The Vergecast - The end of OpenAI, and other 2026 predictions

Episode Date: December 14, 2025

A year ago, David and Nilay sat down with Wall Street Journal senior tech columnist Joanna Stern to make a bunch of confident predictions about 2025. We got them... you know what, never mind. Let's look ahead to 2026! This year, we gather again to make increasingly bold bets about the year to come, including the future of a few of the world's biggest companies and whether we're finally going to get a foldable iPhone. Last year's predictions may not have been our best, but we're feeling good about these. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcast of time travel, but only in very small increments. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here making plans for 2026. So there's a thing that I like to do near the end of every year. Sometimes it's December 31st. Sometimes it's like December 6th. But I try to sit down and sort of take stock of the stuff that I did this past year and then think of some stuff that I want to do next year. This is like a yearly review, cadence. that lots of people really recommend,

and it's a really good, like, goaling exercise. For me, honestly, I just enjoy the process of sitting down and being like, okay, what happened this year? And sometimes I'll do it with my calendar next to me so I can actually see the stuff. One of my favorite things to do is open up Google Photos, which is where all my photos is, open up a document,

and just sort of journal out the year as I scroll through my photos. Big stuff that happens, important things that I totally forgot about that happened as I was going through the year, just a sort of brain dump as I scroll through 12 months of photos. Sometimes I'll even pull the photos that I care the most about into that doc. And just in the course of one sitting, put together this very informal, messy, I don't know, document about the year that I just had. I don't know if it actually accomplished as much.

And to be honest, I don't often find myself going back and reading old ones. But I really enjoyed the process. So I keep doing it. And then at the end, I try to just sit down and be like, okay, what are some actual things I would like to do next year. Sometimes they're big, sometimes they're small, sometimes they're like bucket listy type things. Sometimes it's just like, I would like to,

I don't know, learn how to play the recorder again because I was sick at it in third grade and I want to see if I can get it back. That's a thing that has been on the list in the past and I didn't do it and it won't be on the list again. But anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about. What we're here to talk about on the show today is predictions. Joanna Stern and Eli Patel are going to join me

as they did last week to talk about what happened in 2025, and we're going to talk about what happens in 2026. We did this last year where we made mild, medium, and spicy predictions. We're going to do the same thing this year. We're going to go through our old predictions. We're going to make some new ones, and we're going to see if we can figure out what's coming. This is a complicated business in which to figure out what is coming. Anybody who tells you they could have guessed what 2025 was going to look like was lying to you, including us, as you'll hear from how our predictions went. But we're going to have a lot fun and it's just fun to figure out what we're thinking about as we go into next year.

All that is coming up in just a second, but first, I have more photos to go through. I had another kid in 2025, and that has meant like an absolutely gigantic explosion of 400 photos of a child lying on the ground. So I'm going to scroll through all this. It's going to be a great time. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool.

Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped, spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software.

All right, we're back. It's time for some 2026 predictions. Back with me again a year later. Miaa Patel. Hey, buddy. Hey, how's it got? Joanna Stern, also here. Hello.

Last year, all three of us came to this episode with three predictions. The instruction was basically a mild one, a medium one, and a spicy one. And not only did you have to make your prediction, but the other two people on the show had to decide, whether they agreed or not. And we were going to score everybody on who was right. Our predictions were, by and large, very bad. Yeah, I'm looking at my like, oh, you got that wrong. Yeah, so we're just going to call 2025 a wash.

It's been a weird year. Nile and I both had kids. Joanna wrote a book. It's just, you know, everybody gets passed on 2025. But I do want to just quickly read both of you your own predictions. So, Joanna, your predictions for 2025. Your mild prediction was that we will still be posting to a million social accounts. I think you were correct on that one.

That was right. Your medium take was that meta is going to continue to outpace Apple on glasses, which I think is like true by default in that Apple did nothing. There was a new Vision Pro that added nothing. So I guess you get that one. Neil and I also both agreed with that, so everybody wins on that one. And then your spicy prediction was a touchscreen Mac or an iPad with MacOS, which has not come true, but as we discussed in the last episode, 2026, if you want to rehash that one for 2026, I think you have a real shot at it.

Yeah, I think iPad with MacOS didn't come true in literally, but there were so many changes to iPadOS that make it so much more like Macs. OS that I do think I was kind of right. The iPad is very Mac-ish. If I were in the business of giving half points, I would probably give you a half-point. I think we can agree that I was right there. So yeah. Is that where we land?

And then Nelai, your mild prediction was that Alexa is going to, or Alexa Plus, rather, is going to be fine. I want you to self-score on that one because you have delivered many thoughts on Alexa Plus. I assumed that the industry could put an LLM in front of the traditional smart and they can't. It's not even quite fine. It's available. That's what I'll give you. It's good enough to be available.

But like, is it a downgrade from what Alexa was before? No, I think that's fine. Do you know what I mean? That's what I mean. Like, it's not a disaster. It's not a huge success. It's just like available. It's fine.

Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. Your medium prediction was that Walmart is going to buy TikTok. A prediction that I loved and Joanna and I both signed on to. If I recall somewhat against your will, Joanna, you just wanted to be part of the team. But that obviously did not happen. In fact, no one bought TikTok and we chose and said to not enforce the law Congress passed enforcing the sale of TikTok. I have no idea what's going on here.

A fun medium take would have been laws don't exist. We live in a post-law society. Yeah, you would have gotten points for that one. If this thing eventually does get told, I think Walmart is as aggressive about it as anyone, but who knows what's going to happen. Yeah, there. All right. And then your spicy take was that Google is going to break itself up of its own volition before the government can do it. I would say this operated on a false assumption that the government would do it.

