The Vergecast - MWC 2023 gadgets, Meta's AR / VR roadmap, and TikTok's Bold Glamour filter

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Richard Lawler discuss the phones and laptops announced at Mobile World Congress, Meta's AR and VR hardware roadmap for the next few years, Tesla's "Master Plan", and more of this week's tech news. Further reading: MWC 2023 was a preview of what future phones could (and should) look like HMD's latest Nokia phone is designed to be repaired in minutes  The Xiaomi 13 Pro is going global  Realme’s ridiculous 240W fast-charging phone is getting an international release  Motorola’s new Razr foldable is arriving this year Lenovo’s rollable laptop and smartphone are a compelling, unfinished pitch for the future  This is Meta’s AR / VR hardware roadmap for the next four years Elon Musk says Twitter employees will receive ‘very significant’ stock awards on March 24th Twitter shut off its internal Slack, and now ‘everyone is barely working’ Twitter Blue head Esther Crawford is out at Twitter  Elon Musk's 'lab leak' tweets could be an issue for Tesla's plans in China Tesla’s new ‘Master Plan’ is coming — let’s grade the first two Elon Musk unveils a new Master Plan, a path to sustainable energy future, no new cars  Why won’t TikTok confirm the Bold Glamour filter is AI?  OpenAI announces an API for ChatGPT and its Whisper speech-to-text tech  Microsoft now lets you change Bing’s chatbot personality to be more entertaining Microsoft’s Phone Link app now lets you use iMessage from your PC Sony announces 2023 TV lineup: better late than never Email us at [e-mail] or call our Vergecast Hotline at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast, with Mobile World Congress. Did we get that, that one? Is that a sponsorship we got? What we're getting is a letter about how we're not that from the Europeans. But Mobile World Congress is great.

There's a Senate. There's a 5G Senate. And then there's a House of Mid-Range Android phones. Every once a year they come together. I don't know why it's called Mobile World Congress. Anyway, I'm your friend, Eli. Alex Cranz is here. I'm your friend who also doesn't know why it's called Mobile World Congress.

Sorry. It is a very European name. Richard Lawler is here. I'm here. I did not vote for any of this representation. I saw a very rude tweet this week that was like, Mobile World Congress is hilarious. It's thousands of companies coming together to compete with Apple, which does not attend. And I want to say, one, that is inaccurate.

I'll explain why. Two, I lulled. Like, I definitely just laughed. because there's like there's an internal truth to it. Like if you live in an insular Apple world, like that's the most true thing you've ever heard. And it's very funny. And then everyone else is like, no, but we're companies. Like, we build the networks.

You need us to exist for the iPhone to work. Your iPhone uses all of these things, actually. I was entertained. It was very funny in it. And it's like very small way. But my role of Congress was this week. If you don't know, I have no idea why you're listening to the show. But welcome.

All are welcome here. Now I will explain to you what Mobile World Congress or MWC is. This is the podcast you've chosen to listen to. MWC, we've been going to for years and years. The CS is a show. I think everybody who is in and around tech is familiar with. It's the big trade show in the United States where God only knows what happens there anymore. Samsung shows up.

They're like, now the fridge has a 47-inch TV built into it. Then there's EFA, which is the European version of that thing, IFA. And then there's MWC. the World Congress, which for a minute, I would say Richard, was like the most important trade show of them all because it is the mobile phone trade show. And it's gigantic. It's in Barcelona. We all have gone over the years. Like literally thousands and thousands of companies from around the world. This is where 3G was debuted. It was our 4G was debuted. It was 5G. This is that show. And what's interesting is, well, the iPhone kind of won. Like that's why that joke is funny. Right. Like the iPhone won in a meaningful way. But the show is back, right? It's like post-COVID back in full force. And kind of like a lot of things happened there. Yeah, back in the days of GPRS, it was a whole different story.

Yeah, like, this is a show where it's like, Intel's going to show up with WiMAX. Wow. And it was like, are they? Right, like, it's the show where these battles happened. It's where Windows Mobile made its debut, Windows Mobile 6.5. Actually, I feel like old heads who are listening to this, we'll remember this. And we were all out in Gadget and like Steve Baumers, like, here's Windows Mobile 6.1. And all they had done to compete with the iPhone was they took old janky Windows Mobile and they added a honeycomb shaped launcher to the home screen.

And people are like, oh, it's over. Microsoft's defeated the iPhone. Like, that's MWC. There's been a number of amazing Sony. Erickson, the history here is great. Again, if you're an old head, a lot of amazing things that happened in Barcelona. What didn't work? The list of things that did not work is something that we could go on for literally.

hours. But what we saw this year, John Porter was there at the show at MWC. He handled all of these phones, some of these laptops, these other mobile devices. He noticed a trend of seeing kind of the things that you could see in future phones. Each phone kind of had its own distinctive thing. We had something like this HMD now makes these phones that they call Nokia's. So they've got this G22 that costs less than $200. And it's designed specifically so that you can fix it. You could replace the battery. They say in around five minutes. You could swap out the screen in under 20 minutes. And they're going to have a partnership with IFixit to sell replacement parts. So if that's something that you've been looking for, I want a phone that I can actually work on myself, replace, and keep for probably as long as the software updates keep going.

You might have that option with this phone that is actually going to be coming out this year or actually coming out now in this next week or so. But it's not a fair phone. It's a little more complex. It's got like water resistance. It's not waterproof, but it's got water resistance, which is one of the things they always said, oh, your phone can't be a repairable. otherwise it won't be water resistant. And watchmakers are like, that's not true. We've done this for a very long time.

And phone makers are like, oh, maybe we can catch up. That was kind of the one that I was really excited about. Is it weird to be really excited about a phone just because I can replace the battery? Yeah. I mean, at this point, replace the battery on the phone is like a deeply political act, right? You're like, you know, like if you made the movie pump up the volume again in 2023, Right. Instead of broadcasting pirate radio, Christian Slater would be in his basement, like, doing an iPhone repair kiosk. Yeah, and the cops would come to his house. But if anyone is listening and wants to reboot the movie, pump up the volume with Christian Slater as a rogue teenage iPhone repairman, I can write that script in maybe an hour.

Christian Slater will still be playing the teenager. If only this were the peak of streaming, we could get a 20 episode series out of that. I can't believe. I missed it. How did I only come to us now? So the No Key story is really interesting this week. Nokia split effectively into two companies. They license the old Nokia name to this company, HMD, which is making handsets. This handsets are very cool. The best part is that IFIX is selling a repair kit with it. You should go look at this picture on our site. Pull your car over and go look at the picture.

There's, I believe, IFix, it calls these spudgers. That's the tool that you used to crack open the screen, like a little plastic wedge to get in there. The spudger that comes with this phone, it looks like a pocket knife. It looks like you should be able to, like, quickly flip it out. and then spudge something. I love it. It's perfect. I think more phone repair tools should look vaguely dangerous.

Yes, 100%. I think people would be more into repairability if the tools look vaguely dangerous. And they're all color matched. And they're all color matched. The whole thing's great. I looked at the, I was like, is that a knife? No, it's a spudger.

It also comes to these like a tar pick. The whole thing's fun. So that's great, but that's HMD's Nokia. And so they're still, you know, this is like the classic thing you do when you have a legendary brand, Polaroid is like the example. You sell the brand off for parts. You let people license it.

You just squeeze all the money out of the brand equity until you're done. Nokia kind of doing that in handsets, right? Like, whatever. We're going to let this Chinese company make handsets. HMD is doing something kind of cool here, but it's still operating at the very low end of the market. Right? This is a $150 handset. Okay.

But cool. Comes with the weird spudger knife. On the other side, there's the Nokia that actually remains as, Nokia, which is the networking equipment manufacturer. They make the 5G base stations and the cell towers and the software that connects it altogether. And their big news at MWC was people think we still make phones. So our solution is to change our logo to something ridiculous. Real Kia.

So I think the Kia thing worked. Do you? In case you don't know, Kia changed their logo and now people are trying to Google the KN car is it that they're looking for? Wait, let's just back this up. Let's back it up. Let's separate the two words that sound the same from each other. Nokia, the 5G equipment company, changed its logo.

And then what we all immediately started talking about was Kia, the car company, which admittedly is just a confusing transition, but makes perfect sense. Because Kia changed its logo, I think last year to something much more angular and stylish. And everyone thinks it says KN. So then we have run stories. Other people have run stories that people see the cars. They think the cars are cool because new Kia cars, a lot of them look cool. And then they start Googling KN car.

