The Vergecast - Mark Zuckerberg has an Instagzam

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

Have you seen Instagram's new logo? Meta debuted it right before we started recording, so of course David and Nilay needed to talk about it. Then, the hosts turn to Mark Zuckerberg's 6,500-word missive on the future of AI, and the problem with his idea that giving AI to everyone will fix everything. After that, it's time for Claude watermarks, Spotify AI personas, Brendan Carr, Flock, and much more. Further reading: ⁠This is Instagram’s new logo | The Verge⁠ ⁠The Pepsi Universe PDF ⁠The Future is for Everyone⁠ ⁠Four takeaways from Mark Zuckerberg’s massive AI manifesto ⁠ ⁠Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand how to live ⁠ ⁠https://www.meta.com/design-at-meta/blog/⁠ ⁠Claude will apply invisible watermarks to AI text and images ⁠ ⁠‘If it was opt-in, nobody would opt in.’ ⁠ ⁠Spotify says it won’t recommend music from ‘AI Personas’ ⁠ ⁠Apple could help you prove your iPhone photos aren’t deepfakes | The Verge⁠ ⁠Guitar company D’Addario admits that AI music was used in a promotional video | The Verge⁠ ⁠Fender’s CEO seems to think your bandmates are just analog AI | The Verge⁠ ⁠Suno Unveils Download Song Caps for Free, Paid Tiers⁠ ⁠Brendan Carr is one firing away from an unchecked FCC⁠ ⁠YouTube is making it harder to earn money on YouTube ⁠ ⁠Flock CEO: ‘We got this one wrong’ ⁠ ⁠The first rival Android app store just arrived in the US Play Store ⁠ ⁠ChatGPT and Gemini both just passed 1 billion users ⁠ ⁠The sub-$100 phone market is disappearing. ⁠ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. 0:00 Welcome and Parental Leave Announcement 00:43 Instagram Redesigns Their Logo  01:04 Why Companies Change Logos 03:37 Meta Design Blog Quotes 07:22 The 2008 Pepsi Universe Presentation 09:41 Blanding  10:37 Zuck’s AI Manifesto  13:29 Collective Action Problems 18:49 Superintelligence for All 20:57 Cybersecurity and AI Risks 22:22 China Chips and Distillation 27:48 Write the Law Challenge 32:30 Claude Text Watermarking 35:33 How The Watermark Works 39:34 Limits And Evasion Risks 41:54 Apple Marks Real Photos 46:03 Provenance Standards Fail 46:58 AI Music Backlash 49:39 Fender CEO AI Scandal 53:08 Where AI Fits In Music 59:13 Twitch Opt Out Training 01:01:35 The Lightning Round 01:02:55 Brendan Carr is a Dummy 01:04:55 Bans Don’t Work 01:05:56 Made in America Assembly 01:10:19 Gemini Claims a Billion Users 01:15:40 YouTube Partner Paywall 01:20:56 RAMageddon Cheap Phones 01:23:52 Flock Camera Backlash 01:27:19 Goodbyes and Plugs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.cair, every style, every home. Hello and welcome with the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Instagrism, the new hot social network that launched this week. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neil Appetal is here. What's up? This is just a hot start to the Vergecast for us.

We're doing great. It's real. It's either the best one or the roughest one we've ever. had. So this, I'm frankly very excited that I'm here because I'm going on parental leave any minute now. Tomorrow is my last possible last day. I am, I am just disappearing into the wilderness for a while. There has been so much wild crap on the internet this week that I was going to be very sad if I left before I had a chance to like have a lot of feelings here on the Vergecast with you about AI. Yeah. But we're here. We're going to do this. But we have to start with Instagram. Insta-Zam.

We were putting together the rundown and trying to organize all these AI ideas. And then Adam Aseri announced the new Instagram logo. And I was like, well, there's a full hour of our show. And the only reason that he gave for why there's a new Instagram logo was it's been about 10 years. It's time for a new one. Okay. I'm glad you started with this because this is a question I have actually for you in particular. I have had many jobs in media.

I have never actually been at a job in the middle of a logo redesign. I left the verge right before one redesign and came back kind of right after one. You have done a bunch of redesigns. And the only thing I can think of in these moments when you are at a company for a long time, you're doing one thing is just maybe you get itchy.

Like the people at Gap were like, I've been looking at this logo for too long. Let's change it. And they do that at Cracker Barrel and they do that at Jaguar. And like, it's mostly all bad. But there is, is there just something that happens

when you're like, I've been staring at this logo for too long? long I need to change it. There's a little bit of that. It's a great way to get attention. Sure. And the attention can be good or bad. The CEO of Cracklebarrel got fired.

That one goes in the bad column. Roll the dice, Adam. Let's see what happens next. Coke changed their logo and some of the design of, I think, the Coke Zero cans. And everyone's like, dude, that's just the Marlboro logo. Like, what are we doing here? This was like very recently. Very recently.

That's all very funny. This one, I can't quite tell. Our redesigns, we've always done around format shifts. So the original Verge logo had a bunch of serifs in it. It was designed for like a desktop website. Then we went to mobile. Everything got small. The fine details were getting obliterated.

So we made a change. And then we made another change recently with this last redesign because that old logo was really blocky. It was hard to lock up in all these places. We wanted to go all these other directions with our design and colors. And so there was some reason, right? There was some external force that was pushing you on the old logo can't do all the things you want to do with your design system in the future.

There's also the general, you can't bring back the old logo in a flurry of happiness if you never take it away. For sure. This is just a thing, right? It can't be the classic logo until it's gone. Yeah. You can't, there's no, you can't have loud part. If you don't have quiet parts, and sometimes you've got to take the old book away.

I don't know if any of that is happening for Instagram. Adam has talked about, you know, the Instagram app is going to change. It's going to be more flexible or more AI. But none of that appears today. There's no external force pushing Instagram to be different. It really does appear that they just got a little bored. They haven't said anything else about it. Yeah, there's a really sort of flowery post on the design it meta blog.

about this that I expected to be the place that is like, as we lean into new paradigms, like all this stuff you're talking about, none of that. I have to make this work on AI glasses. None of that. They just say it's been over 10 years since we refreshed our brand identity. That's the explanation. And then it goes into a bunch of flowery nonsense. The thing that is actually most striking about all of this to me, the logo is hideous,

by the way. For anyone who has not yet seen it, I encourage you to really spend some time with it. Well, I'm sure you're seeing it here. We're going to talk a lot about it. It says Instagasm. It says InstaGazam. Shaquille O'Neill starring an InstaGazam. And there's some part...

That was... Who's the other guy in the Mandela Effect version of that? Oh, Sinbad. This is the Sinbad version of Instagram. This is the bad timeline. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Go ahead. You react first.

But the theory behind this is like I keep looking for the reason that they did this, right? And I think even if you land on logos that not a lot of people are going to like, everybody's going to have issues with change, especially to something. I think Instagram's script qualifies as like a genuinely iconic wordmark. Yes. Like I think most people of the Instagram generation could like close their eyes and write the Instagram wordmark relatively successfully. It's that that cursive lettering has been around for forever. It looks really great. I fundamentally disagree with the premise that it looks old, except that it's cursive, like fine, whatever.

I don't know. But anyway, they go through and I just pulled two quotes from this blog post that strike me as ridiculous, frankly. It says, our new word mark elevates simplicity, creativity, and connection. It was important to craft a mark that still makes Instagram feel like Instagram while introducing something to carry us into the future. that sentence, word for word, minus the proper nouns, is what everyone says every time they change their logo for any reason. We want Coca-Cola to still feel like Coca-Cola while introducing something to carry us into the future. This is the only reason anybody who changes the logo is because they're like, is it the future? Drives me crazy.

Anyway, here's a quote from Jasmine Proops, the director of product design at Instagram. I do not feel bad making fun of this quote because there is just absolutely no chance. Jasmine Probes actually said this out. It says, script reflects individuality, so referencing that felt right. The new wordmark is bolder and simpler with touches of unexpectedness. It cues individual expression, a personal voice, both of which have always been core to Instagram. What? Like, it's, we, we took boring sans-serif font and made a couple of the letters bad.

Individuality. We made this hard to read. I agree the existing Instagram logo is iconic. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. When you change your logo, you change all those relationships. Everyone is always mad at you. And every designer in the world has now been trained to be like, that feedback doesn't matter.

We know it's right in our hearts. Yes. And that's 100. And Messeri put this on threads and was like, show me your hot takes. I, again, absent some reason to do this, which they have not said, this feels like an unforced error. Yes.

And it honestly feels like this entire new Instagram logo is the human designers at Meta. getting one over on Mark Zuckerberg before he replaces them with AI. Like right before they get clipped, they're like, all right, we're going to set up one time bomb, and then your robots are going to have to fix it, Mark. Muse Spark is going to fix it.

You go ahead, buddy. You have a bit of it. The other thing I want to say, which is very important to me, is that it doesn't matter how good or bad. Your logo redesign is. It doesn't matter how good or bad your brand guidelines are,

your design system is. every single design presentation is fundamentally the Pepsi universe from 2008. Do you remember, do you know about the Pepsi universe from 2008? I think so, but I'm going to Google this as you talk. There is a PDF that has just been floating on the internet for years since 2008, and it is like a logo redesign and brand strategy document for Pepsi that costs millions upon millions of dollars. This is the rumor. And it is the most insane description of Pepsi with charts and

graphs that you have ever seen in your life. And every time I see any other design document, oh my God, it's the Pepsi universe. This is pretty spectacular. The title of this document is breathtaking in all caps. The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations. We'll link to this in the show notes. It's fabulous. And everyone should experience this document. So this is a page from the Pepsi universe document called breathtaking. creation of identity gravitational pull. And it says attraction theory, the Pepsi proposition. And it begins with typical light path, which is a star shining on the earth.

