The Vergecast - The confusing state of Apple Intelligence

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Nilay, David, and Richard Lawler talk about all of the coming Apple gadgets and software, from the new iPad Mini to the upcoming week of Mac announcements to the many flavors of iOS and Apple Intelligence heading to a device near you soon. Then they talk about the other news in AI, from Anthropic's new computer-using model to the growing set of lawsuits against AI companies. In the lightning round, they discuss the Boox Palma 2, T-Mobile's "lifetime" deals, and the battle over FTC's click-to-cancel rule. Further reading: Apple iPad Mini 2024 review: missing pieces iOS 18.2 will let everyone set new default phone and messaging apps Apple’s first iOS 18.2 beta adds more AI features and ChatGPT integration Apple teases ‘week’ of Mac announcements starting Monday Apple is preparing an M4 MacBook Air update for early next year Tim Cook says he uses every Apple product every day — how does that work? Tim Cook on Why Apple’s Huge Bets Will Pay Off Anthropic’s latest AI update can use a computer on its own Humane slashes the price of its AI Pin after weak sales Apple is ‘concerned’ about AI turning real photos into ‘fantasy’ News Corp sues Perplexity for ripping off WSJ and New York Post Kevin Bacon, Kate McKinnon, and other creatives warn of ‘unjust’ AI threat Industry groups are suing the FTC to stop its click to cancel rule The Boox Palma 2 has a faster processor and adds a fingerprint reader Seniors are PISSED that T-Mobile won’t honor its “lifetime” price guarantee. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to Verchast, the flagship podcast of Jolly scrolling. We're sorry, it's still there.

All right, use your eyes. I'm your friend Neelah. David Pierce is here. Hi. I hate that I know what Jelley scrolling is. You got in a lot of trouble this week, buddy. I did, and then I was immediately vindicated, and it's been a fun week. I would like to, I'm excited to talk about this.

We'll come back to this in a moment. Richard Lawler is here. Hello, I am somehow unaware of the message jelly scrolling scandal. Richard doesn't jelly scroll. That's one important thing to know about Richard. How do you know Richard doesn't pay attention to stakes-free Apple drama? He doesn't know about jelly scrolling.

Welcome back, Richard. What a fan favorite, Richard Lawler? My people, they made the request and we came through. There will be crypto in all of your wallets. It's coming. Richard will give you a Bitcoin if you vote for the Vergecast. It's quantum locked, so it's already there and it's coming all at the same time. It's a thing.

I believe it was Richard who today pointed out, what was it? Starbucks is failing and some other companies failing. And you're like, these are the two companies. Nike. Starbucks and Nike. Tell your theory. Say your theory about Starbucks and Nike. Starbucks and Nike, they were both out there just promoting NFTs.

And there were lots of companies and lots of brands doing NFT things a few years ago that now are acting like they didn't. But they were out there and they were doing it big. They were really, really pushing it. And I don't think that they are going down now or that they're having the struggles they're having because they didn't have T's. But I think that if you look at the companies that were really into it, where the executives looked at NFTs and didn't immediately say, that is nothing and move on, that they had something wrong in their boardroom, that their executives, they weren't focused on what

was going on and what their customers really wanted. Right. The NFTs aren't the cause, but they're a symptom of the problem that is causing all these other problems. Right. And the problem is you have no. idea what you make or sell and you think selling nothing is a functional business. You think NFT shoes are the same as shoes.

It's not. Should we make good coffee or the idea of coffee? I think we will sell experiences behind digital tokens. Hey, hey, hey, don't knock selling experiences behind digital tokens. What is a podcast in our RSS feed except an experience behind a deeply fungible digital token? But never mind. there's a lot to talk about this week quite a lot to talk about

there's David reviewed an iPad Mini I would say that as someone who edited that review felt like a hostage situation for David we'll talk about that there's a bunch of other Apple news iOS 18.1 is coming out next week with Apple Intelligence which means Apple has already started seating iOS 18.2

which has the actual features in it very confusing what worked through all of that then there's a week of Mac announcements to come. Greg Josriak is posting at that right now. There's a bunch of AI news as always, including some deeply funny humane news. And then we got a lightning round. All right, but let's start with the drama. Look, every now and again, the verge gets itself mixed up in a bunch of high-stakes drama, journalism, ethics, what are we doing here? And we did that this week. And then David also pissed off a bunch of people by talking about the iPad. So the iPad mini came out. They updated the

ship, it supports Apple intelligence at eight gigs of RAM. David, you reviewed it. You were disappointed. There's no other way to put this. No, that's, that's right. Disappointed is fair. So I have been an iPad mini person forever. I think I've owned two different generations. I bought my wife and my dad iPad minis over the years. Like, this thing is awesome. And I love it and believe in it and have used it many times or many for many years. Apple shipped this one. And like, I don't know. how else to frame it except it did the literal least it possibly could in a way that felt rude. Like, this was not a case of just sort of chip upgrades that make the thing not necessarily brand new, but like commensurate with the times. Apple gave this a worst version of last year's chip

and changed nothing else. And you're supposed to be like, oh, thank God, a new iPad mini. And the thing that Apple knows, and Nathan Edwards, who worked with me on this piece a lot, the thing he kept pointing out is, like, Apple knows that if you want an iPad Mini, you're going to buy an iPad Mini because it's the iPad Mini and you want an iPad Mini. And that is how Apple has you. It is the most, like, self-selecting device Apple makes. And so why would Apple try if it doesn't have to try? It's just going to do the absolute literal bare minimum and just, here you go.

do you want it? You're going to have it. If not. And so I just got to this point. I was like, this thing is, it's not that it's not good. It's just that it's not nearly as good as it could be.

And Apple only had to try a tiny bit to make it way better. And it just didn't. And the thing I wrote was like this feels like an iPad designed by a supply chain, not by a designer. And it's just true. I cannot shake that feeling. And so it is both a good tablet and a deeply disappointed. one, which is a very strange. It's a thing we deal with a lot with the iPad, honestly,

and frankly is like, we want the iPad to be more than it is, but what it is is is very good for what it is in a lot of ways. And so we've felt this tension more and more. And I feel like with this one, it just tipped the other way for me where I was like, this is just not, it's just not a good buy. Lots of people are going to buy it. Lots of people are going to like it. But it is not good. Yeah. It's funny because, you know, the old one will be around on sale for quite some, like in true Apple fashion, you'll be able to get the old. old one for a minute, right, on some discount. Yeah, and the only meaningful difference is it doesn't run Apple intelligence.

And, like, is that a meaningful difference to anyone and will it be anytime soon? Well, especially because the iPad Mini in particular is a secondary device. Like, almost definitionally, you have another thing if you have an iPad Mini. Right. Like, the iPad maybe can replace your laptop and maybe you want Apple intelligence there. I'm struggling to make the case. But, you know, maybe you do. there's no one who's like,

I need my notifications on my iPad Mini summarized. Right. My travel laptop is my iPad Mini is not a sentence people say. Yeah. It's just not. And so it's like, yeah, all this stuff that Apple does where it's like, help me write this email is not an iPad mini thing. They're like

really good Siri might someday be but again like But you have your phone. I don't think anyone should buy any Apple product on the basis of Apple Intelligence right now. And the iPad Mini might be the one that needs it the least at this moment. And so, yeah, I just got to this point where I was like, unless your iPad Mini is broken and you are desperate for a new iPad Mini, there is no reason

this thing is compelling. And it turns out a lot of people disagreed with me about that. Or what is actually true is there are a lot of iPad Mini people out there. So what's their case? And I guess my question is, what's the problem with this one? So it's using the A17 processor from the iPhone and not the M4 that the other tablets and the laptops use? A17 Pro from the iPhone 15 Pro, but it appears to be like the Bind version. Right. So it benchmarks slightly below the iPhone 15 Pro,

and it also has one fewer GPU core, which in both cases suggests that it's basically a chip that came off the manufacturing line, for whatever reason, not up to full capacity. And that's like a normal thing. A lot of companies do this, right? Like when they sell you a middle range processor, often it is a sort of imperfectly manufactured version of a better processor.

Like that's a super normal thing. People do it. It's fine. But it's just like this brand new product is giving you a worse version of last year's chip in a time when Apple is like, A, telling you that you need all the performance you can possibly get in order to run Apple intelligence, has massively upgraded a bunch of its other iPads. There's just no way to look at this other than it got the worst of the worst of the worst. Like literally the parts spin. Yeah. Like it's a Chevy with the Cadillac logo on it.

Exactly. The Pontiac iPad is just fine. Yeah. So we should talk about the jelly scrolling. Because I think people understand the iPad Mini got a chip bump and nothing is very compelling. And the iPad Mini has effectively no competition. There's not some like eight inch Android tablet that's crushing it. Right. And the iPad Mini has for whatever it's worth the iPad app library, which doesn't exist on the Android side. Correct. Also, pilots use it. I don't know if you knew that. The pilots are out of control. The pilots, and apparently there are like hundreds of millions of pilots out there.

