and paying for the raw materials of your stuff, there are debates about this, right?

All the AI companies say these things won't exist if we have to pay the billions of dollars of money required to get the data to make them, which I find deeply hilarious because that just means you acknowledge that it's worth money and you're just stealing it for free. But leaving that aside, the idea that the Times and whoever else has stuff that's going into the training data for chat GPT and all these other things, that those parties should be compensated seems obvious. Right. Like, I don't think you can make a super compelling case that says OpenAI and Google and everybody else should just have free access to the entire Internet forever to do with whatever they want, including compete with all of those publications. Yeah. I mean, take your hypothetical. from earlier and just remove AI from the equation and just sort of run them as they were normal products.

You, David Pierce, have memorized the entire New York Times. And you've not compensated them for it. And for a small fee, you will just tell anyone what's in the Times today. Right. That's copyright infringement. Like, directly. There's no getting around it. Right.

It's also impressive. And the reason that we don't, like, sit around worrying about it. it is because you can't do that. Right. Right. Like, human memory is so fallible. President Barack Obama undecoder said the genius thing about the human memory is it,

it changes everything all the time. This is like, this was his argument when he was talking about copyright law and AI. He's like, your memories change things and AI's don't. And so I think, and his argument was like human creativity will be forever unsurpassed, which,

you know, he's famously a very hopeful man. But like Mike Maznick at TechDart wrote a smart piece about this after the lawsuit came out. And one of the things that he said was that if the Times wins, it opens up the Times to a lot of issues because the Times is famous for basically taking and building on work done by other reporters elsewhere without giving them credit. And people at, you know, smaller blogs and sites have been yelling at the Times about this for forever. And anyone who aggregates anything on the Internet could suddenly be open to these same things

because just by taking something and knowing it and doing something with it, you open yourself up to copyright infringement. And that's like, that strikes me as like a ways down that road, but I think is, is not a totally impossible outcome. But again, all of this is like, I think there is a case to be made pretty simply that it just feels right that everyone who is helping make this thing for these enormously profitable companies should be compensated in some way, right? So two things.

One, open eye isn't profitable yet. Just burning money. Sure. But they are collecting a ton of investment dollars. So, like, that's interesting. Yeah. But the product itself is not yet profitable. Microsoft's pretty profitable.

Microsoft is pretty profitable. Google, right? But these products right now represent sort of rising costs and not falling costs. That's fair. Yeah. Right? Like every hit on whatever tensor unit or GPU that they're using to run these things, it costs more money than an average Google search or whatever.

So there's some interesting economics that they're not quite as profitable as everyone wants them to be, but everyone can see the future in which they are extraordinary. Also, does that matter? Like, in copyright infringement, does your company valuation make a difference? No, but I think that's the moral case. It doesn't make a difference. Copygrain infringement and copy this notion that there's some sort of big taking happening economically, I think provides ammunition to the moral argument that you're making, which is like you should, you should get compensated for this use. You just, there's got to be money at the other end of the line, right? And like that is sort of as yet unproven. I think everyone believes that there will be a lot of money at the end of the line.

I believe there will be a lot of money at the end of the line. And you should sort out the economics early. That all makes sense. But the money isn't actually at the end. We're not actually at the end of the line. So that's just one thing I'll say. I will say just one other thought to that. And then you should keep going.

Is that like there's a weird thing in this where kind of everybody loses, right? Because if Open AI is taking the New York Times information to make a thing that loses tons of money, but in so doing is taking readership away from the. the New York Times because it can answer some of the questions people might have otherwise gone to the New York Times for and even tell you about New York Times articles, the New York Times also loses. So you're stealing my money in order to not have any money, which is kind of a wild current version of affairs. I agree. And there's a weird zero-sum notion to the value of information embedded in there that is hard to unpack. It costs the New York Times a lot of money to generate

the reporting. It costs us a lot of money to generate the reporting. And then everyone sort of believes that it should be free. I don't know. Yeah. I know how much it costs to employ our staff. We should make more money than it costs to run our business. That argument plays in every part of the world except journalism on the internet. That's very weird. And like you can see, you know, the reaction to that across the sort of media landscape is more paywalls are going up. Like, people are trying to value the information at what they think the market should value it at, and that is working and not working in different ways.

The other thing I want to say is I love Mike Maznick. I think he's very smart. I re-tech at her all time. People should protect her. This is the place where I tend to disagree with Mike, and I am a copyright minimalist, I would say. Like, I worry about the expansion of copyright law all the time. That's how I started my career as a lawyer. It's like what I've written about a long time.

but I think sometimes Mike just devalues everything to zero too quickly and embedded in the argument that he makes in that piece, which again, you should go read. I love Techert. You should read Techord all the time is the notion that the Times work is not valuable. The Times insisting that its work has value unto itself somehow is hypocritical because then everyone else can insist that their work also has value, which will destroy the New York Times. There's something in there that I think on the internet, we're getting to a place where more and more people are insisting that their digital work has value unto itself, not just as a rapper around some advertising or like a rapper around some like influencer merch hustle or like whatever. And that's like, that's just new. The joke I keep making with Addie Robertson, our policy editor is that we came up in a time when the dominant like vibe on the internet was everything is a remix. and now the vibe in the internet is fuck you pay me. That's good.

That's a big shift. It's a big culture shift. It's hard for me to wrap my head around it because I am very much of the Everything as a remix school. But you just, there has to be, like some money has to flow to original creators. And it isn't happening at scale in any of the social platforms. Like every influencer is pivoting into selling you goods. Like, whether it's water bottles or shoes or Mr. Mobile just launched a keyboard case to the iPhone today.

Like, it's fine. Like, that's what the, all of their businesses are going there because there isn't enough value in the content itself on the platforms. I mean, that's why they're boxing. Like, literally, there are, YouTubers are becoming professional boxers because that's how you make money. You can now buy a bottle of prime that is just Logan Paul's blood. That's not true. Okay. I will be remiss if I don't do this.

it will take a little longer, but it's the actual legal nerd thing that we should do to talk about fair use. And there's one point in here that I want to make before we break and talk about CS. So the fair use analysis, which I have pointed out, is always chaos,

always a coin flip. But there is a legal analysis. Like you can go read the statute. There are four factors to consider in a fair use analysis. So just think about open AI and at times in this way. So the four factors

the judge is supposed to consider. The purpose and character of your use, what are you using it for? The nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the proportion taken, how much of the work you're using, and the effect of the use upon the potential market for the original work. So if I take your thing and I make something based on it and then I destroy the market for your thing, I've lost, it's not fair, right? That's an unfair use of the work. So this is, I think, this is why it's always a coin flip, Because in every single case, these four factors are weighted differently.

Sometimes judges wake up and they have different ideas about what the market for art looks like. This is why it's a coin flip because these factors are different every time and different people evaluate them. But the one I would point to here for the times, I would guess that they lean on the most is the fourth factor. The effect of the use upon the market for the original work. Because it is sort of undeniable that the purpose of Open AI's use is to do the things the Times does. Right? You ask it questions.

