The Vergecast - Searching for the first great AI app

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

Nilay, David, and The Verge's Richard Lawler talk about a big week in AI news. First, they go over all the latest on Google's Gemini 2.0 launch, and try to figure out whether Project Astra and Project Mariner will ever turn into products people use. They also discuss OpenAI's release (and un-release) of Sora, the new Reddit Answers tool, and what's new in iOS 18.2. Finally, in the lightning round, there's talk of YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Sonos, and Cruise. There also is and isn't talk of quantum computing. Because that's possible now. Further reading: Google’s AI enters its ‘agentic era’  Gemini 2.0: what’s new in Google’s new flagship AI model Google’s AI-powered smart glasses are a little closer to being real  Google’s new Jules AI agent will help developers fix buggy code Google is testing Gemini AI agents that help you in video games Google built an AI tool that can do research for you Android XR_Keyword OpenAI has finally released Sora iOS 18.2 is out now, adding ChatGPT integration and more Apple Intelligence tools ChatGPT’s side-by-side ‘Canvas’ view is now available to everyone.  Reddit’s new AI search tool helps you find Reddit answers without Google YouTube is still growing fast on TVs in the living room Instagram will let creators test experimental reels on random people It sure sounds like Trump would be okay with a TikTok sale TikTok failed to save itself with the First Amendment Sonos Arc Ultra review: don’t call it a comeback (yet) Google reveals quantum computing chip with ‘breakthrough’ achievements Amazon’s online car ‘dealership’ with Hyundai is now live YouTube’s AI-powered dubbing is now available to many more creators Searching for color at Pantone’s all-brown party  Adam Mosseri on introducing Trial Reels From WSJ: iOS 18.2 Review: The AI Apple Promised Us 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 Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years,

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

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But we say it's AI. Like every other AI company, I want to be clear, that is how they all work. Tesla's Robotaxies, fleet of human operators waiting in the background to pounce. Just how it works. There's a lot going on this week. I'm your friend, Neelai, David Pierce is here. Hello. Waiting to take your commands.

David, memorize this list of names and then make new names. want to talk about, which is just your bad websites made AI necessary. Yeah. This is what I've come to. Richard Lawler is here. I love AI. I'm a big AI guy now. I've moved on from crypto.

It's all about AI now. Richard, big AI guy. That's what everybody says. I'm saying, Richard, you have not had AI change that car behind you from Mercedes to Ferrari yet. There is no Mercedes. There is only Ferrari. And, but therefore, it is a Ferrari already. wherever Hamilton goes, that's a Ferrari.

That is also in many ways how AI is being defined. Whatever this computer does is AI. They should get Lewis Hamilton to be this. I love just remembering three commands to be able to tell my computer to do one simple thing. It's just the best way to use it. Wait, there's a lot of dumb crypto money in F1. Is there a lot of dumb AI money in F1 yet? Not yet.

They've been kind of late on that. I don't know what's going on. That's true. Well, a new season is coming. A new sponsorship opportunities await. I will say that Chrome sponsoring the McLaren and then making the cart literally Chrome, genius. It's very good.

In terms of like just pure actual branding of the thing inside of the actual product, like crushed it. Chrome wheels are a great idea, especially when they're not Chrome, but they look like Google Chrome. Yeah. No, but they added actual Chrome to the car. That was this year's vague innovation. They put literal chrome on the car, which is not what you think about when you think of an F1 car. Like, what if this looked like a 1950s cattle? It's very good.

That's all I'm saying. All right. There's a lot of news. Actually, I news this week, not just Chrome in all senses of the word. And a lot of it is Google. And David, you wrote a bunch of these little bits and bobs. Gemini 2.0 is out. Google is making some mixed reality noises.

There's an Android mixed reality thing yet again. Be honest about that. They've tried this before. They're back again. There's a new Jules AI for code. What's all going on here, David? Okay, so let's break all that into three pieces. And we should talk about all of them.

And I think the three pieces are Gemini 2.0. There's Astra and Mariner, which are kind of like overlapping with Gemini 2.0, but are like products. And they're interesting. We should talk about them. And then we should talk about the XR stuff at the end. It's called Android Xer.

I have many thoughts about the decision to use XR. But we should talk about those. But let's start with Gemini. So the big news of this week was Google is starting to roll out Gemini 2.0, which is the successor to 1.5, which I think it first launched in February. So like nine months of development later, this is the new thing. And what Demas Sassabas told me who he runs deep mind at Google and is in charge of all their AI stuff.

And by the way, I talked to him earlier this week. while he was in Sweden accepting a Nobel Prize. He like called me from his hotel room before the Nobel Gala, which is like the worst power dynamic of an interview I've ever had in my entire life. It was really something. I was like, I don't know how to tell you you're

wrong on any of this because you're literally, you're going to get a Nobel Prize tonight. But anyway, what he told me is that basically what Gemini 2.0 flash is is roughly performance equivalent to what Gemini 1.4 Pro is.

So the way to think about it is it's like a full step up in terms of like efficiency and speed and latency, which is stuff that really, really matters with still the same amount of performance as the pro level tier from last time. Well, just to unpack some Google product names here. Flash is the little model that's supposed to run on phones. That's right. So they call it the workhorse model. It's the one most people encounter most of the time, basically.

So that's not the phones one. That's just the sort of like, here's the one. you get flash. There's one below flash that I can't remember the name of, but it is, it's the main one. Like when you use Gemini now,

you're using 1.5 Flash, almost certainly. Nano is the one on the phones. Nano is the one on the phones. Okay, I just want to be Google product names. Also, I just want to point out, they named it Flash.

Like in the history of technology names to reanimate, they picked Flash. Yeah. It's all. You didn't like New Grounds? Look, Homestar Runner was great, right?

And if these AI systems can deliver me Homestar Runner, that would be amazing. If Google made Homestar Runner, the official mascot of all of its AI, and like that was the voice and personality I was talking to, I would be all in on AI. Honestly. Like, done. Lock it down. Get these woke AIs out of here, put StrongBet in. Let's make this happen. All right.

Keep going. Exactly. But so, so yeah. So it's kind of a magnitude leap in power for them. It's also like natively doing a bunch of things that were separate in products before. So Gemini 2.0 can now do. images natively, which used to be a thing Google did with a separate model. It can do audio natively, which is a thing it was doing in a separate model. So there's just a lot of this like

multimodal stuff coming into Gemini, which is a big deal for Google in a bunch of ways. But the main thing is like, this is going to be the model that Google tries to put everywhere. It's the one that they're going to try to sell to cloud customers who want to do all this kind of stuff. It's the one they're going to put into AI overviews and search. It's the one they're going to put into Gmail. It's the one that's going to be in Gemini. Like increasingly, Google is trying to do kind of the opposite of what Open AI is doing. Open AI is like, we have a bunch of models for a bunch of different things, and you can use them all, and they all kind of interoperate, but it is like different models for different needs. And Google is just like, like, Gemini.

And that is very much like how this company wants to approach AI. And I get the real sense, they see this as a big turn in that direction. Wait, let me ask just a foundational question here. Yeah. There's a big conversation in the AI industry about scale. laws and whether training the next model will result in more capability. You wrote very disparagingly about opening eye trying to redefine AGI down. I think you actually said we should just make fun of Sam Alman on this show a couple weeks ago.

I did. I still believe that. Right. So we're trying to drag the word AGI down to the ground and just be like anything. This F1 car is AGI. Sure. Then there's Google and it's their newest model is the same capability but more efficient. which seems important, but it's kind of lost in the AGI conversation. Because all of that is like, can we make AGI out of a bunch of Nvidia chips that we have today? If we throw more data at them, when they get smarter?

And Google's like, it's the same smart but more efficient. Yeah, so I actually talked a bunch about this with Demas. And I'm very glad you brought this up because I've been thinking a lot about this in the context of these announcements. And I think Google's stance seems to be that there is more headroom to be had. He kind of allowed that it's slowing down that the idea of this stuff just like linearly getting better with every new model is probably not true. But he did say he's like, there are still performance gains to be had. There's new stuff we can learn how to do. And he also said that actually what we need is the new technique.

We don't need more. We need new is kind of what he kept saying. That like the way that Transformers change the way we think about this stuff. Like we need another one of those if we're going to unlock like the real next step change in AI. and he seems to think those are out there and exist and they're working on them and he has some theories. He didn't want to tell me about them. But like there is room upwards, but it is not just bigger models. What's next?

And I think what we're seeing right now, both with what Google is doing and with what OpenAI is doing with this 12 days of shipmiss thing, is everybody is trying to figure out now how to make these things products. Like, how do I get these things in front of you in a way that is useful and valuable and worth paying for or at least use? using and in some very meaningful way pays off as a business for these companies that are just pouring money down the toilet making these things work. So for Google, one thing I liked about the way Demis was streaming it is like Google works on all this stuff at sort of a technological infrastructural level. And then Google is Google's biggest customer, right? So there's like, he was like, we think of this as, and this is like, you're making a face. This is what everybody says about their stuff.