Flying planes directly to Apple stores. Yeah, exactly. Landing right on Michigan Avenue. Outside of the Fifth Avenue store instead of people, it's just a bunch of tiny planes lining Fifth Avenue to get to the store. Right, right in like Michigan, in the pontoons, swimming up to the Apple store. Okay. Don't do that. If you're listening to this and you're like, I should fly my float plane to the Chicago Apple store. I'm just encouraging you not to do that.

If you do send us a video because we will put it on our website. That's the opposite of not showing the person running out of the field during the football game. Opposite incentive. All right. So there's whatever. The spec bump. The thing that got people really lit up is not you dared to criticize an Apple product. It's that the screen on the iPad mini.

is notorious for jelly scrolling, which is when you scroll, one side of the screen moves faster than the other, which warps everything on the screen. This is one of those things, or some people can see it, and some people can't, but unlike 120 hertz refresh,

like once you see it, you're done, you're hooped. 100%. It's never, it's like motion smoothing. It's like you can ruin someone's life by pointing this out. And do you know who ruined my life? Dieter Bone. Thank you, Dieter, with his 2021 review of the iPad Mini,

in which he spent a long time talking about how bad the jelly scrolling is. And I think he either there or somewhere else linked to a test you can do to test for jelly scrolling, that actually it just basically moves a thing across the screen so you can see it. And it's a line. And the idea is if the line appears to bend, it means the screen is not refreshing in a uniform way. And once you see it, holy Lord, can you not unsee it? And you can super see it on the 2021 mini. So yeah, here are several things that I know.

I know that jelly scrolling was a big problem on the 2021 mini. I know that Apple said in 2021, it's not a real problem. Don't worry about it. Everything's fine. You can go back and find that. Those are statements Apple gave that was like, yeah, this is a normal thing that happens on screens. Don't worry about it. Like, bad response, but that was the response.

I also know that Apple this year tried to fix it. They changed the way the display controller works in order to, ostensibly refresh the screen more uniformly. This one is better. It is certainly less jelly than the 20-21 model. I sat. I mean, I, like, so our reviews all went up at nine, and at like 9.30, a bunch of, like, the Apple blogs and stuff do the round-ups of reviews. And because the jelly scrolling was a tiny low-stakes, you know, controversy in 2021, they all are talking about the jelly scrolling. I was the only reviewer. of that early batch that said jelly scrolling still existed.

And it's a bunch of other like good smart reviewers people who's work that I like. So I was like, oh my God, did I get this wrong? So I went upstairs and got Anna's 2021 mini, grabbed the 2024 mini and sat here for, I don't know, 90 minutes, just scrolling, scrolling everything I could find up and down. Do you believe your own eyes? That's the, like I didn't for like an hour and a half.

And then even our own staff, I think it was Chris Welch, who posted a link and was like, everybody else disagrees with you, David. Are you sure you're right? And I was like, no. I'm not. That's one of the most in character Chris Watch things I've ever heard.

Yeah, oh, for sure. Yeah. And it's like typically when I disagree with like Federico Vitechi, it's like I should internally really think through life. But I went and looked and like it is, it is better than it was in 2021. Like you can really see it's like the,

the 2021 screen is like a ship on the ocean. Right. It's like rolling waves as you scroll. The new one is better. It is meaningfully better. It's still jelly scrolls. And the way I think about it is like the easiest one to see for me was you go to the Amazon homepage and it's a bunch of white boxes with like images and text and stuff inside. And if you scroll quickly, the right side of the box appears to pull down and then up faster than the left side.

So it just, it just every, and then it catches up. But it's like you're turning a rectangle into a parallelogram and then back into a rectangle as you scroll. And it's not horrible. Like on the 2021 one, Anna has never looked at me and been like, is this scrolling weird? Like, it's not. Never tell her. I'm not going to. So this is the thing, right?

It's like, it's not. And even a lot of the reviewers were like, I didn't really notice it then and I definitely don't notice it now. And that's, A, fine and B, I think representative of just about everybody's experience. But once you see it, you can't unsee it. And it is there. And the great thing for me was our reviews ran on Tuesday. The things started shit.

I got 24 hours of people being like, you're a monster. who has an agenda against Apple or four jelly scrolling or something. And then 24 hours later, a bunch of people who reluctantly were like, oh, no, he's right. There's some jelly scrolling. Some people still don't notice it. Some people see it. I am absolutely confident it's there.

But it's also fine. Like, don't not buy it because of the jelly scrolling. Well, you have no choice. It doesn't make it better or worse, but also you have no choice. If you're a pilot, you have no choice. You're like, this is who I am now. I have to see this parallelogram. I think if you have the things strapped to your thigh,

jelly scrolling is not going to be a huge issue. It's just a thought. That's a sentence that only makes sense in the context of aviation and almost in no other context. Yeah, like as you walk about the subway in New York City, you'd be like, jelly scrolling is an issue. Would you like to scroll on my thigh?

Yeah, it's too big for a pocket, so you just kind of wrap it around your thigh. That experience of writing the review that everyone disagrees with and then being fully vindicated by it much later, the longer it takes, the better it is. I'm just telling you. Like you had 24 hours.

I'm reading they cut Vision Pro production this week and I'm like, I told you so. Yeah. So that's the iPad mini. You get one. Scroll away. Let us know what you think. If like motion smoothing, it's the thing you start to see and then you blame us forever. That's not our fault.

If you don't see jelly scrolling, don't run the test and just believe that I'm wrong. Like truly, your life will be better if you just send me a mean message about how I'm wrong and then move on with your life. Yeah. There's nothing worse you can do for yourself than learn how to evaluate screens. It's really true. This is why Nilai has been so ruined. Why am I a cranky monster? And Richard, for that matter.

Both of you are like true pixel monsters. You should not do it. Yeah. Why are Richard and I trauma bonded for life? We can look at screens. Okay, so that's the iPad many. We can set that aside. Although, please continue sending David notes about the words jelly scrolling.

That's very good. Then there's what's going on with like this next week of announcements to which it seems like Apple has very purposefully lined up a bunch of things in a way that I don't want to say it's confusing. It's just noisy, right? Like there's just a lot of Apple noise coming next week. There's Apple intelligence launching. There's a week of Mac announcements. 18.2 is in developer beta.

If you were a casual, I don't know that you would understand what's shipping, what's not, what works with what, right? because there's just going to be this flood of stuff. And in particular, 18.1 is coming to the phone. So now Apple Intelligence really is here. But then you're going to see a bunch of demos of like Gen Moji, which is not only in the developer beta for 18.2, which most people can't get, but on a wait list inside that developer beta.

Can you peel this apart from me, David? No. And I honestly, I think that's on purpose, right? Like every time I watch an ad for the iPhone 6.000. and it's running Apple Intelligence, I want to, like, throw things at my TV. It's so just disingenuous at this point to sell this stuff based on,

look, here's a Siri feature you can't use. But anyway, so I think just to, like, run down the list of stuff. And Richard, you should tell me what I'm missing because I'm pretty sure I'm missing stuff. iOS 18.1 is launching for real, like out of beta and onto people's phones on Monday. Yeah.

That's the very first run of Apple Intelligence stuff. some of the like help me write stuff, some of the message summaries, which appear to mostly just be funny for hilarious reasons and not actually useful in anyone's life. Did you see the one that's ring notifications and it was summarized as five to ten people

are at your door? Easily the best one. That's very good. That's very good. Yeah, there's one running around that I think is like, I think it's a joke, but it's like, it's a text from somebody that's like very busy right now, semicolon, not ready for a relationship.

And it's like, well, I don't tell me. I guess. But so 18.1 is coming, but 18.2, which as you mentioned, I think it's going to be a much bigger change for some reasons we should get into, is in developer beta now, which typically means we're somewhere between a few weeks and a couple of months from shipping for real. I don't know if Apple has promised when that's supposed to be coming. I've lost track of the timeline. But it's basically all supposed to happen somewhere between right now and like spring.

So do it that what you will. But 18.2 seems like the real. iOS 18. That's what I'm getting about by how noisy next week is going to be. We don't know what week of Mac news is coming. We can guess, right? There's been a lot of weeks. I think we're going to get M4 MacBook Pros. I think we're going to get this new Mac Mini that's in a much smaller case that looks like an Apple TV that may be some other Macs, but like maybe the Symac that people have been talking about. I don't know. But like, so there's a week of Mac news to come. so a bunch of Apple noise,

which is great. I'm actually, if they do with Apple, if you're listening, if you do a 32 in Chimack, I'll buy that thing tomorrow. Just saying, Jaws.

So that's great. So like dead ahead Mac news. There are new Macs. They look different, at least in the case the Mac Mini, we'll generate some headlines. Then on Monday, you get iOS 18.1 is here.

