The Vergecast - The race to win AI — and hack iMessage

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Dan Seifert discuss Google Gemini's attempt to compete with ChatGPT, Beeper Mini bringing iMessage to Android, and shakeups in the podcast industry, and much more. Further reading: “Welcome to hell, Elon” has now been cited in a Supreme Court brief. Google launches Gemini, the AI model it hopes will take down GPT-4  Google’s Gemini AI model now powers the Bard chatbot Google’s Gemini AI model is coming to the Pixel 8 Pro — and eventually to Android Apple joins AI fray with release of model framework Bing’s GPT-4-powered Deep Search takes its time with AI questions Getty lawsuit against Stability AI to go to trial in the UK Beeper Mini brings iMessage to Android EU officials think iMessage isn’t ‘popular enough’ with businesses to warrant regulation. Spotify cancels industry-favorite podcast Heavyweight  Spotify’s not going for Pulitzers anymore Spotify’s CFO and general counsel sold millions of dollars worth of stock the day after the layoff. Tidal is laying off more than 10 percent of its staff. Seems like Apple’s iTunes Movies and TV Shows apps for Apple TV really are going away.   Here’s how a bridal photo captured a single person in three poses at once Federal judge vows to investigate Google for intentionally destroying chats Microsoft is investigating a Windows issue that’s renaming printers to HP LaserJet  Motorola Razr 2023 review: not enough of a good thing Disney Plus and Hulu’s one-app experience is launching in beta The race to 5G is over — now it’s time to pay the bill Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to Verdechast, the flagship podcast of Samsung Dex enthusiasts. And me. And Alex Cranz. Hi, I'm Eli. I'm your friend. Alex Cranz is here.

I don't know what Dex is. No, I've used it. I've used it. You're going to find out. David Pierce refuses to use Dex. So we've replaced him with Dan Seifert who's going to show us his deck set up today. I'm the Dex Defender. It's coming.

Actually, David is just on vacation. Yeah. But for a moment, you think. thought that I was so hardcore into Samsung Dex that I clipped my friend from his own show, didn't you? Yeah. I would have believed it. It's like, that's who we are now.

Yeah. You and Dan are both like very passionate Dex defenders. In different directions. Totally different directions. And David's like, no. Yeah. If you don't have a strong opinion about Samsung Dex, you can't be a pro or con. I'm forming one right now so I don't get ejected from the room.

It's going. It's coming. No, David is on a very well-deserved weekend. Dan is filling in for him. Hi, Dan. How you doing? I'm all right. I am not recording through Dex, to be clear. We'll get into it. Not the right tool for the job. I saw Dan in the office here that. And he goes,

look at this. And he pulls out what by all accounts looks like a laptop. And we'll let people look at it in a minute. I mean, it's nuts. And he's got his phone magneted on the side. And he's like, it's Dex. And I was like, that's awesome. And I was like, you have to come on the Vergecast and talk about it. And the first thing Dan said to me was, I will not record through this. I don't trust it enough.

enough. Nothing mission critical is happening here. Dan, show us your just frankly absurd galaxy fold Samsung Dax laptop setup. I'm going to try and show it to the camera as best as I can. Remember, it's a radio show. It's a radio show. So if you're in your car right now, pull over and close your eyes and in your mind's eye, imagine what Dan is saying, or alternatively pull over and watch this on YouTube.

Those are your two choices. So this is like not a new thing, to be clear. I bought a next dock, which is a lap dock thing. It's been out for a couple of years. This idea has been out for like well over a decade. You plug your phone into it. It's a laptop looking thing, but there's no guts inside of it. There's no computer inside of it.

It's just a touchscreen, keyboard, trackpad, battery, and you plug your phone into it. But what I did was I got this magnetic mount. It's like a folding magsafe mount. So I put a magsafe. If anyone's been following me on any threads or Ramesodon, you might have seen that I put a magsafe ring on the back of my Z-fold. And then I bought this magnetic mount that I stuck to the back of the next dock. And so now I've got a deck setup with my phone on the side. And it's effectively a dual-screen decks.

Yeah, that's what I'm calling it. It's the world's worst Chromebook. Wait, is it a dual screen or a triple screen? It's dual. It's dual. See, there's two. Yeah, but the fold, I almost feel like it's a dual screen already. Technically, it's triple screen because the back of the fold has a screen that's not being used.

If I could display something on the screen for people sitting across from me at the coffee shop. I'm actually astonished that Dex doesn't put up a full screen ad on the back of the fold screen. It's like, you're witnessing the power of Samsung decks. Yes, now go buy a fridge. That would be quite wonderful, actually. But no, it's a dual screen thing. I got my phone on one side. the cool thing about this setup is that you can use the phone as a phone.

And so, like, that looks like a phone. Then on the other side is the Dex interface. It is also significantly better than what you were rocking. It is such a vast improvement over my attempt to use Dex. The problem with it is that you still have to use a Galaxy Fold. You have to buy this fake laptop. I don't have a problem with that. But, yeah.

I did not enjoy one minute of using the Galaxy Fold. just every piece of that just made me and i that's not to say i don't enjoy using android i like using android the galaxy fold is a very particular device yes with very particular demands and i just didn't like it's got a particular set of skills we can say that and the skills are being clunkier than a regular phone maybe but it could do a lot more than a regular phone you know i think like just to like back up on the deck's conversation here i think there's are like two things that are appealing about decks. One is what you've been trying to do, Eli, which is like, I'm going ultra lightweight, I'm just traveling with my phone, and I roll into

the office, plug into a hotel desk, and I have a desktop setup with a keyboard mouse and a big screen there. That is one dream. Yeah. The other way, the other path that's interesting, to me, at least, is the setup that I've got here, which is like, you could say, well, you're just carrying around as much as a MacBook Air and a phone anyways. The difference is, I don't have to like sync between two different devices here. Everything's running off the phone. All of my data is running off the phone, and it's using my phone's internet connection. So what this is doing is essentially giving me a laptop-like experience with integrated cellular that I can't really get through Apple or really through a lot of other parties. So that is like the interesting thing.

All that said, both paths can lead to madness and there's a lot of junk involved in either one of them. I just find it pretty fascinating, A, that it works at all, and B, how far it's come since I first experienced decks way back in like 2018. It is wildly different. You don't find it fascinating. No, no. You are delighted by it. I am delighted by gadgets, even if they don't look as well as some other solutions.

I was getting DMs from you about this thing. You were just like, look at it. It works. Yeah, it's very cool. It looks cool as hell. Again, the beginning of my deck's journey started by knowing Dan had been decks-pilled. Yeah, but then what happened when you saw that there was like a fake laptop involved? So first I was like, okay, this is so much closer.

Yeah. To what I thought I wanted. Right. And then he showed me the next doc, which is the most aggressively 16 by 9 laptop in the world. Yeah. Like the amount of bezel that is on the bottom of that display. You can see it from here. It's a good inch below the display of that.