I'm telling you this is a gigantic victory for Kia, right? Like in the boardrooms of Kia, when they were like, did the logo redesign work? They're like, yes, everyone is talking about our logo. And now if you know something about cars, you are waiting to jump out of a bush when someone's like, what's that KN car to be like, that's a Kia? And then you have a five-minute conversation about their logo. Like, I'm telling you this all worked. The earned media for Kia off the charts.

Everyone's talking about Kia's, the Kia logos. I'm assuming they do not like talking about the Kia Boys, the gang of TikTok thieves. They spared out of steel Hyundai and Kia cars very easily. That seems like a less good outcome for them. This is true, by the way. It's Kia Boys with a Z. We've written about them.

I think we talked about them last week, didn't we? We did. Anyhow, so the Kia logo, I think, like, worked really well because it was like a consumer. And you can probably argue with me about this. I would absolutely argue with you because I rode in one of those Ks with the K-N. And I was just like, what off-brand nonsense is my friend bought for a car? And now I'm sitting in it and am I going to die? To be fair, that's what people have thought about Kia for a decade.

Yeah. I was like, why did she be from Kia to whatever this is? She's got the worst tasting cars. And then I think like Andy or someone wrote the story. And I was like, oh, she's just with Kia still. Okay, maybe it's not a dub for Kia. See? You see what I'm saying?

It worked. It's seared in your brain. And now the next time someone's like, what's a can card? You've got a whole story about Kia to tell. And now you've talked about Kia for five minutes. I'm telling you this worked for them. And we did on the podcast. And now Nokia, which is not the company that makes Nokia phones,

although there is a company that makes Nokia phones. There is another company that is still Nokia, that is the old Nokia that does not make phones and wants people to know that it does not make phones. And so they did not change their name to something that is other than Nokia, which is still on phones that are coming out now, they just change the way the logo looks. To make it look more like the Kia logo.

No KN. So go look at it. They've removed most of the vertical stems from the letters. There's no other way to describe this logo. Like imagine the word Nokia and then be like, what if we just remove most of the vertical? vertical lines, save for the eye. Yeah.

So you get something that looks very much like Vogue Shia. And it's going to be printed on cell towers around the world because that's what they make. They make cell towers and software and like, you know, like quarter zip fleece vests, like enterprise stuff. And you're not even getting at that moment where like that car looks cool. What's KN and Google it? It's just going to be like, what is that weird enterprise company? And you're going to continue riding the escalator at the airport.

It looks like you know when you're watching a movie and the alien picks up their little alien phone and they start typing to other aliens with their alien language. It looks like the alien languages. That's what they were going for. I liked your pronunciation, though. That feels like the right pronunciation. It's very finish. Anyhow, that was like the other big news. The biggest story is like Nokia rebrand.

It was like the first thing was announced. That was not the biggest news. Not the most important news. All right. What else you got, Richard? The Motorola riser. Oh, my God. The razzer.

The only phone that we want to discuss from MWC, it is not called the riser or it has not been called it yet, but it should be. Everyone agrees Motorola showed off rollable screen devices. We saw a laptop and we saw a phone from Lenovo, both using the same technology. Neither one with a release date or a price or anything like that, but they look like real devices, look like something that we could see in the near and near future. So this is a thing that Lenovo does on the regular, right? So the short version of the history here, Motorola was a company that existed. Then they tried to compete with Samsung.

It didn't go so great. Then Google bought Motorola in order to regain some control over the Android ecosystem. Then Samsung made the software on its phone so ridiculous. This is a true story. Andy Rubin at CES was like, what are you doing to my precious, precious Android? Bring it back to reality. And Samsung said, we'll do it if you sell Motorola and don't compete with us directly. This is a true story.

So then Google sold Motorola to Lenovo. And then later on bought HTC, and that's fine. I don't, it gets a little weedsy there. But ever since Lenovo has bought Motorola, they roll out kind of like on the regular, like pretty interesting concept devices, both laptops and phones, to show that they saw hardware shops. And then some of them come out and some of them don't. So they show off this phone, which we will discuss whether or not it is called the riser,

but they show off this phone that is so cool. So it's a rollable phone. It's not a foldable phone. So it's a little more squareish, Richard. And then when you unlock it or you go to watch a YouTube video or something, the screen rolls out. It extends to become 16 by 9, which is just cool as hell, in my opinion. Yeah, like it goes IMAX mode, essentially. Like suddenly you have an ultra-wide screen now to watch your videos or whatever, just when you need that extra space on the laptop.

If you want your spreadsheets and everything on the screen, and you got to see all your rows. Okay, now I need extra space. I think we talked about this, what, a couple weeks ago where we said on the plane, you're going to extend your super tall laptop screen. Yeah. They're chasing that market. They are following exactly what we're saying. But the phone is something that in your pocket, it's just going to be the same as any other phone.

But then suddenly when you need some extra space, there you go. And it's not super thick or has a hinge necessarily like we've seen from these foldable phones. And at least from the demos, it looks cool. Yeah, it looks very cool. When the screen is retracted, because, it's a rollable, it's curved around the back. So you can use the rear of the screen as like a selfie camera with the rear camera, which I think rules. And then you can get like status updates and all that stuff there. This is the part of the phone cycle now where it seems like the

hardware technology of roly, bendy, flexible screens is not yet mature. It's obviously not shipping in any particular volume outside of Samsung. But it's mature enough that we can see what the products should look like and the ideas are getting a little more sensible as opposed to, I know, a couple of years ago when we're like, which way should the phones fold? And the answer is like exactly one way and it's whatever Samsung wants. Right. But now it's like, oh, this is a lot cooler. Like, I can see this thing where it's like a more compact than regular phone, but then you turn it sideways to watch a YouTube video and the screen rolls out. That just rules. Like, yeah, that's awesome. This feels like the phone that I would want to own, unlike a lot of the Samsung ones.

The Samsung ones all feel like drawbacks. It's either like, okay, you have a little fat square that'll not fit in your pocket particularly well, or you have a really long skinny square that will not, you'll have a really long skinny rectangle that won't fit in your pocket particularly well. And this looks like it will fit a little better, but also just be cooler and you'll feel like a fancier person using it. And I think that's where they're getting the wind kind of is that this feels like, this seems like something that will feel cool to use.

And they've brought back the razor, which was probably the coolest phone of all time by, by a percent. of the phones that were available versus the razor at that time. It was by far the coolest, cooler than anything else has ever been. The revamped foldable screen razor, which they're going to bring out another device and might bring to the U.S., hopefully, hasn't really recaptured that. But this rollable screen, it kind of gets there. Yeah.

So everyone is calling this thing the riser, which does not appear to be its official name. Motorola is calling it the Motorola Rollable, which is fine. I mean, it rolls right off the tongue. Just try saying it. to hit pause on podcast right now and just go Motorola Rollable. Look to your partner. Just say it. We'll wait.

Right in the eye when you say it. Motorola Rollable. It's great and I love it. The riser is a cooler name and so they should go with that. Then on top of that, as Richard was saying, Motorola did a couple years ago put out a rebooted version of the Razor phone, the classic Razor as a folding screen mid-range Android phone. Do you all remember this?

They went nuts with this launch. Influencer parties, L.A., the whole, they were like, we're back, baby. Everybody wants to flip open a razor and drive around a miyadas or whatever it is they think the cool kids do. And it just, it flopped, like total flop. It was a bad phone. I mean, they ran into all the problems that every mid-range Android phone runs into, which is the carriers loaded it with bloatware, the processor was slow, the camera was mediocre and had I message. It was a Verizon exclusive at first, wasn't it?

I think so, yeah. I hate to see it. Yeah, it's... The display was kind of crummy. on it too if I remember correctly. Yeah, it was just a bad phone. Yeah. All of the money was in the folding

and I don't think that they quite understood that the target market for extremely fashionable phones also cares a lot about iMessage. Blomp, bump, and then you're like, oh, and the camera's bad and the screen's a little shitty and the battery's not great. So they're making a third

version. Are you on three? Yeah, I think so. I think this will be number three or four. I don't know. I don't know. I've lost count at this point. I just want to give you the quote from the CEO of Lenovo. This is to CNBC. Yang Wangqing says to CNBC,

I think it's much better. That's some confidence. He's willing to put go on the record saying that. That's real confidence. How is the fun? I think it's much better. Not, I know. Hedge in his bets.

