The Vergecast - The AI is in the computer

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

It's gadget season. More specifically, it's apparently "new computer for your new AI" season. David and Nilay talk through a slew of announcements — Amazon's Alexa Tablets, Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra, the new Googlebooks, and Apple's upcoming smart home launch — to figure out if anyone has the right idea about the future of computing, and where the AI is supposed to live. After that, it's time for Brendan Carr is a Dummy, our thoughts on the Paramount / Warner / Skydance merger, and much more. Please vote for The Verge's podcasts in the Signal listener's choice awards! Vote Vergecast: Best Technology Podcast Vote Version History: Best History Podcast Vote Decoder: Best Business Podcast We’re also on video! Check us out on YouTube. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Read more about the topics discussed in today's 1 hour, 41 minute podcast: ⁠Amazon’s Alexa Tablets are powerful, impressive, and designed to take on iPad ⁠ ⁠Hands-on with Amazon’s Alexa Tablet 12 Pro and its wild new matte display  ⁠ ⁠Amazon is phasing out Fire Tablets because they weren’t ‘giving customers what they were asking for⁠’ ⁠Amazon’s new Kids Tablets let parents manage access to the Google Play store ⁠Apple announces surprise ‘Welcome home’ launch event⁠ ⁠Apple and LG team up on new smart home gear, starting with a lock, doorbell, and thermostat⁠ ⁠New leaks provide our first look at Apple and LG’s smart home devices ⁠Everything announced at Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra event ⁠ ⁠The Surface Laptop Ultra finally has a release date — and a starting price of $2,599⁠ ⁠Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra has built-in magnetic USB-C charging ⁠ ⁠How Microsoft built its MacBook Pro competitor ⁠ ⁠Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is available for preorder for $5,999 ⁠ ⁠The first Nvidia RTX Spark laptops cost up to $7,000 ⁠ ⁠Microsoft is giving Copilot more control over Windows and your files Our first five impressions of Googlebooks — exciting but underbaked  Android’s physical navigation buttons are back on Googlebooks, but not the way you think Google admits not every Android app runs great on Intel Googlebooks  Politico: ‘Head on a guillotine’: ABC says Trump’s threats are already swaying coverage ChatGPT’s ‘Intelligent UI’ update fills its responses with pictures, charts, and buttons Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery complete $110 billion media megamerger  HBO Max and Paramount Plus will merge into a single streamer under Skydance  CNN’s boss will remain as Paramount and WBD merge into Skydance  Skydance is merging Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery’s games teams. Sam Altman says ‘some bad things’ will happen, but AI is totally worth it 0:00 Cold Open 00:37 David’s back! 01:10 Parenting Chaos Update 02:49 Gadget News Rundown 03:47 New Amazon Alexa Tablets 05:15 Panos Strategy Shift 06:31 Play Store Bet 11:17 Default Android Tablet 13:18 Ads and Pricing Fears 15:30 Amazon Great Products 21:20 Matte Display Debate 25:01 Apple Smart Home Tease 26:12 Siri AI Reality Check 29:08 Smart Home Too Complex 33:37 Candy Crush Question 34:56 iPad Multiuser Problem 39:04 Microsoft AI Surface Push 40:35 Local AI Computing Shift 47:22 Magnetic USB C Charging 48:37 Google Book Laptop Confusion 54:20 AI Agents Need A Surface 58:50 Skepticism About Agents 01:07:46 Brendan Carr is a Dummy 01:09:23 ABC License Chilling Effect 01:11:24 Brendan Carr Ownership Cap 01:12:30 Cable Companies Sue Back 01:14:44 SXSW Corruption Game 01:15:50 Skydance Mega Merger 01:18:04 Debt Layoffs Streamer Cuts 01:22:58 Go90 Scale Returns 01:24:02 Netflix Loses Its Edge 01:30:44 ChatGPT Interactive UI 01:37:47 Sam Altman Tradeoffs 01:44:49 Wrap Up And Plugs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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At Capital One, we don't just use technology. We architect it. Our teams have true end-to-end product ownership, shipping distributed systems that handle high concurrency at scale. No single-server bottlenecks, engineered beyond legacy downtime, and operating right here in downtown Toronto. That's technology at Capital One. Search Technology at Capital One, Canada. I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Nathan Lane.

We talk about his critically acclaimed run in Death of a Salesman, taking his dog to therapy, and winning an Emmy for only murders in the building. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Paramount Skydance Warner Brothers Plus Max, a new streaming service coming to you in 2020. You keep my daughter out of this. You leave her alone. Somehow this is all Max's fault. You've named your daughter Skydance from what I understand. She's very well. It's going

very well. Her dad has no largesse. It's a real shame. I will never buy her a media company. Ellison Skydance is a real Taylor Sheridan name. Hi, I'm Ellison Skydance. God, Ants. Just putting it out there. I'm hearing like a Netflix Western. Yeah, it's good stuff. I'm into it. I'm your friend David Pierce, Neil I would tell us here. Close, sir. It's good to have you back. I missed you. I'm very, I'm glad to be here. How have things been?

They've been good. I, you know, other David did a good job. He did do a good job. The people love David to a point that was like really alarming for my own ego. A lot of love for David Amel in my place. And he's dead now. But we missed you, man. We'll have him back. We're going to, we'll find a way to to make David Amel part of the verge extended universe because he was great. But we did miss you. I missed you. I'm glad you're back.

And it sounds like family's doing good. Yeah, things are good. It's three is a lot of children. In a very like strange way, there's the first thing that happens when you have three kids is people immediately start being like, well, you might as well have a fourth, right? And it's like, which I just don't understand. But it is now to the point where I feel like I have infinity children. There's just every time I turn around, there's just another one.

So that's been interesting to get used to. But everybody's good. We had like two weeks of no one sleeping. Just no one. But now we're coming out of that. And I feel alive again for the first time. Last year we had children at the same time. Yeah.

And I do not feel like we have exited the bad part of having a baby with our second one. But you are just, you're back in it. My number one parenting recommendation now is don't have two kids who can't walk. And it's like, there's a real thing that is like, we were talking to a family who like had kids at about the same gap as ours. And they were like, oh, once it's so fun because they'll have each other and they'll be so close to an age that they'll, they'll feel, they'll grow up as peers. And I'm very excited about that. And they're like, oh, it's like in five years. I'm like, oh, my God, five years.

And instead, I'm like, I have not. I've not had an arm free in two months in a way that is like very hard to describe. I've gotten good at doing everything with like my elbows now because that's what I have to accomplish goals while I carry two children. It's a lot. I don't recommend having two tiny children at the same time if you can avoid it. Yeah. But, you know, they're real cute and it works out. Yeah.

I've also had a lot of time to catch up on TV shows and movies over the last seven weeks, which is if you'd like to talk about any major motion picture from mid to late 20, 25. I am ready for it. I'm nowhere there. We should talk about lanterns for like the full hour, but there's like a lot of gadget news. There's a lot of gadget news. That is primarily what we are here to talk about.

So we have Amazon gadget news. It's a big week for what is a computer in a way that is actually very fun and I'm excited to be back for. Amazon is doing tablets again. Microsoft is doing AI computers. Google books are here. I have one.

I am desperate to talk about them. You guys have been talking about them and I have so many feelings and all of you are wrong and I want to talk about all of them. Apple is had just announced today as we're recording that its big home event is next week on the 13th. There's just a lot of new ideas about how we're supposed to use technology happening all at once. And Skydance owns Hollywood.

We'll get to that. Literally that is coming at the very end of the show is how many gadgets there are. Should we start with Amazon? Amazon feels to me like kind of the most immediately newsy. It dropped today, Thursday, as we're recording. I also, this is like a perfectly nilai-coded gadget announcement because the big thing today is the Alexa tablets, a new vastly superior line of tablets from Amazon.

They're not fire tablets. They're actually phasing out the fire tablet brand in favor of a better, higher-end set of tablets that people will actually like to use. And the question of like, what does it mean for Amazon to be a good hardware company I think is really interesting. It's also entirely about the display.

Like I had a call with Panos Penae, who runs all of the devices and Alexa stuff at Amazon, about all of the Alexa tablets. All we talked about the whole call was this new nanomat display that Amazon has built that they swear is like the greatest tablet screen you've ever seen in your life. It does look amazing in all of the photos and videos.

It does. It really does. So the idea is that it takes some of the matte texture that is often just put on as a film and actually like bakes it into the glass. And Terrence O'Brien on our team saw it, said it looks great. We'll get one to review. I'm very excited to see it. What do you make of just the existence of Alexa tablets? Oh, I have so many thoughts about this. You talked to Panos. I didn't, but I talked to Panos

many times over the years. I have a sense of Panos decisions. Yes. But you can identify Panos decisions. You can just see him at a distance. And there are two here that I think are really important. One, he just up-leveled the hardware. And I say this as a person who has, fire tablets. Right? We've got kids. We have a sono system. There's just a fire tablet sitting around to control the sono system, and that's what it does. And the only reason we have it is because it's one of the few tablets you can get that has Pogo pin charging. So it can just sit in a dock all day. Oh, sure. And you can open the app and it just stays charged. And so, like, this is an odd piece of weird technology that I interact with all the time. Like, you would just not expect me to be a fire tablet person.

I would not. That is genuinely sprouting. But it is literally because you can just like put it in the dock and it charges, and then you can, like, use it as a sound as controller. The two decisions are one. None of that hardware is any good. Correct. Aside from the fact that you could put it in a dock and charge it. It appears this hardware is very good. He wants it to be premium hardware.

That is just a PANOS decision. You can hear him in the meeting being like, why is it bad? You know? Right. That's his personality. That's not a, like, dig on the old tablets. It's a strategy shift. Like, Amazon never aspired to make good tablets.

for. They wanted them to be dirt cheap. There were $29 so you would get Amazon Kids, and then that was a subscription, and that was a whole strategy, because they couldn't compete with the iPad. And this is the second big Panos decision that I'm utterly curious about. They have the Play Store. They got rid of their dumb Amazon App Store, and they're just straight up Android tablets that are part of Google's ecosystem, which comes with a bunch of Google stuff. And the fact that they're called Alexa tablets, that you are meant to talk to Amazon's assistant, which has some amount of agentic capability

and presumably more to come. I can just hear Panos being like, well, apps are boring, they're the past. Just give people Google, why are we fighting that fight? We're going to fight the next war. And I don't know if Alex is good enough to fight the next war, question mark. But those are the two decisions

where, you know, at least a distance I can see Amazon hired Panos Panis. and he is very opinionated and very crisp in his decision making. And those are the two changes. The hardware is nicer and we're leaving the apps in the past. Well, I would put it slightly differently, which is I think the mistake that a lot of people have made is deciding that apps are the past.