You could make that laptop 4.3 just by reclaiming bezel. Yes. It's a lot of bezel. And then it's still decks, which is clunky. What have you left the laptop at work? Yeah, what if I just had a desk with a laptop on it that I left here? Like I used to do in the before time, that's where we're going. But see, if someone steals this one, they're not going to get important Neli secrets.

Yeah, you can't log into it if there's no phone. Yeah, it's just the fake laptop. I know it's the dream is that you just walk around with a cool phone. Yeah. Just plug it into stuff and having it turn into your thing. Yeah. That's the dream. We all agree that's the dream.

100%. You throw it in a couple of your car, the car lights up, and it's your phone. Yeah. You can sort of get there, but you have to experience car play for better or worse. It's great. You come to the office, you throw it on a magnetic charger, like a pad, screen lights up. You're doing all your stuff. Everyone knows what the dream is.

Yeah. I get emails. People who are like, I feel you on the dream. And then you sit down and you're like, I have to use this galaxy fold. which again, like the screen is just like a bubbly, wavy experience. I mean, I don't know if it was like your specific one or whatever. No, yours is too, Dan. I mean, so if you look at mine, which is a full five, if you're looking at an off-axis,

then yeah, you can see that crease and stuff like that. But when you're holding it straight on, you really don't see the crease. And when the screen is on and you're like experiencing content, you don't see the crease. It just disappears. It just disappears. I've read like 100 books on it this year. The pixel fold, which has, I think, the better aspect ratio when it's folded. See, I disagree entirely.

Because I want to use it as a phone a lot of the time. And the Galaxy Fold does not lend itself to being used as a phone. Yeah. Because it's too tall and too skinny. So you're always unfolding it. The Pixel Fold at least folds in that direction. And it got a big update this week along with the rest of Pixel updates, which we'll talk about. There's actual news this week, like quite a lot of it.

But we're going to do the first 20 minutes on decks. Anyway, the pixel fold got an update this week that forces any app to work on its version of a folding display at full screen. Maybe I'll try that, but it doesn't have a Dex mode. No, you can't plug the Pixel Fold into anything. It doesn't have video out at all. Like, come on, turn it into a Chromebook. Let's do this. First Party Dex.

What do you just like slap it into the back of the one? The flagship podcast of requesting Google make decks. Do it, Google. All right. That's one thing. So the Dex experiments continue apace. I don't recommend them. But if you have strong opinions about Dex, we want to hear from you.

Two, and I just want to mention this before we begin, this is a big Supreme Court case about the social media moderation laws that were passed in Texas and Florida, which I'm just going to tell you, they're blatantly unconstitutional. There's pure violations of the first amendment. They are government's future regulation. But they're at the Supreme Court. Supreme Court's going to, whatever, amicus briefs are being filed in these cases. one is by public knowledge, which we... Those are like supporting briefs, right? The supporting briefs.

So not from the parties. It's just people with strong opinions, filing briefs of Supreme Court. So you look at the dockets, a bunch of people are filing them, public knowledge, which is an organization that we have talked to a lot. Folks from public knowledge you have encountered on the verge many, many times. John Bergmayor, public knowledge, you've probably encountered in our stories or our podcast in past. He sent me an email today. He's like, you're in our brief.

And they cited, welcome to hell, Elon. Yes. In a Supreme Court brief today. which means welcome to hell Elon is now part of our government's history. Like, it's just, it's in the docket on a pivotal First Amendment case. When do you think, like, law students are going to start having to read, it's required reading for them? When my mom read this, she didn't even call me. She was so upset at the number of F-bonds in the story that she called my sister.

And my sister had to call me to call my mother, who then said, why did you use such language? And now Clarence Thomas is going to read that shit. And I just, I'm just, anything can happen. That's my message to the youth of America. Anything can happen. But I'm actually, these cases are big deals. What's inside of it is do social networks have the right to moderate their networks? Do they have their own First Amendment rights to make choices on their networks?

I think the answer has to yes. It doesn't matter which side of the aisle you're on. The answer has to be yes. Because that way you can get things like subreddits. And you need things like subredits. You need, maybe you need something like X that is moderated in one very specific way and something that is different to let people decide. So that's the heart of this case, but it is just very funny to me. I think it's great.

I'm very excited for you. I'm just, again, I just hope Clarence Thomas. I describe the Supreme Court in this piece as a group of uncool weirdos. I mean, I think most of them will read that and be like, fair. I hope so. Most of them, not to Clarence Thomas. I can go through the nine and be like who will see themselves and who will like Alito is going to be pissed. Like Alito's like, look at these Jordans.

I'm cool as shit. Kagan's going to be like, I get it. Understood. If anyone can AI generate for me a photograph of Samuel Alito pointing at his Jordan saying I'm cool as shit. I'm not sure what we'll do with it, but I will accept it. Just into your heart. Just happy to experience it. The Sam Alito and the Black Jordans.

Okay. There is a lot of news this week. Let's start with Google. We've already been talking about Google. Big news this week, they launched Gemini. It's the new AI model. They've been talking about it for a while. They started talking about it, even when they launched BARD the first time, even at I.O.

They were saying we have this new model called Gemini. They've been doing demos of it. It is finally here. It is obviously meant to be the big step change competitor to chat GBT, in particular with GPT4. Yeah. David talked to Sundar Pichai and Demisis, who runs Google DeepMind, the head of AI over there. They keep talking about benchmarks, which I would like to get your opinions on. We've reviewed many products.

There's an importance of benchmarks in the world. I don't know what an AI model benchmark is, but they talked about it a lot. They talked about it. On 30 out of 32 benchmarks, Gemini beats GPT4. That's like a gamer nexus number of benchmarks to run. Yeah. I don't know, man. So we should talk about that, what that means, and if that is a use.

measure for us as we can figure out, like, how all of us should evaluate different AI systems. But that is their claim. 30 out of 32. Sam Altman, you're back? Guess what? You got fired again. I don't know. Sundar told David that eventually Gemini will be integrated into search.

It's ad products into Chrome. Like, this is the thing they're going to build on. It's in Bard. You can play with Bard. I want to talk about Bard in a minute. And then the main, the main thing about Gemini is that it is multimodal from the jump. Right.

So it understands video and audio. It can spit some of that stuff out. There's a really fun video that Google released where a person is drawing a picture of a duck and it just sort of figures out that it's looking at a duck. Cool? That's cool as hell. I would posit that hot dog, not hot dog, again, remains the baseline framework to understand the entire AI industry.

That's a duck. You know what I mean? It's a duck. So it's cool. It's like fun to play with. It's cool. the addition of multimodal capabilities is what really happened this year in AI.

That was the big step change. And then obviously Google has new chips. It's more efficient. They're excited about all. The multimodal stuff, that's not actually live for most people. That's only like for like businesses, right? So these are the three models.