If you're listening to this in your car just to imagine me rolling my eyes so hard, your car crashed. Everyone ever on Decoder has said that about their companies. But like it's true in a lot of cases. And I think it's true in this case, too, that like what Google needs is for Gemini and Gmail to not run Google out of business because it's so expensive to operate. Right. And so the idea of making this stuff faster and more efficient and lower latency becomes really meaningful, not only because Google is in this like incredible arms race with every. other cloud company to offer AI services. And this stuff is being really quickly commoditized. So being able to say we are the cheapest and the fastest is becoming very powerful very quickly.

But also, like, it matters to Google's own products in a pretty big way. So, like, he kept getting really excited about efficiency. And I realized he's like, oh, no, like, you're serious. This means you can build this into products in a way that is like, that works at scale without just absolutely hemorrhaging cash the whole way. Yeah, but we should talk about those products and we will, but I just, I just want to say this very clearly. And I'm the person in any result of the CEOs about their costs. I don't care.

Right. Like, we made it cheaper to hallucinate is like a, I mean, honestly, there was a time in my life where that would have been a very compelling pitch. But like, they're not better, right? They're just cheaper to run. And I feel like I'm just stuck there. Like, that's a big deal. I'm not discounting.

It's not a big deal to put the thing more places and see what kind of product. you can build and maybe all anybody wants is to hallucinate some emails, like, great. But they're not more capable yet. Like, the big innovation here is that it got cheaper. If Google wants to save some money on AI, they could just turn off the AI overviews on my search results. Like, I don't know how many pennies that would save them, but it's got to be at least five cents considering the amount of services I do. It was really funny, Google. I think it was Sooner Rupertie, I wrote a blog post with all these announcements that was like, you know, there are now more than a billion people are experienced.

experiencing AI overviews. And I was like, that's such a different way of putting it than more than a billion people really are excited to use AI overview. We have foisted this upon a billion people. It's like, this is one of the fastest growing search enhancements ever.

And I just kept thinking about YouTube, being like, this is our most successful album ever because we shoved it onto everyone's iPhones. It's like, I don't know that that's the flex you think it is, guys. So we should talk about the product. I just, that's the thing that really leapt out to me is we have very quickly moved on from talking about the models getting more capable and like we're worried that these are

going to be super intelligence level extinction events for us to maybe sam outman will just say it's a GI because he wants to because that'll get him out of a Microsoft contract or something will happen it'll boost the stock price when they go public to we've made it cheaper we can put it more products and hopefully we can all start making some money and that that's fine like great like very cool the products still aren't there. They're not very compelling yet. Maybe someone just to figure it out. And then it just feels like I keep making the comparison to Bluetooth. It's like they keep telling me Bluetooth is awesome. And I'm like, but these headphones are bad. And we're just stuck in that loop. So tell me, I guess, tell me about the headphones. Are the headphones any good? Well, okay, let me describe the headphones to you. Google launched four new pairs of headphones. One is Project Astra, which we've seen before we've talked. talked about it a bunch in the show. It's, it's basically like the most sort of all-encompassing, ambitious version of Google's AI idea. It's visual. It's listening. It has memory. It's,

it's the thing you, like, walk around your house with. And then you're like, where did I leave my glasses? And it tells you, because the camera is hired glasses. Like, that's the idea. They're able to do some new stuff on there. It's also now connected to things like Google Maps, which is cool. So there's like, they're starting to be able to plug some of these things in. And that's where, like, again, having Gemini underneath all of this stuff makes that doable in a way that's been much harder in the past. So that's one. Thing number two is what's called Project Mariner. And this is, it's a Chrome extension.

Google calls it an experiment. They have a million different terms that all mean some version of prototype. We can kill this without you yelling at us. Right. This is like the most prototypey prototype. But it is like an agent in the way that we've been talking about agents for a while in that it can like go and. browse the web and do things for you. Kylie, Robison, on our team got some demos of this, and her take was basically, it works,

it's really slow, it's kind of wonky. I'm not sure this is meaningfully better than me just, like, looking at some web pages myself, but one of the demos they give is, like, look at these web pages and find the contact emails for me. And it will actually go and literally click around the pages and try to find the email for you. Can we talk about that one for a second? one I was talking about right at the beginning. Yeah.

The request, and you've got to see the video and we put a screenshot of it on the site. But the request is absurd to me. It just starts off with memorize this list. What does memorize mean to a bot? Like, if I gave you a list, I assume that you remember it now. If you were a computer, because that's what you do. No, no, no. These computers are on drugs, Richard.

And now I have to tell the computer to memorize. And then somewhere else in the command, it also said, remember again. So now I have to remind. you to remember this thing, to go do a thing. And then in the context box, it tells you the results are unreliable, like, right below it. So I'm telling an unreliable party instructions that it can't follow. If I was going to have someone screw up a task, I would just do it myself. Like, what is AI doing from you?

But no, this lets you screw up higher value tasks. This fails to get a bunch of email addresses while you, like, you know, crash a bike. Like, you're doing something else. There was a good one on there, too. In the project Astra demo video, it starts and ends with a guy trying to get into an apartment building. And the first thing he does is he's like, look in my email and find the code to this front door and then remember it. And it's like, I had the same reaction. It's like, first of all, it's just in my email.

Like, it can just look in my email every time. Who is remembering anything? And then at the end, he's like, what was that code? And it's like, the code you asked me to remember. And it's like, no, it's still just the code in my email. Like, what are we accomplishing? You just look at the email again if you want to. It's fine.

Like, now I have to remember the conversation I'm having with the computer about the thing I'm trying to do. Right. I have to tell you what I've told you so that you can tell it to me again. And it's just like, what is, just tell me the code. Just what is the code? We fix this. You let me pin notes on my phone screen and then I had the code. Yeah.

There's a lot of weird UI around this stuff. And the question of like, what is this? actually accomplishing that is AI and is new, hard to say. Again, I can't stop talking about the fact that hacking your way into, like, pretending to use a web browser on my behalf is not impressive and not interesting. Like, do other things. Well, so let's split these two up. Astro's interesting, right?

Because we're the same day that Google announced all this stuff, Apple announced iOS 18.2, released iOS 18.2 with visual intelligence. Yeah. and the, hey, look at something and tell me about it. That's the world we live in now. This is the new great AI feature, which other companies have had, but now it's built right into the iPhone, and then Google is talking about Astro with it.

It seems like Astra is very much the future of Google lens, right? You're just like looking at stuff, it's talking to you about it. You're having a great time. But it is very much like I looked at a picture. I scanned all the texts in the picture, or I did some visual recognition of what I'm looking at, and here's some information. You can have a conversation with me about it.

that to whatever extent that is super useful for people I get it I think there's still just what I keep calling the US capital problem like you ask Apple visual intelligence what happened at the capital building on January 6th like that answer is pretty dicey right and like there's a universe of actors who would love to change what that answer is across the political spectrum and none of these companies have contended with it aster's got the same problem everyone else has the same problem but they're headed that way And Google Lens has been headed that way for a long time. Wait, do you think it's like a real mainstream use case that a lot of people are going to walk by the Capitol and be like, what happened here on January? I think it's a real mainstream use case that you're going to be wearing a pair of glasses in the future that purports to augment reality and everyone lives in a weird custom political reality. Yeah, sure. Whether or not you're looking at the Capitol or not. Granted. Right.

I mean, I'm not going to go to it because it's super dicey and loaded. And we should probably just do an entire episode on someday. But you can just think of the infinite questions that come about when you look at something. something that are ultra loaded and that someone will start a culture war over. Right. Yeah. In your house, you can just look at stuff and be like, you know, like, are the cowboys good? And like, there's just like a lot of questions underneath that that are like really hard.

Like, hey, is that Aaron Rogers? Tell me about his ideas. Like, you just go for it. Like just normal everyday things. And that to me is it's great that we're building technology for. and Astra is just very much the future of Google lens, but there's this whole universe of those problems that come with. I'm looking at stuff.

Tell me about it. Who will augment reality? It's like a great question. Yeah, I think it's, I think there are sort of two separate pieces of this kind of thing. And I'm, I'm really bullish on one and kind of bearish on the other. And I think the like,

how to logistically get through your day thing, I think things like Astor are going to be really useful for, right? Like, the demo video they just released where the guy holds up his phone and he points it at a bus that's just going by and he's like well this bus kept me to chinatown there are a lot of like complicated problems to solve technologically there but that's a really interesting ui problem because that's a hard question to answer and if the AI assistant can answer it that's very cool and the like stuff around me and how i get places and like just like how to do your day

this kind of thing can be really useful for it if it works but i mean can i just hold on the bus example Sure, one second. One, ideally, the will this bus get to me to where I'm going is not a culture war problem, right? It's a question with an answer. Like, will this go there? And it's an answer that Google already has in a million structured databases with deterministic systems running them. Sure. So you can just ask Google Maps this.

Google has all kinds of public transit infrastructure projects that have put sensors on buses and there's open systems. You can build products and all that. And they've just built that stuff to enable maps a decade ago. And so now you've got a conversational layer that is a new interface for that, where you're just like, look at this. I'm asking about it, figure out what that is. And then it parses that into a structured query for its existing Google Maps systems and delivers you the answer in natural language way. And so really, you've just built a new interface for the existing good system that works. And I think that's very power.