That's a real rim. We've got like two more Blackberries to release type of vibe. So then we went and asked him for a little. One, Motorola officially refers to the CEO is YWI. Oh, wow. Two Ys. Great. I mean, I can't get enough of that.

And then they said, we're committed to the foldable space, dedicated to expanding the Razor franchise soon. Stay tuned. So there is another Razor coming, and the CEO of Lenovo thinks it is much better. Everyone invests. That's some, like, real optimism. Yeah. What else happened in MDC, Richard? We saw other cool forms.

We saw RealMe and I think they're kind of corporate partners showing off phones that have really fast charging, 240 watt fast charging in the RealMe GT3 that you'll be able to buy outside of China, although not in the U.S. You'll be able to kind of plug these phones and get half charge or full charge in just a few minutes. And these are real phones that people will actually be able to buy. Again, not where I live, but somewhere. We saw a One Plus with its active cooling phone that they say take several degrees off. So when you're doing gaming on your phone, it won't overheat. And Trevor Un's always doing.

Of course. It's a problem everyone. It's a problem we've all had and they finally fixed it. They're launching a foldable later this year. Honor has a foldable. This is what I mean about the technology is it's not mainstream. It's just hit the part of the technology curve where you can get it. Yeah.

Right? And like that's an, it's just an important thing to recognize. This is not limited to a $2,100 Samsung flagship. concept phone. Now it's like, well, you can just get it. So Honor is going to make one. And that's it's just, it's important to note that that's where we are with these flexible screens. And I think honors

just looks kind of cool. Like you can have it sit, you can use it partially folded. It looks a little like the Motorola MPX, I'm saying. They could put a physical keyboard on there. It would be better. I see what you're saying. We'll get there. But I think that was just the kind of the vibe of the show that you had all of these different approaches. You can

see the technology coming and we'll have some, we'll have some of these other things on phones that even we can use with this ridiculously fast charging, with more ways of using it. And I just want a riser that I can roll up and unroll. Yeah, so, well, I want that too,

very badly. I'm very worried that, you know, Lenova's bar is, I think it will be much better. They're all concepts. We have to see. I'm assuming it will have a mid-range Qualcomm chip,

a medium good screen, and a bad camera. This is the default for a mid-range Android phone now. They notably wouldn't let John, like, play with the riser, right? Yeah, I think he could see it, but he could not touch it

himself. Yeah, they wouldn't let him play with it, and then he could still see, like, the crease in the screen, even from afar. Ooh, that's so good. We got some time. There was the one accessory that we also saw. More brand engineering called Motorola, but made by this British company,

Bullet, a Bluetooth fob that you can use with your iPhone or your Android phone, and you can get something sort of like iPhone SOS. Okay. With all But it's even better because you can also send messages. It connects to satellites. You suddenly get that feature without having to buy a new phone. It's only $100.

Only $100. The service isn't too expensive, like $4.99 a month. Whoever your messaging does need to have this bullet company's app, but it just kind of comes in and goes out as a regular SMS from you. Wait, you need the other person needs the bullet app? You can send them an SMS and they'll get it, but they'll get it and a link to the app so that they can reply to you. So they can get your messages, but they can't send back.

out the app. That is just something brutal growth hacking right there. It's like, I'm trapped on a mountain. I need you to download an app called Bullet. Can you imagine sending that to like your partner who's not very tech savvy and be like, help me save my life? And they're like, I have to log into the app store. Never. I don't know my I cloud password. You just die. Like, you're up on that mountain forever. That's brutal. It should come with a sticker on the box. It's like you need a friend who knows their app store password. Make sure. they have FaceD set up. All right.

Lastly, on the MWC tip, Alex, this is your favorite. It's the other Lenovo thing. Yeah. It's the laptop that goes into silly mode. It just goes, whoop, you just go straight up. It looks like a normal laptop. And you're like, oh, look at this little 12-inch laptop. What adorable thing.

And then the screen slowly rises from beneath, from like, beneath the deck of the keyboard and just gets taller and taller. And then you got like two screens stacked. on top of each other. It looks so silly. Go watch the video on the website. John did a great job with this video. But you end up with two 16 by nine screens, right?

Yeah. Or at least that aspect ratio. I just, I like, Nealai, I want to have this like in, next time we're doing the Vergecast and I have this. I want to be sitting across from you, making eye contact. And then you'll just watch me disappear as the screen slowly rises. So rude. Like the worst meeting etiquette is like, boop. And the screen just slow.

rises up and covers your eyes. So it's two 16 by 9 screens. So it would be perfectly sized for you to be on a Zoom call while also watching Netflix if you wanted to do that. And no one would know because you've raised the screen so it looks like your eyes are still tracking where they were at the start of the

call. Exactly. See what I'm saying? But you've just going, whoop? I think this is brilliant. I want one tomorrow. Everybody, I don't know what needs to happen to make this an actual viable product that people buy. But the last few times Lenovo has done something like this where they're like, look at this stupid thing.

And you're like, that's stupid. Nobody will buy that. I want it. Then they go and they make it. Yes. This is Lenovo's thing now. They're just like, here it is. And the last dual screen laptop was pretty good, wasn't it?

I feel like Monica said in the review. Am I going too far? That's generous. It wasn't horrible. There we go. Yes. Monica said it was actually good and, quote, shockingly useful. And then she said, as long as you're willing to pay $2,000 for it.

which I'm just going to point out that in laptop world is not a lot of money. She's like, it's shockingly useful for this amount of money, which, again, for a high end laptop is like the normal amount of money. So I think there's a little qualifier in there. I wouldn't buy it. But like, I would respect other people who did. I don't know if I'd respect them, but like I'd appreciate hanging out with them. Yeah.

I just love that Lenovo does this stuff. Like, they're the one company now that I think reliably ships the wacky, key concepts, the dual screen laptop with keyboard in the front, come on. Who else is doing that? You think Tim Cook is doing that? No. Samsung used to do that. Now they're like, whatever, it's orange. That's as far as they go now. I appreciate that about Lenovo. That's what, and that's what a trade show is for. That's why we go to MWC. So like look at wild stuff and think, okay, like five years from now, this might be the mainstream thing. It's not because we think any of this will actually happen. I say this because I'm still scarred from when Steve Baum are introduced

Windows Mobile 6.5 with a honeycomb app launcher, and we were like, this is never going to happen, and we were inundated in the InGadget comments four months saying that we were biased in favor of Apple. Sorry, that was like 2007, and I'm still, I told you so. Fully and I told you so. And now Nokia is dead. That's what happened. There's a direct line from that moment to whatever the Nokia logo is now. That's your NFT moment.

I get it. Exactly, Richard. I'm holding onto it forever. All right, we got to take a break and come back. Alex Heath scooped the entire meta ARVR hardware roadmap. We got to talk about it. And then, of course, Elon, more stuff happened. We'll be right back.

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Scooped meta so hard that they talked. about him in all hands meetings after the scoop. Yes. Which is the funniest part of the whole puzzle. That's when you know it's a good scoop. I can't tell you what I know. I just know that in many meetings at meta, after Alex scooped the roadmap, they talked about Alex, which is very good.

Subscribe to Command Line. I think he's going to have some of that gossip in Command Line this week. I was like, this is what the people pay for. It's not the scoop. It's the gossip. A hundred percent. That's what I pay for. Anyway, so Heath gets the entire ARVR roadmap out of

meta for the next four years. Along with their insight, right? Like, their insight into why they're doing this and how they're going to do it. Yeah. And meta has been through, like, I would say a weird period. They laid a bunch of people off. Mark Zuckerberg's under fire for focusing on the Metaverse. The Quest Pro is behind me over there.

That thing has not been charged in weeks and weeks now. Quest Pro came out, you know, lots of hype. Zuckerberg is like doing virtual kickboxing with Joe Rogan, trying to tell people the Metaverse. versus here. The product is not good. The Quest 2, in my opinion, is a superior product to the Quest Pro. A hundred percent. Because it's more accessible. It's cheaper. It's just value for dollar. Right? You get more value for dollar on the Quest 2 than the Quest Pro. And then Horizon is just a mess. Just a full mess. And then Meta has layoffs in the advertising market's down. Apple's like done.