So there's Gemini Nano, which runs only on a Pixel 8 Pro. And Google is very excited about this. Now the phone is the best phone for AI. Yeah. So it's only in Pixelite Pro is Gemini Nano. That's the smallest version of the new model. It can run on the pixel 8's tensor processing, all that stuff.

Then there's Gemini Pro, which is what you can go use in Bard today. Right. And then there's Gemini Ultra, which is not out yet. Okay. But that's the one, like, because the pro version is still just in Bard. Like, that's the only way we can currently access it. And Bard is still just text-based. Yeah, the pro version is still a chat bot type of thing, where you type in.

It gives you typed responses back. And Ultra is the one that involves vision and pictures and video and stuff like that. And you're right, Alex. That is like the difference now. And so we can't really experience the multimodal aspect of this just yet. Ultra is coming out next year, according to Google. And it will most likely be used for the more enterprise applications that are the higher demand, higher intensity stuff. That's the part that like Google is the most excited about, like over and over again.

Besides that and the benchmarks, they're like, yeah, it's really fast. and you can do all this stuff, but you can't see any of it yet. Well, it's a new thing, right? Like, the chat interface we've had all year with chat GPT4 and the others, as well as barred. So, like, a better chat interface is great. Appreciate it, but, like, the new thing is the multimodal thing.

So that's understandable why Google is most excited about that. That is, like, the thing that if you want to put your on, your, like, predicting hat, like, a robot is going to use a multimodal LM-AI interface in order to navigate the world. So, like, that's, like, the exciting future-y stuff. So, like, I get it. And that's basically what Demis said in our piece. You can see how we would get to robotics with a model like Gemini, or at least they can see it.

What we can see is Google Park. Right. But you can see how a robot looking at something would be able to make some interpretations of it, spit out some new commands, and go. So this brings me back to like, how do we evaluate this stuff? I haven't thinking about this a lot. You've been playing with it a whole lot, too. I'm addicted to playing with Bard because there's nothing funnier than asking a Google product, how it will impact search. You know, it's just like they've got to dance around it.

So I think playing with Bard is really interesting. I think the connection that Bard has or lack of connection that Bard has to the Google search generative experience is really interesting. So Bard is supposed to be a pretty self-contained experience. Yeah. You open the chat bot, you ask her for stuff. It can summarize things for you. You can watch a YouTube video for you. Again, huge problems with that idea.

like if the robots watching the YouTube video for you, does the YouTube creator receive any money? I don't know the answer to that question. I don't think Google knows the answer to that question. Cliff Notes knows the answer probably. Maybe. So I've been playing with Bart a lot. So far, Bar just has confidently hallucinated at me, left and right. Yeah.

I asked it why a Google executive would be upset at the verge. I won't name names this time. You can go look at my threads post. And it like made a list of answers. And then it confidently hallucinated, complete with a link to you. YouTube. Yes. A Vergecast interview that has never occurred.

It just took us to the Vergecast channel page. Oh, thank you for the promotion. Bart. Great. But that to me is so nuts. And then I asked, why did you do this? Yeah. And it apologized to me.

Like, I'm very sorry. I misinterpreted some facts. I assumed this had happened. I read some, like, titles of other Vergecast episode, which random, like, not even relevant, like, even in the realm of relevant. And it's like, but it turns out on further examination, like, this didn't happen. And I was like, why do you do this? And I was like, every day I'm getting better.

That's how I, what I say whenever I'd, like, file a really bad blog. And I get hard at it. So I'm like, don't, like, I'm working on it. Every day I get better. I didn't read the source material. I'm very sorry. I'm very sorry. You put that up against 30 out of 32 benchmarks.

And it's like, wait, there's only one benchmark, right? Yeah. Does it lie to you all the time? Can you trust what it says? I don't think they're benchmarking that. It appears not. I think they are benchmarking things like, can it do math? Right.

Because a lot of the benchmarks that seem to be around coding. And so there was a ton of coding benchmarks. And that's really where it sounded like Google is the most excited about it. It's going to put a whole lot of coders out of jobs because it can do it as well or better. And then not a lot of conversation about the hallucinations, which for me and you, and I think most people is like, that's what I actually care about. Like, I'm happy it can do Python really, really well, but I need to know if it's going to lie to me and destroy the world. Or just lie to me and keep showing me fake verge cast videos.

I'm going to read you some of the benchmarks. Okay. Okay. There's MMLU, which is massive multitask language understanding. Oh. It scores a 90% compared to GP4 is 86%. That means something to you. Yeah.

There's Big Bench Hard. That's what that's called. That's a reasoning one. That's the one we put on the gaming laptops. Big pen charge. It's a diverse set of challenging tasks requiring multi-step reasoning. Gemini did 83.6%. Gemini Ultra, mind you.

83.6%. GPT4 is 83.1. There's something called drop, which is reading comprehension. 82.4 for Gemini Ultra. 80.9 for GPT4. I swear to God, this isn't a blog post that Google published. There's a reasoning benchmark for AI systems called Hella Sweat.

All of these sound like the like skills comprehension tests my kids go through in elementary school where they take the state test and they're like, are you at grade level? Are you above grade level? Are you behind grade level? That's what all of these sounds like. Are you at hellah swag? What is your hell of swag level? Are you at acceptable hellas swag? Are you hella, hella swag? Are you just swag? Yeah, Gemini is just swag. 87.8, 95.3 hell of swag score for GPT. Let's go. I would remind you again that GPD4 is made by a company that is in pure turmoil. It's fired and rehired a CEO in a matter of days. But it's swag. It's super swag. There's some other ones. There's math ones.

GSM 8K, 94.4% for Gemini 92.0. So you can just read these. They're all in Google's blog posts. We'll link to it. My point is you look at this and with a benchmark test for a gaming laptop. I can draw some conclusions about, I don't know, how fast the laptop is. Yeah. How well it will play Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Yeah. So well. The game people love to play. It's the best. People love it when we benchmark shadow the Tomb Raider. Nobody loves anything more. It's a favorite. We benchmark shadow of the Tomb Raider.

But those things are related to what you might do. Right. And I'm just reading these benchmarks for Gemini, and I understand why Google's proud of them. Yes, it is true. on 30 out of 32, the number in their column is blue. And on two of 32, the number in GPD's column is blue. That great, you won. It doesn't mean anything to me yet.