All the good AI stuff is exactly that. Right. And I just, that's like one. And when people talk about it, it's being a platform shift, like that's the one I see. Like we made a click wheel and now we have iPods. We made multi-touch and now we have smartphones. We made natural language UI that is pretty good and now we're going to get a bunch of other stuff. We made a UI that can listen to a song and tell you about it.

Right. There's like a lot of that stuff that I think is cool. It's the next turn where it's like because it's a conversational natural language UI, you expected to have conversations with you and like be a useful companion. And that's where it just always seems to fall down. Yes. Because the systems aren't actually intelligent. And that, like, that's to me is like, it, it, we keep sliding from one to the other.

Like, here's a kick-ass way to use Google Maps into this is your best friend that will, you know, if you ask it nicely, we'll try to have sex with you. You're just like, well, that's a pretty, that's a pretty long road, actually. Right. We assume because one, thus inevitably the other. Yeah. And I think, I think everyone needs to stop doing that. And I think one thing that Apple is doing right. to its credit is like it is stuck on the idea that these are like features that should be useful

and not best friend companions that you have. And I think like for the foreseeable future that is, you should a pick one of the two and not try to do both. And I think the one you should pick is like try to be helpful because we just keep seeing stories about the friends being weird and problematic. We just ran one of those stories from Josh Trez's like a long feature. Yeah, like it's a mess and it's that stuff is real, but like, but in this case, like, again, I think, like, down every road lies a culture war. I agree, right? Like, if you, if you, if you follow it long enough, there's a culture war there somewhere, but like, there are things along the way that work and are useful. And I think Google is starting to poke at some of that stuff in pretty

interesting. But I'm, like, the culture war is like not even, I'm not even saying it's like politically dicey. I'm saying you're somewhere and you're listening to that new choral version of like a prayer by Madonna. And you're like, is this song appropriate for church? And some people think the answer is yes because they're performing it in churches in America today. And it's like, well, you've got to, you got to just, the robots got to unpack that box for you, right? Like, and I don't think these companies are ready for that, which is what will truly make them useful, is by giving an answer you might not like. And they're super not ready for that in the current political climate. And that's like, that's when you make the turn.

Like, that's when it actually becomes a useful assistant to you. Go find misinformation even if I don't like it. As a slightly lower stakes version of that question, one of the demos... I'm saying, is like a prayer or a song about doing it is like not a high stakes problem? Depends on where you are. I suppose. One of the examples that they showed with Project Mariner was someone pulling up a recipe in Google Docs and saying, add the veggies from this recipe to my Safeway cart.

What if one of those things is a fruit and I forgot that it was a fruit, not a vegetable, or I just disagree. Yeah. Now, that's a high stakes. Yeah. Add these sandwiches to my cart. One of them is a hot dog. And the thing is like a data center explodes somewhere in America. This is something that will happen to someone.

Yeah. So I just want to like call that out. Like the there's the thing we want them to do, which is not just a technology problem, like a straight up culture problem, like a society level problem. And then there's like the really interesting part, which is build a better interface for systems that already work. And then there's this weird middle ground, which I think Mariner is, which, you know, co-pilot is at Microsoft. all these agenic systems, which is, what if we just use the internet for you?

And that's how we solve the problem of we need something in the middle that works. And David, I think this is where you're getting to like, what a stunning indictment of web design? Because you're like, well, the internet's pretty broken. So it would be better if some unreliable hallucinating robot used it for me. Right. The assumption is that you can't find anything, which is a very funny thing for the company that made Google search to say. But yeah, we're at a moment where it is perceived. to be easier to ask this thing to go find a contact email address than it is to just go find

the contact email address. And again, like, I think a place we are landing that is very funny is that all these companies are slowly discovering that the most useful thing their tools do are really boring and really like back-of-house accounting firm kind of stuff. And that turns out to not be very interesting to, like, a mainstream public that you need to get excited about using your products. So they're stuck in this place of all these companies are actually playing, like, a thoroughly B-to-B game and just pretending that they're making, like, huge strides toward mainstream consumer products. That's all fine and good. And I think, like, Neelai, I think you're really, like, you're right to be hung up on the fact that these things get some things wrong,

but also, like, people use them anyway. Like, this thing will write my email for me and it will make two weird mistakes, but then I can fix them and send it. And that's better than having to write the email from scratch. Or not fix them. As we are learning every single day, the answer is not fix them. The answer, to some extent, is read them out loud on cable news. The answer is Hunter DeButs will save us. But yeah, and like, Hunter DeButs will, like, go down in history as like.

I refuse to explain. It's there. you can look at... Ironically, if you Google Hunter Debuts, you'll get correct information about what we're talking about. But anyway, I just think we're at a moment now

where the question for all of this AI stuff, just to bring it all the way back around, is what is any of this actually useful for? And I think the truth is, the models that we have now are better than we need for a lot of things and vastly... a million miles away from being good enough for what everybody keeps talking about.

Right. So now the question is, okay, we're not going to build the perfect thing for a long time, if ever. What can we do with what we have now? And that's where things like efficiency come in because at some point, like running a business costs money and you have to be able to do these things. And if you can make them cheaper, more people can use them and find new things to do and like on and on and on.

But the question is like, okay, if you just take the technology we have right now and you don't pretend it's God, what is it good for? And that is like, that is the question Google is starting to try to answer. It's the question OpenAI is starting to try to answer. That is like the question of 2025 is like, what is any of this actually useful for? Because there are answers. They're just not as like, they're not God and they're not fire and they're not the industrial revolution. So what are they?

It's like a tour guide and an extremely unreliable personal assistant. Which, to be fair, is not nothing. It's not nothing. And I can see why they're compelling and I can see why. I mean, just the demo, I mean, Richard, you already brought it up, like, the Google demo of Mariner where you're just, like, looking at a recipe in Google Docs, and you just ask it to go build you a shopping cart on a grocery site and it just, like, does it for you. Neat. Like, legitimately neat. Very slow.

So slow that the Google PM literally saw Kylie noticing how slow it was and said, that's the elephant in the room. That it's ponderously slow. Right? Like, they know. They know it. They are not hiding from it. It's a research demo, but like, I'm, I'm stuck at the systems are not themselves capable. So they are free riding on other systems that can do the thing.

The grocery site has to exist and work. And it needs to have a database of all the food in the grocery store. And then you need to be able to put it in a cart and like it, like, all that has to work and be profitable and sustainable. And then on top of it, you're just like, and then this robot will cost $20 a month and like do it for. you and eventually you're just like, what if, what if this undercuts all of that? I keep calling this a DoorDash problem where DoorDash has to exist for a bunch of these services to get you a sandwich. And if you just sort of delete DoorDash's business by cutting them out of the equation

and taking you the customer away from DoorDash, like, how is anyone going to get a sandwich? Well, you need this big, traditional, deterministic, logical computer with a database that is reliable doing a bunch of work so your natural language interface can be useful. And I don't think anybody has solved the problem of like, how do you keep DoorDash in business? Including DoorDash. I'm not just speaking in DoorDash. Whatever, Uber, right?

Like, Rabbit's just like, we're going to click around Uber's website. All of these middle companies, these like Web 2O companies that digitize the interfaces for very physical things, like they're pretty, they were pretty vultry in their times, right? Like Uber is the biggest taxi company in the world.

Doesn't own a single taxi. Airbnb doesn't own a single taxi. Airbnb doesn't own a single hotel. Like, that's the joke about those businesses. And now they're under pressure from AI systems that might use their interfaces and never show them to a user. Right. And it's like where this has to go somewhere that is actually useful for people. Well, it's a weird thing because you have all of the AI companies would agree with you,

but they see that as a strength and not a weakness, right? What they're saying is, okay, we are going to have an army of service providers who just invisibly do the job on your behalf. And you don't have to worry about who they are. You don't have to go to the DoorDash website every time you want to order McDonald's. You just order McDonald's and we'll get it done for you and DoorDash or whoever will be our provider of choice to do that. They would call that a victory, right? Because I as a consumer, I shouldn't have to interact to DoorDash to get McDonald's. I should interact with McDonald's. But what they've actually done is A, insert another step and B, completely commoditize all of these providers in such a way that they will eventually just

crash them all in an incredible race to the bottom to be one of these providers. And so it's like when all the carriers got really nervous about being dumb pipes and so they bought content businesses, it's like there is another turn of that coming where Uber is going to be terrified of being abstracted away by all of these AI companies. And so it's going to do more to try and get you to use Uber and it's just going to get really weird as a result. Or it's going to just raise the price. or it's going to raise the price. Or it'll raise the price for the AI systems. So an Uber costs more if you book it through AI

than if you book it yourself in the app and look at an ad for Uber. Yeah, it's just the next generation version of the app store tax. And I think we're just going to see a bunch of this stuff play out. And every time everyone talks to me up with these agents, and Google in particular isn't a very privileged position because they run Chrome.