And what it actually is is apps are solved, right? Everybody needs apps. Like, it turns out that you have to have an app store or else nothing else matters, right? Like if you decide apps don't matter, agentic AI is the only thing, you build the humane pin and your company dies and you sell the HP and you go make printers. Like that's what happens when you decide that apps are dead. But going and trying to compete in app stores is a complete waste of time. It, like, many have tried, none have succeeded.

And the only way to the next thing is to acknowledge that, right? So you say, okay, we're not going to try to play the app game. We're not going to try to build a bunch of new things. we're going to have a couple of new ideas around this fundamentally solved problem, which is the Google Play Store. We can't beat it. We're not even going to try, but we're going to use it to spring to the next thing. And I think that is the right bet.

And it's the bet way too many companies forget to make. Because apps are not the past. They're not. They are the present in a super duper real way. And the only way to bet that it's the future is to actually do the app thing in the first place. And I think, again, we're going to get to Google Books. but like that's the Google book story too, right? They're like, oh, we think agentic AI in the web can solve all of your problems.

And everybody's like, I would like apps, please. And they're like, okay, here's some apps. Now we can go do the other things. And so, and I think Amazon is trying to do the same thing here. Yeah, we're two sides of the same coin here. If you believe that there is a future past apps, that apps are solved, then you give up and put the Play Store on these tablets. 100%.

Because you have to put all of your focus on the next thing. But until that next thing took any shape, you had to make your own app store. Because otherwise you were just handing your business to Google. And so that's what I'm getting at is they're willing to concede the past, perhaps the present to Google. And the Play Store comes with a bunch of in-app purchase fees and all that stuff that Google gets sued for. I have no idea of Amazon was able to negotiate different rates with Google. But if you have the Play Store, the app developers are going to pay Google for in-app purchases. They're probably not going to pay Amazon.

So you've just conceded the revenue model of the present. Right. And you're on your way to Alexa should be your all-encompassing AGI agent to do all of the economic activity of the future. And you're probably better off making that bet. And that's what I mean. Like, yes, it's the past and that I don't think there's going to be a lot of innovation there. There's a lot of emphasis on the AI part. Whether that's good or bad, like fully remains to be seen.

Yeah. But it is. And I think the tablet to me is super interesting because it sort of clears the deck for that question in a way that I think is really exciting. If the hardware is as good as advertised. And I think it probably is like a company like Amazon certainly has the resources to make great products if it wants to. It has gotten in its way many times. But I think this thing by all accounts so far seems to be a good piece of hardware. If you remove the why doesn't it have this thing by giving it, you know, a decent keyboard case. and a decent stylus and all of the Android apps that you want, you've gotten to the point where it's like, okay, now can our thing, and in this case that thing is Alexa Plus, actually win, right? Like, do we have the next thing here? And now in a certain way, it's going to actually get to answer that question because the other stuff is just sort of solved.

So if you can just make a good tablet with Android apps, great. That is, turns out easy thing to do if you just do it. Is this good enough to be like what you would call the default? Android tablet. I think default Android tablet is such an insult of a thing. You know what I mean? This is the problem.

But you know, like for years, you'd be like, what's the default Windows computer? Sure. And maybe it was... The Dell XPS 13. It's the XPS 13 some years. It's the Surface laptop, some other years. But, I mean, we made a lot of hay back in the Engadgett days talking about the default Windows laptop.

Yep. Joanna Stern built an empire on the default Windows laptop. And then it was the XPS 13 for like years and years, years. If you ask me what is the default Android tablet, I would some Galaxy tab? No, I think you would like deep sigh and then say it's a fire tablet. No, not a fire. No, no, not because it doesn't have the Play Store. I'm saying right now.

But it is. Okay, go ahead. Make your argument in favor of the fire. No, I think my argument is less in favor of the fire tablet and more against the entire ecosystem of Android tablets. I mean, realistically, I don't think anyone was looking for an Android tablet. You're either looking for an iPad or you didn't want to spend the money on an iPad until you landed on a fire tablet. There's like five Android tablet fans just furiously writing you emails right now. There are.

Welcome back. I'm okay with that. And listen, the pixel tablet had a chance to be that thing if Google had continued. Google can't care about Android tablets. Like, Google is onto Google books because it's no longer interested in Android tablet. This is not a small thing for anyone to try and get involved in. I think this will almost immediately become the default Android tablet. Amazon is so big and successful, and the price on these is really good.

The eight-inch one starts at $229. And the very fanciest 12-inch one with the fancy screen is $549. You're looking at like $1,000 iPad territory for $550. And that's meaningful. And so I think Amazon, unless these things have some spectacular failure in them that we don't know about, I think they immediately become the obvious tablet to buy for most. I have to ask the obvious question. Every piece of Amazon hardware, does it show you ads in the home screen by default?

Good question. There aren't any in the, well, okay, there's, I'm trying to think about just the photos I've seen. There's a little prime widget up in the top left corner that is ostensibly there to show you, like, what you're reading and watching. And then there's a whole thing you can, you can swipe right on the home screen to get to this big shelf of stuff. I assume that shelf will be a mix of things you're watching and reading and recommendations from Amazon.com. I do think it's possible that Amazon is going to just slather shopping all over this thing in a way that is really upsetting. One of the things they're going to do is make it so that you can just at any time be like, how do I buy this? And it'll look at what LXA Plus will look at whatever's on the screen and put it in your Amazon card.

That's a real flow Amazon imagines. Oh, yeah. That might be awful. Like, it really honestly might be awful in a way that is kind of pernicious and off-putting. If it has just stayed on the right side of that line, I think these things are almost by default going to be a huge hit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, anybody with a kid who needs a plain tablet, this is the one you buy, right?

If it's a nice piece of hardware that can run Disney Plus and then get your kids to immediately convert everything they're watching on Disney Plus and to purchase this on Amazon Prime. This is going to be a huge one for everyone. But that's the danger. At $5.50 for the nice one, that price is subsidized. And the only way Amazon knows how to subsidize a price is with intrusive advertising. That is the entire experience of the Fire TV. I asked Panos about the price, and he said something to the effect of, I don't want to talk about how we got there.

Do with that. Do with that what you will. It's so ominous. It is. It really is. It's like, don't ask me questions about how we got RAM. Like, okay, man, I understood. Wow.

He's, like, in a large conference room. He's, like, blown out by the window behind him. He's like, don't ask me questions about that. This primary drones are launching some strikes. I want to know how you feel about the nanomat display, but first I have a question that has been rattling around in my brain ever since I found out about this thing. And I want you to actually think about this. Has Amazon ever, and I mean sincerely ever, made,

a great product. It has made a lot of successful products. Has it ever made an out-and-out great product? It's made so many products. It's almost impossible to answer that question. Because prior to Panos, when Dave Limp was running devices, he would have those rapid fire product launch moments where he'd be like, it's a washer dryer, it's a stove, it's a microwave,

and all everything's Alexa. have they made a truly great product? I would argue the very first Kindle. That was the only one that came to mind for me. I'm not sure it was great, but I think that it had an argument. It's just, we should make a version history about it.

It's such an iconic product, and it was so weird with the scroll strip on the side. The first Alexa was not a great product, but I remember the day it came out, you and I were in the office, together and we were the only two people who thought it was a good idea. And then it turns out like a decade later, it was still the same idea. Those are the two that I would call it.

Okay. I see, I think the original Echo definitively not a great product. Kindle, maybe. But this is the thing. Like, I think this is such a huge new path for Amazon. It is just, and again, it's not a knock on Amazon's inability to make great products. It has never tried. Like, Amazon.com is...

Wait, I have a question. Do ring cameras count as great product, like Amazon products? I mean, sure, if you want to. They are fully there. I mean, people have a lot of feelings about ring and everything associated with ring, but they relentlessly iterate.

Like, the newest ring doorbell is very good. That is true. Yeah. It will also get you arrested if you sign, you know. Yeah. But I think Amazon has just never cared all that much. much about building great things. Like,

Amazon.com is very successful. No one up to and including Andy Jassy would tell you it is like a beautifully engineered and executed and lovely user experience product. Like, using Amazon to Hong Kong is awful, but it makes Amazon a lot of money. And so it works for Amazon. This is maybe the most ambitious swing at like, can we make great stuff on its own merits and can that work for us that I've seen Amazon do? and I think that's just going to be fascinating.

And we have a couple more, like I have the new, I have a purple Kindle here that is the aluminum one that they just came out with. It's very nice. There's almost certainly some echo stuff coming that I think might be high end in the same way. Like Amazon has just upleveled in a big way. And whether that changes its fortunes in this space,

I think it's going to be really fascinating to watch. Again, I think the impetus here is there's a platform shift potentially afoot. The way we use computers might be changing. I'm saying this with as much skepticism as I can muster into a microphone.

I'm not sure. But the idea that you're going to talk to the computer, issue natural language commands, and it's going to go off and do something for you, creates an opportunity to sell new hardware. The same way that, I don't know, Apple sold a lot of IMAX in the 90s

because people wanted web browsers and they didn't care so much about Intel program is running on Windows 3.1 or whatever. Like, that was a platform shift that enabled a new hardware entrant, same with the phone, same with whatever else. This is the opportunity for Amazon is to say, hey, you don't care about apps anymore. You care about talking to Alexa.

Yeah. Here's some of the best hardware you can get for talking to Alexa. Will this work? Many questions remain. Will Alexa be as capable as Muse? It certainly isn't now. I had Jen Tooie was on the show yesterday talking about this, and she put up her big one year in review of testing Alexa Plus piece today, Thursday. And yeah, the read is like it's gotten very good at smart home stuff and is still nowhere near where it needs to be to do all of that other stuff.

It is nowhere near as good as Muse at Muse things. Today I told my muse that if it doesn't stop reading my email, it has to pay me $250 each time it proactively reads my email. And it just thought about how to make money for like a long time. It's like, this is worth it if I can figure out how to get. This is how the hugging phase hack starts. It's like your muse is just off somewhere making money now. I kind of wanted to see if I could run a crypto scam on meta servers. I was like, please, I've given you permission to read my email for two things because it's only connected to my spamg email.

It's allowed to read for updates to class action lawsuits for which it has signed up, and new class action lawsuits for which I might wish to sign up. And by the way, there's one a week. We're making, like, annualized, if you do it opening eye style, I'm making $10 billion a year. That's actually. It's, but then every now and again, it's like, hey, some other nonsense spam email came in. Are you interested? I'm always like, please, I want you to stop.