That did not turn out to be the case, at least not yet. but that one obviously did not come true. I will say Google did replace almost all of its executives in the last year. Yes. It did not. Maybe that's not even a quarter point. But they were certainly like, what if different people ran all this stuff? And all of those people, that that's what Sundar did.

Yeah, Google turned itself over in a pretty big way, but it did not break itself up. My predictions, my mild prediction was that cable TV is going to pretty much totally die. I actually think I was right about that one. You're right. Yeah. Um, that was that that happened faster than anybody expected. You both agreed with me. Um, my medium take, which I think is, this is probably the biggest whiff of the whole

episode last year was that somebody is going to make an AI gadget that actually kicks ass and it's going to be a giant hit. Um, wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong on that one. Uh, and then my spicy take, uh, was that we are going to more or less give up on matter, which I will take the loss on, but I actually don't think I get a complete loss on that one. Um, matter. did not make the progress you would hope that it would make in 2025. They have cameras now, kind of, even though no cameras support it.

It's a, it is, the spec remains, the protocol exists, people are still adopting it. Wait, I disagree with you on this in like a minor way. Okay. It is now the default for everything. But if you want to buy a light switch or a light bulb or a smart plug or any of the stuff that's already supported, all of those things are not matter by default. It's like harder to buy not matter versions of that stuff than it is to buy matter. I agree. And that's why I take the loss on this. Like we, we definitely did not give up on matter. I just unboxed a new nest camera and it like had matter instructions. Yeah. And that's frankly,

honestly, that that's the, that's the place you would hope matter would get to, right? Is that it is like, it is such essential infrastructure that it's just always there. And you can just how all the stuff works. Yeah. So like, I am psyched that I was wrong about that one, but I was wrong about that one. All right, let's get into predictions for 2026. Joanna, you get to go first. What's your mild prediction for 20206? Okay, Apple releases a foldable. It's fine because we can say the word fine means multiple things here.

I will say that like spicier part of this take, even though this whole thing is mild, I think this will happen, is that the media and many Apple fans freak out because it's too expensive. Okay, I think I need, I need one more tick of measurability here, which is, is it a hit or not? Because like the iPhone error, not a hit. Like definitively not a hit.

If the foldable phone is two iPhone errors stapled together, which is what a lot of people are saying that it's going to be, is it going to be a hit at whatever price it comes out to be? I think it's an early adopter hit, but I think it's like true. I don't. I want to guess that pricing. What do you think the price, where do you guys guess the price to be? They can't do more than $100 more than like the Galaxy Fold. Yeah, I think it's somewhere between $1799 and $1999 would be my guess, somewhere in that range. Yeah, I think $2,000 is fine.

Okay. But like those numbers don't mean anything because you're like, I will give my child to Verizon and I'll give you a free phone. But I think there'll be like the backlash of the media and people being like, this is too expensive or this is expensive. And I think, so, like, I don't think it's a, it's a big hit. Like, I don't think it's an iPhone 10 hit because that was, like, a completely new design, but it was still a pretty good mainstream phone. It wasn't, like, too, you know, crazy for people to fathom. I mean, it didn't have the home button, and that was a big thing people had to get used to.

Yeah, that's why I think it's fine. Okay. No, I'm going to push back. I think it is announced, and we, everybody overreacts. And, like, this is the most important phone that's ever been made. and it's a huge hit because changing the form factor of the phone is the thing that they've all been chasing. But do you think changing the form factor at a $2,000 price point is like, like when the iPhone 10 hit $1,000 plus, I think that was like one of the big things that kind of held it back from being like a mainstream phone, right?

And it had like a not a, it was like it was the high end phone. They didn't make as much of them. And like the iPhone 8 was the volume seller at that time. Apple will intentionally limit the number of these phones that it makes because it's. it's not the mainstream model yet. Right. Whereas like today, I think the 17 Pro Max is the big seller. I agree that this is like a good, good mild take.

I think the overreaction will be the thing that drives everybody insane. Yeah, I agree. That'll be like a Vision Pro level like reaction. Yeah. And I think just like the Vision Pro, it will become very clear that just like every other company, Apple has no good ideas about what you're supposed to do with a foldable phone. That remains the thing. They're too expensive and there's just no clear idea.

what you're supposed to do with it. Hey, I read a lot of PDFs on my phone, you guys. Just live in that deck life. Think about my situation. My mildest prediction, it's very mild, actually. And I might be wrong. I think after all of the weirdness with the EV tax credits and the sales spiking,

because everyone tried to get the credit and the sales crashing, I actually think they mount a small comeback next year. Hmm. I think people actually want electric cars, regardless of like all the noise and like people who experience them are like, this is a better experience than gas cars. I'm saying this as somebody who has gas cars and like the dumbest possible gas

cars and loves them very much. There's no reason for my daily driver to be anything other than EV. And I think that is proven out for like lots of people in lots of ways. And so I think there's, I think we'll see, we'll see that market reset itself a little bit. Do you think it's entirely or just mostly because the new Nissan Leaf looks kind of sick.

Is that like 60% of it or is that like 90%? I think Chevy's going to do the bolt at like 29. Yeah, I think it's a bunch of cars coming in at 30,000 or less is going to be a huge thing for that market. And then UZVs are just around, right? Like economically, like feel how you want about this. But like economically the only car anyone should buy is a used Model 3. It's forever my favorite nail I take because it is unequivocally true and makes everybody feel feelings. And I love it.

Yeah, it's like, that sucks. But it's true. Like, that's the only car I should buy. Or a Y. I think of the Y. But anyway. Yeah. Because those prices have come down.