And then it goes on to show you the gravitational pull of the Pepsi logo, pulling the light away from Earth. And that's why you should have a new Pepsi logo. This is insane. It is incredible. I'm sorry. The bottom of this page, on the left side, it has relativity of space and time. and on the right it has Pepsi Proposition

slash Pepsi Isle. What are we doing? When you're in the Pepsi Al, the new logo will bend the light, will bend you towards it. I'm confident the Instagram people we're doing something different. This entire document is worth this scroll through.

It's one of my favorite design documents in the entire world. But every time I see one of these logo redesigns, I think about the Pepsi universe and how you have to just dress up any logo redesign with the most obtuse, nonsense in the world. So props to Instagram for not doing that, for just saying generic stuff.

No props for taking an iconic logo and making it say instigasm. Yeah, it's not great. It also makes me think, was it the Airbnb redesign a while back that made everybody think, oh, we're getting back to an old era of design. We're going to do a little more skemorphism, a little more physicality. We're entering into an augmented reality world. We need things that feel like objects again. I was sort of excited about that era of design. And boy, is this not that? I think you can argue this is, I mean, and we've been on a run in the tech industry for like a decade now of just everybody taking interesting, colorful, cool logos and just dumbing them down to a sansere font. Like this, every company has done this. It has a name.

It's called blending. Is it really? Yeah. I like that. That is a good name. It's very good. And it is a bummer that this continues apace, except in Instagram's case, they just ruined one of the letters. And that's apparently design.

It's bad stuff. Have an instigasm on meta platform. Don't give them that idea. I don't. This is not branding I'm ready for. Okay. The other weird thing that happened at meta this week is the other thing I want to talk about, which is Mark Zuckerberg's 6,500 word manifesto about the future of AI.

It's called The Future is for Everyone. Have you read this? I have read this. I have a few specific things that I want you to react to. But first, I just want your overall thoughts on Mark's thoughts on AI. Liz, wrote it, Peace on us. This was really good this week. week and they're searching for a headline.

And my suggested headline was, Mark Zuckerberg should have finished Harvard. Because if he had just completed the course of his studies and the humanities, he would have maybe realized that he was having like third year social level thoughts about the world. There's an argument that you got to write the stuff to be dumb now, right? The kids can't read anymore. So you got to dumb it way down to be like,

votes good, dictator bad. Like, maybe that's, maybe he wrote it for an audience. China, frowny face emoji. They can no longer read. But that's how it comes across. Yeah. Like, it's a lot of big ideas that basically are like magic genies will change the structure of the world. What will we do now?

Weird. That's weird just as a thesis. And then the, what should we do about it? The political philosophy underneath it is freshman year. And I think that's very strange. And I think it's symptomatic of the tech industry right now that they have not done the reading. Say more on that because this is actually the big picture thing. I think if you were to boil Zuck's manifesto down to one big idea, it's that he believes that giving everyone access to the best possible AI is a good thing on its face.

Right? He talks about checks and balances. He talks about democratization. He has this idea that no one should be in control. And if everyone is in control, it will, it, will be better because everyone will check against each other. Everybody gets to personalize things for themselves. And this is like, I also had this moment of like as a political science major, you,

you read a bunch of books about how that fails. And we have spent the last 20 years of Facebook watching how that fails. And it just like, it was so striking to me that this guy is still so convicted of the idea that if you just give everyone access to everything and to each other, it will, it will inevitably universally be a good thing. And I don't know if that's what you're thinking about as you say, I wish he had done the rest of the reading. But that was my reaction to, God, I wish he had done the rest of the reading. The reason that we didn't go with, Mark Zucker, should have finished Harvard as the headline, was furious pushback from our team that it does not track that completing

a course of education at Harvard makes you a good person. Like, those aren't one-to-one. Sure. As we can see, you know, like by many elites in our society. But I share, the frustration, I feel the same frustration that you're describing here, which is the entire history of political philosophy in the West, in the East, like, everywhere is, boy, there are these things called collective action problems, where if you act in your own interest and I act in my own interest, actually we will lower our collective results. And the collective action problems just exist across society. USBC is a collective action problem. Right. It took government regulation to make Apple put USBC on its phone because they could get more individual benefit to Apple by selling lightning connectors to you, the consumer. And actually, we had to be like, no, you have to do whatever else is doing. And that increases our collective benefit. There's like, everywhere you look in society, collective action problems. And mostly the past 20 years, particularly on the right, has been an absolute denial that collective action problems exist. Vaccines are a collective action problem.

They only really work if everybody gets them, but I don't, I'm crazy and I'm just going to eat steak and sourcrow instead. And whatever is going to happen is whatever going to happen. This is a description of a political philosophy from Mark Zuckerberg that is in denial of collective action problems. It's as if everyone is maximally free, then we will all have the best outcomes. We talked about this. There's some parts of this manifesto that he first published in the Law Street Journal. And his big, you know, his big example that always tries to crazy is if I have a super intelligent lawyer, all in every case, but if we'd be. both have super intelligent lawyers, justice will be more efficient. And none of that is true.

No. Just flatly, that is not how lawyers work, especially extremely intelligent lawyers. Actually slow everything down. And Mark Zuckerberg's lawyers do that all the time. And so there's just a part of this where it is ignorant of the entire history of how do you organize and govern a society? because the main thing you are trying to do when you organize in government society is get people to work in their collective interest to solve collective action problems. Right.

And that, I realize it's a tech podcast and that's deeply in the weeds. That is what all these guys are charging at with AI. Who should regulate AI is fundamentally a collective action problem. Right? If we all act in our interest, we will destroy the world. So someone has to make us act in our collective interest. Who will that be?

And Mark's answer is, well, it should be someone, but I don't want it to be anyone. And I just, I can't square that at all. Yeah, he's, he's very clear, like, Dario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic, his name is nowhere in this, but it is everywhere in this. Yeah. Because Dario has been out there very loudly saying, essentially, we've got it. We'll take care of it. Don't worry. We can be trusted. No one else can be trusted, including the government. And that has made a lot of people feel a lot of feelings. Mark is very clearly arguing. against Dario and that whole theory of the case that the people who make the AI are the ones who should be able to control how it is regulated and used and the guardrails on which we put it.

Mark sort of wants government intervention, but not too, like just the right amount and he wants everybody to just kind of be cool. There's a lot of like everybody should just be cool about this and it'll be fine in this letter. But I just want to, I don't want to dwell on this for too long. I actually encourage people to read it. It's relatively readable for all the reasons you said, Neilie. It's written for six graders. It's written for six graders and there are chunks of it, I think, to be charitable to Mark Zuckerberg, that it immediately becomes very clear, are not his area of expertise, like scientific discovery. No offense to Mark Zuckerberg. This does not come off like somebody who understands the process of scientific discovery, but there are things that he is deeply immersed in and I think knows very well. And I just want to read a couple of them to you and see how you respond. He writes, your agent will work 24-7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies and more. It will free up time for the things you enjoy and help you accomplish more than you could otherwise. Right next to that, my daughter loves to bake, so my agent plans personalized recipes for us to make together each weekend, orders the ingredients, and then offers suggestions as for baking. How does this make you feel, Neely? I have mixed emotions about that one. I, you know, there's a lot of baking that happens in our house, and it's, we, it's not hard. Americans have been baking for years. without the assistance of data centers. It's just like not that hard.

The idea that you're baking an infinite series of personalized recipes is interesting on its face. The idea that the ingredients will show up if you're on a busy household, interesting. None of this requires the level of investment. None of this justifies we're going to build data centers without permission across the country. And that's the disconnect here.

Yeah, you're describing software, not the future of humanity. I will say, I find this. much more palatable than the idea that Sam Altman tweeted a while ago about the personalized podcast that'll tell your kid about the day that they're going to have in the car on the way to school, which I find, I mean, truly like 10 out of 10 dystopian. That like, don't talk to your kid about the day. Have it play their personalized podcast instead. Every parent responded to that with, no, the kid in the backseat of a car who just starts

talking to you is actually one of the great joys of parenting. It's the whole thing. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, next one. We talked about this a little bit already. but here's how he leads into his lawyer example. People in institutions with competing interests

naturally check and balance each other to lead toward positive outcomes. The best and most realistic path to building a positive AI future is by delivering superintelligence to everyone. Do you buy this theory? This is flatly wrong. And I don't mean to say it's flatly wrong

that not everyone should have a magic genie that can do whatever they want, improve their relationships in some way. You go ahead and put your magic robot in everyone's relationship and let's see what happens. The idea that necessarily giving everyone the same capability will lead to checks and balances is wrong on its face.

