The Vergecast - Maybe it's real, maybe it's Sora

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

Say this for OpenAI: it's very good at raising money, and it's very good at getting attention. David and Jake are joined by The Verge's Hayden Field to talk about OpenAI's demo day, the company's app store plans, why it's trying to build every possible ChatGPT feature all at the same time, and more. After that, the hosts talk about the ongoing popularity of the Sora app, and whether OpenAI has truly built a new kind of social network. Then Hayden has to leave, so David and Jake take on the lightning round to discuss Intel chips, Alex Cooper's Google deal, Starry internet, and more. Further reading: OpenAI will let developers build apps that work inside ChatGPT ChatGPT apps are live: Here are the first ones you can try OpenAI: all the news about the makers of ChatGPT OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT said it will significantly evolve in the next six months.  OpenAI will eventually allow “mature” ChatGPT apps.  OpenAI and Jony Ive’s secret device won’t be ‘your weird AI girlfriend’ AMD teams up with OpenAI to challenge Nvidia’s AI chip dominance Sam Altman says there are no current plans for ads within ChatGPT Pulse — but he’s not ruling it out A busy week for OpenAI’s social video machine. Sora now lets users limit how their AI double is used OpenAI teases licensed fictional characters on Sora OpenAI wasn’t expecting Sora’s copyright drama Developers can bring Sora 2’s AI video generation into their own apps.  Katie Notopolous on Threads  Sora’s Slop Hits Different A new iPhone setting will stop CarPlay from stealing your AirPods’ audio  Here is Panther Lake, Intel’s 2026 laptop chip with next-gen graphics\ Facebook is turning into TikTok  Alex Cooper is making ads for Google / Pixel Here’s how Apple is locking down iPhones to comply with Texas’ age verification law Verizon buys the not-quite-5G wireless ISP Starry to expand wireless broadband  Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years,

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients.

And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of being accessible but not intrusive. We'll get back to that.

Johnny Ife, everybody, accessible but not intrusive. This is what we're doing here. I'm your friend David Pierce. Jake Castronachis is here. Hi, Jake. Hey, good to be here. Haydenfield is here. Hi, Hayden.

Hey, excited. Hayden from some very generic hotel room somewhere in the Bay Area. Is that correct? Exactly. You guys are the first people I'm talking to today. Amazing. About to head to some more AI lab offices. it's an honor for me too.

So you're out there. There's a bunch of AI stuff going on this week, but the big event of the week was Open AI's Dev Day. And we have a lot of news to talk about this week. There's a bunch of AI stuff, but we're going to actually just level with all of you.

We're going to spend most of the show talking about Open AI because it's been a really fascinating and bizarre week for Open AI. We're going to talk about SORA. We have a bunch of stuff to do in the lightning round. But Hayden, we have you for a little while before you have to get out of here.

So let's talk Dev Day. First, just like, What is a dev day like? Jake went to his first Apple event recently. I've been to lots of things, but never an Open AI dev day. What is a dev day at Open AI? Great question, because it's kind of a confusing name. I've been to everyone they've ever done besides the one where they didn't allow press last year. It's basically an annual event where they announce a bunch of stuff. It's technically for developers. They invite 1,500, 2,000 developers to come and listen to all their new announcements, features, tools. So some of it's a little bit niche. You know, it's things that only developers would

want to know so they can build within the platform. But a lot of it is also pretty consumer-facing. They use it kind of as a just a catch-all for everything they're going to do that year to build, you know, investor interest, to get a lot of headlines. So some of it's a little bit niche and hard to understand for the average person. And some of it is just pretty wide. Like they always have a keynote by Sam. And then, yeah, a bunch of like small. workshops, things like that, that are a little bit more, you know, only focused on developers. So if the spectrum is like highly produced video on the WWDC side, all the way to like, I don't know, Microsoft build where it's just a bunch of like VP's writing code on stage, where does OpenAI fall on the spectrum?

I feel like it's an exact middle ground because we literally had people writing code on stage as demos. And then on the other side of the coin, we have, you know, like a live stream keynote by Sam and a very controlled media room with a Q&A with all the execs. So, yeah, it's definitely a combo. And it's a strange combination of both those vibes for sure. Okay. I just, I have come to appreciate Jake. I don't know how you feel about this, but like we make fun of the people who just like write code on stage during keynotes. But I have come to kind of love it.

Like, I respect the hustle of just getting real nerdy with it. Oh, it's a sport. I love that. Like, it is the weird. weirdest live demo because it is the most boring live demo, but like, oh yeah, the stakes are there. They're high. Yeah. It always reminds me of like, I went to the Excel World Championships a couple of years ago and like the vibes are exactly the same. It's like, I don't understand any part of what these people are doing and it is completely inscrutable to anyone who is not like six inches away from the screen watching it. But like, I respect you anyway. Like game recognized game.

I have to say I did interview one of the people that did a demo yesterday like after the fact. And she was. was pretty compelling. Like she narrated what she was doing the whole time. She knew her audience. And, you know, they projected a ton of fun stuff on the screen behind her. So they knew how to hold your attention even if you didn't know what the hell was going on, which is great. Love that. So the big news, like you said, of all of the sort of there's like developer news and sort of infrastructural news. But it seems like the big consumer news was apps inside of chat GPT. Is that, was that the big story, do you think? Yeah, to me that was, you know, allowing companies to, you know, integrate their apps directly into chat, TBTs so that you can say, hey, I'm looking for a house in the Bay Area. Don't worry, I'm not on Zillow. Give me, you know, the houses within this price range. And then you can ask follow-up questions on whatever the app delivers you, not just Zillow, but any of these apps ostensibly. So, you know, let's use the Zillow example. It gives me a bunch of houses. And then I say, okay, narrow this down. to only ones with a yard or narrow this down to only ones with two bathrooms because I'm tired of sharing a bathroom, you know? You say all that and then it can like really deliver follow-ups and you know, narrow the list and kind of work with you. Nick Turley, the head of Chachabit, who I interviewed yesterday, said to think of it as apps you can talk to. So yeah, that was definitely the big news to me. There's also the agent toolkit they announced agent kit where, you know,

companies, enterprises can build their own AI agents, and it's just kind of another push for Open AI into both the consumer and the enterprise world. They're trying to tackle both and corner the market on both, which is a tall order. And then the very last thing that I thought was pretty notable was allowing companies to use SORA's technology via the API. So we're going to see a lot more AI generated video out there. Yeah. So we're going to come back to SORA in a little bit, because I think this has been sort of the week of SORA, and I want to talk a lot about what is going on and what we've seen. But the apps and the agent thing is just so bizarre and fascinating to me

because I think you and I have spent a lot of time talking on this show and elsewhere over the last couple of months about AI agents. It's all anybody wants to talk about. Everybody is like, agentic AI is the future of everything. You're just going to instruct your system to go do something for you, and it's going to go do it. And then Open AI is like, well, what if we just let Spotify integrate so that you could just make a Spotify playlist with Spotify? And we didn't have to magically train some AI system to do it because Spotify can do it.

It's just like watching that announcement, I'm like, this is so clearly and obviously the right idea if what you want is for your tool to actually work. And it's so different from the way that Open AI and everybody else is. talked about it, where it's like, it's not, we're not doing app stores, we're not having platform wars, what we're going to do is we're going to train this thing so that it can do everything all by itself. And that, if it's ever going to work, it's not going to work anytime soon. But this thing where Zillow can just pipe in its database and let chat GPT basically be like fuzzy search for Zillow will work. That is a doable, plausible thing. And it is like a complete strategy shift in how everybody has been talking about AI for the last like 12 months.

Definitely. And it's interesting because something they were emphasizing a bunch when we interviewed these execs was chat GPT becoming an operating system instead of just one tool. So they're really making the push to, you know, integrate all these apps, make it like an everything app. You wake up in the morning, you use chat GPT pulse. You go about your day. You're ordering food. You're looking for a house. You're coding for your work. And you're using chat GPT. They're basically trying to make it a everything destination. And when I asked Nick Turley yesterday about whether they were going for an Apple app store, he was a little bit cagey. He said, oh, there's no metaphor for what we're doing. But no, no, no, hold on, hold on. That's bullshit. That's the perfect metaphor for what they're doing.

That is like, that is the metaphor. That Apple figured out how to basically turn a successful platform into an unstoppable money funnel. And the reason all of these companies are out here saying we're moving past the apps for a model we want to do the other things is because Google and Apple won and all of these companies have spent a generation living under that, right, giving up 30% not being able to do certain things because they don't follow the platform's rules.