And they run search. And like one of their deep research preview that they released in the same set of releases where it's like, go research a topic for me and it comes up the research plan. And then it goes searches the web for interesting results and then delivers that research back to you. That's just perplexity. Right? It's just perplexity by another name.

And perplexity is in a bunch of trouble because it's not paying any of the sources it's using to scour the web in that way. And it's like at some point, all of the people who make websites, us included and I feel like disclosure, the company has some sort of meandering deal with open AI that hasn't really resulted in as far as I can tell. But like, there it is. uh, like all of these companies are going to say, well, we make the information. We make the interface to book a taxi or whatever it is. You, you have to pay us because if you just take the customers away from us, we will go away and the boss will be useless.

And I think that just that economic reality will result in some payments, whether or not the lawsuits or whatever results in payments or blocking robots at TXT. But it's come. It's, it's, it has to be coming. And I think the, I think it's going to like, follow the same pattern, everything else follows, like Uber will be exclusive to co-pilot and DoorDash will be exclusive to Gemini. And like, that part's going to suck for a long time. Yes. Or we're going to, somebody is going to figure out how to like do the hack to make it work whether the companies want it to or not. And then we're going to have an entirely different kind

of mess. And then a new generation of college students will be radicalized by Napster. And then that's how we will be for Vendetta, my replacement. It'll be great. We got to take a quick break, but talk about this X-FR thing really quickly. Yeah. Okay. So, you know Android how it's Android? Imagine if smart glasses were a thing. And if Google just did Android again for those. That's what Android XR is. And basically, Google has been at this smart glasses thing for like 15 years now, maybe,

has tried a bunch of things. Do you remember Daydream? Daydream is one I had forgotten about that I just randomly rediscovered today. Daydream existed. I wrote a whole thing about it for Wired a million years ago. I forgot about that. But anyway, so. Google announced like a developer preview of Android XR.

It's basically what you think. It's immersive versions of some Google apps and some Gemini stuff, basically. The underpinning of all of this is the assistant Gemini stuff that you might want to wear on your face. That's sort of the big theory. They have a bunch of hardware partners. I've been hearing from like every company that wants to sell you glasses over the last two weeks, being like, we're doing a thing with Google that we can't quite tell you about yet. that's Android XR.

So starting next year, I think we're going to start to see real development and hardware products. It sounds like Samsung is going to be the first out of the gate with like a real, honest to God, Android pair of glasses. But it seems very clear that like Apple is trying to be the Apple of your face with the Vision Pro. And Google is very happy being the Android of your face. I think the question of whether Google is going to make hardware is really interesting. Google's made a bunch of prototypes and gave us some indication this week that it is interested in them being more than prototypes.

And if you want to do all this Gemini stuff and Project Astra, you got to have glasses. Like, if this AI future that everybody is imagining and trying to sell you on is going to come true, it's going to be glasses. It just is. I'm 100% convinced.

I'm just saying, it's a decade from now. There's an eighth grader. One of our children will be in eighth grade at some point. They're on their eighth grade trip to D.C. They're wearing their glasses. They look at the Capitol and say, What happened here? What are some notable events in American history? Does it say an insurrection or does it say it was a day of love?

And are the answers on two different eighth graders different? And these companies are racing towards the future where they are going to have to answer that question, regardless of whether they make the hardware or not. Aren't you just describing the internet, though? Like, everything already works like that. Right. But like. And like, is it ruining society?

Sure. But like, I don't know that smart glasses are a new problem here. But you're not literally experiencing, maybe it, maybe you're, Like, that is more nihilistic than I want to, like, I was going to say not everyone's experiencing a bespoke reality. And then I just thought of a generation of Americans who super are. So maybe. But I'm just, you can, want to build this stuff. And then underneath it is this very deep question of who gets to augment reality and do we all experience the same one and they are just not ready for it.

Fully not ready for it. Especially when the answer is different. If you have Android on a Lenovo pair of glasses versus Android on the Samsung pair of glasses and the Samsung pair of glasses is like, there's a second reality here that we made. It sits right next to Google's reality, and it has Bixby in it. It's slightly brighter. We've got to take a break. We'll be right back. Yeah, I'm just going to, I need to walk around the house a little bit.

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That's clod. com. And check out ClaudePro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash Virchcast. All right, we're back. My feeling is that Bixby would say it's a day of love. No further commentary. We should really do like a political alignment matrix of all of the different virtual assistance.

I feel like if I sat down and thought about it for five minutes, I would end up with really strong opinions. Who did Tate vote for? Yep. So my question is, do you want to go viral? Do you want to go viral on X in this specific way? You're like, we're going to milk the last drop of traffic from this one dead platform. And it's up to political alignment chart of different AIs. No, thank you.

All right. There's more AI news. It's just a lot of things got released this week. Yeah. Open AI released SORA. iOS 18.2 is out with chat, GPD integration, visual intelligence. What do you want to start with? Let's do iOS 18.2 first.

Okay. I mean, we've, it's very familiar. I think we had a moment to. morning we're like, how much should we cover this? Because people have seen it. They've used it. It's been in beta. The release candidate was last week. But it's out now. If you have an iPhone 16 or up or even iPhone 15 Pro, you get visual intelligence, you get Gen Moji. Chat ChbT integration is there. Joanna Stern wrote a very funny column where she's like you invoke chat Chb T by saying like secret words. Like if you ask Siri one way, you get a regular Siri answer. But if you ask Siri like write me a list, a chat Chb T is the list for you, which is very funny. I've been using the stuff, David, I think you've been using the stuff. What do you think? Richard famously uses Windows phone, so he's God only knows. It's the only way to live.

I will say two things. I think one, the single coolest thing about iOS 18.2 is the ability to change default apps for various things. Like when you tap on a phone number, you can change which app it goes to. Everyone should go examine all of those defaults because if you get that kind of thing right, it makes your phone a lot better. This is the sort of thing Android has been better at than iOS for forever. And thank you to occasionally confuse EU regulators for making this happen. The chat chvety thing, I think, is interesting.

What I've found is that when I ask compound questions, it punts to chat chapti-t more often than not. If my question kind of has two parts or has a thing and then a modifier, like one I just did the other day, It was like, if I ask for a chocolate chip cookie recipe, Siri will just kind of pull it. And I'm going to not say that word again because it's just activated three devices. But if I ask for a chocolate chip cookie recipe that maybe will taste like I haven't tried before,

then it punts to chat GPT. And then it's a relatively consistent experience. Actually, one thing that I've liked is that when it goes to chat GPT, the thing that it brings down still looks like the normal Siri response. So I think in that,

like, my mental construct of what's going on is very confused in a way that I don't like, but the actual user experience of it, I think, is actually pretty good.

Yeah, I mean, in terms of like, this is a good way to get better answers from a Siri. And so you just get, I think that works to some extent.

Yeah, like, do I have feelings about the idea that my stuff is going to chat GPT over and over and over again? sure, but if you don't, that friction should go away and there isn't actually as much friction as I expected. So I think that's probably on balance a good thing. Yeah. I mean, again,

I've had the action button on my phone mapped to the chat, TBT voice assistant forever. So this is just like a slightly faster version of that for me with like more annoying animation. Like I actually think the new series animation is so overwrought. I agree. I miss the little swirling ball, the thing where it like it now takes over my whole phone screen, I don't like it. Yeah, it's very much like jazz hands. It's like, get ready for an experience.

It's like, I don't need this to happen. It's cool. But it just means that it's going to take a little bit longer to load. Right, and then you talk and then it does the thing where it like fills out the words for you. There's some amount of like obfuscating how slow it was with the swirly ball. Yes. Made it appear

fast. You know, like how progress bars are, they're, they're, they're mostly designed to go really fast for the first part and then they can be slow at the end, but you've already perceived it being fast. That's very much what the old Siri was doing. And now it's just like, everything's glowing and you can see the world. And it's like, I don't need, I don't need to see the mouse running in the wheel, guys. Just like, let me know when there's an answer.

I think that's right. I had actually not really ever thought about Siri as a spinning, like, Mac style beach ball of loading things until it switched to this. And then it is like, it is so desperate to make it seem like something is happening at all times because it's slow. So it's just like, look at these beautiful pink and blue swirlies until it finishes, which it will do eventually. It's like, all right, this is actually like pretty good design on top of a pretty bad system. Yeah. I will say, I mean, it is, again, the natural language capabilities. That is what AI is best at.

So it, it understands me a lot better. And then chat GPD is familiar. I don't know if it's hallucinated at me. But it's all happening and there's some guardrails in there. It's to me the ones that I, I don't think those are the Apple intelligence as here features. Now Siri can talk to chatyPD. I think that is table stakes and it's kind of weird that it wasn't there from the jump.

The ones that I think are big are image playground, Gen Moji, and visual intelligence, right? Where the phone gets multimodal and it can now talk in pictures. like both in and out. But I, like, Gen Moji is just purely silly to me. Image playground is like 50 steps behind, although that's probably the safest way for it to be. Yeah, that seems to be deliberate.