I know this because Instagram exists and Facebook exists. And everyone has the same broadcast capability to millions upon millions of people on the social platforms that Mark himself runs. And his entire life is a series of moderation controversies, of CSAM scandals, of misinformation, scandals. He had to set up a Supreme Court to deal with all the moderation scandals. And he hated it because they keep telling him that everything is more complicated than he wants it to be. And he has essentially sidelined it because he'd rather be the dictator. And that's just that. That's just social media, which is an intractable problem no one can solve. If you give people offensive cyber capabilities, you're like, naturally this will lead to checks and balances, you are completely off your rocker. Some people need more capabilities than others. And some things should be flatly illegal. that's fine. Like, this is what I mean about a sixth grade level. This is sixth grade philosophy. If everybody has a gun, there will be no more gun violence in America.

I will tell you, I have thought a lot about the idea that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun in the context of the way a lot of people are talking about AI. And it is, I mean, that's Zuckerberg's entire argument. That's not even a disingenuous reading of the argument. That is the argument. Yeah. That if you have AI, the only way to defeat you is if I have AI. Like, literally, okay, I'm just, I will use Mark Zuckerberg's words to prove my point. He says, over time, I expect that widely deployed AI models with strong cybersecurity capabilities will lead to systems that are more secure, not less.

This will be definitively true once superintelligence enables most of the world's code to be verifiably secure. The verifiably secure is doing an awful lot of work right. of work and also the tacit assumption that there will be no more holes for the we're going to get AI that is so good that it can patch all the holes, but not AI that is good enough to find new ones is just, it just that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. It also doesn't account for social engineering, which is an actual exploit vector that many AI systems have been able to use, including the ones that have broken out of their sandboxes in various ways in recent weeks, including meta's own AI, which you can believe whether it's iterative. or meta just felt left out. You know, like everyone else's AI is breaking out of the sandbox, like ours is it too. Yep. There's a little bit of that going on here. But the idea that it's just the code that is the vulnerability and not the systems or structures or human beings around the code that are the vulnerability, it doesn't even factor into the analysis here.

And that makes no sense. Yep. It's just fundamentally no sense. Yep. Totally great. Okay. I'm just going to do two more. I have 15 here.

But I'm just going to do two more. more. This one, I just chose for you specifically, Neelai. It says export controls on silicon have been successful for slowing the progress of foreign labs during this critical period. So it is the right strategic move to continue those. Any policy that slows American model releases, even by a month, could add significant risk to American leadership while letting foreign models race ahead. China bad, Nilai. It's funny because we're going to get to this later. Our government here in the United States is touting the fact that banning Chinese drones has resulted in a surge of drone manufacturing in the United States. And we will come to the truth of that later in

the show, in America's favorite podcasts in a podcast. Export controls have been successful so far. But it's not like China's going to sit there and not invest in chipmaking and chip design or steal our chip IP or find any number of ways to make their own chips. And so we should continue those. But anything that slows down America creating these new offensive capabilities that might break containment and cause havoc all in their own, well, we can't have that. Because even though we know that China will react to us trying to slow them down, we must proceed. Like, there's just something confused in there where, again, it's a collective action problem. If what you actually had was cooperation between rivals to make sure that

problem doesn't escalate out of control, you might have good outcomes. You might have nuclear nonproliferation. There's like, right, there's like dozens and dozens of years of political and military strategy here to not kill everyone in the world that is just not even mentioned here. Yep. Okay. I, I, there's just a part of this where it's, you know, tech people love first principles. and it's like, great, you did first principles. You know, there's like a hundred years of principles built on top of them, right? Of how great powers should interact. He should have finished Harvard.

That's all I'm saying. According to Mark Andresen, looking backwards is not useful. You should no introspection, always look ahead. Okay, here's the last one, and this is the purest Nile I Bate in the whole manifesto. He's talking about distillation, which has been very controversial, the idea that you can essentially use a model to train another model. It's how a lot of people think that Chinese models have gotten so good, so fast. Very hot topic in this space, should distillation be legal? Mark Zuckerberg writes, The ability for models to learn from other models is an important principle of how the open source ecosystem works.

All AI models are derived from human knowledge. Some have tried to frame distillation as harmful, but I think it is important to protect the principle that you can learn from anything you can observe. This is how the world works, and the U.S. will not be able to lead if we restrict ourselves on this front. This is Mark Zuckerberg saying, you have to make it legal for us to do everything that we've been doing with AI models. The distillation discourse is very funny to me. It just fills me with a kind of joy. Sure. Because everyone is mad about the thing they did.

Right. If you're anthropic, you're mad at a distillation. Well, you stole all the books in the world. Yeah. What do you want? Fine. You got nothing to say. The principle that you need to learn from what you can observe is just a bedrock applies to humans.

Computers that retain perfect copies of everything that they've ever ingested. And in many cases with these models can spit out perfect copies of everything they've ever ingested. Totally changes the game in terms of who should get compensated for what and who has permission to ingest what. And Mark doesn't care. Like, this computer is the same as me is also a fundamental thought that, exists throughout this entire framework. Yes. And throughout the entire AI industry, right?

Like the fundamental goodness of computers and bonkersness of humans is a real thing that is just burbling up. You leave my robot girlfriend alone, said Mark Zuckerberg. I'm sure she's very nice. Okay, I have a bunch more. He goes on a whole tangent about RSI, which essentially describes AI that... Repetitive stress injury. Exactly. It's when AI can search a train itself,

essentially. You set it loose and it is able to train itself on how to get better. There are a lot of things that become possible when that happens. These things can theoretically improve very quickly. That's also how we get to like Terminator stuff. So he goes on this whole long discursion about how we should a lot compute to the RSI models so that they can get better. But we have to give humans more compute because that's, it's like all of this is insane. You should just read it just to understand his theory of the world as much as anything, which is that humans are fundamentally all great, and if you just shove them all together, everything will be fine.

Like, meta. I went to a school for nerds, extreme nerds. The motto, the unofficial motto of the University of Chicago, literally, they make T-shirts, is where fun goes to die. I loved it there. Could not be happier with my education there. and a number of professors had two cliches in all my political science classes. One, where's your evidence?

This is what they would just say. You would say some nonsense. And they would say, where's your evidence? And then you would have to be a big nerd and you have to, like, produce your books and do it. Mark has no evidence for any of his ideas. The second one, much more actionable. An exercise you can do if you, like me, are screaming in your car at Mark Zuckerberg. Try to write the law that puts any of this into practice.

Write the rule that says, We have to somehow slow down China by limiting chip exports, but we can't let American models fall behind in any way, shape, or form. We have to allow distillation, but we have to protect the value. Everyone should get as much superintelligence as they want to do as much baking as they can, but they also have to use their superintelligence to make sure the bad guy next door is somehow not doing offensive cyber attacks. Just write it down. Just write down your law. Pass it. Go to the United States Senate.

Get a number of dead people to show up. you know, and be like, this is, here's the rule. I'm giving it to you. Mark Zuckerberg's lobbyists are certainly trying to do that today. He has not shown us what they are proposing in any way, shape, or form. He's given us this freshman year nonsense. But write the rules down. Yeah. That's actually my number one response to this was to rewind my brain to when I was in college, and I would have professors say, write the rule that you're describing. Make it work. I think this is why everybody is so obsessed with the idea of, of government review of frontier models,

because that is at least in theory one thing you can do. And there are so many things in this space that are not actually things you can do, but when does the government review models? How do they review those models? What does that review look like? Who's in charge? That is all actually tractable stuff

in a way that is very unusual. And the AI industry stance is, we'll do it voluntarily. Don't worry about it. We're all just going to be cool. Everything's going to be fine. We don't need laws. We will volunteer to do this. And that will be, that will be enough. That will be sufficient. Because I think they're deathly afraid that the minute somebody tries to write a law, it is going to accidentally or intentionally cause them vast quantities of pain that no one even saw coming. This was the Biden administration, which said, you're bleeding edge models.

You have to tell us what they're capable of. There's some transparency around them. It was not a lot. They all fought against it. They all went to Trump's inauguration because he took away all the rules. And the Trump administration has quickly realized it's going to impose some of the exact same controls the Biden administration imposed, if not more, in additional controls. And again, when I say right of law, it's not, Frontier Labs should be forbidden from doing offensive

cyber attacks. That's not a rule. You can't, you got to write it down. You got to define a frontier lap. You have to define offensive cyber attacks. You have to say what it means to not do them. Write that route. It's very, very challenging. So all these platitudes are great. All these predictions about how it's going to be amazing when there's superintelligence having your relationship for you. Amazing. I couldn't be, I love reading science fiction. Show me the rules, Mark, because I don't think they exist. And I think his argument generally, is maybe they shouldn't because we'll just give it to everybody and it'll be fine. Don't even worry about it.

And that has never caused any problems ever. Including on meta platforms. How could he know he's never seen this before? I'm having an instigasm! Sorry. All right. We should take a break. That was it.

That was it. It's your last episode before you have a baby. It's my last episode ever. I'm having an instigasm is the title of this episode. It's going to be fantastic. I can't wait. We're going to take a break and we're going to come back. And unfortunately for all of us.