And they've been saying, okay, what we need to do is actually build something that is outside of that and bigger than that. And that's what the metaverse is supposed to be. That's what AI is supposed to be. And now, Open AI, looks around and realizes, oh, we're huge. We have critical mass. We have the thing that is hard to get, which is scale. And now that we have scale, what we should build is the unstoppable money funnel where other people do all the work and give us money for it because we built the thing with scale. Like, it's the same exact playbook. And anybody who says it's not is just trying to hide something from you. It is the exact same thing. Exactly. He didn't deny it. He was just a little cagey, but it was clear to everyone in the room, I think, that that is what they're doing. And it's also like, you know, yeah, the level of control seems pretty similar. You know, right now they're only launching with eight or so apps.

I asked him a lot about what the process is going to look like for developers who want to submit their apps to be rolled out within chat GPT. And he said, anyone can build right now, but, you know, there's going to be a tall order for getting distributed. and then there's going to be another kind of design aspect that you have to meet in order to be widely distributed. So it reminds me a lot of Apple, to be honest. Yeah, that's the stuff that Apple tries not to say out loud is that it has that kind of control over what's going on. Jake, am I overstating this? You and I have been fighting about app stores for forever. This is giving me nightmare flashbacks to Alexa Skills and basically every other app store on Earth, right?

I feel like we keep having this thing where a new platform comes out. Maybe it's the Apple Watch. Maybe it's, you know, VR headsets. Maybe it's a smart assistant. And we're just like, well, we'll make it good by making apps on it. Great. Okay, so now there's a million apps within ChatGBTGBT, so I can use the apps that I can already use on the same platforms in a different way.

I don't know. Every time that happens, it feels like they're just throwing stuff at the, at a wall and it feels like a dead end to me. And interesting. I'm not saying that it's not going to work here, but the promise of AI was that they didn't need to do all this, that they're just like, we can use these things.

We can use these apps. It's fine. We're just going to go use them. And instead they're like, you know, what if we actually made other companies do all the work and hard code everything and put specific rules around everything so that our product works?

And what if they don't? But the difference is it might. And the first thing you just described doesn't work and might never work. Like the whole like we're going to teach our AI model how to use the internet the way that you do. Like all the computer use stuff like all of that is somewhere between vaporware and just bullshit. And I would put it closer to bullshit than vaporware. But like none of that exists in any kind of meaningful way. And I keep talking to people who are like, we went down that road.

We tried it. We have pushed. We have tried the thing, and there is absolutely no evidence that, like, truly useful agentic AI is anywhere close to being anywhere close to being useful. Whereas you can plug your API into my front end and we can do stuff together. That works. That's technology. That's how everything already works.

And we're starting to see the companies with scale figure that out, right? like Amazon is running this exact same playbook with Alexa Plus, which is like, you know, no one should really want to be compared to Alexa Plus right now. But like the idea is the right one where they're like instead of trying to convince our model to like learn how to click around the DoorDash website, we're just going to plug into DoorDash because we have a relationship with DoorDash and they'll do that. This comes to a certain problem that like, like Neelai always calls this the DoorDash problem, which is why would DoorDash say yes to that?

Why would I let myself be completely disintermediated by this other product? But the difference between a lot of the stuff you were talking about, Jake, and where I think we are now, is chat GPT is already that front end of stuff for lots and lots of people. Like, people are increasingly used to the idea of no matter what I want, I'm going to go to chat GPT for it. And that is powerful. And if you have that, and I think there is some evidence that chat GPT has that or is at least getting that very quickly for like millions to millions of people, you become the home screen for people. Right? Like, that's the closest thing to like the iPhone equivalent. And so if I'm open AI, I completely understand why I would be chasing this as hard and fast as I possibly could.

I think that's completely fair. And I think you're right. Like this, this is what they need to make it actually work because the thing that they are promising does not actually work in that way yet. They haven't made God yet, it turns out. And until they make God, APIs are pretty good. You know what I mean? They're so close, I think. That's what Sam Altman said.

This is the thing. My fear, my great fear is that all of these other. platforms, they go apps, apps, apps, and then they don't do anything else. And I think if chat GPT goes too far down this road, they lose track of whatever else they're trying to build, maybe they never build it, then the platform becomes less useful, right? I am worried about where this ends up. At this moment, I tried it. It made some Spotify playlist for me. Pretty cool. All right. Wait, did you actually try it? How did, what, tell me about your Spotify? Yeah, yeah, I was like, make a Spotify playlist for me.

It made a Spotify playlist. Cool. I said, hey, can you actually remove a song from that Spotify playlist? It said, nope, I can't do that. But here's instructions on how you can do it. So, you know, it's a start. It's like, but this is the thing.

It needs to get way, way, way more powerful. And I think the thing they're promising, right, if it can do computer use, then it would just go and it would click the buttons and it would remove the song for me. In this case, it was like, oh, that one wasn't hard-coded. And then you just run into the same set of problems you had originally with Alex apps where if you didn't say the exact same, you know, prompt

to order a Domino's pizza, how you're supposed to order a Domino's pizza, you'd just end up with nothing. Yeah. One example I saw on X the other day was that someone was like, oh, this would actually be really useful if you could say, hey, Jordash, order me a meal that you know I'll like tonight that's like under this number of calories and is like, you know, not pizza, which is what I've been eating all week, you know, and then it would be really useful. But as we know, AI is not good at common sense. So we'll see when they're able to offer that if ever. The Zillow example I liked

because it was a follow-up question on the data you were presented, which is great. But like you just said, Jake, the follow-up question you asked, it was not able to deliver. So I think, you know, something they kept emphasizing yesterday was that they're in the early stages of this. They just wanted to roll it out. But, you know, people are going to be underwhelmed if they don't work. So we'll have to see because I want to test all the apps they have out there right now. You know, the Canva one for posters, does it really work? You know, if you're saying, hey, make me a slide. Luckily, I've never had to make a slide deck in my life.

But I hear that's a common thing that you need. A lot of people need in their jobs, you know, stuff like that. I want to see which of them actually work well and which of them can handle the follow-up questions, or is it just the only one that they presented on stage that can handle the follow-up questions? It is very telling what they choose to do in some of these demos. But I think the Dordash examples are a really interesting one because that is the sort of thing that seems like an obviously good idea. And you sort of look at the technological pieces of it.

And you're like, well, all the steps to do this kind of sort of exists. So like it can't be that out of the question that I should be able to ask that question and get a return. And I think where I land is that I 100% agree that that thing you do. just described is impossible. And it won't work and you shouldn't try it. The shortest path to get there for me seems pretty clearly like some kind of functional AI input system, right? Where like that is better than going in and clicking a million filters on a website, right? Like, there's a reason travel keeps doing this too, where it's like now if you want to find a flight, you have to go to 35 drop downs, pick a thing and do the flight. But if I could just type in what

where I want to go and when and have it do it for me, that's a better way. And that's the kind of thing that these AI bots are very good at. Then the other side is, okay, either chat GPT or Claude or whoever else has to go and successfully click around the internet in order to select all those filters for me, or it needs to plug into somebody's database and API to inform it what those things are and pull the data out of the database. And to me, that seems a lot more plausible than chat. GPD is going to learn how to click around DoorDash's website.

And so, again, none of this works, but it seems like if you want that thing to work, these companies working together and making apps makes a lot more sense to me than any kind of, like, agentic future. I agree. That's actually what I thought when I was watching this demo for the first time, because the way I always think about this stuff is I think it's easy to get in the weeds. And when you're really in the AI industry or when you're really into just covering the AI industry or you're just consuming it a lot, you get really into the small stuff and the small incremental

steps forward. But for me, I always think about, like, who is really going to use this? Are my friends that are, like, pretty offline going to use this? Are, is my mom going to be interested in using this? Is anyone I know really going to use this? And this was the first thing I've seen in a long time where I could say yes. Like, right now, a lot of my friends use Chat GPT all the time. A lot of them don't even have to count. This is something I could see. getting the people that don't use it to use it. Because our lives are really annoying in some ways, and this is a way to kind of fix that if it works the right way. Like what you were saying, David, with travel, the reason I haven't booked my Thanksgiving flights yet, it's annoying,

and I don't want to deal with it. If I could just plug that in. And by the way, when I was interviewing some of the Open AI folks yesterday one-on-one, they mentioned travel again and again as an example of something they were trying to, you know, help fix here in terms of the booking process. So we'll see how it all plays out. Jake, you look skeptical. I, my fear is that I think you are correct, David, right? Like, this is the way to get things done. My fear is that if it stops here, then what they have done is spent $500 billion to invent Alexa.