Apple intelligence is here. And then what actually people will have on their phones is almost nothing. Right? Like truly almost nothing. It's message summaries, a little bit of Help Me Right. It's a new Siri animation that isn't connected to an actual new Siri. Weird.

Yeah. That's just weird all the way around. Yes. But then what people also see if they go to any tech website, including our own, is a bunch of coverage of 18.2, which is now out, which has the features people want. And not just the AI features people want, like big features people want. Like alternative browsers set as default. Alternative message clients set as default.

all their browser engines being able to set web apps on the home screen in the, like big, sweeping changes to iOS 18. And then also the good Apple intelligence features, like visual intelligence and gen moji, like things at chat GPT integration, the stuff that people thought would be there from the beginning. So that just feels like a lot of stuff to parse that at once. My ongoing theory about Apple intelligence is that the only three features most people will think are cool and get excited about are gen moji, which I actually think it's going to be a big deal. I think it might be sticky, but I think a lot of people are going to use it in the way that like, I don't know if this has been y'all's experience, but like tap back emoji now are like completely normalized in my life.

Like everyone I text with uses the tapbacks now, which I think. think is awesome. And like that is the gen moji is like the next step to that, which I think it's going to be cool. By the way, can I just say I desperately wish email had tapbacks? Yes. It is, it is such good messaging UI. Like bring it everywhere. Let me like an email. Like, and let them see that I liked the email so I can just be like, yep, I read it. Please don't follow up again. Like, if you ever liked an email. That's fair. Well, no, it's, um, down an email. You know, Everybody watched the show The Bear and then everyone went through the phase where they talked like a Chicago line cook for like a summer and said heard. The word heard is just an IRL tap back.

That's all it is. And that's all I want to do with most of my email is just signify receipt. Yeah. I see what you said here. I have no further reactions. That's it. Nothing. You are getting nothing else for me.

What is the emoji for that? Is it the face that's not smiling or frowning? It's just the completely neutral face. That face is Dieter. Hmm. So then what's the, what's the, is it just a, is it just a, by the way, that's true. But he's sent me that emoji more than anyone else in my entire life. No, I don't think there is one.

You just need a, like, a check. That's the one. Check is good. I use the raised hands emoji for that a lot. That's horrible. That's like a celebration. No, no, no, that's good. That's what it's for.

Yeah. The raised hands. Raise hands can be like, oh, thank you. Or it can just be like, got it. or it can just be like sick. I'm under arrest. It's just a sort of like, I'm under arrest. It's just, it's just acknowledgement.

That's all it is. If you think raised hands is, I'm so confused. A lot of our conversations, I have to rethink a lot of our conversations. Do you think I'm telling you I'm being arrested every time? All right. So Jen Moji tapbacks of being arrested are coming to iOS 18.2. That's where we're getting. But yeah, anyway, so Jen Moji is the first thing I think people are going to care about

that is actually like a net new thing. The second one is chat GPT, which I think it remains to be seen if that's actually going to really be baked into iOS in a way that people care about right now. It seems kind of clunky, but it is a thing people will like go find and do on purpose. And then the third one is visual intelligence, especially because of the camera control. So I totally agree with you that like the first sincerely new Apple intelligence things are all in 18.2. And they're also pretty big complicated things. So I would not be shocked to see this in a dev beta longer than some features we've seen from iOS before. But also the part where 18.2 everywhere, including United States, lets you set default phone and messaging apps, is a big change to iOS.

And that's 18.2. The part of 18.2 where the beginnings of different browser engines in the EU, huge. like earth-shattering change to iOS 18.2. Richard, what do you know about how this is actually going to work? Because I'm skeptical of this being actually a big deal. In terms of the browser changes and the default changing? Yeah. Like, what does it mean when you do that?

Do we know anything? The way that I am reading it is that you will actually be able to have a different browser engine. Because what we've had so far is people, you can have Chrome on your iPhone, right? But it's still Safari underneath. It just looks a little different. But if you can actually have your own browsing engine, And you can have a lot more features. You can enable a lot more things than they are able to right now.

Right now they're limited by what Apple wants to do. I think that those are things that they will be massaged as they're saying they'll a lot. But the things that people might notice, I know at least in our newsroom, Jen was excited seeing this announcement about the mail app, having categories, like Gmail has had forever. Like we've seen the on-device AI scanning. They talked about how that's going to do a child safety thing in I message.

I think there are going to be a lot more like kind of small features of things that it does on the device now that just haven't been there. And those may be bigger than any of the Apple intelligence features right away. Yeah, I think upgrading that apps people use, yeah, that's always better than use a new thing. Right. Like, if you use mail every day and now mail has new features, you'll be happy. I'm just getting at the idea that iOS 18.2 is going to fast follow 18.1 when it is actually full of huge changes to how iOS works and Apple intelligence.

the first real set of Apple Intelligence features, I just suspect that one's going to be longer in the future. And then we're going to talk about AI agents and stuff in the second section because there's a bunch of that news. But, you know, the real promise of Apple Intelligence is a Siri that is actually smart and can do things for you. And that is a million years away from what I can tell. Yes. It is not here.

We can say that with great confidence. But the thing on the defaults that I can't figure out is, I think A, the browser thing is very cool in theory, but Thomas Ricker pointed out this morning that it's been nine months and no one has built the browser. So like Google and Mozilla, like, where are you at, friends, build us, build us the better browser, prove to us this will actually work. And the second one I really want to know is about messaging apps

because I actually think being able to change your default messaging app on iOS could be like massively consequential, but only if you can do SMS and RCS in the US on those things. Like what this will mean for a lot of people, especially in the EU, is that when you tap a phone number, it'll go to WhatsApp, right?

Like that's a big victory for all those people. And I think is like a pretty neat sort of one-to-one mapping of features that is just, it just makes more sense, right? Like that is, instead of having to copy it and then paste it, you just tap it and it'll go to WhatsApp. That's great. For me personally, and for people in the U.S., the question is, can I SMS from another app? And I'm assuming the answer is no.

And until you can, the default is sort of meaningless. So my theory as to why Apple is willing to do this everywhere, specifically with messaging, is that it actually isn't going to do very much. Yeah, Apple always gives up the ones that it's like, fine. Yeah. Right. You want to leave on, you can leave on us. Yeah.

Do you want to switch to a browser engine that doesn't exist or, like, go use a messaging app that's worse, knock yourself out. The browser one in particular is interesting because, you know, the Safari team will be upset that I say this because I say it a lot and they're always upset. But Apple has intentionally limited what Safari can do on the phone to keep web apps from competing with App Store apps. That is real. Yeah.

That is in the heart of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Apple, evidence of that is presented. And every browser maker will tell you, we would love to do more things on the phone browser and let web apps flourish like they have on the desktop. But there's only Safari and Apple has carefully calibrated Safari at exactly the level they need to to keep everyone away until the DOJ woke up and filed a lawsuit. So things like game streaming, Microsoft really wanted to do that. They tried to do it in the web browser, if you recall, and they just kind of couldn't get there. Like, it's just not compelling. The apps don't feel like real apps.

Safari will just, like, be like, you know what? I'm out of memory. Shut everything down. Like, there's a million things that are a problem there. So the idea that Chrome can show up and build, let you build real web apps inside of Chrome or Chrome will be more powerful. All of that is great. But then the reality of it's still a mobile phone.

It still has a battery. It still has a limited amount of RAM. It's still often on a cellular connection. I think those things are real. You know, they're just meaningfully real. And I think a lot of people are taking a lot of time with it. And then on top of it, who do you really want here? You want Google to show up with Chrome.

And Google and Apple are currently in a international regulatory dogfight about how much Google pays Apple to be the default. And then opening up a new sphere of competition for applications in the App Store versus WebKit versus Blink web apps. I mean, I, that seems like Google would have to give up negotiating with Apple in the future, right? In like a very real way. Do you know what I mean? Like Google's like, screw it. Here's Chrome on the iPhone. You can run web apps in it that are great.

This will disrupt the iOS app store. It feels like that is a move that's nuclear enough to foreclose any amount of future Google Apple negotiating, which they need to do because Google is about to be forced to stop paying Apple billions of dollars a year to be the default search. All very complicated. It's essentially like a declaration of war if Google does that. And the thing I keep thinking about is from the search trial, one of the things that Apple was really worried about with Google and their deal was that if Apple didn't set Google as the default, Google had a bunch of apps on the iPhone that were super popular and it was really worried that Google would just start getting people to use the Google app and that because it had such a wide surface,

like if Google put a banner at the top of YouTube and Gmail and docs and everything else that they have on the iPhone, saying download the Google app and do all of your searching there, it could do that. Like Google could engineer scale in that way, unlike almost any other company. And Apple was really worried about that happening if they took Google out of the default position in Safari.