We're talking more AI. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Bitwarden. Quick gut check. How many of your passwords are actually strong and unique? If you had to think about that for more than a second, today's sponsor is for you. Bitwarden is the trusted open source solution for pass key,

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Visit oikos.ca for more details. All right, we're back. Nilai, we have more AI shenanigans to talk about today. The unfortunate theme of this show is everybody has bad ideas about AI this week, which is fun for me because I get to get all of my feelings out and then go on parental leave. But for you, you get to just stew in everybody's bad ideas about AI. But I want to start with an idea that I have not decided whether, it's good or bad yet. And it's Claude's new watermark for AI-generated text. The idea here is

Anthropic is rolling out a new tool by which it will invisibly watermark text created with Claude. I have done more research than was necessary on this, and I find it fascinating. We can get into it. The idea is that it will be then detectable by the AI detectors. They're also going to embed information in images. They're trying to be more transparent about what is and is not generated by AI. This seems like a good thing in the way that all of these ideas seem like good ideas. We've also, once again, it seems run into the XKCD comic of there are 14 standards. Yes. Let's come up with a new standard problem. There are 15 standards? Is this just, are we just doing this again? The most important thing to know is that all of the labs have realized

people don't like AI content. And they especially do not like AI content when they're not told it's AI content. And you can see it on your own feeds. Somebody posts something and the immediate response is, this is AI. And it doesn't matter what that thing is.

And they all knew this was coming. They did essentially nothing about it. And now the backlash is here. Everyone hates them. Right? They're pulling worse than ice. No one wants for data centers. You got to do something.

And so we're going to do lots and lots of water. marking ideas so that you can see the AI content and hopefully you can see that you like some of it, which is the unremarked flipside of all of these efforts. Oh, that's interesting. They're like, no, it's AI and it's good. You loved it, didn't you? We'll see about that. That's really interesting.

So you don't think this is sheer sort of corporate responsibility of these companies trying to be good guys. You're like, they want you to be tricked and then have your mind blown by the fact that you've been tricked. It's like a reveal. It's like they pull the cloth up. Right. It was clot all along. Some of that is in there, I think. I think there's also just the notion that maybe you'll opt into a feed full of all

AI contact, which is a dream they all have. Wrong. Just tell you right now. No. Half of them have tried it. Mostly they have failed. But that's the meta structure of this, right? The reaction to AI content in almost every case is negative.

and we need to label it because everyone, there's a disinformation crisis across the world and a misinformation crisis across the world, and so the labels will help us get there. How are we going to do this is not a problem that was solved yet? I'm dying to know if Anthropic asked Claude how to watermark Claude's text

because this system seems so complicated to me. Did you get all the way down to red lists and green lists? I did. I did. Can you explain this to me because I'm not sure I quite understand it. I can try. So first of all, shout out to our commenters who immediately found this great video from a couple of years ago that links to a University of Maryland paper from a couple of years ago digging into this idea.

So the idea, as I understand it, is Watermark is actually sort of the wrong term. Watermark connotes that there is some thing invisibly embedded in the text, like a special character or some kind of underlying metadata that says this is generated with AI. This is not that, to the best of my understanding. What this is is basically, if you think of an AI system as next word prediction, which a lot of people don't like to, but it is fundamentally what's going on. It looks a bunch of words and says, what's the next one? It is essentially going to up and down rank certain answers to what the next word might be. And the way that they talk about this in this paper is you have a red grit list and a green list.

So, like, Neely went to the, there are a bunch of. of words that could come after that, right? So, like, store, football game, and then there's a bunch that it would never be, like, I don't know, Taylor Swift concert. You love Taylor Swift. I'm just kidding. That's sad. But so the idea is then you essentially break these things into all the things that could possibly be, and you uprank some and you downrank some in order to create a certain kind of slightly slanted version of the output. So there are going to be words, that the text doesn't use. It's going to use certain words more often, but it is basically upranking and downranking certain answers to the question. And then it's able to, over time, the way they use red and green is like you take all the possible answers, put them into red group and green group, and you only use the green group, or you mostly use the green group in the actual text that you're predicting. Then if you go back and you say, oh, that's so weird,

this is four paragraphs of it always picked the green one. Suddenly, you, you have an incredibly high likelihood that this thing was generated by AI. And that's essentially the idea is rather than embed some extra character, this is why Anthropic is able to say, if you copy and paste the text, it will carry with it, because it is the text itself. The way that it was predicted and the order in which and the types of words that are actually used are the ones that reveal that it was created by AI.

The paper is fascinating. It's deep and weird, but it seems to work, and it especially works on long texts. And that's a big deal because one of the things that Claude even will do, in this case, they'd say, is not do a great job with short text. One of their, like, cautions is if the text isn't long enough, it may not be reliable. But with like multi-paragraph stuff, you're going to get to the point where statistically it is incredibly unlikely that a human would have written this same set of things in exactly the way that we have slightly. lightly geared Claude to do. Did you feel the same glimmer of recognition when you read this description that I did? No, tell me.

This is how people detect that things are AI. I mean, yeah. Why would you use an M dash? It's like literally the thing that everyone online is always doing. Like, you know, it's, that's not AI. That's just common sense. Like whatever that thing is that you are always doing with AI content now, where you see the fake AI influencer on TikTok.

Here's my honest answer, Colin. They're too shiny. That's clod. You know, like AI video people, like AI avatars are too glossy in like a very specific way. It's like, oh, this is the thing that I do. Like, there's something about this that I just find fascinating. Yeah. It also means it won't work unless the model providers sign on to it.

So here's another collective action problem. Quads list of green words is made by Anthropic. they probably won't release them, right? This is, Anthropic is particularly closed. They're probably not going to tell you what words or what tokens Claude has. They'll tell like the pangrams of the world, but they're, they're very unlikely to share it with everyone. That's, even that to me feels like a hard maybe. So only Claude text is detectable and chatchee-b-text is not detectable.

Now you have an imbalance of power and it is an open-ey-ey-ey-ey-dress to never, ever use, Claude's detection system. Right. And if you take text out of Claude and put it into chat GPT, it immediately breaks the whole thing, right? Like, this is, these are not hard systems to get around unless everyone agrees that these are the systems. So yeah, I mean, I applaud Anthropic for being like forthright that mountains of text spamming every text box on the internet is a problem. And you should be able to have a detector that can just disregard it. Straightforwardly disregard it. or say, are you, you're a real person. You've been shoving a lot of AI text into LinkedIn lately.

Would you like to pay us some extra money? Because I think that's going to happen. Yeah. I also wonder, I mean, to your point about the already overused words in AI tools, it's going to be very hard for them to do this in a way that is actually imperceptible. And they say that it is imperceptible. The paper it's based on says it is imperceptible that you can do this with very little extra compute, very little extra time and very little degradation.

of the output, everything we see from AI-generated text suggests that that is probably not the case, that what this thing is going to do is it's going to develop a new set of ticks that are going to make it even easier for humans to recognize AI-written text that are going to make it weirder and harder for Claude to know what to do with that. Yeah, I think walls of AI-generated text are so inherently disrespectful that I kind of don't care about this one. Fair. Like, You can see it. It's not hard to see it. I don't want to read it.

No one wants to read it. Fine. Hopefully, Anthropics are successful of this and people learn to not do it because everyone's looking for detectors. It's the multimedia stuff that is way more dangerous,

way more widespread in a lot of ways, and way more fractured in terms of detecting it, how the watermarks work, and in particular, how the platforms display that information. So there's code, I think, in the latest, of iOS called Apple reference image, where if you take a photo with an iPhone, it will mark

it as a reference image and say, these are the actual pixels, which is already funny because there's so much computational photography going on an iPhone, and whether or not they're the actual pixels is challenging. WWC, when Apple started showing off their AI edits, background remover, changing poses, all the stuff you can do. I asked them if they were going to use. use some of the watermarking standards that we already have. C2PA, Synth ID.

I think they said they were going to use Synth ID, which is Google's, but it sounds like they're going at it the other way. They're also going to mark the real image, which is not an approach many people have taken thus far, but you want that real image to travel around and be marked as real. And you want the AI edited image or the AI generated image to also travel around to be marked as AI. Somewhere in there is some real fuzzy lines, right?

Even the noise reduction on an iPhone now is like an AI powered situation. So these are very fuzzy lines of where the AI takes over and what makes an AI image or not. But everyone is labeling and no one is picking the same labeling standards. And none of the platforms have agreed on how to display the information. Right. And this, when you say this is just segments about bad ideas by AI, the reality that people don't like this stuff has just like hit them in the face and they weren't ready. and they did not have a unified plan in any way, shape, or form to handle it.

Yeah. And I think from Apple's perspective, the idea of we're going to mark the real one makes a lot of sense to me because that in a certain way might be the more controllable outcome for Apple, right? Like it's actually, it's a bleak state of affairs, but it makes a certain kind of sense

if you think we're going to get to the point where you should assume that everything that's not marked real is fake. And if we're in a moment where no one is going to agree on how we mark things fake, it's easier to be the one who says, well, we can be the arbiters of what is real. And that is just a weird societal switch

that I feel like we are making. And again, it makes sense for Apple. Apple can actually verify whether this thing was made on an iPhone is probably vastly easier in many cases than trying to verify whether something was generated with AI. Yeah. Weird state of affairs. Like maybe we're not going to have an AI

feed, we're going to have a real feed. Do you know what I mean? Like, that's the mental shift we're all having to make, and I think are kind of making in real time from all of this is probably real to all of this is probably fake. Oh, I mean, we wrote that story ages ago. Sarah John wrote it for us. The headline was, no one's ready for this. Yeah.

