The Vergecast - The next next thing in AI and AR

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Alex Heath discuss Apple's Vision Pro team reportedly refocusing on a cheaper headset, Meta launching a new "Wearables" organization, a new AI company startup from former OpenAI chief scientist, and a whole lot more tech news. Further reading: Apple’s new hands-free unlocking feature won’t work with existing smart locks Apple’s fancy new CarPlay will only work wirelessly Android’s AirTag competitors are off to a poor start. This universal remote wants to control your smart home sans hub The Framework Laptop 13 is about to become one of the world’s first RISC-V laptops The Beats Solo Buds have a great look and an even better price Xreal’s new Beam Pro is an Android tablet designed to work with your AR glasses Apple’s Vision Pro team is reportedly focused on building a cheaper headset Meta forms new Wearables group and lays off some employees OpenAI’s former chief scientist is starting a new AI company Perplexity continues to piss off publishers. An AI video tool just launched, and it’s already copying Disney’s IP Anthropic has a fast new AI model — and a clever new way to interact with chatbots AIs are coming for social networks TikTok ads may soon contain AI avatars of your favorite creators McDonald’s will stop testing AI to take drive-thru orders, for now Nvidia overtakes Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company US sues Adobe for ‘deceiving’ subscriptions that are too hard to cancel Tech CEOs are hot now, so workers are hiring $500-an-hour fashion consultants 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

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. Prompts something like,

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 Skylar 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 the arm architecture. That'd be great. And then if anyone knows of a rival podcast, there's a flagship podcast of like Risk V.

I would love to know who they are so we can start a fake beef. But only Risk V. Right. No one wants an X-86 podcast. Yeah, no one wants that. We only want the cool, weird ones. If anyone knows of the flagship podcast, of the X-86.

I would, we'll send him a gift basket. I mean, they're, you know, someone ought to be nice to them. Hi, I'm your friend, Nealai. Alex Kranz is here.

Hi. Alex Heath is here. Not David Pierce. Hi, Alex. Hi, I'm not David. Want-w-Wa. But happy to be here. David is off this week,

but we've got Alex, which is going to be great. There's a lot of AI news. There's much of VR news, including some, some scoops out of meta in the reality, Labs division that Alex is here

to talk about and have some insight into. But we should start with like the news, which is a weird bit of news in that half of the news got delayed. Weird. Microsoft's co-pilot plus PCs are now shipping. They have Qualcomm, Snapdragon, X chips inside them. This is the beginning of what might be the end of the Intel dominance, the X-86 dominance,

for Windows machines. But Microsoft had to delay recall, which was the flagship feature of the co-pilot plus PC. see because of horrible security concerns. Just a weird moment, Kranz, right? Yeah. A weird stutter. Even the review units didn't arrive on time because they were disabling recall. Yeah, like, this is wild.

We were expecting to get these a week ago to start kind of reviewing them before the embargo list, and we got them the day of the embargo. Tom's got both the elite and the plus, and is checking those out, and a whole bunch of other people on the team all have them and are just, we are all in this one room, just furiously benchmarking constantly. They're having a lot of fun doing it, but we've still got a lot of work to do. So far, we figured out that some stuff is working, some stuff isn't. There's still a lot of weird, like, emulation bugs and stuff.

I think Adobe Premiere was having a weird issue where it would work with the elite processor, but not necessarily with the plus processor, some games crashing. Some of this might be, like, alleviated with more updates from a very? everybody, but what was supposed to be this big monumental moment for Microsoft and Qualcomm and everybody instead was like, we did it. Yeah, here it is. We turned off half of it. Even in Best Buy, there's like signs that's a recall coming later on the demo units.

Because, so if you don't know, if we were on listening to show in the previous weeks, Microsoft announced these PCs and the flagship feature was Recall, which even if it was working in a totally secure way, is weird. The computer watches everything you do on the computer, like Windows watches everything you do, takes screenshots of it, uses a local generative eye model to understand what's in those screenshots. And then you can just be like, what there was a website I thought I liked. Did you remember what it? And the computer will tell you. Or I was working on this document.

Do you remember what I want? And you can talk to the computer about what you've done with it, which some people, David Pierce, very excited about. Because David would like to be friends with the computer. That's my understanding of his first time. Just friends. just friends. David is happily married and has a child. Other people would like to be more than friends with a computer,

as we have learned time and time again as the AI industry has dominated that minds. Microsoft was storing those screenshots in basically plain text. So there's just like open database of everything you've done on your computer on your computer. Huge security hole. Microsoft has had a history of security problems recently. Nadella sent out a memo to everyone being like,

If you have to choose between shipping fast and security, I want you to pick security. And then they announced recall and everyone's like, this is a huge security fault. And they'd just delete it. So they thought they could fix it in time. They issued a blog post by fixing it in time. And then they'd realize they couldn't and they'd delete it. Cranz, does that feel like, I feel like that's only half of the story here. That's just the background.

That's part of the stutter step and part of why it's not as flashy to launch. Like recall is a great feature for what I think of is like the local news, right? Yeah. This is a great demo. for the local news, and that is how you get a lot of mainstream attention on new things. But the real thing here on all of these Snapchat and PCs is performance in battery life, where they have not been competitive with M-Series chips on MacBooks for a long time, and now they think they are. Yeah, yeah, that is absolutely the big moment here.

And, like, the other part was going to be really cool, and that was going to be what got people really excited to maybe upgrade. But for the rest of us, it's, okay, is this finally the moment where Arm on Windows works because we've seen it so many times before and every time it has fallen super short of the mark. And this time, like, from the early benchmarks, battery life looking pretty good. Batteries in that, like, that, that, that, that, that chip range. We're still testing, so I don't want to say which M chip, but it's in that, like, M chip range. The speed is looking pretty good. Gaming is, like, possible.

we've still got some work to do there to figure it out. But it's a surprise. It definitely doesn't seem like this is going to be a moment where just Qualcomm blows everybody away, kind of like how Apple did with the M1 chip, where we were like, holy crap, Apple actually did it. Doesn't seem like we're going to have that moment, but it's still kind of too early to tell. Well, it's interesting because Apple hasn't even had the incremental moments after the M1. Like the M2 to M1, it's faster, but it wasn't the big step from Intel to arm, right, M3 to M2.

It was faster, but it wasn't the same kind of revelatory experience. So Qualcomm's coming into just a very different set of expectations. Yeah. Right? Like, if you can match the M1, you've done great. That's a big step forward over Intel. If you can beat the M3 or the M2, you're, it's the same incremental progress as everyone else is made.

Yeah. I think that's kind of normal. We sometimes expect everybody to just blow each other out of the water. But these, like, Windows is hugely. complicated to run. It is not an easy thing to run. There's so many dependencies, code for old code that it has to work through and stuff. And then a lot of times that stuff isn't built for arm. And so they're having to do all this emulation more so than like a Mac would because a Mac just, it's all built from Apple. And so not all of it, but most of it's built by Apple for Apple and it can

kind of run and knows what to do. That big like translation. moment hasn't quite happened for Windows machines. They've been trying for a long time. They've been trying, and nobody's wanted to do it because it's like, well, you don't nobody makes good arm chip, so why should I build my programs for arm? And now it's like, this could change that. This could change that, but it is so, so, so early to tell. Yeah.

I get the chip story underneath this, but does Microsoft actually think that anyone is going to switch from Mac to Windows because of this AI stuff? Because I look at this and it's like, you basically need to tell me that I never have to actually understand or know how to use Windows to actually switch to Windows. That's how I feel about Windows. Like, it needs to be so dramatically different from what I expect from a laptop as a lifelong Mac, Apple lock-in blue bubble guy. And like, this recall thing sounds cool, but it's like I, you would literally have to say AI is running your laptop for you for me to consider switching because of the software locking. This is a pressure addressing, right? This is just for them to be like, no, we can't lose any more Windows people to Chrome or Max.

Like, we have to keep them here with cool features. Like, that's pretty, it's not like, let's entice these people back. It's, please don't leave. Yeah. Well, no, actually, I wonder about that. You know, I... Or at least that how I feel about it. I've heard a lot of CEOs, Alex, I'm sure you have to describe AI as a platform shift.

And I'm always like, from what? to where? Like, what platform are you talking about? And what they want, what they're trying to invoke is mobile, right? This is a platform shift on the order of mobile. We went from laptops to smartphones

and not smartphones dominate computing. And what they're trying to say is this is another platform shift on that scale. And it's like, is it like where? Like, you still have to have a phone to use the chat bot. Like, is it that?

And I think part of this Windows stuff for Microsoft is very much. Okay, we own this entire stack. We have this giant investment in OpenAI. We've built co-pilot. We have all these ideas about what a computer can be. Here's a new way to use a computer that is meaningfully different than before. Also, you have to pre-install Edge or whatever. Also, we'll push you towards our browser.

I don't know that Apple has different ideas. We talked about it in the show after WWBC. Apple's ideas for what AI can do in its operating system are basically the same as Microsoft's ideas. So the idea that it's a platform shift, I think, is under some pressure. But I know that's how these companies think about it, that this will entice you to switch platforms. But it's just features right now. It's like, I still have to look at the Windows nav bar and figure that thing out, right? And it's like, I'm just not going to do that.

I'm sorry, Tom Warren. Like, I'm just not. So, yes, I think they think of it that way, but it shows, I think this recall thing shows where the real platforms are. And it's like building two decades of software lock-in on. on top of hardware, which is not AI, right? AI is software that you're putting on existing hardware, at least right now. Yeah, and I'm curious, you know, people are listening.

