The Vergecast - Meta's new smart glasses look like the future

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

The Verge's Alex Heath joins Nilay, Alex, and David to talk about all the announcements coming out of Meta Connect: the impressive (and expensive) Orion glasses, the new features for the Ray-Ban Smart Glasses, and lots and lots of new AI. Then they discuss the latest executive departures at OpenAI, as the industry's foremost AI company undergoes a huge shift. In the lightning round, it's time for more AI gadgets, the PS5 Pro... and then some more AI gadgets. Further reading: Meta Connect 2024: biggest news and announcements Hands-on with Orion, Meta’s first pair of AR glasses Meta’s Ray-Bans will now ‘remember’ things for you Why Mark Zuckerberg thinks AR glasses will replace your phone Meta’s VR app store is about to fill up with phone-style 2D apps Mark Zuckerberg: creators and publishers ‘overestimate the value’ of their work for training AI Meta’s AI can now talk to you in the voices of Awkwafina, John Cena, and Judi Dench Kristen Bell told Instagram to ‘get rid of AI’ before she became its official voice OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is leaving Just 5,000 people use the Rabbit R1 every day Google Pixel Buds Pro 2 review: big upgrade, much smaller earbuds I played the PS5 Pro, and it’s clearly better Inside Jony Ive’s Life After Apple and His LoveFrom Design Business Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of face computers. And the trademarked Vergecast matrix of wearable stuff. I don't want to start with a swear word, but if you know, it's usually a swear word.

Hi, I'm your friend, Eli Alex Kranz is here. I'm also wearing my augmented reality glasses right now. Because they pass light through them? Yeah, they pass light through them. and everything is augmented now. I can see. It's been augmented into focus. Yeah.

I got you. David Pierce is here. Hello. And Alex Heath is here. Alex, are you actually wearing a face computer? I am, but you'll never know. It's a big week in tech news, quite a lot going on. It was MetaConnect.

Alex was there, along with Kylie Robeson and Jay Peters. Alex, you wore the Orion AR glasses, the demo. You interviewed Zuckerberg. We got to talk all about that. There's tons of other news out of Metacconnect. And then there's chaos at OpenAI, which a company for being as successful as it is remains mired in nothing but pure chaos. We could just snip that and play it every single week on the first cast. Just that thing you just said is like a it's just a universally true statement at this point.

Yeah, we have to talk about that. And then we have lightning round unsponsored. Still. I have walked into rooms at this company. demanded why the lightning round is unsponsored. Was anybody else in the room? No one else was in the rooms. This is the, I'm getting, I'm working up to the final result.

But you walk into a room, you know, where Eater is having a staff meeting demanding the lightning round around be sponsored. And they're like, I don't, we're doing a roundup on cakes. Like, get out of here. I'm working on it. Every day closer to the goal. Okay. Let's start with meta.

Alex, you wore the Orion. I think the Orion is the thing to talk about. They've been working on this for 10 years. Reality Labs burning billions of dollars a year. They did it. They made AR glasses. But you can't buy them and they cost $10,000. Kind of.

Yeah. You can't buy them. So they are glasses in the sense that you can put them on and they work to a degree. I wrote this in the story. And I had a hard time writing about this because I've been getting a lot of almost products put on my face recently, like just coming off of snap. We do have a series of photos of you that is incredible. right now. Yeah, I need to make like a like a photo book to just have at home and look at it and go like, that's a cry for help. Me wearing all these face computers. Yeah, it's it's a really impressive

demo. I think meta is doing the demos because it knows it's impressive, but it's not a product. So I mean, I wrote this in the story. It's it's not vaporware. Like it's very real and it's not a simulation. It's not totally on rails. I used it for probably a total of two and a half hours between the two days we were shooting. And I had enough opportunity to go off of the beaten path a little bit and make sure I wasn't just getting piped in a complete simulation. And it's a real working piece of kit. But it's not a product. And that says a lot about the state of AR in these glasses.

and at the same time, I finally feel like I've been writing about this for so long, banging my head against the wall, I'm being like, what am I doing? This is never going to happen. And I finally feel after this week that AR glasses I may actually want to use are not a pipe dream. Yeah. I want to argue with you about the definition of the word vaporware, which is very important to me personally. And holograms. And holograms. So let's start. That's Alex and I had gotten a real fight about what the word holograms means this week. We'll get into all this, I promise. But let's start with what it is, right? Because AR glasses, you're correct.

The industry has been talking about them for a long time. Magic Leap promised AR glasses years ago. If you'll remember, their founder claimed that he could hack the GPU of your brain. This is a real thing. And that was in reference to a display technology because this is the challenge. How do we build a display that you can look through, they can augment reality, have the processing power to see reality and augment it, have connectivity, have a battery,

and no one can solve these problems. Most of all, the display. Yeah. The thing doesn't exist. The thing that you look through to perceive the world and then layer information over stuff, you could maybe solve battery and processing and all this stuff and you're wearing a backpack.

But the actual display technology, to make it good, has more or less not existed in any realistic way. and magically they had to give up on their idea and they tried another thing. And HoloLens was another thing with a tiny field of view. And there's a long list of things with bad fields of view. And it seems like that's the thing meta solved most of all here. Yeah.

A quote that really stuck out to me from the product lead when I was getting my demo was that the display was a scientific breakthrough problem they had to solve. And now they're in the engineering problem solving phase of making these glasses work at a price. point that people can actually buy. And that really stuck with me. You're right that the display is the hardest part. The distinction between AR glasses like these in the Vision Pro or the MetaQuest is that, yes, you can do mixed reality in the Pro and the Quest, in the Vision and the Quest, but what they're doing is fully enclosing your face in a computer, piping video in and mixing all that in the displays. These are literally just these glasses, Orion, are letting light in. They're actual glasses. And so the challenge there is much different.

And meta has a lot of good ideas here. And they also, I think, realized that the specific optical stack that they went with for Orion was just inexplicably hard to manufacture. And these lenses are made of silicon carbide, which is also used in like space. it's used in EVs. It's just in like drimmels. It's like what you use for cutting tools. It's literally like a giant crystal. Yeah.

It's also used for wedding rings sometimes. So basically it's like having two fake diamonds on your face. Yeah. And they were talking to me about this and this like challenge of the yields on this. It's like, yeah, you have to cut the crystal perfectly. He's like, and there's not enough of it in the world. So we're growing crystals. We're growing like big ass silicon carbide rocks.

I'm sorry. The image of Mark Zuckerberg walking into the basement of his layer looking at his like crystal farm in a haze of like purple smoke and being like, I will conquer the world. I mean like I'm go get it, Mark. You know? Very distinct image. But you have to be that person to do this. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's another thing of all this that we'll get into. This is like, I think this is a device that only meta could have built in a way that they can show to the world. because for a lot of reasons. Because everybody else would expect it to ship. Yeah. Like everybody else does hardware more often. So we'd be like, okay, but when?

I think if Meadow was not a founder mode company to the fullest extent, this thing would have been killed a long time ago. So can I read you? I just want to read you a quote from Ben Thompson who writes a newsletter called Trekery. He tried on her eye and he just said this thing that it just made me start laughing. a lot, and I'll explain why it made me laugh so hard. Here's a quote. The difference from the quest, and he's him talking about Ryan, the obvious limitations of the display, particularly well-resolution felt immaterial.

The difference from the quest or Vision Pro is that actually looking at reality is so dramatically different from even best-in-class pass-through that holographic video quality doesn't really matter. Even the highest-quality presentation layer will pale in comparison to reality. Yeah, dude. I mean, this is very funny. He's presenting this as like a, right? And it's Ben and that's how he writes and that's fun. But if you'll recall, my review of the Vision Pro was looking at display sucks.

Like this is the end of the road for video pass-through. If you want to put a screen in front of your head in a VR headset and then do camera-based pass-through, this is as good as it will ever be and it is nowhere near good enough. At the time, many people disagree with me. I believe that I have been proven to be correct about the value of the Vision Pro over time. still not pleased with myself that I gave it a seven. Seven out of ten. But like this is the thing, right?

Meta built the displays that grew the crystal. Zuckerberg is like, I'm spending the money. I can't be fired because I own super voting shares of this company. Here it is. I made the displays. When you say it's not a product, did he make the rest of it? Like, is the software good? There is an OS.

Right. So I guess I'll just quickly explain like how we got to where we are. They started developing this about 10 years ago. This is like Zuckerberg's big bet to maybe control the next computing platform if you buy into the idea that face computers are maybe that. In 2022, it became, I think everyone remembers the year of efficiency. Meta stock was not doing as well. They were cutting back budgets. And they decided looking at how expensive it was going to be to create Orion.

I'm told that the cost of build is somewhere around $10,000 per pair. and that the display stack, especially the lenses, the silicon carbide, was just not something that would scale. They decided to make it a prototype internally. And then there was debate after that of, okay, do we show it to the world at all? Is it good enough? And, I mean, a thing that stuck out to me that Baws, the CTO told me, was like, we just didn't think this was going to work at all. When we set out to build this, we thought maybe a 10% chance we actually get to a working device. And I think he literally said, I was just like, holy shit, it works.

And I think they were amazed that it works. And so they started in earnest on the software stack like three months ago, deciding that they were going to show it off at Connect. So it does have an OS, you know, they have pretty concrete ideas, especially on the interaction elements of it, which we'll get into. The software is bare bones. They've got some demo apps. They had Instagram. You and I did a call over Messenger. Nealai, they've got a web browser.

But these are like the early primitives of how you would bring 2D experiences into 3D space. It's like a, it's like Vision Pro. It's like a floating pain. I think the work they're doing now that they have a working kit is in the next couple of years. How do you actually make uniquely 3D augmented type interfaces, which is like you just have to have the thing on your face. You have to be able to use it. And for the longest time, this hasn't been something that even resembles an actual pair of glasses.

Like the thing they showed me that it was even like in 2022, it had like a backpack. I mean, it was just the iteration they've done, even in just the last couple years, is pretty remarkable. Yeah. So yeah, the software had enough ideas in it to where I went, okay, they have ideas of where this is going. It's still super rough. but like the AI stuff especially, it's compelling. What all did you get to actually do in the headset? Yeah, we did, you know, web browsing, video calling,

um, basic kind of Instagram stuff, um, calling in a 2D HD pain, which like Nilai beamed him that way and I could see him. He couldn't see me because they, there's all these things in Orion that they just turned off because they decided to not make it a product. Like there's, they have inward facing cameras that could potentially map your face to an avatar to show someone and they just have them turned off because like they're not it's not being used for that now yeah but they could also just look like garbage yeah so we did that some meta employees came in as avatars like floating like think of the horizon quest avatar style but like legs or no

legs legs legs and like full body scale across the 10 000 a leg is what I'm told yeah uh and then we did like a code they have their hyper realistic kind of uncanny valley codec avatars someone called in as one of those as well. And then there were some games. And the games were actually, you know, I've done a lot of really kind of, I would say, just gimmicky AR games in my career. And the games were actually decent, like the interactions, because they've nailed a lot of the interaction elements and input elements of the glasses.