We'll link to it in the show notes. And the mental shift in society to I'm probably looking at something fake when presented with a photo or a video is totally destabilizing. And it already is destabilizing. I listened to a fantasy football podcast. Shout out the ringer fantasy football podcast. And last training camp. So a thing that happens at the beginning of every NFL season is all the teams go to training camp and you see all the players for the first time in several months. And last year, everybody got fooled by a picture of Debo Samuel. It doesn't matter who Debo Samuel is. But somebody had edited the photo to make him look really fat. And it became a news story before everybody realized it was fake. This year, Everyone assumes every picture of every player is fake. It's just the most fascinating shift that, like, in 12 months, they've gone from instinctively believing the photo they saw on Twitter to assuming it's fake and actually having to go back and verify before discovering that, oh, no, he's actually fat and out of shape. And this is going to be a big problem for the end of all season.

And it's just the speed with which we have all had to make that change just kind of continues to blow my mind. Yeah. And this is, I mean, there's market demand for providence information embedded. It's the time of capture from the sensor. Great. So Apple's going to do it. And it's going to go up to private cloud compute and generate an ID. And someone is going to have to respect the ID that Apple embeds in the photo and display the information.

Do you think that that is X, the everything app? Right. This is where it falls down. Yeah. Jess Weatherbed has written about C2PA, which is the competing standard here over and over again. CTA doesn't work very well. It can be defeated pretty easy. And the other problem with it is that no one respects it.

Right. And I don't just mean they don't respect it because it's bad and they look down on it. I mean, no one displays the information. You have to go to another website and like paste an image into it and run the detector check. And this is all nonsense and no one's ever going to do it. Completely defeats the whole purpose. The platforms that are doing it are kind of interesting. So Spotify announced it's not going to recommend music from AI personas this week.

Because they know that their customers do not like it when AI artists show up in their feeds and their recommendations, and they want music from other real people. This goes back to exactly what you were saying, too, about people not wanting to be tricked. There is, I think, a lot of people have had the experience of having AI music appear in their algorithms for one reason or another, shows up in a playlist, it shows up on your Discover Weekly, whatever. You get 30 seconds into it, and then you start to get that kind of tingly feeling that

this is AI. Or worse, you'd like it. And then you discover it was AI. And I have watched a lot of people go through that experience in various ways. We're like, oh, this song is a bop. And then you're like, oh, my God, it's AI. And that feels bad on so many levels. I mean, we just had an entire news cycle in the music industry about rubbers.

Oh, yeah. By Phoenix Flexen. He's a real person. It's obviously an AI track. And first they denied it was AI, and then it was obviously AI. And now they've been admitting that more. and more of it is. They were going to get to the end,

which is, yes, we just opened Suno and told it to make a Smith song. Yep. And then I pretended to sing a Smith song. Wait, have you been tracking this, DiDario, the guitar company thing? The guitar industry is in full turmoil. Can you explain this one to me?

I have not followed this one as closely. Dadrio, which is they make all the guitar strings. Uh-huh. If you have ever played the guitar in your life, you have ended up with a pack of Dadrio. guitar strings. They made an ad and guitar people thought the music in the ad was AI. And then their first denial was that it was a real song and they just recreated it with

AI, which is incredible. That doesn't even mean anything. Sure. And then they just issued a full walkback and apology and said they believe in real music. This is an incredible problem for the company that makes guitar strings. I'm confident they make. other things, someone is going to correct me and be like, they're the biggest manufacturer of

violas, I don't know what it is. I've played guitar and they're the guitar string company and they should probably lean into being the analog guitar string company and not have AI anywhere in their process. They threw like someone on their bus. We didn't want to do this. It just happened that the music was recreated with AI.

This is right next to the CEO of Fender describing having bandmates as analogia. And then having to do a full walk back. You were following him much more closely. So, okay, this guy's name is Bud Cole. He's a CEO

Fender. Unbelievable name for the CEO offender to be named Bud Cole. I imagine him sitting on a stage playing blues guitar. He gave an interview, I believe in May, to the magazine T3 and he said, among other

things, I think AI has existed in music as long as there's been recorded music, which what? Sure, bud. And then he says, I actually believe cover music has been sort of analog AI for a long time. I listened to a lot of REM, U2, the Smiths, and the Cura, and at some point I got sick of just listening to them. I wanted to play it, so I learned to play guitar.

To compare that to AI is so fundamentally insane. And this goes, I mean, this goes back to what you were saying about the differences of humans and computers, right? Like, it's one thing to say, I listened to a bunch of Smith songs, and so I learned how to play a Smith song on the guitar. The idea, just, just at a very simple way, the idea that I, play the same notes and am thus playing the same song is bananas. And anyone who has ever heard a song, a song, knows that to be true.

But then this guy, I think, without meaning to, is basically denigrating every music artist ever in history of music, which is a wild thing for the Fender CEO to do. But he basically is like, we are going to free people up from the nightmare of having to learn other music and play with bandmates. and just create whatever they want to. Yeah, this is, by the way, the same thing that the CEO of Suno has said over and over again. Yeah, but only one of them is trying to sell me guitars. Like, Suno's at least trying to sell me AI software. Like, I get why they would say that.

Bud Cole has guitars to sell me. If you listen to a lot of R&M, U2, the Smiths, and the Cure, and you want to play it, it's true that it's important to learn to play the guitar. You also definitely need to buy a delay pedal. And so I think that is probably a, better expansion opportunity. Yeah. For Fender, you know?

Like, here's the Johnny Marr sound from how soon is now. No one has ever been able to figure it out. AI will figure it out for you. That would have almost made sense. This does not. No. Suno, by the way, also under fire. And they've unveiled download song caps now because they know that there's mass exports of

Suno music flooding platforms. They're under fire. Actually, Ashley Carmen, former star, reporter Ashley Carmen now at Bloomberg, just an entire profile of Suno, including interview with the CEO over at Bloomberg with Lucas Shaw. That piece is great. They know that they're in trouble. Like they have to meaningfully participate in the music industry in some way. They just signed a deal with BMG. They've got other deals in the works. They're in copyright hell because everyone's suing them. But the music industry secretly loves Suno. Right. They're every, they're,

they're percolating all over the music industry all the time because artists who do know how to play instruments who do know stuff, still find it interesting and easy to prompt Suno to give them a sketch. And then sometimes that sketch just ends up on the tracks. Right. And I think the trick is when is that deception? When is that garbage? When is that slop? And when is that something meaningfully new and interesting? And it's, it's, I don't know that there's an answer across the board. And all of these companies have just rushed forward to be like, this is the future without accounting at all for, are we deceiving people? How will they know and are they going to hate us for it? My most maybe controversial opinion on this front is that I actually think the line is somewhere in

the middle. We're going to hear from a lot of people watching and listening to this who are like, the answer is clear as soon as you use any AI tool, it is tainted and ruined and I'm out. And I respect that opinion. I just don't agree with it. Right. Like I think, I think to the extent that AI is software, which is a thing that I believe, can you use. use software to make music, sure, right? Like, people, people freaked out when we started making computer music because you could make a drum kit in garage band. Like, I don't think that makes it not music anymore. Uh, it's, if you want to disagree with that, that's fine. But I do think that is the interesting conversation in AI to have. And in a funny way, like, you talk a lot

on this show about how music always is at the front of every technology question. It is so perfectly suited to have this discussion about, like, I think, I think most reasonable people will agree that typing a sentence into Suno and generating a song is not an artistic expression. Some people think that it is, Suno's CEO certainly thinks that it is, I do not, and you will not convince me otherwise. Somewhere in between there

and you are not allowed to open your computer is the right answer. And I think it's actually going to be really interesting to watch the music industry from all sides. The creatives, the platforms, like Spotify on this front, you mentioned the personas thing. They're very clear that this is not about AI, generated music, this is about AI personas, people, artists who are wholly AI creations.

In part because Spotify can't figure out how to detect or litigate what makes AI music. Because that would require Spotify to make a decision about when a music becomes a piece of AI generated work. And nobody knows and we should really figure it out. We should really figure it out. Like as people, as societies, as businesses, like that is the question in front of so many people. And it really does feel like the music industry is just the deepest in it right now, but it's kind of coming for everybody. The music industry is always at the vanguard, like I'm always saying, for a few reasons. One, everyone always listens to songs over and over again. So Hollywood, streamers, you might have watched Infinity War 50 times. That is the most anyone has ever watched

Infinity War. Sure. Do you know what I mean? Like, that's the max. Most people watch that movie once or twice and that's it. And then you watch clips on it, bootlegged on TikTok for the rest of your life. But you've consumed that movie once or twice. Your favorite show, even if you're a massive weirder like David and you're just streaming the office 24-7 in the background of everything you do all the time. Like, you're only watching that so much. Yeah. Music is infinitely consumable. I have probably listened to London Calling by the Clash 10,000 times. High Fidelity is on Netflix, so I keep watching it by accident. accident for sure. That's not like a perfect

Neelai movie. Definitely not. He's just like watched too. It's a place in Chicago. I can't get enough of it. Nick Hornby, who wrote High Fidelity in one of his other books, he wrote that he has listened to Thunder Road by Bruce Springsteen every day of his life. Wow.

Infantly consumable material. Like there are songs like this for lots of people, right? There's music like this for lots of people. So you have over and over and over again, you have the opportunity to sell the same product over again. It is also mostly a closed ecosystem. There's only a handful of record labels. There's only handful of distributors, a handful of big agents. At this point, there's only one artist in the world. Her name is Taylor Swift. And they all are repeat players.