If you have an idea of where this platform shift is, I'm dying to know what people think. But it is what Nadella has told me. It's what Sunnar Pichai has told. Like, down the line, the CEOs of the biggest companies are like, this is a platform shift. We cannot get left behind. Like, in particular with Microsoft,

there is like a fear that they got left behind in mobile and they can't get left behind this time. And so you see them kind of, I mean, they have been ahead of the curve at every single step. You didn't hear Elon say it's going to be trillions of dollars worth of Optimus robots. That's the platform shift. I mean, that's the true platform shift. It's kicking back with a brusky and letting Optimus do all your computer for you. It'd be great if AI express itself not as AI integrated into the operating system, but you have an Optimus robot that knows how to use Windows. And that, that's actually what happens. I love that. That would be Alex T.

And then Tom Warren would get the one that knows how to use Macs. Yeah. And, Eli, you joke about how you know, you would love to not have to use software at work. You know, you just have an optimist user software for you. Yeah. I need a fully complete Optimus robot that can use Octa. And if you can just get me there, I'll do it. If you can, if Optimus can file my expenses for me.

Those codes, they suck. The CEOs of these companies, will not come on decoder, where I will just ask them to look at their own software. We'll see. We're going to test them out. I will say that I have a running list of my favorite Slack rooms at the company, and it's the ones where people have developed their own language. So my number one favorite is we have a support room for a finance team where people just file tickets. And some people have discovered, well, some people come in there and they ask very nice questions.

It's like, hello, I need help with that. And some people have discovered that this room is staffed by a bot that just files tickets. and they just yell nouns. They're just like, Invoice 245. Like, that's all that they're just, and the other people are very polite. And it's the greatest room in the entire company. Because people realize they can just yell at a robot.

The other one is the Verge Benchmarks room, where it's just people communicating in increasingly arcane benchmarks. Yep. And they've developed their own language about Windows on Armed benchmarks. And they're not using the normal rule. Like, no LLM can figure out what's going on in this room. Statistically, this language has never existed before. It's very good.

I'm excited for it. They're going to come. We're going to have all the reviews. I think David is going to do a full show with Tom and Nathan our reviews editor, just running down all this stuff on Tuesday, I believe, right, Alex? Yeah. Okay. So we'll come back around with that stuff.

Qualcomm has made a lot of promises here. They bought that company Nuvia, which was a bunch of X Apple engineers on the chip team, who were making server chips. And they said, no, make a consumer chip in session. Because Apple didn't want to use its arm architecture to make server chips. And they thought there was this big opportunity there. But then Qualcomm bought them and said, no, make the next generation of Snapdragon. So I shifted them.

I don't know if you know there's some backstory here. Arm decided that Qualcomm's license didn't cover this. And so Arm is suing Qualcomm right now. And Qualcomm's suing Arm back over these chips, which is bananas. It's going to come to some resolution. There's no way this actually ends up in anything but payments. But these chips are like very, very controversial in their way because it's a bunch of ex-Apple designers who left and started a company and Qualcomm snapped them up to go compete with Apple's consumer chips. Can they deliver is a big question.

I'm excited to see our reviews and see if that's true. Same. Also, this lawsuit is just the funniest lawsuit. It's a good lawsuit. Like, if you're arm, like, screw it, let's sue Qualcomm. I feel like Qualcomm gets sued a lot. Like, every time you turn around, somebody's like, no, I hate you. Broadcom's like, I'm suing you.

Apple's like, I'm suing you. Yeah. This company is under fire. And by the way, we talk a lot about 5G on the show. The level of interest in 6G is at least partially driven by people wanting to get away from Qualcomm's 5G patents. Like, what if there wasn't a dominant player in wireless that we could get away from? And so there's already talked about 6G just to get away from Qualcomm. Like Apple bought all of Intel's modem division.

still haven't produced a radio that can compete with Qualcomm and its fans. Get ready for the six-G-hypes cycle. People love suing this company, and that's going to drive the six-Gy hype cycle. Some of the other stuff we should talk about, this is kind of like a gadget rapid fire round. Yeah. It's not quite a lightning round. We've learned some new stuff out of WDBC about various Apple products. Jen had a pretty good scoop.

Apple is extending home kit to use the ultra-wideband shell. in its phones to automatically unlock doors, which is cool. So a combination of ultra-wideband and Bluetooth low energy, it can sense when you are six feet away from your door on the outside and walking towards it and automatically unlock the door. Which is just sick. If it works. But if you have a smart door lock, you need a new door lock to enable this.

Yeah, none of them work with it. This is a lot. Alex is, he doesn't make the face. I got two Alexes now. This is last name's only. This reminds me of the digital ID driver's license thing. Like, it just seems like a bad idea. Like, I get that it sounds cool like you're in a product meeting in Cupertino, and it's like, oh, we should digitize this.

But I don't really want my device automatically unlocking my house. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so the argument, I felt this way about the feature where you can just point your phone at a door lock and it unlocks. in express mode. The same way that if you use mass transit, you can just like beep your phone at a trancey on the subway and it just pays and like whatever.

And I was like, I don't know. I definitely want to authenticate before. And I was like, no, if you steal my house key, you're in my house. Like the level of security is the same. And I think one good question is like whether that is an acceptable level of security. But it is, I guess, is the answer.

Like if you have my phone, should you be able to get in my house? It's like a good question. Everyone should ask. And then you can adjust that. setting however you want. If you have my phone, you're six feet away from my house and you're walking towards it. Should the house automatically lock? It's like a different question. Like that, that's a new. I would like this feature if you could set it to where if face ID hadn't been used in say an hour or two hours, then it doesn't work. But something like that, something where like

the recency of me unlocking the device means that it's definitely in my hand, you know? All right. Or your phone has been stolen and another iPhone detects you shrieking. to avoid in your house locks down. Like the bizarre use of the Find-My network. It's interesting because Apple has put a lot of chips and a lot of radios and a lot of things recently and hasn't really done a lot with them. So these ultra-wideband chips have been in a lot

of Apple devices for quite a while now. And some of the uses are cool, right? Like Find-My is a little bit more precise if you have the right selection of ultra-wide-band devices. You can, like, point your phone at a home pod and send the music to it, which is, you know, supposedly like magic. It works half the time. Yeah. I said supposedly like magic. Like, if you were a shit magician.

Yeah. It works about that well. If I did magic, that would be my magic trick. Yeah, you know, those people are like, I'm floating and they're really just like standing on their tiptoes. That's me. That's what I'm saying. But if you're always doing that, it's sort of the wrong angle and someone's like, you're just standing on your tiptoes. That's about how well the home pod thing works.

then they added thread radius that was the other gen scrup from a couple weeks ago like now they're adding other radios to these devices you see that they're like okay Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can't do all the things we want to do they can't do it at the power level at the location precision level whatever it is that just can't do it

so we need to add more radius this thing and then you see the animations from the new Siri and you're like oh, they are super getting ready to take all the ports and buttons. Oh, yeah. Stop. Like slowly over time, there's like, there's 45 different radios for every level of, like, precision location and power that you can think of.

None of them aren't able to do much. And then the buttons are going to be capacitive very soon. The arc of phones is that they just become pains of glass that then start to curve that we then put in front of our eyes. Like, that is the next 10 years of technology. I want to come back. I want to come back to that when we talk about that. And the Vision Pro to some extent.

So that's the UWB chip. We're seeing Apple start to use it in more interesting ways, especially around the home. I'm very curious if they ever acknowledge these thread radios. We were kind of hoping they would at WWDC. But it's interesting that there's a bunch of thread radios in these devices. You could do all kinds of things with in a smart home because it used basically no power compared to everything else. And then the other thing we found out, which is really interesting.

interesting, speaking Apple and wireless, is that the next generation of CarPlay that no one has shipped yet will only be wireless, which is fascinating. So I, you know, I'm obviously obsessed with CarPlay. Carcio's are always on a coder. I'm always asking they're going to use it. They're always like, we'll see. So as you just to set, just to reset everyone's like understanding of car play because it's very confusing right now. There's the car play you have right now, which is basically just like a second monitor for your phone. That's very much what's going on. So you plug into your car. or even a wireless car play, your phone sends out another video stream and receives touch input from your car, and you've got a second monitor for your phone. And if you think about it,

almost everything that's happening on that screen is just phone stuff. Right, it's music, it's maps, but it's all just running on your phone and showing up on this display. Not a lot of car stuff over there. Apple has lightly extended this to be able to send a map

to some instrument clusters so they can send multiple video streams out from a phone, but it's still phone stuff. Like everything's local on the phone without any understanding of the data from the car. The next generation of carplay, which they showed two years ago, I didn't even realize this was two years ago.

I thought this was last year. Two years ago, WWC, 2022, they showed that mockup of like a giant screen and other screen. And it's all carplay, and there was like 45 clocks on it because no one that's to do with all that screen, the weather in 10 different cities, which you definitely need when you're driving. And they're like, this is the next generation of car play. And then they showed a bunch of carmaker logos. Do you remember this?

They showed a bunch of carmaker logos. And all those carmakers are like, what? That was basically what happened. Porsche and Asin Martin announced last year they would ship cars this year, haven't heard a word about those cars. No idea when they're coming out. And that's it. So Apple had sessions at this year's WWC, and I ran around talking a bunch of people there just about car play and what's going on. And I can't tell if this is a change in strategy, if this is a change in strategy, if this is,

always been the approach, or if this is just Apple softening its language. But Apple's basically saying to carmakers, look, people have iPhones. They love CarPlay. What if you used our design toolkit to redesign all of the stuff in your car? So it all looked really good together. And then you needed iPhone. Is it the context here that Apple just abandoned Project Titan? So if they're not doing a fully integrated vehicle, wouldn't it make sense for them to make this more of an open?

And this to me is like them going the route of Apple TV Plus and Airplay, realizing that we are not going to make a TV. And so therefore, we want TV Plus everywhere. Is that not a fair analogy here? I can't necessarily tell how much Titan played into it. Right. Like, this is what I'm saying. I can't tell if this was always the approach. And now they're just softening the language.