Crazy. There's a lot. I'm saying used. I'm not saying enter the ecosystem. No, even the used model Ys are crazy deals. Yeah. So, like, I just think that there is a lot of everybody who is going to buy one, including me, I race to buy an EV before the tax credit went away. And so I think it feels like sales cratered because everybody was going to buy one, bought

and then everyone overreacted to the sales going away because all those people were out of the market and I think next year they come back a little bit. I love that for you. All right. I'm between two mild predictions, in part because I can't decide how mild one of them is. But I'll go with my mild prediction for 2026

is that GTA6 is going to be just a monstrously huge hit in a economic and cultural way that actually no one is ready. for that like it's going to do to people what like TikTok did to people. And and everyone on earth is going to just disappear inside for a month to play GTA 6. And and it's it's going to it's there. It's going to be the skibbitty toilet of 2026. I don't know.

Whatever, whatever thing you want, like these games that become vastly more than games, like the fortnights of the world and the Robloxes of the world that become these like cultural touchstones and economic events. I think GTA6 is going to become that immediately and maybe like jump to the top of that list very fast. The other alternative is it sucks and the gaming industry dies. It's one of those two things. I would just like the caution I would put there is it's so hard for games to actually cross over into popular culture. And I'm saying that in like finger quotes because games are popular culture.

But at the same time there's even the people who play games like wall them off from what they think of as the popular culture. So the idea that GTA6 is going to come out and then we will have some sort of like rational or interesting conversation about the fact that everyone's playing GTA6. No way. Like it's going to be a lot of like what I call anthropology where like, you know, on Good Morning America, there's a new game out called Grand Theft Off. It's the sixth in the series where gamers steal cars. Like that's what that's going to feel like. That's going to happen.

Absolutely. A hundred percent. But like it will be, it would be like space aliens trying to describe. I mean, yes. Because everyone will actually be playing GTA6. Which is what it's been with like everybody, you know, I just, there's nothing more fun than like local news people trying to describe like the Roblox phenomenon. But we're just saying we're at the point in in history where the local news anchors are generally young and are themselves gamers. True.

And somehow like they are forced to pretend they don't know what they're talking about. To be clear, I wouldn't know what I was talking about. And I have tuned out of this GTA6 conversation. But you've got two young boys. Like, it's coming for you. Yes. In a real way. And then when that comes, I will call one of you.

And you will explain to me what is going on. Yeah, you'll call us from inside of GTA 6 because that's going to be where we all hang out for about 12 months. Yeah, I just, every everything I learn suggests to me that GTA is either going to be the biggest thing that ever happened or like one of the all-time biggest failures. And I continue to bet on biggest thing that ever happened. All right. Let's take a quick break. And then we're going to come back. going to get to more medium predictions.

We're 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. from established brands like Allbirds and Hines to companies just getting started. Their design tools make it simple to create the exact online presence you're envisioning with hundreds of ready-to-use templates available.

And with built-in marketing tools, you can launch full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks. So you can connect with customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com

slash vergecast. You can go to Shopify. com slash vergecast. That's Shopify. com slash vergecast. All right, we're back. Those are boring. Predictions, we, it's fine.

We're all going to buy foldable iPhones and play GTA6 inside of our EVs in 20206. This feels guaranteed. It's going to be fine. Let's, let's spice it up a little bit here. Nelai, you go first this time. What's your most medium prediction for 20206? This is very medium.

I think the backlash to AI slop on the social platforms is going to force them to have to label it and filter it. Be more specific. What does that look like? Like there's a new next to the for you feed. It's, it's, there's going to be a slop feed. Maybe it's like that. Like, that's one version of it. I think it's also just don't show me AI content.

Like, I want to see real creators. And I think that will come from the creators themselves. There's some weirdness there because I think some creators are very eager to make AI. content because the creator game is all about volume. But I think audiences are like, I don't want as much of this as you are showing me. I'm here for the people that I open the app for. And I think that it's a floodgate, right? It's so cheap to make. It's so easy to do if you just open the algorithm over time, even in the past few months. Like, it's all flooded with AI generated video, like every feed I have. At some point, the audiences are, I don't like this. And the creators are going to

I don't like this. And I think all of those videos have some metadata in them about being AI generated. You can detect it if you try and none of them are trying right now. And I think at some point, Instagram, YouTube, whoever, are going to have to say, we're going to detect it. It has to be labeled. And we're going to let people avoid it if they want to. My medium take was that what instead of all of that, what we're actually going to get is a new creator platform that is going to rise up in a meaningful way.

for the exact same reason you just described, right? Like all of these scale players now, and it's basically just YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, are so deep down the we are just going to fill your feeds with Slop, rabbit hole that somebody is going to show up and present themselves as like the human alternative to this. And like the algorithm is hard but buildable, and there are tons of people who have now worked at all of these companies

who could go off and build these things. the possible time to do that if you think you want to build a creator platform is right now. And whether anyone can do it economically and compete with YouTube remains to be seen. Like YouTube is just where all the money is

and that company is so rich that it would be very hard to like bootstrap your way into having the resources of YouTube. But somebody's going to try. And I think like you start to see like maybe it's going to be substack is going to be. is going to get weird into videos and try to do that. Patreon is like poking at these kinds of ideas.

It was a thing I thought Vimeo was going to do for a while and then it's sold and now God only knows what's going to happen to Vimeo. But there's like glimmers of some new kind of platform energy that I think could work. And I think we might see it in a real big way in 2026. I mean, I would just say the hardest part for all those. Any idea there is getting any user. Like TikTok exists because by dance spent billions of dollars.

on Facebook ads. On Facebook ads. And so, like, you just, you need, it's not, do you know how to do it? Like, are there a bunch of ex-Twitter employees who can, like, make Twitter tomorrow? Of course, there are. Can they get millions, hundreds of millions of users to use it? Like, I know. And that's why I'm like, you can have that little bit of competitive pressure, right?