And so today I was like, what if you had to pay me money every time you read my email and I didn't give you permission? And it was like, I made a ledger for you. And I was like, no, but make the money. And it just sounds like, here's my Venmo. Get at me. It didn't get anywhere, but I'm working on it. And if I can get Alexa to do it, we'll be in a much happier place. That's true.

Do you have any thoughts on this nanomat display? I was talking to Panis about this and reading about this and thinking about you at the Apple launch event, standing there in front of the two studio displays, the one and the fancier one, and just like staring in awe trying to find the two differences. And I was just like, I'm, Nelai's going to hear the word nanomat and have a lot of feelings. I mean, I want to see it. It's funny. I was thinking about the last album that I went to, which was the iPhone Duo launch, and the opening the duo

and seeing that it's a matte display was, it was just a collective gasp in that room. Like, everyone had that experience. We're not expecting it to be Matt. It's since come out that there's, like, a lot of reasons for it to be Matt, including hiding the crease. It feels like we're about to have

a little matte display fad in consumer devices. I really enjoyed looking at the mat display on the duo. I haven't seen this one in person. There's something about it, especially for a very portable device that you have in like sunny spaces, bright spaces,

where the reflections, where it's going to be great. But we'll see, especially for a cheap device that kids might use, it is much easier to clean a glossy screen. Oh, that's interesting point.

Yeah. I can definitely see my children doing bad things to this display. Maybe that's why it's only in the highest end device. That like if you're buying the fancy 12-inch one, you're probably not, buying it to just stick in front of your kid on a plane. Well, I'm curious.

I mean, you talked to them. What was Amazon's argument for having a mat display? Essentially just that it's better, right? Like, PANOS started with the argument that the screen is the only thing you absolutely cannot compromise on a tablet. And I agree with that fundamentally. But I think they also are really into this being a device that does lots of things and goes lots of places, right?

That it is a productivity device and it has the keyboard case. and Pannis was like very proud of the fact that he uses it as his main work computer. But then also it is a thing you will, you know, hold in your hands and read books on. And so it has some of the like tone shifting that it can do automatically when you open the Kindle app. They really like the idea of be using it to watch movies. Like they understand, I think, pretty thoroughly how many things people use tablets for. And so we need something that looks good and feels good in all of these different, use cases, I think does kind of inevitably lead you to a matte display if you can pull it off.

And they seem to believe they have. Yeah. I wonder how fast they will end up at a folding phone. I think if Amazon hadn't made the fire phone, they would have shipped a phone instead of a tablet. But I think this to me feels so much like one toe into that water. And then if this works, there will be an Alexa phone in 12 months. Yeah. Especially if you're talking about, I want to go all these places and do all these things.

You're just going to end up with a folding phone. Yes. But I think the hill for, oh God, Amazon made another phone is so high that unless they have this huge hit tablet on their hands,

it might feel insurmountable. So I see why you do this first, but I also like, remember, Panos Panay, long time advocate of folding devices. made a bunch of them at Microsoft, killed a bunch of them, shipped a bunch of them. Nobody loved the Surface Duo

and the Microsoft Courier like Panos Penae. No part of me believes he doesn't want to work on that at Amazon, too. It's super clear that that's coming, if they can hold this up. Again, especially if you buy the notion that the entire paradigm of computing is shifting and this is your opportunity to try something new.

Yep, 100%. Real quick, before we switch gears to everybody else, his ideas about computers. Right next to all of this is whatever Apple is about to do in this space, right? Where Apple is having a some kind of something next Tuesday. That's as specific as I'm able to be. They sent an invitation to some people. It was mysterious. It had yarn that made an Apple logo. We're expecting Apple to launch a bunch of smart home things. Yeah, they invited Gen Tui. Yeah, right. America's smart home reporter. Yeah, I feel like I know what's going on. What are you looking for it here?

I still have in my head this social video you made the other day with a screenshot of you scrolling through the insanity of your smart home. This is very much Apple running towards what Amazon and Alexa have been doing successfully for some time, while Amazon is trying to do what Apple has been doing successfully for some time. Are you bullish on whatever Apple's about to do here? So the rumor is Apple's going to announce the home pad. That's what we've all agreed to call this product. No, we haven't.

I don't love it. We have not agreed to call it. That's what we're calling it. You know, some sort of Siri AI device that lives in your kitchen and does video conferencing. And we just had Mark German on decoder, and he was like, this device has been ready to go. But they held it because Siri AI was not ready to do the thing. And it's fascinating that Apple believes Siri AI is not ready to do the thing when Siri AI is now about as capable is 2023 Gemini

because it is distilled from Gemini. Yep. Do you know what I mean? Like, that's where we've gotten. Like, I've had a nest hub in my house for ages that can control the smart home and answer natural language query. And then it has an ad for itself on the screen all the time that says start a live chat with Gemini. And I'm always like, but isn't that what I'm doing? It makes no sense.

That's awful. It's truly, if anyone at Google can explain what they think the difference in those things are, I would love to hear it. But we're at the agent part of the conversation now. Yeah. Grockbot and dots and muse. And I think launching a device like this and being like,

it can do lights and locks. And we've partnered with LG, a company that just got into a huge scandal for listening to you. Yeah. All of that seems very, it just seems from yesterday. And maybe Apple just got slowed up because Siri wasn't ready. and they would have released this if Siri had been ready. But the, yeah, there's just some part of this

where Apple is the company that won apps and they might be trapped by apps. Interesting. That's a good theory. So, yes, I'm, you know, I'm as a huge smart home nerd, yes, I want to see what Apple's riff on a smart lock with LG looks like. I don't know that you can convince me

to get rid of my Schleg locks that run on thread where the battery lasts for 500 years and they're already installed in the doors. Is it possible that the reason Apple is partnering with LG on this stuff is because it knows that, that like even Apple knows that it is probably not going to convince most people to rip out their front door lock just because Apple made a new product. There is some level of humility somewhere in Apple Park

that prevents them from believing that. And so they're happy to voice that stuff on other people and be like, what we're going to be is the control layer in the middle. And that's where Siri AI becomes important. Yeah, I mean, I can already, you know, if you want to go straight an Apple announcement, you're like, this will work with the huge ecosystem

of Matter doorlocks that run on thread. And, you know, we had some great ideas. So we partnered with LG on making some with Apple flare them, whatever John Turneris is going to say. Yeah. They'll have two chips in them or whatever. Yeah, like no buttons, whatever that is, whatever Apple thing is.

But it needs to work with a big ecosystem of Matter devices. There's some reporting out there that, you know, this is a big reset for Matter too and HomeKit in general. But the point that I have just been making for ages that Jen has been making for ages is that you cannot sell a smart home in a box. Right. Like sort of definitionally, everyone's house is an edge case.

So you cannot sell in a box something that works for everyone. Just in my house, the basement door doesn't get any Wi-Fi signal. So now you've got to add a repeater or an earo or a mesh note Like it's all it's we're already done like it's already gotten more complicated than any normal human would ever deal with Uh replacing light switches is easy but also complicated Like it's not actually very challenging to replace light switch But then you got to flip your breakers off and you absolutely have to flip the breakers off just take it from me just turn your breakers off Don't do it hot

I'm starting to myself in trouble. And you got to do it. And not everybody wants to do that or call them a Tristan and pay the money to do that. Like you just end up with, oh, this is getting complicated really fast. Yeah. And I don't, I'm very curious to see how Apple repositions HomeKit in this device and a bunch of second party accessories from LG as an actual product solution, not just some fun stuff you can nerd out with.

And just to say it again, I love this stuff and I love nerding out on it. and I'm a sicko, and I don't think any of this is ready for prime time. Because there's just no way to sell it to anyone else. You just end up being the systems administrator for your house. Or your Apple and you try to convince everybody that Siri AI is ready to be that thing. And unless there is some enormous advance coming next week, it isn't. Like, the more I use Siri AI, the less impressed I am by Siri AI. It is, I think Gemini in 2023 is actually the exact right place to situate it because it does some of the things, right?

Like some very basic things Siri used to not be able to do like answer questions or find information for you. It can now do. And that's not nothing. That's useful things. It can search your text messages and email like never before. It sure can. And it actually does that passably well. That is not bleeding edge AI technology.

But it does work. All of this other stuff, the like just make sense of the world or, around me stuff actually is bleeding edge AI technology, and I don't see any of it in Siri right now. Yeah. And, you know, you can say there's a lot of reasons Apple was behind, but to me, the number one thing is that Apple makes an awful lot of money on in-app purchases in the app store. Yep. And disrupting the app paradigm is fully disruptive to Apple's business. And, you know, there's reporting out there that says John Turnus actually wants to make more money from services. I mean, of course he does.

sure but like John turnus will get fired if he doesn't figure out how to make more money from services it's just a real thing well he can also make new devices people want to buy it it's another choice there's a lot harder turns out and and so of course meta was out with muse of course meta put an app on your phone that means you don't have to use other apps right they've got nothing to lose right and like I just I think that it's going to be one of those things I mean this is the classic innovators dilemma like Apple is trapped by the scale of its own success here. And they probably should be the company that gives everybody eight gigs of RAM in the cloud to run a little web browser so you can tell Siri to go do stuff for you and figure out how to do that in a privacy first way. And then, you know, Siri will shop for you and they can take 30% of that. But they're not going to. It's going to be a, they're going to say Siri can use the apps on your phone.

That's their model. And even Google to some extent is sticking with that model. They announced Gemini Spark, which is an agent at I.O. Yeah. They are not running NFL ads for Gemini Spark. No. Spark is so funny because every time anybody has a conversation about all of these devices and the sort of AI assistance, everybody mentions, you know, Mews. Instinct is kind of up there, Grockbot.

And then there's a couple others percolating around. And then every time there is one commenter who from like several rooms away is like, what about Spark though? And it's just like, oh, that's the Google employee in the room. Like, that's where you find them. And like, Google was out in front of this and just didn't do the thing. Like, as ever, Google's ability to coherently make and ship and market products remains to be seen. But, okay, last thing on this, and then we need to take a break. I want you to call this yay or nay right now.

Are you going to be able to play Candy Crush within app purchases on the homepad? No. Okay. Look, here's the number one thing about the home pad. Think of the billions left on the table by that decision. So, well, here's my number one question

about the own pet. The reporting on it all suggests that it's going to have the camera on and it will recognize you as you walk up to it and then pop up some personalized stuff. First of all, now you have a camera in your kitchen that is just like looking for people,

looking for faces. Big questions for Apple there. Like, I don't like having cameras in my house. Cameras outside the house, fine. Cameras in the house. We just like don't have it. Even the baby monitor, I won't get a Wi-Fi baby monitor.