So they're all doing deals with each other all the time. And if they overdo it, they won't get a deal the next time. So they're motivated to make long-term deals. And then the music industry is so litigious and so protective of its value because of these other two qualities that they super, people if you screw them in a way that Hollywood doesn't. And so you just have this machine that figures out how to make music worth money over and over and over again because the catalogs are worth something. If you buy one of the big catalogs from Neil Young or someone, that's worth a lot of money to you in a way that buying the entire back catalog of Warner Brothers when it eventually

crashes into the ocean might not be worth anything to you. Right. And so all of this means that these issues will get figured out in music first in like maybe annoying ways, maybe the wrong ways, but there will be some set of answers. And I think one of those answers looks like Suno has to put the labels on it. If Suno generates a song with vocals, the vocals will be tagged as not a real person because people particularly hate that. On and on and on. And Spotify will take pressure from Universal. and BMG and whoever else to label the stuff generated by Suno in very specific ways because the human artists won't participate with Spotify and on and on and on it goes because it's a closed ecosystem that knows how to make money. And then whatever happens there will come to YouTube and Disney Plus and TikTok because the model will exist in music. And this is a prediction.

I'm not saying this will definitely happen, but there's a reason why everything happens in music first. It's a good theory. Do you remember that phase of music in like the mid-aughts when the first 25 seconds of every song was all the producers saying their producer tag? Yeah. And you just get six of them in a row and it would always end with like DJ college just being like DJ college. Like that was, it was great. Another one. Another one. Right. We're going to get that but with like AI labels at the beginning where it's just at the very beginning of every song. It's just going to be like suno. And that's how every song is going to start. A suno producer tag is actually great. I'm actually, one, I'm shocked there's not a DJ calling himself

soon already. True. Just take the credit for it. And the second, it was producer tags. And for a hot minute, my friend, it was face tattoos. If you recall, the SoundCloud rappers and their face tattoos, just to stand out from the crowd or a real thing. And whatever the AI version of face tattoos, it's coming for us.

Unfortunately, it might be face tattoos. We should take a break and then get to the lighting around. But I do. I just want to leave us with one. more piece of evidence in the everybody knows this is a problem bit of the story here, which is from

Mike Minton, the chief product officer at Twitch. Twitch just rolled out a new thing where they basically are starting to train Amazon's models from Twitch content. They made it opt out, which means that by default, everyone on Twitch is being used in this program unless they go to opt out.

He was asked, why not make it opt in? A very simple thing to do is just let people choose to be part of or not. And his answer is, if it was opt in, nobody would opt in. They know. The true nature of all opt in. Yeah, I mean, yeah. We want to opt in a targeted advertising. You want this bad thing. Yeah. They, like, this is my point. They, they, they know, right? Like, it is increasingly clear to all of these companies that people do not want this. And they are in a position of either having to make hard decisions or run a foul of, what,

Wall Street and the economy in a very real way. And I, like, I don't envy the people in that position, frankly, but boy, are they just making user hostile decision after user hostile decision. You know, I'm not up on the nature of the relationship between Twitch creators and Twitch the platform. I'm guessing it's as testy as the nature of all platforms and creators. We're going to come to some YouTube changes in the lightning round. And if my prediction is that the music industry figures out some labeling and attribution stuff first, my prediction right next to that is YouTube undergoes some sort of AI training creator crisis first.

Right? Because they have basically opted all their creators into training and they are making it harder to make money. And somewhere in there is a very angry swirl. Yeah. Every, I mean, it is, it is now, I think, basically beyond doubt. that YouTube was a foundational part of the training data for every AI model everywhere. Yep. And boy have creators not had their full say about that. Well, let's get to some of that stuff. Let's take a break.

Then we're going to come back. We're going to need the laying around. We'll be right back. Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old.

You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Way fair, every style, every home. Concerns about dark money in U.S. politics date back years, at least to Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that removed barriers on corporate spending in elections. During midterm cycles and presidential races, there's always grumbling about dark money.

And this year in Michigan, it sometimes seemed like the whole race. The pro-Israel lobbying group A-PAC spent about $30 million boosting the campaign of Haley Stevens. Her opponent, Abdul al-Sahid, drew attention to this again and again, and she lost. APEC is in a difficult position. Its support can now be a liability, and some people are questioning the way the organization disperses money. I'm going to sound crazy when I say this, but Crush MAGAPAC is affiliated with a different pack called Save Democracy,

and Save Democracy has received $100,000 from United Democracy Project, which is APEC's super PAC. So sometimes the layers here are two or three or even four packs deep. On today explained, the backlash against APEC. Today, Explain drops every weekday. Hey girl, it's Teffy. This week on Teffy Talks, we're talking about paris social standums with Ariana and Perez Hilton, a Harry Potter star joining OnlyFans, and the Met Gala's questionable theme for next year.

If you're not already following the show, find us everywhere at Teffey talks. Subscribe on YouTube and all the podcast platforms and Instagram and TikToks you can share with your other work bestie. Promise? swear. So sexy when you swear like that. All right, we're back. It is time now for the lightning round, beginning with, I get to escape this.

I just realized I don't have to do this for a while, but you have to. Every week and this week, America's favorite podcast, then a podcast, Brendan Carr is a dummy. Brendan. Brandon Carr's a dummy.

I'm a Brenner. Brandon Carr is a dummy. All right. That's from Rich Straff. who sent this in with the caveat that it is, quote, bad in a distinctly human way. It does seem like you drank a lot and opened a sandboard, but in like a fun synth wave way, you know? Yeah. David, I got a surprise for you. You know, you're having a baby. I hired you and a new night nurse. His name is Brendan. He's coming to your house. He's just, he's just going to sit with my baby in one arm and on the phone with like a Comcast in the other.

Just from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. He's just going to look at your shoulder, right? You can't. say that every single day. He's going to yell at the late night TV while he sits there with my baby. That's not funny. I mean, it's pretty good. I'm down. I'm ready for this. He's coming to your house.

Oh, God. No, thank you. What do you do this week? Brendan Carr this week is, it's a complicated deal. It's not the usual we are banning speech and being a traitor to the First Amendment, Brennan Carr's saying it. So I'm just letting it as a switch up. This week, the FCC has taken to tweeting proudly about how shotgun banning different things

has led to a resurgence of manufacturing in America. Oh, sure. That's exciting. They tweeted, made in America following the FCC's action to ban imports of new models of foreign-produced drones. There has been $5 billion in U.S. drone investment, thousands of new American jobs, and new U.S. factory square footage, read more. And then, actually, this is particularly good. They retweeted rapid response 47, which is an official White House account, that posted a bootleg clip of Fox News visiting a Michigan drone startup called AG3 Labs.

Perfect. Just a little copyrighted infringement. They're thrown in the mix there. Love it. Can't be happier about it. They also tweeted economic independence under a Brendan Carr FCC. We have taken action alongside the executive branch to ensure that America is not relied on hostile for nations for drones, routers, advanced robotics, or power inverters. They tweeted a link to a study about the manufacturer power inverters in America, which is going to hit some high number.

They forgot to note that the research note that they tweeted also pointed out that they would be vastly more expensive than the Chinese power inverters we were on for. This is all very good. Fabulous. So this is on its face great, right? We've banned Chinese products or Chinese components that has led to resurgence in American manufacturing, which is, one of the biggest policy goals of this administration, and then you scratch at it, and you're like, oh, none of this, none of this is actually happening.

And it's right there, it's right up there with tariffs. I think this rhymes with, we're going to put tariffs on all this stuff, and that will move manufacturing back to America, which has basically not happened. No, instead it's just made everything more expensive. I made everything more expensive than the tariffs got knocked down. So as Sean Hollister on our team has been pointing out over and over again,

these bands are, first of all, fundamentally ineffective. If you want to buy a DGI drone today, you can. These manufacturers are finding ways to get these products onto shelves. Sean is basically the compliance officer for the United States of America right now. He keeps finding stuff and sending it to the FCC and saying, isn't this illegal? And the FCC keeps not responding on the record. Perfect. And I'm just pointing out that if they had any stones, Brendan, they would respond on the record with a name spokesperson, per our background policy, instead of just saying some stuff we can't print.

Pointing it out, that is the state of the reporting right now. Sean Hollister every day is like, I bought another illegal Chinese camera. Do you have anything to say about this? Look at all these drones in my house now. And every day, the FCC has nothing we can print to say about it. Perfect. And then the things vanishly disappear from Amazon shells. This is a real dynamic that is happening.

We're going to report it all out. I'm just putting a little pressure on our nation's government to respond to the record. The other thing is that even these companies that claim to debuting all this investment in manufacturing all these devices in the United States are not actually doing it because what they're really doing is importing components through other channels to get the United States and doing final assembly here in United States.

I know this because we just had Evan Smith, the CEO of Altana on Decoder. Altana is a startup that does massive supply chain tracking and data. They just make it easier for goods to move around the world. They've built huge platforms that everyone uses and can track everything. And I asked him specifically if manufacturers are moving back to the,

United States, and he specifically responded with respect to drones. Here's what Evan Smith said about drone manufacturing in America. The Chinese control roughly 90% of the, you know, relevant value chain components for autonomous systems. So even if you have a U.S. startup that's saying, hey, we're making everything here in America. No, you're not. You're assembling component parts to make, you know, an air or land-based drone.

and, you know, you're saying made in America. Yep. Here's lying. And here's our nation's government being like, look at these cool lies. So what we have in America is like, we have screwdrivers. Everything else comes from China. Here in America, we have the screwdriver. Yeah.