And then in actually using the product, I find myself saying, well, if I can't trust it, it doesn't matter. Yeah, it reminds me of the battery benchmark testing. Yes, I was about to say the same. Like manufacturers do rundown benchmark tests. All of them do this on laptops, mobile tests. devices, whatever, whether they're Apple, HP, Dell, whoever, and they will come out saying 22 hours of video playback time, which means nothing when my laptop dies in five hours of me using it for work. Because you look at it and you see there's usually an asterisk and it's like,

we've turned off the Wi-Fi, we've turned off the Bluetooth, we've turned off the soul. Like, yeah, screen might not even be on, but we did it. And it's the same thing here where it is actually really, really hard to test a battery because there, because there are so many variables. And in the same way, there's so many variables with hallucination. So it's, like, it's really hard. They can't even figure out how to make something to test if it's hallucinating. How are they going to make a benchmark to test if it's hallucinating? Yeah, I mean, I think it is fascinating that they have a benchmark for understanding infographics. I think that's cool. Someone had to come up with that benchmark. Yeah. And someone had to point out that Gemini Ultra

gets an 80.3 on that benchmark. Nailed it. Whereas the, GPT4 gets 75.1. We can talk about the actual product. I'm focused on this because I think there's a tendency with all tech products to try to find some objective measure that will say that Apple is definitively better than Microsoft or whatever it is. Windows drools. Yeah. Look at this benchmark. Like, we live in it.

And I'm just trying to apply that instinctively to being shown some benchmarks. And I'm like, but I don't. I think it's so hard to do with AI because AI is. especially large language models, so nebulous, it is so vast, right? Like the amount of stuff it's ingesting and then that it can, like, recreate is enormous. We are very close to being like, I'm going to measure Gemini's skull and tell you how smart it is. Yeah. It's like right there.

It's like, oh, do we want to do that? So there's just some weirdness here. But at the same time, knowing that one of these is good or worse at decoding infographics, I shared. a post with Andrew Marino or engineer the other day where someone was uploading all of the manuals to old roll-in synthesizers

to GPT. That would be something you too would talk about. And then asking it how to make the sounds on Cure Records and it would just read the manual because those manuals

are impenetrable. Yeah. And it would just like spit out some settings for various songs. That is the coolest shit in the entire world. Were they accurate though?

I don't know. It was just a threads post about somebody was excited. Cool. But it's like I'm certain it got closer than if you were just ice cold reading the manual, right?

Especially a manual that that's impenetrable. I mean, if it gave you some like Depeche Mode settings when you asked for the cure, that would not be very good, right? I mean, that would cause a holy war. That's my point. But there's just some of that, which I think is so cool that these tools can do. And I don't know how to evaluate a company telling me, I don't know how to make the connection between the benchmarks are better and the

capabilities are better. I think it's because it's really, it's hard for them to do. So they're like, okay, well, I can lean on benchmarks because this is like something I can actually say. I don't have to just be like, doesn't it feel nicer? Would you get a lot of times with gadgets? They always are like, give me those subjective things. And largely with AI, it is largely subjective.

Like, okay, yeah, it's cool that it can do Python and stuff better. But the big stuff, the stuff that most people are going to be using it for is all that, the subjective stuff. And you can't test that. Like, it feels like you more have to do like a research project. Like, it's more like anthropology or something, I feel like than it is like mathematics and computations. Right. Do these models have different personalities?

Right. Do they, are they better at different things because their cultures or not? Like, you do start to get into some very deep questions about the nature of intelligence. And then you're like, someone asked it if I was handsome. And it was like, hmm. It like literally said like beauty. isn't the eye of the holder. And I was like, well, you got a little bit of personality there.

Foo! All right. I see how it is. Damn. Yeah, it's like his contributions are vast, but I, no, no, no. So anyway, people should play with it. I'm curious what people think of it. There is, obviously, the future of Google's business is here, right?

The future of the search business, which is the cash cow for Google, is sitting right in this product. And I still don't know how that's going to work. And I don't know if Google yet knows how it's going to work. How is it working in the pixel? I haven't tried the pixel version yet. And I'm just curious, like. So the Pixel A Pro is only, there's two things today. It's auto summarization in the recorder app and Smart Reply in the Gboard keyboard and Smart Reply

keyboard are now Gemini Nano. Okay. Yeah. I mean. And you can really feel that 29th benchmark. Yeah. When you're using Smart Reply in the Pixel A keyboard. I mean, look, those are auto reply, auto-complete.

That stuff is really important. That is true. But the AI stuff they've been doing the recorder app is neat. And like for, you know. A lot of our reporters like it. Like a lot of our reporters are like, oh, yeah, I'll use a pixel phone to just record because I don't have to worry about all the wide variety of transcription services that cost a lot of money and also use AI.

Yeah. So you can just do it that way. That's genuinely useful. But for a very small group of people, I imagine. Google is always thinking about the, the journalist. The hardworking journalists of the world when they make the pixel features. But if you're recording a meeting and it summarized the meeting for you and that gets meaningfully better, that's great. And if that happens locally and you're not sending your enterprise work product off to a cloud service, that's good for you.

Going to do all my CES briefings this way. It's just like throw the phone down. Be like, talk to this robot. Let's go. It'll summarize what you have to say for me. Anyway, so that's the big news of the week. Like, this is the future of Google. You can just go play with Bard.

It's neat. There's other AI news this week. So Bing, dear sweet Bing, announced something called Deep Search. So the Bing is always, I can't believe I want to say this. We started out with Dex and I'm going to go to Bing. There's always been one really fascinating part of the Bing search product as it relates to GPT4. I just want to sit with that sentence for a minute. They've been doing, I don't know if it has been good or it's worked or it's taken one point of market share.

but they've always been doing something really interesting, which they call search orchestration. Now what it's going to do is take that one step farther. It's going to read your search query. Microsoft's example is how do point systems work in Japan? It's going to figure out all the things that could mean, and it's going to go search for those things and lace them together. So you can figure out if you mean credit card point system

or weird social credit systems or whatever it is, and it's going to lace those here. So it'll take more time, but it's actually sort of like expanding your query for you Yeah. And doing a bigger, deeper, search of the web, which I think is fascinating. Yeah, I feel like, you know,

looking at it and seeing what they did there, I think that's a great example of the loyalty programs because it is something huge. It is nebulous. And if you don't have like the card, the points guy or whatever for your region, that is genuinely useful. You want that,

that summary. And like, that's hard to do on your own. Yeah. You can, but it's obnoxious. So what's really fascinating to me about this is that, If you will remember when chat GPT launched and Bing launched, there was that explosion of interest in prompt engineering.

Yeah. And we had lots of conversations with people, lots of executives around Decoder saying prompt engineering is just a thing that's going to happen in the middle. There needs to be other kinds of interest. We did that great piece on prompt engineering. Yeah. And everyone, there's this theory that that's like a local, that's like a flash to the pan moment. Yes. And then you look at what deep search is doing.

And it is mechanically taking your query to the. Bing search engine and rewriting it to be a longer prompt. So it takes how do point systems work in Japan, and it rewrites the prompt to Bing as provide an explanation for how various loyalty card programs work in Japan, including the benefits, requirements, limitations, and then it goes on. It's like a full paragraph long prompt. And you see that Microsoft has learned that it should just automate prompt engineering for you, and that's how it should constantly talk to the LLMs.