This is the inverse of that, right? What Google could say is, now you can run full feature. Chrome web apps, which have become very powerful in the last few years, as progressive web apps on your phone. Like Google, it could essentially, like, undo the whole App Store model under this new system. And if in a purely competitive world, that is obviously what Google would try to do, right? To say, don't download apps from the app store and give up 30%, just install the app running on Blink and Chromium, because now you can on your iPhone. And that would, that

that would put these two companies at, like, incredible odds with each other, but is also, if there weren't many billions of dollars between the two of them, exactly what Google would do. And that is the heart of the DOJ case against Apple. Right. Totally. Like inside of that case, the thing that that lawsuit claims, like, at its core is, well, web apps did this to Windows. There's a reason they haven't done it to phones.

Right. And it's not battery life. It's because Apple has kept blah, blah, blah, blah. We'll see. It's like, it's very funny to go from you can install native. Web Apps and iOS 18.2 to look at this thicket of lawsuits. But that's really what's happening here. Like that thicket of lawsuits is directly impacting how these products are assigned.

Yeah. I think it is also, we should just talk about this Tim Cook, big Tim Cook interview in the Wall Street Journal magazine. Because it's a big argument for being, I think his quote is best not first. Yeah. Right? Like he's like, we'll make the best products than the first products. And that is in reference to the Vision Pro, which we should talk about for one second,

and definitely in reference to AI, right? He's like, we're not first out of the gate, but we're going to be the best with these over time. These are our big bets. With the Vision Pro, he basically is like, here's how I use it. I lie flat on my back on the couch and I watch TV. It's a real quote. Fun fact, that's how Richard watches TV too.

And he's like, at $3,500. Yeah, at $3,500, it's not a mainstream device. Fine, right? Like, they took a shot on a weird product and whatever, And they did admit there was VR headset. Fine. They're going to make a cheaper one. With AI, it's like, I get that you're saying, you know, you want to be the best thing.

And you certainly have the distribution advantage because you have the iPhone. You can just get it in front of more people fastest. But have you looked around? Like, this week, Anthropic is saying, Claude can now just use computers for you. Like, there's just a, there's, the level of innovation in the industry is, like, out of control. like everyone is racing as fast as they can, whether or not that's going to come to anything,

we should talk about. But it's this thing where Tim Cook is saying, these glimmers of Apple intelligence are evidence that will make the best thing. I'm not, I'm not so sure about it. It's evidence that they're making something now. They are at least in this kind of artificial intelligence race that Google and Microsoft and everyone have been just driving forward

over the last, I guess, year, 18 months now. But I think that's the, question. Is it any good? Is it what people want? Is it going to do something other than generate a new emoji that you will send to only other people with iPhones? Yeah, I don't know. Is it going to kill your battery? We don't know. That part, actually, we definitely do not know. Like, if you make Gen Moji all day or, you know, destroy a battery, uh, David will soon find out. And also potentially the world. Yeah. I, I don't know. I read a lot of this Wall Street Journal pieces. Like, what else is Tim Cook supposed to say? Right. Like, seriously, I don't even, I don't even blame the guy

Like, this is, uh, seven months ago he was telling everybody how he liked to do everything in a edition pro. Like, this is just what you do. And I think Apple is in a position now where it is forced to try to make the case that this stuff is really great. So Tim Cook is saying he like wakes up in the morning and checks his email and having summaries of his emails as a game changer. Like, I just don't believe that. Like, maybe having a bunch of emails slightly better triage. for you is a game changer in your life,

I don't think that's true for very many people. Can you imagine if you were an Apple executive and you're like, this email got summarized? Yeah. Tim Cook didn't read my shit. I think Tim Cook can afford an assistant. Like, if that were the game, if that were truly the game changer that he needed,

what has he been doing until now and why has someone not been summarizing Tim Cook's emails for? Like, like, how much value have Apple shareholders lost because Tim Cook insisted on reading every word of every email for the last 10 years. Well, no, he's famous. He's one of the CEOs who's famous for reading customer emails and, like, forwarding him off.

But you an email Tim Cook and, like, some Apple SVP, three layers down the chain will write back to you because he'll do that. I don't know if he does it the way that Jeff Bezos used to do it, which is forward the email to a deputy with just a question mark. Like just. At like all hours of the day and night, which is truly incredible. am I getting this email. Yeah.

Do you think Tim Cook uses Enterprise software work? No. I'm just asking. Like, has this man ever logged into concur? No. Do you think he knows his frequent flyer number? He has a plane. I was going to say, I bet he does, I bet he knows his United number.

No way. Because Apple famously has like a big thing with United. For people who are not Tim Cook. Apple's famous thing with United is they own a plane and sometimes they say the word United on it. Yeah, that's reasonable. I'm reading this profile. And I'm looking at the two big product launches this year.

And the profile is very much about Tim Cook making big bets. Right? And it's, okay, the Vision Pro, whatever. You got to put one foot in front of the other. And yes, the meta glasses exist. And yes, the Quest 3S is even cheaper than before. Whatever. It's much more like his argument is we will eventually do this best and that will win.

And I actually don't know if that is the case right now in these two categories. Well, his argument for the Vision Pro is that they're getting the started for the developers. They're getting the ecosystem kickstarted and that these early adopters, the people who are going to make things are getting into it. But I'm not seeing that yet. I'm not seeing the people who are making and using these tools and that that's kicking a flywheel of innovation that's going to help to make something that someone else will use years from now. Have we actually gotten anywhere with this $3,500 device? Isn't that also the opposite of the best not first strategy? Yes.

Nothing about the Vision Pro suggests best not first. Nothing. $3,500. $3,500. Yeah. Seven out of ten. God damn it. All right, he said one other thing in this profile that I just want to sit with for a second.

He said he uses every Apple product every day. Every product every day. That's a quote. Our own West Davis tried to figure out how you would do that. Apple makes a lot of products. Wes owns a lot of them, including a $3,500. Art Vision Pro. And I would say that he made a valiant effort and failed because there are too many Apple products. Like using every kind of iPad in a single day is not a good idea. It's not just that

there are too many Apple products. It's that they overlap in complicated ways. Right. So that like even Cook's thing is he claims to have an MacBook Air, a MacBook Pro and an IMac at the office. and like God help you if you try to use all three of those devices during a single workday like how what? Well so that's what kicked me off because I was like Wes you should do this story

because it's one thing if you say I use every one of every kind of product we make every day right. I use one Mac, one iPad, one phone, one AirPods. I think that's what you mean. Every product every day and then specifically calling out three Macs is like, oh you mean every product. Right?

Does that include both sizes of the Apple Watch? Both sizes of Apple Watch, all 15 skews of the Apple Watch. Do you think he's like, well, time to switch the Apple Watch with cellular? Like, that's a lot of products. And I actually think the evidence is that he doesn't use most of the products most of the time. The number one thing that came up in the comments was this guy does not use Apple Home. There's no one. Right? No one believes it. No, Tim Cook's a Sonos guy. Let's be real with each other. He's definitely a Sonos guy. I could buy it. Well, Sonos supports Airplay. Joanna Stern interviewed Craig Federigi at Walser Journal Tech Live this week. You can watch that. She has some Apple Intelligence. And two things she said of note related to that, Richard. She asked him at Siri. And he said, I use Siri every day.

Siri serves $1.5 billion queries a day, which is interesting number. I should come back to. And he said, I use it to open my garage, which is fine. Implies that Craig Federigi has a home kit garage drawer opener, which is, challenging, actually, for a variety of ways. And that he does not, he chooses to say Siri open the garage every single day instead of just pressing a button. As somebody with two different kinds of HomeKit garage store openers, I love the idea of Apple's SVP of all software, going on Amazon and ordering a $30 Miross garage door opener and wiring it into a day. I love it with all of my heart

and I am absolutely certain that did not happen. I don't know how he's opening his garage tour at home kit, but that's the way you do it. And I just, I love the idea of him being like, my ecosystem is working while he's like scouring the thing into the terminals. I wonder if at Apple,

when you get like promoted to SVP, instead of getting, you know, a Rolex or a company car or whatever, they just hand you a giant box full of Apple connected gear and they're like you have to have this in your house now. Like this is this is the setup. Yeah.

Welcome. You're now in charge. You're in HomeKit now. Actually I, you know, as somebody who runs Homebridge, uh, to bridge a lot of stuff into HomeKit. I know that a lot of the people who work on HomeKit at Apple also run Homebridge. This is a real thing. Huh.

Like a lot of HomeKit engineers are like, yep, we're going to build the plug-ins to integrate reins. It's a real thing. Uh, and if you are those people. let us know because I have a number of feature requests for you and also I just want to say thank you. I don't know that you can use every Apple product every day, but if you are listening to this and you can figure it out, send us your chart. We'll read the chart next week. That's all I really want to say. We think Tim is mostly an iPad guy, right? In my head, Tim is an iPad guy. Tim has got it figured out. He's circling things in red and sending PDFs back to people. Okay. All right, we got to take break.

Again, if you can figure it out, let me know. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about some AI with Richard, which is going to be incredible. Incredible. Get ready, Richard. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S.