The game experience was actually surprisingly good. And they have some connected ones where like you scan a QR code. You're in this pawn game immediately with someone else wearing the glasses who just scanned it. And that's how I did it was Zuckerberg. in the video you can see on all of the Verges channels. He beat me, of course, in Pong. Did they have a laser tag game? That's my AR dream.

Yeah, that would be cool. They had this kind of Space Invaders-esque game where your head was move the ship and the band, which we'll talk about, was the lasers for the ship. So here's what I'm curious about the, they've built a lot of stuff in the quest, right? Like they've taken Android. They've built an entire operating system. They have a store.

A lot of that is complete. And I've always assumed, based on what Mark and others have said, is that they're doing all that work there in that form factor. And that lets them build the software experiences. And then they're building the Raybans and the other form factor. And then, you know, Orion is like the goal. Are they using any of the stuff from the quest? Like any of the user interface gestures, any of the, is it Android? Yeah, it's Android-based.

It's a similar kind of app launcher UI. The thing with the app launcher, though, that's different is like it's much more minimal and your finger gesture brings it up and then takes it away just as quickly. They're very different products. I mean, the avatar was the same as what you would see on like a Quest game. But I'm just kidding, you know, like Zuck has laid out the idea that like the meta-ray bands are on one side of the spectrum and the headset is on the other side. where this is not the right form factor,

but I can do everything in it. And the raybans are the right form factor. I can't do anything in them hardly. And in the middle are these glasses, right? And these products are going to converge towards the glasses. So it just seems interesting to me that they haven't used all the stuff from the quest because that was the plan that they sort of articulate. Well, like I said, they started doing the software for this like three months ago.

Sure. And I will say the coolest thing, David, to your earlier question that we did was this meta-AI thing where they laid out all these ingredients for a smoothie on a table. They gave me the prompts, which means they tuned it a little bit, right? But there's just a guy in the background being like, no, I messed around with it to know that it was actually, it was a model running. It wasn't Tom Brady being like, all right, smoothie. Yeah, but it was like, I asked it to make a smoothie out of the ingredients and it popped up like a recipe pane above me with I could like click through the different steps. Can I just quickly be the turd in the punch bowl on this particular demo?

Because I've seen a bunch of people talking about this particular demo. And I am so spectacularly unimpressed with that demo. and I would like you to tell me why I'm wrong. So, first of all, if you go look at that demo, every single thing on that table says what it is with big-ass letters. And you know what's a really easy thing to do? It does.

The bag of dates says dates in big-ass letters. And the box of macha says macha in big-ass letters. Like, those are not hard computer problems to solve. If you're listening to this in your car, I want you to know that right now, Alex Heath is scrolling through a picture to confirm or deny that the bag of date says dates on it. There are two things on the table that don't say in words what they are on the box.

It's the banana and it's the pineapple. And it identifies the banana, which is, again, a really easy thing for a computer to do. And it misses the pineapple entirely. Again, I'm just putting this out there. If you're listening, you know, when you're on a Google meet call with someone and their face instantly goes to I'm browsing the web face? I've never seen anyone move to I'm browsing the web face as fast as Alex did when David said everything. I have a label. Well, okay, you're right.

A big box that says dates on it is not a hard computer problem to solve. David, so the pineapple, it missed in the video I did with Zuck. It got it right the first day I did it. Okay. That's good. That's encouraging. You still pick the two most distinctive fruits that you could have possibly picked. I'm just saying this demo is the easiest possible version of this demo.

And still, it gives you a recipe that involves not everything on the table and a bunch of stuff you don't have on the table. So I get to the end of that demo and I'm like, what problem? Did we just solve? David, I fully agree with your big point. Like, yes, there's a lot of smoke and mirrors here. The bar is also low. What they were trying to communicate is like, oh, what happens when you have the visual AI and the ray bands with a display?

And so what I'm talking about is not the fact that it recognized everything right or wrong. It's just this idea of like that visual AI with a display. And then, oh, I can actually like, I don't have to like just listen to the recipe. I can see it and I can move it around and I can make it big. was cool. The thing in the demo where it popped up above it saying what each thing was, I actually thought was like, that's a really cool little bit of UI that it was like, this is the cacao. Never mind that there was a box that said cacao right underneath the label. But still, like, I actually thought the UI was very cool for what amounted to a not particularly

impressive problem. So looking at it as like, here is how you do this, I think is actually very clever. I just was so, like, so many people were like, oh my God, the smoothie thing. And it's like, did we actually do anything here? Also, to make a smoothie, you just dump everything. I was going to say, like, push the button. Yeah, it's a blender. It'll be fine. There's a technique here that the AI is going to walk you through.

You hit pulse a couple of times and then you hit play. It should have showed us you'd make bread. So on the smoothie thing, just really quick, I kind of freaked out not because of how crazy I thought it was, did it correctly identify the pineapple the first time, David. They had been doing all these little Easter eggs for me throughout my. I spent like a full day at Meta and I had done a bunch of other demos before. this. And they were like dropping little things all throughout my demos, like the text that came up in the glasses was like an employee being like, hey, I've got the scoop for you on the next AR glasses.

Like I need to go like step out of the room to like not get caught. And then they by the time I got to the smoothie, I do, I make smoothies every morning. And so by the, I thought I was like, did they, do they have cameras in my house? Like I got to the point I just turned around to the room because there's like 12 people in the room. And I'm just like, Are you guys like watching me at home? Are you listening to me on my phone? Just say yes or no. Yeah.

Yeah. It was the smoothie thing felt special. And so I was actually very disappointed to see that everyone got the smoothie demo. But that's okay. So I want to come back to whether the demo is real or fake in the debate about what the word vaporware means. But you talked about the control band, the wristband several times. Let's explain that real quick first. There's a part of this where the neural wristband is the most.

ready to go product, which is fascinating in and of itself. Kind of the coolest, I think. Yeah. It's done. It's one part of the dream, for sure. It's very clear that the band is done. I also know this because they're releasing a pair of glasses with a very small heads-up display.

It's not full AR that will use the band, I'm pretty sure, next year. It was very clear that the band is done. And that's why I spent more time in the story than I originally thought writing about the band. Also because it was genuinely, I mean, I think I said this in the video. It was one of the coolest experiences with a new piece of technology I've ever had. Because there's no calibration. You put it on.

You go through the gestures and it has this haptic feedback in the band that kind of reinforces when you're doing it correctly. I did that for like 10 seconds. And I was just flying through the thing. And to the point where I had to take them off at one point and put them back on and go back through this setup. And I didn't even, I just did it on my own. And like it just clicked so fast and it's so precise. And yeah, it uses EMG electromyalography. And it's not reading your thoughts, but it's interpreting neural signals through the movements of your wrist and translating those into input in the glasses.

And Meta bought a startup that we have covered extensively. I believe Adi covered this even before they sold to Facebook. This was like in 2019, Control Labs. And it's this tech. and it's really powerful. I think they've stumbled onto something here that I haven't seen four headsets, which is how do you control them without putting your hands out in front of you? You know, like I used the spectacles, which rely on just hand tracking the week before.

And I was thinking when I was like flying to meta the next week, like in my airplane seat, it's like, you're not going to stick your hands out like in an airplane seat to control your glasses. North glasses did that too, right? They had, they had like a ring that would, they used to control it. It was like a joystick on a ring. Yeah. It was cool. Yeah.

But this is like moving your hands out in front of it. This is like hyper precise click like input that you can do with very, very small hand gestures in your pocket or behind your back. And I just, I mean, I like audibly gasped when I started using it. This is like cool technology. we've seen for ages, right? Well, Control Labs has been around. Yeah, yeah, like Control Labs. We saw, we've seen, like, horrible products from small startups using this stuff before.

But it's also, like, just regularly used in prosthetics style, particularly, like, hand prosthetics and arm prosthetics to give that movement. So it's, like, it's really cool to see it come to consumer products. Yeah, I'd never seen EMG in a consumer products. So it was, it was really cool. There's like one in 2014. It's called, like, the frog or something. Does nobody remember this? No.

I swear that there was a real bottom. Yeah, we were like, that's my face right now. No, but Alex, the thing you said in your story that most got me was the moment where you're, like, you had your hands in your jacket pockets and you're controlling the thing. And that's the moment where you're like, oh, this is obviously the correct answer for this. And I think I'm fascinated by the whole kind of kit that they put together where it's the, it's the glasses. there's the wireless compute puck

that feels like you put it in your jacket pocket or your backpacker your back pocket or whatever and then it's the band and I think at least for now that strikes me as like the exact right three parts in the right way.

I think the Vision Pro's cable thing is wrong the only hand motions that the cameras can see in front of your face is wrong like I honestly believe meta got that part of this thing like exactly correct. And it just feels like you instantly are like using it in a way that feels way more natural. Yes.

Even like Neil is experience at the Vision Pro where you like, you still have to sort of keep your hands on like the front plane of your body and in view. And that is just an amount of thinking that you don't have to do with this. And that feels much better. Yeah. I totally agree. I want to talk about the puck just I guess on the band though too. What meta hopes is that over time the band becomes its own platform and that it

It interfaces with appliances. It interfaces with your car, other gadgets. And the idea is like, this is probably a 10 to 15 year out thing, honestly, for it to really, you know. Interfaces with your car? Yeah. So the idea is like you're walking around with these glasses. You look at your car and you want to start the engine as you're walking up to it. You do a little tap because it sees that you're looking at your car. The band is connected. There's an API. You're logged in and you turn your AC on or you turn your. This is the idea of a man who. who can grow crystals in the basement of this mansion. Well, it's honestly, it's, there's several leaps to get there. It's not like the ecosystem of it all will be tough to develop until there's scale with these glasses. But it's pretty obvious to think about, okay, if I'm wearing contextually, you know, spatially wear glasses at all times and I'm walking around my house and I look at my thermostat and I want to change the setting, why can my band not, because it's all connected,

why can my band not adjust the thermostat? And that's, that's the idea they have. I think it's really cool. Why can I turn reality into a bitmap display with Windows and a mouse? Yeah. With a camera and a controller and good enough processing, you can get a pretty long way towards that. Yeah. So people will see the band soon, like next year.