And look, you can say it is our goal to move component manufacturing component supplies closer to America or in America specifically. There's a lot of that going on. There's a lot of shipping to Mexico or Canada, which have different relationships. with China and then shipping to the United States a slightly more finished product. Right. And maybe you can get around it. And the Trump administration wants that to talk to you.

Like, there's all this stuff happening, right? There's, there are rules, and the company's trying to get around the rules, and all this is fine. Like, this is the nature of the system. None of this has resulted in true American manufacturing end-to-end of these products. There is some investment occurring, but we haven't actually achieved the goal. And we can tout the investment. But the shotgun.

approach to banning things left and right. The FCC just banned Roomba's. And they didn't actually notice until Sean noticed that the rule is that they banned Roombas. Yeah. And like this is where we are with Brendan Carr's FCC. We're doing a big First Amendment violations with speech. We're issuing laws that make no sense in regards to broadcasters and how much broadcasters to be owned by a single company.

We're doing corrupt favors for Trump cronies left and right. And then over here, we're issuing blanket bans based on national security that are not achieving their outcomes and then openly lying about the outcomes being achieved. And you don't have to look too far to see if the outcomes are being achieved. You just have to look on Amazon to see if you can buy a DJI phantom. And the answer is you can. And it boggles the mind that Brendan thinks everyone is as stupid as he is. because you can just see that he banned foreign-made routers and a bunch of router companies said,

whoa, hold on, can we get an exception? And he gave him exceptions. And the mechanism of that, still a little unclear, but based on everything I know about the Trump administration, suggests only one of two possibilities, and neither of them are fully above board. No. Anyhow, Brendan, if you can answer how any of this works

or how you're going to move component manufacturing back to America or whether the router ban is effective in the slightest, please join the show. We'd love to have you on. I have a long list of questions for you at this point. My AI will ask them politely of you. I mean, he's upstairs.

I can just go get him. He's watching TV at David's ass. He's just hanging out. Yeah, also, if you have babysitting availability, I would love, I'll pay you above market rate. Anyhow, Brendan, that's been Brandon Carr's a dummy.

America's favorite podcast for the podcast. I will say We have the other Brendan Carr's dummy theme song that we love that I've asked that we license. And there's a big debate on our team because it's obviously AI made. True. You want to have it like a real emotional breakdown. There's a hot Brandon Cars, a dummy theme song. I feel nothing about it.

I think we should play it again. All right. I have a lightning round item for you, Neelai. Yeah. This is a segment that we're going to do one of because I'm leaving for a while. It's called numbers or lies, and everyone should stop it. As you may recall, I had a long obsession with my running thesis that everybody's view count is nonsense and that views don't matter and they're all lies and you should never believe them all. I had a similar experience this week with two companies, OpenAI and Google, both declaring that they have reached a billion users.

So Sundar Pichai tweeted this week that Google Gemini now has a billion users. Big, huge, incredible number. Last week, OpenAI kind of buried in a blog post that Chat Chupit hit a billion users. But I went, found, like, reported that out, managed to confirm that, like, yes, they have, in fact hit a billion users. This has started kind of a firestorm all over the internet because does it make, like, emotional sense to you that a billion people use Gemini every month? Like, does it feel popular in that sense?

It just depends on how U.S. centric your worldview is. Okay. Explain. Because Google is just available in many, many, many more countries than chat chit. Yes. I mean, that's definitely true. But I think people's immediate reaction to this, which I think is largely correct

and also just really interesting, was there is no way Gemini is as popular as chat chupt. It's just impossible. Even their numbers are different. Google reported a billion monthly users. Chat ChupitpT apparently hit that number a while ago. wouldn't tell me more specifically than a while ago, but they had a million, a billion weekly users a couple of weeks ago in July. So monthly versus weekly is meaningful, but I would say historically speaking, not like orders of magnitude different necessarily. But it just, it feels

wrong to people in this space that a billion people use both of these products. And so everybody starts essentially accusing Google of cheating. There's this, because like a lot of these people come from, one way you might use Gemini is by owning an Android phone. If you have a recent Android phone, you have used Gemini by accident. It just happens. It happens all the time. And you count as a user.

Gemini is in Chrome constantly asking you to do stuff. There's the Gemini app. So like Google has gone way out of its way to say that, no, the Gemini that pops up to help you do stuff in Gmail does not count, but an Android phone does. And on the end, that's fair enough, right? Like, you're using the assistant as it is intended to be used, but everybody is like, this doesn't count. All of these billion people had to go get chat GPT and use it on purpose. You're cheating. And, like, to me, it's like, well, kind of, right? Like, they certainly didn't have to work as hard, but you're also describing all of Google's strategic advantage in this space all

at once. Google's distribution advantage was a huge advantage. It's not cheating. Exactly. And yeah, so I have just been, I have been so caught up in this that like, essentially what Google's saying is a lot of people on Android phones. Which is true, but it also makes Jim and I really popular.

Like, both of those things are true at the same time. And I think, you know, we talked a lot about Demis DeSas and Jeff Dean and this sort of shakeup in the AI industry. You did a decoder this week. The headline was basically like, does Google even want to win an AI? And this, this feels right next to that to me.

That it's like, actually, Google isn't even playing the same game that Open AI is playing. And I think that drives everybody crazy who really wants to watch the model benchmarks compete with each other. And Google's just over here being like, buddies, we got the third best model and Android. And we are going to win. Yeah. And we have everyone's training data and we own YouTube. Yeah. Bloomberg ran apiece this week.

It's just like, Google is killing the web. right? Because there's like the search traffic has gone down and one it's nice to be right. It's nice to be validated in this way. Did they name you specifically? I actually didn't read that. I just saw the headline. I was like, well, here we go. Like at this point, this headline exists every single day. Yes. And it is just abundantly clear to me that Google has moved on from wanting to fight the same fights as everybody else. Right? Like publishers can be mad at Google all day and all night. They've got YouTube. And eventually YouTube creators will be mad at. at Google all day and all night, but where are you going to go? Right. Which is what they basically said to publishers for 500 years. Yep. And chat ChatshpD can say they have more users. Google's like, we have Android. And this is just how Google works.

It's probably the reason Google doesn't always appear to have its foot on the gas, right? And they don't feel that competitive pressure in the same way. But they've also won. Right. They don't have competition in the same way. It's not open AI. ChadGBTBT is not competitive with Google in the way that I think, I would like you to think that it is.

Yeah. I mean, again, how long ago was it when Satchanadella said he was going to make Google dance on Decoder? No one danced. Nope. There was no, I mean, there was some dancing in the sense that like all the executives are different, but not in the sense that like one point of market share moved. Yeah.

Yeah. I'll actually connect this to my lightning around item, which I hinted at earlier. YouTube has made it vastly harder to get. into the partner program and make money on YouTube. So we've said this over and over and over again. The vast majority of creators do not make their money from the platforms. Wait, they make their money from brand deals. The platforms are notorious for not really paying anyone for content.

The gold standard of paying creators for content is YouTube, in the YouTube partner program and the RevShare. And you can have a really big debate about if YouTube started today, would they have the same payment terms to creators? Because when they started out early, is a little bit more idealistic at the time. It wasn't clear that everyone would win in the same way or that they'd be so dominant in the same way.

And so the partner program has been historically quite generous compared to what TikTok has or what Instagram has, which is nothing. I was going to say, not actually generous, but certainly relatively generous. Yeah, against that floor. Instagram is nothing. There's some amount on TikTok, and then YouTube is like compared to that,

the most generous any platform has ever been. Until now. Right, because there's a surge of creators. and YouTube is paying out more money from its spot to more creators. And so they've just made it harder to get into the partner program. So you now need at least 1,000 subscribers and 8,000 qualified watch hours over the past year. These are almost impossible numbers for a small creator to hit out the gate. Yeah, 8,000 watch hours is a big number.

This is a double. Or this is my favorite one, 20 million shorts views in the last 90 days. Good Lord. That is the only way to do that as a new creator is to pump so much garbage into the feed that you collect as many views as possible. Yeah, that's like hundreds of thousands of shorts views every single day, always forever. Just 90 days to get into the program. No, but I mean, but then you have to maintain a super high number like that, usually to stay in the program. You have to maintain 10 million shorts views over 90 days to earn money from the shorts creators pool, which is a different pool of money.

But if you don't hit that, you don't fall out of it. the program. Okay. All I'm saying is if you're a new creator getting into the money, now basically requires you to front a bunch of money, right? You have to make a bunch of videos for extremely free for quite a while to hit any of these numbers. 8,000 watch hours is a lot.

Right? If you're a new creator, getting to 1,000 subscribers is already challenging. 8,000 watch hours is even more challenging. You do the math. Every one of those people has to watch you for eight hours. Yeah. There's just something here that suggests to me, YouTube is not just making it harder to make money with them.