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slash sell. All right, we're back. We're going to let AI drive this segment. It's going to be great. Take it away, Claude. Hello. Welcome to... We should let Notebook L.M.

Do a virtual show. That's a pretty good gimmick, actually. That is actually fun. Maybe I'll do that for the next one. I'll just upload all the stuff in our rundown to Notebook LM and let it make the podcast. And then we'll run it, because it makes like a 12-minute podcast.

We'll run it at the end of an episode, and people can decide. which one they like better. That's actually pretty good. I will say that the chances that that is a more evenly paste verge cast is very high. Yes. More focused. Anyway.

Do they have more catchphrases than Nilai is really the question? No, absolutely not. So there's a lot of AI news this week. The big theme is that everyone figured out the chatbots aren't going to make them enough money. And so now we have to build robots that can take actions on our computer. So about right, David? Yeah, I think there's basically like two big pieces of AI news this week, which is we have to give AI more stuff to do. And then, oh, God, what if we give AI more stuff to do?

Let's sue the AI companies. So I'd say those are the two things. So let's just take them one at a time. The biggest news, I would say, in terms of like things that got the AI people excited was the new. update to Claude, which is Anthropics chatbot, it's, it's competitor to GPD40 and Lama and whatever else. It can now use a computer for you. They released a very cool demo video, which is just one of the researchers sitting there and he basically opens up a spreadsheet and is like, hey, I need you to pull data out of this and put it into an email for me. And it goes through and it clicks around and

it says, oh, I can't find this data in here. So it opens, I think it's like a vendor software thing, searches through that, finds the information, puts it where it is. The idea is that it can actually click around and look at and use your computer and pull data from it. It was actually tracking what it was doing as it was going. So it was saying, like, I hit the page down button and I put the cursor over here and I typed this into the... Seems to work very well. It is one demo. And it's not a product that Anthropic is shipping.

It's a thing in the API that other people can build on top of. I've already seen someone build an app that can sort of do this on a Mac. Oh, really? Yep. Sort of. I will say Anthropic is productizing its AI better and faster than any of its competitors right now in a way that I think is really interesting. But that is the thing, right? That's what everyone is out there trying to build. That it's a more elegant version essentially of what Rabbit is doing with the large action model. I mean, it's the same thing. It just clicks around a webpage for you. I mean, is Rabbit doing it? They said they would do it and they have built something that does something. And some people have tried it.

and it does mostly nothing, but some things. I'm sorry, they've built something that does something, and so people have tried it, is the AI industry. Right. Can you actually do anything useful with what they've built? Yes. Again, we have to see a rabbit on decoder. You can listen to it.

They're at a very different spot than Anthropic. And we had Mike Krieger, who's the head of product at Anthropic, and your point about they are better at productizing is because they have a great product person. Yeah. And all the AI companies are trying to hire product people. Yeah. I hired Kevin Wheel,

who's done a bunch of really interesting product stuff for social companies over the years. Like, this is the playbook now. Everybody's after this. And so the first product everyone's thinking of is beyond a chatbot, what can we do? And it appears to be super Siri.

Right? Like the thing that everyone is trying to build is the ultimate Google Assistant or Super Siri or this vision, that everybody had when Alexa first hit the scene ages ago, which is you're going to talk to the computer and the computer is going to do stuff. And then the sort of

of how underneath this user story, no one could do forever. Right? Like, here's what Alexa can do. You can play music and set timers and not much else. Here's what Siri can do. Apparently, open Craig Frederi's garage door. That's what it can do. But then

because it can't understand actual language, you're stuck. You have to write every query and match every query. Now you can understand actual language, now you've got to do the next thing. And then the solution seems to be, we'll just have it use a computer to do that for you.

And then AI will solve that problem too. Yeah, and it's actually the, I encourage everyone to watch the Anthropic video because it's actually sort of inadvertently a really interesting breakdown of how this tech works. Like it essentially just goes through and takes a series of screenshots and OCRs the information out of the screenshots

and then says, oh, I don't have what I need from this screenshot, but I see I see from the scroll bar I can page down or I see there's a thing over there. Like, the key here is basically taking this thing that people know how to do, but is very complicated to teach computers and just breaking it down to a bunch of very simple things, which is like, look for this number next to this name. And if you don't see the name, search for it in this thing. Like, it's actually a bunch of pretty discrete steps.

It's just very hard to explain to a computer in an efficient way. But like you said, now that a computer can understand language and images, essentially, all you have to do is figure out a way to keep feeding it language and images. And it can do something with it. And I think, like, the Anthropic video was the most convinced I've been that this is doable because it's like, here's just a bunch of screenshots. And it's like, it's the same thing that Microsoft is pitching with recall. And we've seen from some startups and stuff. Like, if you just turn the universe into a series of screenshots, AI can actually. make a lot out of that for you.

Well, it's not that far off from the way that autonomous vehicles work. I mean, they're not necessarily looking at things the way that a driver does, but they're taking these pictures many, many, many times a second. Totally. And reacting based on that. And it's just doing this on a computer, which, to some extent,

more and less complicated because of the way things are already labeled. Yeah. It is amazing to me how many people building all kinds of AI products I talk to who just want to use the sub-churcher. driving car metaphor. It's very funny. And I think you're right. It is a really similar problem. It's also a really similar like challenge over time to get from like very good to perfect.

But it is like you're totally right. I think that's exactly the right comparison. The really interesting thing on the computer side is self-driving cars can't like be recursive in that particular way. The most interesting clawed demo I saw was Claude asking itself to generate code to solve a problem. Whoa, you can Claude with Claude. So it's like, you're like, do you solve this problem for me? And it's like, okay, the best thing I know how to do is open a web browser, open Claude, ask,

prompt myself, get an answer. And like, that is really clever. You know, there's all these benchmarks that candidly, I think, are too early in the world of AI benchmarks to mean anything. But they're like, here's a test we ran that

humans score 70% on. Claude is it like seven, you know? Like, yeah, it's nowhere, but it's twice as good as the next nearest thing. And then Rabbit is like, we're not doing a good job of Spotify. Sorry, I'm going to get another angry email. Who is doing a good job with Spotify? Can you use Spotify? Well, I think we are all in about 7% using Spotify.

Spotify is like, it's a podcast. Like, that's not what I wanted. But the idea that the computer will figure out how to use itself is powerful. The idea that the computer can generically use any computer and reason it's way to, I should just use Claude to solve this, powerful. And then underneath it is, I think just a, like,

the industry has to come to grips with the idea that we're not programming computers anymore. Like, an API is the best way to use Spotify. Yeah. Right? Like, there's a lot of tasks where just telling the computer what to do and having it do it deterministically

is the correct solution. and we're headed towards a place where a robot taking an infinite number of screenshots of a Windows desktop clicking on stuff is going to support the billion dollar valuations of the AI companies. And it's like, I don't actually know about that. I don't know. I don't know. It's probably broken and I don't believe you. Well, this is a good pivot into the humane stuff, which is the other kind of agent might even be. too kind to what Humane is trying to do. Every company is doing. Microsoft announced some agency stuff this week. In response to the Anthropic news and some of the Microsoft news, OpenAI leaked out that it's working on some agent stuff.

Like, again, the future of Siri that they have described is the, I'm so sorry for this word, agentic. Yep. Whatever I keep saying. So the future of Siri is agentic. Apple has a different way of building it because they actually have the apps running locally in their operating system and they control the operating system. So they can do more API layer stuff.

But everyone's headed here. And then Humane sort of like, here they are. You skipped right past that, by the way, but that is Apple's single biggest advantage in all of this. I'm increasingly convinced is that Apple is going to, with the new Siri, just launch a thing. I think it's either called Siri Intents or App Intense. And basically it allows developers to open up things that Siri can go do inside of their apps. That's the answer, right? The only reason to go do this much more complicated deterministic thing is if you can't convince the world to open up APIs to you.

And Apple is maybe the only company that can just tell developers to give it access to stuff, and most of them will do it. And I think it's- We'll see about that. We will. It's possible that I'm wrong, but historically speaking, Apple is the only company on Earth that tells developers to jump and they jump. Netflix, still not on Apple TV or Vision. or integrate it into the Apple TV app or on Vision Pro. True.

That is true. There are not many companies as powerful as Netflix in those negotiations. That's true. But so I think it's, if Apple can do that, it puts Apple way ahead because you don't have to solve really complicated AI problems if you just are handed the structured data. Then Siri has to do the beginning and end, right? Which is understand what you want and figure out how to go do it. Make sense of the universe is not part of it.

And that is the hard part. but the humane thing is so there were two bits of humane news this week that I very much enjoyed one is that humane drastically cut the price of the AI pin from $699 to $499 and if you're saying David that sounds too expensive is there still a $24 a month subscription the answer is yes it there is but they're still here they're still trying to ship stuff and do stuff and the other bit of news that has been, it's like kind of news, but kind of not news. O'Mallack went and met with Bethany and Imran, the co-founders, and saw their operating system, which they call Cosmos,

but it's OS at the end capitalized because it's an operating system. It's very good. Running on some kind of car dashboard was not exactly clear, but the idea was Humane now wants to license its AI operating system to other companies. The WebOS story. Yes. That's what I said. This is BlackBerry.