Just not a thing I'm comfortable with. Apple's like, yeah, we're going to do facial recognition in real time, such that when you walk up to it, we will switch to your accounts. There is not a device anywhere in Apple's ecosystem that can do fast user switching at that speed. Right. So my number one question is how is that going to work? And then if it works, like, sure, now you're in your App Store account. you can do Candy Crush.

But if this is a single player experience with one app store, like it's never going to work. Right. Yeah, I agree. Even, yeah, I hadn't even really thought about that. Because what you actually want in that situation

is something that can actually be used simultaneously by multiple different people. And if it's trying to essentially context switch every time, it's going to be a mess. But it also kind of has to if it's going to have the permissions that it's asking for, that is complicated. Yeah, I mean, Apple could have saw this a million years ago by doing user profiles on the iPad, which I believe all of us have begged them to do. Like every writer at the verge gets their wings when they write, why doesn't the iPad have multiple user accounts? You've written it, I've written it, Dieter's written, like, we've all written it.

But this device, at least from what they're reporting is, like, that's the feature. So maybe it'll just be face ID and unlock. But that sucks. Yeah, yeah. Having to do one more step every time you want to touch it, it feels bad. All right, whatever it is next week, we will inevitably talk a lot about it. For right now, let's take a break. Then we're going to come back.

We've got some laptops to talk about. We're right back. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system.

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two companies this week with some more traditional, I would say, ideas about laptops that are also weird ideas about laptops. Let's start with Microsoft. So Microsoft had an event this week. They teased it by saying something to the effective. We have something new from Windows. That's something new turned out to be a couple of new devices. They re-announced and announced a ship date for the Surface laptop Ultra.

They announced a thing called the Surface RTS Spark dev box, which really just rolls off the tongue. A lot of this stuff is its sort of AI-forward laptops built in particular on the RTSPARC platform from Nvidia. Let's start with the Surface Laptop Ultra, which they've talked about before. This is by a mile the most powerful surface they ever built. It's intended to be for local AI development for people who want to build with AI. There were a bunch of new Windows features about how co-pilot will be able to use your computer

more. The thing that happened, by the way, while I was on leave, is co-pilot just became a joke. I don't know if everybody noticed this while you were in it every day, but co-pilot is now the AI that everybody makes fun of. And like, there, but for the grace of God, go every other AI tool on the planet. But Microsoft is still doing it. They're plugging copilot into everything. They're giving it more control over your files over Windows.

The Surface laptop Ultra, Nelai, is this a real laptop to be interested in? Or is this just like a supercomputer play thing for nobody? We had a number of locally conversations while you were out. You know, Apple announced a bunch of Macs. made a lot of noise about how they were great for running local A. A. models. There's something there that is super interesting. You don't want to rent your compute in the cloud.

You don't want to pay the enormous token fees. You want control of your data. Do you care about privacy? And then right next to that is, boy, a lot of people have to rethink the fundamental paradigm of computing that they have been swimming in for ages. I'll just give you a really dumb example. I'm writing this Dakota book, right? And so there's like 320 odd decoder transcripts from the last five or six years.

Like obviously this is a thing for AI to do. Yeah. Right? I should just make a decoder search tool and I'm like doing a thing. I'm like, find me a quote. When someone said blah, blah, blah, then AI should go find it for me. So I built the tool. And I just like built it in clock.

And it didn't even occur to me that that tool lived on my computer. Hmm. Right? Like the artifact and the transcripts that was all just on my computer and I was using it great. and then I was traveling and I opened my laptop and I opened Cloud and I was like, where the, is it?

Right. Because you're just so used to the stuff being everywhere. Yeah, yeah. Right? And I was like, I figured out and I made it work and it's all fine.

But there's something about this paradigm of computing that makes you really reconsider where it's going to happen in a way that, I think, you know, unless you had a files and folders job,

you were not thinking about that a lot with your computer until recently. And I'm fascinated to see if Microsoft's selling an Nvidia platform, I mean, it's expensive. It's $2,600.

Yeah. But is there, like, massive demand for a high-end Nvidia laptop that might be able to do local AI? And is that a glimmer

of a signal that actually local computing is going to be back in vogue when we've all just been trained to be like, it's all in the cloud. Nothing is actually happening here. Right.

like why do you need 16 gigs of RAM in a laptop because Chrome is shit like there wasn't a reason before and now there's like a lot of good reasons yeah part of me wonders if what we're missing there is these sort of simple use case right like what you're describing in a lot of ways is sort of an interface problem that I think is much more easily solved by download you know jemini or muse to your computer and it will use your computer but also go to the cloud when it needs to yeah the like how to get a local model onto your computer is still sort of opaque in a lot of ways, and then what do I do with it?

And how do I interact? Nobody has packaged that in quite the right way, I don't think. And maybe that's Microsoft's chance is we make the operating system. We can do this. Like Apple's trying to do this with Apple intelligence, but it's so narrow and incomplete in that way. Microsoft could be the one to be like, well, we've just baked this whole thing into your computer,

and now it works offline. Like, it is a very funny, switch from the company that just spent the last decade. From the Azure company? The Azure company that also spent all of Satya Nadella's tenure moving office to the web, moving Windows to the web. Everything is in the cloud now. Sasha Nadella once looked me in the eyes and said,

if I could rename Windows, I'd rename it Azure Edge. Really? Yeah. He's like, whatever, man. Satya Nadella, by the way, not great at naming products. I don't know if any of them are. point. But I mean, again, I think it's a fascinating device. The idea of a really high-end Nvidia arm laptop that is optimized for running models locally is new. Like, I am taken by the

idea of new kinds of computers. I'm curious about them. I'm interested in them. And then you're just like, well, the paradigm of this, especially in a laptop, is kind of weird. Right? Like, okay, I'm going to have a bunch of compute in my house. I don't want the models to be in a cloud. I don't want my data to go to Anthropic or whatever it is. I'm put a server in the basement. Right. You have a headless Mac studio. Like that is understandable. Yeah. And then wherever I am in the world, I can use that because it's sitting here on my connection. This is a laptop. It's like, I need to take the model with me to do what in the coffee shop locally. Like, I'm just dying to see what use cases emerge for that thing. Yeah. Yeah.

I will say, I think there's a version of this that is just finally Microsoft made an honest to God out and out MacBook Pro competitor that can hang at that level. That is all on its own very exciting. Like it's expensive, but so is the MacBook Pro. You can spec it up to death. Like if the RTX Spark platform is as good as advertised, this thing is, it looks great. It has the specs. Microsoft got very excited about how many ports it has. It got so excited that it spelled the word surface wrong

on the slide about all the ports. It's really good. Really a lot going on. When you say co-pilot has become a bit of a joke. What I know is that it was active while those slides were being made and it said nothing. No, it's like, oh, Sirass.

I love that. That's my favorite other computer. Thank you, co-pilot. But yeah, it does seem like if you just take this as the true sort of Surface Pro, fine. But I do think Microsoft is

trying to make an argument that there is a next way of using computers inside of this device that you can build and use on this laptop. And yeah, I agree with you. I'm not sure anyone has quite figured out what that product is supposed to look like. And maybe that's fine because this is a developer computer for developers. And in this rev, everyone who gets it will know how to make it work. And maybe that's enough. Yeah, or, you know, there's a market for $2,600 Windows laptops that look nice and perform like a Macwood Pro, and people are going to buy them just for that. Maybe the battery life is great,

and performance is great, and that Windows on Arm will have solved it. Because Nvidia brought to bear a whole new platform. Like, that's reasonable to. I'm just fascinated by the idea of, okay, it is not clear if the models commoditize, if you can run distilled models locally, there's all this stuff, right,

where the compute can and should live. Yeah. And I actually think that's totally up for grabs right now. Yeah. I agree. And I think it's actually a really huge, interesting product opportunity for all of these companies. Well, also, it's like if it turns out to live on a laptop in your backpack, maybe that doesn't mean it needs to live in a data center, which maybe that's how the bubble pops. Like edge computing, baby. Azure Edge.

Yeah, I love it. There is one spec of the laptop watch that we should talk about. And it's apparently the most important thing about it, which is that it is the first. And I have to read this to make sure that I get all of the words correct. it has built-in magnetic USBC charging and if you were to say David, why is that an interesting milestone? I would not have a great answer for you.

But that's apparently a thing. It's MagSafe. Do you not watch our video? It goes, pink. Yeah, but instead of being MagSafe, it's just a USB cable. It goes better. And he goes, pink.

Does it actually make the noise? I miss the video. Yeah, because it's like physically going into the, think. Do you Are you getting the vision? One more time? Oh,

All right, now, man. I get it now. That's good. I never used the MagSafe fort on my MacBook Pro. Like, never, not once. Even though I was like psyched to see it come back because I'm always just someplace with USBC.

Right. I'm not going to carry another dumb cable. This is like a perfect solution. Yep. Yeah. Oh, I totally agree. I think this is great. And I think it's,

it replaces Microsoft's kind of long-term Janky Surface Connect port with something that makes a lot more sense. Yeah. And if this spurs everybody to start doing magnetic USBC, I will be a happy, happy man. That would be awesome. Okay, the other laptop we should talk about is Google Books. Google Books are here.

I can just go. I know you have like a five-hour monologue now. I do. I have a lot of thoughts. But, okay, my actual question for you, Nilai, is very simple, which is why on earth did Google ship this now? And I want you to try to hash this out with me because the story of Google Book so far, right? There's five devices out.

You guys have talked about this on the show. They're an Android-first take-on laptops. There is nothing. Not one thing about this platform that is finished. There are some weird interface edges. No apps understand what a Google Book is or how to use them or what's supposed to go. Like, nothing.

It's just an Android tablet pretending to be a laptop in a way that completely drives me crazy. And I just keep looking around trying to figure out why Google shipped this now and what it feels like it needs to be out in front of or what wave it's trying to get. Well, that one's obvious. I know the answer to that one. Do you? Okay. The holidays are coming.

Okay. That's when people buy these things. So you got to get them out now. Developers have to have them. Hopefully you get a wave of software updates. People buy cheap laptops for the holidays. Off you go. Black Friday is coming.

Do you know what I mean? But it's that thing. Sure. Okay. But is, are they ready? I haven't actually heard anyone describe them as an Android tablet all dressed up as a laptop. That's very good. It's what it is. Like, okay, let me give you an example.

So you open Netflix. Netflix, app I was very excited about, right? This is like, the reason you want a desktop app is so you can download things to your computer and watch them on planes. Right? Like, this is an annoyance with my Mac. Some apps exist for the Mac that will let, me down, like Prime Video has an app that will let me download stuff locally. Netflix doesn't. Very annoying. So it's great that I just have Android apps. I can download stuff locally.