Like, the technical approach is that you have an iPhone, you connect to CarPlay. your iPhone will go download a bunch of Apple carmaker co-branded assets. Like in the videos they have posted, they refer to this as a co-branded experience. One of you ever heard Apple describe anything as a co-branded experience? That's bananas. Red. Sure, Project Red. Windows on the Mac, like at the very beginning?

That wasn't co-branded. So, like, there's some element of Apple designers and Carmaker designers, like, working together to design speedometers for car plane cars. Weird. And like, this is public. I'm not, this isn't like some deep dark reporting. This is me saying you can go watch the videos. They're public.

And they're calling it a co-branded experience where we're going to work together to express your carmaker brand identity inside of the Apple design toolkit. Weird. It makes sense in that all the cars UI's are terrible? It does. So the idea is you have an iPhone

and you get this like upgrade to your car UI. so everything looks at CarPlay. Yeah. Weird. How is Apple going to make any money doing this? No, I think that's like, I mean, for a super wealthy company like this, this is just like really good branding, right? I think it's about, you can go and show your, I mean, you can show your dominance in design

and show these companies. So the specific way they're going to show their dominance in design is actually my favorite part of this whole thing. Okay. The only font you're allowed to use in Next Generation CarPlay is Apple, San Francisco. You can change how wide it is. It's how stretch it is. You can italicize it.

You can make it really thin. You know, like, and they're like, look at all these different things you can do with this font. It's a variable typeface. And it's like, yeah, but it's only one. Like, Porsche and GM don't get to use different fonts. Comic Sans. Get, get right. Like, that's weird.

Like, so there's an element of control where they're just, they're doing a very Apple thing. And then there's an element of complete chaos, which I think is really fascinating, which they have not talked about at all, which is they will, when you have like the next generation carplay interface up, and you're like, I want to control my massaging seats and my Aston Martin. You can push the button that says control the Apple San Francisco labeled button, and instead of showing you the next nice carplay thing, it'll do a thing called punching through the automaker UI, and it'll just show you whatever garbage Aston Martin massage seats. Oh, man.

Never mind. I take it all back. This is crazy. I can't. That's horrible. This is the concession to make it all. I can't. Because what carmakers have been worried about.

is they have to build everything three times. They have to build their own native one because you need to have something. You need to operate the entire car without a phone, right? A non-negotiable if you buy a car. Then you need the next generation carplay version of everything, and then presumably Google will do something for Android, right? So what are you going to do?

And they don't want to build things three times. So Apple's solution is like, well, build it once. And then, you know, for some stuff, we'll just let you show them. Your weird stuff. I can't wait for Siri powered by Chachi PT in my car to just, like, open the, doors like while I'm driving when I request the massage seat to turn on and it just hallucinates

and you know it just like completely goes in reverse just ejects you and then to bring this around Apple wants this to only work wirelessly because their goal is that carplay will be connected active in operating the interface of your car by the time you open the door and if not by the time you open the door by the time the screens light up right so you get in the car you sit down the screens light up it's car play it's should not be you sit down in your car, turn it on, and then, like, you have some, like, loading process. And so you can only accomplish that over wireless. So CarPlay is only going to be wireless for whatever carmakers adopt the next generation car. I'm hesitant to say this, because

I am very against this move. But isn't that also just a precursor to them removing all the ports? They're like, it's got to be wireless because we're going to... It's not not a precursor to them removing all the ports. And it's funny because to make this work, Apple also has to give up some control of what runs where. You don't want your speedometer running on the phone. So your Apple designed speedometer, or delightful co-branded experience, to be more accurate, needs to run locally on the car.

So this is the first time I can think of that any Apple assets are going to get loaded onto somebody else's computer system in that way. Outside of, to your point, Heath, the Apple TV Plus app unlike Rokus, right, which is where Apple ships an app. And this is the split is kind of the same. It's like, okay, we're going to give you an asset package of Apple things to run locally on the car for things that we cannot risk if there's a disconnect.

The speedometer, the turn signals, that da, da, the dot, right? And there's some differentiation in how that stuff works. Like the truly critical stuff cannot be touched. They call that the overlay layer. That's your turn signals and hazard indicators. The speedometer and stuff, like the needles, those assets can get refreshed over time. So those run in a different layer called Local UI. And then there's everything that runs on the phone.

And then in the middle, there's like, I don't know, you want to like mess with your sport settings in your fast car? Like, that'll just be the weird automaker, you are shining through CarPlay. And it's like, oh, this kind of feels like a mess, right? It's unclear who will take this and who will use all of CarPlay, like, redesign the entire car to be CarPlay to be Apple and who will say, okay, we took Next Generation CarPlay. we fund cool new speedometer. Every other part of the car controls will be the existing UI because we can punch through carplay. And honestly, based on the feedback we get on the show,

it's like some of our audience will pick the carmakers that use all carplay. Like they will make an affirmative decision to be like, you know what, that carmaker, Toyota uses all of carplay. We're going with them over Honda, which is like, here's your weird heated seats. Well, the third path is Rivian or Tesla, right? where it's totally controlled by the automaker.

And like Rivian is a great example of, I think, you and I both test-driven Rivians and Eli, like I think their interface is great. It's very snappy. Obviously, I miss some of the iPhone connection, but I could also see more automakers going that direction. Yeah. But they have to make good user interfaces.

Rivians is good. That was a big difference between, yeah. Yeah, like Rivian and Tesla made good user interfaces for the most part. everybody else I said for the most part It's like you turn the car on and it's like, do you want to like play a game on Netflix? You know,

it's, yeah. It's a lovely experience. So Rivian just upgraded in the Rivian, the Generation 2 R1 trucks just came out. They've changed the computing architecture of those is different,

but then they also updated the interface to be more cell shaded. I mean, they love an Unreal Engine and they like using it. that said, I looked at the parking lot at Apple Park when we were at WWC. A lot of those people have Rivians. Oh, yeah. Right?

And there's all these rumors about Apple and Rivian doing stuff together. Apple Music just came to the Rivian interface. If Tesla's never going to break, I feel confident about that one. Just a prediction I'll make based on nothing. The Tesla UI is going to be X.com in a few years. That's the direction Tesla's comes. It'll be Brock, like, fully, just like telling dirty jokes. We try to drive the car.

Rivian is still in the place where they might try some other stuff to claw back some market share to win some new buyers and there are an awful lot of Rivians It's California people like trucks there but it's something I noticed

All right moving on to see it's like a fast round Not quite lightning We're just moving Cranz tell me about this remote Because you're very excited about a home remote You know I love a home remote. I'm still sad about Logitech. I still have the fanciest of the Logitec remotes

and it had soft touch plastic, which means it's starting to rot. I have a Tevo remote in the corner of this house. It's like not a good situation. It's so bad. Like the rot on that soft touch is so gross. But there's a, there's a Kickstarter happening right now for the Haptique RS 90 and the RS 90X. And they promise all the stuff, all the big universal remotes promise, which is like you can control stuff via Bluetooth, you can control it via IR, you can control it via Wi-Fi. Usually that requires some sort of hub that you have to plug in somewhere in your house. This appears to require no hub. And also, it's just got a big screen on it, so it's instantly the coolest remote you can have in your house. It's supposed to be able to control all their smart homes and stuff.

And like I said, Logitech did this. I've got a control that does this, doesn't have the cool screen, and it required a hub. So this is instantly. Instantly cooler, and this also is going to come soon rather than discontinued. Well, it's a Kickstarter. It's, yeah. Kickstarter. There's like, the Kickstarter part of this is the really big heavy caveat, because there's a whole bunch of integrations that they're promising. No.

Not there yet. There's no matter support. There's no support for some of the other smaller, like, radios and stuff like that. So this is, like, cool, neat. We're, like, two minutes away from San Francisco. Samsung being like, Bixby AI and your TV will not do everything for you. I don't want it. We are, though.

We are. It's coming. Yeah. Like, AI is probably, you know, the reason Logitech got out of this business was because they said nobody wants these. No. And me and four other people are like, oh. I want my phone to be my universal home remote. That's it.

I don't want another remote. I want fewer remotes. Can we make that happen? Yeah, I just, that's how I use my phone. But like, I just getting, like, who is this for, I guess is the question. for me. It's me. It's me and four other people.

It's the four people who are still sad that are Logitech remotes. Whenever I see a screen like this, I just think about how slow it will be. I think of touching a button and nothing happening, right? Like, you know, I love it. I'm like, yeah, I want a screen like this. But you know that thing you do with the touchscreen where you touch it and the button looks like something happened, but nothing happened? That's this product. Almost like a guarantee that that is this product.

It is, I will say, it is, I love that it's. It's called the Haptique RS90. Great name. Great name for a universal remote. Fully good name. I just worry that actually people just use the apps on our smart TV, and what this thing is trying to solve is not... I mean, that's why Logitech got out of business.

We can't control the apps on your TV. We can't see your TV. Yep. Yeah. So we'll see how this does. It looks like it's going to be funded. It looks like enough people have invested in it. This is like hot.

on the heels of that company Brilliant going out of business. Yeah. Which Jen covered. And they were like, we're going to business, but like the thing we put in your wall will still work. So Brilliant. Put like a touchscreen in your wall that can control everything, which I was super hype on because the idea of having an in-wall Sonos controller screen seemed sick.

Right? You walk in a room. You're like, I'm going to pick a song. Boop. I'm not using my phone. Like the whole thing. And then they just like went out of business. And it's like that is always the worry I have with all these things.

Yeah. This is going to be like almost $400, probably when it comes out. That's too much. All right. Speaking, let's do one more gadget. And then I want to talk about what's going on air and BRR with Heath. We mentioned risk V at the top. And we mentioned companies that might go out of business.

Framework is shipping the laptop 13, which is fascinating because they're going to have a risk V chip in it. This is the competitor arm, right? This is the open source competitor arm that has the performance per watt characteristics. sticks. I'm kind of dying to try it out. I'm also I have no idea what software I could run. Also, I think one guy pointed out that it runs, it'll run about as fast as a Raspberry pie four.