And I'm excited about that. I've got to do an update real fast. I found the band. It was called the Mayo. It cost $200. They first started reporting on it in 2013, came out in 2016. and you wore it like on the middle of your fore. Oh, sure, yeah. To control your laptop and also to keep this sweat away from you while you play tennis.

It's so ugly. Oh, I remember this thing. I tried this thing. The thing looks like a Bala bangle. It really does. And it uses EMG, Kranz? Yeah, yeah, it used EMG. Like that particular technology, the EMG technology has been around a while.

We've seen it and other stuff. But it's always like been kind of, nobody's gotten the software part of it right. And the form factor. It looks like the fifth. Yeah. Like this thing is not bulky and it just sits on your wrist. Did you have to wear it tightly around your wrist? It's tight, but it's not like, like there are sensors that indent a little bit into your skin, but it wasn't like uncomfortable.

I wore it. I left the demo room with it still on to go interview Zuckerberg and like they came running after me and were like, you still got the band on. Like, please let us keep that. So if we're talking about, you know, the three parts of this, I guess on the puck. I just like, David, I agree with you that this feels like the right combination for now. They obviously don't want the puck to be in the picture long term. Sure. But I think we're a long way away from that.

Yeah. They made the decision, which I think is the correct call, is that they want the glasses to be as light as possible and to not burn your face, which is, you know, what I've experienced a lot, not literally burning, but just they get really hot. And so they made the decision to offload most of the app logic onto the puck. they invented their own Wi-Fi protocol. And it has to be 12 to 13 feet max away at all times or the glasses just don't work. Why do we call it a puck and not a computer? I mean, why do they call them glasses and not a computer? Yeah.

Is it a circle? Yeah. It's like it looks like one of the big like iPhone brick chargers you could like put on the back of the iPhone with like MagSafe. Like a big ass anchor. Yeah. It looks like you could put it in your back pocket, but you want to. wear a belt. Okay. I could put it in my back pocket because I have huge back pockets, but yeah, I mean, are you wearing jinkos? Did we just learn something about it? Um, yeah. I know you live in LA,

but like, how bad is it gotten over there? It's pretty bad. Um, yeah. Uh, so the puck is the right trade off to make because these glasses only weigh 98 grams, whereas the Vision Pro is like five, six X that. And I, like, I, like, I said, you. said, I wore them for two hours, and I never felt, like, uncomfortable. And a funny thing about the two hours, I was informed as we were rapping, like, you know, there's a bunch of men of employees in the room. I'm, I think I was the second journalist ever to try them. I've also written about these extensively, so they were really, like, on edge. And they, um, towards the end, like, I took them off and I could just hear everyone, like, breathe a sigh of relief. And they were

like, you just broke the, the record for longest demo. Actually, longest continuous wear of them at two hours. We were like, yeah, we thought they would just, like, crap out by now. So that was... Was there a battery indicator or anything? No, no, there wasn't. And they didn't swap them out or anything. That's cool.

Yeah. How? Okay, you wear glasses. Yeah. How heavy versus the ones you're wearing now, which seem fairly light. Like, you notice, but, like, I have a pair of chunky L.A. glasses that honestly felt in the same ballpark. Okay.

It wasn't too heavy. Because, like, it was on the ears. It was just those earpieces are so big. No pressure on the ears. I mean, if anything, it's a little on the front of your face. But, and the thing that struck me was, you know, they told me definitively, like, the frames will be half as thick in the consumer version, which means. Okay. So, okay, wait, that's it.

That's my cue to argue with your own paperware. Okay. So just let's describe the product you saw, which is a very impressive demo, right? Lots of people saw a demo. Everyone is suitably impressed. Great. The thing that they accomplished, that no. else has been able to accomplish is getting that display to work in that form factor.

98 grams on your face, two hours of battery life, you can look at reality through the lenses, and it will put, from what I understand, labels above boxes of cocoa. That's wonderful. Mark Zuckerer can play with you. They had, right, they've iterated it and developed the existing EMG control band. We put a computer in a giant battery and are sending signals from it wirelessly to something else. Challenging because I got to do it in real time, but, right, a thing that existed. We put it all together in a product and we sell it far, far away, right? Like, I'm giving

them credit for a bunch of stuff. Some stuff they iterated, some stuff they bought, some stuff they had to build from scratch and spend billions of dollars that basically no one else has managed to crack yet. All great. It's a long way from here to there. Three years. So that's their promise. And so, like, you know, the thing I would say is like, it's a vapor. till it ships. And meta has the extraordinarily opportunity to show a thing that isn't shipping. They're all proud of it. You can see they're bursting

with pride. They in particular built a display technology. They can demo for two hours with a variety of people doing stuff that no one else has been able to do. Magically, hacking the GPU of your brain, I think, is the closest to this. And they had people sitting down next to a box the size of a refrigerator and they couldn't

ship it. What is the, the, and meta doesn't have to do that, right? They're selling the quest, they make a bunch of money selling ads, they got Kristen Bell being an AI voice, they have a whole business that's running that can subsidize this thing. It's still vapor, in my opinion. Like, they have to ship it. They're just able to be confident that they've gotten this far, but it's unclear to me what this actually looks like as a product, because I sincerely doubt it will have a wireless compute puck and like once they start shipping the neural wristband it won't take on a life of its own in some other way and it will be completely divorced from the quest ecosystem there it's just like there's a set of unanswered questions here that I think it's very tempting to pre-answer or

imagine and that honestly is the fun part and I'm excited to do some of that with all of you but it's also like three years a long time a lot of things can change in three years and a lot of other things have to go, right? Like, the lenses in your story, they are planning to ship regular lenses, right? They're going to go from silicon carbide to glass. Well, they wouldn't tell me the material. And the truth is that they're parallel pathing like four or five different options. So they're... Right, but if your big innovation is the display and you're like, we have four options to bring this display to mark, you actually haven't picked. I think you're being simplistic when you say display, because the display is the projectors, the waveguides, and the lenses. The lenses specifically are what they

can't manufacture in a cheap enough way at scale. So the lenses will be different. The projectors are on the path of what I saw going to be the same kind of technology. They invented them, you know, from scratch. The waveguides, the same. They wouldn't tell me what the lenses are, not because I don't think they don't know necessarily, but because they haven't fully decided because they're locking these things in on like a timeline that is aggressive, but also they don't want to speak before they, like, if they would have said, you know, let me back up. Like, they decided to not ship Orion two years ago. So the timeline for this hardware stuff is farther out. They, when they, when they say, you know, this is coming in a few years, it's not like we have not set anything

up for this to happen in three years. They have. They're on a, believe me, heads will roll if there is not a consumer version of these hair classes in a few years. Sure, but those are the stakes. The stakes are, either we're all double-clicking on cars, you know, to see what happens, or heads will roll.

Like, I don't want to shy away from the stakes. Yeah. The part of me that says it's great to imagine how these products might work, especially products that are meant to deliver AI as a new platform that replace smartphones. On balance, I don't believe you in a probably doesn't work is like the right answer.

and the fact that they got the display to work, which no one else has ever achieved, as far as I can tell, is incredible. Now comes like an incredible hard part. Okay, but let's talk about these lenses, though, because like the lenses is part of the magic of these things, right? Like they went with this really expensive product to do this, to have the best light refraction and stuff.

And that's because that material exists in the world. I mean, it doesn't, very little of it exists in the world. They usually make it all. But like they have to do all of that. Now they're going to have to go to a whole different thing, which presumably would have a lower price, but similar qualities. And that seems not like an engineering, but like a science problem. And that seems like a big science problem for them to have. I don't think they see it that way.

I'm sure they don't. Yeah, I kind of agree with you. I mean, look, here's what they told me the consumer version will be. The frames will be about half as thick. Projector technology will be very similar. will be in line with what I saw. The wave guides will. The field of view, which was 70 degrees, which is super wide,

will be slightly smaller, but not, like, dramatically. And the puck will exist. The band will exist. Like, it's just the lenses that they, I think, are looking at a few options, and they don't have to make the call right now, so they're not committing to it. And on the why they're not using silicon carbide and why they did it in the first place is they told,

me they had hoped that the rest of the industry, whether it was other companies doing air headsets or even the EV industry, for example, which hasn't grown in the last five years, I think, as everyone thought it would maybe five years ago, which is when they began the manufacturing of Orion and Ernest. They thought the rest of the industry would go to silicon carbide and build up the economies of scale with them. And they ended up being the only company that was trying to do this in this form factor. So that's like a really interesting bet, right? You think Apple and Google and and Samsung are all going to go forward, invest in the technology,

and you'll just catch the tailwind, and that didn't happen. Yeah, they thought economies of scale would make silicon carbide more efficient and less costly to produce, and that didn't happen. I mean, Boz told me 90% of the cost is the lenses. Yeah, because it's like having two diamond rings on your face. Yeah, but I'm just, I'm coming back to the thing no one has solved is the displays. So whether the lenses are the key element of the displays, or just they happen to have bought a lot of silicon carbide

and they use them this time. Like, I don't, I'm curious to know, like, how much of the thing that they demoed is down to that lens. Because everybody's vision is the same, right? We're going to put glasses in your face. You're going to look at the world. We're going to layer digital information over the world. And then you're going to be able to take action on it.

This is Apple's vision, and they couldn't build it. So they built the Vision Pro. And if Apple is like, we can't make it good enough on a timeline to sell. here's a VR headset that fakes it. Meta doesn't have to do that. Like, meta's business is good enough to keep funneling money into this R&D project. I think I'm curious here to read on Zuck

wanting to show it. Yeah. Because I think he was just having the time of his life yesterday at Metacconnect, like showing up all the toys that he's built and like how far ahead of both Apple and Google in various ways. There were a lot of shots at Apple and Google in that came out.

Wait, Nilai, you and I have paid a lot of attention to these companies this year and have talked about this, would you bet for or against Apple having something that looks and works an awful lot like Orion and is just as expensive to make in existence in their offices right now? I would say they probably have 500 variations of something that looks and works exactly like Orion. And Apple is not the kind of company that shows off science projects like this at all. They just won't do it. They've talked about it, right? I mean, like Tim Cook, in the lead up to the vision, before the vision,

Before the Vision Pro existed, Tim Cook was like, I'm making glasses. Like, I'm going to, everything that he ever described was Orion. So I think Zuck loves the fact that he showed off the thing that Apple has been describing for years, well before Apple was ready to do it. I do wonder, like, when Apple's like, we need chips, they go to TSM and they're like, we're going to buy all the chips. We're going to build you a factory, Corning. But it's your, we don't want to own it.