This thing does not understand that it's not an Android tablet. It only runs full screen or 169 just down the middle of the thing. It doesn't interact with any other windows. It can't be resized. Like, it's just these are tablet apps. And to some extent, this is like Google's ongoing problem, which is that it can't make anyone care about Android apps. Like I've sort of, danced around saying this for a long time because every time I denigrate the state of Android apps, a lot of people send me emails and get mad. But this to me is like such a blistering indictment of how much developers care about making good apps for Android that even after all this time, Android is pretty good on a Google book. It's pretty good on a television. It's pretty good on

lots of things. Android apps suck everywhere but phones. Yep. And it is so much more obvious to me on a Google book than it has ever been on anything else. And I just look at this thing. I'm like, maybe this is just a completely unsolvable problem, and Google is host. It's funny because all I want back is a Chromebook pixel from 10 years ago that just had a web browser. But there's infinity research that people want apps. They don't just want to browse the web, even though that's what they do on their computers all day long. They don't think that's what they want, even though it is what they want. Google has now complicated the idea of a Chromebook to the point where what is a computer is an existential crisis.

But there are a bunch of things about this that work for me. Like the Google book has a concept of a home screen in a way that laptops really don't. Like you can come and you can see widgets and it'll show you. You can array apps like you were on your phone. And there's something about that that is immediately like, oh, this is actually a good idea. Like we should use my desktop for things instead of just being a mess of files that I've downloaded. That's smart. The control center is laid out like my phone and is actually much more understandable than how to find settings all over the Mac in a lot of ways.

Like, a lot of these things make sense to me to bring Android and Chrome OS together works. The Chrome on the Google book seems a little worse in a way that we're all still trying to figure out. It's like desktop-ish Chrome. Oh, no. It's not. No, no, no, no, no. If someone can actually put the pieces together on this for me, please call me and do it. But it is not just they lifted desktop Chrome and put it on here, which is essentially what ChromeOS is.

It is full bore Chrome with some stuff around it. I would argue there's actually nothing worse than a desktop-ish browser. Yes. I mean, this thing runs extensions. It has some of the extra features. I haven't found any websites that are broken. But there are a bunch of little pieces of the interface that aren't there. There are a couple of little tweaks to the way that things work that don't feel quite right.

The way Windows is a little bit different. Like it's just, it just feels somewhat less than Chrome. And to me, it's like the one thing this thing needs to be. is full-ass chrome. Yeah, if you see a laptop, you're like, I'm running full-fat Chrome. Like, we're doing it.

That's the whole thing. Yeah. When I say there's nothing worse than a desktop-ish browser, it's like, when you're using a mobile browser, like a baby browser for babies, at least you know.

You're going to get kicked out over here and you're not going to end up in like some mobile web backwater because the site automatically detected a blah, you know, this is the experience of using an iPad for me. All the time. It's like, oh, it's so close to being a real browser.

And then everyone knows it's not. And they're like put you in a kiddie pool. Like, there's nothing worse than that because you're like, oh, I'm so close. I'm using a thing that feels like a laptop and it won't just let me be a laptop. For Google to do it with Chrome, a thing called Chrome on a thing called a Google book that looks like a laptop, it's going to confuse lots of people in lots of ways. Yeah, it is kind of crazy making. But it occurs to me that the sort of reason for existence of basically. basically every gadget we've talked about so far is the same.

And I don't think I processed that until we were sitting here talking about this. The idea underpinning all of these is some kind of new hardware on which your AI agent is allowed to just run amok. Whether it's Siri AI or Alexa Plus or co-pilot or Gemini, whether it's a laptop or a tablet or a weird home. Like, everyone's hardware idea boils down to, we need to give you surface on which to let your AI agent do things on your behalf. But the right surface for that is eight gigs of RAM and eight gigs of storage in the cloud. Like, meta figured out. It's a little tiny Linux computer.

Yeah, it's like, fine. We'll just give you a little Cloud VM. And it's going to have a browser in it. And, you know, I think meta's approach to like, it's just your computer. You can do whatever you want. And here's a file system is neat. I think that was so smart, by the way. Even just in the way that it is describable

in the way that you just described it is so smart. They're like, we just gave you a little tiny Linux computer in the cloud. Immediately your brain goes, oh, I understand that. I will say,

you missed some drama while you were out because I think they kind of reconed their way to that. Oh, yeah, I don't think that's real at all. But I think it's a good explanation. No, I mean, like they announced Muse and then people found that it could talk about the file system and then they're like,

no, it was always meant to do that. And they could quietly change the behavior of muse to make it actually do that. Oh, I saw because you got really pissy about it on threads because you got in a fight with somebody and then you double down and then everybody was mad at everybody. And then I won. And then you, I think you won. I'm not positive.

Then I demanded a statement on the record from meta saying what the intended behavior was and they declined. Say I won, Mark. Say I won. I was like, put your money where you have is. Say that this was always the intended behavior on the record. And then it was dead silence. Yeah. Just like, you know.

But whatever. They got to the right answer, like a cool ass answer. Yeah. Okay. Right? The idea that you have a little computer in the cloud and your muse can use it, and this is kind of what I mean about where is the compute going to live for, especially for consumers. The only answer is it in the cloud managed by an IT professional who gets paid a lot of money

to make sure that your agent stays in the sandbox and that, right? Like there's no way a regular consumer should have a Mac Mini in the basement with OpenClaught just firing away. Right. I don't know if you saw the Ben Thompson piece this past week. Like, it opened with, I got a virus. And it's because I had in my basement, right? OpenCla.

But he's like, but the only reason I found out I had a virus is because I had open claw on my MacMitty and it detected the virus. And it's like, all of this is a swirl of problems, right? There's something there that I just find utterly fascinating. Like, all of these devices are there to get you through a platform shift. Yeah. The Google book, the idea that it can sort of like silently stream apps from your Android phone onto that display, all of the walls between these app paradigms are being torn down because they don't matter anymore. Like Google was pretty reticent to do that. The app vendors are reticent to do that. And over the past few years, everyone's just like, screw it. Just run the apps wherever you want.

Yep. But everything's everything. It's fine. Because the next thing is coming and that's actually the battle worth fighting. I just don't know that I want the AI agent to click around on Chrome on my Google book in front of me. Go do that somewhere else. Yeah. Yeah, that's where things like Instinct and Muse feel good to me. It's like I actually don't most of the time want to see you doing the work. Just let me know when you need me and it'll be fine.

But that's very hard to do because then you get the thing where it's like, open up this weird browser inside of a messaging app and click around. like you're a desktop user with your finger, it's bad. But again, there's a million interesting product ideas here. And then I can't help but wonder if this is where like OpenAI and Anthropic start looking around being like, do we need to build laptops? Like if this is the thing, if it's give people a browser, the Android app store, and our AI agent system, we can win on the merits if that's the next thing.

And maybe there's a tablet coming from Anthropic in six months and it's going to actually make a kind of sense. Maybe. I'm just going to inject the skepticism back into this because we have bought a lot of the framing from these companies. And I do think this is a strategy they're chasing. Yeah. Just to say it, none of these agents actually work perfectly yet. They're all brittle and fascinating ways. Amazon is blocking muse.

It seems very likely that some companies, of cloud flare and every other major website in the world are going to be blocking every other agent soon unless there's money exchanged. Like, we're in a very interesting and fun period right now where there are no rules, and it's very easy to imagine the future. And then, especially because it's e-commerce, like, all of the walls are going to go up until people make the appropriate business deals. And then maybe the joy of having an agent that can just click around the browser on your

behalf and do anything will fall apart. Yeah. Right. And like I don't, I don't know how any of that's going to play out. I just see all these companies are like, well, we could never beat the phone. Right. Is this our chance to beat the phone? Yeah.

Yeah. It's the only, it's the only realistic chance they've had in ages. Yeah. This is what you have to do if you are one of these companies. Like you, it's the only chance. And I think, I mean, I look at a lot of this stuff and I, even using some of these devices, I've been using a Google book pretty extensively this week, and I just can't build the bring Gemini in muscle memory.

Like, I just, I know how to use computers. And adding this brand new layer on top of it that does things sometimes faster, but sometimes slower. And, like, the sort of circle-to-search thing that Google has been doing, I think is spectacular and useful. That it's just like, what is this? And where can I buy? It's like surprisingly a question I ask a lot.

Do you get good answers to this? Hit and miss. I have like a 50% hit rate on this. 50's not bad though, right? And that's kind of my point. I think it's horrible. Well, okay, let me give you an example. So my three-year-old goes to preschool and every day at preschool, he rides this little

blue and yellow and red plastic motorcycle on the playground. It's just one of those like little balance bikes. But it looks like a motorcycle and he rides around with all of his friends. and he desperately wants one to have it home. I don't know what it's called. I don't really know how to look for it. If you just like Google blue balance bike, you get nowhere. But they took a picture of him riding it at preschool and sent it to us in the app.

So I cropped the thing, sent it to Musen. And I was like, what is this and where do I buy it? And it found it on like a Dutch school supply website for me to buy it. Never in a million years of Googling would I have found it. I went to go and try and do it on my own and didn't find it. And it went and found it for me. And like sometimes it fails spectacularly and sometimes it doesn't. But like it is a genuinely useful thing in spots.

And that is about the extent of the actual muscle behavior I've been able to build to use this stuff. And there's so many other things where it's like, oh, I could kind of do this with AI. But it would take just as long and be vastly more complicated. Like most things don't take that long is the thing that I keep discovering. Most things that we do are not that hard and don't take that long. And the idea of learning some new thing to offload to AI, just because it's sort of there waiting for me, is not compelling. This is like when you get your first internship

and you just sort of like wander around someone else's office being like, do you have anything for me to do? Exactly. And everyone's like, no, dude. Like even just telling you what to do would take too long. Yep. It's that. I will say Mustafa for Microsoft,

Mustafa Silleman for Microsoft was on Dakota recently. And we were like in the thick of AI safety pacing the frontier conversation. And just as a throwaway, he's like, you mean, you have to admit the models are getting better. Like, we don't even talk about hallucinations anymore. And I was like, I can't do this with you right now, but do these things hallucinate all the time?

Yeah. Constantly all the time. Like, one of the reasons that I'm so skeptical about all of the agentic promises that are being made is all day long. They are just making stuff up. And then, you know, they do that clawed apology where they're like, you're so right.

Yeah. And it's like, no, I'm madder at you now. I this isn't helping fair m dash that's my bad is immediately just gives me hives as soon as it appears in in my conversations yeah there's something about again it i agree with you it is the thing they have to do yeah there's no choice but to say well that might be the platform of the future we should build hardware and uis around it so that if it does emerge we might be the winner. But there's nothing to say that it will get there on the time frame that people are talking about. Yeah. And the fact that Muse, I think right now is a phone app that looks like a messaging app and is the one that has really escaped containment is fascinating.