And visual intelligence is, you know, it's just the same thing we're talking about. We're like, is this a flower? And it's like, it sure is. And like, the next turn isn't quite there yet. But like, maybe I'm just being a hater. Well, A, you're definitely just being a hater. That's certainly.

I'm in a real salty moods. I don't know what is. I can tell. I'm enjoying this very much. You're like, what if everything was awful? and woke and I hated it. Look, I know where the views are.

I don't know. The Gen Moji thing is one that I'm really torn on because I feel like we've been covering Apple's weird ideas about emoji for like the whole life of The Verge. And I don't think I have ever once earnestly sent or received one of Apple's weird emoji other than like to goof on another tech reporter.

If like if I just made a job, Jan Moji and sent it to my wife, she would, like, call the police. Like, it would be so weird as a thing to just do. Wait, has your kid discovered that you can hold on a face in a photo and make a sticker of a face? No, thank God. Because I have a camera roll full of those or wherever they are in the file system on, like, just billions of stickers, like left and right. And those are very funny to send around because they're horrifying.

But that's very much like we use the walkie-talkie feature. and Apple Watches and we're the only people use it with the Waki Taki Beach on Apple Watches. And I just feel like all of this stuff, image playground, Gen Moji, like, and this is true of lots of other people's products, too, is like, I'm convinced that all of the AI image generation stuff is more of a meme than a product at this point. And I just don't, I don't know that there are actual reasons that they exist other than somebody made them. I don't know. Richard, am I crazy? Are you just like sending Gen Mojis to all your past? house every day? I am not. I unfortunately do not have a device ready to run Apple intelligence in my home. I probably never will because I do not want to send Gen Moji. I don't want to do this. With Jim and I 2.0, you're going to be able to generate some weird stuff too. So get ready.

When you open up Instagram, I just want to like search for an account and oh, now I'm in the AI window. Thanks. I really do hate that. But I've, it's bizarre because I have never wanted to generate an emoji. Not the, I don't know if all of the emoji that are in the phone exist and cover every feeling I've ever had. But whatever feelings I have that aren't covered by those emoji, I'm not in touch with yet. I just haven't considered it. It's not, it's not something that's just dying to get out of me. That I cannot, I must, I must find the zebra of many colors with, you know, anatomical incorrectness that represents how I'm feeling right now.

I just, I haven't gotten there yet. I think it's very important for everyone listening to this right now who has access to Apple intelligence to pull over in their cars. Send in that prompt and then send us whatever it generates. Like I issue a lot of instructions on this show. Ask your phone to make a zebra of many colors that's anatomically incorrect that expresses a feeling that you don't know you're having or whatever it is that Richard just said and just let us know what it gives you. I'm dying to know. I feel good about that. Look, I think ultimately Apple wants it to seem like the phone is very capable,

and AI makes, whether or not it actually is capable, AI makes it seem like the phone can do more stuff than it could do yesterday, right? Now you can press camera control on your iPhone 16 and look at something and it'll be like, here's a flower. It can write for you in a way that I think those ads are doing it a massive disservice to because it just seems like everyone's a jerk at work. Yeah, every one of those ads is like, hey, dumbass, would seem like not such a dumbass

Apple they have a real problem with those ads because they have to find something that is so important that you have to send the message but also not so important that you need to write it yourself. And what is that? And also that you could conceivably be hired for even though you're dumb as a rock.

The one where the guy rolls his chair out of the meeting to summarize whatever rolls back at the meeting. I get it. It's very funny. It is attention getting which is the purpose of advertising. but it's like, oh, that sucks. Like, I would, like, get out of this meeting.

Like, I don't need to waste my time if you haven't done the reading. You can tell what our meeting's like. I just say, like, they've made the phone slightly more capable, but this big Apple intelligence is here a moment. I don't know. It's not the same as the chat, GPT moment that everyone talks about. Like, no, your mind is not expanded because the messages, notifications are 8% better than they were in iOS 18.1.

if there's going to be that thing anytime soon, it's going to be agents. And even Apple agrees with that, right? Like you talk about the intense stuff that they're starting to build into iOS that's going to get Siri more access to apps so it can actually go and get information and do things inside of those apps. Like that's what everyone is trying to build. And if somebody gets it right in a way that is useful and doesn't cause a culture war, Patel, that's going to be the next thing.

Because those will be the moments where people are like, oh, I now understand a thing I can ask this to do that is useful and new. The culture where I just want to point out is in AR. It's in visual intelligence. I see. Okay. App intense is money. Right?

Because Apple is counting on a bunch of app developers to do what they say, which they usually do because their customers are on the iPhone and they're in the app store. And to say, you have to do app intense. Just like they said to a bunch of app developers, you have to do in-app purchases so we can take our 30% cut. That's how you get a Siri that can actually use the apps that you have to build the features in. A bunch of developers are going to say no. I don't know why DoorDash would say yes to that.

The answer has to be money. And like no one has figured out that money yet. And I do just keep picking on DoorDash. If anyone from Derdash wants to come on and tell me that they're going to happily let everyone disintermediate their service, like that's great. But I just look at that, put any company in that mix. Well, look at Netflix. Yeah. You don't have to participate if you have your own audience.

And what they've done with the Apple TV and Vision Pro, if you're big enough, You can just say no. Yeah. So I just see that coming, but everyone wants to build these agents. And the systems they want those agents to use do not have to play ball. And we just haven't sorted that out. All right. So that's 18.2.

People get it. Let us know anything. Send us here at Multicolor Emotional Zebra. Please. Let's talk about Sora. Sorah is fascinating to me. And that it doesn't appear to be great, but it's super good enough to be, like, ultra-interesting. Yeah, that's about my read of it.

I mean, I think the sort of. is so bizarre because it is another one on the list of things that Open AI is like, this is too good. We should barely even be allowed to launch this. We are desperately afraid of all the things that this will visit upon the world if we release it. And then they're just like, here, it's a person doing gymnastics whose body explodes in a thousand directions every time they do a flip. And it's like, this is another one.

We're like, does this exist for any reason other than so that people, will post about it on the internet. I sincerely don't know. Also, it's not exactly available. They very quickly ran out of capacity and stopped accepting signups. Yeah, wait, can you explain to me what happened here? I was away from the internet for several hours and it went from Sora is available to Sora is not available while I was gone. What happened? Yeah, that's pretty much what happened. It was like a shoe release. Like, oh, it's out. Now it's not. And then Sam Alton was like, ah, you know, we just underestimated the capacity and we'll be opening it up at some point. So how How much capacity do they actually have? How much capacity can they support to run this thing?

We don't know. You do have to pay to use it. You have to have either the $20 or $200 plan. If you have the $200 per month chat GPT Pro plan and you've got access, then you can make 1080P videos that are up to 20 seconds long. So, I mean, pretty good deal. I think like 20 seconds of 1080P video for just $200 a month. Wait, $200 a month? Everyone doesn't have two accounts. $200 a month on the chat GPT pro plan. I mean, you can use on the chat. That's one they just announced, yeah.

Yeah, you can use the chat GVT Plus plan, but like that's a 720P five seconds. I mean, who's going to do that? That's nothing. You can't destabilize one country with five seconds of 720P video. I mean, look, I watched Marquez Brownlee's video about Sora. The most fascinating piece about it is when he asked it to make a tech review video and then it had his plant in it. Yep. Because it has clearly trained on his videos without any permission.

What are we doing, guys? Like, I can't tell if Google's going to file that lawsuit or the YouTubers a lot of that lawsuit, but that lawsuit's coming. Just from that alone, that lawsuit's coming. I mean, yeah, there is so much obvious, clear, clean evidence that a lot of OpenAI is just built on YouTube. It's pretty horrifying. Also, Richard, I would point out, you forgot one key difference between the $20 and the $200

chat GPT subscription, which is that if you pay more, you can download the videos without any watermarks. Oh, good. So that's good. You can definitely destabilize a country if you pay more then. That's worth $200. That's what I'm saying. Marquez also said something really interesting in his video that I have just been

ruminating about ever since. He said, I had it make a bunch of CCTV footage because it's so bad that people would assume it's real. Like he intentionally generated footage that was already low quality of like cars driving down a street, but in like black and white security camera footage. And that's like super interesting, right? because they are 20 second clips with no sound, and people experience a lot of grainy, low-quality clips with no sound

that they take to be reality in a lot of contexts, particularly, hey, we found some security frame of footage, or we found some ring footage, or whatever it is. So you can pay to get rid of the visible watermark you paid to or something like. You just crop it, whatever. Are they doing C2PA, the like, the fancy embedded one? Yes. Open AI says that videos generated with Saur will have both visible watermarks,

if you have the cheap version and C2PA metadata to indicate that they're made with AI. We hope that that works in save civilization. I will say we've written a lot about C2PPA, the Content Authenticity Initiative. Just Weatherbett has done incredible work, just trying to understand what it is and how it will play out

and whether it will actually mean anything to anyone. And every time we read about it, we get a bunch of angry notes from readers who have been deep in it, who are like, this is a total fraud. Like, this will never work the way you want it to. for infinity reasons, but it's the thing that we have.