It delivers you answers that potentially were first generated by the New York Times. The nature of the work is the same. It's attack. The amount and substantiality

of portion take, well, it's all of it. Yeah. That's all of it. So what's the one with the wiggle room in it? Yeah, it's the effect of the use on the potential market.

And if the Times can prove that Open AI is replacing the market for the New York Times by copying the New York Times, If I had to make one prediction, I would say it's this fourth factor, the market factor, that is the most heavily weighted and the one that gets discussed the most. Well, and there's a bunch of that in the complaint even, right? Like, the Times talks a bunch about trademark dilution and the idea that the chat GPT hallucinating New York Times articles and attributing product recommendations to the wirecutter that didn't come from wirecutter, that that kind of thing is actually bad for the New York Times as a competitor in the,

market of good and valuable information. And again, like you said, this thing where you can just basically have it read you paragraph by paragraph a New York Times article. Like, it's already seeming to push past this idea that it's illegal to have a database full of our things. I think it would like to make that case, but it seems to have quickly jumped past that too. By doing this, you're making the times look worse and trying to steal our business.

And I think at least of the cases that I've seen, that is the step beyond a lot the other stuff that I've seen. Not just it's illegal for chat GPT to have trained on this data, but it is actually turning it back around in ways that harm us. So I think you're right. And I think the Times is going to push that pretty hard. I mean, an amazing amount of this complaint is just like examples of conversations with chat GPT about New York Times articles, which again, to your point about these things being marketing is is not accidental. Yeah. This thing is made to make the argument for us to read to you on this podcast for news anchors to read.

That's what complaints are for. Eventually they're going to have to make more pleadings and actually have a trial. And the thing that is crazy about all this is if the time settles with open AI, it doesn't mean anything for the next case to come along because there's no fair use precedent here. So I think some of these cases will run to ground. But what you don't have is a music industry that is invested in its own survival as the music industry to develop a whole bunch of deal structures around sampling and interpolation, which they have done.

Like it has taken them several decades to do, but there's a whole business model for like publishing rights and sampling in the music industry because it's a closed ecosystem. You're like, I'm going to take some music and make some more music based on it. I'll give you this example. Major record labels have songwriter workshops where they get a bunch of songwriters. They take their own catalog of old hits and say write new songs based on these hits because they know that's the safest way to sample their own work and they can trade on some nostalgia. That is a totally wild act.

Like, if you said this would be happening in the 80s at the dawn of hip-hop, people think you were crazy. But they've built an, they've built a legal and financial ecosystem around this copyright problem of sampling that is actually now generated, here's how songs are written. There's none of that on the internet. Like, there's no closed ecosystem of news providers and tech platforms and YouTube creators, it's all going to get together in a room. You're like, how are we going to do this? There's just chaos. So hypothetically, if, say, the CEO of Amazon were to buy one of America's

largest national newspapers, would that, would that, you know, close the ecosystem a little bit? And maybe another one, like, bought Time Magazine. Like, hypothetically, if these tech companies started to buy these media organizations, like, maybe we'd start to see. something like that. So that would be hilarious. If like all the entire Salesforce UI was based on the Taylor Swift article in the Time magazine, it was just like, she's great. I don't know what you're asking about. I can't increase your sales, but she's amazing. That's actually what Salesforce is a yeah, I should be. Just talk to your clients about Taylor Swift. Number of times Taylor Swift was mentioned on this. The Amazon example is better. So Jeff Azos owns the Washington Post

and he obviously has a huge controller stake in Amazon. If you get to the place where the purpose of the Washington Post is not to make money as the Washington Post, but it's to serve as a cost center for training Amazon's AI. That's a weird reason to do journalism. Yes. And you can skip to that ending pretty fast in a lot of these cases. But faster than you think, the purpose of X, you can argue,

is to serve as training data for GROC. Yeah. That's the argument Elon Musk is making. Like, is that what we want? Is that the right incentive to make content so that we can mush it all together and spit it out as AI somewhere else? Like, I don't know the answer to that question. That does not appeal to me. I don't know if it appeals to you, but that's, you can quickly get to the end result,

where even if the AI companies are paying millions of dollars in fees to journalism companies or media companies or YouTube creators or whatever, because there's more margin on the other end of owning the AI tool, well, then a bunch of YouTube creators are basically working for the AI tool. But that's weird. That supposes that the AI tool will, like, actually make that kind of money. Right, which is what I said. Like, I don't, we're not at that place yet, actually. So you, it's, I find it tempting to skip to the end of, like, what does YouTube look like in the world where Bard can summarize a YouTube video?

And it's like, none of that is good right now. That's a problem Google wishes it had. No, but to some extent, it's already doing that, right? Because so many YouTube videos are now made to the algorithm, right? Yeah. Like there are already made to appeal to a algorithm. So it's just like, okay, that homogenization that we see on YouTube just gets like accelerated. I cannot wait for the New York Times to adopt the Mr. B style for all journalism.

Oh my God. This is how I was wondering how we're going to cover the election. And it's just straight rips of Mr. Beast videos about tech policy. And every, every picture on the homepage of the New York Times is just the reporter with their mouth open making a face. No, it's close now, right? It's close now. Oh, you're right. Yeah, your mouth is closed.

And there's something gold and a bunch of money behind you. And it's just the New York Times reporters. Look, it would certainly be interesting. That's what I'm saying. All right. We got to take a break. I'm, I talked about a copyright law for two. This is my fault.

We're going to watch the chart and Apple Podcasts be like, you know, I did it again. All right, we're going to take a break. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about some CES. We'll go back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too.

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That's all the copyright lot of talk. Well, there'll be a little more. copy of the law. I was going to say, you've made that promise before. Don't believe them, guys. It's my favorite. It's the only law that works on the internet telling you this is true. It's also the law that might break Google in the end, which is fascinating to think about. Okay, that's enough. That's enough. We should talk about CS. CS is coming in a week. We're going. We're going to be there. I would say there's a bunch of stuff here that has been announced pre-CES. I always wonder if they announce the best stuff early to get the early wave of hype or this is just the hey pay attention to us.

The real stuff is coming. I think it's like both. I think it depends on the company. Some companies are like, I want to get my cool stuff out early. But most companies are like, I want to get some fun stuff out, tease you, and then do the really cool stuff later. Yeah. And nothing will have a price or a ship date. Yeah.

All of it will be like the weirdest render you've ever seen. and then you can come see it in person or a booth. Or it'll be a sticker. Or it is the thing you are most likely to buy, but is kind of the least interesting, right? Like the, if you're going to release a spec update to your already existing laptop,

do it before CES. Because by the time we get there, nobody cares because everybody is like drowning in weird flying iPhone cases. But if you have something that is like, here is an actual product that actual people will probably buy, this is when some of this stuff comes out.