It's another job claimed by AI. created and claimed in the same year. And, you know, now that we know more about particularly how Bing works, like the huge meta-prompt that it feeds into GPT is crazy. That's just the one that killed Sydney, basically, and killed the personality and puts the guide rails, is just a meta-prompt that is appended to your query. And so I don't know if that's how Google is managing BART. I don't know.

That's how they all work. But this is very much how Microsoft is starting to manage Bing, which is fascinating. Sistairical. And this deep search tool is just kind of an extension of that. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that it's pretty candid about it. I'm curious, like, in practice, how often it's going to show you that whole search prompt so that eventually you can figure that out and be like, okay, well, so I just do a whole paragraph now instead of being like, tell me how to fix it.

Which is probably useful for people. I mean, I would do that. I don't know. I'm sure most people will just be like, tell me how to fix it because that's faster and easier. Yeah. But the race to your point, the race to just answer the question continues apace. And I think for Google, the Gemini stuff is exciting. It shows they're in the game. They're excited about it very obviously. Sundar, you know, did a press tour the whole thing. But how they turn that into money is still a huge open question. Yeah. And I just don't know the answer. But if the end result is you ask the L-O in the question and just tells you the answer, whether it's going through this like,

secondary prompt engineering exercise or not, or it's passing the hell of swag test, or whatever it's doing. They got to put ads in there somewhere. They got to make some money. I have seen some people say they think that Gemini Ultra will be a subscription product, the way that GPT4 is a subscription product. GPT3.5 is not. Or Hel Grok is a subscription product?

Grock also launched this week. Yeah. Don't. It's fine. Last two little bits of AI news. Let me take break. Apple also made some AI news this week, which is the first time Apple has made any AI news, really. Baby steps.

Baby steps. They released a new model framework called MLX that allows you to run various kinds of models and various coding languages like Pi Torch on their chips using their memory architecture ideas. I bet that was an internal tool that they're like, it's good enough we can now make it public. Because that's been a big deal at Apple is they don't want to actually use all the other AI tools, but they want to. their own A-Di tools. Yeah. So they've been having to like, how do we build our own BARD and Jim and I? Yeah.

Why are these names all that? Well, and Apple is also leaning more into the open source world. Yeah. So if you are, if you, you know, your open source research, you want to use Meta's Lama, which is open source, you want to run Apple Silicon. You now have a framework to do that that Apple is providing and supporting. Will that get you anywhere? Like, I don't know.

I'm curious to see how well the Silicon handles it because just how different all the different architectures handle AI. And it's particularly like that stuff is like the Apple Silicon is very specifically built for a specific type of processing. And it's good at the other stuff. We've seen how good it is with video. And I'm just really curious if that translates as like GPU kind of translates. I think you're right.

Like Apple has very particular GPU ideas. Yes. But they also have very particular neural engine ideas. Yeah. And we've just never seen anyone attack that part of their chip to go head to head with like an invidid. Yeah, because all I have to do is. It's say like, yeah, it opens your phone real fast.

It's really good at it and it's super smart. And it's like, cool. I have no way to ever test any Apple product. Here's what you do. You run Shadow of the Tour. I was like, that's what we got Shadows of the Tomb Raider. It's the only thing that works. The only way to test an Apple product.

Okay. And the last little piece of AI news, I would just remind everyone again and again and again. These companies are running rampant with copyrighted information to train their systems. No one knows if it's legal. They are insistent that they are. but all of them, all of this money, coin flip, fair use lawsuit could take it all down. It is just true. It's a total coin flip.

You might have some opinions. I have some opinions. Our company has some opinions. Sundarpa Chai has some opinions. Sanchindella has some opinion. I've asked all of them. And they're like, yeah, the legal process will have to pay out. Getty's lawsuit, Getty Amager's lawsuit against Stability AI is not going to trial in the UK.

And they obviously have sued here too. The law in the UK, different than the law in the United States. This is just a gigantic time bomb in the middle of the AI boom. Yeah. No one knows of this training data is fair use. Again, I have an opinion. I think it is probably not. And I am not that person.

That's not how I came up at all. That's not that it was a surprising opinion for me. But the idea that you can just take all of this stuff, just to hoover it up, and somehow create billions of dollars of value for your users out of it. That seems wrong. Without any return, just on its face, it seems like you're going to go to a court with that argument and something there is going to happen that you cannot predict. Yeah. Weird.

And so we'll see. I don't know. I don't know. The courts are not predictable. We're all going to get like 50 cents for our tweets. Yeah. That's what's going to happen. Sorry.

Here's your 50 cents. We used your tweets. Google has to send you a penny every time anybody uses part. Man, those fanfic writers are going to make bank. And the lawsuits are just going to keep happening because in, particular in this country, fair use is not a precedent-setting decision. Every single fair use case evaluated on its merits, de novo, like, it's supposed to be case by case. It's in the law. So you can just keep filing the lawsuits until something else happens. Could somebody just make a law at some point?

One would hope. I don't know if you've been paying attention to the state of our government. Just fix it. Doesn't seem likely. One day. Doesn't seem likely. George Santos is on Cameo. That's the state of our government. our government. He's not in the government anymore. Well, he's on Cameo. Yeah, just good pivot. All right, we got to take a break. I'm going to sign up for Cameo. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I've really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify.

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All right, we're off the AI benchmark news. Yeah. Now it's time for hacks. Hacks and snacks. And freaks with a pH. actually a pretty important what would you call it Dan a workaround reverse engineering workaround yeah but there's like solution there's some spoofing happening

there too right yeah okay so so beeper which is a longstanding i message workaround that for years basically until just recently involved you signing into your iCloud account on a mac minnie in a cloud

as a relay service now has reverse-engineered iMessage, and they say they can do it natively. Dan, what's going on here? Yeah, so it's a fascinating story. As Nielai just said, you know, beeper's been around for a while, but over this summer,

a developer posted proof of concept to GitHub that they had reverse-engineered the iMessage protocol and was able to send messages directly from basically any device, Linux, Windows, Android, to Apple's iMessage servers without having to use a relay server. And when Beeper found out about this, Beeper, who is headed by former Pebble CEO, Eric Mijikovsky.

Pebble the Smartwatch company. Pebble the Smartwatch. Yes, you do have to clarify, there are like eight failed pebbles now. Don't name your future company Pebble. That's all. My advice to anyone. He reached out to this developer, contracted with him. Turns out it's a 16-year-old high school kid.

He hires him part-time to develop this into a full-fledged app. So now what we have today is a new app called, they're calling it Beeper Mini for now. It is an I-Message client for Android. And it is exactly what that says. It is, you install it on your Android phone. You don't even have to sign in with an Apple ID.