And that's why you keep writing out of because there's nothing else. There's no other choice. There isn't like market competition to this metadata standard. Like there's this one. And Google has chosen to use it. And it sounds like opening eyes using it. Adobe's using it. The platforms have to start using it, right?

The YouTube's and the Facebooks and the TikToks have to agree to display this metadata. And they are not uniformly agreeing to it. And Apple hasn't chosen. and to use it on the creation side. Meanwhile, all those platforms are furiously building AI tools of their own and have exactly no incentive to point out when things are made with AI. Like, I just, who benefits from doing that other than regular people? And thus, why would they do it?

Yeah, we're just headed towards, I think what we're going to end up with is a series of more closed platforms that basically guarantee you stuff from, like, real people and then open platforms where it's a free for all. And maybe that's going to be good. Like honestly, maybe it's good to be like on if I open this app, I know it's a bunch of like Hollywood movie directors who have actually made the thing. And if I open this app,

who knows what random AI generated slop I will get. And like maybe that's fine. Maybe that's the thing that breaks apart the internet in that way or like causes that fragmentation. I just, I don't know. But it's, we're just at a point now where all of the channels were used to.

are going to get completely infused with AI-generating. I think the only problem with that outcome is, I think the audience split between those two different kinds of platforms would not be what you hope it would be. Oh, I think, yeah. One will be expensive. Yeah. One will have a small audience and cost money.

Like that, that seems correct. But even now in TikTok, I see videos, and it's just like silly stuff. It's like, here's a big wave crashing over a building. And it's like pretty obviously real. And then all the comments are like, this is AI. Oh, yeah. And we've just destabilized that entire information economy.

Yeah. LeBron was never dunked on. That was AI. A little more. There's more AI stuff. Chatsby launched Canvas View. What's going on there? Canvas is basically the slightly more sort of interactive thing that you can do where

like if you have it write something for you, it can display the thing that it's making next to the conversation you're having about it. And you can sort of edit the thing in real time with the bot. This is the thing that Claude has been doing Anthropics bot for a while. And I think it's actually very clever, right? Like if you allow for the possibility that maybe generating several paragraphs of text is the best thing a chatbot can do, this is actually a pretty good version of that interaction where like you can have it to a thing and it generates it in the right column and

then you can go back and forth with the bot tuning it and changing it and you can make changes to it. and it becomes this sort of interactive thing rather than just blocks of messages, which is what we've had before. This is like the big trend here with all these chatbots is everyone has run up against how much you can do inside of a back and forth messaging system. So they're all trying to tack on little bits of UI

and little bits of features that don't feel like that, but still work inside that kind of basic construct. So I think in that case, like Canvas is a good idea whether you're, you know, writing stuff or writing code or whatever. it's been out, it's been tested for a while. I haven't heard a ton about it, but the people I've heard from seem to like it. So it seems good.

This thing you're saying about UI across all of these products is super interesting to me. Like chat, GPD was the moment, right? Everyone talks about it. Like my eyes were opened. I could see the world in color. And then like two years later, we're like, actually that interface isn't it.

But we have to build all these other kinds of products to make this useful. And the arms are. of like what will the chatbots themselves look like? Fundamentally, I think they're going to get subsumed into operating systems the way that Apple is subsuming them into Siri and then there'll be more specialized for other tasks. That's my guess. But it's interesting to see them revet. I think that's probably right.

I mean, and I think like the way that I've come to frame the way that I'm thinking about AI for next year is the last two years have been like running towards the point of diminishing returns for the actual underlying technology. and we're there, right? This stuff will keep getting better. There might be some incredible physics miracle that changes how all of this stuff works, but on the path that we're on, this stuff is going to keep getting better, but much slower than it has before. And so now the question is, is any of this useful for anything? And we have not had to ask that question because we've been on basically a two-year run for all these companies of novelty. And they've made it a really long way

just by finding slightly new seeming things to do and just the fact that I could take a picture and say, is this a flower? And it would say, yes, it's a flower. It was like novel and cool and exciting. And we are at the end of that moment. And I think you're starting to see it. Like the disillusionment with what all these things are attempting to do

and whether they're actually good is coming and it's here. And so the question now is like, let's assume the technology is not going to get several orders of magnitude better next year. What else is there to do? do with the technology that we have is the question. Okay, so here's my answer. This is the last one of this section. The most useful thing I've seen with AI yet, Reddit built Reddit answers, which lets

you just search Reddit without having to go through Google and it has AI in it. So we'll summarize a bunch of Reddit threads. So when you search for whatever, it'll show you a bunch of Reddit answers, but summarize them with AI. That might be the best thing yet. This might be the best AI feature of all time. I haven't used it. Jay Peters used it a little bit and had, I would, I would,

would say sort of mixed experiences with it. But the idea of being able to kind of poll all of Reddit with a question that you have sounds amazing. And it doesn't work quite as well, even in Google search, which made this very expensive deal with Reddit to get the data, because it just isn't compiling them the same way. But like, if I could just quickly be like, okay, what baby gear does everybody on Reddit think you should buy. Like that,

that information exists inside of Reddit. And if it can go and actually, like, compile all of that stuff in a way that works and makes sense, kick ass, dude. I will use that all the time. Okay. Now that I've said that,

I do agree. This is very good. There, of course, the supplied examples are, what does Reddit think happen on January 6th? The, the one,

um, uh, Jay put in was tips for flying with a baby for the first time. Hmm. Pretty good. like a perfect Reddit query, right? Like, and honestly, what I want out of that Reddit experience is like, give me 5,000 stories about this, right?

And so it summarized everyone's stories and the answers were consider car seats, fly in first class. Some parents find the extra space in first class helpful. Solid. Cool. I personally find my private shop very helpful with our baby. Feed them during takeoff or landing. Classic advice, by the way.

And then bring plenty of snacks and drinks to keep your baby occupied. And it's like, well, it's just stuff. Okay, wait. This is very funny. I might just immediately take back everything I just said. Because if you go down to the next screenshot, which is the Google searches, the stuff in the previews from the Google searches is dramatically better. Like, let me just read you some of this up. It says, change diaper before getting on the plane.

Don't board first. Good tips. Being strapped into the car seat is the safest way for baby to fly. Good tip. Baby will need to be in a car seat. Baby will also need to be held by you the entire flight. That seems confusing. You're holding the car seat.

C. Take some sanitizing wipes to clean the areas and plan your baby will be touching. Have a light pad you can use for changing a plane. All of that is more useful than this stuff. By the way, can I say none of that is the most useful tip that we found with Max, which is just bring five packs of differently colored post-it notes and let her go crazy. Oh, that's good.

Mine was just snacks. We bought, I would say, 40 different snacks on a Tijuana. It's not a parenting podcast. I'm just saying it's just funny, right? Because if you take the world's body of information and Reddit, which is a lot of personal experiences, which are kind of useful for this kind of thing where there's not an answer. And then you try to shove it into the form of this is the right answer, you end up with put baby in chair. Yeah. But this is the problem that we've run into with Apple intelligence, like notification summaries.

Like notifications were already summarized. Like the people who wrote the post already wrote them to be read by someone who wasn't really paying attention and didn't have a lot of time. and they laid it out in a way they were upvoted because they were written well and they got you the information they needed. You didn't need to summarize them and extract further value out of one particular line. You needed the whole thing.

A hundred percent. We did it the wrong way. I mean, this is the like ongoing it's like it's not quite context collapse but it is just the pure lowest common denominatorism of AI which is that if you take everything, and you try to shove it into two sentences,

you're going to get two incredibly uninteresting sentences. And I think what we've seen from some others, like I think Notebook LM from Google does a pretty good job of this, of basically it goes and finds stuff and then just hands you a bunch of sources, right? Like what I want from this Reddit thing is not Pat answers in paragraphs. I want a bunch of links to like, here are the 10, like you said, Eli, here are the 10 most loved and contentious and funny responses that we've ever gotten

to this question that everybody replied to, oh my God, I tried this and it worked. That's how you do this right, not by saying here is the rough summary of 12,000 Reddit posts. And that's what too many of these services are trying to do. Yeah. That's it. I do think Reddit is it's where I see the most opportunity because Reddit is vast. And you can burn a lot of time hearing every version of everything on Reddit. and having a tool that helps you, like, get through that better is kind of interesting.

I'm just, it, you know, it's like, that's one example. I'm sure there are other ones. But the glory of Reddit is that it's a bunch of people telling you what they experienced. It's very rarely that there's a right answer, right? It's just like, I'm going to synthesize all this information from all these people or telling me about whatever or just talking about their fandom or whatever it is. And that makes me feel like part of a community. It makes me feel, um, it makes me feel like part of a community.

It makes me feel validated that I might have some experiences too, not I need to, I just shove her in a car seat. Right. Okay, we got to take a break. We'll be back with a lightning round. Boy, this is a minute. This is an action-packed lightning round. We'll get back. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it.

Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of Where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. They are doing well.

Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, explain, drops every weekday afternoon. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to

settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority.