The ad tracking transparency thing. Tough times from it all around. So I think they were having this moment where the idea was we have to rerally the troops around our AR VR plans, around reality labs, around the Metaverse. So they have this like roadmap presentation of AR and VR and what they're going to do. And importantly, Alex, why they're doing it and where they think the money is going to come from. It's fascinating. Because I think we so often just get these roadmaps.

A lot of times when these kind of leaks happen, usually, it's just like, here's some documents showing the roadmap. And in this case, we get so much insight into what they're doing. and their plans that I think was really, really helpful, even if it does showcase an optimism that I think is extraordinarily foolish. Well, so let's start with the one piece of the puzzle that I think all of us have been curious about. They said they have sold nearly 20 million Quest headsets to date.

That's Quest 1 and Quest 2, although I think Quest 2 is the vast majority of that. That's not bad for a games console. Yeah, that's, like, pretty solid. Like, the Nintendo Switch is the most popular console of all, and I think it's over 100 million, and that's where it is. Like, we're so used to phone numbers. Like, Apple's like 95 billion iPhones. We're like, that's the, but like the number for the Nintendo Switch, which is now officially the third best-selling console of all time, is $122.5 million. It's a lot.

Yeah. Obviously, far more than $20 million. But in context, I think we all thought the Quest to, or the Quest was smaller. Well, I think my question is kind of how does that break down among, among, um, among, um, obviously. the generations, but the Quest 2, unquestionably, sold pretty well. I know a lot of people, we all kind of know people have seen them around this past Christmas who got Quest 2's. The 20 million number, there are estimates that say the Xbox series family is around 20 million. That's a VG charts number. If you know, you know, not totally reliable, but probably not that far off.

So it's a decent number for the hardware. But the thing that was in the article that I kind of didn't understand is they're saying that the Quest 3 is going to be at least a little bit more So how do you get people to pay more? What exactly are they going to put in it that people are going to pay more for? Right. Or are they going to try to continue to grow the market, right, and say... They already raised the price of the Quest 2. Right.

Meaning this is like the classic problem. Like, are you trying to get everyone to upgrade? You're trying to get 20 million people upgrade and you think that your whole market is 20 million people or do you think the market is 100 million devices? You're going to keep supporting the Quest 2 and you're going to go try to get the next 80 million people with the Quest 3. I don't know. I think they don't know.

I don't know that you can get 20 million people or another 20, 80 million people, whatever, with the Crest 3 because it's more expensive. The get for the Quest 2 was its affordability. It was that perfect blend, which is why I think they were talking in the roadmap. There's plans for another device that's going to be cheaper, that's going to hit that sweet spot while also kind of like maximizing the VR capabilities. I've heard this before. It was called the Sega Saturn and 32X. I don't think that worked out very well. So here's a quote.

Meta says around the third year of Quest 2 and the newer people that are coming in, the people who bought it this last Christmas, they're not as into it as the ones who bought it early. Which kind of makes sense, right? The early adopters are into it. The early adopters are going to use a lot. People get it as a Christmas gift.

They're kind of going into an ecosystem that is mature. Horizon is not the thing. It's games. The thing is a games console. It needs great games every season. I don't think the Quest had great games. So the Quest this year. So the Quest 3 is going to hit with 41 new apps and games,

including some new mixed reality stuff. There's going to be passed through that works really well. This is the mainstream headset that's coming. What I would put around the context I would put around at 20 million number is Microsoft sells 20 million of the Xbox series consoles. And they're like, this is a great business. We sell a ton of games. People love this thing.

We should buy Activision because people are buying games and subscribing to Xbox Live and they're, right, they monetize that so well. Meta is like the new people who buy this aren't even like using it as much. So that entire secondary ecosystem that you need to make money off of this device does not yet exist for meta. One thing that we've seen that they maybe are trying to expand that. The Battle Royale game, what is that, Population 1 or maybe I'm maybe different way? They're making that free to play like games on other consoles are, which is one approach we saw it obviously, Fortnite is the biggest example, but that's one way that you can kind of onboard people onto it. You can say, okay, look, you get the headset, you can just play it with your friends who are playing.

You don't have to buy another thing. And then, of course, you start spending money on the in-game cosmetics and whatnot. I think we're seeing like meta's misunderstanding of what their audience is, because meta's so focused on building the metaverse and getting every single person you know into the metaverse. They forgot that they've just really built a really good game console and they're in the video game business. And they need to be doing what Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo do, which is focused on making really good games. And instead they're like, no, no, no, we're going to go and we're going to do the Quest 3. And yeah, it'll be a little bit more expensive, but it's going to blow your socks off.

And as we saw it happen with Sega, as we saw happen with the PS3, those tend to be kind of like, if not boondoggles, certainly not successes. The PS3 was a huge success. Was it? They lost a lot of ground to Xbox that generation. That was the one generation of the Xbox one. It still grew the market for games. It grew the market for games, but it didn't grow.

Like, the people going and buying the PS3 already owned a PS2. It wasn't like a whole new audience. And meta's right now needs to be building a whole new audience. And instead, they're like, no, no, no, we want to just go build cool hardware, which as a hardware lover, I respect. But like... I'm going to make a different comparison for you. I don't think the PS3 is a comparison.

It got better once they revised it and made it not look like a form in grill. And then they started selling more when they made a slim and they made it cheaper. I have the one that you can run Linux on. Same. Oh, man. You can kill someone with that thing. It's huge. It's huge.

It was heavy. It was hot. It was ridiculous. The whole thing. Fine. And people can argue with me about whether PS3 was a huge success or not. Whatever. I'll make the same comparison.

The same point you're making out. I agree with you. The better one is the Xbox one where Microsoft was like, here's what we did. We made it Windows PC. for your living room that you can play games on. And now, we're going to talk about how much of a Windows PC it is. By the way, it also has an IR plaster

to control your cable box. And everyone's like, where's the games? And they're like, no, no, don't you want to run windows in your living room? And that was a disaster. That's a good point. Right? Like, that's where Microsoft lost all the ground

where they had the... Remember that E3, where they talked about everything with video games? Everybody was so mad. People were mad. And the people who were maddest for the people who were mad at me, this is just showing me airing old grievances.

This is the best episode of Rochest ever made. I was like, nothing with an iron blaster ever works. They never got mad at me, you know, whatever. But I was right. The Nvidia Shield, that first one had an IRR blaster, and now we're on what? Fifth Gen. Boom.

And boy, has the Nvidia Shield taken the world by Storm. There will be 17 revisions of the Quest 3 before they kind of get it right, probably. Yeah, that's what I'm saying is the exact point Alex is making. You're correct. Is when you make it a game console and you make it great, people buy it, they love it, they're going to play it more. when you start to be like, it's also a general purpose computer.

And this is true, the Quest 2 right now. If you open it up, it wants you to do things other than play games. It's like sign into your Facebook account. Here's this new thing. We've added multi-window support.

I don't want to do any of this stuff, man. I'm going to play NFL pro era. I'm going to be bad at being quarterback for a while. And then I'm going to put this down. And like, that's all you want out of it. My PS5 is not like,

oh, interested in Grand Turismo? Have you thought about opening a web browser? It's like, no. Like, stop. And I think this is the challenge that Meta has with the Quest 2, which they're trying to expand. But going Quest 2 to Quest 3 to Quest Pro, it's a replacement for your laptop. This is the next generation of computing devices.

I think it's a bigger gap because people, like, they think that games, machines are an appliance. Yeah. Even if the chips and some of the software is all the same as a general purpose. computer, there's still like appliances and that they are supposed to do a job and then you're supposed to go away. Now, I know there's people right there right now talking, they're like, already, they're in chat, GPT being like, write an angry email about my Windows PC that I play games on. I understand. I'm just saying that these devices. It's Tom Warren. Tom Warren is doing that as we speak. What do they have lined up after that? So where do we go from there, I guess? We've got

years of data of what meta is going to do. What do they do next after the Quest 3? So that's, That's the Quest line. That's the VR side of this, right? They're going to quest three, and then at some point there's a new Quest Pro. They talked about it. That's like a weird product. I think they got to figure that out. They didn't talk about that very much. The real stuff, and this is like the battle with Apple that's coming, is the AR glasses. So we are expecting some sort of mixed reality headset from Apple this year. And we're expecting a virtual reality headset with cameras. It does pass through. That's mixed reality. Very expensive. $3,000 is not from Apple, developer tool. I think we're expecting it around WWC. This is the rumor. I don't know anything about this. This is what the people say. Meta is doing something very different. So in 2025, they're going to release a new set of smart glasses, like the ones they've already released with Raybans that just sort of like have a screen in them. You know, you can get notifications. So like what North was doing there for a while before they got sucked up by the Google machine? Yeah. I think the current ones, they just like take photos. They don't like do anything. You know, it's like, it's got a camera in it. Yeah. All the, all the, the rebands just take pictures and grads. You took some pictures with your. When I think of things I trust Mark Zuckerber with, it's putting a camera on my face that other people can't see. 100%. So the next generation in 2025 will just have a screen in the lens and you'll be able to get notifications.