Like, Muse is not some giant mainstream thing, but it's the only one of these that people outside of this world have asked me about and tried and talked about. and it is not some big new idea about things. It's a messaging app and a tiny computer in the cloud. Yeah. I mean, META does have the world's greatest advertising ecosystem. It sure does. They have,

like, I felt really bad for Open A&A when they launched Dots because then they went ahead to pay META for Instagram ads for dots. And I was like, oh, man, we are all just way behind here. Yeah. But then META comes out with glasses, and everybody says,

no, thank you. These are perfect glasses. I'm out. No, no, no, phones don't have a light, David. It's fine. They have a light. There were a few things that I was really grateful to not be at work to have to reckon with. And Mark Zuckerberg saying, no, phones don't have a light, was one of them.

Oh, we're going to reckon with phones don't have a light almost every week for the rest of our lives on the show. I promise you. We're going to have a dedicated segment. We'll have theme music. We're going to collect sponsors. Bones don't have a light. Our new, what is a photo, 2027. Oh, God.

Well, in the meantime, let's take another break so I can go collect myself. Then we're going to go back with the lightning round. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Satelli. Every dog owner knows that sinking feeling, the one you get in the pit of your stomach, when suddenly you realize that you don't know where your dog is. The Satelli Collar Go is a GPS dog tracker that helps keep tabs on your dog

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All right, we're back. After seven weeks off, Eli, is it, are we still doing this? Is it still time? It's time. Today's is really good. It's time for America's favorite podcast. We've been a podcast.

Brennan Carr is a dummy. The halftime breakdown is clutch. As a special treat, we had the offspring record Brenning Carr as a dummy theme song. The people have realized that you like pop punk. The people get me, and I appreciate that. This one comes from Corey Wright, who wrote, Nealai and I are around the same age,

so I felt like this is a fitting tribute to our era of pop punk. You have to understand that I love pop punk. Neelai likes sad boy music. That's important to understand. I'm just an older generation. Write me a clash song. We're going to be very happy. Yeah.

But that does not mean you have license to do white boy reggae. Like, we excuse the clash for doing white boy reggae. Very few other people get that excuse. Correct. Also, see also ska music. But we'll leave that. I feel like we're really close to getting a Scott running cars. Like, every week we're inching along and now we've just tipped him over.

All right. There are two this week. Okay. One classic sort of First Amendment Brendan Carr battle, and then the second one is delicious. I don't know. There's not even another word for it. So the first one, as we have been covering over and over on Brendan Carr's Dombey America's Fair Podcasts from the podcast,

Brendan keeps threatening our nation's broadcasters over the content of air because he says their use of the public airways is subject to public interest. and that means late night comedians are bad, something. Yeah, that seems basically right. Yeah. It's always been unclear what he actually means here. He's hauled in a bunch of ABC stations owned by Disney for early license renewal,

which he is not supposed to do. That case is in court. And ABC's lawyers this week on Tuesday said, quote, we sit with our head on the guillotine. We are watching everything we do. Yikes. So over and over and over again, we have pointed out that the point of governance.

teach regulations is often not the actual regulation. It is the chilling effect. It is the prevention of speech. Just by saying the government will punish you for your speech, you will not speak. And so here you have ABC very clearly saying by hauling our licenses in for earlier review against a nebulous standard and off schedule, you are chilling our speech. We are watching what we do at our news networks in a way that is impermissibly viewpoint-based, especially in the United States where we have a First Amendment,

the government should not be doing those things. That case is in court. It seems like that judge understands what's going on. We'll see what happens as it winds to resolution, which it should ahead of the thick of election season. I mean, it is happening right now. Yeah, we're in it in a real way right now. I'm in a swing state and it's a mess.

I watched the Packers game last week on NFL Sunday ticket, and somehow in New York State, I was getting ads for Ken Paxton. Like, that's how much money is being just shotgunned into the ecosystem. Yeah. That they broke in ad targeting. I was like, look, I'm not voting in the Texas Senate race. I was like, please stop showing me this advertising.

Okay. The second one, the one that I find delicious. Okay. If you've been paying attention, you know that the thesis of our segment, Brendan Carr is a dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast, is that Brendan Carr is very dumb. It's the foundational principle of the show, if you will. Well, one thing that happens with Brendan is that sometimes he's so corrupt, he comes all the way back around and irritates the people for whom he is generally corrupt.

Are you going to agree with Brendan Carr again? This is my favorite when this accidentally happens. So Brendan waived the ownership cap on local TV stations. So in the statute written by Congress, there's a 39% cap. You are not allowed to own more than 39% of the local TV stations in a market. This is designed to protect competition. You don't want all the media in a market to be owned by one company. Brendan's argument is, well, Google exists.

And so surely Sinclair must be able to buy all the local TV stations. You reason that out however you want. But you waive the cap. This might be illegal. Guess who's suing him, David? Sinclair. Cable TV operators. Everyone's favorite.

The lobbying groups for our nation's largest and, dare I say, most beloved cable TV operators have realized that by allowing Sinclair and Nextar to get huge, they will not be competing for rights and prices. They will just be able to demand rates. So the lobbying groups for Cox and Comcast and all the rest have filed a lawsuit and they have said that larger broadcast TV station groups will have the leverage to demand higher retrans. transmission fees from TV providers, resulting in higher TV bills for consumers. The FCC order, quote, arbitrarily and capriciously ignores the harms that will surely follow from allowing broadcast station groups to exceed the national cap. You come all over that around, Brendan. You're so close to getting it, you guys.

You're so close. Just say the word antitrust. Just say it. I just say it. Brendan, you did corruption for one group, but you forgot that you're supposed to be in the pocket of the big cable companies, the big ISPs. They're the ones who are paying the bills. That's great.

But no. So now everyone's mad at Brendan. You know what this makes me think of for no reason. There's this headline today on Variety that says, Glenn Powell. Disclosure. Variety is owned by our parent company. Oh, yeah, that's right.

Our friends at Variety. That says, Glenn Powell is staying quiet on politics because, quote, I do not like the discourse, says, running man flopped after Paramount laid off entire marketing department. And I just saw a post that just screenshoted that headline and said, God, he's so close to understanding that business decisions are political in this environment. And it's just like, yep, we're all so close to getting it. We're all so close.

It's delicious. Anyhow, Brendan, I would love to see you come on the show and thread this particular needle. Because, I mean, who are you going to be more corrupt for? I'm just dying. Just come on. Let's hang out. It's got a beer.

Is it going to be Comcast or is it going to be Sinclair, buddy? Quite a love triangle you find yourself in. Okay, so here's an idea. I'm going to pitch you very quickly. Our new parent company also owns South by Southwest. They do. So I'm proposing that it's South by Southwest. We get one of those things where like you have two people on either side

and then you put the dog in the middle and see who they run to. But it's Brendan Carr in the middle. And it's the Trump administration on one side and it's cable operators on the other side. and they all try to just lure him in and see who he runs to first. Main stage, South by Southwest, would be huge. Brendan, I can make this happen for you.

We literally can do that. I was just in Austin with the South by people. We can figure this out. And yeah, that has been Brendan Carr is a dummy, America's favorite podcast, and then a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. I feel cleansed.

We're going to have to make a Spotify playlist very soon. I think so. It's going to be very long and very confusing to anyone who finds it by accident. That's our midterm election package. It's not substantive coverage of the issues. It's a Spotify playlist of pop punk songs calling the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission a dummy. Verge. My first lighting around item is in this swirl of insanity. Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery finally completed this long-awaited, messy, expensive, complicated. merger. Yet another thing I'm glad to, frankly, have missed many of the recent machinations

of. There have been many machinations. Will they? Won't they? Who's going to be in charge? What's Netflix going to do? We're going to move to Nashville. Yeah. Like, fights with various governments, all of whom kind of whist out at the end, it seems. I mean, look, at what middle age man hasn't woken up one day and threatened to move to Nashville? That's real. It's just a thing you do. This deal is now done. And it puts paramount in control. of Warner Brothers Discovery, which is now a company known as Skydance in a turn

that makes perfect sense to everybody. What do you get when you put Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery together, you get Skydance? This is now just an absolutely monstrous Hollywood company. It owns huge news businesses like CBS News and CNN.

It owns vast swaths of the studio movies that get made every year. They've made big promises about how many movies they're going to make. It owns lots of channels. It, importantly, now owns and operates two very big and very competitive streaming services. And there's been a lot of speculation about whether that's going to continue to be the case. Oh, there's no speculation. They have announced. They are merging these streaming services. Sort of. They, even they have talked out both sides of their mouth on this where like there have been people who have said things like, we're going to merge them.

And then there have been other people who are like, well, actually, that's going to be more like a bundle than a merger. No, step one is a bundle. Okay. Step two is one big, big. streaming. Sure. David Ellison was on CNBC this morning and he announced that they're going to compete with Silicon Valley with tech. Well, that doesn't mean anything. Just letting you know what I heard.

Sure. I'm thrilled for them. Congratulations. Like, they, they too have iPhones to make movies on, I guess. Okay.

So the idea is eventually one single streamer. Somewhere somehow. Yep. On what timeline I do not. know. Sure. But the idea that they, they have a lot of debt to service, like an enormous amount of debt to service. Which I would point out is exactly what happened when Warner Brothers Discovery combined and nearly killed it. Oh yeah, and it's what happened to AT&T as well. Yeah, that company made a lot of really bad decisions because it had to service debt. And now

it's a richer guy with a lot of debt to service, but still a hell of a lot of debt to service. Oh, no. We are just rolling over this overfinanced Nissan Ultima into a new Nissan Ultima every couple years. Like, there's a $10,000 payment on this Ultima and we're just going to keep going. Like, that's where we are. Yep. But they also have to make 30 movies a year or pay $30 million a year per movie they don't make into like a health care fund run by the biggest unions. Like they have to spend a lot of money and they got to pay off a lot of debt. And the only way they're going to do is cut costs. And there's just no way they're going to run redundant marketing budgets, redundant customer support, redundant AWS bills. The word you're looking for is layoffs.

They're going to lay a bunch of people off and they're going to cut anything that looks duplicative. So two streaming services just simply cannot be on the menu. That's fair. I also think it's very clear that Paramount Plus is not going to win. And if this company is actually going to make smart, ruthless decisions, they'll just cut Paramount Plus. Yeah. They hired, this is a real Decoder or PhD thesis. David Ellison is the CEO of Skydance.