It talks to Apple servers, takes your phone number, and turns it into a blue bubble on iOS devices or Macs, whoever you're messaging. And it does it all locally without a server, relay server involved. And the way that they kind of reverse engineered it is a fascinating process. I strongly recommend going to check out Snazzy Hughes video on it because he explains step by step. And frankly, it's above my head how it all works. But they end up spoofing serial numbers of real Apple devices, which is a technique that's been around for a long time

in the Hackintosh world and in other applications in order to get Apple software to run on things that maybe Apple doesn't formally approve. Apple's kind of just always ignored it and left it alone. But they're using this now to basically spoof iMessage onto Android and allow you to be having completely, you know, fully supported, for the most part, Blue Bebble Conversations on an Android phone. And it's fascinating because it works incredibly well. Yeah, because you've used it.

Jake, I know, who wrote the piece, has been using it, and you really like it. I think it's great. Like, I switched my SIM fully from an iPhone to an Android phone, and nobody knows. Like, nothing skipped to beat. Like, I am still a blue bubble to all of the iPhone contacts I've ever had. And now I can message with RCS in Google Messages app to Android users. And I, like, don't get left out of group messages. I don't get missed notifications on reactions.

I, if I wanted to send voice messages, I could. Like, all of those features are supported. It's just fascinating. When somebody says, congratulations, do you also now get the balloons? So you don't get the I message reactions, I think? think that's called. You don't have that. I believe they said they are working on that. They are working on actually integrating FaceTime somehow, which I don't know how they're going to do. And the one thing that they don't ever anticipate ever being able to support are

the iMessage apps and games, which, sorry, big loss. Oh no, not IMessage apps and games. The IMessage experience that most people think about on their iPhones is now fully replicated on Android. What happens if you have a mixed group of some Android phones? some Beeper Mini and some iPhones. So the Beeper Mini is going to act as an iMessage in that, and the iPhones are going to act as an I message in that, and everything's just going to fall back to SMS. And so that would go through your SMS app,

probably Google messages on your Android phone, because it's just going to be an SMS conversation. When you text someone, are you getting the text both to your Beeper app and to the regular text app? No. Oh, that's cool. If you are iMessaging someone, see, the app can tell if you're talking to an iMessage client.

And so it just, your iMessage conversation stays entirely within Beeper Mini. If someone sends you a text message, it will come through your text message number through Google messages. So, well, I was, I was thinking like the example Neil I had where he was like, okay, what happens if you've got a Beeper person and an Android person and an I message person, then where does that message? Like it goes to the Beeper app because. No, it goes to ESM, it falls back to it. In that scenario, you, the Beeper Mini user, are using SMS. Yeah. And so the annoying part of this is that you now have two apps for messaging.

You have your iMessage app and you have your Google Messages app. And Beeper's plan is to the original Beeper app was kind of like an all-in-one message service. So it integrated all of your message services. Beeper Mini is strictly iMessage for now. Their plan is to integrate all of those other plugins into the Beeper Mini app, eventually drop the minnie name, and sunset the old app is the ultimate plan. But for today, you're using two apps. And the claim here, which I think is important,

we don't know if it's true, but the claim is that Apple can't stop it without completely rebuilding the iMessage protocol. I'm really curious, I think because I keep getting stuck on the spoofing part of this, like with Hackintoshes, I built a lot of Hackintoshes when I was younger.

I love it. It's a fairly small community, so it was like, okay, Apple, we were all like, the police are coming now. We understand that Craig Gregory just listening to this. He just called the police.

Yeah. My poor dog's getting arrested as we speak at home. But it was super easy to do. It was a lot of fun. But it was also understood that, like, it's a very small community. So it wasn't really a big deal. And it wasn't like a bunch of money was exchanging hands. You weren't being like, build me a Hackintosh.

Because as soon as you did that, Apple came down you on. Well, so the difference there is with Hackintosh is usually you have to go acquire Apple software and install it on a device. And there's no real legal way to get that software if you're getting like OS10 Leopard or whatever without getting it from Apple. And Apple's not going to give it to you if you don't have a Mac. So you have to like basically torrent it. Well, that's why we all, like everybody I knew who did it had a Mac. We just wanted to also have a tiny Dell latitude. Can I tell you a story from my youth?

Yeah. So there was a company in Florida called SciStar. Do you remember this? Yes, I do. And it was like two kids and they figured out how to build Macintoshes. and they did an early, like, internet marketing campaign where, like, take down the man, run OS10 on your size star. We can do it.

And they had all these, like, I would call them Reddit caliber legal theories. Yes. About how it would be legal and how they would defeat Apple in court. And they would, you know, I had a Cy Star. I reviewed a Cy Star for Engadgett. It was just a PC. Yeah. It was, I was like, what am I supposed to review here?

Like, it was just a noisy-ass tower PC that, like, sometimes boots up into OS 10. That's what I used to build. And sometimes does nothing. It was exciting. But they had all these theories. If you owned a copy of the operating system, you weren't committing copyright infringement or breaching the contract.

That's what we would all say in that it was like Tony Mac 86X for it or whatever. We'd all be like, oh yeah, yeah, we're fine because we already own it. Like I went out and I had the physical copy of each CD for the OS that you could have until they stopped distributing them. And we were like, we got this. But we also generally, unlike Cystar, weren't charging for it.

Yeah, Cystar was charging money. And got bought. But this is like folk copyright. Yeah. Like you've convinced yourself that if you just buy the CD, you can make, you can send as many MP3s to your friends as you want. Same thing with torrenters. They're always like, no, no, we're fine.

Yeah. And it is all just like you are concocting like a moral argument that somewhere some money has changed hands. Clarence Thomas will ignore. Yeah. Who knows what's going to happen, man? But the end of my size story is they pitched themselves a bunch of it. And they were compelling.

They were like young kids. It started a business. They were taken on the man. They gotten all this attention. And some like local Florida Alt Weekly wrote this piece about how they were taken on Apple and who knew what happened. And so I wrote it up and I got it. I was like, I can't believe they conned. I called it a puff piece.

I was like, big puff piece about Cy Star, like, fun look at these guys, but they're doomed. And the reporter, and I was like a baby blogger. Yeah. The reporter wrote me just like the most hammerer email. Like, how dare you? I would never write a puff piece. These are valid issues. And I was like, I don't know how to break this to you.

Like, this company is not going to make like five minutes. And sure enough, Apple sued them. And I went away. Immediately. And I was like, that was crazy. But it was all based on this argument that, like, like, if you did one right thing once, then you could do the wrong thing as many times as you wanted.

And I think the difference with Beeper is they're not using any of Apple's code. Right. They're not, they're just sending Apple a number. Right. That happens to be a serial number. Yeah. That's tough. The reverse engineering is legal and protected.