Yes. You got to start somewhere. Baby steps. Baby steps. Baby steps. Yeah, I have no idea what can run this, but I want to, like, this is just this cool. This is the kind of thing I just want to have one. I like how the actual line from the company.

in the PR is the mainboard is extremely compelling, but we should be clear that in this generation, it is focused primarily at enabling developers, tinkers, and hobbyists to start testing and creating unrisky. Like, don't use this. The peripheral set and performance aren't yet competitive with our Intel and AMD-powered framework mainboards. It's like, uh, yeah, this is just to play with.

I will say, EMMC storage, uh, the risks, the nerds in our audience have been very excited at risky for a very long time. Because Arm is a dominant quasi-monopolis now. The Arm architecture license is the thing, and there hasn't been anything to compete with it, which is why everybody is moving to it, including Microsoft. Because if you want performance for a while, you end up on this architecture, which means companies like Qualcommidating to dominate the market right next to Apple.

And you need an architecture license from Arm to expand beyond it, And Arm isn't giving this up anymore, which is part of the reason they're suing Qualcomm, because Qualcomm is saying the Nuvia chips fall under its architecture license, and Arm says no. So there's all this stuff that's wrapped up when you have one dominant architecture that is owned by a company, and Risk V is the thing. Yeah. The opening source. Was it Nvidia? Not quite as fast as a Raspberry 54, but it's the thing that might break it.

Was it Nvidia that tried to buy Arm a couple of years ago? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so Arm was, I mean, the finances of Arm are hilarious, right? Like, it was, it's a weird English company that started licensing these designs. It got, soft bank bought it, right? It was part of the Vision Fund. They, in the heady days of the SoftBank Vision Fund, where Massa Son was like,

everything I touched will be a monopoly. It didn't work out. You might recall WeWork blew that entire business up. They tried to, they started divesting of assets. They were going to sell Arm, and Vita wanted to buy it. basically everyone yelled. Like everyone yelled. Apple yelled,

like all the architecture licenses are like, you cannot let our competitor by this company. They said no, Arm is now public instead, which is a good outcome. Mergers are bad. Fun fact, arm going public made up for all the losses

the Vision Fund has had for the last 10 years. That's crazy. Somewhere that we work, people are like, God damn. They're just launching a new product. Don't worry about it. I could have changed the world.

It's a lifestyle. I watched one episode of We Crash. I was like, I can't live this again. I cannot be a part of this again. All right, let's wrap up by talking about AR and VR. Heath, you've got a scoop. Meta just reorganized. Reality Labs are talking about that.

The Vision Pro team is trying to make a cheaper headset. There's a lot of action here. What's going on? Yeah, maybe we'll start with Vision Pro. The information had a good story out, confirming and putting more details on what German and others have reported that Apple is indeed working on a cheaper Vision Pro. They hope to release it by the end of next year. And they have shelved a future iteration of V2 of the Vision Pro as it is today.

So another high end, very expensive one. They're trying to get this cheaper one more into the ballpark of a premium top of the line iPhone price. So we're talking $12 to $500. I had heard even before the Vision Pro came out that Apple was already working on this cheaper. version. Apparently, when Mark Zuckerberg was talking to me and others and basically saying, I'm going to scorch the earth with cheap headsets forever and not really care about making a business, which we will get to in the next story. Apple was like, oh, okay, we need to like really work on a, on a cheap one and get it out. So they've been working on it for already a couple of years.

I do expect we'll see it next year, whether it ships next year, TBD. And I think, you know, I've only used the Vision Pro once in that initial demo that we all had at WWC last year, Neelai. But I would think that, you know, if it was in the ballpark of $1,500, I would maybe pull the trigger even if the OS and the software hadn't meaningfully gotten better just because of, you know, the immersiveness of it. I kind of, at 3,000, it's just like it's out of touch for most people. Yeah.

And it's still out of touch at 1,500, but it's much more of a almost impulse buy. for some people at 1500. So yeah, and it will get hopefully more developers interested. But yeah, Apple's plugging away on. And I think what we're, what the other part of this, the fact that they are canceling the more expensive one or shelving it just goes to show that they packed so much tech into this thing that it may not actually be a good product. And they may kind of like have found that out already.

Nilai, you talk about how you don't use the Vision Pro anymore. It's a great demo. Honestly, it was probably top three demos I've ever done of technology. And it's something that I consistently hear people do not use after the first couple weeks. Would you say this was a Homer car? No. I mean, it's not like that ridiculous, right? Like it had some focus.

They wanted it to be something. I think about the fact that it was a great demo. So much of technology right now is like great demos to fall apart of this product, right? And that was the Vision Pro to a T. And every AI demo so far has been that from, unless you have some very narrow use case where AI can solve a problem consistently for you. Every other demo is like, what? What?

I don't know if I would do that. Division Pro, they have to make a big decision. And here is the thing that I noticed at WWC that I've been thinking about in that opening keynote video, when they were like jumping off the plane. Yeah. And they were like doing the introduction. And everyone was wearing their flight suits. Do you remember this?

Fivitly. Ridiculous, bombastic opening. They had Mike Rockwell on the plane, who's the, he's in charge of the Vision Pro. And he turns to the camera with the eyes on, and they played it for laughs. The eyes were a joke. Those eyes aren't shipping anymore. I can tell you that. That's what, this is what I'm saying.

The idea, if you remember the initial Vision Pro stuff was like the eyes will place you in the environment. They're very, they were. so serious about the eyes. So serious. Like dead serious about the eyes. I asked in one of our briefings, because the only question I asked anybody during our Vision Pro briefings were, have two of you ever looked at each other with the eyes?

Like, have two people ever existed in the same room wearing a Vision Pro? And when you looked at each other with the eyes, did you laugh? And they were like, that's not funny. Because they were dead serious that this thing would bring you into the environment. They meant it. It was sincere in that Apple. new age sincerity way. Like when you go to Apple Park

and you walk towards the theater they play new age music at you and they're dead sincere about it. And I'm like, this makes me feel like I'm in a cult. There's a gap there between like how sincere Apple can be and then the world.

And they were super sincere that these eyes would be the thing that enabled you to wear a headset all the time. No, let's be real. They did the eyes because they wanted to be able to not call a VR headset. Right.

Well, so this is what I'm getting at. This next version, this cheaper version, They have to decide if this is a VR headset or an AR headset. And playing the eyes for laughs was the thing that signaled to me. Okay, this is going to be a VU. I will bet strongly that there will not be the eyes in any future Vision Pro product. And I'll tell you why.

It's just a bunch of cost for a reason, right? No one's taking you on that bet. We like our money. I'll take the bet. The eyes stay. It was a Johnny Ive thing. I know this from talking to people who worked on the Vision Pro. it was Johnny Ive who insisted that the eyes ship.

I don't know the exact dollar amount, but it added an absurd amount of cost and manufacturing complexity to the Vision Pro. Because they had to do that curved glass. Well, the curved glass was... It was having the front facing OLED. I think it's an O-L-E-D, right, anyway, with the eyes.

Yeah, it added an absurd amount of cost. No one wanted to ship it except Johnny and his people. And they've all left. And so, and they're making a joke about it in keynote videos. So, yeah, I don't think, I don't think the eyes are long for this world. But so if you get rid of that and you're like, you're not, now you cannot be perceived by other people in the world. The thing is a VR headset. Yep.

Right. And that, to me, is concession in one way, right? Like, they talked about this thing as AR, AR, AR, AR, AR, AR, AR. But if you can't wear it with other people, like, it's a VR headset. And then everything they've announced since is emerging. right new immersive videos new experiences new immersive games and it's like oh this is becoming a VR headset and at a $1,500 VR headset right now the state of the state of the art there is a pretty good product right like you can make something great for a $1,500 in VR.

Yeah and I guess that maybe brings us to meta right should we should we go to that? Yeah. So meta obviously was first to this bought Oculus a long time ago. They restructured reality labs, the division that does all of their hardware and Horizon, that cursed platform. This week, I had the scoop and command line. They are forming two new groups. So, reality labs is now Metaverse and wearables.

So you will notice there is no VR in those two phrases, right? The Rift, I'm sorry, God, look how the Rift, wow. The Quest is now under Metaverse reporting to Vichal Shah, who used to run ads at Instagram and is a software guy. So you basically have the thing that created the, this whole org that the company really bet its future on is a subdivision of a software org. Meanwhile, wearables, I'm told, is leaning heavily into the Raybans. I published this internal memo from Boz, the CTO, basically saying that the Raybans

had been a much bigger hit than any of us anticipated. Zuckerberg and others have been kind of alluding to this throughout the year. I've heard that it's somewhere in the ballpark of a million-ish units that they've sold, which is 3 to 4X, the first version of the Raybans. And they're seeing really good retention on the product. So people are actually using it consistently. I have them. I have the AI turned on in them.

I wrote in command line a few weeks ago. I'm not trying to pat myself in the back, but I will just saying that Meta is quietly winning the AI wearable race here. Because the Raybans are something that Meta has not done in a while, you could argue, maybe ever. but shipped a really good consumer product. Yeah, you're 100% right. It's something that like normal people like, something that tech people like,

because it's got the AI and yeah, the AI still hallucinates, but it's very fast and it's right, like maybe half the time, right? So like I pointed at a tree in my backyard and I say, what is this tree and how do I water it? It got it right.

So like that's not, it's still a demo, right? It's not like, it's not going to like change the world. But in a couple of years, you can see where that's going. And it's like, oh, if I have reliable visual AI in Raybans,

I may use my phone less, which is the reason Meta is doing all this, by the way. So they are putting way more resources behind the Rayban line. And they also have these full-fledged AR glasses that they've been working on since 2018, codenamed Orion, which are insanely expensive.