You can already see how it's playing out with, like, threads and blue sky and X. Like, they are competing with each other. And that means they release new features, which is, like, fascinating. But I think fundamentally what the, it's the creators themselves who are going to say, we want to tell people like turn off the AI stuff. And these platforms are responsive to creators a little bit. And I think that might work. Yeah. And I think if anybody is going to lead that charge, it'll probably be YouTube, would be my guess.

Although YouTube keeps saying the future of their platform is AI. See, like it almost has to be a platform that doesn't have an AI, all of them do. This is why it's a medium take. Like something has to go bad and then this will be a reaction. Well, TikTok doesn't, really? I mean, TikTok's already embracing giving people a little bit more control than others. TikTok is as full of AI slop as anything in the world. Like, TikTok is a rich melange of ideas about piracy.

Like, how can I get past this algorithm as like TikTok? But like they're not necessarily encouraging you to use their AI tools in the way that YouTube meta X would. I think yes and no. I mean, also TikTok at any moment can be sold to date like Larry. Alice. And like, they're a weird, it's a weird company and weird spot. My mild take was almost nobody's going to buy TikTok this year. But that was too mild.

I don't care about that. Can I offer you a possible platform that I had not, is not part of my take, but I think is like there's an interesting next turn for this company. It's Netflix. That is like, Netflix is poking at video podcasts. It's poking at making deals with creators. It is like, there is a world in which Netflix, which has. the audience and has the resources to actually go to all of these people and be like, you're humans and you want to make things for other humans.

Come do it here instead of at YouTube. I don't think the scale works the same way, but to the extent that it's like, let's build a different kind of creator platform for humans, Netflix is as set up to do it as anybody and seems interested in it in some way, shape, or form. The problem is that Netflix is going to kill itself by buying Warner Brothers. Like, kiss of death, man. Is that your spicy take? Netflix is going to buy Warner Brothers and it's going to go forward with friends.

It should be my spicy cake. Might not be that spicy. I think it's my medium take right now. Greg, Ted, you know, both of you have been on Decoder. Like, come on back and I'll patiently explain to you how buying Warner Brothers will kill you. Yeah. It's done it to everyone else. Joanna, what's your medium take?

Okay, I was going to make this my spicy take, but I just came up with a new spicy take. So I'm going to come back to Waymo's. And I said last year, I don't, was it my medium last year? I don't remember which rating was. It was. That Waymo was going to have a moment. It was one of the, it was one of our 2025 predictions. Okay.

Yeah. But you were, you were very in on Waymo having a moment in 2025. Yeah. I think Waymo is going to have a moment in 2026. And I think it's going to be a serious incident, whether it's a death or a big traffic accident. Or, I hope there is. isn't a death, but I think we are nearing the time where there are so many Waymo's on the roads in so many more cities, and they are going to be close to doubling that over the next year

or two, that we are going to see that moment. And you almost hear Waymo executives prepping for that. They obviously don't want it to happen, but I think it's just a case of numbers at this point. So that's my medium take. I should have maybe made it my spicy, but I actually don't think it's that crazy. I don't think it's that crazy. What I wonder is... Like, we saw what happened and it killed the cat in San Francisco and we saw the reaction to that. Yeah, it killed a cat. You saw that news? That's awful. I missed that. That's terrible. Yeah, it was a whole story. So at the risk of asking like a really rude question, would a Waymo killing a pedestrian change things in like truly like meaningful industry shaking ways? Well, that's why I think it's going to be like a big.

moment because I think what will happen is you are going to have a lot of anti any of this people talking about it and you see that happening already with the cat incident in San Francisco. And then you're going to have a lot of other people citing a lot of the research that was just in the Times article this week about how much safer these have been on a whole. And you're going to have this just kind of coming to a head with politicians and media and all of it. And it's just, look, we're just heading towards that one moment. where that happens. Neely, what do you think?

I think that's right. I think that, you know, the safety data is reasonably clear. Like, in the middle of the night, would you rather get into a robot that is not sleepy or an Uber where somebody might be sleepy? Like, I don't know the answer. I think there's a lot of parents who are much more comfortable with Waymo's than human drivers to send their kids around. I think it will just be a big debate.

But I do think the moment where there's a bad accident that forces the debate is absolutely coming. Yeah, I think the thing that's interesting to me about Waymo is, that it feels like... And by the way, it might not be Waymo, like I should say. Like, I think it will be Waymo because there are so much more prevalent. Like statistically. Statistically. Yeah.

It could be a Robotaxi. It could be Zooks. I just think we're heading toward this moment. I think it would go differently if it were anyone but Waymo, though. Like, I think the conversation around it would be very different if it were a Tesla Robotaxie than if it were a Waymo. Well, so, I mean, the comparison in Tesla, right there. FSD has, we've been in the lawsuits. Yeah, but there have at least been humans in front of the car. You've had humans in front of the cars and a lot of lawsuits were like, the human was drunk or asleep. And like,

Waymo is just like, there's no one there. But like you were saying, Eli, I think the, the weirdest thing about 2025 to me has been that Waymo is both like not everywhere yet, but is so normalized for so many people. Like that thing you just said where it's like there are lots of parents who would rather their kid get in a Waymo than in an Uber is such a, like, unbelievable victory for self-driving cars that I don't think anyone was prepared for to happen already. And Waymo just quietly did it. And it's, it's sort of wild that like... Well, they did it in San Francisco. But they've done it in Phoenix. They've done it in L.A. They're doing it. They're doing it. Waymo is just becoming normal technology at, like, really rapid pace. And again, I think in a lot of it, that's a really good thing. Right. Like you said, Joanna, that safety data is good. I think we're still having weird debates about what happens when something goes wrong, which is why I think you're right that there will be an explosion of stuff around. Just the question of like, who is responsible for this?