Like that is like a valid thing to do. It's particular, particularly when it comes to enabling interoperability, which is like the whole hinging thing here and enables interoperability for iMessage on Android devices. There is another law that could get in their way. It's like it's there. It's always lurking in the background. It's like one of the worst laws in the books. It's a computer fraud and abuse act that says if you wrongfully gain access to a system,

that is a criminal penalty. Well, this was how all the bioses, they would reverse engineer the bios back in the 80s. And you're like, had to be in a different room from the people of reverse engineer. hearing it, right? This is, uh, Kranz, this is a plot point of, uh,

Halt and Catch Fire. It is a plot point, but it's also true. It really happened. That's why it was such a good plot point. One of the best shows ever made. Uh, but it is a whole plot line of it.

It's very cool. I remember being really excited. I was like, they're doing it. They're doing bios law. Uh, but, you know,

again, it's a, the technical side of this is really kind of above my head, but Quinn over at Snaz EQ in his breakdown video. And he like, he installs the open source code on a Linux laptop and connects to the protocol and, like, does the thing as it works to show what it's doing behind the, like, polished app that you see on Android.

And it's really quite fascinating. He makes a point that spoofing the serial numbers does have a number of legitimate use cases. And there's no way for Apple to know whether this serial number that you are sending them is the 2015 IMA 21.5-inch model that it was originally, or it's your Android phone. Apple can't tell that. So if Apple were to like turn that off, it would break a lot of things for legitimate users. So that's kind of where the rub is. But because the code is public, because the activity is public, Apple could certainly sue Beeper and say you are improperly accessing the IMessage servers that you are not supposed to have access to. And there is a long line of

cases like everything in America have total coin flip outcomes once you hit the Supreme Court. Right. Like AT&T won a case and the characters involved in the case are somewhat unsavory, but AT&T won a case for someone who was just hitting the AT&T website to do lookups over and over again. And that was a CFAA case. LinkedIn just lost a case to an analytics company called IQ that was scraping the LinkedIn database. And it's like, well, that seems wrong with an IQ one. The Supreme Court just took another case where a police officer improperly did a lookup,

like someone paid him money to use the police database. to do lookup. No, no. But he was authorized to use the database. He just did it in an unapproved way. And like, you just like, if there's a server on the internet and you talk to it and it tells you something, there's a million different ways to parse out whether that is legal or not legal.

So does how big is Beeper's legal fund, I think, is the real question we need to be asking. Here's a couple questions. Right next to this, the EU decided this week that Apple did not have to treat IMSG as a platform that has to be interoperable, like, metahasasas. with WhatsApp. Did they decide or they just lean them? I thought they've just leaned in that direction.

They've signaled. Signaled, yeah. European politics is a lot of signaling, posturing. Yeah. You rotate a piece of cheese. And everybody's like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yes, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Oh, the Bree has turned to the left. I message will not be a gaykeeper service. Like, that's like, it seems like that's not going to happen. That is almost certainly because Apple agreed to adopt RCS. Right. Right, which was the gambit. And I think we all saw that as the trade. Like, there's the threat of this big interop regulation or

they could do RCS and say, look, it's interoperable this way. Great, they did it. So that's sort of the background here. Like Apple's going to say, look, there's an interoperable way. It's coming. We're going to use it. Maybe only four people ever use people. Or maybe Apple's pretty litigious.

Maybe they just send a threat to this company and say stop it. But the need to stop it where Apple's desire to stop it is going to cause problems. Yeah. Because they don't actually have the RCS implementation yet. And so to say we're going to keep people locked out of our service. while we work on this other thing. I think it's just going to be, and it's an indie developer

that's really well liked. It got a lot of press because a lot of Android people in this country really want to send high messages and they're going to pay BEPA $2 a month or whatever it is to do it. They should have solved this problem

a million years ago. They should have found a way to do this on their terms a million years ago because now they're doing it on the terms of the European Union and somewhat improbably on the terms of Eric Kloski

and Beeper Mini, which is just weird. It's a delight. And this is a 16-year-old kid who reverse engineer the protocol and is like spare time. Like, that's a weird place for the richest company in the world to be. Yeah. Go after that 16-year-old kid. This is the thing.

You want to file the CFA lawsuit against the 16-year-old kid for reverse engineering. Like, you're the bad guy. That's just straight up. You're the bad guy. Yeah. I mean, that's what Sony did, right? I think it was a PS3. Yeah, this is the legend of George Hots.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, maybe don't do that. Well, George Hots did work. It did work. Twitter for five minutes. All right. So that's that.

Other big piece of news you should talk about this week. It seems like podcast industry is in turmoil. Spotify just had layoffs. They're canceling really popular shows, including a show that won Pulitzer Prize. They canceled heavyweight. The title laid off 10% of its staff. It just seems like in general podcasts, they had the big tech moment where all the money from the big tech companies, particularly Spotify, rushed in. Yes.

And now the tide has come back out. Spotify rushed in with zero plan. And then when the gravy train, like, did not continue. The plan was celebrities. The plan was own this entire industry as quickly as possible, like, grow so fast, so big that nobody can stop us and we're a title wave. And then, like, we'll be supported by all our ad dollars. And the ad dollars are like, no, we're not going to support you that much. Right.

And they bought an ad tech company. Yeah. And they wanted to do a dynamic insertion of ads. Because they were trying to own the whole ad tech industry side of Spotify. Disclosure, our ads are served by Spotify's ad tech platform megaphone. Disclosure, we're a podcast. I don't even know what I'm disclosing there. Someone uploads us to this thing and we use it.

Someone else runs the ads. But it's true. There's a disclosure. The whole story to me is they thought they could take a big, rich open ecosystem and turn it into a very closed one. Yes. You could turn Spotify in the open podcasting ecosystem into something that looked a lot more like YouTube. and I think it just didn't work.

Yeah, I 100% agree. I think they failed. And we all kind of knew this. I remember Ashley came on Ashley Carmen. Now at Bloomberg broke a lot of this stuff about Spotify. Notable trader, Ashley Carmen. Yeah, horrible trader. But came on this very podcast like, what, two years ago talking about this.

And we were all like, ooh, this doesn't sound like it's going to work for Spotify. It feels like they're just ignoring everything else about this and why this is a bad idea. It feels like we were all right. High five all of us two years ago. Yes. Yeah, I mean, obviously they've held on to Joe Rogan. His deal is up for renewal, we have been told. So we're tracking that.

Did not hold on to Prince Harry and Megan. Megan and Harry didn't make it. You know, there's something interesting there. You know, the tech industry loves to talk about going direct. Yeah. Like, loves to talk about going direct. You don't need these journalists or Paxi. And it's like, if you go direct and you have nothing to say, no one will listen to you

and you will have gone direct to no one, which is truly the Harry and Megan story. Like, they're out of things to say. Yeah, they did the book. We were all like, thank you. This is actually all we wanted from you. We just wanted the tea. And I'm not even someone who, like, I'm Indian American. My people have fled the British twice.

Like, we just get out. And I do not care about any of this. But it's like, even the people I know who do care, and we have them on our staff. Liz Lapot and Sarah Jog love some royal family drama. And they're like, whatever we're done with this. And like, that to me is you need some tension to tell a good story. Yeah. And like that's, you buy a bunch of the celebrities directly.