They cost thousands of dollars to make. I have heard from people inside meta that it's a, again, incredible demo. They really feel like they've gotten there on the hardware. They're not sure what the software use cases will be yet. They're doing a lot of reviews of it right now. I expect we'll get a tease of that later this year at Connect, their conference. So they have these two lines that they're doing with glasses.

They've got the AR glasses, which I leaked the whole roadmap for Meta's hardware a year or so ago. So we know that the Raybans are going to be updated next year with a little heads-up display. So think more Google Glass, less full AR magic leap. And they're going to come with a wristband that uses neural interface technology from the startup MetaBot called Control Labs to control the display and to control some of the other inputs. Because you can also like play podcasts through the, they have speakers in the frames, right? That's shipping next year. That's going to be interesting. And then the AR Glass is the full-fledged ones that are going to be more expensive.

and also have the band will be 2027. So this is the path meta is on. They're going full on glasses and really deprioritizing. They hate when I say this, but it feels like that, the Quest, because the Quest is still really struggling. They're not really,

they have some early product market fit with gaming, but the retention is still not very good. I've heard. And the Quest 3, they got a lot of really good things about the mixed reality, right? But it's just, it's just not, I don't know why I want to put it on,

Whereas the Raybans, it's like, I get it. I have audio on all the time. I can take calls. I can take photos and videos. And I have AI that is starting to work more and more. And by the way, they look like normal glasses, right? So it's just obvious that this is the direction they should go. They seem to now be realizing that.

And they're putting all their chips there and laying off some people as a result. So that was the news out of meta this week. So what's really interesting on the Quest 3 is the rate of innovation on the Quest 3 or improvement, I guess, in the Quest 3. skyrocketed after the Vision Pro came out. They're like, oh, we should ship a bunch of these features. Like, I guess there's some competition. Like, here's travel mode. We took it away.

It's back. They increased the fidelity of the pass-through, right? Like, just stuff that they should have done. But they're still not winning. And even Apple, if they come out with a $1,500 version of the Vision Pro, they still have to make the case for VR. Right, which, like, Meta's been trying for a long time. And now if Meta's saying, all right, it's these glass.

It's the thing that everyone always knew was the thing, right? It's augmented reality glasses where actual light passes through to display, and you're looking at actual things instead of screens, and then we can put some information near or around or over those real things. Turns out that's the thing everybody has won at the whole time. Why would Apple continue to boondoggle its way towards the Vision Pro even at $1,500? Well, because they're on this path, right? Apple was working on air glasses like Orion.

at meta and they basically shelved it semi recently in the last year or two for the headset route. They think that if they can keep iterating on the headsets, they'll figure out glasses eventually, whereas meta is like, no, we are going to have glasses out in a few years. And Apple's fine. They're always late to this. Like, we all know that. So they'll come in late like they usually do. I don't know if it'll be as late as they were with the Vision Pro, but they're going to be late.

And that's fine. But yeah, I think they're betting on productivity and being at home. home and coding and all these things with Division Pro. And Meta's like, no, we want you to lose. Meta's goal is to use your phone less because they hate being under Apple and Google's thumb, whereas Apple is like, let's just extend what we do. And I think there's the big strategic difference. Yeah.

I will say that I have a friend like from the Brooklyn years who in the pandemic became one of those people who like doesn't live anywhere. Like she just lives on beaches. I know one of those folks. Yeah. She's great. Like does she work? Does she work in a video?

or what? She does not work in a video. And she was the first normal person adopter of the meta glasses with the Raybans. Like all of our Instagram pictures are a beach taken over the beta raybans now. And you can just see it like, oh, this thing worked. Like the thing worked.

It looks like she's wearing wayfarers and all the pictures. But it's the meta glasses. And like it worked. It's like so much, there's no chance that any of these people are wearing Vision pros. as they like nomadically travel the world or the Quest 3. But there's a hundred percent chance that, hey, your camera is now in your sunglasses and you're looking at cool stuff.

You want to share on Instagram is a loop that Medican close. I was at a very fancy tech conference where I'm not even allowed to say the name earlier this week, but it was a lot of tech CEOs. And there were several of them wearing the Raybans, like walking around. CEOs of companies that it would be very funny for me to say who they were wearing the raybans. And you're not supposed to record anything here, but like they're wearing them. And it's like, oh, like, yeah.

this is like catching on. It's catching on with tech people, powerful people, and it's catching on with normal people, which is like that is a circle that meta has not been able to draw in its entirety of existence as a hardware player.

How good did Jensen look in the glasses? I can't comment. I'm telling you, I think, VR is interesting. There's stuff in VR, like Supernatural. They keep promoting as a hit. And there was actually,

Supernatural just commissioned some study where they claim that waving bats in VR as Strenios is running. It feels like it. Sure. Like, sure. Whatever, man. To me, yes, agreed. That fancy Peloton Beat Sabre is the same as like a swift run. Like, more prior to you.

But that's the only thing that's sticky, right? And Apple doesn't anything that's sticky yet, except for the monitors. We'll see. I just think Apple moving away, the compromise of the Vision Pro was, They built a VR headset with all this pass through and the eyes and stuff to make it closer to AR. And if what they're going to do is drop the eyes and go head more towards VR, that feels like a turn that is notable because the real platform. You want to talk about the real platform shift has always been there. Everybody knows this.

Tim Cook has talked about that as being the big platform shift. And to go to, we just made the best VR headset. All right. We've been going, we're way too long. This is out of control. Does this show ever go long? I don't think that ever happened. I don't have pierce here to hold me in.

That's what's going on here. We've got to take a break. We'll be right back. More on the road chest after this. 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.

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going on ai and a lot of it is just as always ever confounding decisions by ai companies Let's start with a confounding branding decision. There's a new company. It's called Safe Super Intelligence, SSI. Good name. This is Elias Hutsever, who, if you recall, was a CTO of Open AI who participated in the coup against Sam Altman and then changed his mind. There's some safe superintelligence right there, whether or not you have belief in that decision. Then they couldn't figure out how to bring him back to the company, and now he's left to start doing an out.

What is going on here? Yeah, I mean, Ilya, not just the CTO, the co-founder, and really the one who is driving the research agenda at OpenAI. It was his decision to lean into the transformer, the T and Chat TPT. So I think I've heard one of the largest individual shareholders, like incredibly influential. He's someone that AI researchers look to as like a demigod, right? And he has been totally quiet. There's been this meme of like, where's Ilya for the last, you know, six state months, really since the November coup attempt. And yeah, he's back with a company that they will not describe anything about,

except that they're going to invent super safe AGI, whatever the hell of that means. His co-founder is Daniel Gross, who used to run AI at Apple, which is interesting. And now I would consider one of, if not the most plugged-in venture capitalists and AI, who's been raising a ton of money and deploying it into startups. And they are putting the call out for people to join. and I'm sure we'll be rating Ilya's former org at Open AI in very due time. And the key thing here is Ilya saying we are going to be free from, I forget the exact wording, but we're going to be free from the products and management day to day and only focus on long-term

aligned AGI research and we will not release anything until we hit AGI. So this is a this is a pure research lab, which is what Ili. has been known for his entire career. I'm going to read this paragraph to you. Yeah, read it. Because anybody who has ever worked anywhere is, well, I think have the same reaction to this paragraph. Our singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles.

And our business model means safety, security, and progress are all insulated from short-term commercial pressures. I'm sorry. What? Well, the business model is we just raised, uh, an ungodly amount of money, and we're going to keep raising ungodly amounts of money. But that means you don't have a business fault. Right.

Yeah. Like, that's how you get to do these things. Is like, you don't, you don't have the pressure of a business. Yes. Isn't that just all a really pointed jab at Sam Haltman? But yes. Right. Like, I figured it was more that than actually.

Like, in this case, I was assuming that he was going less like, I'm here to make money, because he's made it very clear he doesn't care about money. And more like, I'm here to like say I don't like what Sam Altman did. And so I want to make a company where we're going to do cool stuff. All I'm saying is I watched Max and two of her six-year-old friends from kindergarten try to play lemonade stand and they are distracted by management overhead and product cycles. And their business model means they often compromise on safety security and progress. Like there's just like no way you can put any group of people together and not have management

and over read. It is, it is not possible, especially if you're trying to hire the most highly paid sought after talent that exists in technology today. And that's what I mean. It's like, I don't, I read this paragraph. I'm like, this doesn't, you can't do this. The VC math here. The VC math here is simple. We will give you whatever you want. And when you invent AGI, it will change everything. It will be the new fire. And we'll figure it out. That's, I guarantee you that's the extent of the diligence. I was going to ask. ask, like, where is the money coming from to recruit all of these very highly paid people? Well, they won't say where they've raised money from.

So if you know, let me know. But if you're listening to this, I want to find out. Daniel, they're all super wealthy. And they will have no trouble raising whatever they want because when you co-founded OpenAI, you can raise whatever you want. And then in particular, participated in the notable management overhead of doing a huge coup against the CEO. Yes. A failed coup?

Yeah, it's like your track record of not having management overhead is very bad. Also, like a question I have is what is safe AGI? I keep hearing this. No, super intelligence. It's not AGI. Our super intelligence, which is actually now the new word for what comes after AGI apparently is the thing I keep hearing. And so we keep inventing new terms because they realize like the terms they had.

No one understands or they don't actually even understand what they are. What is safe AGI? What does this mean? Like Ilya's whole thing at Open AI was alignment, right? He set up this alignment group that was going to get 20% of Open AIs compute budget. Apparently, they never did. That led to a lot of infighting. And I think helped him try to kick Sam out.

But I always hear this. And I'm like, aligning for who? And under what values are we aligning? And they don't seem to have an answer. And that's been like a consistent problem with AI, right? Is that they're always like, yeah, this is going to be for everyone. But we only trained it with these certain data sets. We only trained it using like the pre-established knowledge of the certain people creating it.