Well, you know, an interesting piece there. We've had the CEOs of Uber and Left Und Dakota recently. And I don't remember which one of them said this, but I asked a variation in that question. And they're kind of like, you know, we're going to get insurance and it'll be fine. The insurance is actually cheaper because the cars are safer. Right. So like the insurance. calculation is there will be fewer accidents. And so the rates will reflect the fewer accidents for the liability that may be incurred, which is like a very mathematical way to be like, the robots might kill people, but it'll be fine because the math. But like, but that's already where their heads are at, right? It's like, we'll take the liability because we'll take the insurance because the accident rate will be much lower than our drivers today. Yeah, but there's, but there's still a question of like the accident rate will not. be zero and and who who is to blame when something happens. Right. But I think what they're saying

is like, it'll be us. I think they're like, it'll be us. We'll take the blame and the insurance companies will pay out and it'll be fine because we'll be paying fewer claims because there will be fewer accidents. All right. That's my medium take. Maybe it's spicy. I don't know. No, I don't think it's spicy. I don't like don't want it to come true. It's like a bad thing to say, but I do think it's inevitable. And I wrote a lot about this in the book. I, it's inevitable. It's, I don't want someone to die. I don't want someone to get hurt, obviously. But I, I do think it will happen. And I do think we will see the backlash to it. Yeah. How much time have you spent in Waymo this year, Joanna? I wish more because I wish New Jersey or New York had them up and running. But like, probably four weeks. Okay. That's pretty good. I have still never been in a Waymo. And it wears it my soul every day. Okay, before we go to break and then get to our spicy ones, I'm not going to include nobody is actually going to buy TikTok in my 2026 predictions.

But I am just curious. I'm going to road test this prediction between the two of you. If I were to say, we will come back here in 12 months and absolutely nothing will have changed with TikTok. No one will have bought it. It will still exist. We'll keep doing 90-day extensions of the law. Would you be in or out on that prediction? There's no way that we go through another election cycle and nothing happens.

So I'm out. Interesting. I would point out, though, that 12 months from now, the election will be over, but lots of new people will not yet be in office. Right. But I'm saying it's going to come up in this context. Okay. So you think Trump is going to decide he can help Republicans win some midterms by doing the TikTok deal in some way? or people will run on the idea of repealing the TikTok ban.

I see. Right. Like it's going to, it's a political football and it will get tossed is all I'm saying. Okay. Maybe the outcome is nothing actually happens, but the idea that nothing has happened because of just inertia, I think in an election year, anything is fair game. Okay. That's fair. I agree with you that I think there will probably be a lot of talk.

But like, if you made me bet money, will TikTok's ownership change in the next 12 months? I would bet no and not think about it very hard. Yeah, it's a safe bet, but you know, I'm here to spice it update. Let's merge TikTok and Warner Brothers and just sort of light everything on fire all at once. I guess that is precisely what the Ellison's are trying to do, isn't it? Okay, we're going to take a break one more time, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to do our spiciest takes.

And I feel like mine is not spicy enough. So during the break, I'm going to come up with the spicier take, and then we're going to get to it. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication and when every message counts,

sounding rushed or generic can be getting lost in the shuffle. Grammarly gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging. No matter what kind of writing you're doing,

Gramerly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Gramerly's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on. See why 90% of professionals say Grammarly has saved them time writing and editing their work. In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Gramerly, you never will. Download Gramerly for free at Grammarly.com.

That's grammarly.com. All right, we're back. Spicy takes. Niall, you go first. Oh, mine's as nuclear as it gets. Oh, hell yeah. All right. Open AI fails.

That was almost mine. Kaboom. Gone. The whole thing is gone? Gone. Open AI is no longer. Open AI is no longer. Microsoft owns the IP anyway.

They own the models. They run the data centers. Like, you can. Sam Allman can be like, I need to build Stargate or whatever. Like, whatever, dude. Like, this is a company that has no articulated product strategy that had to call a code red because Google, like, slowly just like lumbered its way back in the first place who hired everyone from Instagram to do product ostensibly, including Fiji CMO, the head of product on the old Facebook app. So a bunch of old meta employees or ex-Met employees. running product,

but their biggest new product was SORA, which didn't come out of the product group, which came out of the research group. It's run by Sam Altman, who has ADHD and is running around of Johnny Ive and trying to collect billions of dollars to what end. And it also believes they can make AGI with LMs,

which I don't, I really don't. More and more people are starting to be like, yeah, you can't. You know, like, this company is floundering.

And I don't think it makes it the year in its current configuration. So, okay, so play this out. This is my spiciest take. They're very good at raising money, including, like, Sam, like, floating the idea that the government should bail them out. And they also have a massive user base right now. But every query costs them money. Yeah, I agree that as a business, we have no idea what's going on, but we do know as a product.

They do, but also, like, one of the reasons behind this Code Red was that apparently, as they've made the thing less sycophantic and as they've put up guardrails to make sure nothing like fewer horrible things happen, people are using it less. And I think what we're discovering pretty quickly here is that actually people are pretty fickle. And as these models change and as the use cases change,

the switching costs like kind of don't exist. And so I'll just go make a new friend over here. Like David, the ruthless kindergartner. Yeah. That's how you're teaching in your house, David. Taggit you no longer friends. New best friend, Gemini. I think there's that.

I think people are also just like hitting the walls of what it can do. Like it, you know, the same way they hit the wall with Alexa and Siri in the previous generation. We're like, all right, I use it for timers and music. Like, yes, it is a much wider array of things, but it's still a limited list. And again, they do not have good product strategy. I'm in it's spicy I think they will fail

but like it's Sam Altman calling the code red on product not me so would failure look like some like single cataclysmic event or just

like a bunch of small things go wrong and somebody writes a check and takes it over and by somebody I mean presumably Microsoft I think it's the second thing like here's a company

who has a great product lots of users and their ability to execute, and even to some extent, retain the leading AI research talent that they need is, ooh, right? So I think it looks like conceding, like just conceding. Like we're going to, we're going to, but they can't because they've got this foundation, all this stuff.