That's why we're seeing a lot of like monitor upgrades and, you know, spec bumps to laptops and things like that. And then I think you get to CES and that's when they're like, have you seen these speakers? They're 62 feet tall and they cost five million dollars. CES. And there's just me standing in front of me like, this is why I do what I do. I'm home again. All right. So I'm just going to read a few of them that I think are incredible.

LG released like a speaker system. I don't know how to describe this thing. It's a speaker with a vacuum tubes in it and a transparent OLED display on the front of it that displays the name of the song in like old-time font. Yeah. I want this thing so badly. It's sick. It is so stupid.

It is so dumb, but it is so cool. It just is like a Kickstarter that somehow LG made real. That's exactly right. Like a 2014 Kickstarter and they're like, no, we're just going to sell this thing and put LG label on it. It is so cool. Like, ridiculously cool. Big vacuum tubes, little vacuum tubes, old-timey fonts.

I'm not even sure if it's recasting the name of the song into the old-timey font, or if they just found a song whose album cover is in an old-timey font. Do you know what I mean? Like, I don't know what's going on here exactly. I just know that this picture of this, it's a black and white picture of a guy leaning back in a chair, but then the speaker system is in color, but then it's actually not in color. It's just the orange of the vacuum tubes is the color. It's just sepia.

It's perfect. It's so good. It's a very CS product. I'm very excited about it. I'm going to go look at it a lot. There's been a bunch of display news that I'll just read quickly because it's a bunch of gaming monitors. Samsung now has more Ola gaming monitors. Some of them have up to 360 hertz refresh rates, which I believe is many times faster than human perception, but good for Samsung.

Hell yeah. And then LG has topped Samsung with a 12. 27-inch OLED that has a 480-hertz refresh rate. You face Samsung. So we are just doing like watt war, horsepower war specs. Is this the new thing? This actually kind of makes sense that if we're definitely in a phase where the best way to sell a really fancy monitor is to sell really great gameplay to gamers, like that's

who buys your fancy monitors. And I think we're just in a place now where we're just going to be on like a crazy Hertz refresh rate arm race. and eventually Samsung is going to be like, we did it, everybody, 1080. I think it'll be more like everybody will start to realize they don't actually need that. And most of their games will never take advantage of it. And it's probably not worth their money. Yeah, but that's like three years from now.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. After a bunch of people buy monitors. After the 1080 hurts comes out. Right, exactly. It's after. And then we'll be like, oh, remember that phase? Weird. Well, so just to be specific, the LG display is 400.

80 Hertz at 1080P, which is, I think that's why a bunch of monitors hit 1440 for a minute. That was a sweet spot of resolution and refresh rate. And so I think what this actually signals is you're going to get faster refresh rates at the resolutions you actually want to run at, and then you have to make some sort of decisions about what you prioritize. But yeah, this is just a spec war, and I'm here for it. I want to be very clear that anytime LG and Samsung decide to engage in a display spec war, you just call me.

I'll be there. We're going to cover every ounce of that spec war because display spec wars are what this business is made of. I also still really like this trend where everybody is putting smart TV stuff into computer monitors. It's the best.

It's so good. Like just to have a thing that's like I have a 32 inch screen and it is my television and my gaming monitor and my computer monitor and it does all those things pretty well. It's like I love it.

Can you imagine being a college student and having that? Like I'm just like, I want to. that? I know. I'm going to go back to college just so I can have this monitor experience. But then I'm going to be in the dorm one night and be like, wait. I like having a house. I just want to be clear, both of you are very senior editorial staffers at work.com. David's like, I can't wait until I can own a chair. I'm going to go back to college to get a monitor.

It's good. We all need dreams and hopes and ask me. Yeah, our dreams just going backwards or forwards rapidly in time. I'm going to get a chair, guys. It's going to be my chair. He's going to have his name on the back. You have to earn comfort, Eli. Don't forget that. All right. The last little display one I want to call out, and then we should do this as lighting

around, is this LG projector that looks like an old Bell and Howell film projector. Like it, it's a handle, but it looks like a crank on the side. It's called the Cinebeam Cube. Cube is spelled with a Q. Extraordinarily important to note that it's spelled with a Q. It weighs 3.2 pounds. it's just a little bit shorter than an iPhone. So it's itty-bitty.

And it can do 120-inch image at 4K. It's pretty dim. It's 500. It's not great. But it is so pretty. It's beautiful. It runs WebOS, of course. So I really think back to what we were talking about

about the kind of disintermediating phones as a thing. I think this is one way it's going to happen. I think we're going to get this really cool run. of like furniturey gadgets that I'm really excited about. Like we spent a long time with all the smart speakers and all this stuff being like, what if we made everything in your house more gadgety? And it looked more like the future.

And everybody said, that sucks. And then like with TVs and like the Samsung frame, which I know you haven't have many feelings about, we've kind of gone back to like, what if these things actually looked, you know, nice and designed and looked like they've been. belonged in your house and weren't just sort of dropped out of a Best Buy. And I think you're starting to see it from some of these bigger companies too. These things are all kind of like special edition

larks right now. But you really get the sense that these companies are testing the waters to see. Like if we made a thing that doesn't look like a big fat white piece of plastic, would people buy that? And like I know for me the answer is yes. And I really hope it is for other people too. because I think design, like, this is what a projector should look like. Yeah. I'm so sick. Cool as hell. Yeah.

What's funny, though, about all of that is, you know, old projectors look this way, partially beautiful, but partially because form followed function. Like, they were very utilitarian products. This is just a projector. Like, this is just an arm chip and some, I'm guessing, some, like, very standard off-the-shelf projector parts that they have lying around. And they've made it beautiful. They've made it look like the old form, like the old function.

And we haven't quite figured out like, oh, you can just make it really, really small. Like, oh, we should make it bigger and like beautiful. And like that is interesting to me. The frame TV is like a deeply fascinating product to me. As somebody who now owns a frame TV in a frame, I will rant about this product all day and all night. First of all, have you used smart things? What? What?

I used it like four years ago. Horrible. The frame TV is fascinating because Samsung will just tell. you, this is a TV that's designed to be off. And people buy it because they realize that their TV is off more than on. Yeah. And so it should be beautiful when it's off, which is just wildly interesting. Second, if you actually put a frame on it, you destroy the functionality of a frame TV. This is a true thing that I will talk about it like because it blocks all the sensors in the front. Neelai has assigned like a half dozen stories investigating what went wrong with his frame TV.

I think a tech product that is a bad TV that kind of doesn't work when. you do what you're supposed to do with it, and it's still the best-selling tech product in this category, is a fat, like, as a cultural object, we should just think about that more. Totally agree. It's kind of like what happened was for a long time when they were making technology for, like, going in the homes. They wanted to make it look cool, or they wanted to make it look like it was meant for anyone and not be scary. That's why they had all the wood paneling and stuff like that. And then one day they were like, oh, we can just go like balls to the wall, do whatever we want, like do our spec wars. get to 1080 hertz.