It's Palm. It's WebOS. You name it. Yeah. Yeah. And so, a perfectly reasonable idea. I think there are a lot of bets right now about who the AI operating system is going to be. Wait.

Is there? Is that a bet? Is that a, it's, I don't get it. Amazon is about to spend an awful lot of money and try to convince you to spend some money on the idea that it might be Alexa. that can underpin all of your AI devices. Google, that's what Gemini is trying to be. I mean, that's what GPT-40 is. Like, all these companies are going to make most of their money

baking their stuff into other products. Like, that is the win here, if you can pull it off. That's what I mean, but that's not an OS. Like, I'm looking at this humane image of what Cosmos... CosmoOS. Whatever it's called, Cosmos. It's called Cosmos. Well, but the OS is capitalized.

You just have to kind of hit it hard. You hit the last cosmos. It's Rebovin. Oh, my God. I don't want to talk about Rebovin at this time. But so you look at their block diagram of how Cosmos works. And all they've really done is they've sort of replaced like applications with the word agent and then added like 15 more blocks on top of that that are basically like we hear you speak and then we understand what you want and we go to one of these agents. And the part where you replace the application layer with agents is a big deal.

If that's the thing that's going to happen, that is like a 50-year industry-wide project, not a thing you can ship to HP to put in a car, which is kind of what the article says is going to happen. Like, it's very confusing. Maybe. You still need applications. Sure. You still need a Spotify to exist so you can, like, click. on it.

Yes. As long as you need Spotify to exist, the easiest way to play the music is to pay Spotify money to use the API to just play the music. Rivian's going to get Apple Music. You're like, cool. And I was like, here's how they're going to do it. You're going to ask Alexa to open a web browser and open Apple Music and click on Apple music and app.

You'd like, what? And I'm like, or you can sign a deal with Apple to put the Apple music app running on the Rivian, which is what they did because that is sane. And there's no reason that you have to give up on the way that we've run computers up until now just because you need to license your I'm deeply confused by this. Yeah, it's, it's, I think the same argument we've had a lot about all of these AI devices is like, isn't this just another app on your phone? Like, is, could, could an AI system, like, credibly replace a lot of what you do in Android Auto or CarPlay over time? Like, yes, absolutely.

is good Siri the solution to carplay 100%. That is not the future of iOS. It's part of it, right? And I think there are a lot of instances in which agents are going to be useful and powerful and valuable. But the idea that they are going to like immediately overthrow the whole ecosystem we currently have is just wrong. And so I think, again, if you're if you're an OS maker and if you're, and if you're,

you're humane and you're desperate to have a reason to stay alive, you have to make this bet, right? Like the big swing is we are going to be the one who controls all the agents. And if you're the one who controls all the agents, you become very powerful. The problem is there aren't any agents, the ones that there are aren't very good. And also no one needs them yet. So like, it's a, it's a tough sled. I think the thing I struggle with every time we get into discussion or we're talking about these things is, let's say that it works perfectly, that they, get all the bugs out that it's smart, it's fast, it's efficient, it's still like clicking around and using a thing. How many times a day do you click on something and like the page doesn't load?

Like, and maybe they can make it smart enough to, okay, now I need to refresh or I got an error and I need to go back and I need to do it again. But like if I'm just sitting there saying, hey man, I told you to do the thing and it's like, yeah, the page isn't loading. Sorry, bro. Honestly, if my computer would be more honest with me about why it's not working in that specific way, in that specific tone, that would rule. Like, it was like, I'm sorry, bro. Like, this connection's shit. That's what Siri should do whenever,

instead of being like, here's some stuff I found on the web, it should just be like, sorry, bro, I don't know. Yeah. I would like it better. Do you have Verizon because AT&T's sucking right now? Yeah, that would be incredible. Yeah.

Or just, like, think for a second, and then it's just like, I don't know. Does it matter? Who cares? The vibes are off. The vibes are off. I just like, I'm very curious about all these, like, AI agents. Everyone's pitching them now because they have to. Like, I really think the business imperative for why are we spending all this money?

Why are we running all these GPUs all day and all night is not chatbots. It's not image generators. It's not disinformation at scale. It's a little bit disinformation at scale. That's like, that's like fun. You know, it's like a fun little, it's like the garnish of the business. you know, like, do you want to see a picture of Elon Musk jumping up and down and turning into a monkey and then exploding? We can do that for you. Is that a business? I don't know. It does not appear to be paying anyone's bills.

But I can make you an all-powerful robot that can use a computer for you and fill out and do this spreadsheet work that you don't want to do. Maybe someone will pay a lot of money for that. And so you just like see them charging towards, well, hopefully we can pull this off. hopefully we can get so good at this and the business pays this for it and I you're gonna we're gonna cover it a lot because it is the dream right you just talk to a computer and goes off and does something for you

I'm just not sure any of the technology can actually pull it off yet and then underneath it this is the next thing we should talk about is the fact that all of this is built on a bunch of models that are trained in a bunch of copyrighted information that none of the lawsuits have been resolved yet and more

of them show up every day so just this week news corp which owns the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post It's Murdoch Empire company. They sued perplexity for infringing on all of its content. Perplexity gets to the paywall. Perplexity is sad. Perplexity is sort of like perpetually sad that it's getting sued for copyright infringement.

Perplexity is the one that Wired and Forbes and others have repeatedly also pointed out is, I think the wired headline was perplexity is a bullshit machine, which is very good. Yeah. And then wrote another story about how perplexity stole the story about perplexity being a bullshit, it was just very good. And perplexity so far has basically been like, ah, it's the internet. Everything's probably fine. We can just have it.

And it's really only been a matter of time until this came for perplexity in a pretty big way. I think it was, was it this week or last week that the New York Times sent a cease and desist to perplexity essentially alleging the same thing. Yep. Is that last week? It was last week. It was last week. And we should know the Times is also sued Open AI.

That's an ongoing lawsuit. our company, Vox Media, the business sign of the company, signed a deal with Open AI, as did Condi Nast, is a bunch of other publishers. Like, this is in the air. Like, that's the disclosure, by the way.

You have nothing to do with that deal with that deal. But this is just like in the air. The Atlantic signed to deal like that, and they actually have a cool set of open AI powered tools on their website. One of which is just a Chrome plugin that as you click, like, as you browse the web,

it shows you relevant stories from like the 150 year history of the Atlantic, which is neat. Like, yeah, I wouldn't read old Atlantic stories, if not for an AI. Like, it works like C-plus. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But like, they're building stuff with it. Yeah.

But this is the foundation of this entire industry is like copyright infringement or alleged copyright infringement just this week as well. Kevin Bacon, Kate McKinnon, 11,500 other creators just like issued a letter saying this is an unjust value transfer. We made all this work. This is our life's work. You've taken it all. And now you're supporting these valuations

without giving us anything in return. You can feel about that any way you want. I know a lot of people who feel like this is history's greatest crime and Sam Haltman should be in jail. I know those people exist because they write to us every time we talk about this on the broadcast.

We welcome you here. Then there's another group of people who say, well, look, it's just a computer reading everything in the world. It's the same way that if you could read everything in the world and then summarize, I message notifications, you would do the same thing, which is a stretch, but also an argument

you can make. And I have no – this is a coin flip, pure coin flip. I have no idea how this is going to take off. But if you believe that the future of Alexa and Siri and Google Assistant and humane and anthropic is doing – like taking a million screenshots of your computers and clicking around for you, all of that is built on the foundation of copyright lawsuits that have not yet been resolved in any way, shape, or form. And it's kind of like, you know, this industry is headed towards the cliff.

like full cliff. Yes. One way or another. The one other part of this backdrop that we should talk about is all of these companies right now are trying to raise gigantic, astonishing amounts of money.

Open AI just raised the biggest round of funding ever. Anthropic is out trying to raise a ton of money. Perplexity is out trying to raise a ton of money. Like there's a real sense from all of these companies that they are going to need just vast oceans of cash to do some combination of building, God, find a way to sell this stuff to enterprise customers and protect themselves from lawsuits. Like, I think every one of these companies is trying to make the case that this stuff is going to be

so big and so lucrative in order to be able to fund the fight to get there. And it's such a bizarre dynamic where it's like they are simultaneously promising how great the world is going to be and like battening down the hatches, right? And they're like Microsoft and Open AI this week was another piece of news that they're giving a bunch of money to newsrooms to make them make more AI stuff. And it's just like what what a bizarre inversion of this same thing where they're like, we are going to give you money to take your stuff or we're just going to take it for free. But here's some money to make AI stuff. Yeah. Well, they're giving some money.