And then Enon Kreis, who used to be the CEO of Mattel and before that of Maker Studios. His title is co-CEO. So there's a CEO. Not two co-CEOs. A CEO and a co-CEO. David Olson is a CEO. Enon's title is co-CEO. This has real like Dwight Shrewd is assistant to the regional manager kind of vibes.

We just had Peter Kafka on Decoder. He just wrote a profile of Enon. He's deep in it. You should listen to it if you want more for that. But that, I'm just like, what are we doing? It's very good. I mean, yeah, I think I bring this one up in part because there are obviously a lot of important news questions about what's going to happen to CNN. Now there are a lot of obviously worried people who work for these companies who are worried about layoffs.

But the play here, if you just take David Ellison at his word, is to build something that is so big it can compete with specifically Netflix. I would not say anything that has happened at the already combined company of Paramount and Skydance suggests that this company is equipped to do that. I don't think it's Netflix. I think he knows that it's YouTube and TikTok, which, by the way, Elson family has a stake in TikTok. The way he was talking about on CNBC this morning was very much Silicon Valley came in. I mean, this is the quote. Silicon Valley came into media with platform TikTok.

whatever you think that means, and they took it away from us. But now I've assembled the biggest and best bundle of IP the world has ever seen, along with sports and news. And we're going to put together a tech platform that can compete with Silicon Valley and win. I think they mean Netflix when they say that. Maybe they mean TikTok and YouTube. Maybe I'm wrong. But like, it will be interesting to see if they try to make user generated content work at scale, which is a thing all of these companies keep trying and keep failing at.

Oh, yeah. I think we, Disney has already announced that creators can use their IP to make vertical videos for Disney. Plus, I think that is a partnership with TikTok. It would not surprise me at all if the Ellison family finds a way to get TikTok content into whatever forthcoming app there is. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. We'll see. But I will just say this again.

I say it's so many times. The problem for Hollywood is that everyone is actually watching vertical video and none of those platforms pay a dime for it. Yep. And they have to pay actors and actresses. They got to pay Glenn Powell. And then apparently they need to pay Glenn Powell's marketing department. Right. And like, that's just a lot of money for every minute a video that they produce.

And Instagram doesn't pay anyone a dime. Or, or you realize that actually there's a lot of really positive signs that people want to go back out into the world and watch movies and you go make good movies. Like, I, a grand theory that I am percolating is that actually the company that is in trouble here is Netflix because it's going to be caught in the middle of, it doesn't have the vast quantity of free content, nor does it have the event content that people will actually go out of their way and pay for. And so it's turning into, and this is true on the platform, it's turning into just chum, right? Like, it is, it is reality TV. It is, it is hours to fill. And I think everybody looks at Netflix is like this, unsubbingymed. unstoppable behemoth. I look at Netflix less every month than every month before because there is just

increasingly nothing on it. Oh, boy. Okay. We're going to do it. We're going to do it. We're first episode back after you're leave, David, but we're doing it. It's time to break out the go 90 stale of Doom streaming services. So if no one remembers anymore, because it was 100 years ago, Verizon launched a streaming service called Go 90. Yep. His innovation was that you could turn your phone sideways. Also, I believe you could join a gang. That was their version of of community? Were they crews or were they gangs? It was one of those. I think it was gangs. It would be amazing. It was a gang. That's going to be our app. When we do diverge video app, it's going to be gangs. Anyway, Go 90 quickly failed. There's no other way

to describe what happened to that platform. And thus, the Go 90 scale of doom streaming services were spawned where you start at zero. That's alive. And 90 is dead. Many, many, many, many streaming services have gone 90. Quibi, famed. Misley, I believe, is the paradigmatic example. We all knew. We all knew what direction that thing was going, and to 90 it arrived. Yeah. All right.

Netflix has been sitting at zero on the Go 90 scale of doom steaming services since Netflix existed. You are making it sound like it's not at zero anymore. I mean, it's hard because it is so big and it has so much money that it is, it's like betting on Netflix to cease to exist.

is ridiculous. And yet, I think you only get to be a zero if you are also an unstoppable cultural force. And Netflix is not that. And if it's not, it, it, no, I'll say that. It is losing that rapidly. Like, it, it was a cultural force because Stranger Things was a cultural force. And Wednesday kind of was. And it has, it has inched along through a few things.

that have been huge and now it is just betting that you will go on and there will be so much reality stuff to watch that you'll find something and you won't cancel. I would put it at like a

15. Like it's still somewhere in the green zone here. But it is like also remember Netflix spends an unbelievable amount of money on content. It is forever

hugely expensive. It is forever at the mercy of continuing to grow, and I think things could get ugly the minute anything starts to turn for Netflix. So again, I am not moving it towards it might disappear from existence,

but I think this idea that Netflix is the like unstoppable behemoth of the future of entertainment is wrong. Wow, that's bold. I think only YouTube is a zero for me on this scale. Oh, YouTube is absolutely easier. It's not going anywhere. Although if they continue to slop up YouTube, the way that they appear to want to slap up YouTube. I would actually, I would move it.

Am I crazy? Do you, like, am I just way over my skis on Netflix? I think Netflix is an aggressively well-run company. Sure. And the danger for Netflix, in my opinion, is that everyone has realized that their library of, like, good movies from the 2000s is valuable. And they don't just dump it on Netflix anymore. Yes.

And there's not an engine to make a bunch of those movies. movies anymore. Right? Like, this is like the problem. You can go watch that Ben Affleck clip about DVD sales and like why they don't make movies like that anymore. By the way, Ben Affleck this week gave like amazing interviews about how DP is an AI. We should spend an hour just talking about that.

Everybody, like Ben Affleck, please come on the Vergecast. I know you listen. Come on the show. Tell us about your Python scripts. I want to hear about all. We can make this happen. But Netflix is also a slave to data. And I think.

think there's a reason every Netflix movie looks the same and is kind of bland and every Netflix TV like there's a Netflix look and I think it's fine it is you can watch TikTok while you watch Netflix yeah they got to get over that they got to make things worth watching or find a way to win the licensing battle with everybody else to buy things worth watching and I just don't I that's that's their danger but I don't think that they're confused maybe not mean yeah that might be right. I mean, yeah, that might be right. We should talk more about Netflix sometimes. But by the way, while we're looking at the scale here, my read of this is Paramount Plus immediately goes to like an 85 on the scale. Oh, yeah, because it's going to get merged in HBO Max. Yeah, and I think HBO Max is like a five. Like HBO Max, I think, is the clear end state of all of this for this giant new company of Skydien. Yeah. And they put Casey Blois, who was running HBO into.

in charge of all of this stuff. Like, the bet here is very clearly on HBO, both like the people and the brand. Yeah. Which I think is the right bet, to be clear. Like, people don't have feelings about Paramount the way that they do about HBO. We have never had to contend with,

does being merged in HBO Max constitute going 90? We have. Because it's going away. It's going to be gone. This is the Hulu thing, right? Like, Hulu still exists, even though it's also still been merged. but that's still kind of a bundle

but eventually Hulu will just be a tab in the Disney Plus app and when that happens, Hulu has gone 90. Yes, I think that's correct. All right, last one, Disney Plus. So that's the other one of note here. Yeah, Disney Plus is like a two or a three. I think it is as close to being the cultural force

that you have to reckon with as anybody on this list. It's very obvious that you have three. three children. I mean, yeah, I have young children. But also, like, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, they have the IP that no one else has. And it'll be interesting, like, Amazon is out there spending all this money on James Bond. Can that vaulted up this list a little bit, but. Disney is just the one you can make theme parks out of. Like, it's, that's not, that's not changing anytime soon. Yeah. We could do all the rest of them, but I, I, it's interesting to see where you put Netflix here. Because I, I, I, Netflix was a rock solid zero for the last five years. Yeah. It just, it feels like it has lost something. And maybe you're right.

The company is as well run as any you will find in this space. So maybe it'll figure it out. But I don't know. It feels. Oh, yeah. No, just to say this as clearly as I can, I think Netflix is run by essentially sane people. And all of these other companies are run by crazies.

I, yes. That I, like, I don't know how else to say that. Like, we don't know much about Josh Tomorrow at Disney, but, you know, this past few weeks while you were out on leave, did you see Bob Cheapeck reappeared? He wrote like a angry memoir, right? He wrote a tell-all book. Yeah.

And, you know, his theory is that he was only made CEO. So Bob Eiger didn't have to do COVID layoffs until Scarlet-Shaw Hanson Black Widow was coming out on streaming. Incredible. And then he's like, I knew I was done for when he gave that interview to Ben Smith. And I was like, I know Ben Smith. What happened in this interview? I think more CEOs should write pissy books. He's very upset.

Yeah. And then something clearly happened because he was all over the place talking to stuff and then he disappeared. Yep. He's no longer available. I did notice that. It's good stuff. All right, this is officially the slowest lightning round we've ever done. What's your next lightning round item?

I want to talk about intelligent UI, which we sort of have. been talking about through all the computer stuff. But chat, CBT this week did an update GBT6, and now the responses can include interactive elements right in line. Buttons, I'm guessing BuzzFeed quizzes. They love to pretend we're all smart. So they're like, here's a color picker for clothes. And like, an interactive chart where you can do a slider to learn something.

And I'm like, tell me who the five sexiest presidents were, like whatever BuzzFeed nonsense. I am fascinated by this. right? The idea that you would get multimodal interactives has been an idea that's been floating around for a long time. As with everything, Google announced this at I.O. two years ago.

Yeah. I mean, there's like a little bit of it in AI mode. A little bit. It will sort of, it will gin up a spreadsheet for you rather than just write you a bunch of numbers. Like there's little pieces of that coming to fruition,

but this is the idea that everyone has had for a long time, right? It's like, what if it wasn't just text and then every product everybody ships is just more text. Yeah, but even though, like, it made you a spreadsheet. It's mostly been like, yes,

we can do tables and bullet points. Everyone is Axios now, right? Yeah. Sometimes pictures. This is very much, yeah, sometimes pictures. This is very much like we've made an interactive bicycle for you because you asked how bicycle works. And there's something about this,

which if you put right next to agents and natural language interfaces, is the dream, right? The computer will naturally adapt to you and give you exactly what you need right at the right moment. And we have been covering this industry for 500 years.

So many people have tried to build this thing. Yes. In so many different ways. And what it always runs into is people just want the controls to be fixed. You actually want the computer to be vastly more predictable than any adaptive UI system can ever give to you.

And the comparison that I will make is we just went through, I don't know, five years of carmakers being like, you don't need HVAC controls. You need a button on a screen that says auto. And every single person was like, no, I want physical buttons that turn the fan up and down and move the temperature.