We can do all of that and have fun with it and not worry about the design factor. And now they're starting to realize, like, they're starting to hit a lot of those limits on a lot of the technology. And so they're like, okay, what do we have left? Oh, we can actually make it not look like garbage. Well, there's such an interesting philosophical shift underneath what you just describes to, right? Because we went through this whole long phase where technology was exciting because it was technology, right?

And you kind of wanted the things in your life to scream technology. Yeah. And I feel like we are headed into something very different from that. That is going to be like technology is not supposed to be everywhere and scream its name in my face all the time. It's supposed to like blend into my life and surroundings. And I think like if that's this next generation and the design is sort of the leader of that, it's going to change a lot of things in really interesting ways. But I think you're right. I think that is at least where a lot of people are pushing us right now is out of this thing where it's like everything I have looks more.

and more like a gadget and my house just becomes one big gadget to like I have more gadgets but they don't show themselves the same way. Well, we're seeing it too in like how how people are moving that in different spaces in their house, right? Like the office is not in the kitchen. It's not in the dining room. Generally speaking, it's often a room. The home theater is another one. Like most people's home theaters probably isn't the same room where they do other just like hanging out stuff. It's probably cool and dark and I want to own every like all $10,000 worth of equipment. Do you have one of those in your dorm room also? I will. I will when I go back to school.

No, the other thing is really interesting. I'm sure we'll see us at CS a bunch. This is why sound bars exist as a category. Yeah. Because people didn't want to put five speakers in their house. Now, if you're me, you want to put 12 speakers in here. That's a very different approach. But most people are like, no, what about one inconspicuous black bar under the TV that sounds good?

Leave everything else out. And that, more or less one. The thing you're talking about, David, is what we used to call, like, the ambient computer. Like, several years ago, this was the... theme, the computers would disappear in the walls and we would just like talk to Alexa. And that really didn't play out. And I think the twist here that is interesting, and again, this is just one 500-lumen projector, but the twist here that is interesting is the things are designed to be seen.

Yeah. Right? They're designed to be beautiful objects. And because you can take the smartphone supply chain and say, okay, now your computer monitor also has its own operating system and its own arm processor. and also, by the way, it's easier to get a bunch of streaming services on this weird custom computer than on your desktop computer. So we'll just like run it over here or we can make a little projector or whatever we want to do using all these commodity smartphone pieces. You're seeing more technology, more complete computers put into different things is like single purpose things that actually work well.

And that lets you get to the design element of it. Whereas before, I think, the idea of putting a computer in anything required like an awful lot of computer. Yes. Yeah. And that made everything ugly. And now all that stuff is just teeny, tiny and small and cheap because we've had smartphones for so long. Yeah. I think that's right.

And I think we're going to see a ton of that at CES, including some of the stuff we've seen already. All right. So let's wrap up this little CES preview segment by doing a CES lighting round. Then the third segment will just be a regular. None of these are never quick. I don't know why we pretend this is lighting. Please buy the lightning round Someone show up

You can have it We'll rename it for you It's fine This is the one thing Where I will abandon my journalistic ethics And just sell, sell, sell. The Samsung frame land Tell me, yeah,

whatever kind of refrigerator You want me to hawk You got it What's that weird brand That just makes the retro fridges You want the lightning round? Smeg. Smeg!

Smeg! The lightning round, chilled by smeg. You got it. Oh, boy. Just show up. His name is Andrew Malazek. He's her director, like network integrations or whatever. You just talk to him.

Write him in check. He got to say whatever you want. All right, Alice, what's your CS lighting? So this one is, they announced it before CES. They're going to show them off at CES, but Dell has redone the whole XPS lineup. The XPS 13 plus is gone away. Which is good because it sucked. But it is also technically the new XPS 133.

It's using a lot of the same stuff, but then they've gotten rid of the 15 inch and the 17 inch. Those will both still be around. You'll still be able to buy the old version for a while, but they're not going to be doing big upgrades to it. And instead, you're getting a 14 and a 16 inch. And the 14 inch, I'm really excited about because it's only like a pound more than the 13 inch, which I don't carry my computer everywhere, so that's not bad for me. It gets you like a much larger battery. I think it goes up to 69.5 watts per hour versus the previous one, which was 55 watts per hour.

And it gets you discrete graphics. And that's just really exciting. And also there's a little tiny co-pilot button. But they, like, hadn't figured out the rounding. This is one of the funniest pictures we have ever run. With just a little sticker? The sticker on the copilot button. They hadn't figured out.

They, like, they didn't get it until the last minute. And so they're like, okay, a sticker. We already made these laptops. Thanks, Microsoft. The sticker's a little fuzzy. Everything about this picture is perfect. I love it. Thank you, Amelia, for taking beautiful photos.

Yeah, it's just, it's just, what is this, is this the menu button that they just literally put a little sticker over with the co-pilot? And now it'll go co-pilot, which just, it really, I know everybody's very excited about the co-pilot button, but for me, maybe it was because I first experienced it with the Dell XPS. I had big, like, Cortana vibes. Yeah. Yeah. Look, this is the dream for Microsoft, right?

It's like there's a button, an assistant shows up. You ask it some things that lies to your face and tries to bang you, and you move on with your day. That was the original pitch for Clippy. Clippy tries to bang you. Yeah, I don't want that. Clippy get away. Yeah, that's somehow worse. Those eyes.

The fact that I keep insisting the thing is trying to bang you. They haven't said a word to me about it is like very funny. The silence is definitely Microsoft. They're going to get you for clicking. Not one email, not one text, not one LinkedIn message from some aggrieved Bing product manager. They're just like, yeah, I don't try to bang a bunch of people. Sure did. I did.

What do you got? Mine is, and I literally have to load the page so that I can tell you the name because the name just breaks my heart every time I say it out loud. The Samsung 24 bespoke four-door flex refrigerator with AI Family Hub Plus. Yes. Yes. which is the Samsung-yest thing to ever Samsung. It is Samsung's new smart fridge. I love, love, love that Samsung is all in on smart fridges.

Like, this company will not abandon the idea that your fridge should be the biggest and most important screen in your house. And I think that rules, and I hope it never changes. So, and I actually think, like, I have two thoughts about this. One is that we're going to see just infinite gadgets at CES that are just gadget plus chat GPD. Like name a thing plus chat GPT and they'll be like, is this anything? And I'll just be wandering through the Venetian being like, that's nothing, that's nothing. That's nothing. You can't just put chat GEPT in it.

That's still, it's still nothing. But then the other thing is going to be companies that are further ahead of the game trying to figure out what cool stuff you can actually. do with some of these AI tools. And Samsung has been doing this for a while. It's had some fun slash bizarre ideas about what you can do with a camera inside of your fridge. And this one in particular, it uses a camera inside of your fridge to not just figure out what you have, but to help you identify recipes that you can cook with what you have in the fridge, which for me is like the dream, right?