That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. This week on Networth and Chill, we're diving into another edition of Am I the Asshole, Finance Edition? And trust me, these money dilemmas will have you questioning everything. We're picking down real stories from real people who are navigating financial situations that range from mildly awkward to absolutely unhinged. And I'm giving you my unfiltered take on who's in the right and who needs a serious reality check. Because let's be real.

When it comes to mixing relationships and finances, someone's always asking if they're the asshole. Learn how to set boundaries, protect your wealth, and avoid becoming the villain in your own financial story. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash you're rich BFF. All right, we're back with the Lightning Round. Liam, who is the Lightning Round sponsor? This week's Lightning Round is presented by Amazon Q, the new Generative AI Assistant from AWS. Oh, it's so good.

Have we started adding the cash register sound effect? I think we only did it on the first one, since you asked for the effect, but if you want that to be a regular thing, we could... I feel we got a lot of trouble with an episode recently by asking for sound effects that we didn't deliver. Also, if you'd like to make a Gen Moji of Neli being...

showered in cash and send it to me. I'm good with that. Right next to our emotional zebra. All right, lightning round. David, you wrote about this week. YouTube is still growing fast on TV's and living here. What's going on here? Yeah, so I would say statistically,

if you are absorbing this podcast right now, I don't even know what word to use anymore. If you are experiencing this podcast, there is an increasingly large chance you're watching us on your television in your living room. If you are, hello. Oh, Leds only. If you're watching this on some janky, side-lit LCD.

I still love you. You should actually watch it. Watch it like several times, actually. Yeah, watch it on all of your different TVs, just to check the resolution differences, I would say. But no, basically, YouTube put out a bunch of stats this week about how fast its living room stuff is growing. 400 million hours a month of podcast viewing is happening on TVs. Sports stuff is way up. They launched this new feature that I think is kind of cool.

It's called Watch With. and essentially what they discovered is that a lot of people are watching a sporting event with live commentary from somebody streaming and talking about it, and they're now smushing those things together. So creators are going to be able to actually do their own commentary over top of something that they're watching. And they're starting with sports, but also made it pretty clear that that's going to come to other things.

So like Kurt Wilms, the guy I was talking to who runs product for YouTube's living room stuff, specifically mentioned, like, what about an Apple keynote where there are all these creators who want to talk about it and comment on it. That's just a thing we can offer that you can get all these different commentary streams. I think that's very cool. I'm sure Apple will have some very interesting thoughts about that. Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? Who's going to be mad about new commentary on every movie that exists in the world?

But more broadly, like YouTube is now huge on TVs and has gone or gone this shift, I think really in the last year. Like, I follow this company pretty closely. And they used to talk about the TVs as just kind of another place people watched YouTube. And now they're like really thinking about it as like a primary platform for YouTube. And they're building features for the TV kind of for the first time. Like they have this shows thing where you can put up a bunch of videos in seasons and episodes that makes it feel more like a streaming service. They're doing the watch with stuff. They're doing a lot of work to sync your phone with your TV.

Like YouTube has always kind of wanted to be net. in a certain way, and I think we're starting to see it push to be a little more premium, a little higher end, a little more TV-centric. They're convinced they can do this without killing YouTube as a product elsewhere, but that tension feels very real to me, and I think it's really fascinating. Yeah. Can I say one thing on YouTube very quickly? We've talked about enough about our business in the past couple weeks, so I don't want to

overdo it. But I have a story on the website. This week, a lot of people complain that our... YouTube videos on our website don't let you click the title to go to YouTube and everyone thinks that's our fault because it makes sense that the publisher would want you to keep you on the website that it just it makes sense to people and because forever every YouTube video on the internet you've been able to you you hover over it you click the title and it takes you to and in particular on phone you want to open the YouTube app there's all this stuff you want to do

I hope people know the verge is like very pro links we have links everywhere like links on the home page all the time that's on our fault it is a YouTube decision to distinguish to disable those links. And if we want to reenable them, we have to make less money in our YouTube videos. You can read the whole story? I was very annoyed

that I spent months being like, can you turn down these links back on? And the answer, at the end of the day, was a hard no unless we choose to either not use YouTube at all

or make less money. And I'm not really part of the business side. Maybe the business side make a different decision, but I was like, that sucks. I'm just going to tell everyone

about this. And all the YouTube people just made a very sad face at me. If the internet goes back to every publisher having their own, like awful, bespoke video player again. I'm going to be so angry.

Like, feel however you want about YouTube. It's a good video player. And the internet was filled with bad video players for so long. By the way, the links worked and we made more money. Since 2016, it was all fine. And then in the start of this year, they changed it to, quote, remove their branding. And they think the link to YouTube counts as branding. That's dumb.

It's dumb. Let me tell you how much. Brad I've been for the past two and a half months and the answer is a hard now and I was like I'm gonna write up with this. Is Vimeo still around? Can Vimeo fix this? Sure. All right. Here's a really weird one. I'm obsessed with this one. Instagram is going to let creators

test reels on people that don't follow them. So like Adam has Sari made this release. You should go watch it. It's a very interesting. It's a sociological document of how Adam thinks Instagram creators think about Instagram.

Like watch this video through that lens. He's like, I know a lot of you are stressed when you upload a reel that it won't perform. So now we're going to let you upload a reel. We won't show it to anyone who follows you. We'll show it to people who don't follow you so you can see how it'll do before you publish it to everyone. And it's like, that's not how you should feel about your creative work. Right? Like I'm going to focus group my video before I show it to the people who follow me is a weird thing. It is correct. I think if you're making like advertising,

you run the pressure washing business. Like, is my pressure washing business going to do better? Because I made, maybe that makes sense. But that's what I'm saying. Adam thinks everyone is making commercial videos.

And they're trying to optimize them for reach, as opposed to making stuff on Instagram. Richard, what do you make of this? This makes perfect sense to me. I think it explains, like you said, it explains a lot about the way that Adam Lassari and Instagram kind of see the world,

especially what we've seen with threads, for example, the way that you could have a post, that you would put up, and it would go viral with strangers, but not be seen by the people who follow you. And in particular on threads, go viral with strangers who don't like what you said.

It was very, very, very good at identifying people who do not like what you said and making sure that they see your post. But this is kind of just the way that they see it. Okay, so you made something. You would love to be seen by whoever, random people, not your community, because you would be deeming them in your channel if you wanted that.

No, but they're saying you don't want to blow it with the people who follow you. So we'll like focus group it with people who don't. And then you can decide if that data makes you confident to show that people to follow you. And like, maybe that I think that's interesting. I'm like, that is legitimately one of the most novel features a social network has released in forever. Super interesting. I think the idea that you kind of can't trust the people who follow you to just. judge whether your content is good. It's just a really weird way to think about things.

And that might permanently downrank you in the algorithm. Like, that's what I mean. Like the, when I say watch this video from the perspective of how does Adam think about creators thinking about Instagram? It's just purely commercial. It's like, what you want as a creator is to do great in our algorithm. So here's some tools that will help you do great in the algorithm. And it's like, actually, what I want as a creator is to make art. Like, those are different things, like wildly different things. This is going to sound more cynical than I mean it, but I would take pretty strong bets on

that more people are interested in making money than making art. Oh, yeah, but that's what I think those platforms... Just where we are. I think creator platforms are commercialized in that specific way. People want to win them. And here's a feature. And he even says in that video, we made this with creators,

like, well, we've gotten a lot of feedback. They've been working with creators. But there's just something very commercial about everything that's happening there that is very far away from. This was a photo sharing website for like me to talk to my friends. Yeah.

Go watch the video. There's something really specifically Instagram-y about this that I find really fascinating. Like Richard, like you were saying, what this says to me is that you are always on a knife's edge of losing everything on Instagram. In the way that like on TikTok, everything you make is like a new pull at the slot machine, right? Like Instagram cares so much more about who follows you and who you follow than TikTok does. TikTok is just happy to shove stuff into the algorithm and see what works.

and you'll randomly go viral and sometimes you won't. Instagram lets you build something that is like much more sort of understandable by you as the creator, but also if you make two videos in a row that your audience doesn't like in response, doesn't respond to, you're toast.

And this is like every creator's desperate fear is if you miss once, it can kill the whole thing for you. And what this is, is Adam Ossari basically saying, yeah, that's true. So we're going to give you more tools to make sure you never do that.

It's weird. Yeah. Weird. Speaking of it can all vanish an instant, TikTok lost its court case, challenging the law that would force it to either ban itself or be sold. Lauren Feiner wrote up the decision in that case. Complicated, but the court basically said the Congress made a national security decision. We're not going to override it. Many complicated First Amendment questions will deal with them probably in a decoder episode down the line. But Donald Trump, incoming president of United States, asked about this by Kristen Welker on NBC News. an hour and a half long interview. I'm just going to read this quote because

it's a lot of words from fun. I use TikTok very successfully in my campaign. I have a man named TikTok Jack. He was very effective, obviously because I won the youth foot by 30%, which he did not do. But whatever, I just wanted to say TikTok Jack. Anyway,

TikTok Jack, email us. I need to know everything about you. And then he said, I use TikTok, so I can't really, you know, I can't totally hate it. It was very effective, but I will say this. If you do that, meaning ban it, something else will come along and take its place

and maybe that's unfair. And what the judge actually said was you can't have Chinese companies. They have the right to ban it. If you can prove that Chinese companies own it, that's what the judge actually said. She has to follow up. She said, well, you protect TikTok. And he said, I'm going to try and make it so that other companies don't become an even bigger monopoly. And specifically what he means is Facebook.