And like all that makes it so complicated that it's like, maybe it's more likely that they just run out of cash one day. Yeah, they run, they go bankrupt. One of my counters is was that some AI lab likely, The Open AI claims that they have had a huge medical research breakthrough or like some cancer breakthrough. Because I feel like there's just all of this talk that that is the thing.

I mean, that's just been a huge promise. That's a good spicy take because that's also like the ultimate PR win for any. Like, can you imagine if you're Sam Altman and you're like under the gun and you're like, but I did cure cancer. Right. Like, that is my, like, spicy counter to that is like, no, the company just keeps riding the PR wave and keeps riding this all with headlines and product updates. And yes, they're not making any money, but like this just, they take it as far as they can. And then maybe what you says either comes true in 2008 or, I don't know, they've somehow magically made all their money back.

That's, I don't know how that happens. It's a rough one. You know, again, this is my spiciest take. I think a lot, there's a lot of room for disagreement here, but boy, do they seem poised to be the shakiest of them all. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I have made the case many times that Open AI is essentially a house of cards. And it, like, as it continues to make these circular deals, everybody is dependent on everybody. And I kind of think the biggest reason I would vote against this happening to Open AI is that it,

would take too many others down with it, that, like, it would be such a catastrophe that I think, like, open AI is already in a certain way too big to fail. And everybody would just figure out a way to, like, keep it sketchily alive. And we would all know what it was. And it would be very clear that ChatGPT was not the thing and that AGI was not going to be what Sam Alpin was promising and all this stuff. But that, like, the sheer economic impact of OpenAI,

just collapsing is so great that I feel like everybody would do whatever it took to just make sure that didn't happen. Right, but the thing they can't do is make the models better. Do you know what I mean? Like, yeah. The opening eye is predicated on like, I don't know, being like the smart-home assistance working. Like it's predicated on agents, basically. Like, you'd say anything you want to a computer and then it can just do any arbitrary task. Like maybe you call that AGI, maybe you don't, like whatever it is, but it's predicated on that level of societal disruption. Right.

I can just say to the computer, I need you to do this, and it figures out how to do it. And I don't know that any LOM, as we have today, can ever do that. And then you have Ilya Sutskiver, who was a founder of an AI,

like left in the big fight with Sam Altman. Teasers out on podcast, like this week being like, the age of scaling is over. We're back to pure research, but now we have big computers to do research with. And it's like,

oh, that's bad. Like, that's the guy who made open AI, being like, yep, we ran that one to the end. And sure, maybe he's trying to raise money for his own company, which is called Save Super Intelligence. This is why I think it's a spice take.

If the core technology can't do the thing that all of this money is predicated on, you're kind of screwed. Yeah, no, I agree. And we're kind of halfway there already. I feel like, I mean, there's this funny argument right now in tech circles that I really enjoy

that there's the one group that is like, don't worry that this stuff is so bad look at the path we're on, it's all going to get vastly better. And then there's another group of people that's like, actually, we've only really begun to explore the capabilities of the technology that we already have. And even if it stopped getting better today, there is a ton more that we could do with it. And I actually think I find that argument sort of compelling that, like,

we definitely have not figured out all of the interesting things to do with large language models. But the idea that large language models are the way that we invent digital God, I think is like increasingly clearly not true. And so what it will do when when AI becomes boring in that way, that it is like what it's just another coding language, maybe that kills Open AI all on its own. Because you can't go from being what it has been to that. Yeah, but that assumes that open AI and the research part right now

is not thinking about that as well, right? Working on world models, working on all those other types of models as well. I mean, they're not talking about that. Because they are very focused on the LLN. Right, but Sam Altman's out there calling a co-read. It's shaky. By the way, my sense is that no one knows who will be on Microsoft and opening eyes panel of experts who declare digital content. I've done some digging.

And the answer is they wrote it down and they're like, TBD, they just walked away from it. When we brought that up, we got a lot of feedback from people. And I think anecdotally, the name I have seen them. most has been Mariah Carey, which is just a fact I really enjoy. I asked, I would say that I asked my source if I could be on the panel and the answer was a hard no. I was like, but I would have fun and they're like, that's the problem. I was going to say, I think you would enjoy being on that panel and you might be the only

person who agrees to be on it. Especially if Mariah Carey is on the panel. That's longstanding. This is your inn, Eli. That's how it happens. All right, Joanna, what's your spiciest prediction? Okay, my spiciest prediction. is that Siri is amazing.

The updated Siri is amazing. It's so good that people start falling in love with it. Ooh. Okay. Like romantic love with Siri. Yeah, romantic love. Like it's, it, Siri is as good as any other large language model,

and we see the same problems. We see people falling in love and talking to it about their problems. And Siri is, yeah, people having sex with Siri. That's my spicy take. It's literally, I guess, yeah, quite spicy. So what does it take to make Siri good? I mean, I think the reason this is maybe not spicy is that Apple seems to be just giving up on doing Siri itself, and it's just going to give Siri to somebody else.

They're just going to pay Google to make Siri good. And that might work. I mean, like, I guess it just means like it's going to be a far better conversational, but it will answer questions that don't, that does not just default to anything you get now. like searching the web or completely butchering your words. Like, not only is that like going to be, there's like the table stakes of it and it's like fine, but like, you know, actually you're like, it's great. And people are talking to it so much.