Right? I agree. Yes. Is an option? It's just a lot of people. people wasted a lot of money in that case. Yeah, I mean, they need to make it good and keep building both the things they're building if they want it to not just die a slow death like all the other things we've seen. Yeah, Alexa, but you can talk to it in actual sentences, is a very

plausible outcome for all of this that is going to cost a lot of people, a lot of money, and maybe burn down the U.S. economy in the process. But, like, I agree. That feels like a totally possible endpoint because I think, like, I don't know if this has been Y'all's experience, but in my AI use, the thing that works most consistently is the input. Like I can, I can say complicated, rambly things and these systems more or less understand what I'm talking about, far more successfully than anything we've had before. You don't have to say, you know, instructions in a very specific cadence. You don't have to like remember the exact words to say in the exact right order. You can just sort of talk and its ability to figure out what you're talking about works. It doesn't

always work, but it's very good. Those are the things that I am like consistently improving. pressed by with these AI systems. Everything after that, which it turns out is where all of the work is beyond playing music and setting timers, still undone. And again, I think to Open AI, and back to what you were saying a few minutes ago, the thing that is so interesting to me about Open AI is it is running at every possible version of the answer as fast as it can at all times. And even Sam Holman seems very clear about like, we have no idea what any of the answers are.

I'm very good at raising money, and we seem to be winning. So I am going to chase as many things as fast as I possibly can. Like, he's basically said those words in that order to anyone who will listen. And he's probably right, but like opening eyes rolling out the thing where you can do all of that kind of like Spotify, make a playlist, you know, find a flight, whatever sort of search in chat GPT. It's also offering that technology to those app makers who want to build it into their own stuff. It's also doing the agenic stuff. They're just like, we have no idea, but we have all the money and all the users. And so we're going to chase everything at the same time and see what happens.

And that is the open AI story. Except during the exact Q&A I was at, they seemed a little more nervous than usual about making money. You know? Really? They kept saying it wasn't in their top 10 concerns. But then they would go on to say, but eventually we're going to have to be very profitable. But then they would say, but we're patient and confident that that will have. happen. But I've never seen them act more nervous about it. You know, they, they usually are very

calm and just mention it maybe once, but they mentioned it multiple times. They're really cagey about the amount of compute they need, which is, of course, all the compute. Yeah, it was interesting to see them squirm a little bit about the need to make money and how they were going to do it. So, yeah, I think this is them, you know, going into a bunch of different ventures trying to make that happen. Yeah, I think there was a lot of really interesting reporting and just sort of puzzle piecing this week of all of OpenAI's money stuff. Like they announced this big deal with AMD to get more compute. They have this big deal with Nvidia. They have a big deal with Microsoft. Like there is just this gigantic pool of money flowing in and out of Open AI at all times. And it's like as long as

Open AI continues to be the big leading thing and everybody believes it, it, it's, this will keep working. But like, one of, one of my hottest takes coming out of the summer was that opening I is a house of cards. It, it still very much feels like that to me. And it's like, the question is, is Open AI so big and so propped up that it's going to get to chase all of these things until one of them becomes the answer? Or at some point, like, the minute anybody loses confidence and pulls out, like, one of the

Django blocks here, the whole thing is going to come falling down. And I think if you're Sam Altman, you have to know that, right? That, like, he's on this treadmill and he has to keep running this fast or else things are going to start to get really ugly, really fast. Because the minute somebody looks at him and goes, can I have my money, please? He's going to, no, they don't have any to give you. They lit it all on fire at a data center somewhere. We'll see.

That's the Open AI story. So the other thing that happened at the Dev Day this week was we got somewhere between a little information and no information about what OpenAI and Johnny I ever up to, you went to this like fireside chat, right? What was it, what was it like? What did we learn? Nothing. We learned nothing. Stunned to hear this. It was very high level. It was very navel-gazy, you know, beautiful words, essay vibes. We didn't get any concrete info. I didn't expect a lot of concrete info, but I expected like, you know, maybe one specific or a semi-specific, anything. Just give us anything.

And it was very go-girl, give us nothing. Like, you know, we didn't really see all the reporters I was sitting with. We had high hopes, and we all turned off our recordings. Like, you know, we knew nothing was going to happen. And we ended up just, you know, sitting and writing some of our stories that we needed to write. I saw a couple of people get up and leave. The media knew very quickly that nothing was really going to come out of it. I had an opening high person asked me afterward how it went.

And I said, you know, it was something. And it didn't, I think it was probably pretty inspiring to the developers listening, you know, but they didn't say anything. It was a lot more about, like, you know, what advice would you give to someone who's building for the first time? You know, it was very, like, inspirational quote, navel-gazy, nothing that people really who wanted specifics from something would be excited about. So I think it was a little tough because, I mean, it was a fire. chat led by an AI CEO, so, you know, we didn't really expect a lot more. But everyone knows they're building this mysterious, buzzy, hot device of some sort. There's been a lot of headlines about that

even this week. So, you know, people wanted to advance the storyline a tiny bit, and that did not happen. Yeah, there was an interesting Financial Times story this week with, I would say, more details than Johnny Hive was willing to give up in that chat. And one of the things that the story talked about, And this is the reason I bring it up now is that they're having real compute issues trying to figure this thing out because evidently the device they want to build is basically like an always on

always listening assistant type of thing which makes sense. That seems like if you're OpenAI and Johnny I, that's the thing you would want to build. But they're trying to figure out how to A, navigate the unbelievable privacy challenges that that creates, which yes, of course, good idea. But also trying to figure

out how to manage the incredible compute requirements of that. And this is like, Open AI is already pretty honest about the fact that it can't get enough compute to do what it's trying to do. And that stuff is very expensive and cost a ton of money. And they want to, they want to make a thing that is listening to you and processing everything that you do and hear and say all the time. Like, that just presents a completely different set of problems that I I think it's going to, like, you can see why Sam Altman spends all of his time talking about and raising money for data centers. Because none of this works if it can't get that kind of like nearly infinite, very cheap compute. Those are the jangle blocks that go away the most quickly and all of this falls apart.

There's also a really important element for an at-home device. Gen 2, he was just writing about this for the site with, you know, the new Google Home speakers, the new Alexa Plus stuff. these things take longer than they used to because they have to go up to the cloud and do the fancy AI processing and then come back down. That's not a good experience. It's not clear if they're going to be able, right?

ChatGPT is fine, but it's completely different when you were in your home asking it to do something that is immediately right in front of you. If it takes time to turn on the lights or get you something useful, you're not going to use this product.

It's not clear to me which direction they're going to go here or if they're going to be able to solve that problem, right? They fundamentally have just have not had to deal with the problem of a local chat GPT in the past. So this is like very much a new space for them. Totally. I think it's it's going to be interesting to see where any of that lands or like one fun Johnny Ive problem will be how do you interface away the slowness of it, right? Because like we've even seen all of these tools get.

One of the reasons they like talk to you more as they're thinking is to make the process feel faster even while it's slow. so it feels like something is happening. It's not fun to talk to a thing and then just sort of stand there and watch it think silently for 30 seconds before it gives you an answer. And when it's just a little pendant around your neck, I don't know how you solve that problem

for an interface perspective, but I'm very curious to see what they come up with. I'm also interested because, you know, one thing I've seen with the Johnny Ive and opening eye device is that it's supposed to be the same type of, you know, concept. You know, you put it in your pocket.

You have it in your bag, but it's something easily accessible, you know, kind of like a small device that you're not going to wear, but it's going to be there listening and you put it on the table and you ask it things. So, I mean, I just can't see right now how people have a different experience than they had with friend, you know, because, you know, yeah, our own V-Song wrote about her horrible experience with friend asking her, oh, I. I didn't hear that or, hey, you know, I only caught part of that and then it was a TV thing instead of an actual conversation. You know, this device, ostensibly is supposed to be sitting there learning

about your day, offering commentary on it, seeing things that you might want to learn more about, doing research in the background, the open AI device, I mean. So it's like, you know, I just don't know how they're going to solve for all that, but I guess that's why, you know, they're dragging their feet and probably not giving a lot of specifics in their fireside chats right now. Yeah, it makes you wonder if they even know the answers. Like, are they being KG or do they genuinely not know? And I'm starting to think it's that. But anyway, if you have seen

this thing and want to tell us about it, hit us up. David at theverge.com, don't tell Hayden or Jake. Just tell me. That's all I want to know. We'll talk about it. All right, we should take a break, and then we should talk about the SORA app because I think there's a lot of this that's wrapped up in the SORA app. So let's talk about it. We'll be right back.

Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I've really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce. They offer a host of helpful tools you can take advantage of, from payment processing to analytics to website design. Their design studio includes hundreds of templates to help you create the exact website you've been envisioning for your business. If you're wondering, what if I need help,

then no worries, because you're never left to fend for yourself. Shopify's award-winning customer support is available 24-7. It's time to turn those what-ifs into a thriving business with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. Go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Upwork.

The days of doing it all, all by yourself, are over. There's no romance and burning out while you're trying to scale. Instead, you can check out Upwork. Upwork helps grow your business

by giving you fast access to specialize talent across more than 125 categories so you can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale without committing to full-time headcount. And finding the right talent is easy. You can browse profiles, review past work,

and get help scoping the role so you can get started quickly. Seriously, you could connect with the right freelancer in just a few hours, especially when you sign up with Business Plus. Their AI-powered shortlisting pairs you with the top 1% of talent in under six hours. No endless searcher required.