We just want to build it for you. so we have the capacity for it, you run it. We're not putting that on our books. Like, that's the level that Apple makes investments at. And I don't think they were able to pull off this form factor. And even with the Vision Pro, the form factor compromises are like now in retrospect, like ludicrous, right? Like the battery, all the stuff, right? The hand tracking.

And actually, you know, even the Orion, right, that uses your eyes to the pointers still feels like a miss to me. That's still overloading an input within output. I disagree because of the band. The eyes, when they're your drag and not your click, and the click is not sticking hands up, it works pretty well. Like, I thought the same thing with the Vision Pro. If you try Orion at some point, I'd be curious to hear how you think when you try it, because the eye tracking was surprisingly good with the band.

When you were having the conversation with NELI, were you able to also do other stuff at the same time? Yeah. Because I'm just curious, like, how that works. if you're like looking at him and then you need to move something over here. And that means you have to drag it. So you have to kind of like look away from him in a potentially awkward way. You could stick your hand out and pinch it and drag it or you could glance at it really quick.

Tap your fingers together to. Oh, because it does hand tracking too. It does hand tracking and it will merge hand tracking with all of it anytime you put your hands out. That's smart. Yeah. Well, the reason I brought all this up is like Apple solved, Apple punted on the big problem and the dislay problem. and then try to solve a bunch of the other problems, or at least show you what a bunch of the other problems

could look like if they were solved, like hand tracking, like Windows and space, spatial compute, all this stuff. But they couldn't solve the display problem so that you end up with the Vision Pro. Even in the compromised state of the Vision Proform factor. Meta has solved the display problem, at least we think, in a way that cost $10,000.

And we have yet to see how they will solve the rest of the problems. And that is kind of just an interesting place. I agree. Here's the company that could not solve the display, but they shipped the product, like the operating system and the app model and the blah, blah,

and then here's the company that solved the display, but can't ship it because it's too expensive. Eventually, it seems like the answer is going to be someone will get to the right answer in the middle first. But again, I keep coming back to, like, Heath last year,

when Meta tried to front-run the Vision Pro, one of the things that Zuckerberg basically said was, we could have done something as good as the Vision Pro, but it would have been as expensive as the Vision Pro when we don't want to do that. I think it is perfectly plausible that at a bunch of other companies in the tech industry right now, there is a thing that looks and works and costs just like Orion.

And then there's whatever Snap has. And I was going to say the difference is there are only two companies willing to show it to people. And of those two, Meta is just absolutely kicking Snap's ass. But in a certain way, kudos to meta for being the ones who are actually willing to be out in public, sort of showing the state of the art on what they're working on. but I genuinely wonder how far ahead it actually is because the gap between we've made a thousand of these and they cost $10,000 each and we can make millions of them at a reasonable price is so much bigger than anybody ever makes it out to be, including experienced hardware

companies. Like the gap between I can make one and I can make a thousand is huge. And like, kudos to meta, they're there. But thousands to millions is a completely different thing. Wait, wait, wait. But have we seen people wearing, is there an increased use of global? glassware and like at Google, at Apple. Like, does it just seem like more people have bad vision and thick glasses?

I mean, Google's been showing off the, the, there are their prototype glasses in a bunch of Google videos recently. Like, they're, that kind of look like the size and shape of Orion. Like, this stuff is just out there. I just, as the Verge's foremost phase computer expert, again, this is a cry for help. This is not a brag. I actually will push back on you guys. I do not think anyone has anything working.

in this form factor as a standalone kit that is not completely on rails or something on a desk that you look through. I don't think that actually exists. Can I just for the sake of our own comments, can I just say a bunch of nouns so that people... What? HoloLens. X Real 2 Pro Air or whatever it's called. HTC. Other companies. Yes, I know other companies have made glasses before. I know that the hall Alex and I have both changed spark plugs wearing a HoloLens. Like the form factor innovation here is real. Like getting it down to glasses. I'm not trying to take away from that.

I'm just pointing at like it's vapor till it ships. Like it's one of our rules, right? And the distance from what we see today to a product, all of the questions I have to answer in the middle. This is what I was asking about the quest. They've answered a bunch of these questions with the quest. I suspect they think that some of those. answers are the wrong answers, actually. And they need to go in a different way to enable some of the

things they want with true air glasses. I think that's right. I also just think that before this week, I honestly didn't know where they were at with this in terms of how they were going to do it. And I feel like after this week, they actually have the right approach of how they're going about it, which is just relentlessly focusing on the form factor, which meta has made a lot of hardware mistakes over the years and has, I think, just not had the right priorities in terms of what they're building and what it's for, or even understanding what it's for. It took them 10 years, really, to understand that the quest is really just a gaming device, even still. Yeah. How much do you think that's the Rayban lesson? That's part of it, but I just, I think, I think there's clarity here about why people

would want these. And like something Zuckerberg told me was, I thought, pretty illustrative of this, is like, we want them to be just as good when they're off because we know that you're not going to have the AR on maybe most of the day. And so focusing on that first and letting the technology then kind of fill in, I think is the right approach versus just how they've approached hardware so far, which is like, let's just put as much technology in something as we can and see how people will use it. And here they're like, no, we know how people will use this. It's utility. It's like heads up, lightweight interactions, video calling, and AI. But the form factor is primary.

And that's what, like, that's the intro of the piece. Like, I walk in and I'm looking at them, you know, I'm probably four feet away. And you can't tell. You can't tell that they're AR glasses. And it's like, even that as a prototype. And I struggle with this because, yeah, Nilai, it is vapor until it ships. But it's also not like, it's somewhere between a mirage and a product. It's like it is real.

Like I touched it. I used it. But it's not productized. So seeing that and going, wow, like the form, like, and it's going to be half as thick in a few years, like, okay, I finally see where this is going. Especially with the band. And I feel like before this week, even I, as someone who's been reporting on this a lot, couldn't really see where they were going. And I think they feel so confident in where they're going and the clarity of what they're going to do that that's why they shut it off this week. And also, I think Zuck just thinks it's really cool.

Yeah. And he's right. really cool. No one else is done. Again, I'm just not taking anything away from it. No one else has pulled off the display. Like hundreds of millions of dollars, or not billions of dollars, have been thrown at this problem of can I put lenses in front of your face

that can convincingly in 3D augment reality, not just show you a TV like the X real glasses do and not required to wear a hollow lens and still have no field of view. Like billions upon billions of dollars in a synergy to have been thrown at this problem and only meta has allowed people to wear it for two hours. And it's not an overestimation to say that they have probably

spent SNAP's market cap on Orion in the last 10 years. And it's like no other company would do this. Like Apple killed the car project because it's like we don't see a realistic timeline to shipping. We're not even sure what it is. Like this is a uniquely meta thing. And it's it's like a personal thing for Zuckerberg, which is just like screw Apple and Google. I'm never going through this shit again on mobile, you know, that he's gone through. Actually, hold right there, Alex. I want to talk about Zuck versus Apple and Google, and I want to talk to the Raybans a bit, but we got to take a break.

So let's take a break and come back, and then we can talk about Sucks war with Tim Cook. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work?

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It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. All right we're back. Heath, right before the break, we're talking about Zuck,

and you said he doesn't want to go through this shit again, which is, you just interviewed him for quite a long time. You saw him on stage at MetaConnect. I mean, he is, I mean, the hairs flow in, the Latin t-shirts are in Latin. He's feeling himself. He's bringing out, he's got a chain. He's bringing out MMA fighters for meta, Rayban demos just for the hell of it at this point. Take mine out.

He's like, I can produce the MMA lightweight champion in the world that will. Like, here he is. Get out of here. It's great. It's all good. But the thing that strikes me about that is, you know, you know, Yes, there's a politics of it, which maybe we should talk about a little bit. But he really thinks that these glasses are the next great computing platform.

And he wants to win that fight more than anything. And he probably perceives that he's ahead. But put that in context of why he does not want to lose to Apple and Google. There's so many reasons. Do you guys remember when all of Facebook's internal apps went down for like a full day in the entire company? ground to a fault. Because Apple revoked its developer license. I do.

That's just one example. There's app tracking transparency. I don't want you to get to a moral debate about that, but it objectively like killed billions of dollars of meta's ad revenue. There's all of the app store policies that he's talked about for a very long time. Like people think of meta as just an app developer and they are really in terms of their business. but they came up, you know, 20 years ago, they watched mobile happen.

They tried to do a phone, failed at it. Zuckerberg has always wanted to be in control of a platform. And this is something that I think like companies that were born in the mobile era don't even really like think is possible because it's like you just come into the reality you're in, but he knows what the reality was before mobile when he was building Facebook early on. And I think they really feel that, you know, if Apple does glasses and the Vision Pro, people start using it and they ship a cheaper one and these start selling.

Maybe they don't let meta-zaps on there at all. And there's this just real tension there of who has the distribution control. It's why Google pays billions of dollars to Apple to have search in Safari. Whoever controls how you access to your thing ultimately has leverage over you. And Zuckerberg's been feeling that pretty acutely for 10 plus years. And so, yeah, this is as much about like inventing the future as it is correcting the past. And I don't think any company without that unique context would be doing this. And I think so that's a uniquely meta thing.

Can I just read a quote from the interview that I thought was very telling? You guys spent a long time talking about basically what AR and AI are going to do to the next generation of gadgets. And then what he says is, for what it's worth, I also think that all the AI work is going to make phone. a lot more exciting. You know, blah, blah, AI is cool. If I were at any of the other companies trying to design what the next few versions

of iPhone or Google's phones should be, I think that there's a long and interesting roadmap of things that they can do with AI that as an app developer, we can't. Like, to me, that's the whole thing, right? He's like, if I am convinced that if meta had its way, the puck wouldn't exist on Orion,

the puck would be your phone. Yes. That's what those companies want, and they just can't do it. Because the only companies that are ever going to be allowed to do it are Google and Apple. And so if I'm Mark, I'm like, oh, a gigantic part of what I am doing

should be tethered to this thing that I'm just not allowed to touch. And that would piss me off. They are so mad that they can't automatically sync photos off your raybans into your iPhone camera roll. They can do it on Android. It's super annoying. It's so dumb. They can do it on Android because the APIs are there.

Android's a little looser. iOS, no. Like the reason the first ones, the first raybans also had a lot of issues, they had a lot of Bluetooth pairing issues and, like, limitations with what they could do with Apple. And Apple is because of the EU gradually being forced to open up its APIs. But, yeah, they're like, they're pissed. They can't sink photos to a camera rolls. But why doesn't Meta complain more, I guess?