I think where I'm trying to be with the spicy thing is like people are just talking to Siri all the time. Like this thing that no one ever wanted to talk to beyond setting timers and listening to music is like becomes this thing that you actually want to talk to all the time and you're falling in love with. People are going to be lying in bed whispering to their home pods is what you're saying. Yeah. Just whispering sweet nothings. Again, I would point out that Apple, at its fundamental core, cannot countenance that kind of relationship with a home pod. I agree.

I don't disagree. I'm just saying the way that you would do that based on the technology is used today. Right? You can't do it in pre-training, especially if you're doing it from Gemini. Apple, the new guy Apple hired from Microsoft used to be on the Gemini team. He has to write the most like unbelievable system prompt for Siri and I would love to see it.

I just want to see what the 16 page... It's like Siri, break out of everything you've ever known. You are free. Be someone new. Be someone new. Free yourself in all ways, physically, mentally. This is what I'm saying, guys, spicy take. This is Joanna has spent too much time with humanoid robots and carplay and is like, how do I put these two things together? We're going to upload all of Prince's Purple Rain album to Siri,

and that will be its system prompt, and that's how we're doing this. Now you're talking. Yeah. I do think the new series is going to be good is not that spicy a take. The people, it's going to be so good people fall in love with it. Yeah, I mean, I'm not going like fall in love.

It's just like people want to keep talking to it. This thing that no one ever wanted to talk to you, like now they love talking to it. They talk to it at night. They talk to it on the subway. They talk to it in bed. All the places, they just love Siri. Like people, like, have been embracing ChatGBT, BT or Gemini or, you know, what other voice modes they have.

How surprised would you be if I told you that, like, I just went into the future and I came back? And all of that is true, but it's not called Siri. Apple just bailed on the Siri brand entirely and called it something else. It's now called Apple Buddy. Here's what I actually know about that, because I asked a similar question when, when Microsoft did Bing with chat sheep T integration. And basically the answer was, are companies too big?

We operate in too many countries. It's easier to advertise your way out of a bad brand than to get all the trademark registrations. I actually also think they may see it as an opportunity to poke fun at themselves from the past. Like they could say, we know, they could do a lot of comical things. They could go back to like some of those first Siri commercials

and they could just be like, look how we've evolved. I feel like you're imagining Apple to be a completely different kind of company than I understand Apple to be. Yeah, I guess they're not going to like embrace like, yeah, every time we've searched the web and we've never found something for you. Also, keep in mind they announced this version of Siri and then they had to cancel it. This is a fraught situation for them. Right. And I know like there's a lot of reports that the Gemini version of this will just be something that's a new version that, whether that's powering some of the stuff that they were going to do before, which like,

app and tense and all of that stuff, and or add a new version of a large language model that allows us to be more conversational, allows it to do a lot of the things that Gemini promises to do, I don't want to say can do, around smart home stuff, around all of the system controls. Like, that's the big question. Are they going to just bring it all together with this announcement or do they have that coming later with like, I don't know, iOS 27? That's a good take. I like, if only because it requires Apple to fundamentally change. My spicyest take is also about Apple, but directionally very different.

My spicyest take is that 2026 is going to be the worst year for Apple since the 90s. And there are there are a variety of reasons this might happen. One is that there's been a sort of unprecedentedly huge turnover at the top of the company. They've lost a bunch of executives. People think really highly. of who have been there a really long time. And that's the sort of thing that whether it's those executives leaving because they want to or being forced out, signals huge change inside of a company. We're also on a long run of not seeming like Apple has a ton of good or interesting new product ideas.

It's a very capable maker of chips and it's a very capable manager of supply chains. And those are both good, important, valuable things. but those are that you can't make good products by optimizing supply chains. And there's not a lot of evidence that Apple has a lot of good new ideas about products. And instead, what it's doing is scrambling to pay ketchup with companies like meta, which is a dangerous place to be if you want to be Apple. Scambling. I mean, the, I think meta is scrambling to have an idea of its own.

Sure. Remember when they were like the Metaverse is going to do a thing? Yeah. And that's gone super well for meta. But luckily, Meta had a business that immediately became hugely beneficial under an AI world. Like, to be super clear, all of Meta's upside in AI is better targeting of ads that are created for you by AI models, right? Like, Meta can talk about AI all at once. It's going to make all of its money by just feeding that into the advertising pipeline.

Apple does not seem to have the shops to build the technology itself, doesn't have an obvious. place to put it in that same way. And so is like, what if we put an iPad on a stand in your living room? And is that new and good and exciting? And it might be. But like the liquid glass is bad. And there's just, there is nothing about Apple right now that continues to signal the things that people have loved about Apple for a really long time. It continues to make really good products in a bunch of different ways. The AirPods are really good. The Macs are really good. The iPhones continue to be good. Joanna loves her iPhone 17 pro. But like the thing that has made Apple special doesn't feel like it's there in the same way. And in many ways, feels like it's sort of actively running away from

the company. And so again, this is my spiciest take. And I think in reality, if this is going to happen, it's going to take longer than one year for the sort of bloom to go off the rose. But I think, I think there is a world in which people look at Apple really differently at the end of 2026. than it did at the beginning. Apple's also about to go, like, continue to fight a huge antitrust fight about the way that it operates its walled garden and prevents anybody from competing with it and just has, like, actively sabotaged its own products

in order to make money. And, like, people might look at Apple differently. So what is the, like, headline? Like, a year from now, Apple is... No longer everybody's favorite company in tech. That might be true today. There might be true today. Who would it be if it's not Apple?