You can visit upwork.com right now to post your job for, free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's UP-W-R-K.com. Upwork.com. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster.

That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track.

Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. Let's talk about SORA because I think SORA, the app, launched last. week, but has been like sort of the thing everybody's talking about this week. Have you guys used SORA, the new Open AI? It's TikTok, but everything is AI generated. I would say it's essentially how the app works. Have you guys used it? Yes, I wrote a few stories on it. I like tested it so much. And I was screen recording so many copyright violations, so many interesting videos of Sam Altman committing crimes, crying, talking to people, and a lot of other weird animal videos. So,

Yeah, right now I think it's a combination of open AI employees, Sam Altman, and Animal Videos. That's my current read. I used it for a few minutes. And honestly, I thought it was way more compelling than I expected it to be just compared to like the usual, I don't know, feed of other people's AI is usually wildly uninteresting. And the SORA feed felt to me like just a kind of a weird meme feed, which, you know, take it or leave it.

But there was something there. It felt lively. Well, so, okay, let's poke at that because I think part of what's been so interesting to me has been, that has been a more consistent reaction than I expected to SORA. And I think Katie Nettopoulos who writes a business insider posted on threads a thing that I think perfectly encapsulates this whole thing. And there's nothing more fun than reading somebody's jokes on a podcast, but I'm going to do it. She said, me looking at vibes feed, this is meta's vibes app, which is just the same thing.

but worse. Me looking at vibes feed. This is screensaver. So boring. Why would anyone want it? Me looking at videos I made of my own face in Sora. He-he-he. I love this. It's funny. It's me. I have seen versions of that reaction so many times. And there are so many people who are like, I went into this, not expecting to be compelled by this. I thought it was just going to be a feedful of AI slop. I hate feeds full of AI slop. This one feels different. So Jake, why do you think it feels different? So number one, their algorithm is better, right? Or their AI is better. They can make better videos, right?

Meta's Vives Feed, screensaver is the perfect way to put it. It is just like glazed over generic nonsense. There is nothing to see there. Sora, it feels like memes, right? Like you can write a joke and the video can land the joke. And I'm not going to say that they're all amazing, but the app is like very much intentionally set up to kind of get to the joke and make it land.

One thing that they did that I think is very clever is when you go to a video, you can swipe up or down to go to the next video, but you can also swipe left or right to see different variants of the same video because people can keep remixing them because it's AI and it's fake and you can turn it into whatever you want.

And so that puts this really fascinating riff on the sort of, you know, TikTok remix of everything where, okay, maybe the first person didn't quite get it, but by the 10th iteration, maybe somebody has actually landed a joke that's pretty funny here. And so that's the one that gets served to you, and the feed ends up feeling pretty lively,

and you can see a lot of people kind of collaborating around the same idea. So I do think there's something a little more social and a little more natural there, and it starts with the fact that they're able to make better, more specific videos that have some intent behind them, and I think it follows through with the fact that they actually put some smart social features,

in here to feel like there's liveliness and activity to it. One of those features is the fact that when you double tap on a video, the AI like picks an emoji that captures the vibe of the video. So like, you know, if you're like walking by a cornfield talking about something totally different, maybe the emoji that it picks is a farmer. And so that's another aspect of the joke. Like it seems like that part. It's also kind of in on the joke.

But I felt the same way, Jake. It was interesting because, yeah, vibes to me was like, Facebook slop. You know, I saw like corgis on Hampstead Heath. I saw like, you know, just random blobs blobbing is kind of the great like explanation of what I saw. But so with SORA, I think, you know, yeah, I think people underestimate how much people just want to like meme their friends, you know? And that's what it allows you to do. And it's also strangely accurate. I was like terrified when I saw the demo because I couldn't tell what was real, especially when it was not like a fantastical setting.

You know, if it's someone just talking in front of a white wall or flipping a light switch, I couldn't tell. Even if I had met someone in real life, you know? So I think that was what was both scary and compelling. It's like, you know, a potential misinformation nightmare, but also people can make realistic funny videos of their friends and their pets. So that's something that I've seen a lot of people do, week and people have been like begging me for SORA codes just so they can try it out because of that.

Yeah, the thing that I have thought was really interesting. And I think Sam Alton mentioned this in the, they like released their first update to SORA with a bunch of sort of new policy things. But one of the things he said was that an unexpected use case has been people using the app to make something and then share it with small groups of people outside the app that it is like, and this has certainly been the case for me. Like SORA videos are suddenly everywhere in my group chats, which I find like mostly sort of cringy. And it's like if you're the person who is just like constantly making AI videos

you think are funny and sending them to your friends, like please reconsider some of those decisions, is what I would say. But they're everywhere. And this is like, this is clearly like a behavior of people are engaging in. And so I think even if they haven't nailed something

in the sort of social network experience of it, there is something about this creation tool that works. And I think, and to the TikTok point, like TikTok is as, much a creation app as a consumption app. And so it's like the idea is we want to make it easy for you to make something.

And I think like Jake, to your point, this is the easiest app ever to make something. And that's powerful, especially when that something involves you, which just inherently means something to people. Like everything is more fun when it involves you as the user. And that push in that direction just seems like it's working. I completely agree. And I think that part of this is that they are. you know, maybe trying to turn the notch past AI slop, right? The problem with most of these

AI generators is you actually just don't have that nuanced control over what they're creating. And here, you're able to get a little bit closer. You're able to put text and it does the text that you want. You're able to put dialogue and it does the dialogue that you want. And I have not tested extensively. I'm not saying it's perfect. But I think there are clearly people who are writing jokes and landing those jokes here? Will this maintain itself as an entertaining thing for more than the five minutes I spent on it? I think there's a big open question there, but it does feel like you're getting more intentional content. It is stuff that people are actually creating. And it kind of just has the liveliness of a weird Twitter feed,

which is very different than, you know, the Facebook AI slot feed, which still just looks like, I don't know what this is. You couldn't make anything better than, like, like, this This is nonsense. Just glistening puppies. And it does remind me of TikTok in a way because on TikTok, a lot of people are just lurkers. And they're like, you know, sending TikToks to their friends. They're talking about TikToks they saw in the group chat, but they're not actually making anything. And some people do make things and everyone knows their face.

So this is kind of a similar vibe in that I've seen a bunch of Open AI employees, for example, as you would expect, make a ton of videos. And then I've seen a lot of other people I know personally in regular life, just consume them and send them to each other. Or like you said, Jake, make them and then send them to just the group chat but never post them publicly. And that's something Sam said on Dev Day. He said he didn't expect all the group chat fodder. And he also didn't expect that people would want maybe in between of their cameo being public. He thought it was either they would be all in or all out. But he didn't expect, he said, that some people would. want to have their cameo public, but only for certain scenarios and not being allowed to say certain things or appear in certain videos or maybe only be visible to some people. So I think he said he didn't expect the, you know, continuum that people of comfort that people might feel with their own face being used in an AI slot machine or just an AI generated TikTok social media app. Okay, I'm glad you brought this up because you were there and you wrote a really good story about sort of open AI being surprised by what has happened with SORA.

A, that it was as popular as it was. The number we saw was 627,000 downloads of the app in the first week, which is, A, a lot, and B, not that many. Like, just in the scheme of things, like, that's a lot and also not a lot at the same time. So we should just do with that number what we will. But he kind of went through over and over and was like, yeah, we had no idea this many people would use it and have feelings about what AI is doing. And I'm just like, buddy, like, either you're lying or you're not paying attention.

And I don't know which one of those things it is. And to me, this thing Open AI continues to be happy doing, which is just releasing things and then figuring it out later, is dangerous. And this is like, we've been through this with Facebook for so many years, right? Where it was like, okay, Facebook kept doing things without thinking about the like second and third and fourth order effects of those things. And I was like, you do that long enough, and all of a sudden, like, really, truly horrible things are happening around the world enabled by your technology. And that you didn't think about them or expect them does not absolve you of responsibility for those things. But Open AI and Sam Altman in particular has been very happy to just be like, here's a thing. We don't know how you're going to use it.

So we'll all figure it out together. And he even said, I pulled this quote from your story. He says, we've got to have this sort of technological and societal co-evolution. I believe that works, and I actually don't know anything else that works. There are clearly going to be challenges for society contending with this quality and what will get much better with the video generation. But the only way that we know of to help mitigate it is to get the world to experience it and figure out how that's going to go.

That sucks, and I don't like that at all. And for say, a moment to be like, oh, people might have complicated feelings about how their video is being used. I don't believe him for a second. But I just, I think they can't, they are happy to not have guardrails and put them in later when companies with copyright lawyers demand it. And short of that, I think this company is just very happy to just unleash everything up on the world and see what happens. And that worries me a lot.