They announced $10 million and five million of it is in credits for the software. Oh, is it really? That's annoying. Which is not the same thing as money. No, it's not. It is super not. But all of this stuff is like, it's, everything is running as fast as possible in these like mutually exclusive ways,

except that it sort of feels like if the money gets big enough, it'll just be okay. So this is, I haven't thought this all the way through, and I'm curious for reader if you're back on this. What the first cast is for? If the money gets big enough, I think the judges in the copyright cases are going to be like, look at all of your money. Pay it to them.

Like at some point, you're like, I made a thing so valuable by taking all of this stuff without permission, a judge is going to say, well, that is actually a value transfer that doesn't make sense. Right? If you needed all of this to raise your $6.9 billion, open AI, then it stands to reason. that that stuff is valuable. And you should take some of the money you raised and pay it to the people whose work you need to make your product that supports the valuation. But that's kind of my point, right?

I think if you're open AI, you say, okay, listen, Judge, finess one billion dollars. That's so much money. One whole billion dollars. Oh, it's cool. We got five and a half. And this is what I mean. Like, I think there is a sense among these companies

that if they can just build a big enough war chest, they can either buy out or wait out all of their problems. And those are tech problems. Those are regulatory problems. Those are fights with publishers. That just gives them the money to wait. And there's a reasonable evidence that they're going to be right about that. The wild card is, are we due for some kind of judicial ends to this that just knives through the whole industry?

And that, I think everybody is lying to you if they think they know the answer. Yeah, that's definitely coin flip. The other thing that's happening is that they're also getting attacked from the other side, on the output side, not just the copyright infringement accusations of what they've done, but who is responsible for what these tools do? There's a lawsuit that has been publicized, written about New York Times and other outlets we wrote about it, where Character AI and Google are being sued after this team died. And one of the main questions about this is, so if I interact with your generative AI tool and maybe I put in a prompt and it says, something back to me. Is anyone legally responsible for what happens next? Who, how much? What are you supposed to do? What should be the rules? What should, what safety should you implement? Should these things be usable by children? None of these questions have been answered yet. And

there, that could have been another problem. Yeah. And that is the realist problem, especially for the character eyes of the world where they're sort of like advertising that these are therapy tools. And it's like, well, if you lead people to these outcomes, you're probably responsible for And no one has sought any of this through. I'm just saying it's neat to talk about agents and a Siri or Alexa that can just do stuff for you. And then there's like, oh, shit, it's doing stuff for you. Also, the foundation of this might be Kevin Bacon gets a billion dollars. Like, weird.

Weird outcome. Can I just read you the one sentence thing that they all signed on to? Yeah. It says, the unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people. people behind those works and must not be permitted. Okay. Like, I'm just, I'm amazed they got 11,500 people to care about that enough to sign. Oh, no, no, no.

We could get 11,000 people to sign a statement like tomorrow. The verge commenters alone would sign that statement. It's just such a like, I don't know, it's just such a milk toast way to be like, I am gently mad at the AI industry. I don't think that's gentle. It's a major unjust threat that must not be permitted. what do you want them to say? Sam Altman should be arrested.

11,000 people. It's just like, money, please. No, it says must not be permitted. It says livelihoods. You know what that is? It's this is not, it's not, it's money. Money. The unfortunate part is that it already happened.

Yeah, cats out of the bag, Kevin. No dancing in this town, bro. Yeah. Open AI raised $7 billion so that it can give Kevin Bacon one of them and then it can move on. The other thing that's going on in the AI world, which we just skim over because it is an election year, and everyone can see the weird AI election misinformation for their own eyes, is that the companies that make these tools and have promised labeling and metadata for years and have done nothing while all of this is getting fully out of control are slowly starting to add labels and metadata to their own work. So Google is going to open source its watermarking tool for AI generated text. we'll see how that goes.

That one's the hardest one. But Google Photos is now going to show AI-generated metadata in the photos. Like there'll be a label if you can text the metadata. We're just, it's a slow, slow burn. And then, oh, Apple, Craig Federigi in that same interview with Joanna, so that he wants photos to be photos. He doesn't want real photos to be fantasy. And they are also showing some information in the photos.

This is not enough. Flatly, none of these companies are doing enough. they've all talked a huge game about things like C2PA and content authenticity, and we're kind of at like, we're going to do XIF data and labels that people can change while the misinformation is like running rampant everywhere. Has Craig Federigi seen that photo, the brides made with like three arms? Because somebody should tell him about that. Yeah, that was like a panorama mode thing, right? It wasn't even AI. It wasn't even AI.

It's just the pace of all of that is so backwards to me because the logic for going slow on all of this from all of these companies is like we have to really test this stuff and harden it and make sure it works and make sure it can't be, you know, easily removed and we have to understand how it fits into the product. And absolutely none of that care is being taken with the tools that these same companies are making to make the things that are the problems in the first place. So it's like it's very hard to take seriously this group of people who's like, we have to. to take our time and do this right when the people who sit like three cubicles over are the ones being like, want to put guns in your pictures? Here you go. It's true. And that is the funnest team at Google, actually. Fire a building. There's a whole building. One of the buildings in Mountain View is just the just add guns building. Yeah, very good. All right. We got to take a break. We're going to come back with a lightning round, clear our palettes. I'm very excited for the one that I've assigned

to Richard. I'm going to just going to be very honest with you. I'm very excited. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation.

When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter.

Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud. A.ai slash vergecast. That's clod.a.ai slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned

in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people,

all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think, that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of,

everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third. That doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America actually. Let's begin. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembark, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French have since tested positive for the virus, and yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning,

and we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back with the lightning round. Sponsored by no one. No one for all of your not money needs. see see what it did they yet that's what it could look like if you paid us money someone money not me we'll get there one day all right it's lighting around David I think you need to start with honestly the news that should have led the entire verge cast I just want you both to be very proud with me that I made it over an hour into the verge cast and I have not mentioned the books palma two once I haven't even I haven't even

teased it the best thing about the books poma too is that we've entered the stage of covering this thing where there was a leak of it and we covered the leak and then the announcement of the tiny e-reader. We're deep in the weeds. The verge is the official

news source of the books palma and I feel very good about this. What I like is that they got the sequel out fast enough that my pre-scheduled six-month-out tweet asking people if they know where their books palma is

hasn't even gone up yet and they're already selling the secret. They beat me on this one. Somebody posted on threads today, accusing me of being in league with books to get rid of all their inventory on the one before the two came out. They're like, you timed this on Burbiz, didn't you? Big books is good. Big books. Yeah, that's, that's, that's me. They fund everything. Everything in the basketball hoop you see behind me. Uh, so the book's Palma 2, still $2, $2,000, which is still too expensive,

but it's, it's still, it's a smartphone-sized e-reader. To answer your question, Richard, I use mine every single day. And I love it very much. It fixes a couple of the things that were wrong with the last one. Mostly, it was a little slow and it ran a really outdated version of Android. Now I suspect it will be less slow and it runs a less outdated version of Android. It doesn't run a current version of Android, but it's better. It's still, it's the same size. It's the same screen. It has, I believe, the same amount of RAM and the same amount of storage. It's just like a gentle, of the same device, which I think is fine. To me, honestly, the fact that books just made another one of these is the thing that is

most exciting and interesting. Books is basically like a spaghetti at the wall kind of company. They just make every single product size and skew you can imagine. They're Dyson, but for E-ink screens. Yeah, and that's fine, right? Like, you can go on their website and buy just about any dimension of E-ink device that you want. And I think just the fact that this one is getting a second rev suggests that it is successful and meaningful to people. Just by the way, just in case people are wondering what I mean

by Dyson is if you want something with a fan in it, Dyson will sell it to you. Suck, blow, anything with a fan. However tall you'd like your vacuum to be, Dyson has you. They got you so good. There was, there's one, I believe, that launched in just China that also doesn't have a camera. Yeah. Which I think is pretty cool. And it's a- a thing there were a bunch of people when I wrote about the poma in the first place were like I would love for one of these without a camera for just a variety of you know security and privacy and family reasons but uh the one that's shipping around the world still has a camera why I they say you ever use the camera on your books palma too no literally not once uh

when I wrote about it I forgot it existed until somebody I was talking to asked me if I had ever used the camera and I said no I forgot it had a camera um But their thesis is that you might use it for like scanning and digitizing stuff, which like, sure. But to me, it's like, get rid of the camera and knock the price down 40 bucks. Everybody wins. Yeah. It's way better. But yeah, I think this thing is, I'm excited about it.

I'm hopeful that they'll ship me one and I can review it. I think the thing Books is trying to do, it got kind of right the first time. Like that combination of the size of the thing and the fact that it's E-ink and the fact that it runs Android apps is awesome. uh we tried to get panos panes pana to look at one he refused to do it on camera it was very upsetting uh and yeah we'll we'll we'll see i got a lot of people asking me should i buy this one or the new kindle paper wait people want eink devices man yeah i will say i encourage everyone to pull over in your car and then look at our article with boogs poma too click on it and scroll down and look at bookes's own press photo of a guy holding the books palma two he's very much like

what am I doing here? Yeah, he's like, what is this thing? He's like, how did I get here? He's like, yep, I'm looking at a little phone with a meeting screen. It's true, it's just a guy in a beige sweater. He's like, why does this have no colors? It's like, his face is like, I hate this book. I don't want to be reading it.