Like, we saw this with Epic. No, no, but they complain all the time. We saw Epic put their money where their mouth is. Like, does Meta do that? It doesn't seem like they do. Well, meta is also monopolistic. Yeah. I was like, is it because they know that, like, Lina will be?

Like, yeah, yeah, that's true. We are. And this is what I mean by the politics of it all. And Alex, in your talk, like, Mark just complete. There's just hard shots to the EU, like throughout your interview where he's like, they should figure out what they want. And it's like, dude, what they want is like slightly better Bluetooth on iPhones. Right.

They want to open, interrupt between messaging platforms. And so that is bad for WhatsApp. Like, straight up, I think they're trapped between we would love for you to. kick open the doors on iOS, but also don't do that to any of our platforms that have the same kind of restrictions. I mean, they're being forced to do interop with WhatsApp like we just wrote about you're going to be able to message people outside of WhatsApp. Yeah, yes, there's truth to what you're saying. I would argue like Apple is still super locks down and it's opening up over time. But I don't think they think Apple will open up soon enough. And so it's like we need to

just invent the next thing. Well, and I think my read of this is that, if you're meta, the easiest way to get where you're going would be to start all of this cool AR stuff as an accessory to your phone, right? And the reason that the Raybans have worked is that they are an accessory to your phone. They're a vastly underpowered accessory to your phone just because of what they're allowed to do, but also the restrictions of the technology and stuff. But like, the 1.5 step of this transition you would want to be, your phone becomes the computer and then you have a bunch of new wearable accessories that you use. You're just not allowed to build that.

And so what all these companies have to do is basically like engineer a giant societal shift out of nowhere because the like gradual change that actually would make this make sense is just walled off to all but two companies on the planet. And if I were anybody but one of those two companies, I would be really pissed about that. So what has Zuckerberg done? He has gone and linked up with the Italians and the French because it's technically. Elisor Lexotica, the parent company of Rayban, is French and Italian. But what did you think, Neelai, of his comment? So they've just done a 10-year deal with Elisor Lexotica.

The idea is that Meta's tech stack is something Elisor will be able to put into any of its lines. It owns a ton of brands, Oakley, Rayvan. It's a monopoly. You and I are both wearing glasses made by them right now, presumably. Yeah. Pull over in your car. Look at your glasses. Probably made by Exeter.

They just bought Supreme, so Supreme Glasses. He confirmed in our interview that they're buying a stake in Ellesore Luxottico, which was news. But his comment about he thinks that Ellesor will be for Europe and smart glasses, what Samsung was for Korea and phones. Incredible. It's a good line. It's a great line. It is extraordinarily presumptuous in the best possible way. Yeah.

Like, if you're at Samsung, you're like, yo, we were Samsung. before. We make chips. Our nuclear reactor division is doing just fine. So that is confusing. But what he means is Android is the operating system

enabled Samsung to enter the mobile phone market. Samsung is now even more Samsung than was before. I would point out, by the way, a Saturday Samsung alert, if you are over a chess listener, you know that Samsung required all of its executives to work six days in the office. to insert a sense of urgency and crisis into the company.

They don't make anything, so all I can do is come up with deals. They cut the price of one of their gaming monitors by 50% and gave you not one but two TVs for free if you buy one. Incredible, it's on the website. Saturday, Samsung, everybody. You had to go on that tangent. You have to. It's just incredible. Every part of Saturday of Samsung is better than last.

But what he's saying is there was a hardware vendor in Samsung, and Android came along, provided at the operating system and the opportunity to go address the world market and now they are Samsung. Again, extraordinarily presumptuous in the best way. Are you saying

that Eslora Luxotica is a hardware maker and are something is the operating system that will let you go become Samsung? Well, you're missing some key components, right?

Eslarosata doesn't make chips. Samsung makes fucking DRAM. They're like the hardware maker. They make OLED displays and chips. The first processor and I found was a Samsung arm processor, right?

So, like, the industry was built on top of Samsung from the jump. I'm pretty sure I'm looking at these new transparent ray bands they announce. I'm sorry, Tom Warren, translucent raybans. Heath really ran into, like, I work with a bunch of nerds this week. And I think it's a Qualcomm chip inside, actually. I'm just saying, like, all of that, like, Samsung's latent capabilities were brought together because Google provided them an operating system that let them become dominant in phones.

Maybe Microsoft could have provided an operating system. You remember, Samsung made a bunch of weird Windows phones in the early days. But does Luxottica have chips and RAM, or does it just have design chops and retail distribution? I think that whole comment was basically another shot at the EU. Because the big criticism of all the EU regulatory stuff is the United States

deeply weird libertarian unregulated United States makes the tech companies and you make the taxes and all you have is Spotify which only ever complains about not having access to iOS and that basically is the

shape of the complaint and we have European listeners are going to argue with me about something or the other it's fine but that is the shape of the complaint from Silicon Valley and I think Mark is saying look I'll take one of your companies

and I'll turn them into Samsung just get the hell out of my way and I don't know that that comparison holds up because again, Luxottica does own everything but instead of DRAM fabs, they own Supreme. Yeah. It's just a very different thing. But potentially, like as the proprietor of the Nelai's

insane theory of wearable bullshit, I'm ready. I'm ready for this. If you're open in this door, I'm walking right in. You have to acknowledge that making the DRAM and owning Supreme might be equally important in this. Like, oh, they are. They think that.

You can't sit here and tell me that fiddliness and value are opposing things unless you agree that looking good on your face is important. And there are a small number of companies that are very, very good at making things that people like wearing on their face. And I think you could argue that a lot of companies in tech have tried to, like, acquire or develop that capability and can't do it. There's no way meta would have made these. There's no way they would look anything like. It honestly, it might be easier to learn how to make DRAM as a company than to learn how to be cool. Yeah. Okay.

Well, can we just clip that line and just put it on TikTok and just let it live its own life? I sincerely believe that. The history of technology said that is probably true. It's easier to make DRAM than glasses that look good. It's, I mean, the ones that they wear, like they got Jost a little, right? The Orion's because they look like Buddy Holly glasses from the 50s. Which are actually kind of coming back. Like, that was another thing.

That was another thing Zuckerberg said is like, it's kind of nice that chunky glasses are back in style. This is like a Zuckerberg long game, right? Like, yeah. He bought off a bunch of fashion houses in the background. I was like, make the glasses bigger. And it's like that scene from Devil Wars product. He turned all the knobs on Instagram to make vintage cool again and now it's back. I mean, he's right.

He's right. I was at the snap event the week before and I saw someone wearing what I thought were the new spectacles and they were prodig glasses. I'm just saying, Surerlian was picked in this. room for you, Alex. That's what's happening here. No, but like the, look, I'm saying I agree. I'm very excited to get my clear raybans on Monday. They look so good.

They're pretty cool. They only make them in the small size, and I have a huge head, and I'm furious about this. You're 49 or 50 or 52? Whatever. What's the bigger? Go bigger. 52 is like, you're 60.

Just as big as they can be. 52 is like, most brands are like, sorry. Like. Yeah. I know. So you're probably a 50. I'm like a 49.50. These are comfortable.

Stop measuring my head, first of all. I've just been enough with you in person to kind of, you know, map it in my mind. I have a side hobby of head measurement. It's not problematic at all. I'm just saying as big as they can get, and I know Baza has an equally sized noggin. And I know that he should have built the bigger ones. Because the regular ones come in two sizes and these only come in medium.

But I'm getting him in Monday. I'm very excited. It's the first time I've got them. I think the clear ones look sick. I'm excited to do all the stuff with them. The jump that I'm curious about, right? Because now meta-a-I is more conversational. I can remember things.

They've added some capability to it. That's all running in their cloud still, right? Like you talk to the glasses. It talks to your phone. It uses your phone's connection. They've got a decent amount that's on device now. On the glasses on device. Yeah.

Because they're doing with Lama, these super fine-tuned distilled. models. So the latency on these is like pretty incredible in terms of how quick the AI is. It's not humane pen wait a minute to set a timer. It's like answer something in like a second, right? Or like tell me what's in this photo and it does it in a couple seconds. And I got the demo of the new AI stuff that they're adding to the Raybans. So did Kylie. So did Jay. And it's like, wow, okay, they're they're understanding this form factor and what's unique about it. So being able to look at a phone number and say call that phone number and it just calls it and the call comes in on your glasses because it's paired to your phone or scan that QR code like you're looking at a menu, the webpage for the menu just gets sent to your phone. Like breaking down some of the interactions you would do with the phone that require extra steps and just like taking a step away is like kind of an aha moment when you do it.

You're like, oh, like this is where it's going. And it's the first time that I feel like AI makes sense and a wearable. And did you guys watch the keynote in the live translation demo that Zuck did? Yeah, that's when he brought out the NMA fighter. Yeah. He said, yell some words at me in Spanish. That is wild. That is wild.

That is like Putin's earpiece on stage, like at scale, you know, for like anyone. And it works. I mean, it was a thing like Google promised a couple of years ago, right? Yeah, I think that there was. really interesting part of this is these ideas are all just the ideas. Like, these are the demos we have been hearing about or promised for a decade, if not more, right? Live translation. Like, Apple has live translation on your iPhone. You just open the app and it'll do it. Google can do it. It's the form factor, like you're saying, Alex, that like, okay, we've put this in glasses. Your phone is away.

There's no screen. There's just an ambient computer, another thing that has been promised for a billion in years and it's just paying attention and helping you out as you go through your day. Does that ambient computer require sending an awful lot of data to meta? It sure does. Right. It just really, really does. But that's the tradeoff all the way down to one day, I'm guessing Orion, will have my dream feature, which is I will look at someone and it will tell me their name.

Yes. And that will absolutely require meta searching its gigantic worldwide surveillance database of names and faces. But like, they're going to build that. name. I was waiting for you to bring this up in my Orion demo. The VP of wearables at Meta said, we're excited about name tags. Yeah, it is the feature. If you can do name tags, it doesn't matter. I will wear the backpack. Yeah. Right? Like all day long. Everybody at CES. I want to double click on what you said, like, that the phones have live translation because I think this is important when we're talking

about like these swarm factors. Yes, they do. Like, especially iOS 18. It's really easy to just do like live, language translation from the action button from the action button. There's something about not having your phone out though that feels like, oh, I would actually use this. I like think about like talking to someone in another language and holding your phone between you. It's like an interview. Like it's just awkward. But it's like, oh, wait, when this isn't a form factor where like they can't even hear that what they're saying is being translated to me in my language and I'm not even pulling a device out, like all a sudden these features make sense as like something you would use in the world. And I think that's what these mean. Like these, it's like taking all these concepts and like putting in a device that like,

oh, like you'd actually do this. Yeah, because they are cuter than the pixel butts. No disrespect. Well, so here these are, they're just, again, the ideas, the end state, the goals, very familiar. Everybody shares them. The demos as described, very familiar. Everybody has the same ones. It's really down to where is the form factor? How fast can we get there? Can we ship it at scale? are the phone makers, the operating system vendor is going to get in our way, which is a big deal. And you're kind of like, okay, well, the closest Apple is fundamentally is AirPods. Yeah. Right?