It's like you want to open it up and be like, okay, I have broccoli and pasta. and a half a thing of Worcestershire sauce. Like, what can I make for dinner? And it'll just tell you that's like, that is... If you can't figure out what to do with broccoli and pasta and Worcestershire on your... You mix the broccoli with the pasta and you set the Worcestershire side. Throw the Worcestershire sauce.

You rizzle it on. You're like, not today, weird sauce. No, that's, I mean, you should... Can I, can I just... I support your dream. Can I just point out the most hilarious limitation of the dream as expressed in this refrigerator. The AI camera can only recognize 33 different items.

So if you're just like a little bit out of Samsung's strike zone of 33 foods it knows about, it's like, I don't know, man, you're on your own. Just one small clarification, it can, it can identify up to 33 food, I guess. 33 is the dream. Does it have to be like specific brands? Uh, yeah, that unclear. I will say the touchscreen has a, uh, TikTok app and a YouTube app. Oh, that's what I mean.

Standing in front of your fridge, scrolling TikTok videos, actually kind of amazing. Like, honestly, kind of, like, I'm going to go try to have that experience. I mean, how, have you never done the thing where there's something in the microwave for 60 seconds? And you're like, oh, I'm just going to look at four TikToks while I do this. You could do that on your fridge, the screens. And the way that I'm going to choose to express that desire is not by pulling out my 15, $1,800 state of the art phone. It's using the computer in my fridge.

Yeah, I don't see what the problem is. By the way, deciding who in the family gets to determine the TikTok algorithm or even the TikTok account loaded onto the refrigerator. I think you've got to give the fridge its own algorithm. The fridge gets its own account. That's like truly one of the most dangerous and destabilizing pieces of technology. You can introduce him to any family is full-sized TikTok on the fridge. And you're like, whose account is going to sign into this TikTok?

I don't know about that. It's a lot of trust. We have an LG. By the way, LG has a smart platform called Think, Thank You, that looks exactly like smart things. I know everyone always wants to dunk on Jaomi and Huawei for exactly copying iOS. The fact that LG and Samsung have exactly copied their bad smartphone experiences, very funny. Very funny. So we now have a think Q microwave and a thank you fridge. Uh, the microwave will send you a notification when it is done, which is the least useful notification in the world. Because how long, like, getting a notification on your phone for something that you've set for a minute. It's like not useful. People used to roast turkeys in it. Maybe you're roasting a turkey. Turn in your microwave and just sprint out the front door. I'm out. I'm gone. Um, uh, uh, you. Uh, you. Uh, you. Uh, uh, you. Uh, uh, uh, you. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, you. Ours is over our stove, so you can also tell whatever voice assistant to turn on the light and the fan.

And my wife was like, but the button is right there. And then our refrigerator will not send me notifications for when it thinks our ice is too old. And it's like, throw away your ice. And I've never even considered this before. And I don't know why I have any of these notifications turned on or why I've even connected any of these devices to the internet to the beginning. Wait, are you supposed to throw away your ice? Yeah. I was like quietly Googling.

Straight up, I got a notification. It's like, it's been seven days. Please discard your ice so we can make you fresh ice. Seven days? If you had said a year, I would have been like, oh, I've never, I've still never done that. So our old fridge didn't have an ice maker. So I, you know, we bought the most ice maker. It can make four kinds of ice, my good man.

And I was like, what a luxury. And then it turns out we don't use ice. So now I just have like a fridge full of ice. And the fridge is like, get this ice out of me. And that is the relationship I have with technology now. Listen, if you are listening to this and you know if you're supposed to replace your ice every seven days, please email us. Vergecast at theverse.com. If you're an expert on ice replacement situations in fridges, I need to know this.

Please. I think LG is in the pocket of big. That's what I'm at right now. Yeah. And it's also someone who's been installing a lot of new smart light switches. I think Lutron is in the pocket of big wire nut. Oh, yeah. Because God bless the Lutron switch, but that's a lot of wire nuts.

You're just packing them in that box and screwing them tight. Delai, what's your lightning round? So mine is the TV stuff. We're getting some glimmers of the TV stuff. There's two trends that I think are really interesting in TVs this year. One, they're bringing AI to settings. So actually, if you go back years now, AI has been at CS for years because every TV company is like, look at our AI picture processing and upscaling. like they've been talking about it forever and ever and ever and everyone's like ha ha AI and this year it's going to be out of control

because now the AIs can lie to you but they've been doing AI and upscaling for years and years and years to get you know to upscale your horrible 720P Fox NFL broadcast to 4K they've applied a lot of AI to that at the panel level so they're going to do more and more of that this year the thing that they're all doing is they're applying it to settings so they're going to say okay we're going to recognize your content and adjust to the settings of the TV. So you won't have to switch between game mode and cinema mode or whatever. We'll recognize, okay, you're playing a video game. We're going to switch you to the highest refresh rate, the lowest latency, the whole thing. Okay, you're watching a movie. That's Tom Cruise's face.

We're going to put you in Tom Cruise mode, which is fascinating. They should have done this ages ago. Yeah, that's a good idea. But why does that require AI? Couldn't that just require acknowledging that you've changed inputs? but you can already do input level settings but if you have if your input level setting is like an xbox knowing what kind of content is coming out of the xbox is actually really hard right like the xbox either needs to communicate with the tv which given the say of as shmi seems unlikely

what was the name of that thing that the the box that had all the inputs that the cavo that was the one of the things it tried to do was figure out what you're watching and actually like tune the experience based on literally the content on the screen. Yeah, the Kavo is different because it was a universal remote. So its whole pitch was like, you tell us what you want,

and we'll know what you have, and we'll deliver that. Like, we'll click around the Apple TV interface for you. And because it was machine learning, it wouldn't be brittle. Like, if you want to do a, most universal remotes, if you want to do a macro,

you're like, okay, press power, wait four seconds, click right three times, wait, you know, like, and that is all inherently brittle and broken. The Kavo is like, we will look at the screen, and we'll make sure we're going to click on the Hulu app.

We'll click on the Hulu app. We'll see what's on the screen. We'll find the thing you want. It did not work. That company pivoted to selling video conferencing solutions for nursing homes. This is a true story. But the idea that you can recognize it's on the screen and take action on it, kind of an old idea.

Advertising on connected TVs has worked this way for a very long time. Really weird stuff, but ACR, automatic content recognition, has been built into most panels for a long time. So the TV manufacturers know what you're watching. They can sell lines against it, which isn't great. And now they're going to finally start doing a useful thing with that technology, which is saying, okay, it's a movie. We're going to put you in the best mode for this movie.