So it's actually fairly insular and doesn't work for everyone and there are enormous edge cases every time we deploy it. And you know, as Nila and I uncovered when we were reporting on the coup attempt, like this gets kind of portrayed in the media as this, you know, acceleration versus deceleration, almost like religious faction war that's happening. And I do think there's part of that. I do think Ily is almost like religious and is like, fervor here. But a lot of this is just like boring company stuff, business stuff. It's like you wanted budget, you didn't get it, you got layered, therefore you don't want to work there anymore. OpenAI just hired a CPO who used to run product at Instagram and a CFO who was the CEO of Nextdoor a public company. It's very clear where Open AI is going. They're going to IPO. They want to

build a massive business. They're going to get rid of being a nonprofit. It's very clear. And so if you're, this week made some noises about not being a nonprofit. Right. And so if that's the direction they're going, you're Ilya, it's like, you just want to do research, right? And that's where a lot of these researchers still are. They just want to do cutting edge frontier model development. And this is him saying, come here, we'll do it. And we should also note this is now the third offshoot of open AI that has been created to create safer AI from Open AI, whose mission is also to create safe AI.

It's not a great look. Yeah. So you have Anthropic. I would actually put XAI in this camp. Elon was the co-founder of OpenAI. Now you have SSI, which is also, I feel like it's a medical term or something. What am I? I got this once.

It was, you take a pill for it. It's fine. It's a neo-Zempec, SSI. Yeah. Look, I just, it's great that everybody thinks they can accomplish these things. I actually think it's unclear at all. whether Transformers and LLMs can ever do the things that people want them to do. And in fact, over time, it has been more and more clear that perhaps they cannot.

And so what I'm dying to know is if SSI or any of the other companies that think they can build AGI, if they have another idea. Yeah. Because if the only idea is we're going to make a slightly better LLM, I actually don't, I'm not, you're not going to make, I'm not worried about whether it will be safe, because it's not going to be super intelligent. I'm just, why are people trying to build an AGI? Like, these people are nerds.

They watch movies. You just answered your own question. No, but they watch the movies. They play the games. Like, this man is setting out to be the audio clips you hear when you're walking through the ruins a thousand years later in a video game of the guy being like, I don't know what's happening. Why is my AI going and killing the world?

Like, that's what he's setting himself up for if he was actually successful in his grand ambitions. And I'm just like, why? Because the industry thinks that they have invented a new form of intelligence, and that hasn't happened before. And so I think the natural progression of this is that it's all smarter than us and replaces us. And it seems inevitable to the people building this stuff.

What we see is like chat GPT can't get a math equation right, right? That's like what we see. What they're seeing, we got to keep in mind like they gate this stuff. Like GPT4 was in existence for like over a year before open. AI actually deployed it in the world. So they're seeing things we're not. I'm not going to give them too much of the credit there. But I do think there's, you know, Jan Lacoon, who's the chief AI researcher at Meta, has been saying what you just said in Eli that LLMs are not the path to AGI. So his group is actually working on what comes after the transformer. What is the architecture

we need? Because these are parrots, right? These LLMs are fancy prediction engines, right? And you You don't really unlock intelligence that way. Yeah. No, I mean, yesterday I assigned our futures team to write language as not intelligence. Like, I feel like we just need to say some very explicit declarative sentences that are true. Like, dogs are very intelligent and cannot generate a PowerPoint. Like, you know what I mean? Like, we're getting confused about what intelligence is at a very high level.

I've been lately thinking a lot about the Steve Jobs slide of technology and liberal arts. you know, it's like, oh, you guys forgot about this whole street. This whole street's missing from this conversation right now. And there's just a piece of this puzzle where you can bet on this stuff to get better at an infinite rate, but like most curves level off. And it is unclear to me what actually makes things intelligent. That said, well, you know, good luck. Good luck building your company with no management overhead.

This website. Come on decoder. If you pull that off, boy, do I have a podcast for you. Right? I spent an hour talking about management overhead every week with people. people, but like, it turns out it always, like three six-year-old girls have management overhead. I promise you. Maybe more than any company in America.

Speaking of confounding decisions by AI companies, perplexity started out so hot, man. They were the ones, right? You can pick any model. You can ask these questions. It was better searching Google. And it turns out, boy, have they been awful shady along the way. What is going on here? Well, yeah, so perplexity for those who don't know is trying to unseat Google with an AI search engine.

It's actually a good product most of the time. I would say that I like their AI answers more than Google's on average. And now we kind of know why. It's because they're stealing a bunch of content. And yeah, so Wired did some good reporting and found out that they were going around their crawler blocker. I've heard rumors that perplexity has been doing this at an even grander scale with even much larger corpus of data. And this is the open AI playbook on steroids a little bit, which is just run fast and beg for forgiveness. And that's what they're doing.

They're basically going around people who have said, no, you are not allowed to summarize this and doing it anyway. And the way they're doing it is both shady and hilarious. So they published some IP ranges of their crawlers, and they publish the name of their crawler. So poor robots.t.t.X. A text file that should not bear the weight of all intellectual property law on the internet, but which currently does. You can set it to disallow these crawlers. You can set it to disallow GPT bot, which is OpenAI. There's Google Bot Plus, I think.

So there's Google Bot, which is a regular search index, and there's the other one, which is Google's AI crawler. I feel like I need to disclose here. we used to disclose GPD bot at Vox Media, and then our company signed a deal, and now we don't. There you go, there's a disclosure. And you could disallow perplexity. And on top

of that, they did this thing where, like, here are our IP ranges. Like, if you don't trust robots, you can disallow these IPs. And then what Wired found, and then the folks at Mac Stories, which is a great indie Apple site, they found that their content was showing up anyway in perplexity. And then the

investigations basically revealed these IP ranges were and the crawler was fake. And they were setting up headless Windows 10 machines to browse the web. Yes. Like, you know those pictures of like the streaming fraud farms where hot dogs are just swiping Android phones? There's your VC money. I love it.

Just swiping away on a Windows 10 browser. Just imagine if those Windows machines had recall. It's just like crazy. And the CEO for Flexi has talked a lot of shit about Google. Like, why are these results so bad? And, like, Google, for better or worse, is trying to play by the rules. It's still pissing everybody off, but they're attempting to play by the rules, the publishers have to. I mean, Google is under consent decrees.

They're a massively regulated mega-cap tech company, so they can't do this kind of stuff. Yeah, and here's a startup being like, what if we lied. Yeah, what we just didn't do any of that? And to be clear, I keep making this comparison. You called it the opening eye playbook. This was the Google playbook. 20 years ago. Yep.

Right. Google just allowed all of Viacom's content to be on YouTube. Google indexed every book in the world without permission. Google did image search, which we got sued over.

And it won all those lawsuits because those products were new. So they would show up in court and be like, judge YouTube. And the judge would be like, YouTube's sick. And Viacom would be like, our marketing staffers are using this anyway

because it's sick. Google image search. So useful. Let's concoct. And it's nothing like this has ever existed before. Let's concoct some reasoning to allow Google to take all this stuff for free because the theory is that you'll go buy

the image from Getty once you found it on Google. It's unclear what that theory really came out to in the end. I never did that. Yeah. Alex is not like, I opened a Getty library the next day, a Getty account the next day. But those are the theories back then. Google books, that might have worked, right? You can search all the books.

Maybe you'll actually buy the book in the end. Did it work out totally? I don't know. But those were the theories back then because the product. are so new, the experiences are so new. Proplexity is just like, yeah, we stole a bunch of stuff, and what we've delivered is an incremental improvement on Google search. And I don't think that's going to win this time.

Maybe. I am shocked at how little the people inside these AI companies and their investors, again, I was just at a very fancy tech conference with a lot of these people, how little they actually care about this problem, how it is really just like, this is a bunch of speed bumps that will go over to getting where we're going to go. And maybe it's because of the fact that Google is Google. And they did all this 20 years ago, and they're a trillion, multi-trillion dollar company. I think it's back to what...

Yeah. I was going to say, I think it's back to what Neely said about liberal arts education. They just don't have any, like, historical context. They're like, yeah, this is going to work. They didn't take any history classes. I didn't. I don't need to know about Google. This is fine.

No, these are systems people. Yeah. They don't think in terms of these, the, values that we get mad about when it's like, hey, I made a thing. I charged people for it and you took it. That's not okay. With intellectual property, with writing and stuff like that, for some reason, it's just not a thing that a lot of tech people that I know, it doesn't register for them. I don't know why. Right. Because they didn't take liberal arts. They're like, what is an English class? I want to spend more time. I don't have a view of this. I haven't locked this into my brain yet.

So people have thoughts to send them to me because I need the help. But I can feel this weird shift that I've been calling the copyright apocalypse because some people care about it a lot now, more than ever before. The this is mine and you took it between influencers on social media platforms rages out of control now. Right. I'm a Taylor Swift fan and those three notes of a song sound like three notes in Olivia Rodriguez fan. we have to do fandom war now until the music industry doles out writing credits

is a real thing that happens at the craziest level this is a real thing that happens and that is copyright maximalism by really young people and then over here you have nobody owns anything that's just something

and I should get it for free and those things are just in tension in a way that it feels unresolved and potentially unresolvable like you can't you can't have a bunch of YouTubers I made this YouTube video first and anybody who even makes a video that looks like it is stealing from me right next to everything in the internet should be free. Maybe that's it. Maybe there's not a lot

of love for media companies as we all know. And the fact that it's scraping wired or the verge or whatever is like, whatever, they're fine. But when it's like your favorite influencer, your favorite creator and they're on their feed going, hey, like this model, don't use it because they trained on my stuff. I do you think you're right. I think people feel a lot more viscerally about that than they do, oh, like, companies, right? I think it's when it becomes the individual. And again, what Google was up against, what Napster was up against, was the big bad, right? Like, the only face of the anti-Napster movement was Lars Ulrich from Metallica.