Like fundamentally the closest they are to this kind of idea is AirPods. They haven't put glasses on your face yet. They have an Apple Watch, but it doesn't really do any AR stuff. Yeah. They have pinchy pinch. You can tap away with an Apple Watch. I wear my meta ray bands. The number one feeling I have is, boy, I wish this is actually tied in with my phone.

So I could use Siri because then I would have access to all my stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Siri could just like, you know, like text the wrong person at any point. I could just play my music. Okay. So it's AirPods for Apple. Alex, you were just bringing up the PixelBuds?

Yeah. That is Googles, although does Google remember that it made the PixelBuds? It made the PixelBuds too, which. Sure. Nelai. Yeah, the review came up the same time the metal event. So, Nelai, AirPods, great example. With my AirPods, I can say, hey, remind me about whatever.

I can say whatever I want it to remind me about at a certain time, right? And I'll get the notification in the reminders app. With the Raybans, you can say, hey, look at this and remind me about it at whatever time. Right, because it can see. Yeah. That's like, that's wildly useful to me. I cannot tell you how many times throughout the day. I just want to have a snapshot of whatever I'm looking at and go back to it later.

And like those ideas, because you literally have a camera on your face, you can't do that with their pods. And so you're right, like the closest we have are these earbuds that are internet connected and can hear our voice. There's something about adding the cameras, though, that's big. So, you know, the prevailing theory of why the camera control button is not just on the pro phone, but also on the regular 16, is that Apple will add visual intelligence, and then you'll be able to quickly access the camera and look at stuff. Well, when you say theory, you mean Apple just said that out loud in that many words. Well, they haven't shipped yet. It's vapor till it ships. No, but I mean that is, whether it's good or not is a question, but like that is, that is clearly, that is half the purpose of the thing. Like, they have just said as much. At this point, my theory, like, whether Apple has its own unified theory of what it's doing. It's like, sure. I've used Control Center and iOS 18 enough to be like, did anybody pay attention to it? But also, there are, there are increasingly convincing and well-sourced rumors about things like AirPods with a camera, which what would that look like? And an Apple Watch with a camera. Because I,

I agree with you, Heath. Like, the camera is the thing, both as the input and as, like, the activity, right? Like, I hear from people all the time for whom the reason to have the smart glasses is to take pictures of your kids, like, or your pets or whoever. Like, I'm convinced my dog knows when I take out my phone to take a picture of her. I'm 100% sure, and she runs away. And now she doesn't anymore. And I can take picture of it's awesome.

I can't wait to get these glasses. Did you buy the glasses too, David? I already have two pairs. Okay. I don't have a great answer for why I have two pairs. Do you have, like, the large size or the small size? because if you don't need the large size, I'm in the market. I have, I don't know, I also have a big head.

So we'll have to figure this out together. Alex, how big do you think David's head is? What do you think? I'm going to guess he's like a 48, 47. Neil has like a 65. Yeah, I'm saying, bigger the better. It's not insulting to me, 80. Let's go.

The bigger, the better. All right, let's, we, we, this, so we talked a lot about the meta stuff. I want to make sure we talk about two other pieces of Metacconnect. that are important and then spend a little time in open AI before we go to later around. The other piece of Metacnect that I think is deeply fascinating is you guys did talk about AI a lot and how it will be expressed. It seems like they're chasing a big distribution advantage with glasses that maybe other

people will catch up to. But then there's like training data and open source models. Zuckerberg said, and I think this is one of the shots at Google, like I think all of the we're doing live demos were shots at Apple. for doing infomercials. I think when he says things like we are the Linux of open source because Lama's like that's a shot at Google, right?

We're just going to have more distribution. We're going to have more development. We're going to be better at everybody else because open, always piece close, which is usually Google's model and that's just not how Google's doing it. They had to suck up a lot of training data and you asked about people wanting to opt out.

There's all the celebrities on Instagram right now saying opt me out of this. His answer, explain his answer. And we should talk about it a little bit because it was really interesting. Yeah. He said the quiet part out loud, which is that everyone thinks their data is more valuable than it actually is for these models. In aggregate, it's valuable. But when you're a company like meta, and it's like the entire world is your corpus of information in the Internet at large, what exactly do you have to have?

And I think, you know, we were talking a lot about publishers and about how. Helmetta's basically thrown its hands up on news. And, you know, Rupert Murdoch is in Australia saying, pay me or I'm going to take your news off. And Zuckerberg's like, fine, like whatever. Like, people don't even like this. So we were talking a lot about publishers, but I think he's kind of just saying that, look, like, yes, you know, people have feelings about their data being used to train these models. And yes, we're all doing it. But we also, like, if you, you know, if you don't like it, like, go away, like, whatever. So it's really interesting to me about this is that's the line to the publishers.

Like, we will derank your news. We won't have news on threads however you want to interpret all of the many things Adam Saria said about that. There's no opt-out for any user of these services unless you're in the EU from having yourself trained on. And guess where meta-a-I is not a... available in the EU. Right. And so, and he did say I remain, what, eternally confident that we will launch this in the

EU. Something like that. Um, on stage. But there's just, I would just draw a connection. And I think it is very funny to dunk on people posting what amounts to chain letters on their Instagram stories being like, dear Zuckerberg by the statute of Rome, I command you from not. We were doing this on our Facebook walls like 15 years ago.

Yeah. This keeps happening. Yeah. This is a chain letter. Like, that's what it is. And it's like, people think the law. magic words you know you just like issue an incantation to the internet like someone has to do what you say it's like usually chain letters have a lot more like

promising death and then than these yeah I really miss that I wish if it was like send this to 12 of your friends or Zuckerberg will appear in your house in his Latin shirt and beat this shit out of you that would be great have you ever fallen down the whole of courtroom videos of people invoking the sovereign citizen defense yes and like local courtrooms and then they're like shut up and the judges are like, that doesn't mean anything. You're going to jail. They're like, by what authority?

And the judge is always like, because I'm the judge. And it's just like that, that's happening on. And it is very funny. It's Michael Scott on the office yelling, I declare bankruptcy. And then somebody pulls him aside and says, that's nothing. And he goes, I didn't say it. I declared it. That's what these people are doing.

So it is very funny. And I, and Tom Brady, who has a meta deal to use his face for a chatbot, has done it. He did. He did. He did. They canceled the deal because that idea was bad. And they came up with the better idea of what if we just used the celebrity's voices and said they were the celebrities, instead of pretending they were other characters? Yeah, it was Tom Brady as like, Barry your workout partner or something.

Yeah, it was very confusing. Not great. But it was his face. And then Kristen Bell, you can just chat with Kristen Bell. She put up one of these that Kylie noticed because she's a Chris DeBelle fan. And so she's like, you have a deal with meta AI and you have an Instagram post saying, don't use my stuff for meta AI. That was before she sold the zeros on the check. Yeah, but money.

Money is cool. Yeah, they're paying for these celebrity voices. Great. They're not paying for the rest of us. Yeah. So here's what I will just say about that thing. The idea that you can negotiate with meta feels intuitive to everyone, right? Or any platform.

I'm posting my stuff here. I should be able to tell you how I want you to use it. But you don't. And the answer is, well, you already signed the terms of service and you go away. You didn't, but everyone knows nobody reads that shit. When half of your users are like collectively trying to renegotiate the terms of their agreement with you, that means there's a problem. Like, kind of. They're doing it on your platform, though.

That's the thing. Like, well, that's fine. But like, you can't. There's, there's so other things in the world where like you don't get to negotiate on this level, except for weird. internet terms of service that everyone agrees no one reads right like and i would just say like if you are one of the many many many young staffers in dc who listens to the show which is a weird audience that we have and i love you i'm glad that we're making the commute to your basement office in the capital better um you should look at all the people posting i don't want you to train on my data on

meta's own platform and the basic response of yeah go fuck yourself and be like oh This is actually what regulations are for, right? Like, the people are expressing that they do not like that the terms of this arrangement are not in their favor. And no one as an individual has enough power to change it. And Mark Zuckerberg is like, everyone overvalues the vote in this context. So I don't have to pay attention to it. Like, that is actually the problem that, like, it doesn't matter if you're a Republican or a Democrat or a libertarian or whatever. That thing is the problem that governments are meant to equalize.

How is this any different from using data for ad targeting? Think about when we copy and pasted protest messages on Facebook 15 years ago. What was it about? I'm putting this all in the same line. Right. This is all in the same line of thing. My point is when everyone is like I signed this agreement, I didn't read it. Right.

And now I've handed over whatever leverage I might have had because I signed this agreement that I didn't read. And the second I made aware that I that by saying abracadabra, this is like go back in my favor, I will just happily start yelling abracadabra as loudly as I can. Like that is, that's the problem. Yeah, but that's also just like no one reads Ula's and that's. But like, so who should read the Yula for you? Should we hire? And you can't do AI. And then what?

Do you have bargaining power if you disagree with the terms? No. Using iTunes and Instagram. It's terms of service. and ships it to you, are you like, you know, Tim, paragraph five,

a couple of notes. Are you saying that social media needs to unionize? I am saying terms of service agreement should be illegal, like flatly.

Because they're a contract. They are contracts no one reads. And it's these moments. I just have a lot of empathy. I've written the don't believe the Instagram

meme story five times in my career. And one time I got a call from Instagram, I'm like, thank you so much. And I was like, I don't like this.

Because it happens over and over again for a reason, which is whenever you offer somebody back the mechanism of control over their own information, they're like, yeah, I'd like that back, please. Yeah. Universally. Yep. And no one reads the agreements. The agreements change all the time.

The agreements always change in favor of the platform using your data for more and more and more things. And then you get Zuckerberg saying, everyone overestimates the value of their individual data. And it's like, who? what is the mechanism that you would rebalance this equation with? There isn't one. There isn't one. And I think Zuckerberg's also thinking, yeah, guess what? You're using Instagram and you're going to keep using Instagram.

He's not incentivized to say, actually. Yeah, we should deliver more value. Yeah. He doesn't care. He's like, yeah, give me all of your data for free so I can make lots of money and afford my cool shirts. Like, of course he is. Look, I'm not saying we all shouldn't dunk on a bunch of people posting abracadabber to Instagram.