I don't know. Hayden, am I being too mean to Sam Altman here? No. To me, yes, it's a really controversial thing to just say, oh, we're going to roll out this technology, just see how people use it, and then that's how the world's going to contend with it. We've got to put it out there and then just see how it works and go from there. To me, that's a move fast and break things approach, which is obviously so controversial, and we've all seen how that plays out.

You end up breaking things. Like, to be clear, that's that you've said the quiet part loud, which is that you will break things. And it's one of those things that, like, we've seen this happen over and over again where it's disproportionately affecting minorities, vulnerable populations. We've seen, like, facial recognition go wrong when it's just rolled out. AI generated revenge porn. You know, this has already allegedly already been used to, like, generate kind of threatening stalker-ish videos of someone. So it's interesting because, you know, the few people in power and AI don't always, I think, think about the downstream use cases of how this could be used for the people that are most vulnerable here. However, I know what Sam Alman

would say to this, which is that they didn't do a move fast and break things. approach because they introduced this with more safeguards than people wanted. He said that everything he's hearing from critics is that it's way

too restrictive, that it's censorship, that it's not even a fun app because there's so many controls and safeguards on it. So that's kind of the weird continuum here. Does that track at all

with what you're hearing in the world? Because that does not track at all with what I'm hearing in the world. What I'm hearing in the world is I can make SpongeBob do meth. Like, that's cool. Yeah, and also the fact that, you know, they started out with this opt-out copyright policy, and then they changed it to opt-in after stakeholders protested. Now, for me, I've only seen

power users complain about the restrictions and the safeguards. I haven't seen any, like, just the kind of general consumers complain about it. That's just me anecdotally. Maybe everyone's really up in arms about the fact that they can't, you know, generate certain things because of the safeguards. But for me, you know, anecdotally, people have either been happy that they can make videos of their friends and their dog or they just don't use it at all. I've seen on Twitter, of course, a lot of power users complain about how restrictive the safeguards are. But to me, they're not that restrictive. So the opt out copyright idea. What are you talking about? You can't just like grab cash from a register and be like, whoa, whoa, sorry guys. It's opt out for me.

Like, I, if you needed to tell me in advance, if you didn't want me to steal that. Like, that's not how it works. These companies have a very expensive lawyers. Like, you know, you know that Disney doesn't want you generating these things. Like, you can't just tell them, oh, you, we didn't know, you didn't tell us that. Like, that's just the law. It's just there. It's not a conversation.

I, so, yeah, I don't know. It is very funny that Sam Altman is out there. being like, we didn't expect any of this. Who could have known how people would use this? And it's like, everyone. Yeah, like, have one meeting. Have one meeting. Do you know why they made it opt out?

Because they knew it would be more entertaining that way, because they wanted to see how long they could go before they got into trouble. And the answer is like 30 minutes. But, like, obviously, because that is the first thing you're going to try to do because it's a lot more fun. We can generate weird things of Pikachu.

But, yeah. I it is true. He is correct. The way that we contend with this as a society is that we unleash it into society and reckon with the whatever horrible outcome there is. But yeah, that's not like very comforting to hear that said aloud by the guy who is unleashing it into society. It also doesn't have to be. The idea that like society is the guinea pig for new technology is like not how it has to be. It is if what you need is infinite amount of money to keep doing what you're doing, but it doesn't have to be like that.

And the idea that there is no other way to roll out interesting new technology other than to just like drop it on the world and watch and see what happens is not great. I agree. And another thing that I thought was interesting was like what in this app was like maybe overly safeguarded compared to what wasn't. So, you know, I saw Rick and Morty videos. I was able to generate like a ton of stuff that I shouldn't have been able to. But then when I tried to make a video of myself running through a field, it was like, ooh, too racy. Like that could be too sensual. I changed the word.

Yeah, I changed the word to frolicing instead of running. It was fine. Nothing sexy about a frolic. That's what I always say. That's what I thought was hilarious. It's like it was overly, maybe this is what some people were complaining about. It was overly safeguarded on some things. And then the dial was turned way down on some of the,

stuff that it should have been against. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, like, why are we able to see, you know, SpongeBob cooking meth, but not me running through a field? I don't know. That is very funny. I like that very much. So Hayden, you need to go here in a couple of minutes, but I do want to talk about how you guys are thinking about the staying power of this thing. Because Jake, you mentioned it too. And what we've seen with a bunch of these tools, particularly with the image and video generators in the past, is they have this, like, huge flash in the pan because everybody's like, oh my God, look at this. amazing thing. Look what I can do. I can make SpongeBob do meth. And then they all kind of

die, right? Like we had the, everybody made the studio Ghibli versions of themselves and then kind of stopped using those tools at the same level. Hayden, you first. Do you think Sora has a different kind of staying power or is this just like the next meme along the path of like flash in the pan memes? I mean, it's hard for me to say because there have been things I've been wrong about in the past. but I think this is going to be one of those things that some people really, really love and use all the time but I don't think it's going to replace TikTok or be

a mainstay for most people. I think it'll have like a cult following and some people will use it every once in a while and a lot of people will use it a lot but I don't think it's going to have the same staying power as say TikTok or any of the other social media apps that people lose time on for hours and hours every day, just because by nature, I think it's like full of memes, full of jokes. It's not something that you are going to spend

a ton of hours on if you're just the average person. One example is I saw some research the other day that showed that the more you use TikTok, the more it funnels you into like longer form content, story times, things that are high drama that you're going to get invested in, maybe multi-part stories. You know, I don't, Sora doesn't have anything like that right now. So it's like, you know, you're going to pop on, you're going to make a funny video, maybe you're going to send it to your group chat. I don't see you spending a lot of hours on it.

So that's just my take. Jake, what do you think? I think it all comes back to the intent, right? Are you creating something that has purpose and meaning behind it? And right now, all this feels very novel. And you go on there, you're seeing stuff that you've never seen before. There's lots of funny jokes. At some point, I'm going to see my 500th AI Obama.

and it's going to not be funny and novel anymore. And at that point, I don't know why I'm going on this app. So do I think that this kind of medium has a future? Like, yeah, probably. I think if you built this into TikTok and you allow people to create these every once in a while for specific purposes, yeah, absolutely there's a future there. But they fundamentally have a novelty gap to overcome. Because on TikTok, there's always going to be something new and different and real

that actually matters. And fundamentally on SORA, there's nothing that really matters. And so I'm not sure it will be able to sustain itself in that way. The TikTok example is really fun because I was thinking about this, like, is the success of SORA

dependent on the idea that me typing into a prompt, you know, make a video of me doing X, Y, Z, dance challenge, as compelling as a video of me doing that dance challenge. And I think the AI bet is that if it's not, it's very close and much easier. And so that will win. But I don't think I buy that. And I think that gap of like ultimately the me doing the thing is just going to be unbeatable by some AI system of me doing the thing. Keeps it from making that final turn that you need to be that kind of mainstream success.

It's about whether it's just as compelling, like you said, David, to see someone a facsimile of someone doing something or seeing a real person doing a real thing in a real way and I don't know I think this comes back to the same question of like AI generated music, AI generated film sometimes people just want to connect with a real person doing a real thing in a real way and I think that's like it comes down to human nature

and so you know people think this is fun it's cool it's like a novelty but I don't know that it has yeah, the same staying power as an app full of videos of people doing real things in real ways and real people that you can really meet. Yeah, agreed. All right. And speaking of, you've got some real people, you need to go meet. So we're going to let you go.

We're going to take a break. And then Jake, you and I are going to plow our way through the lightning round. Hayden, thank you. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. because let's be honest,

you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, asset compliant, enterprise ready,

and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers.

developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring. partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates

and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less than that. time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire.

Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise.

That you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means? to the elected officials and what it means to the people. So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary, third.

Like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. All right, we're back. It is time for the lightning round. It is the lightning round. I don't know how many more times, Jake, I need to say this. Like people, it's been so long now.

Nobody even remembers the Thunder round, which is a distant, distant memory at best. I get tweets from one to two people a week telling me how appalled they are at what has happened here. I will say more people miss the sound effects than I expected. We have a lot of sound effects fans in a Vergecast audience, and I want you to know I hear you and I love you. I don't want to upset anyone here.

I never really like the sound effects. I thought we could have gotten some cooler thunder sounds. They were a little weak for my taste, But maybe that's why the Thunder Round didn't make it. If you can figure out how to like 10x this idea and we have like video effects and set. Like if you can terrify me with the sound of this thunder, we can talk about it. I want some cool like electronica thunder. Like that's what I want for the revival.

Or if we can somehow get the budget to license Thunderstruck by ACDC. Then we can talk about it again. But for now, it is the lightning round. And since it's just you and me, Hayden had to go, like we said, we picked three things each, and we're just going to blast through them. Why don't you go first? What's your first one? My first one. So Alex Cooper of the podcast, Call Her Daddy, announced this week that she's like an ad agency thing.