He has often complained that Facebook would just become a bigger monopoly if TikTok is banned. And then during the campaign, he obviously said to a bunch of young people, I will protect TikTok. Biden wants to ban TikTok. I'll protect it. this is in my mind a massive walkback, right? All he's saying is I don't want to face a movie monopoly. Not I will protect bite dance owning TikTok in America. And I'm,

I'm just betting. I think we, we've done this a million times now, David, like who's going to buy TikTok? Because that's the out. The out is he negotiates a deal for Amazon or Walmart or subway to buy TikTok.

Uh, and he gets to say he saved it. I made a great deal to save tick. aren't you proud of me? I'm doing what I said I would do. And I'm I just you can watch the clip we have it on the website. It feels very much like that is the door he's opening. I think I mean it's it's it's the escape hatch right. It's it's it's the closest thing he's going to find to a win win at the end of this. He gets a he gets an America first win. He gets TikTok to still be here. He gets to like poke a knife at Mark Zuckerberg.

Time's running out though. Uh, ban goes into effect on January 19th. TikTok has filed with the Supreme Court to appeal. We'll see what happens. Notably, January 19th is the day before January 20th, just when he takes office. So, wait, Neil and I have, have been on the record about what we think is going to happen many times. Richard, you have to make a prediction right now what happens on January 19th. Oh, uh, TikTok actually turns into a new app called TalkTick. Something. It won't be owned in China. It won't be owned in like Malaysia or something. But, you know, by a very mysterious company that just happened to come into a lot of money. Who knows where it came from?

Next one, Chris Welch reviewed the Sonos Arc Ultra. He says the hardware is great, particularly the new transducers from mate. It's a company at Sonos bought to make smaller transducers and make more bass. Loves those. App is still a little something. Richard, what do you think? I don't know. I mean, it's Sonos.

and they still have the problem of the app that they messed up and made everyone mad. So how's that going? Medium. I would say the answer is medium. But I will say that as a soundbar, seems very cool. Chris was basically like, this is worth upgrading, which upgrading from one expensive soundbar to another expensive soundbar is almost not. Like, no one has that thought.

Like, I'm a person who likes to buy speakers and I'm never like, I should upgrade it. poor. Like, uh, and Chris thought it was worth upgrading, which is fascinating. So hopefully, hopefully this is a big news. This was big news this week. Uh, GM shut down the Cruz Robotaxy service laid off a bunch of people. The former CEO of Cruz, uh, just flat out posted GM is a stupid company, which is great, but it feels like, I used was dummies, which I like very much. Dummies is a, is a, is a surprisingly powerful, that's powerful, mean thing to say to somebody. I don't know. David, there's just like a lot of action in this world and obviously GM is like up and down. What do you think is going on here? I think it just is

starting to seem like all of these car companies got out over their skis on technological revolutions, right? There was the sense that EVs and self-driving were going to happen really fast and that they were going to be immediately mainstream and they were going to become a big business and everybody got really excited about the idea of robotaxies because then you have a really interesting, like diversified business from your own vehicles. Like, you can see how they get there, but we're not there. And I, and like, unless you're Tesla and people just keep giving you stock price money with which to have weird ideas about where to go from here, you're still fundamentally

running a car business, which is not getting higher margin. It's not getting less complex. you still have to make the things that people are buying now and it just feels like one by one these car companies are starting to say

okay we made these big giant future bets that just aren't coming true as quickly as we thought and we just have to get out of it. I also think a lot of people who cover this space more closely

than I do think there is something we are going on with this one in particular that the way GM is handling this suggests that something else is going on inside of cruise that it basically just like pulled the plug all at once, which is a very odd thing to do when you're this kind of

company that is this invested in Cruise. But the macro thing actually kind of makes sense to me. It's just everybody made a bet 10 years ago now that they thought was going to be true in five years and now looks like it might be more like 25. I think it's just hard to lose money the way Google has chosen to lose money on Waymo for this whole time. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's just like, we're just going to lose money until this thing can make it through Phoenix. All right. We're going to Keep losing money until we can make it through Austin. And it's just like... Yeah, GM just doesn't...

Literally doesn't have that money. Yeah, it's just not a thing. Richard, you're the one who put quantum computing on this list. Google reveals quantum computing chip with breakthrough achievements. Tell me why this one made Richard happy. Because most of the other stuff did not. I fully understand quantum computing. I understand everything about it, actually.

The quantum computing chip... Richard is currently both here and not here. As I have said many times, Coin, RJCCC coin is quantum locked. It is both launched and mint and pre-Ment at all time. That's how it works. That's what we do here at RJCCC coin. And we're going to do it on Willow. Because it can perform a task in five minutes that would take a supercomputer 10 septillion years to complete, which may be evidence that we live in a simulation or a multiverse. Maybe or maybe not. I don't really know what any of these words mean. But it happened. They have a chip. They're doing a thing. And now they're trying to find a basically, now that they've done. done this thing, they're trying to find something to do with it that you will actually find a use

for so they could prove how fast it is because right now all the stuff they can do is theoretical. The answer is breaking crypto. RJCC coin. That's what's going to happen. You're already in. It's quantum. You're already in it. You already have it.

I have three very brief things to say about this whole thing. One, everybody should read the research paper that Google did because even Google's own researchers are basically like this thing we did is cool, but I don't know. what it is that we just did here. That's all quantum computing. Yeah, they're like, we did an amazing, unprecedented mathematical calculation that no one cares about it,

has no bearing on the real world. Like, they say that. Like, it's amazing that we did it. We don't know why we did it or what it actually accomplishes. And then they're like, the main thing that we've solved here and our real breakthrough is that we've made it make fewer errors. Yeah.

Like, imagine if your computer was just like, sometimes when you try to move a file, it just explodes, but now our computer does that less. It still does it. It's very good. I'm just saying the main purpose of quantum computing is going to be to break cryptography in specific ways. You're ready. Yeah. Get ready.

But then the third thing is that they just very casually are like, this might be evidence that we're living in a simulation. And that's just like the end of a, they just, they don't address that anymore. They just say it. All right. Here's the last one, which is pure evidence we live in a simulation. You can now buy a Hyundai on Amazon. It's very weird.

It's very weird to go on Amazon and see something listed for a price of $67,000. But there's no one-click buy. The button is like, start now. And then you get kicked to a dealer. And I feel like we have to buy a car to test out if the dealer actually plays ball. Wait, that's less exciting. So I was really hoping there was going to be like an Amazon warehouse somewhere that's just full of cars. That's Carvana.

Right? There's the vending machine. Yeah, the car vending machine. This is, they're, I think they're just doing some pricing games with Hyundai, right, where Hyundai sets a price, Amazon sets a price, and the dealer just delivers a car. And every ring gets a cut and it's happy. But there are still car dealers involved. And I assure you, at some point, they're going to be like, and we've marked this one up. We filled the tires of the nitrogen.

So now that's an extra $6,000. Like, that's car dealer stuff, right? If anyone wants to buy a car on Amazon and tell us how it goes, I'm dying to know. If you just want to cut me a check for $65,000 so we can buy a hot day. We will accept that money as well. But I'm kind of dying to do this because I want to see if the dealers play ball. This is so bizarre. It's weird.

Amazon will give you a $2,300 gift card if you buy a car through Amazon. It's the future, man. It's kind of like a tax break, but it is. The weird thing is the car only works on Kindles. and that. But I want them to link up and bring a trailer so I can just go on Amazon. Somebody's more core XR4TI is up there

and I'm just like, yeah, buy it now. And then it shows up at the house next day and I have to explain that. That's what we need. They bring you the whole thing and then the delivery driver just hands you the keys and walks away. My cousin in New Jersey has absolutely

impulse bought a car and bring a trailer and had like a 1980s Mercedes roll up in his driveway. And his wife is like, what's going on here? But you can absolutely impulse by a car and bring a trailer. That's a real thing that happens. All right.

We got to get out of here. This is a great one. Richard, thanks for being here. And I want to call out one story, which is maybe my favorite story of the month so far. Kristen Radkeke, our creative director and Amelia Hallow-Dekrails,

our photographer went to Pantone's launch of the color of the year, which is called Mocha Moose, which is brown. So they went to a party for the color brown. Kristen was horrified because she was accidentally wore brown on that day. But then she got to the party. everyone else is wearing brown it's like a perfect verge story everything's great about it go read that story photos are amazing uh that's it that's fredcast you and that's it for the verge cast this

week hey we'd love to hear from you give us a call at 866 verge one one the verge is a production of the verge and box media podcast network our show is produced by leam james will poor and eric gomez and that's it we'll see you next week