Roku is going to announce new Roku Pro Mini-L-D TVs. They've got Spark Picture modes. Their pitch is 90% of people never change the settings on the TV. This will help a lot of people. They're also, Roku's going to do Mini-L-D TVs. They're going to make higher-end TVs that I think is really interesting. Mini LED is going to be everywhere at CS this year. And then Sony is not going to announce new TVs.

Sony is off the TV cycle at CS, which is fascinating. The Sony A95 Quantum. Oled, that was the flagship TV of last year, just hit in October. So Sony is just way off the cycle. They're just doing whatever they want. But they previewed, we've got a bunch of mini LED tech coming this year. It's better than before. So they're still making CS announcements, which is fascinating.

And then LG announced its next generation of OLEDs, kind of minor bumps from last year, but the big news is MLA, its multiple lens array technology, is going to hit the 83 inch size and the G3, and then they've got smaller versions of its ones that are wireless, which means you plug all your stuff into a box on the other side of the room,

but you start to put your TV into the wall, which I don't know, man. But so like sort of iterative on the OLED side, and then I think huge strides in the mini-l-l-D side, which is going to be really interesting, because many LEDs are cheaper. They're just LCD screen. with really, really advanced backlights,

but the backlights are getting simultaneously more advanced and more interesting and cheaper. Right. So they're going to crash right into OLED. So I just bought an A95. My thesis is that the TV is going on my wall for like a decade.

Spending money on a TV is actually pretty good investment. And I came this close to buying an X-95. So shout out to Value Electronics and Scarsdale. I went. They had two calibrated Sony TVs, not in retail mode, but calibrated. A95 next to an X-95. A-95 is the OLED.

X-95 is the mini LED, and I was like this close to my next-N-X-95. What were they playing on it? They were playing some, you know, dark, stereo. I literally, I feel like...

Like, look at this lizard. I want to know, A, how many hours you spent standing between the two of them. And, like, how close you got to one, and then you'd walk over the other. Like, did you bring a loop? Did you bring a microscope? Like, did you bring your trusty and Icon?

macro lens to take pictures of the pixels. Like they just closed and left you in there overnight. They were like, we'll see you tomorrow. Let us know. It was like me alone in a dark store with like various $30,000, like, BW speakers, hugely expensive. I was just like in heaven. And then this store, they're the ones who run this thing on YouTube all the King of TV

shootouts. We've been here for like 20 years. And so like they calibrate everything. It's like beautiful. So I like, but I came this close to buy in the X-Nifex because the mini LED tech is so close. it's like it's right there and I think at CS

we're going to see the next evolution of it across the number of manufacturers and then Sony's going to show us some more stuff this year and the point I always make is if you pay attention to displays like one it's fun because it's just a it's a stakeless spec war right like it's not like will TikTok ruin democracy you know it's like

will this display look sick or not is like all you need to know but if you keep track of it you can kind of tell what kind of devices we're going to get a few years down the line Yeah. Right? Because the display is usually the thing that limits the form factor of any device you're talking about. And so TVs are where you kind of get the state of the arty state of the art.

And that stuff just trickles down to everything else. And the mini LED moment is like we're right here. We're spending the extra money in an OLED for a lot of people isn't going to be worth it ever, which I think is fascinating. That's going to suck. I like to be smug about my OLED. I love it. I just, I bought, I didn't buy the X-95. I bought the A-95 because I want to be, I want to be.

I want to be smug. Oh, look at that thing and just feel a wave of smugness every time I look at it. Like, I need to know what I'm going to be smug about in four to five years. Here's what I'm snug about.

I now have access to the world's most useless streaming service, Bravia Corps. You get the really good reds on Spider-Man, though. You get the really good reds. It streams in pure stream. It streams 80 megabits per second on Bravia core, but you can stream four movies

and three of them are Spider-Man. It is. And as soon as you turn it on, on Comcast calls and says, are you running a Bitcoin mine out of your house? But one of the movies on Bravia Corps that I had access to, because they changed the library all the time, was a remaster in IMAX of the original Ghostbusters. And I was like, I'm in heaven. Like, this is a kind of, it was kind of like a bad 4K upscale.

You like see the pores, but they were weird looking. Yeah, you know, there's like too much contrast. Alex, what was the one you were pointing out the other day? You quick post about it. There was something that just got upscale and it looked really bad. Well, they're doing it a bunch with everything. Like on YouTube right now. if you go and look up an old trailer, almost all of them have been upscaled.

Yeah. And you're just like, oh, that's weird. I sat and rewatched all of Ghostbusters in this bad upscale. I mean, it looked insane in some ways, like, just like too contrasty. Like, that's the thing I always catch with these bad upscales. Like, it's like too contrasting. And some things are blown out in weird ways. But then I was like, I'm reading the titles of the name tags.

Because you can. This is the movie I watched 100 times on VHS on a 13-inch screen. And I'm like, look at, look at all those words. that are on the screen. How is slimer. Beautiful? I mean, you look, no, like, parts of it are blurry. Like, because, you know, the old lenses weren't perfectly sharp across the whole frame.

And they were, and, like, you know, a lot of that movie is shot at night. So there's, like, a lot of film grain that's getting re-upskin. Like, none of this looked good. I do not think you should buy a Sony TV for this experience. But in terms of things I am smug about, having had this experience, because I own this TV, very, high in the list. Like, I need a shirt that's just like Bravia Corr stand. And everyone's like, what are you watching?

I'm like, nothing, Air Force One? I gotta go. Got rid of your Netflix account years ago. Yeah, I'm watching four movies on Bravia Corp. Meanwhile, I was just making plans to watch Oppenheimer on my iPad on the way to Vegas next week. Christopher Nolan is going to be behind you on the plane. Like, be careful.

All right, we got to take a break. As you can tell. I'm very excited to go look at TVs at CS. We're going to say, Rick, we're going to come back with a non-CS landing around. We'll be 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.

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And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. We're back. The lighting around not sponsored by Smeg. It's unchill. This poor company is like a great business selling retro fridges in the back of office max.

And like, uh, boss. Whatever, man. We said Smeg like 10 times already on this podcast. Weird name. Weird name. Yeah. Our Google results are blowing up today. Someone's got the Google or email.

It's like, what is going? They're adorable. They look like the 50s, only using modern. Pay us the money and I'll finish the sentence, smeg. Get the modern what smeg? By the way, in case you're wondering, this is not how you generate sales. I don't know how. I think that should be very clear to everyone that's not my side of the business at all,

but I'm very clear that this isn't how you. do it by threatening the maker of a retro refrigerator. But if you know the good people at Smeg, if you know Alan Smeg, you know, call him up. All right. I don't know if his name is Alan. Last name is probably not smegg. Lighting round, part two, non-CS. David, what you got? So there was this patent that came out this week. We think we're about three weeks-ish away from Division Pro-Long. from Apple. That's the word on the street, I think, is like January 25th, 26th seems to be what that means, who knows, but it appears to be imminent that this thing is coming. And

one of the things that came out this week was that Apple was granted a patent for stuff to put on the outside of the display. So if you remember, one of the things that the Vision Pro will do is essentially give you Googly eyes on the front of your Vision Pro, pro. so that you can sort of look through them. And it's like creepy and weird, and I hate it, but it's technologically kind of cool. But what it turns out happened is that Apple, including Johnny Ive,

who is named as an inventor on this patent, had a bunch of ideas about what it might do with an external screen on your face. And I think they're awesome. One of the ideas is just that you could have the words, do not disturb, one of them could just project the weather on the outside screen. I love the weather.