She has some big inaugural deal with Google to make pixel ads. This starts with an initial ad, which as far as I can tell, only appeared on Instagram. Maybe it's on TikTok. I don't know. It's like it's a vertical video. That is, I don't know, kind of nonsensical. It has some pixels in it. This does not matter.

This is another thing I want to talk about, really. What I want to talk about is that, so Alex Cooper was at the pixel announcement event over the summer. She like did a weird little demo in that weird Jimmy Fallon hosted event. I was on her Instagram. And in the time since then, she's posted a handful of photos where, you know, the very first photo on the grid. is her with a pixel. And you can see that pixel real clear. And I have traditionally been very skeptical

of the celebrity endorsement deals, but I'm starting to come around to the idea that perhaps these actually matter quite a bit. And I think that a few years of Alex Cooper posting Instagram photos with a pixel would probably do more for Android and the pixel brand than if the pixel 12, could perform brain surgery.

Like, I do not think there is a feature that is going to convince people to move over from the iPhone. I think that it is a cultural battle at this point between iPhones and not iPhones. And you actually need that permission slip. And it's silly. I don't know how much people notice,

but I do think that Google paying Alex Cooper to post photos with the pixel is maybe the best thing they have done for the pixel. Okay, I completely agree with this. This is not where I thought you were going to go with this, which, uh, like, this whole thing that Alex Cooper and Google sort of co-announced where they're like, they're going to make a bunch of content with these devices and they're, they're going to use it in their production process. All of that is always nonsense. Like, I don't know how to be clearer about that. All of that is always nonsense. And the, the only thing

I think when I see those announcements is like, I can't wait for her to get caught in the same way that like Galgado got caught years ago, doing, like posting, I think it was Huawei sponsored content with an iPhone, like via Twitter for iPhone, and like Marquez Brownlee made a habit out of calling these people out. And like, I loved all of that stuff.

I think you're absolutely right that Google should have done this and is going to get way more than it paid for with whatever it is paying Alex Cooper. Alex Cooper is like wildly famous and beloved and important, like hugely culturally relevant in a way that I think even like the professional athletes that Google has paid before to do this are not.

Like Alex Cooper carries a different kind of weight specifically with women than anybody else I've ever seen holding a pixel before. And I'm like looking at her Instagram grid now and you're right, the pixel is everywhere. In a way that is like sort of obvious and gross, but also he's going to work. Like I think you're right.

And it's sort of nice to see Google actually try and do this because Google, we're going to talk a bunch about this on Tuesday with V and Allison who reviewed all of Google stuff, but like, Google's gadgets are very good. And the reason for years now that more people have not bought Google's gadgets is that Google doesn't market well. Google seems unable to successfully spend and do what it takes to market its very good products. And so the fact that it's actually leading into this stuff, I find, like, very encouraging as somebody who wants to see the phone wars be more interesting.

It's really interesting because I do think, to your point, there's a difference between Alex Cooper and a lot of the sports figures who usually get these deals. There's much more of a parissocial relationship there because she is this enormous podcaster. I'm not sure who the right people are to keep expanding this idea, but I do think, right, they're great phones,

but unless you are, I think, you know, a Vergecast listener or somebody who really cares about getting the best phone and who's going to go wherever the winds are blowing and shift platforms as necessary, you're probably locked in. You made your decision a while ago.

You're either on team iPhone or on team Android, and you're just going to stick with that. And what they have to fight here is this cultural battle of, oh, actually, there is something good here, right? The pixel is a fantastic phone. It is, is it substantially better than an iPhone?

Absolutely not, right? Yeah. And if you're looking at the two side by side and one you're used to and you know is solid and reliable, what's going to make you take that jump and that gamble? This feels like the kind of thing that can start to change that. And it is very silly to be like, I'm not saying that I am excited that, you know, Google is spending money on things that are not developing a better product. However, this feels like the thing that actually is going to matter in the long run. Yeah, if you actually want to win, this is what you have. have to do. Yeah. And I think like the part of me that always wondered when Google is going to

decide to stop caring about the pixel is the part of me that wonders why Google doesn't seem to be interested in winning. And this is like, okay, Google might actually be interested in winning. And I think that's cool. I agree. I also think the idea that they are going to use this in their production process is nonsense and everyone should remember that. It's, that's just going to make production five million times more difficult. Do not do that. Yeah. No. For the Like, dear Alex, like, don't do that. Using pixel raw photos and bringing them into light, like, don't. No, yeah, don't bother.

No. All right, for my first one, I just want to tell you about a thing that made my life better this week. Oh my God, yeah, tell me. Last week, we talked about the Spotify setting that will keep my son's music taste from ruining my life. This week, a small change in iOS 26 that I think Mac rumors found first that is called Keep Audio with Headphones. And this does one very specific thing, which is if you are listening to something on your headphones, and then you get into a car and automatically connect to carplay, or you turn on a speaker that, you know, can automatically connect via Bluetooth. It will not any longer immediately pipe the audio to that thing. It will keep it in your headphones. This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to you.

Okay. I saw a lot of people who are thrilled about this, and I have a question. Are you walking into your car listening to music on AirPods and you plan to keep the AirPods in the entire ride? No, let me tell you the mainstream use case and the non-mainstream use case. Okay. The mainstream use case is I am on a phone call and I get into the car. Okay. What happens now when I'm on a phone call and I get into car is 15 seconds of we can't hear each other while the audio transfers. Oh yeah, that's bad.

That just sucks. A phone call should never come out of your car speaker. Correct. And I think the like leave one AirPods in while you drive. for a minute is like, listen, I'm not a lawyer. I can't tell you to do that. I just know that lots of people do that. And that is having that not just do the awkward,

where is the audio coming from, dance is very good. My current reason for being excited about this is that I have small children who are often asleep at inconvenient times as we're getting in and out of the car. And the idea of whatever I am doing or listening to, not suddenly blasting through the car speakers or the speaker speakers, just because I turn them on is wonderful. It's dumb that this is a setting. This is evidence that what Apple can't do

is actually figure out proactively where your audio should go. Apple has the handoff thing that always sucks and everybody hates it. So I just, I want this to exist, which is great. But I also want the one that is like never, ever, ever, ever, send my audio to my laptop

just because I opened my laptop. Like, it's so simple. Like, if I'm on the phone, keep it on the phone. Don't be like, Do you want to transfer this call here? No. This is not hard.

But I'm fine. It's a setting that you can turn on and everybody should and I am glad it exists. I'm so happy for everybody who gets in enough cars and I was also listening to the AirPods lot. But you are right. Handoff is both the most amazing feature and just a tangle of pop-ups sometimes. Yes. And you're just like, it feels like you're dodging and weaving, trying to be like, no, do not transfer

that there. Do not do that. It's great because it is like, it is the description of handoff. is the sort of thing that only Apple can do and is a reason to buy a bunch of Apple products and buy into an ecosystem like this. But it turns out Apple can't do it. It is a very appelly idea and a bad execution.

They just love handing things off too much. They got so good at it. They're like, you're over here now? Great, great. Go, go, go. They're like, it's impossible that you would ever be using two devices at once. So we're just going to shove everything onto whatever screen you were looking at it this second,

even though we don't know. Cool, thanks to Apple. Anyway, more settings. Yes, please, all the time. Jake, what's your second one? Okay, my next one is that, do you remember Starry? Yeah, that was like a cool startup internet provider. Yeah, yeah, I think it was from like 2014.

This was, um, so the guy behind Ario. Yes, I'm going way too far back. This is like deep verge lore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The guy by an area, which was like the broadcast retransmission startup that got shut down by the Supreme Court, then went and launched Stari. Stari was an internet service provider that brought internet to your home using millimeter wave, which would later be used for 5G. That startup, Stari, has now been acquired by Verizon, which is just a lot of feelings, a lot of feelings. I generally see an acquisition by, you know, Comcast or Verizon or other major ISP and assume.

Okay, that's like, it's weird. My initial thought on seeing this was like, okay, so they're dead. Like, you wouldn't buy them unless you were just going to kill them. But Verizon, like, claims that they actually want to use Starry's technology to expand their reach, particularly in cities and dense urban areas. And I'm not sure how I feel about it. I think it's really interesting to see this technology get used. Stari kind of stalled out pretty hard.

To be fair, so did 5G. Like, this is just, this is why there's a confluence of like, there's an overlap in these ideas that might sort of make sense, even though each individual idea kind of ran its course. Stari has this incredible idea that runs immediately into these huge problems. So they're like, okay, it's number one, really expensive to build out ISP infrastructure and put wires everywhere.

Number two, the regulatory environment for that is just horrible. You just have to get approvals left and right to run cables in different neighborhoods. It's terrible. It takes forever. It's really, really expensive. They're like, we're going to skip all that.