Like, we absolutely should. We should. It is one of the funniest repeat memes that can possibly exist is people basically doing sovereign citizen on Instagram. Very funny. But if you just, I'm just one step back from a place of empathy, it's a bunch of people communicating that they don't like the terms of the agreement. And there's no mechanism to channel that into any change. That agreement is not changing. I fully agree with you.

And that's how I framed it to him. I'm like, do you sympathize with this icky feeling people have about this tradeoff? and the sense that value is not flowing back to them. And he said the thing about how everyone overvalues their data. Well, there's also a sense of, yeah, if you feel this way, stop using the product. We were doing this about ad targeting and our data being used for ad targeting 15 years ago and copy paste messages on Facebook.

Everyone's still using, well, not everyone. Three billion people apparently are still on Facebook. So for them, it's like the platforms. They don't see any data to suggest that this value exchange is actually unfair because in their mind, we would stop using the services. Yeah. Yeah. And that just presumes that people have that power and you can afford to do that. You can delete Instagram?

Yeah. I would say these things are businesses for a lot of people, right? Like, this is a way they advertise their businesses. Sure. This is a way they advertise themselves if they're influencers. But like most people in the Verges newsroom are no longer posting on X. Like people can make decisions about that. People can.

And I think it's, even when they have career implications. I think there's also a lot of journalists who are still on X. I mean, I think there is a power imbalance there that Neli is speaking to of like, these people have no power in this relationship. It is gone. It is, if you want to use this, suck it up. And I think people slowly get tired of that. Right. I think it's just that there are very few other relationships you have.

If you are a creator and creators are mostly just business people at this point. Yeah. They're all running content businesses on the terms of the platform. If you're a celebrity, you're just a content business on the platform, which is why I think the celebrities are so fast to be like, don't use my stuff. Like they know they do not want their voice and likeness to use without payment. And I'm just, all I'm saying is from a place of empathy, one step back, there's no mechanism to channel this frustration into anything.

And that is actually, again, I don't think you have to be very political on either side of the spectrum. It's like, oh, this is actually the thing we should, this is what it's for, right? A lot of people, like most people in the society would like to renegotiate the terms of their agreement with the large platforms, that is called a privacy law. Right. We're just going to reset the floor of the agreement. A lot of people want to reset the terms of how their content can be used for training. That's just an AI training law.

Like that, it's just very simple. And, like, I don't know what those laws should do or how they should read or whether you are a conservative and you think the answer is like, I don't know, some weird public-private partnership that the Heritage Foundation runs. Like, those are those ideas. Or you're a hardcore liberal and you're like, I will start a government commission. And we will, the government will set the rates, which is what we do in copyright law. Like, there's a million solutions to this. I don't think that's a very liberal solution in copyright law.

I'm just saying there are government entities that set rates in other parts of this world. But it's just, I would just point, like, we're talking about AI and distributing it and who has the power, where the models run, and how powerful the experiences can be that you had, Alex. And underneath it all is like, hey, do all of these people feel ripped off? Like, is that okay? And like, Zuckerberg's answer is Zuckerberg's answer. I asked Sundarpe to try this about YouTube in the same kind of framework of a question. How do you feel about opening eye training on YouTube?

And he was like, I think that would be inappropriate. And it's like, do you understand why all of your creators think that's inappropriate? And he just like sighed at me. And I suspect something else is going to happen there. Like some set of lawsuits or some Scarlett Johansson open AI situation where it just becomes less and less tenable to be this blithe about it. We should get off this point because we could do this for hours and we'll end up talking about the Fedaverse and it'll be a whole thing. Oh my God. Let's do it.

But the thing is no one has any reason to believe that any of what you just said is true. And what's actually happening is everybody is now saying the quiet part out loud. Eric Schmidt is out here being like, oh, you want data from the internet? Just steal it. Mustafa Suleiman was like, oh, it's all free. It's on the internet. You can just have it. Like, this is what everybody thinks.

And there has been absolutely nothing to convince them otherwise so far. So if I'm Mark Zuckerberg, why I'm going to look around and be like, oh, I'm going to be the good guy here. And it's going to cost me in this race to AI that is suddenly the only thing anyone cares about. Like, no, of course he's not going to do that. He's going to say, oh, you like Instagram? Keep using Instagram. We can do this for another hour, but also his new attitude, which is like, I no longer apologize for everything. Apologizing was a 20-year mistake that I'm not going to make anymore.

No. Dude, you grow the hair out. You get a little older, you know, like, I'm thinking about growing my hair out. I watched that interview. I was like, oh, I could get the, is it the cauliflower hair? Is that what they call? Look, every 12-year-old in your boy is gifted a gold chain and you have to make a decision. And I made one decision, and I'm saying I could remake that decision.

You could. The hair is getting wrong. You could, yeah. I feel like you're like, you're a few months away from curls. Oh, this hair is very curly. I could, tomorrow. We're not talking about this right now. We are changing the subject.

Meilat's hair is so French and we need to go to a break. Yeah, can we, just before we go to break? I do want to talk about opening eye. Oh, yeah. God. Seems like chaos over there. What is going on over there, Alex? Did you guys know that Open AI is a nonprofit?

Do they know that? I'm not sure they do. I think they're finding out and that's what's going on. honestly, like at a very high level. But everyone's leaving. Like Mirroati, the CTO is leaving. Greg Brockman, the president, apparently just vanished. Yeah, there's this great photo of all of the, like,

execs, O'I, Greg, Mira, and Sam together for this big New York Times profile. This was like right before the boardroom, boardroom coup, which Nilai was almost a year ago when you were at Disney. No way. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? You were at Disney not getting to ride the rides almost a year ago because we were reporting on this, which is, yeah, nuts to me. But there's this photo of him and all these

execs, and now they've just photoshopped out everyone except Sam Altman, who's the only one left. And what's happening is that OpenAI just raised the largest round of funding of all time. I think they just went above Elon's mega round for XAI, which was, I think, $6 billion on purpose, of course, optics. They're valued at $150 billion, which is more than the market cap of Goldman Sachs. Guess what? Open AI is legally still a nonprofit. They get tax breaks in the state of California as a nonprofit. They make billions of dollars a year. And so what's happening is this very chaotic fast transition from what was a research lab.

We're going to invent AGI, all the Ilius stuff to in the last year when Sam won the board coup. No, we are a large commercial for-profit next big mega tech company. And they hired a CFO. They hired a CPO who used to run product at Instagram, not the other one who used to run product at Instagram. He's an anthropic. And they are very chaotically turning into a real big company. And I think what you're seeing is a lot of the previous era being abruptly managed out, quitting, what have you. And it's the Altman show.

And he famously does not have equity in OpenAI, has been doing a ton of, interesting dealings with other startups and investments around OpenAI. It is now reportedly going to be getting a large stake in this new for-profit company that they're creating. I will love to see how what the tax implications are of this transition. More to come on that. And the state of California really doesn't like when nonprofits become for-profits. It's a very, very contested thing. And yeah, I think that's what's happening at high level. So Mira, the CTO is out. who was memed with her reaction to, did you use YouTube to train Sora?

They were very unhappy about that from what I understand. And then they're a head of research who literally just did an interview about the new reasoning model with Kylie a couple weeks ago, who won out against Ilya in the research kind of group battle a year ago. So yeah,

it's just like stuff's happening very fast. And yeah, big picture, this is OpenAI entering a decidedly commercial big tech company phase. They are speed, Does that be terrifying for us, given that they were supposed to be the safeguards of AI? Well, yeah, now Ila is doing, Ilya's doing super safe, whatever, AI.

So it's going to be super safe. Yeah, but he raised a million dollars. He raised a bunch of money. Yeah, he raised a bunch of money. But not as much. No, does. Yeah, not as much. But, I mean, they are speed running the Facebook Google Playbook, which is move incredibly fast,

let regulation catch up, let, you know, just outrun your competitors. And it's intense. I mean, the vibes that we hear is that working inside Open AI is just, it's way different than it was a couple years ago. The pressure to ship, the pressure to make things commercial. And so that research culture that built the company originally is being just broken down. And it's very messy right now. Yeah.

That's a bummer. My sense of it, David mentioned Mustafa Suleiman earlier, who is now the CEO of Microsoft AI, is Microsoft is reacting to their former research investment. becoming a product company by being like, now we have a CEO of products. Yep. Which I'm very curious to see how that relationship manages over time. All right, we should take a break. We're going to go through the Lightning Round at lightning speed because we are so over at this point.

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All right. Alex, let's start with you because I think you've got the most relevant Lightning Round item after that previous conversation. Yeah, Trip, Michael at the New York Times has this great story about what, Johnny Ive has been up to post-Apple and this design firm he founded called Love From. Lots of nuggets in here. I thought it was very interesting that he says in the story he interviewed Ive in June. And this came out the week of iPhone 16.

The timing was interesting. But yeah, Johnny's he's working. I think the time's kind of buried the lead here. Literally, it's like the last paragraph in the story. It's very, very, very, he confirms that he's working on some kind of AI device. with OpenAI, it sounds like they haven't quite nailed down what it will be. It was the first time he'd confirmed it on the record. My understanding is that Love From is super small.

It's like 40-ish, 50 people. There's only 10 people working on this project. Yeah. And a wild detail in this story is as Mr. I've climbed a wooden staircase to the studio second floor that morning, and by the way, he bought like a whole block, a city block of downtown San Francisco for their office. he said he spoke about Love firm's clients, Love Frum's clients, which pay the firm as much as $200 million annually.

And that includes like Airbnb, Ferrari. He just designed a $3,000 jacket with Montclair. Love firm is like 50 people. So how much money are they making? Johnny I. This is crazy. They bought a whole block in San Francisco. Like they're doing good.

Brian Chesky is paying him $200 million a year to like riff on what the Airbnb logo should be. Can I just tell you a story about the Airbnb Johnny Ive connection? Yeah. Because I was reading this. And it says what he worked on. Like they did the experiences where you can like live in a pineapple house or something. Whatever Airbnb.

$200 million nonsense is happening. Airbnb last year, the year before, after the Johnny Ive stuff was out. Like announced a bunch of redesign stuff and like an app redesign all this stuff. And we emailed them and were like, was this the stuff? Johnny I've worked on because obviously that is very relevant and interesting detail. And they're like, yeah, yeah. And then we like, pushed it and they like freaked out at us. And they're like, that's not wrong.