And it did not work for him. But really, the face was like Hollywood in the music industry. And no one ever feels any sympathy towards Hollywood in the music industry. Like, Hollywood could be like, you wouldn't steal a cigarette, like, whatever they would say. you wouldn't, what was it? You wouldn't download a car. Right. So Hollywood can put up the banners that say, you wouldn't download a car.

And everyone's like, screw you. I'm super going to download a movie. If I could download a car, I would. That'd be sick. Yeah. I've had this 3D printer for years, not making cars. But they were the big bats. Influencers are like people.

Like influencers like people. You know what I mean. Influencers are actual people that you have parissocial relationships with. Yeah. And like, there's something very emotional there that is not resolved. And it's going to come to a head because, you know, the next story we have on our list here is a bunch of social networks that want to introduce AI in various ways. Alex, you played with one. And before we get to that, I just want to call out TikTok is now letting people make AI avatars of creators.

Yeah. Right? And saying this is your ad creative. And this is going to come for every social platform. Yeah, that's right. Like in a massive way. Like, if you are a creator and you feel the burnout and you can make 50 more ads during your brand deal using it, you might do it. Yeah.

No, this is happening. So, yeah, I wrote about this new app, which was, you know, I get a lot of test flights to try things. And this is the first test flight I've gotten in a while that made me feel something very strongly where I was like, oh, when I opened it. And it's, it is like Instagram, it meets character AI where basically it's a bunch of AI's in a feed commenting and posting together. And there's humans, but they don't need to be there. And like, it's actually in some cases, not most, but in some cases, hard to tell who is human and who is not. And they just raised a bunch of money. It's an ex-snap people.

And the reason I wrote about it is because meta is about to do the exact same thing. Zuckerberg told me so last September. And I think later this year, we're going to see them start to roll this out where basically anyone can create their own AIs, send them into Instagram, send them into Facebook. And same thing with businesses. And the idea is that if you're an influencer and you feel overwhelmed by your DMs, maybe an AI handles that for you or maybe an AI actually posts on your behalf. Zuckerberg is super excited about this. I know because he's talked to me about it.

It's very freaky to imagine what this actually does to our social networks. It's coming way faster than we think, though. Well, it's interesting because like in South Korea, they've been doing a little bit of something like this, right? with K-pop stars where you can engage with K-pop stars on sites owned by the K-pop-Stars companies. And it's not always. Sometimes it's them. It's not always that. Usually it's a bot.

It's a person pretending to be them. And so that parasycial, how do we automate that parasycial stuff, has been happening in Korea for a long time. But I think the difference here is that was gated to, okay, you have to go download this app for this publisher and use it. Whereas this would be on meta, Instagram? This would be like you open Instagram and it's like, oh, is that account an AI? They may have three arms. Okay, maybe then. Yeah.

Well, that's coming. So then there's the other part, which is you send agents out on your behalf as an influencer or someone where you're like, someone wants to pay money to subscribe. And one of the things I offer is like DMs with me. Yeah. And then my agent will just like do that. Yeah. And I won't do it. And that's infinitely scalable.

Which if you are an individual creator and all these platforms are organized, towards tearing down collectives and enhancing individual creators. If you're not even a creator, your ability to scale is limited by your emotional capacity to do this work and your minutes in the day. Yeah. And so, of course, you're going to let the robot talk to your fans for you. Like, it is the biggest no-brainer in the history of the world. Of course you're going to say, okay, you brand X wants to do an integration with me, but they want 50 different versions as creative. I will make one and let the AI deep fake me into five.

more. And that is already happening. Like, TikTok is enabling the feature. Like, it's happening now. Yeah. Well, Alex, to your question about why, like, I was talking to Vutran, the CEO of Butterfly, is this new app about this, the why, because I showed this app to my wife and she was like, just like, it was an immediate, just like, oh, you know, like, I'm like, I think you're going to meet a lot of people like that who are like, why does this need to exist? Like, why do we need to, like, fill our time with just empty AI social media? And his, point was like, yes, it feels kind of broken right now, and I wrote about this. It feels like when the hosts in Westworld break a little bit, it's like not there. But he was like, you know,

I got into tech by like making friends on forums, talking to people that I never met. I only knew their username. He's like, we will get the models quickly to that quality. And as someone who also came up and got into tech in a similar way, like through like making friends on forums, like, what happens when like I never met those people, right? I don't know a lot of their names ever. So if they were AI, would it have made a difference? I mean, we had a whole philosophical conversation about this, but he was like, you don't actually want to talk to people. There's traits of being human that you like, and AI will quickly copy all those traits.

And I'm like, mind blown and also no. No, thank you. But is it inevitable? That's the question. It ignores like in the 80s and 90s, there were the 900 numbers, and you could like call like The Cryptkeeper was one, like Corey Haim and stuff like that. And Corey Haim was not answering the phone to talk to a little 12-year-old girl who had a crush on him, right? Like, that was a voice actor, pretending to be him.

And quickly there's- Wait, actually, we just learned something very important about what you spent your money on when you were a child. It was not me. Because if I had called a 900 number, I would have not had a good time. My dad super caught me calling you 9-100 number once. He was like, you're never using the phone again. But that was like part of why, I mean, it was one that was the cost of 900 numbers, but that was the other part of it where it was like 900 numbers were a little sketchy as a kid. You weren't really supposed to call them.

And it was because like, yeah, it was a bunch of like not con artists, but basically licensed con artists pretending to be other people. And it's like, that's gross. You hear this from tech people all the time. You're like, this is just the same as this other small problem that we had in the past. But now you're doing it at scale. Yeah, like now you're doing it at scale. And that's like, what if we took the small problem? and made it global.

It's like, I think maybe there's something different here. This thing, by the way, that you just mentioned, it's come up several times now. It is this unshakable belief that these models are going to get better.

Yeah. Like on the rate of like Moore's Law, we'll get better. And I don't, that metric doesn't exist. Like there isn't a Moore's Law of LLM models yet. You know, we've only really experienced

3.5 to 4 in the public. Mm-hmm. But I, and I understand that they've all got stuff we're looking at that we can't see. Sure. someone's got to give me the number.

Like, give me the rate of change before I believe that this model will be able to simulate whatever happened to me on forums when I was a child. Like, you know, like, you wouldn't last a minute in the asylum when they raised me. It's like, I don't think so. Well, so, yeah, there's no Moore's law. There's. That's incredible. I mean, there's no Moore's law.

There's scaling law. And the idea is that as you continue to put more data data and compute into these models, they get exponentially better, that continues to hold true. If you compare the output, the creative output of like GPT2 or GPT3 to 4, it's a massive difference. But they're also running into how to... But you're saying that line is not linear. That's what I'm saying. No, I'm saying everyone who works and I believes that it is still linear.

Yeah. But it's not because we've just seen multiple stories about how they're all desperate for data to the point that they're like, what if we make AI machines to just create more content for us, that can't go wrong. Oh, the thing I'm hearing is it's going to be synthetic data for. for training. So literally, you're, you're going to have the AIs get good enough that they start talking and then the AIs train on the AIs. That's where we're going. All right. We got to bring this here. I can't. I can't stay here. I'm just saying make real

friends. Go to the forums while you can. All right. Get in there while the getting's good. Get past the username. Get their actual name. Because they may be an AI in here. Request a driver's license immediately. We're taking a break. We'll be right back with the lightning route. 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.

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comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.com. slash vergecast. That's clod. dot AI slash Verchcast and check out Claude Pro

which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. clod. 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

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

Like, that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America, actually. Let's begin. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, 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. It's the lightning round. I will say the first segment of the show was much more like a lightning round, and this is just going to be different. It's fine. This lighting round remains unsponsored, but many options exist. for you, the potential advertiser, but you can't do AI ads. Yeah.

You have to let me do it. You can only do AI ads if they're trained on Neelai's voice. What's the most dangerous advertising you can buy? It's letting me do the ads. All right. Cranes, let's start with you. Nvidia's super rich. Can I say, so the story, right, is Nvidia's overtook Microsoft and Apple as the world's most

valuable company. Microsoft and Apple has been going back and forth on market cap for a while. Invidia is not big of them. The crazy thing about this whole story to me is, one, Nvidia has been around for a million years. Video game fans exist. Right? Yep.

Like, people put Nvidia cards and their PCs all over the place. It has been on this run for a long time, right? Yeah. Like, this is years now of Nvidia stock skyrocketing. And the way CNN covered it, the headline in CNN was, this company whose name you can't pronounce is now the world's most richest company. It's like, yeah. It's actually pretty easy.

I'm busy to pronounce. I feel like... Yeah, it's not... One, it's not that hard. It's easier than SSI. An editor and a writer together, and they're both like, I don't know what this is. We got this. It's just like at some point...

I understand we run at tech publication. We're like swimming the water, but like they've been headed here for at least two years. Yeah. Yeah, we had to hear about them like cryptocurrency, right? InVitya had this big, all these big stock jumps because of cryptocurrency because everybody was buying the GPUs because that was the best way to train. Oh my God. This was completely out of my brain.

this was gone. This information had been deleted. Yeah, because it was 2020. Just like crypto. We don't think about 2020. And so that was happening to NVIDIA. And so it was like steadily ticking up. And it was like, oh boy, AMD and Intel or might be able to beat it.

And then it was like, we're going to take all the crypto stuff out of our GPUs. And then everybody was like, hey, AI's here. Yeah. Yeah. And others have been. The effect of this, the effect of this inside NVIDIA is fascinating. I have heard, and there's been some reporting, and I want to keep doing more reporting on it. So if you have stories, if you're listening to this and you have gotten fabulously wealthy at

NVIDIA, hit me up, we can talk off the record. They have a retirement problem inside NVIDIA. There was a post I saw where it said if you joined as a mid-level software engineer five years ago and your total comp was $700,000, which is a lot, right? But in tech, that's actually pretty middle of the road for a good engineer. Your compensation yearly now is $10 million. That rules. they actually have people just retiring like en masse.