It's very much the face I imagine Richard made the first time he helped the book's like this is the face that made you pre-scheduled a tweet like right here. It's good. And I'm glad that these things exist. Like someone should make like an Android thing with an e-ing screen that runs apps. It's great. I just think that people will probably put them down and forget that they bought them. Just as I believe this gentleman put this one down.

It's why. If you asked him about it right now, he wouldn't be able to tell you what a book's home. What are you talking about? The what now? That was a job. Like that's his face. This is why the problem is the price with really with all. of these devices. Like the poma or something like it at 99 bucks, like sold, right? Like the,

the Kindle succeeds for that same reason. It's like if you buy a Kindle and use it a bunch and then forget about it for a while and then use it a bunch and then forget about it for a while, you've paid the correct amount for it. Uh, 280 bucks is too much for that use case. Yeah. That said, I will be purchasing one. I got to go use my books promo one at least one more time to make it worth it apparently. All right, Richard, you've got the best one at all. Yes, senior citizens, very, very upset at T-Mobile of all companies because it won't honor its lifetime price guarantee. Turns out they lived, I guess, longer than T-Mobile thought. When you tell people that you're going to give them a lifetime price lock, you figure how long could that last?

Longer than you think, T-Mobile. They probably figure that out the same way they do security. That's rough. That's a rough secondary stab right there. Thousands of FCC complaints from people saying they signed up for price lock in what, 2015, so 10 years ago. So T-Mobile assumed everyone would die within one decade. They had a senior plan that was marketed specifically to people 55 and up. With lifetime price lock.

Yes, and it included this. And those are not people who you want to disappoint on a lifetime offer. Like, they will remember. Has anyone ever not lived to regret the lifetime price guarantee? Like, this always makes me think of back in the day when the airlines would sell the people, like the $250,000 lifetime fly wherever you want, first class thing. And then there were the people who were like, all right, challenge accepted. I live in the sky now.

Yeah. And eventually all the airlines are like, well, you can't do that. And they're like, remember when you said lifetime? And like the everyone is just don't do this. If you can't do it, just don't do it. And then there are the companies that offer a lifetime deal and then go out of business. And it's like, what are we doing, y'all? Well, that's a win.

That means you outlived it. It's the lifetime of the executive who approved it. Right. Yeah, 100%. In the FCC complaints, there are some choice quotes. Archax, I dug them all up. One of them, I am not dead yet, a customer in New York wrote, bluntly.

That's very good. There was one person who complained that their prices going up $50 a month because they had 10 lines. I'm like, 10 lines? It's good. We've got that lifetime guarantee. I mean,

that's fair. I'd get everybody on that plan. You guys want to join my plan? I will take this opportunity to remind the Vergecast audience the T-Mobile existence in its current state because the government allowed it to buy Sprint in a deal, which took our nation's number of viable. nationwide wireless carriers from four to three. And to solve that

problem, the government made DISH network make a network. That network is called Project Genesis or Gena 5Sys. That network does not exist. I don't know what to tell you. You can go to the website. The website sometimes doesn't load

when you go to the Dish Network Project Gen. It sometimes just isn't there. Just physically doesn't load. And then if you do get it to load, you can buy a, what is it, a Motorola Edge Plus, like a 2023 Motorola Edge Plus. That's the phone they sell. And that phone, if you go look at the subreddit, will mostly roam onto AT&T's network.

Perfect. I don't see the, it's competition, baby. What I'm just saying, you know, it's election season. That was the deal negotiated by Donald Trump's antitrust division to preserve competition in the wireless market. We did it, y'all. When I think of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, and the biggest, threats they face every day. Can I just read you one paragraph from their story?

Yeah. It's like an aside in the middle of the story, but it is the best knife in the whole story. Last year, T-Mobile notified some customers that it would automatically switch them to newer, more expensive plans unless the customers called the company to opt out of the change. T-Mobile customer service reps were instructed to tell users. We are not raising the price of any of our plans. We are moving you to a newer plan with more benefits at a different cost.

It's not whether the price is more or less, you guys. it's just different. It's just different. I'm sorry, and I'm just reading the Project Genesis subreddit. None of it's good, man. Anyhow, wireless carriers and ISPs,

your favorite. Now, to further enrage you about our nation's wireless carriers and ISPs, I will inform you of my lightning round item, which is at the Federal Trade Commission passed what's called the Click to Cancel Rule. This is the rule that says

if you sign up for something, canceling it has to be as easy as signing up, right? So you can click on something to sign up for a subscription or yearly membership or whatever. To get out of it, you got to be able to click one button. These are called negative option contracts. There's a whole thing. There's like three or four different laws to try to solve this problem. And the FCC put up a rule a while ago.

Everyone complained about the rule. Now they passed the rule. This is like Lena Kahn's FCC saying, this is bad for consumers to make people dance through cancel flows or to hide, you know, options where the price escalates. It's got to be as easy to get out as it was to get in. This is an objectively correct stance, right? Everyone loves this rule.

There's not like a secret thing that I'm missing about why this might sucks for consumers. This is just great. No, it's totally fine. This is what happens when you make millennials call the New York Times cancel their subscription. Millennials hate phone calls. 100%. And so, you know, the Lena Con FCC is like doing its thing. Guess immediately who sued to stop this rule?

If you guessed our nation's ISPs and wireless carriers, you would be correct. I was going to guess Jims. That was going to be my other. Jims is in there. A bunch of advertisers are in there. ADT is in there. So it's their trade groups, right? So the NCTA, which is the ISP trade group that represents Comcast Charter Cox.

It represents streaming services like Disney, AMC, Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery, disclosure Comcast as an investor Our parent company I'd take that for what it's worth I think they suck in this case The IAB which is the advertising The internet advertising bureau That's Google Netflix Amazon Meta Vizio and the NFL

The ESA is ADT So all these huge companies are Through their trade organizations Basically suing the FTC And saying no We do not want you to that make click to cancel mandatory. And the argument is the FTC is trying to regulate consumer contracts

for all companies and all industries across all sectors of the economy from forbidding businesses for making customers cancel services using a method that differs from how they signed up. Yes, that is what they're trying. That's correct. And so the argument here is freedom in America requires us to be able to fleece our customers. Like get the nanny state out of here. It's wild.

Underneath that, this is some real wonky legal stuff, is how they will probably attempt to go after this. So the FTC is an executive agency of the government. It has some powers or some powers. It doesn't have. The main power is like it's rulemaking authority. It's like ability to like make decisions, basically. And that was basically just overturned by this Supreme Court. we'll link to it,

but there was this concept called Chevron deference where the courts would defer to the agency. Like you know best, like you're staffed by experts. You made this decision. We will defer to your rulemaking process

if you get sued. But this Supreme Court threw that out. So now the courts get to decide if these rules make sense, which is basically just like an explosion of how our government works. Anyway,

all that means is Comcast gets to sue LenaCon for making these rules. get out of your ISP agreement and that is stupid. So that's good. This is going to, it's amazing that these companies are buying this amount of bad press. They should just make better products. But here we are.

This always just makes me think of the place we've gotten to with streaming TV where basically what we've done is just very slowly reinvent cable, but it's easier to cancel now. And in a very real way, that's a giant victory that like I pay as much. It's a worse user experience in a lot of. ways, but at least I can cancel it. Success. And it is just bonkers how few things have gone that way. Yeah.

Like it's, I, there are so many things I pay for because I just can't figure out how to cancel it. Like literally, just to name one, the Wall Street Journal, which I'm not important enough to need to subscribe to if we're being honest with each other. You don't get a free journal subscription because you used to work there? No. No. Like alumni club?

No. I barely got it when I was there. They were like, listen, you read about like smart home stuff. Like, you don't need to read our journalism. But like, you have to call a number and find a person. And I, like, I sat on hold for a while one time and gave up. And it's like, this is not how this is supposed to work. This just sucks.

Yeah. And it is like that everywhere. I had to go to my gym to cancel. Like, the third time ever I went to the gym was to cancel the gym. It was awful. Well, David, I think you should take better care of your health. So sign up for another gym membership. And then never get it.

out of it. That's it. We're way over. I'm furious that I can't cancel more things more easily. I don't even know my Hulu password, but I'd cancel that. If you want to cancel the Vergecast, you have to call Neli, and we'll never tell you his number.

That's it. Call the Vergecast line and explain to us why you need to cancel the show. That is a dangerous prompt. Think twice. Make it funny. That's it. That's Vergeass.

Rocket Roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge11. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poor, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.