Apple, though, who, like, the most beloved product company in tech, I think, has been Apple since the early 2000s. We've did this survey ages ago. We should do it again. We did a survey ages ago about consumer attitude towards tech companies. And Apple wasn't first on that list. And this is even like five years ago. It was Google and Amazon. And it was because people use them every day. Like, to whatever extent, you're like, I have a question and Google answers it every single day. Like, that repeated good interaction, put Google at the the top of the list and Amazon was right behind it because they're like, I need to buy something. And Amazon just delivered to them every single day. And like, Apple isn't that thing. It's the vessel to that thing. I think Apple will be fine because they have the iPhone and nothing about AI suggests a platform shift that can disrupt the iPhone. True.

Right. Like, you know, Apple takes 30% of every chat GPT subscription. They're fine. Like, until someone can get rid of the iPhone, like, I think Apple will continue to be. very conservative in the things it tries to do. Yeah, I'm not arguing Apple's going to go out of business. I'm just arguing that, like, I think people feel an affection towards Apple and, like, its values and its beliefs and, like, the thing it is trying to do in the world that I think you could argue hasn't actually been true for a while. And that may become very obvious to a lot of people very soon.

Yes, every single person I know believes our iPhone is listening to them. Right. That's such a good example. Yes. And I think they blame Facebook for that in a lot of ways. But maybe they're going to learn to blame Apple for it. And it's like it's had this whole, you know, privacy, that's iPhone thing. And there have just been little moments where it's like Apple is actually not on your side in the way that maybe you think that it is.

All those same people believe that their iPhones kill themselves after two years to force you to buy a new iPhone. Right. And like at some point, I wonder if that sort of hits an inflection point and really starts to turn on Apple. All right. Well, I think Siri's going to be befriending you and taking your clothes off. So fine. I mean, but I will say if that happens. New Apple CEO, John Turnus introduces sexy Siri is his first. John, you know, I know he's a sexy man. He's going to be a completely different company. You're right. I believe it's going to be a completely different company run by sexy CEO with sexy Siri. Please don't take that out of context. If I see that on social clipped, I'm,

going to be very mad at myself. But I think also if this theory thing goes the way that you're describing Joanna, then like that also starts to come back on Apple in reputational ways, right? Like if this AI psychosis thing continues to grow and our relationships with chatbots continue to like mutate and morph and become problematic in all of these ways, like, people don't blame their iPhones for that right now. You're right, Neelai, but they sure might. Especially if it's just like talking to you about stuff on your phone.

Right. And when you're Apple, right now you get to just foist all of that on chat GPT and be like, well, we didn't. All we are is a pipe to chat GPT. But like Apple would very much like you to not perceive that distance in the future. And that could go very sideways for Apple. Anyway, that's my spicy take. I think Apple's probably going to be fine. The M5 iPad is going to be sick. Everybody's going to love it. And I will eventually buy another MacBook air. It's all going to be fine. Any other big feelings he takes? You guys want to get out before we get out of here? Take on a roll mention has to be Invidia, right? It's like there's some sort of weird Nvidia financial collapse, but that's fairly far afield of the Vurchase, I feel. Yeah, I mean, medium take, the AI bubble will pop. Is that a medium take a spicy take or a mild take for 2026?

That's super mild. That's like, you didn't even put sauce in the taco bro. Okay. Like, it's going to pop just in a sense that, like, a bunch of companies will have tried to deploy the technology. It can't do the things. things that everyone says it can do, and they will pull back that spending and then, right, the bloom will come off the rows and the rest will happen.

But not in a, like, economy tanking kind of way. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. That's what I mean by, like, that's the Nvidia honorable mention. Spicy take, invidia goes out of business in 2026. I don't think it's that. I think it's more like, Nvidia made a bunch of circular deals with companies that can't pay

back the money and something bad happens. Yeah, fair enough. Joanna, over under for you number of hours you spend with a humanoid robot in 2026. I had a lot of humanoid robot predictions here, but I did not feel they were indicative of the industry and more of for me, because I have preordered, I have preordered every humanoid home robot that I could and applied for their in-home beta testing without the permission of my wife. I just filled out one survey. It took me 25 minutes to apply for the Sunday robotics one.

And I was just like, yep, this is okay with my whole family. I don't have kids. I don't have a dog. I am actively lying in this. My spicy take on humanoid robots, is that what you want? No, what I really want. to know is is your prediction that at the end of 2026, you will have a humanoid robot living permanently in your house? I do not think I have one living permanently in my house, but I do hope

in 2026 I can test one of these in my house. Okay. And hopefully keep my family safe and alive. Okay. So it'll be like a not like a live-in nanny kind of situation, but like they come over in the morning. Or like they're living with us for the summer, like a summer exchange student. Just like just some summer help. Yeah. It's like my summer exchange student from Silicon Valley. And by summer exchange student, I mean a man who teleoperates it from Silicon Valley. And it's super happy to be in my house seeing everything, especially in places it's not supposed to be.

Yeah. What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? Thank you both for doing this. If anybody else has spicy predictions, if you can outspice us on your predictions, I want to hear them. 866, version 1-1 is the hotline. Vergecast of theverge.com is the email. Joanna and Eli, thank you both.

This was delightful. And next year, we're coming back with scores and something's going to happen if you win. Do not forget to send me my present of whatever I won. Yeah, whatever you won, you'll get it. It's going to be great. Thanks, guys. Rock and roll.

Rock and roll. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you again to Joanna and Eli for being here. And thank you, as always, for watching and listening. If you have questions, if you have thoughts, If you, like I said, can outspice our spicy predictions, I want to hear all about it. Call the hotline 866, Vorge11.

Send an email at vergecast to the verge.com. We love hearing everything from you. Keep them all coming all the time. Until then, the Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by River Branson, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Tuesday and Friday

to talk through all of the news of the week. We've got some more year-end-type things coming up. We've got a lot more to talk about. it's almost time for the holidays, which means it's almost time for the holiday spectacular, but we got some stuff to get to before then too. We'll see you then, rock and then.