Everyone's like, take it down. But you said, okay. And we like adjust this story. You can like read it. There's always like back and forth corrections in it because Airbnb is trying to clarify this. And I was like, what is the point of spending all this money in Johnny Ib if you don't want to say that he worked on this stuff? Yeah, that's worth easily a hundred of the 200 million is just to be able to put Johnny

Ive in your press release. Check out the new Airbnb app designed by Johnny Ive. I don't know. Brian Chessy's coming on to Coder in a little bit. I'm going to ask him about it in addition to talking about Founder Mode, which he's excited to talk about. But I read this profile and I was like, but yeah, we tried to write the story about him designing his app and they were like not into it.

They were like pushed back on this idea that he had done it super hard. He's like the Wizard of Oz. He just needs to be in the background. There's also a part. There's part of the story that I loved where he designed a steering wheel for like an EV Ferrari. And he's like, he completely rethought what a steering wheel should be. I'm like, it's a circle. Oh, he didn't do a yoke.

It's definitely a circle. I've famously a car guy. It's very good. Yeah. So I just think it's like Ive is clearly gearing up. And I think there's a lot of pressure on him if this AI device is going to be real. Like that is a, that is your Johnny Ive. Like this thing has to work.

has to not be the humane pin. And he's got Evans Hankey, who succeeded him at Apple, leading design, at Love From, working on this device with him. So it's a bunch of OG Apple people that invented all of, like, the original Apple stuff with him. So that's a really interesting situation to watch. We've seen one company with a very similar description to that, make AI hardware, and it didn't go super great. So we'll see.

Gosh. Yeah, you know, like he doesn't have, for example, Apple's famed antenna team. which once had to save his ass from his own designs. Wireless product. It'll be super thin. Whatever it is, you can bet it will be thin. 25 minutes of battery. Five.

I'm very curious. I mean, we just have this whole conversation about meta. They have all of the same product. Like, Apple is not going to give him hooks into iOS, presumably. Or the reason that Chad Shabee got announced as integrated in iOS 18 is when this device comes out, Tim Cook would be like, it's mine now. I just have a feeling whatever it is. It's going to be so deeply, deeply weird that it's going to be awesome.

Like, the longer he's away from Apple, he just is doing weirder and weirder stuff. And so some kind of AI device from him is like, yes. I'm excited to that. Yeah, I agree. It's going to be insane. And I love it. Altman probably isn't going to be excited about it because he wants something that he can sell and make lots of money. What do you mean?

Open AI is working with him? Yeah, I know. But like, is that the guy you hire if you want to make something really? commercial and sell and make lots of money. I mean, you can argue Johnny I've done okay with that. He's done, yeah, yeah, he did great. He made the iPhone. He made the iPhone in Apple.

iPod did decent. This is a design firm. That's true. I will say there's a picture of him in that profile where he's just holding his iPhone in like a regular blue Apple rubber case. And I'm like, that's not weird enough for Johnny I've. I'm like, but he made the iPhone. He puts his feet.

No gold Apple Watch either. Gosh. It was upsetting he put his feet on the couch. That was the part that got me. Like these gorgeous white couches and he had his shoes on. him. I was like, oh, hurts. He can just get new ones. All right. Cranes, what's your lighting around on?

Sean got a hands-on with a PS5 pro. And if you like to pixel peep, it's going to rule. I do. It's apparently, he says it really, like, lives up to the hype as far as, like, things just look a lot clearer. They're a lot prettier. It's awesome in that way. But also, it is still so much money.

And you can, there's a lot of. photos in his piece where you can go and look and try to see the differences and it is sort of like playing highlights as a kid you can see them but you got you got to look for him so uh i would say if you don't have a giant monitor that you sit like two feet from you're probably okay but otherwise this is cool i will say that i was in the queue to buy the the the ps5 pro 30th anniversary edition and then i forgot i was in the queue i don't place in line the one the one to really look at is in David Maytronomy before we recorded, because I pointed this out, is the ratchet and clank rift apart? You can really see the ray tracing working. It's, it's beautiful.

Thank God. I've always said that's the main thing missing from ratchet and clank rift apart is ray tracing. That's the thing preventing me from enjoying ratchet and clank rift apart. There's a very funny line in Sean's hands on where he notes that all the controllers were wired so they couldn't get far away from the screen and not see the ray tracing. anymore. Choice. That's pretty good. All right, David, what's yours?

While you're over here, Neil, identifying Google's headphones, uh, Chris Welch published our review of the Google PixelBuds Pro 2, which is a name that I have never set correctly until just now. So I'm very proud of you. They're awesome.

They're smaller. They sound better. They're a little more expensive. Uh, seem great. But the thing I just want to point out is that Google absolutely crushed this hardware cycle. Like, in a way that Google,

never has before. The TV streamer is great. The buds are great. The watch is great. The phones are great. The foldable phones are great. Google just, like, did the whole thing this year. And that is sort of wild to me. Do you think that's Rick Oshelow now runs the whole thing? It's Dieter. It's all Teter. It's all T's. Deeter. No, I think whatever. And Dan, don't forget Dan. Yeah, it's Deeder and Dan. They did it. Thank you guys. I think there's a certain amount of this that is like the compound interest phenomenon, right? It's just like Google's been at this a while. And like, hey Google, if you're listening, this is why it's good to stick to things, because you can make them better over time, and then they're good, and people like them. Like, that's a concept.

Try it with other things. But at any rate, like, what Google did here is not, like, reinvent the wheel as it is prone to do all the time. It just made all of its products better. And it did that a bunch of years in a row. And I think the thing Rick Astralo gets credit for is he has made a plan and stuck to it. Like, I talked to him years. ago at the very beginning and I was like, why on earth would anyone believe you that you're going to care about this for a long time? And he's like, you shouldn't. I don't know why you would, but we are going to. Like, we're, we're bought into this. And this feels like the first time that Google is like really truly playing hardware offense in like, it's, it's up there with

everybody. We gave the TV streamer a nine. Chris gave the PixelBuds Pro 2 a nine. Like, these are some of the best products you can buy in their class. And I don't think that has ever been true of Google products before. So I just think that's very cool. I didn't put this in the iPhone review because I think it's unfair to say this until Apple intelligence comes out and we can use the features. But I spent a lot of time using a pixel-line pro camera stuff while I was doing that review to compare the cameras. And every time I picked up the pixel, I was like, this phone is a lot more fun than iOS right now. Yeah.

Like it's just like bursting with ideas, the chaotic, weird, clipy level ideas. Every time you breathe, it's like, Gemini? Yeah. Should be Gemini? Do you want a gemina? It's a little nuts. But it's fun because it's just like ideas, like new ideas for what a phone could do or should do or why it should do anything at all. And Apple is like, all the icons are brown.

Huh? You've been asking for big brown icons and now you can have them. Can I say one more thing about the iPhone and then I will do my lighting around item? Control center. Total, total chaos, like a mess. and they should just let me edit it on my Mac. I feel that way about my home screen. Let me get,

let me do the home screen and control center on my Mac. I know you can do phone mirror and you know, click and I'm right. No, no, I want like full like old school Adobe page maker print layout, you know, like all the tools, the mirror,

the rulers and just let me just, this is we're past being able to do this on the phone. Control center is like the once you get it set up, it's pretty great. But the thing is like, and I feel like, the same way about the home screen. Like, if I drag an icon somewhere into a page that is already largely full of icons, it takes a, it takes a PhD to figure out where all those icons are

going to go. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it is, it is just a mystery every single time. The fastest, most capable, most efficient processors, humankind has ever created. And it's like, I don't know what's going on with these icons. Like, too much for me, man. Yeah. Yeah. All right, Neelai, what's yours? We have to end here. Uh, because we've been talking about. at AI gadgets the whole time. Only 5,000 people use the Rabbit R1 every day, according to the C. Is that how many people own it? He gave an interview at some conference, and the number is 5,000 daily active users

to the rabbit. That's more than I thought. Yeah, I was like, I'm surprised that many people have found a good use for the rabbit. The other thing to note is if you cannot recycle or resell a humane AI pin, but you can just return it to the company for full price. Which, kudos. Good for them. Yeah.

Send it back. That is the correct thing to do. So, my bad. Wait, I am curious. I've spent a lot of time trying to try. So it's 5,000 of buyers. 5,000 people is 5% of the rabbit R1 buyers. Well, that's, that's,

100,000 is the biggest number we heard. I actually think it's probably true that more people bought it than that. That's just the last number we heard. Is that higher or lower than you would have guessed? Like, reasonably knowing that at least 100,000 people bought the thing. Most people buy gadgets intending to use them. Do you think 5,000 is higher than you would have expected?

Do you use yours ever? day? No, it's sitting right here. The battery's been dead since, I don't know, April. I am going to fire it back up, though. Do you podcast from like a pile of dead useless gadgets? I do everything from a pile of dead useless gadgets. Yes, that's what my job is. I live my life. Everything you can't see in this maybe fake background of mine is just a pile of dead useless gadgets. It's just slowly swelling batteries. I have the humane pin right here. Oh, good. It's been, it's been six months since these things came out almost. I believe it was April 11th.

We're a couple weeks away from the six-month anniversary. And I promised when I did them that in six months I would come back. So God help me, I have to fire these devices back up and see how it's going. Yeah. I think it's substantially higher than I expected. I expected the people who work at the company to use this thing every day and everything else will see. I will say daily is a lot. I think I would guess the number was higher than this for like people who still turn it on sometimes.

Yeah. Daily is a lot. Jesse, Lou, the CEO of Rabbit has told us he's coming on Decoder. I will let you know when that happens. But we're booked. It's on my calendar. I'm dying to ask him questions. So let me know what your questions are.

And we'll see if we can get some answers about the record. I will say to Rabbit's credit, they have, like, continued to post through it. Like, they are not shy about the stuff they've been dealing with. Yeah. He's out there. I mean, he's obviously on a media tour, right? he's at this conference. He wants to be on a coder.

We're going to do it. I'm very curious. Like many of the things we talked about with meta, can you get past the phone operating system or do you have to build your own hardware? Rabbit is an answer to that question. But then you have to do all the rest of it. We'll see.

Yeah. All right. We're way over. We've got to wrap this thing up. Does anybody else have any last minute Zuckerberg-style dunks on the whole industry to issue? No? All right.

Let us know. You can get hold of us. There's quite a lot to talk about. So we welcome your feedback. Leave us your voicemails. You can send David a text to his rabbit R1, I believe. I'm trying to figure out what other dead gadgets I have around here. There's a lot.

I also have an office. It's full of just slowly expanding with the MI and VAT. I have a green flip phone that I couldn't tell you what it is or why I have it. But I have it. That's the Virchast, everybody. We'll be back next week. Rock and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week.

Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866, Verge 101. The Vergecast is a production of. of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poor, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.