Like they called it a viewfinder. You'd like incoming text messages, scan QR codes, translate text from one thing to another. This is like everyone's favorite demo. And what's the other thing they're going to have? They're going to have a smartwatch that controls it using a neural interface. Which is tech that Meta has had and that they have demoed before. Addie has seen this technology. She loves it.

She thinks it's so cool. She was very worried when Meadows seen the last. They're going to get rid of this. But they're betting on it that instead of this thing right now where there's a bunch of cameras on a headset and you like wave your hands around to do pinching motions, they're going to be able to put a, like, a smart watch on your wrist that will detect what your hand is doing, which is, it's just cool. They have the technology. They've demoed it. Well, they were going to do the watch for a while, and then the watch got killed because everybody was like, nobody wants a Facebook branded

smart watch on their wrist, even if it does do the neural stuff. The entire underlying thing here, not to make this whole thing about Apple, but the entire underlying thing here is Mark Zuckerberg knows that his company is at Apple's mercy. And we've seen it now several times. Like Apple pulls a security certificate, all of Facebook's internal systems stop working. Apple decides it wants ad tracking transparency, puts up the prompt. People say no, Facebook's business goes away. Mark Zuckerberg knows he's at the mercy of Apple. So if you want to make a smart watch and you're like, you cannot reply to text on it on your phone, like you're done for. There's a reason there are no competitive smart watches on iOS, because Apple restricts all the good capabilities to its

own platform. Fine. We argue about that, whether or not that's right. Elizabeth Warren is going to like jump through a wall like the Kool-Aid man screaming out of here, whatever. Mark Zuckerberg knows that this is the current state of things. He's got to build a new platform. And so building a smart watch that's like still dependent on Apple, I don't think he's interested in that. So he's like, I'm going to build a headset.

The headset, you're going to live in the headset, you're going to brain into that. You're going to post it Instagram all day. I'm going to read your thoughts and we're going to move your laptop into this headset. And now I've got the smartwatch that is the control surface for the headset instead of doing camera-based keyboard stuff or controller-based stuff. I think this is the coolest idea they have, because everything we know about Apple is that Apple is going to do the camera-based,

you know, pinch in the air situation. Now, it's Apple. They will probably do a better job than what we've seen in the past, but that's what we know so far. So that is the coolest part. They're going to do these smart glasses. They're not AR glasses, just sunglasses with the screen that do notifications,

and then this control system. Well, they'll have a viewfinder. They'll have like that limited, range that is already capable in other glasses. Because I think that's the thing that I keep getting focused on it with AR. We all have our little bits where we're like, AR can't happen until this happens because there's so much stuff that has to happen first. And for me, I always get hung up on the, like, how are you going to use these?

What's the technology behind the display? And in this case, it sounds like they're going to be using kind of robust technology that already exists, which is those little, like, tiny lasers and reflective, the whole reflective apparatus that North does. Yeah, we'll see. Just to, like, define the terms here again. When we talk about AR, it's, I think what you and I aren't talking about is you look through a pair of glasses, you have, like, perfect field of view. The glasses see that you're looking at a tree, and you get, like, the little label that's, like, pine tree, right? Yeah.

By the way, huge problems with this, especially if you live in the world of Facebook content moderation. Imagine that you're standing Washington, D.C., and you're looking at the Capitol building. Who gets to label the Capitol building? What happened at the Capitol building? Any notable events that your uncle on Facebook might like to notate around that building? The content moderation nightmare to end all content moderation nightmares. I just got, like, tired thinking about it. It's exhausting.

And no one's ready for it. Who will augment reality? A real question. That's a real headline. We should put on the side. But that's like the holy grail. Like Mark Zuckerberg has called this. Holy Grail. I've said this a million times in the show. If I could just remember people's names,

I'd be the King of America that you couldn't stop me. Unstoppable, charming. The charm, the dedication, the memory that I remember your kids' names. I mean, I got an unstoppable politician. As it stands, I can't remember anyone's names, so all of you are safe from my reign of terror. But these glasses, the problem is you have to build a worldwide facial recognition database to enable that feature. Again, not something I'm sure we want Mark Zuckerberg to do. I think he's already done it, but yeah. Well, I'll be unstoppable. You can't touch me. Who cares about privacy? I know who all of you are. I know your names. Vote Patel. This is like an interim step. Like that's the dream. And that's what we think

Apple is building towards. This is like it's a pair of sunglasses and it's got a little display in it. It's like Google Glass display. Yeah, it's a little monitor in your glasses. And it, It can do things like show you a notification, and it sounds like it'll have a camera still. So it can do things like take a picture of a sign and a foreign language and then, like, show you what that text means. It does not appear that they're talking about you can overlay or augment reality with that screen. Right. We don't quite know, but it doesn't seem like that's the case. Which is interesting because Apple's product is that thing.

They're going to jump right there this year, and this Facebook smart glass is 2025. Now, Facebook is then going to do its first true pair of AR glasses, codenamed Orion, internal launch in 2024, so next year, and then a public version in 27. So we'll see. That's a long way out from Apple. And this is what we're talking about, like it overlays holograms onto the real world, like the demos that Mark showed off. No, because Apple's still doing pass-through. The problem is nobody's figured out the display technology to actually do AR. So the hack right now is to be like, look like a weaner where a giant headset on your face and the cameras will pass it through and process the information.

So like that's Apple's plan for the foreseeable future. And no, you're not seeing, the thing is there's not a lot of movement in the display technology space to suggest that something cooler is on their horizon, right? Like you would normally hear little trick. You'd hear little bits of that at like Seagraph and other places and we're not hearing that yet. So it's just like, okay, this big breakthrough that we need to happen for true AR hasn't happened. And everybody's like finding hacky ways into it. Somewhere there's like a wave guide engineer listening to Alex right now, like shaking his fist being like, I'll show you. But that's what they're promising with this Orion thing is that they're going to do these high quality holograms.

In 2027, Orion will do the high quality AR. That's that's meta's red map. That's their projection for when they'll do it. Allegedly. We'll see. And they'll have an internal prototype in 24. So next year. So between their internal prototype and actually consumer launches on this roadmap three years.

I'll just write a stub for the internal tests have been delayed until 2025 right now. Just get that ready. But Alex, you're right. That stack of problems is really hard, right? And we've gone through it many times in the show, but I'll do it one more time. It's you need glasses on your face. The glasses have to contain a camera, enough cameras to see the world around you. You have to pass all the information from the camera onto a.

computer that can recognize what you're looking at, go out to the internet, figure out what it is you're seeing, figure out what to augment reality with, send it back to you and it will like zero latency, or process all that locally. You need a battery that can run all this all day, and you need a display that's thin and optically transparent enough so that they're just glasses and you're not like... Yeah, with a large enough field of view that it feels like reality. is being augmented and a postage stamp isn't. Yeah.

This is not a solved problem. Like every part of that is zero percent solved. Well, maybe not zero. Every part of that is way less than 50 percent solved. Like even the part where it's like you want to go out to the cloud computing center and like identify the tree and send it back to you with zero latency, that was the whole point of 5G. And like, does anyone want to trust that to the current state of 5G networks?

I was in New York City last week. I pulled 35 down on AT&T 5G plus. You were not allowed to augment reality. That is just, it's already a horrible experience. There's something coming for that. Stay tuned. We will have a report. There's something coming.

That may be like 40% solved. The 5G part? No, the latency part. It's not 5G, unfortunately, which did not do what we promised. Is it Comcast 10G? Maybe. It's not not Comcast 10G. Disclosure, NBC Universalist and investor in Vox Media, our parent company, Comcast owns NBC.