They're trying to radically shrink the amount of money they actually pay out, even though the amount of content coming on to the platform is going up. And there's a lot of analysis here that says this is because of an influx of AI content, right? Under the previous requirements, you can probably just flood the platform with a bunch of AI content, hit the previous numbers, and go. And that has in fact become like a,

a noted public strategy of a lot of creators. Yeah, this is an arbitrage opportunity all day long. And by the way, the number of people automating Instagram in this way is like off the charts. Oh, yeah. Everywhere, all the time. But Instagram doesn't pay out any money, so Instagram doesn't care. YouTube pays out money, so they have to care. And their response is to make it vastly harder to make money on YouTube.

Now, existing creators aren't going to be affected by this. Like I say, every creator gets their wings when they make a video about how mad at YouTube they are. And they all do it. They all turn into beautiful business. and spotterflies when they make the video about how YouTube is a monster that they can't get away from. But something is going to come here. Something is going to happen when a cohort of new creator shows up to make money on YouTube. And they discover that it's effectively impossible.

And actually what they should do is go get brand deals. Right. Right. The pressure to go get brand deals and be a niche creator is going to go up because the actual programmatic money you can get from YouTube is now harder to get. Aren't we kind of already there, though? That's going to turn YouTube into Instagram in a more meaningful way. That's interesting.

I guess that's true. And then it becomes, it actually rests some of the control away from YouTube. Because a big part of YouTube's appeal for a long time has been it is a place you can actually make money. Right. Like we've talked about this many times in the show. A lot of people use a lot of platforms, but they feel like YouTube is their most important one because it is the thing that pays the money. And even if it's not all of your money, that thing is still meaningful. And I think you're right that even, because one of the pieces of feedback I've seen to this all week is a bunch of people being like, well, I don't care.

I don't make any money from like 10 million shorts views like that and a nickel will buy you a soda. You know what I mean? But I think we're in a position now where like it actually, that may be YouTube testing the where you're going to go theory in a pretty powerful way. Right. And it's right next to eventually a bunch of creators are going to find out that Google trained on their content and they're going to be unhappy about it because they will want payment. these platforms just don't pay creators. They don't pay creators enough, and it's turning everything into advertising, and I can rant and rave about that like I usually do,

but everyone's heard before. What do you got, David? Okay, I have a brief Ramageddon update for you. Things are bad. Prices continue to go up. We talked about the Pixel 11 prices on the live stream. On Wednesday, everybody should watch that. But there was a really interesting bit of data

from a research institution called Counterpoint about cheap phones. One of the things we've talked about a bunch on the show is the possibility that the market for inexpensive phones is essentially going to evaporate because you just can't make cheap phones anymore. And what Counterpoint found is that sales of phones under $100, which are crucially important to lots of people all around the world, dropped 64% year over year in the second quarter of this year. And essentially the main thing that happened is everybody but Samsung and Motorola just can't be in the market anymore. So the others portion of the chart here, it's basically like Samsung, Motorola, everybody else.

The everybody else portion of it dropped by about half because there are just aren't companies that can afford to float these things anymore. If you're Samsung and Motorola, you can shrink your margins, you can make your money somewhere else, you can do. things to stay in the cheap phone market. But if you are a manufacturer of cheap phones who mostly makes cheap phones, there is essentially not a path forward for you at this moment in time. It's just, it's bad on so many levels, but we're at a point now where like if you make a phone that cost $100, most of that sales price for not just like material price, most of that sales price is going to be eaten up by even the like meager amount of RAM in the phone. If you can get your hands on it. So like this is an industry and a price tier of gadgets in general. We have

wondered if it would survive this and increasingly the answer just looks like no. Yeah, I think it's gone. And by the end of the year, I think these are gone. Yeah. I think there's probably still some stock on some shelves. But none of these companies are motivated to go figure this out right now. No. And it's, and it's hard to even like be mad at them about that. It's just, it's a horrible business idea to go spend $70 on RAM and try to charge $90 for your phone. Don't do that. It's called bad business. But it's bad out there, dude. If anyone wants to report out a story about, like, weed dealers in the crisis and burner phones, I'm just saying. That's pretty good. It's probably something. Yeah. You're a young reporter on the make. Give me a call. The thing, like, at the

counter at CVS is now $300. There's, like, blue phones. Yeah. What are you going to do? And you can't get a burner. It's pretty good. There's a lot. There's a lot. I guarantee you there's a young reporter in New York City. You can get that story.

Oh, absolutely. Go by every burner in New York City. Neil, I will pay for them personally. I got a good one. Lauren Feiner reported this one this week. She interviewed the CEO of Flock, which makes the license white cameras. Yeah. Everybody's least favorite company on Earth right now, I would say.

And so Flock has the same problem as the AI companies, the data center companies. They need to go make everyone love them. unlike the AI companies, the data center companies, they can't just show up in your local community and be like, we'll buy your electricity for you. Just like let us have a data center. They're not flush with cash in the same way. So the CEO flock said to Lauren,

we thought that there would be some regulation around surveillance that would tell us what to do. And we were wrong about that. So Garrett Langley. By the way, with the parent, hypothetical implied there being, so we went and did a bunch of surveillance. Yeah. So we went super hard at surveillance because no one was here to stop us.

Garrett Langley, to Lauren, he's seen firsthand how slowly the regulatory process can move. It's such an obvious way to curb abuse, he said, of the tool that lets agency administrators require case numbers before searching the worldwide surveillance drag that he built. And I said, fine. You know what? I think that's right. We got it wrong. we should make case numbers a requirement. This is, this is, he's going to make people love him this way.

This is so bonkers, dude. I think the whole flock thing is, is absurd. Like, the idea that a company came along that made Ring look sort of benevolent and neighborly is bananas to me. And this is what flock has done. They're like, look, we have horrible dystopia cameras. This is fine, right? Everyone's like, no thank you. This doesn't even like, tell me when there's a package at my house.

It just sucks. And so to come in and be like, oh, we didn't do anything because we were waiting for somebody to tell us to stop. And so we never did is so like even even his apology is so grossly saying the quiet part loud that it just really bums me out. He's like, American no, because she didn't stop us. But you all hate us. Right. So we've added some fields to the database. You want an argument against capitalism?

Like there's a damn good one. There it is right there. The ACLU released an analysis of the changes. And it says, quote, they appear more focused on addressing a perceived PR problem than the significant harms these products create. Yeah. Very good. Langley has been a fighter in the past. But everyone, I mean, he's called Deflock a terroristic group.

And they just have a database of where Flot cameras are. So he's walking back. He's going to be a real Cuddlebug now. He got a bunch of things wrong. I had a friend text me and say, you're all about data centers being the thing that realigns left and right in America and brings people together in midterms. Flot cameras and surveillance is the other one keep an eye on it. And I think that might be true. There's a political article about it this week.

And the headline was something like work boots and Subaru's come together to protest flock. It's a great headline. That is good. It is really flock, I feel like just in the last couple of weeks has really broken a certain kind of containment. and I feel like everyone is aware of what it is doing now in a way that I think your friend might be right. Letting the government track your movements without permission is just, what are you doing?

That doesn't seem right in any way, shape, or form. Well said. All right, on that note, I got a baby to have, we need to get out of here. Nelai, who's on Decoder next week? Dakota next week is Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semaphore. They're launching a big new thing called Silicon Valley in the world.

he keeps describing their event series as Davos with follow-up questions which is very good it's very good we talked about publishing we talked about the army of teenagers working for free on platforms semifour uniquely

big website spends a lot of money one of the few without a paywall so we just talked about the I've had a lot of media people on Dakota recently Ben also not short of opinions about the future of media

Ben is absolutely not short of opinions that was a really fun conversation it's good hang looking forward to that one Also, go listen to The Decoder from this Thursday with Hayden about the Google stuff and AI. Hayden's done a lot of really good reporting on what's going on with Google's AI teams. She's a really good perspective. That's a good episode. All right.

We need to get out of here. Nealai, you're alone for six weeks. Are you going to be okay? Jake's going to be doing a lot of stuff. We have a really fun run of guest hosts. Don't worry. It won't just be Nilai. I know David immediately answered that question.

He's like, Jake will fix it. Jake will be here to keep Nilai company. That'll be great. I'm going to, yeah, it was super fun last summer. It's insane that it was last summer that I did this already. I was also gone last summer. Yeah, you were also gone last summer. We had Hot Girl Vergecast summer.

It went fabulously. And now we're going to have, I don't know what this one's going to be called. I'm just going to crash out with other people who are like, what are you doing? People listen to this show? I will tell you, if they launch a foldable iPhone, there is a 100% chance I am going to bully my way onto that live stream with a baby. It's going to be great. It's going to be rad. I'm excited about it. Until then, a reminder, as always, the best way to get in touch with us about all of this and everything. If you have knocked down a flock camera recently

and you want to tell us about it, email us, vergecast to the verge.com, call the hotline 866 Verge11. And the best thing you can do to support all of this is to subscribe to the Verge. Theverge.com slash subscribe. It gets you all of our newsletters, all of our coverage of Google and flock and insane things that we're going to do. Zuckerberg says and everything else. Theverge.com slash subscribe. Thank you in advance. The Verge cast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk.

We will see you next week. I'm going to be gone, but we've recorded a bunch of stuff. So things that we have made already are going to keep appearing. We actually have a couple of really fun episodes coming up at the beginning of next week that I think folks are really going to like. I am just going to sit and listen to them loudly in my living room. And I'm very excited about it. We're going to miss you, buddy.

I know. I'll miss you too. Give me a good one so I can leave. Rock and roll. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair.

With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home.