The weather one is incredible. So useful. It could show your... All the rest of these are sort of like, the weather one is incredible. I agree. It could show your eyes in a bunch of different shapes, including like Zoom icons in front of each of your eyes for when you're on a video call. It could show a play button.

Like if you're playing YouTube, it could show a screensaver. Like, there's so many. ideas here. And this all reminds me of like early Apple Watch when they were just like, here's a bunch of wacky features. You can send your heartbeat to somebody or draw on your wrist to draw on somebody else's wrist. And this feels so in line with that to me where they're just like, what can we do with a screen on your face? And Johnny Ive is just like, hearts. I'm missing the heartbeat thing, though, on the Apple Watch. That was it? It was like creepy.

Did you ever do it? I mean, just to be, like, creepy to people. It's from, that's how I do the walkie talking now, too. It's just to be creepy. Never to, like, actually communicate with another human being. Oh, see, I, my wife and I have constantly used it. Yeah. It's really quite good.

And actually now our house does not, it's not necessary, but we still do it. So I will walkie talkie her and she will just yell up the stairs. It's great. Technology, everybody. But I think the thing I like about this is, one thing Apple has always been really good at is taking things that are otherwise kind of problems and making them sort of iconic. Like all the way back to the white headphones on the silhouette in the iPod commercials. Like it took the cable of your headphones and turned it into a thing.

Right. And it like did the same thing with AirPods, which are objectively ugly, but it made them like culturally cool. And I think Apple's going to try to do the same thing with the Vision Pro. In some way, it's going to try to make it like, no, this is not a stupid thing you wear on your face because it gives you stuff like, this. this is a cool thing for your face, which is a hard sell to make,

but I think Apple's going to try. But yet, as Jay pointed out in this story that he wrote, we still have not seen, as far as I know anyway, an Apple executive, Tim Cook, or otherwise, with a Vision Pro on their face. And it is very rare that one of these things comes out and is not instantly made a meme. And so for Apple to both simultaneously,

pursue this idea of like how do we do more and more and more and more and more with a screen on your face and let's maybe hide the fact that it's a screen on your face for as long as we possibly can. I just, we're like a few weeks away from figuring out which one of those is going to win in the real world and I think it's fascinating. I'm excited for Tim Cook's digital eyes. Tim Cook, just like giving interviews and he gets bored and the weather pops up is just going to be incredible.

Like I cannot wait. The little play side. You can go read the post and look at the pictures. The actual claims of this patent are very small. Like the actual thing that is being patented, a wearable electronic device with a camera in it that captures images of the wearer's face. And then a display in the housing that displays images of the wearer's face, the images based on the captured images. And then a sensor that detects the position of the observer so they can point the images. That's the whole thing.

that's the whole patent. Oh, and the usual thing, they stick this in all computer patents now. They're like a computing system that does it. And it's like, yeah, we understand the patent office doesn't understand computers. There's not a small person inside doing it for you. Yeah, exactly. It's always fascinating to read what Apple is actually claiming in these

because they'll put a lot of pictures in these. And as everyone knows, you get to read the actual claims. And the claims are here are just like, we put a camera in it. And it's playing on the outside. That's the whole claim of this patent. And then Johnny, I've got to do some pictures. I will say that if you walk around in an Apple Vision Pro, just displaying to people the weather in Cooper Tino, California, it's very good.

I like the idea they don't even change the weather. It's always going to be Cooper Tino. I think if you wear one of these, you should be obligated to be showing your TikTok feed on the outside of it at all times. Shame. CS is next week. Apple has said Vision Pro is coming early 2024. A lot of rumbles out in the world. I would bet there's some sort of vision pro announcement

that interferes. Apple loves upstaging CES. Loves it. Yeah. Yeah. I bet you're right. So that's just my bet. I don't have any insight until on that.

I just based on history. Remember one year at CS, Apple is like, we have an event. And I was like, the iPhone's now on Verizon. Cool. Yeah. It's the same one. All right, Cranz, what you got?

Okay. So it is with like great sadness. I say that Amazon is moving to advertising starting in January 29th. That means you're going to have to watch ads if you have Amazon Prime. That's crazy. You want to pay extra. But it's also like it was always inevitable. It was always going to happen.

Nobody was shy about putting ads on these things when they started with maybe Netflix. But everybody else was always like, yeah, ads is somewhere in a forecast for us. So now it's just like, okay. And for Amazon, a company who we don't actually. actually know how many people watch their shows. We just know they have all of the subscribers because everybody has Amazon Prime. This makes a lot of sense because now they can make... I think we can confidently say it's not very many based on the success of their big shows that they have.

Which ones? Yeah. Womp-womp. Reacher. There's the boys. The boys is good. It's Reacher and boys. It's a show.

Everybody's dad watches Reachers. Like, you two are going to be watching it soon. You don't know it. Isn't it just singular Reacher? It's Reacher. It's Reacher. Yeah, you're right. It's just Reacher.

It's like the James Cameron sequel is Reacher. It's coming for you guys. Just a lot of tall, quiet men running around small towns in America. The only thing I know about Reacher is I saw a tick. Who's the main actor? I don't even know. I just saw a TikTok with him where he was saying that the amount of muscle he has to carry on his body to portray Reacher is actually causing a physical toll on his body. He's like, imagine walking a flight of stairs, but you're holding two 40.

on dumbbells. That's my like now. That's a lot. That's too much muscle. Yeah. He was like, yeah, but it's worth it

because I'm Reacher. Soon as starting the sequel, Reacher's direct to which James Cam. It is inevitable that all these streaming service are doing ads. Like everyone watch Netflix

turn on ads and make more money. Amazon is actually a secretly huge player in the ads business. Yeah. Like a huge player in the ads business. It's meta, Google, and Amazon. And of course

they're going to do connected TV ads. but it's kind of gross. Like the whole point of Prime is like not that, right? Like you pay Amazon the money up front to get all the good service on the back end. Yeah. And now it's like now it's just cable? You just, I'm paying for cable and shipping. I think for them it's like, okay, you get free shipping.

You get whatever other stuff comes with Prime. And now you also get free cable. And if you want to get rid of the ads on your cable, you can give us even more money every month. And four people are going to do that. And no one. Write us a note. If you're going to pay for the ad-free tier of Amazon Prime Video, I want to meet you. I feel like I could meet you in.