We're just going to do it wireless, and we can get really fast speed because of millimeter wave. Thing about millimeter wave is if there is, I don't know, rain or like a leaf in the way, it's blocked. Or you like step, backwards. Yeah, yeah. If you're here, it works. If you're here, it all falls apart.

It is like super precise line of sight, and so you need to have this very clear, you know, through line from the transmitter to the receiver, which is sticking out your window. It's tricky. And, you know, maybe Verizon can scale that. It would be really interesting. I think the other reason this is interesting to me is, as somebody who lives in a city, I have one choice of internet provider or at least one choice of wired internet provider. And I do think it's interesting. These 5G home internet things have become bigger and bigger and I do not trust them at all. And maybe this is just like, this is like a little bit of a pipe dream. I'm being like really hopeful. But Starry feels like it's this middle ground where it's like it's 5G internet, but maybe it's actually fast and

reliable. Maybe I don't know. Like I don't trust T-Mobile to give me equivalent home internet service to an actual wired connection, even if the actual wired company is charging me just crazy amounts of money because they know they're my only option. Well, this is the whole thing about 5G now, right? Is I think we, and like Verizon also just appointed a new CEO and it's going into, I think it called it the next phase of growth, which is like there's been this real sort of quiet reckoning of like 5G just didn't do the thing it was supposed to do. Like we've been making fun of it for a long time.

I don't think it's that surprising, but I think it is now fairly common knowledge that actually wired internet is faster, and we're not beating it with 5G. Even in the best case scenario, we're not beating it with 5G, and we're starting to see a pull back towards, yeah, we're going to go lay cable in trenches,

and that's actually how we get fast internet to people. And so the idea that we're going to, like, A, keep pushing on this because if you're Verizon, you kind of have to, but B, try to figure out what to do to move past this, is just really interesting. And like, give it a minute, and everybody's going to start yelling about 6G.

But, like, even Verizon is out here being like, we are reinvesting in digging trenches to get fiber internet to people because that's what they want, and that's what actually works. I don't know, you say that, David, but I can't think of a single surgery that hasn't been performed over 5G.

That's true. I'm having surgery right now. My doctor's thousands of miles away. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Here's what I wonder is if Verizon is going to use the starry brand. Because I think Verizon to me is fascinating. So I get visible commercials all the time.

Like Hulu in particular thinks that I speak fluent Spanish and want visible wireless. Those are two things that Hulu believes about me for reasons that I don't understand. So half of my ads are in Spanish and the other half are for visible wireless. And there's this very clear thing where it's like everybody understands that Verizon has the best. network. That is just like taken for granted that Verizon has the best coverage in the United States. But also everybody hates Verizon and doesn't want to deal with Verizon. So the schick of like, we have Verizon's network, but we're not Verizon, is actually like a very compelling marketing case that a lot of these companies are making. So I wonder if Starry is going to start

to be able to just do exactly the same thing. Be like, we are Verizon, but we're not Verizon. Do you want our internet? Okay, can I tell you something that I found adorable in this announcement? They gave a line to this in their press. Oh, really? They said, Stari has a net promoter score that is nearly double the industry average. There you go. I realize that is like jargon and nonsense, but these companies care so deeply about net promoters score. All it means is people have good feelings about Stari and bad feelings about Verizon.

Yes. Right. And this is what they said. In their press release, they're saying, by the way, people like Stari twice as much as us and everybody else. That's a meaningful thing. Yeah, there's something there. Yeah.

Stari is also a good name. Starry is a good name. Yeah. That's very interesting. Like, I was actually just looking at this up, so I have, I have Ting, which for my internet, which is like blisteringly fast, and I switched away from Comcast the minute they laid fiber outside of my house. And true story, when we were house hunting, one of the things I looked for was to see if they would still have Ting. And for the life of me, I can't remember.

It's one of the carriers that I hate that owns Ting, but I can't remember which one. And I'm like, every time I think about that, I'm like, oh, that's why you do it. Nailed it. Because I don't remember which company I hate owns this. I've always assumed that's the reason Xfinity exists, but Xfinity is also an insane name. Xfinity is also bad. I think they've now tarnished that reputation so successfully.

Yeah, that makes sense. They just have to run. But it is still, it's better than Comcast, and they would love you to not think it's Comcast. By the way, I guess we should disclose. Comcast through NBC Universal as an investor in Vox Media, or a parent company. They love us, as you can tell.

My second one is about Intel. The beleaguered chip maker that everyone from NVIDIA to the U.S. government is trying desperately to prop up. We just got our first look at Panther Lake, which is Intel's next set of chips. They're coming out end of this year, early next year, and it's basically a three-tiered set of functionally laptop chips. But this is like, I don't honestly care all that much about, like, generational chip news. This one matters, and I think we should pay attention to it in a pretty, big way because this is the one that Intel has been promising for a long time. As it's gone through this huge change into being both a maker of its own chips and a foundry to make other people's chips,

this is like, this is like the one the company has been saying is going to be the one where we've been able to put all of our resources together, do all the right things, get all the right pieces together and get back on the right track. Like Panther Lake is supposed to be the one that is proof that that works. And it's supposed to work from like these sort of qual, Qualcomm competing thin and light laptops all the way up to like the more powerful GPU running Intel inside kinds of laptops. I would say the correct approach to this is to be deeply skeptical of the fact that any of this could work because Intel has made arguments like this for every generation of chips. But this one does still feel important, right? We have the competitors,

particularly like AMD and Apple and even Qualcomm starting to catch up. And in some cases, like run away from Intel in the chip market. Intel is a hugely important American company if you believe in the sort of global chip wars. Like what this does matters in sort of big macroeconomic ways, even if you never end up buying a laptop with Panther Lake inside. And I just, I think it's going to be a fascinating one to see what it does. It's funny. As you were saying that, I was like, wait, I would. swear they have said this before. And it's like, this has been going on for a while now. But you're

right. You know, I think particularly as, you know, as Qualcomm was emerging, and I think as its chips were getting better and better, as Apple started making their own ships and, you know, blowing people out of the water, there was an element to which it was exciting. It was like, this is great. We're starting to see more competition. You know, things have been very, you know, slow and steady with Intel for a really long time and it's good to see some competition. I don't think. think we necessarily wanted to see Intel fall apart and just disappear. And this is like really starting to be the threat there. Everyone else is just so far ahead of them and just like has their business together in a much more functional way. And it is not clear to me that any one line of

chips is really going to be the thing that saves them at this point. At this point, it seems like they need a pretty substantial like evolution of their business. They need to prop up this foundry business that they're trying to make happen. It seems like the pieces are starting to fall into place, perhaps thanks to the cajoling of the U.S. government. But they still have to make chips that matter. They still have to make chips that matter. And at this point, we will see. I'm not convinced that any one line is going to be the one that gets them there. But it is true. Like, I think we are actually at a point where it is, we have to ask like, okay, how many more chips are they making, right? Like, are they going to be able to

get to the next one. It feels like they have stabilized. It feels like they are getting there. And this is maybe the line that they need to, you know, keep going. Yeah. I think the thing to look at for this one is Intel has this new thing called 18A, which is just a new process for making chips essentially. And this is like Pat Gelsinger years ago, the now former CEO of Intel who didn't even like get to stay in the job long enough to see the idea. out. That's how bad things have been at Intel. This was the thing they were betting was like, this is sort of a basket of changes in both what the chips are and in how Intel makes them that is supposed to prove to like the world that Intel can do advanced stuff. Right. This is like,

this is how they catch up to TSMC and this is how they prove that they can do the kind of work at the kind of like bleeding edge of this that is possible. So it's even like, even again, if you don't ever want to buy an Intel powered device, which, given the last several years, is a pretty practical and reasonable decision, this is still a big deal. Because even if you just want Intel to make chips for other companies that are smarter about it, it still matters whether or not this works. I've read enough about 18A to know I don't understand anything about how chips get made, except that it's very impressive and they're very small. But this is one to keep an eye on. And I think we're going to, like, I generally roll my eyes at, like, tables full of benchmark tests.