They don't love me. Comcast's been super thirsty with the 10G marketing lately. Have you noticed this? Yes. And 10G, if you were wondering what it stands for, it is more than 5G. They're like, we know you love the convenience of the mobile internet. Have you thought about faster internet with wires? It's good.

I'll take it. I'll take it. Liam, I think, are you upgrading to two-gig internet home? I know you're talking about it. Still thinking about it. The second I can. I'm doing it. I don't care what you say.

I can't even use all of what I have now, but I kind of want to be a monster and just say, I have a two-gigabit internet connection. Yeah. Do you know how many horsepower your car actually needs? It's like 50. Does that stop anyone in America? When you look at the horsepower of cars from the 90s, like what a probe turbo came with compared to what everything has now, it's like a joke. But I recently cut the cord. I got in touch with Comcast and they had to kick TiVo one more time.

I'm on the way out. I asked them what I needed to do with my cable card and they said, oh, we don't get a lot of questions about those. Yeah. Wow. You saw the cable card? What was your cable card plugged into? A TiVo.

Oh, man. The last one. The greatest hits, Virchcast right now. We've done to Windows Mobile. We got TiVo on the show. Richard's debugging a cable card. I was super right about Windows Mobile. I just want to put that out.

I are Blasters. We're going to talk about boxing next. Let's go. We've got to take a break. We've got to come back. We've got to talk about Elon. We've got to talk about AI. There's still much to discuss.

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This is self-care. There's a lot of Elon news, but kind of like none of it matters. I don't know how to describe that, Alex. I think on the clock of Alex winning her. bet against Monica and Liz, I think I'm much closer to winning the bet now. Because he was doing some like A-plus shit posting this week. He was tweeting replies to people arguing about the war in Ukraine during Tesla Investor Day. He was backstage at his own Investor Day replying to Randos on Twitter.

I'm just saying, I'm so sorry it's going to happen. I'm going to get a coffee and a bottle of champagne. and the rest of you are just going to have some nightmares in your head forever. I very much like not acknowledging what the bet is. People can just guess what it is. You can guess. All right, let's go through the Elon headlines. He laid off more people over the weekend, including Esther Crawford, who's a woman who very

famously was sleeping on the ground, and was going to be like the head of Twitter blue as product. She got laid off along with a bunch of other founders from companies Twitter had acquired, who had accelerating investing schedules, bigger payouts because of their stock and so on. more cleaning house. He apologized. He said it was necessary. Twitter financially quite dicey. Like, we don't know what's going on there. There's a lot of rumors that he's picked a new CEO. The CEO, Esther Crawford slept on the floor by herself in a sleeping bag. The guy they think it'll be the new CEO, Twitter. He just moved in with his wife and newborn baby and is sleeping there. So that's the level of commitment that Elon's looking for is, does your family sleep here as well?

We'll see. Twitter has gone down a lot recently. It's been very slow. are spiking. The main timeline just like didn't work this week. Twitter also shut off its internal slack and employees went over a day without working. Just all fully ridiculous. Then all the things that we thought would happen when Elon bought Twitter have like started to happen. And I don't mean the he fired everybody and the site's not reliable. We didn't actually predict that part of it. We predicted a bunch of moderation crises. And that is beginning to happen as well. So there was a report out of the Department of Energy, that the Department of Energy with low confidence has deduced, has decided that COVID leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, China. That's obviously, there's discrepancy

with what the Department of Energy thinks compared to other parts of the government. This is an ongoing debate in the scientific community. Elon tweets about it, gets reprimanded in Chinese state media. It says, don't bite the hands of Fiji, in using a Chinese idiom. There's a huge problem for Elon. China has a huge market for Tesla. He's got to keep that in check. or leave China, right? Like the same way that, I know, the NBA gets in trouble for Kowtown and China. Like, Elon's got the same problem. Only now he owns Twitter and he's addicted to it.

And he loves owning the lips. This is the problem. He has no one to just say, no. Before that, it was the moderators at Twitter. And he fired them all. Well, he had a response to the SEC. He wanted to try and make up a little acronym for them. And he's complained and complained and complained about their restrictions on his tweeting.

I feel like that's not going to go over. overworld with the Chinese government. I feel like it's not going to go over with Chinese government. So that's Twitter. So just escalating chaos at Twitter, including now some of the problems that we thought we would see. And then there's Investor Day, which was, we were recording this on Thursday. You're listening to it on Friday. We all watched Investor Day on Wednesday night.

It was very long. It was four hours long. I will say Elon's deputies at Tesla, by and large, all very polished, all very put together, very committed, very passionate. it. Elon looking like he just showed up off the street. Like, just rambling. Like, they kept dragging them out there to be like, not Elon's going to talk about robots. And he'd be like, here's a render of optimus. And he'd say something like, yeah, I think it's pretty important. This could change the economy. And then you would look off into the distance and say, what does economy even mean? And then everyone would politely clap. And then they would like bring out the head of supply chain to be like, here's

how we're going to make more cars. But overall, it was four hours. They announced nothing new. Right. And there's no, they hinted at the new platform. Everyone thought we were going to see it. They hinted at cheaper cars. I thought we were going to see it, but we didn't see it. And the stock price collapsed. It sounded to me like a long presentation of Elon's people telling investors why they're going to need a lot more money for the next period. Yeah, I got some of that vibe. You know, there was something really interesting. So Tesla is very innovative as a company. And like the way they design package and build cars is new and novel, right? This core argument they're making, which is that a big car company like a GM or Ford or whoever is or VW is,

is like their job is they go buy parts from lots of suppliers and they integrate all the parts and there's like so many parts in the car and that's why they're hard to upgrade over the air and all this stuff like all that is a hundred percent true it's just that was the argument at the beginning of Tesla that was the argument when the model three was coming out right we're we're now making a mass market car we've designed and built it from the ground up we are using less computers less supplier computers in the in the car we are designing the manufacturing the same time like this is all to me this is all very very important familiar to the Tesla story we've heard for years. It's also really familiar to the story of every

other kind of high-end EV startup that we are now familiar with. Like, when you go hang out with Rivian, they tell you a story about how traditional carmakers are lazy and they don't realize the cars are computers. There was just a weirdness to Tesla restating their core value proposition in that way, because for the larger part of the market, this is always what they've been investing in, right? Tesla makes better cars because it designs them differently, and it's much more of a computer company than a car company. But we are now at the point where Ford is like, we've done it.

Like, we split ourselves into two divisions and we're going to act this way too. Like, there was just something weird there. It's like, it's weird to see Tesla repeating itself. Well, and I think this was, this kind of reinforced a lot of investors fear that he was spending too much time with Twitter and not enough time. He was tweeting during the investor day. Yeah. And so he, and then he was like, like, I think.

Elon has definitely gotten to a point where he has forgotten that actually he does owe people things. He does just because he's the richest man in the world on paper. Well, not anymore. Oh, he is again. Is he again? He's back. He's got a lot of people that he has obligations to. And I think he keeps forgetting that because he's like, oh, I got a tweet.

And it's real important. And the investors kind of reminded him. Yeah. I think there's a real world in which any one of the deputies we saw a Tesla yesterday, he could say you're the CEO now and that might be a good thing. The same way like Quinn Chowell is the C-O-O, SpaceX, but very much in charge of SpaceX. He doesn't have that person at Tesla. He does not have that person at Twitter delegating. Hot management tip, fresh from Decoder.

You should sometimes delegate some things. He did roll out the new master plan. It is about renewable energy. It's not really about building cars. He wants to increase the world's energy storage capacity. They have some new ideas about battery technology. Elon, he's like, this will need substantially less than 30% of all nickel on Earth, which is an incredible thing to say. It's just good. It's like, yeah, you know, I have a plan.

Don't worry, it'll be less than 30% of all nickel on the planet. It's like, yeah, you should set your goals high. And then they talked a lot about just in general manufacturing more efficiently. And then they did spend some time talking about full self-driving and how they think they get full self-driving out the door. The cars will be taxis. The cars will be in service. More often, they'll be driving themselves around, making money for you while you're sleeping. And that will go a long way to sustainability. That was a part of the whole presentation. I was like, what are the car? No. Like, we're a long way from there. Like, as far away from that as we are from optimists. And you've already promised it and didn't deliver it for several years. We've heard it. I'm just thinking of the day where

like you forget you left something in your car and you send your car out to be an Uber and like your laptops in there, your child something. You're child. I don't know. I don't have a kid. I assume people sometimes forget them in their cars. Look, if you get my car and Max is in it, it's actually the rates goes up. She's very entertaining. She happily sing you any song from Enkanto you want while you're on your way to your destination.