Oh, yeah. Like that's a scalable proposition is I want to meet all of you. You could fit all of those people in like a single Davein Busters. Like, no question. We're going to have a party sponsored by. You know who you are. All right. I have two.

because I added one because it's so funny. But my first one is Alamo Draft House runs Sony Digital Cinema Projectors and they had some sort of certificate timeout over the break and they just stopped showing movies. It's so brutal.

And that's like, they're supposed to be the good company. They're supposed to be like the good movie theater that like actually cares about how they screen things. So for them to like, drop the ball this bad is. Yeah, so it's unclear what happened. We've read a bunch of forum posts from like theater employees and like projectionists.

One amazing thing about the internet is you're like, man, I wonder if there's a community online that's deep in the weeds of this. And like, oh, it's the projectionist forums. Yeah. Obviously. So there's people like explaining what happened. You know, they're like man to the company. But it feels like David.

I know you read a bunch of this stuff too. And we're going to write a story on it because it is very, it's like perfectly virtually virtual house. There's a lot of DRM involved. in digital projection. Like you send a movie to a movie theater. There's a bunch of DRM steps in being able to play back that digital file.

And somewhere between the projector and the file, there was a certificate timeout and no one, like no one sought. Yeah, that's about as far as I've gotten down the rabbit hole. I think that's right. And Sony kind of increasingly has no interest in this business. And these things are notoriously brittle anyway. Remember we did that story a few months ago about the IMAX theaters that still

crucially rely on a Palm Pilot and are now emulating a Palm Pilot on an iPad. The true nature of the tape and strings that hold these things together is just unbelievable. Even if you're Alamo Draft House and care deeply about how this stuff works, these folks just don't upgrade the equipment unless they have to. And meanwhile, the equipment on which these movies are made is increasingly high tech, and the way that they're being shipped around is increasingly digital and increasingly high tech. And to your point, these companies are taking more and more care to lock this stuff down, especially with big, important movies.

Like, these things are more carefully controlled than ever. They're not just shipping giant reels around the country nearly the way that they used to. A lot of this is happening online. It's mostly happening digitally now. Like, there are just so many more places for it to break in these. old weird systems than there used to be. And if you're Alamo, there's just like nothing you can do.

You just update the firmware and hope for the best. I think the suggestion from a lot of those projections, though, is that, like, Alamo probably did mess up here. And there's been, like, a lot of talk about, like, in the theater community about Alamo and it's kind of decline. And so this is kind of like an indication of that decline. They've been rough since, like, 2017. But, like, there's no such thing as, like, a full-stack movie theater, right?

Like AMC is not out here making its own projectors so that it can show you the movie better. Like everybody is still reliant on this crazy chain that is not really designed to make the process seamless and good. Yeah, it's supposed to be as complex as possible because they don't want like a young projectionist to be like, ooh, let me just upload this to BitTorrent. Going to have a good time? Beautiful film. Yeah. Can I tell a story from my youth? Yes.

When I was in high school, my friend Allison's dad. was the manager of the local movie theater. And somehow this emboldened us to believe, as we were walking out of a movie, that we could pick up the reels of Austin Powers 2, the film reels of Austin Powers 2, and sprint them to our car. They were very heavy. We got nowhere before we were just stopped by a group of theater employees going, what are you doing? We don't know.

What was your plan? Like, wind this all the way back? What was the ideal outcome to this story? Did you have a projector? I don't know. High school in Racine, Wisconsin. We saw the reels to Austin Paris too. We're like, now we'll have them.

I was like 16 years old. But it's burned into my brain how heavy they were. Like, you know that, oh, this is a mistake. But then you're too far in. Is there like a, as soon as you picked them up? Yeah. The second you pick them up, it's already over. even if by simply trying to pick them up, you've realized you've made a horrible mistake.

Fun fact, the opening sequence for that movie is you couldn't play it on Twitch now. Oh, because they just... Yeah, because of the implied nudity rule. And that's the whole first, like, section chunk of the movie. You know, it's probably for the best. Where will you watch it now? There isn't a time and a place for the opening sequence of Austin Bowers, too. and I don't know if it's Twitch

to be honestly. It's on Bravia core in 80 megabits per second crystal clear and peer stream. See every strand of chest hair. Speaking of stealing things, the Kia boys are back. Yeah.

And Kia has a new plan to stop them. So if you're aware of the Kia boys, it's apparently very easy to steal many, many Kia and Hyundai cars. So Kia is acknowledged this problem. They're getting sued by various states who say Kia is negligent because they've made their cars too easy

to steal. Very funny outcome. It's a deeply funny outcome. Kia is doing like software updates. Hyundai's doing software updates. They're shipping out like steering wheel locks, like the club to people. It's all very funny. Now they're in addition to this, there's press release. They're shipping out devices to protect the ignition column.

Incredible line in this press release. This is a bullet under the headline in bold. device reinforces ignition cylinder body to guard against theft methods popularized on social media. Wow. It's very good. It's one of those things that you write

and you're like, what has the world become? Like, what are we doing here? Exactly. Very good. And then in order to make it clear to the Kia Boys that you've installed this device

that are giving everybody a sticker. So now your car can have a sticker that says, stay away, Kia Boys. We have a device that reinforces ignition cylinder body. No chance whatsoever that that'll backfire. None. That sticker will solve all of your problems for sure. Another bullet in this fresh release.

Second wave of local software upgrade clinics also planned in coordination with local Kia dealers in key cities across U.S. Yep. Software upgrade clinics at the Kia dealer. If you have a Kia on it, go get your car fix because the Kia boys are on the loose. Only park it in the garage. Yeah, there are Kia's in my family and I have family members. I've got to get this thing in the garage. Neely, do you think if you were a teen right now, you'd be a Kia boy?

I feel like there's like the same Nilai that is stealing Austin Powers 2 reels is definitely out here being a Kia boy right now. Just be like, never take a car. I think it is very good that I was not a teenager in the age of social media. That's what I got for you. I think I would have turned out differently. Fair. Probably in jail. That seems like the most likely outcome of teenage Eli plus the internet.

All right, that's it. We're way over. As always, there was an extended copyright loss segment for which I apologize, nothing. Zero apologies for that. And also zero apologies to the local refrigerator factory, which would sponsor this lightning round immediately. I like how they're coming into a local refrigerator factory. Yeah. Just around the corner.

I'm coming over there. We're going to CS next week. We'll have a ton of coverage. We have two Vergecasts, right? Yep. At CS. So two Vergecast from CS, historically, our craziest Vergecast of the year

because we were all sleep deprived. Just tons of coverage on the site. CS is where the year really kicks off. So I'm excited to go look at some gadgets, see a bunch of people, do a bunch of reporting, and obviously talk to all of you on the Vergecast. So we'll see you next week at CS. That's the Vergecast.

Rock and all. 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 Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by Zander Adams. And that's it. We'll see you next week.