This is one where I will be eagerly awaiting benchmark tests. All right, what's your third one? Okay, this is more small Apple features, but I think this is pretty interesting. So Apple came out this week, and they announced the changes they're going to make to the iPhone, to the app store, to comply with some new age-gating laws. The immediate one is happening in Texas. There's going to be some more in Utah and Louisiana, as time goes. on, it seems like there's a lot of interest in these laws, and so these may not be the start. But what's interesting is Apple is putting these rules in place, and they're saying, if you're in Texas,

you have to do it. And everywhere else, just keep doing what you're doing. And so the specific rule here actually doesn't seem that wild to me or unreasonable. It's that if for people who are under 18 for kids, they have to be part of a family account. They have to get permission to buy and install apps, you know, maybe that's a little bit restrictive. I'm sure that's not great if you want to sell a lot of in-app purchases through the app store, but doesn't seem egregious to me. What I find really fascinating about this overall, though, is, you know, companies love to talk about how, you know, oppressive the regulatory environment is and how they have to do all these different, you know, jump through all these different hoops for different countries and jurisdictions.

and mostly I roll my eyes at that stuff. And, you know, there continue to be laws around app stores. And it's gotten to the point where Apple is twisting itself into knots to have different rules all across the globe. And now, even within the United States. And to some extent, I think some of this, at least, is a little self-inflicted. There are areas where perhaps they could go,

we'll just take the L on this one. We're just going to be... But at this point, if you're a developer, you as a developer now have to comply with these things to make your apps work in all these different areas. If you want your app to work in Texas, you have to apply this specific API

to make sure that it, like, gets the age range of the kid, and it's wild, and I am just fascinated to see how complicated the app store is getting, because Apple, in part, refuses to just apply these things worldwide. This to me is like full on malicious compliance from Apple because it's not, when I, when I first read this headline, my assumption was that Apple was

going to start to do some of the things that we're seeing like social platforms do, which is basically like look at your activity and behavior and try to guess what age you are and make decisions about what to show you based on that. I think that's a giant mess, but is like fascinating to watch. Like, we've seen a lot of people who are like, I'm 38 years old and YouTube thinks I'm 16, so it age-gated my account. That stuff is a mess, but I think is actually coming for a lot of these platforms. This thing about, like, actually, we can't just put a button that says, are you over 18 and trust that that will work? Like, when you go to like a liquor website and it's like, are you over 21 and you hit yes and it lets you in, it's like, what was the point of this thing that we're doing here? That's what Apple's doing here.

All Apple is doing is if you're in Texas and you set up an Apple ID, it's going to say, are you over 18? And you say yes. And it will say, needo, and let you in. Like, this is nothing that Apple is doing here. This is the least you can do if your Apple in order to cover your ass and say, well, they told us they were over 18. What are we supposed to do?

And again, I think there are huge reasons to be worried about this. Like, we're going to guess your age based on what you do. But actually, if any company were set up to do that in a way, that is both relatively privacy preserving and successful, it would be Apple. Like, do you know, do you know what knows my birthday is my phone? Like, it's just sitting, Apple could do it, but it is choosing not to just as a middle finger to all of these laws.

And it is both very funny, and I sort of appreciate that. It is really strange. Like Apple is like really taking a stand where they're like, we do not want to be the one who is responsible for checking your age. I get that because they're like, I don't want the legal liability for it. It's all downside for app. But it's like, instead, what if every single app did it individually and you provided that information to every single app?

That seems more private and secure. And, you know, I get it from their point of view. But your phone already has it. The app's where you has it. Like, you've got a credit card or you don't. They can kind of figure that out. It is more the broad trends of this, the broad strokes of this. And I think your point about malicious compliance is,

exactly spot on, which is that has been Apple's, like, M.O. for all of these laws. Yes. They jump, you know, they, again, they twist themselves into knots to make their compliance as weird and wonky and hard to follow as possible. I literally, when they announced their revamped rules for the Digital Services Act, I believe it is, to, you know, open up the app store in Europe, I spent, the weekend, reading through them, trying to make sense of who, what you do and who it applies

to and what apps have to pay, it is so wildly complicated. And like, that is exactly how they want it. They want you to not understand this stuff. They want to make it seem so burdensome and outrageous that the governments just go, ooh, we messed up. We're just going to walk this back. There's a team of lawyers at Apple who is just desperate. to be sued about this so that they can go in and be like, look what you made us do. Look at this horrible thing

that we had to create because you demanded that we do so. And I'm very much looking forward to that. It's going to be very funny. All right, my last one, and then we should get out of here, is about Facebook. They still make that an app

that neither you nor I have opened on purpose in a very long time, I suspect. But we've talked about this few times. There's a big push, particularly from Mark Zuckerberg himself to make Facebook Facebook again, right?

Like they're talking about the OG Facebook and bringing back this idea that like actually Facebook is a place to hang out with your friends and not just like look at reels from influencers. And the big changes that Facebook is making in order to engender this is to just be TikTok. Like in a very real way,

Facebook is like, oh, you don't like Facebook and you like TikTok. So we're going to do TikTok. So they announced a couple of things this week. One is that they're changing the recommendations engine in Facebook so that it will learn what you like more quickly, which A, I think is very smart. Because as I've been saying for years now,

the thing that is magical about TikTok, like the thing that works about that algorithm is it is so willing to show you stuff you don't like. And it is so quick to figure out what you do like and start giving it to you that it will take chances on that stuff over and over and over again. And because scrolling is so easy and because we're so used to it,

there's no penalty for being wrong. And so Facebook is clearly leaning into that now. Inside of that is the admission that all Facebook is now is Reels. Like it's just Facebook is Reels. Instagram is increasingly Reels, right? Like the Instagram iPad app opens to Reels. They're testing an Instagram app

for mobile that opens to Reels. Like Facebook is becoming WhatsApp and Reels. Is like that is meta. is they have smart glasses, they have WhatsApp, and they have reels. Those are the businesses. And that's fascinating.

But the other thing is what Facebook is calling friend bubbles. And basically the idea is we're going to up rank and show you more of the stuff that your friends make and like,

particularly that they've made and liked recently. And this to me suggests that everyone who worked at Facebook a bunch of years ago has since left Facebook because this is the exact thing that Facebook unwound because they realized that, oh, actually, your friends are idiots who

post stupid stuff. And what you care about actually has nothing to do with who your friends are. And so Facebook just became sort of random slop from influencers, just like every other platform, because that's what people actually turned out to want to watch. And so this pivot back to friends as like they're going to be the curators of content for you is like, we did this once already, and you Facebook didn't like it. So like, what are we doing here? This is like the disastrous proposition, right? They're actually talking about two distinct things. You can either have a service that is great for you and your friends. It is a small community where you get updates about your friends and their lives and you love it because there are people you care about there. Or you can

have TV where you watch different things than your friends and that's fine and it's good. And sometimes you talk about it, but sometimes you don't. But also, the one, the first one of those is demonstrably not a very good business. The second one is demonstrably a fabulous business. And it's a worst product and I like it less than it might ruin democracy, but it is a way better business. It also seems to be a much easier business to build your way into, right? Yeah. It is, I don't know, like next to impossible. Can you think of any service that existed already? that went, oh, we're going to be more social friendly and everybody and their friends

are going to move their network over to it. Right? This all happens from upstarts. It is mostly upstarts who have something a little bit new and a little bit fresh, and everybody rushes there. And that is why Facebook exploded in the first place,

and it lasted for a really long time, and then it wasn't there. And you can kind of see that pattern repeating on every single social network, where eventually it just becomes a little stale, becomes a little too stiff, and something else comes along. Yeah, and I think it's bizarre, frankly,

that that hasn't happened yet. And I think, frankly, the fact that it hasn't happened to Facebook yet, the fact that it hasn't been sort of disrupted on that particular side of things might indicate that actually we've just solved that problem with, like, group chats and text messages. And that maybe this is a product that doesn't need to exist. And actually, even as I'm saying this,

I'm saying, you know what, has disrupted that is Snapchat, which is a perfect example of terrific, culturally relevant, massively popular product, not a very good business. And so it's like, is maybe if I'm Mark Zuckerberg, I'm willing to say I'm going to, you know, chop off some of this business in the name of making it a product that people actually like and use on purpose

and makes them feel good. But nothing about the history of meta suggests that that's the case. Well, and the original Facebook, I think, is explicitly very slow and rigid, which is just not how the internet works now. Maybe it should be, but it's not. Yeah. It is not, and it doesn't work for people, and that is, I think, why that side of the site does not feel fresh and lively anymore, and they have just pivoted to, you know, weird TV. That is not as good as rival networks.

Indeed. All right, we need to get out of here. I've gone two hours without looking at TikTok, and that's too long. So I'm going to go, I'm going to go scroll some TikTok. We need to get out of here. Thank you, Jake, for being here. Thank you, Hayden, who is, you know, long gone doing AI things. This was a delight.

that is it for the Vergecast. If you have questions, if you have stuff you want to talk about, if you have Facebook friends who actually post cool things, I would love to hear about it. You can email us, Vergecast at the verge.com.

Call the Hotline 866, Vorge11. Keep watching and listening to Version History. Episode 2 is coming out on Sunday. It's a very fun one. We all get very mad at each other at various points.

It's a great time. You'll enjoy it. Keep telling us how you feel about this episode. Lots more of that coming. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Shows produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer,

and Travis Larchchuk. we will be back next week and I believe actually I'm just going to say this out loud so he has to do it Nilai Patel will be back next week I am very much looking forward to it we'll see you then rock'amore