She's the emcee for the ride. She's got a little like bowler hat on. She's like, welcome. She'll tell you any number of jokes about butts. She's very funny, very into them. She's four. Yeah, I just, the whole thing, I think, kind of landed with the thought.

It landed with the thought with the Tesla fanboys, who were expecting to see a new car and instead got very long explanations of like assembly efficiency and factories. And some of them couldn't get into the event what the whole Mars blog guy? Like there were people who were supposed to be able to be there who suddenly couldn't.

Yeah, but then they tweeted Elon and they got in. Of course, because customer service is what he does now. That's his whole job. So that's Tesla. There's some other AI news this week that I want to talk briefly. There's this new filter on TikTok that Just Weather read and Mia Sato wrote about It's called bold glamour.

So normally a new filter on TikTok, not a huge newsman. These are really interesting for two reasons. One, TikTok rolled out a new set of tools for filter creators that use AI tools, in particular, GAN's generative adversarial networks. We've covered these a lot on the site, basically point two networks at each other and make them fight. So what this thing is doing is actually replacing faces. So before TikTok would like make a 3D model of your face. layer the fake eyebrows on it and then layer that over your face. So you could break it really easily.

It was very obvious that this is a filter. This is actually replacing your face. So it's like deep faking you with hotter you. And it's like smart and like uncanny ways. So it knows a more feminine face from a more masculine face. On more feminine faces, it puts like loads of eye makeup and contouring on my face. It just like smooths my skin. It makes my jawline straighter, which is really annoying because I look amazing in eye makeup.

Just give it to me. Just like, let me have it. Like, eyeliner improves all faces. I look fucking amazing in eyeliner. And TikTok won't let me have it. It's very annoying. So Jess and Mia wrote about it. They talked to some experts in the field. It's obviously GN.

And we assumed that TikTok were just like happily to confirm this information. They rolled out the filter tools. They rolled out the first party filters. People are going crazy for them. It's fairly obvious what's happening here. It is very impressive. I encourage you to go try it. and TikTok is silent for a full week, just like won't even respond to the emails.

Why? Like, why? It's utterly bizarre. And then when you started looking around at the other media coverage, and Fox News is out there being like, this is psychological warfare on young women. NBC News called it terrifying. And it's like, oh, they, TikTok just doesn't want anyone, like, they're already in so much trouble and people want to ban TikTok so bad that they're out there being like, we've created deep fake filters that make up on young women, like, they're going to get kicked out of the country even faster. It's like totally weird corner of the culture war. It's super, because these filters have been pretty common for a while now, right? Like, the filters that make people slightly more pretty, China's been doing that for years. Your phone,

if you bought a phone in China and you took a photo of yourself with it, a lot of times, you'd be like, oh, I didn't remember I put on an eyeliner today because the phone would just add it for you. So this is like very, very common in other cultures, in other places. And in America, where suddenly everybody, everybody is now thinking about this in a way that a lot of places, particularly Fox News, wouldn't normally think. Fox News is not really the place I go for really insightful commentary on representation of gender. No? Just not my first stop. And now they're like, yeah, it's a culture. We're being destroyed from the inside. I was like, well, welcome to the struggle. have you looked at your own desks yet?

There has been a lot of coverage. I'm trying my best year. There has been a lot of coverage on both sides about social media and young women in particular. 100% percent. Like recent coverage about the depression. And like this is part of it, right? Yeah. People see the filters.

I think the filters are reality or they want to look more like the filter. There's been a wave of plastic surgeries to look more like Instagram. This is all real. And neither have a filter that doesn't. It doesn't even look fake, right? It looks super real. Mm-hmm. That's the difference here, I think, and why it has struck people here is that it actually

works really well. You have to decide what working means. I didn't say it's good. It just works. Right. It works well, and that the thing it's doing to replace your face is impressive. The actual, like, makeup look on some people is great, on some people is fine, and some people looks bonkers.

And so Jess, you know, like, it's her photo at the top of our story. He was like, this makes me look like a troll. Like, I hate the way this looks at me. The thing is that it just looks very real. And I think there's an entire tech culture verge story in there that has been distorted into the, this is Alex's point, that has been distorted into the Fox News headline if this is psychological warfare. And it does. It does look like a person who's had contoured and heavy makeup on, but it looks like an actual person's face, even though it really doesn't look very much like your real face is looking at all. Yeah.

Yeah, like, if I could contour as well as this thing does, I would be a makeup artist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, it won't even let me see. What would I look like? It's always creepy. When you do get that contouring, the really heavy stuff that, like, Kim Kardashian is super known for, like, she was kind of popularized that type of contouring, you're like, am I a witch? What's happened here? When my face is different, people go, oh.

And you're like, is it a good oh? is it a bad oh. And this just lets you do it without having to like spend hundreds of dollars at Sephora. It doesn't let me do it. You keep talking about it. It won't even run on my phone. It won't run on the pixel.

Yeah, it only runs on iPhones, right? There's a lot going on here. Like I said, it's a very vergy story. And the amazing thing about it, right, is we're talking about something that it's base level is just a really cool piece of tech, right? Whether or not the technology is being pointed at due contouring or whatever else it might be, that underlying in real time we're doing generative adversarial networks to remap your face at a frame rate that is close enough for video. That's cool.

And then it's the culture war has just come for it. To the point where TikTok won't even talk about the technology, because the culture wars are out of control. So that one is the one we're tracking. Speaking of Mia, right as we came on air, we have talked a lot about CNET and the use of AI to write SEO spam, basically. I feel like I can just condense that story into what's happened. It's a very complicated story, but right, they're using AI tools to write SEO spam articles to get you to sign for credit cards. Natural results of that, CNET today laid off 10% of its message, which is really bad. I mean, these are people we know.

These are our competitors. I don't like it, but you can see this thing is happening where we've talked a lot about AI in the context of Google. It's like CNET turning into the AI content farm. Yeah, first they're just going to, the private equity company, Red Ventures, they're going to gut CNET, right? But they're going to point the automated tools at winning Google search terms until Google is forced to contend with it, because that's the money. And then right as we're coming on air here, Mia broke the story that the editor-in-chief of CNET

is stepping down and becoming the AI content head of the... That's brutal. It's sad, folks. I don't love it. I don't like it. This is the future. I hope you enjoy the Vergecast because soon it will just be chat pots

or doing with each other about our air blasters. That happened to someone on our staff this week. They didn't realize that they had, I believe it was Otter AI, activated and it joined a meeting for them that they couldn't attend and just started like chatting at everybody in the meeting. And everybody's like, why are they ignoring us

and not talking to us? and they just accidentally activated some sort of AI chatbot to show up to a work meeting. This is my dream, is it soon all of our meetings will just be our chatpots talking each other. And they come back to us with like, here's what everybody discussed. Nothing actually happened. You still have to go slack with each other. So like most meetings. Just to be clear, most meetings in corporate America are exactly that thing.

Bing, on the other side, Microsoft added some personality tools. to Bing. I think there's been a real, I don't know how you two feel about it, so I'm curious. There has been a real reckoning of whether Bing is actually a replacement for search, or it's just a thing that various, very smart tech writers want to smooch. I finally got access to it. Unfortunately, after they nuked the personality a bit, and I used it. There was something I was looking up, and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to Google it very well. I've used Google a lot. I can tell when it's going to give me an answer or not. And I decided to search in Google and also in Bing.

And neither one gave me the answer that I wanted. The summary response to Bing eventually gave me was decent. It was decently written. It was easy to read, but it didn't have the information I was looking for. And it was slow. By the time it actually popped up, I had done three Google searches and, you know, it was kind of closer to getting the kind of question that I wanted. So no, I don't think it's there yet as a search replacement.

It's improved versus chat GPT, because in both of them, I just asked who I was. And chat GPT was like, she works at Laptop magazine. And I was like, oh, that's a while back. Folks, that's a while back. And like the Bing one gave me a much. It was like, oh, it made me sound fancy. I felt very great for a day. But it still struggles with like the searches I do want.