And so like the question for NVIDIA is like how, what do you do to motivate people when people have gotten so fabulously wealthy so fast? And it's obvious there's going to be a correction. It's obvious NVIDIA is not going to stay the richest, the most valuable company in the world, right? So how does that collapse happen? Is it a slow collapse? Is it a fast one?

And what happens to the employee base is fascinating. Well, you get rid of management overhead and product cycles. There you go. That's obvious what you do. Merge with SSI. It's going to last a while, right? Because they are the only ones making the really good AI processors for server levels, right? Well, they have software lock-in, too, with Google.

Yeah. Google's their main primary competitor, right? Yeah. Well, yeah, Arm, AAMD. I would say AMD is like an arms dealer is probably the biggest one. Google doesn't sell TPUs really as much. But Nvidia's got a big head-star. This is one of the things that, like, has kept Intel propped up for years

was because Intel had this huge headstart in the server space, 99% of the server space. So, you know, they can bomb a couple of years against Qualcomm and be fine because they got the servers. And I think Nvidia's kind of feels like not quite as cushy a position, but similarly cushy. Yeah. I mean, they have Kuda.

Like, what they have is a software layer that makes their GPUs more valuable. Yeah. Which AMD does not, but if you run Azure, I mean, we've had all these people in the show and Alex talks them all. If you run Azure or AWS or Google Cloud or whatever, you do not want to be beholden to Kuda and Nvidia. No. You want all kinds of things to happen. That's why Apple and Nvidia don't look at each other anymore. It is very funny that Apple and Nvidia hate each other.

It used to be just like a little funny because Apple would insist that bad graphics cards were good graphics cards. And that was just funny. like in its way. Now it's deeply funny. It's extremely good. Because all that open AI integration is happening in H-100s that Apple does not want to talk about at all. And doesn't want to pay for.

And that's the thing. Market forces will ensure that Nvidia does not stay the top GPU supplier in the world because they are too expensive. And no one wants Jensen being the king of GPUs, right? Everyone wants to have options. And so, Nvidia's challenge to justify this valuation and to keep growing is to build lock-in. And it is like,

it would make a lot of sense for them to start. competing directly with Google Cloud and Azure to become a one-stop shop, because otherwise, people will outchip them. That's just going to happen. And we'd take time. And we would seem that for years with them and, and, and, and, and they're like, like, on the gaming side, they got really, really good at the lock-in. They got really good at being like, you can't use these AMD processors because we went out to every single game developer and made sure they were using our tools. So you had to use our, like, we get the better stuff. So they're, it's going to be really interesting over the next couple of years is they just like absolutely duke it out with some of these other companies.

And I think a lot of people are going to be surprised at how vicious they get. Oh, yeah. But it's like one step down from that, right? Alex, Heath was saying these things are free. Like Apple's not paying for it. If there's no business model one step down from we paid all of the money in the world for H-100s, the price of the H-100 will just fall. Like if the demand is there right now because everyone thinks are going to monopolize something,

what it is remains to be seen. But that's why the price is high. We'll see. All right. I'm going to go next because I want Heath to end the lighting round with his. We just continue to track tech litigation. The United States Department of Justice has sued Adobe for deceiving subscription pricing in Creative Cloud. And it actually is deceiving.

It is deceiving in one specific way, which is when you sign up for Creative Cloud, you can pick annually build, annually build monthly or monthly. annually bill monthly is the default choice. So that means you pay for a year, but they charge you per month. And you've signed a one year contract. And if you try to cancel early, they just charge you the rest of the year. Or you can sign up for monthly, where you can just cancel after every month. Because it's the default, because it's the cheapest, people pick it. And they think it's a monthly subscription.

There's no fine print. It doesn't actually disclose that this will happen. They try to cancel to get stuck with the rest of the bill. This is bad. This is straightforwardly bad. for a company with basically a monopoly market share in these tools, it is also just beyond the pit. Like, this is pittly shit.

What are you doing? Like, people are going to buy Photoshop, Ben. That's a local gym move on their part. I really think about, I've been thinking about this a lot with Adobe. I've basically insisted the verge overcover Adobe over the past few years because they're such a central player and everything that's going on. Like, influencer media. depends on the existence of Adobe. That's weird.

Premiere runs YouTube. Like, YouTube never built creative tools, which is one of the weirdest things about YouTube. They had that one app on the phone once, but they've never built a video editor. The success of TikTok is they made a video editor. That's really good. They made all those templates,

and they made it easy to do all this stuff. YouTube never did that. They're like, upload some videos, and then people built the entire creator's ecosystem on the back of Premiere, largely, and a little bit of final cut,

because there's so many creators to use Macs, but mostly Premiere, and Google never built that stuff. So you should look at this industry. Adobe's at the center of everything.

They're at the center of all these, all these AI creativity battles, right? Because they have Adobe stock and people use Photoshop and General Phil. And the more you cover Adobe, you realize there's a massive difference

in how the company perceives itself and what it does and the tools it makes and how everyone else perceives Adobe. It's a yawning gap. I've said this before. We had Shantanu Ryan on Decoder. He never talks to anyone really. He shows up on CNBC after earnings reports.

It never gives wide-ranging interviews. I was so excited for that interview. This guy never talks. We asked him all the questions. Some of their questions were pretty harsh. The audience was mad at me just for paying attention to Adobe. They were like, why would you platform Adobe? Which is an incredible question because it's Adobe.

I don't think I've seen a company burn that this much goodwill ever. Right? And then on top of it, they had their Terms of Service debacle, where we've covered Terms of Service changes like this so many times. Like, I could barely even pay attention to it, where they change their terms of service to let them do content moderation on their cloud services. So if you run a cloud service, people will put bad things on your cloud service. That is just as true, effective nature as there is, like, horrific shit will end up on your cloud storage system if you have a scaled cloud. storage system. And what you don't want to do is give a bunch of contractors PTSD, which is a real thing that has happened that we have covered by making them look through stuff on cloud

services or look through reports. So you build automated systems to go through your cloud services and find the child abuse material. Like that's what you do. So Adobe changes its terms to let people know it's going to do this in Creative Cloud. People assume that they're going to train on AI and they freak out at Adobe. And that Adobe has so little goodwill that even as they tried to explain this, people are like, we don't believe you. And so now they've updated their terms of service again. And you just connect that directly to, oh, you're getting sued by the government because annual paid monthly was not clear to people. And you charge them the rest of the money when they canceled.

It's just like, it's crazy to me that this company is so important, but does not realize that it needs to maintain the goodwill of the people that depend on it. Well, you don't have to when you're a monopoly. You can just be a monopoly. But it's a, but it's a sneaky. I met all their executive. They're not dumb. Yeah. It's like baffling to me.

Yeah, but they're, you know, they can do what they want. They're monopoly. What are you going to do? Go to Da Vinci? Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. A lot of people, yeah.

Them not acquiring Figma, I think, will go down. We're going to come back on the failed Figma deal. One, because Figma will turn into a different company and we'll see if they can go compete with Adobe. But that was driven as much by some of this burned goodwill as anything. And I think we're going to see the creative tools industry bifurcate on that moment over the course of history. Because if they had acquired figma, a lot of things would have been a lot different, I think. All right.

Last lightning round one, we got to end here. Heath. This is the best story in history. Okay, yeah. The San Francisco Standard has a fun story where techies are increasingly paying up to 1,200 an hour for fashion consultants because of CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg, deciding to wear chains. and I just encourage everyone to read this story. There is a side-by-side photo of a guy who's gone through one of these fashion consultants. I would argue he looked better before.

I'm not going to judge, like, you know, whatever. Or at least the same. It's just like, as my grandfather would say, you know, money doesn't buy sense. And like reading this like, like, techies like, just be who you are. You don't need to like try to look cool. And you don't need to pay 1,200 an hour to try. to look cool. Like, the internet is there.

Like, you could just research on your own. This side-by-side photo is brutal. It's brutal. It's not brutal because he looks better or worse. He looks the same. Yeah, the same. Like, both of them are kind of just baggy outfits. Yeah.

And then, like, it's perfect because at the end, like, the story, they're, like, interviewing a founder who's done this. And then he's like, I'm making an AI app that will do this for people for $20 a month. And it's like, the circle just completes itself. That's amazing. You know, Amazon tried to do that with their weird camera. Yeah. Super didn't work.

Yeah. I would say if you're paying someone this much money to take you to Bloomingdale's, you can do better than this photo. That's what I'm saying. Like, it's, Oh, I don't think he went to Bloomingdale's. No,

it does. That's a couch doesn't. Yeah. This is, he's in the, he's in the dressing room at Bloomingy's. Oh my gosh. Get out.

Leave the store, sir. No, that's a bad look if that's what you're pulling out of Bloomingdale's. That's like, you get that at Dillards. That's brutal. All right, we got to end it here before we do more shaming. Sorry for your fashion shaming.

You can look cool no matter where you shop. I love a Dillard's. Everyone is constantly asking me where the jackets come from, and all of them were pandemic purchases at either Home Depot or Walmart. I'm just telling you that's like I had money to spend, and there are only two stores to spend it at. It's like, you can look cool no matter where you shop. Tractor supply.

Just know who you are. That's a quote heat. Just know who you are. Just be that person as loudly as you. All right, that's it. And also make an agent of yourself and have it flirt with other people on Instagram for money. That's the future. More gold chains.

More gold chains. All right. We'll be back on Tuesday with more of the Windows Arm laptop benchmark scores. That's a big deal. I'm excited for those reviews to come out. And then we've got all kinds of stuff. It's a summer. It's like wild time in tech.

And then we're going to get rid of all over management overhead and product cycles. Just pure intelligence. Can't wait. VBI. Thanks to Heath for Phil. filling in, good luck to David, doing whatever he's doing. That's it. That's Richcast, rock and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week.

Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.