Stop taking them away because you don't think I don't want them. Or worse, intelligently assuming when I should want them and making them appear and disappear at random. So I can't tell if this intelligent UI update for Chatchabutis is brilliant in the future. Or we're just going to recapitulate every adaptive UI conversation we've ever had or whether there's something else happening here. I think all of these companies are kind of dancing around the wrong idea, which is this constant reinventing the wheel of user interface. Like, not only is it what if it was just a button that said auto, it was what if every time you got in the car that button was in a different place and looked different? Wouldn't you like that?

And this is what it has been with all of these companies, right? You can build this AI UI on the fly. And what it actually does is build it in a slightly different way, in a slightly different place every single time. And I think I was talking to some product person a couple of years ago when we were really first starting to talk about AI code. And he was like, the reason I'm so bullish about building code with AI is that I can do it once. I can use the AI to build something that I then understand. and then I can go use that thing. And I don't have to keep using the AI.

I don't have to keep burning tokens. I don't have to keep guessing how this thing is going to work or reinventing my prompts. I can build a thing that I understand. And then I can go use the thing that I understand. And this to me is trying kind of to be too clever by half. And in some ways it will work and it'll be very cool. Like it's an information retrieval system that it's like, show me company earnings, which is like a thing people care about from time to time.

It will show you that in a more dynamic way and that's all fine and good. or like show me how to split the bill between these people. Like show me that in some nicer visual way. Fine. I don't think it goes beyond that at all in a way that's going to work for people. And I think actually a lot of people prefer text because text is a thing that is there that I understand that I can refer to that works in a predictable way that makes sense. And all of this generative UI stuff, I think just feels like mess to people.

Yeah. My hottest take lately is no one actually knows how apps work and they don't know what the buttons are and they don't pay any attention and this is why the average number of apps downloaded by the average person is zero. Well, and when you do learn how to do them, you learn how to do the two things that you need to do

and then your brain ceases to even see everything else in the app. Yeah. And I think this is why chatbots generating text was like, well, at least I can just read this. Right. Yeah. But like it's going to make you an app And it might have a, like, crazy UI idea in it. I don't know.

There's something about this. Again, I find it fascinating. It has been the industry's dream stretching back decades, right? Like, the computer will adapt to you and present to you exactly the right interface at the right time based on its understanding of you just speaking to it. Boy, every single executive we've ever talked to has issued some proclamation that this will be the future. Yes. And so maybe we're on the cusp of it. but I'm looking at it.

I'm like, huh. Like, actually, you know, all the actual users we talk to might not want this. So, I see, I don't say this, I think this feature as expressed in chat to me today is cool. Like, yes, it will make you a chart and graph

and a slider and do a thing. And like, it is funny that Google announced us 100 years ago and open a shift. Yeah. That sounds right. What are we doing, everybody? But the next turn, When you have an opening a hardware device that has an agent in a cloud,

and it's like making you custom UI and adapting the UI to you, that's the one I'm interested in because it's going to be the H-track problem at like massive scale. Yes, yes, completely agree. And that, yeah, and figuring out how to do that in a way that is, build something that is sort of permanent and that you can refer to and find and use again and share, is like, it's not necessarily impossible, but no one has come anywhere near that yet. But I do think it's a fun idea.

Like, it's fun to watch people try this thing. That, like, how do I, how do I deliver you information in new and better ways is great? Lots of people learn and retain information in lots of different ways. We should keep trying this. But I am not at all convinced that let's redo some, let's reinvent the wheel every single time is, in fact, the answer here.

It's funny because everyone knows that, but the, like, it just seems like if you're a product, designer at a tech company, you were required to forget it on a three-year cadence. Yes. That's how you get promoted. You reinvent the wheel. You get promoted. You take a vacation, then you come back and you start to reinvent the wheel again.

Yeah. It's a thing. All right. We really need to get out of here. But before we do, I just want to talk about one thing very briefly. I just want to get your temperature on this thing. So Sam Altman did an interview on a new political podcast, the name of which I will not say out loud for reasons that anyone who knows the name of the podcast will understand.

You know, no, the podcast is the lawyers that are fancy big company. So Sam Altman on this podcast is talking about all the things Sam Altman likes to talk about. And he says at one point that some bad things are going to happen with AI and that we have to be okay with some bad things happening because, and this is a quote, people will do tremendously orders of magnitude more good stuff. This became a whole kerfuffle, right? everybody spent a couple of days being various degrees of mad about Sam Altman being like, I accept some bad stuff because there's also going to be all kinds of good stuff happening. I confess my immediate instinct is to be like, this is such a nothing burger of a statement. Like everything that has ever happened has some bad things and some good things.

And we try to, you know, lessen the bad things and increase the good things. But this is just how every advancement we've ever had in history has worked. Yeah. What do you make of this? Like, is this a real thing for people to be angry about the same Altman is saying? I don't think so. I think the way he framed it was particularly awkward. So the exact quote is, we believe the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, when you put it like that. I don't care what the benefits of this technology. Like, the point, the technology is whatever. Like, and I get what he's trying to say. There's a big technological revolution and we're going to. give people a lot more capability and some people will do bad things. And then negative consequences will be far outweighed by the positive. And you can apply that, as you're saying, you can apply that to anything from electric lights, to cars to whatever it is, right? You're going to give people

cars, you're going to increase mobility. You're going to also have some car crashes. And then the anti-car movement in cities in 2026 will be a loud and vocal potent force. And then we're going to do congestion pricing, whatever. Like some sort of. swirl of decisions will have to be made because cars exist. Okay. Like, if that is what he's trying to say, straightforward, I think is fine. But for the benefits of this technology is the entire problem with how the AI industry communicates is as though they are not in control of what they are doing. Right. And so either we're going to have AGI or not, and if I don't get there first, then something bad will happen. And so some bad things have to happen. Like, that's how he

I know that's just how he sounds to people, that he has to get there. We've got to do this. So you deal with it. Deal with the data centers. Deal with the teens getting AI psychosis. Like all of that is fine because we have to do this and I can't possibly slow down or be more careful. And so if he's talking about the straight up societal tradeoff, like the reason the decoder tagline is big idea is another problem is it is embedded in the very notion of the big idea that you will have to answer for some problem. Like, the reason the decoder tagline is big idea is another problem is, like, it is embedded in the very notion of the big idea that you will have to answer for some problems that you have caused.

Yep. Okay. Like, of course I buy it. But the way this industry talks about the thing that they're making is though they have completely lost control of their own ambition. And we all just have to, like, yeah, man, I think data centers and surveillance are going to tip the election in this round. And a large part of it is because the industry cannot help itself. Right. Yeah, and they also, well, at some point, at some point you and I are going to have a long, deep conversation that may or may not ever make it onto a podcast about this thing, where they've all decided that AI is alive and deserves feelings and fair treatment and all of this weird.

Like, the fact that the clawed terms now prohibit you from being mean to clawed for too long is just like buck wild in a way that I'm actually like just out of my mind about. But in this one, I just kept thinking about the fact that Sam Altman, in this case and in basically every case, is just completely unable to articulate the good thing that AI is going to do. He's like, yes, all this bad stuff is going to happen, but it's going to do so much more good stuff. And it's like, well, what, Sam? It's going to put everybody out of jobs. It might kill all of us. What's the good part? Well, it's going to monitor your email for class action.

It's going to, like, do sick math. And that's cool. I like math. But yeah, it's going to monitor your email for class. action settlements. I just, I don't know. Again, just as a watcher of this over the last couple of months, I just kept looking out and it's like nobody has a better idea for AI than it can help you book trips and everybody has ideas about how it might kill us all. And like, boy, is that a bad trade? If you can, if you can give me the trade that is good enough that I will accept a 10% chance

that we're all going to die, that's actually a really fun conversation to have. I would really, really like someone to make that argument once and no one can do it including sam altman and it drives me nuts they're going to cure all diseases but they also might kill you even say that jemisasobis is out here being like we're going to cure all diseases sam olman doesn't he's like i don't know war weapons maybe i don't know and i think that to me was just like this this thing that like yes there are negative consequences to technological innovation is just true but like even mark zuckerberg with Facebook was like, we're going to connect people and that's good. And that's

bad in lots of ways and good in lots of ways. I think there's a famous memo from Boz at Meta called The Ugly. And he's like, here are all of the bad things that will happen if we connect everyone in the world and we're going to do it anyway. And there's a lot of lore around this letter.

You should Google it and read it. But the sort of most important part of the lore was Boz saying, it's important for me to just say it all out loud so this whole company can react to it. I've written this as a provocation. And then the company did not react to it by trying to stop any of the things, which is maybe a strategic mistake. But there's no question that the tech industry understands that it has negative consequences when it reorders society.

Right. And I think here, Sam, again, if you're just saying that conceptually, fine, like true. Like the steam engine, like whatever it is. But to say it is like a toss off, which is, I think, how most people read it. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. I agree with that. And also, for what, Sam?

10% chance I'm going to die. I can book my own flights. I saw a video of Heath Lodger's Joker doing a ukulely rap with Batman the other day. All right, you've got me a 2% chance I'm going to die. We can work from there. We're going to go from there. That's what I have.

That's a real thing that happens. All right, we have gone way over. Send me that link, by the way. I appreciate that. We have gone way over, as we are wants to do. It's good to be back. I missed you. I'm glad to be back here doing this.

We should get out here. Thing before we do, vote for our show in the Signal Awards. It's a podcasting awards thing. We would very much like to win. This show is nominated for technology podcasts. Version History is nominated for history podcasts. Decoder is nominated for business podcasts. Not to brag.

That's all of our podcasts. We've got it a thousand. Please go vote. We'd really like to win all the links are in the show notes. Also, we have a bunch of cool decoder stuff coming up next week. Eli, who's on Decoder next week? So go listen to the Peter Kafka episode if you want more on Skydance. He really did just profile the COCO Skydance.

He's deep in it. And then Ben Jordan is on to talk about flock cameras and surveillance and his experience testifying before Congress. And I'm just going to say, I'm a huge fan boy. And you can just sense that I was delighted the whole time that he was even talking to me. That's awesome. I'm excited about that one. This weekend on Virgin history, Gen Tuwee is coming on to talk about the leap pad. Gen Tui and Angel Marino to talk about this weird little reading device that taught millions of kids how to read in the early 2000s.

Also, if you haven't watched the Chromebook episode, if you want to know the source of all of my feelings about Google Books, go watch last week's episode. You and me and Marquez Brownlee on the Chromebook. It was a great time. We've gotten a lot of really good feedback on that episode. I enjoyed it very much. Remember to subscribe to The Verge to get all of our podcast ad-free, all of our award-nominated and winning podcast ad-free, all of our exclusive newsletters. is everything else. Theverge.com slash subscribe. It's the best way to support everything that we do here.

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