Like if I'm thinking about, oh, I want like, what's the best kind of pants or whatever? I don't want to go and search that on Google because it's all SEO spam. And Bing's not helping because it still seems to be based on Bing search results. And I've been trying to use Bing just to like experience the magic. Boy, it's not magical. Like, just the straight ahead Bing search engines real bad. So they integrated Bing with Windows 11 now, and it's really just a button on your search bar that when you click it, it shows you the news widget that you were already ignoring. And then you click Bing again and it opens up edge to the same Bing chat app that everyone else says.

It's just a button. That's what they did. Here's my idea for Bing. They should stop pretending that it's a search engine and just let it be a dating sim. Just let people date Bing. People pay for Tinder Gold. Be like, it's $8 a month, and you're dating it now. It will not go with you to the wedding this weekend.

Yeah, it's your girlfriend from Niagara Falls. Just like it's fine. But it will find someone on Craigslist to go to the wedding with you this weekend. Just to complete the Windows Mobile Nokia triangle, I agree with Steven Sinovsky. That's basically what he said. Wait, Steven Snovsky said people should be allowed to date bang? Not in so many words. He said that they should consider these things, features, not bugs, and just let it go do that and stop trying to

challenge Google as a search engine. Yeah, but the money is in search. This is the problem. The business model that Nadella is excited about is taking any dollars away from Google search. And everyone else is like, what if you could kiss it? And like, there's not as much money there. You can make that money. It's not the same amount of money.

Like, one is the most lucrative business model in the history of the internet. And the other one... The other one's a very lucrative business model for millennia. In the history of the world in a different way. But not on the same scale. And it's one of those things that comes up. I think every time people ask about, like, why is this company blocking adult and porn content from their thing? Because it doesn't make as much money as Google does.

Yeah, it's very good. Last little bits here. Sony announced its 2023 TV lineup finally. They didn't do it at CES. Looks pretty good. New gaming menu. Alex. Some nice TVs.

There's an anime button on the remote. Yes. It's got the crunchy roll. Like, the trajectory of Crunchyroll, which was originally where you would watch fan subs of anime. It was all pirated. And then the guy went, the guy like made some deals with anime companies in Japan so he could have the anime air at the same time on his pirate channel. And now it's a button on a, like the trajectory from that to owned by Sony to now being on the Sony remote just delights me to no end. Yeah. Good for them. I just have to get in here

and say, as the representative of 2 gigabit internet speeds, that they're top of the line, Sony A95J, I think is the letter this year, 4K 120 capability, but it still has a 100 megabit per second Ethernet board on it. I just... What? You need more than 100 megabits per second to your TV. Well, how about for the Sony streaming service that supposedly delivers you Blu-ray quality 4K content. Or streaming definitely legitimate rips from your Plex server that are completely

uncompressed. I don't know what you're talking about. I have to go now. All right. A Blu-ray, okay, a 4K Blu-ray is 100 megabits. I got you. Saying, that's crazy. But that's like an uncompressed Blu-ray. There's not a streaming service in the world that delivers 100 megabets. According to them,

they need at least 80 megabits per second for their streaming service. This only service that no one uses. This is like, just to go back to Verchcast hits from the 80s. Remember when Sony, like, no one remembers this. Only I remember this. One year at CES, Sony was like, we have a new 4K streaming device.

And it will download 4K movies in the background. It was a silver circle with a light. It was like huge. It was like an oval and it had a light. This was the problem. And it's like, can I see it? And they took me to the booth and they showed me very proudly this device that they were going to release to consumers along with their first wave of 4K TV.

that would download 4K movies in the background and you'd be able to buy them and there was a whole thing. And I was like, is this actually it? And they're like, no, that's just a box with a light in it. And then I pulled back a curtain and they're like, this PC is where it runs right now. And I was like, only at CS do you get to fully announce just a box with the light and be like,

we're going to figure this out. Don't worry about it. We got this. It's coming. Needless to say, the Sony box with the light did not upend the streaming landscape. But they do have a very expensive service where you can like, and it's kind of like a better version of what Apple does when you buy

or rent a movie from Apple. They actually, those movies are higher bandwidth than what you would watch on Netflix or something, same movie, because it downloads the whole thing to the Apple TV device. And so Sony has like tech that does kind of similar. So for nerds like Liam and I who really want like to see every little piece of film grain, it's nice. But aren't you downloading that anyway? No, I just have blu-rays.

Aren't you pre-fetching that content? You're not streaming it over Ethernet to your TV. We all need the extra headroom. We all have it. Fine. Can I just say I just got, I recently received the new PDF of Stereophile I see on Apple News?

You're ready. You're going to tuck in. It's very good. And the entire editor's letter was written about chat GPT. And he asked it if cables made a difference. And chat DVD was like, I know what you want. And it was many paragraphs about,

why some cables are better than others. Chad, GPG gets it. I was like, no, this is wrong. This is pure misinformation. This is the most dangerous misinformation that's ever been printed. They're just HGMI cables, man. It's once in zeros. Some HGMI cables are better than others.

No, that's it. Monster cable is bad. Here we go. It's happened. You've got to get the gold-plated, man. That's how you know. There's nothing that brings me greater pleasure than tucking in with my iPad. in the latest PDF of Starved File.

I love it so much. I can't believe I haven't been doing this for years since Apple News Plus came out. But it's true. This is a true story I'm telling that he was just like, let's see if Chad GPD can write the editor's letter. And it was like, cables are great. It's a lot. Okay. Lastly, this Microsoft

Phone Link, I message thing. Richard's pumped. A lot of controversy this week. So Microsoft releases a tool. They have phone link on Windows, which I don't know if you have it. But they're like, you can now use iMessage for your PC with it. And what they're doing, Microsoft, the company that is at once the forefront of the state of the art with its emotional chatbot that will just lie to you about whatever you want it to. And then you want to kiss it.

They're like, here's what we're doing. We're bluthing into your phone. We're reading the notifications that come in and passing them to your computer as though it's a message. The hackiest of all hacks. So it's like your car when you get a text message. Yep. They're using the exact same past. through, right? There's a little notification standard. And you can send them back, right? You can, you can,

if you have voice integration in your car, you can usually send a text back out. And then I message will decide if it's an I message or a text, Microsoft using the same tool. But is that not the hackiest hack that has ever existed? I love it though. Like, they were like, no, we're going to do it. Apple won't give us the tools. So we're going to just, one of the largest companies in the world is just going to hack it. But Apple is letting them. And they're friends now. You can get your Apple TV app on Windows. It's all cool. Everybody, everybody's cool. You just can't get real I message on Windows. That's all. Everything but I message. The thing that keeps you on the iPhone forever. It's true. Elizabeth Warren, again, about to jump through the wall. It's cool, man. Interoperability, she screamed.

That's the Verstress, everybody. We've gone over time. Liz is coming for us. If anyone wants to draw me a cartoon of Elizabeth Warren jumping through a window screaming in their offability, we'll run it. I'll put it on the website tomorrow. Just keep that in mind. You can send them to Alex. She's at Alex H. Grans on Twitter. Richard is at RJCC. I remain at reckless. I check it once a day and retweet funny jokes. So that's how I'm using Twitter.

You can also call us for 866 Verge 1-1. Alex, what happened on the Wednesday show? Okay, so the Wednesday episode, I actually can't tell you. It's going to be something really special. People are really going to be excited when they get it in their feed. The Monday episode, we've been doing this really great series called Solo Axe with Ashley Escada. She's an absolute delight every single week. She and I run over our lot of time just chatting.

She's great. But she is talking to Madison Carr, who is a game designer who designs her games all by herself, even though it is potentially more lucrative to go and join a big studio. And she's going to explain exactly why that is. And it's a really great answer. I loved it. Well, those are great. I really like having Ashley on the show.

I know a lot of you have tweeted at us about how great she is. Keep listening to her. It's been fun to have her on. And then next week, we're at South by Southwest. Yeah. And we're doing a special episode live at South by Southwest. with some special guests, including a returning special guests. We're very fun.

That's it. That's a Vergecast. We are fully out of time. Our master plan is to continue using GPRS to control your TV over our air blasters. Please tell us if you just want us to make entire episodes about how we were right in the past. Richard's NFT special is coming for you. That's it. That's a rich cast rock and roll.

And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Box Media podcast. Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.