You're not going to have any tension. Every celebrity podcast is like a celebrity and then someone else just needling them. Or there's the new trend now is it's the D-list celebrities that were on the shows with the really big folks. They all get together and then talk trash about the big folks. And then sometimes talk about like how they slept with the entire cast. And you're like, a lot of Disney Channel. You're like, don't get into the podcast. There are so many like Disney channel.

We're ending this podcast before we before we go that way. Yeah, we won't do that. It's wild though. That's the new trend for celebrity podcasts. Yeah. All of that seems like it didn't work. Just to be clear.

Spotify burned millions of dollars on this. They torched Gimlet, which was a darling. It was failing as a company. Obviously, they sold the Spotify for tons and tons of money that they had no plan themselves to gain because they were failing as a company. So good on them. But it also broke Gimlet.

It broke reply all. It broke the culture of that company. At some point, like, the mergers are just bad. The acquisitions are just bad. And I think this feels like they bought Gimlet, they bought Pardcast, they bought Anchor, they bought Megaphone. And they had no plan to munge them all together. They bought the ringer. Yep.

And the plan to munge them all together. Seems like it just failed. Yes. But the stock is up and they turn their first ever profit. And it's like, is that all that matters? Well, if you like money, yeah. Yeah. I think we're, I don't think podcasts are going anywhere. You can see some of them are still growing. You can see money is flowing into some categories in them. But it feels like we're returning to a much more sustainable place to grow the podcast industry. It was very unsustainable for a while. And now it's going to be like, we're only going to support podcasts where people actually say something interesting.

Maybe. And also Joe Rogan. And then the other thing Spotify and all the other big podcast players are doing is they're, they're, they're pretty. focusing on chat shows, influencer, you know, the solo podcast where the influencers just rant at the screen, but it looks like a podcast. Yeah. A deeply fast, like that's a media PhD. That's going to be my spinoff. If there are any media PhD, any media study students that are pursuing a media studies PhD, I would read your dissertation on the one person podcast where they just talk the whole time. What do they do? I just like to talk. I like to talk.

I mean, I love it. That's the AM radio model, right? Like, that was the Rush Limbaugh model. It was the Alex Jones model. Just talk to the microphone for three hours straight. Yeah. I'm just dying to know in podcasting to do that on your own and then to like close your laptop lid and be like... I did it.

Good job. There's something in there about like that personality making that kind of content with that kind of distribution that I promise you as a PhD thesis. I'd read it. Like there's some feedback loop in there that I just want to know more about. Just send it to Neely. Send it to all of us, honestly. I want to read that too. Well, do it.

Go get your PhD. That's what I'm telling you. That's a good use of money. And then title, obviously laying off staff. Again, another Jack Dorsey brilliantly managed company. Yeah. Love it. It had Beyonce for a while.

It did. And then last piece of little media news and we'll take a break. Apple is munching together. It's iTunes movies and TV shows app into the proper Apple TV. TV app. So now we have to use it. And it was already sort of done that way. Yeah. So it's just like, they're just like cleaning up the crumbs. Like the people who haven't really touched their workflow in 20 years are going to be like, oh no, how are we going to like watch my old Aquaman episodes from 2006? That sucks for them. But also the rest of us have been living now where you just use the one app. Yeah. I'm judging people. What I'm doing is what you mean is Plex. Alex's Plex app. it's the Apple TV app. Sure. By the way, there was a piece of news this week. Very distressing. Sony's just the leading TV shows that people bought on PlayStation accounts.

We're going to talk about it later. We'll take a break. We're back. We'll talk about that. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But Whatnot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you're the live shopping marketplace where you're You can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy.

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slash build. All right, we're back. We're back. Tell us about the Sony thing. Earlier this week, a lot of PlayStation users noticed that they were just getting banned out of the blue.

A lot of people say, oh, I'm getting banned. I don't know what happened. And you're like, no, you do. This wasn't the case. They were just like totally outright banned. They didn't know what was happening. It was a whole lot of people,

which was the other part of this. And so Jay Peters and Tom Warren looked into it. And eventually Sony was like, oops, are bad. And just slowly has been giving everybody their account access back. And it was all just an accident. It was just like a bug. And they screwed up. But it also just immediately reminded everyone, particularly when paired with the fact that Sony also recently said,

okay, a lot of this content you purchased from Discovery Plus, you will not have access to it anymore. We've changed some of our licensing. It's just like a big reminder that you don't own any. you buy digitally. Yeah. You don't own any of it. It's not yours. It's all licenses.

It's all fake ownership. And Sony just accidentally reminded their entire, like, customer base, which is not what you want to do when you're highly dependent on all of them buying shit on your stores. They just radicalized a lot of people in the buying that distrive. Yeah, which is... Maybe this is all a plot to get people to buy it external distrive. Yeah, they're just trying to, like, move those disk drives. I'm like, all right.

You're losing it all. Like someone opened a closet. We have a lot of Blu-ray drives. Way more than we thought, you guys. All right. Pull the disco plus stuff. Let's go. We got this.

Dr. Pimple Popper's out of here. We got to move these drives. But Jay wrote a really great piece just kind of lamenting it. And he's absolutely right. Don't, like, if you really want to own something and you want to own it for a long time, don't just buy the digital version. And a lot of times you can just go buy a DVD or a Blu-ray and get the digital version. Then you have both for the same amount of money.

Look, I'm building a new home theater right now in the new house. I'm really thinking about putting a Blu-ray player in it. I don't know why. Do it. I've got one. I use it once a year. I know you do. I plug it into my computer.

Use it once year to rip legal media to your Plex server. You know, it's folk copyright law and we don't need to talk about it too much. I've got a Bluery player that's been running macOS 9 for a decade. It's great. All right, Dan, what's your lightning round? I got two. Okay. Can I do both now?

Yeah. All right. The first one is Allison did a review of the Razor, which is not to be confused with the Razor Plus. It is Motorola's budget flip phone. Turns out it's not a very good phone. I'm just going to start off by saying that. But what's really fascinating to me about it is this is price at 700 bucks. And because Motorola discounts things 100%.

of the time, all the time, you can buy for $500, which means this is a flip phone with a folding screen for $500, which is kind of like a fascinating thing to me, that we are already at that point of affordability of these kind of flip devices. The cameras aren't great. The processor can be a little slow. The outside screen is not very useful. It's not a phone I would recommend anyone buy, but it's pretty cool that like we've gone from these are all $1,000 or $1,400 to $500, $500, just a couple years. So that was my first one. Yeah.

It's true. And the second that first Galaxy Fold came out, we're like, oh, the cost curve on this is going to go boop. What's interesting is the technology curve has kind of stopped, right? Like the screens are better. They're more durable. That was the big thing. But they look largely the same.

They're still lumpy. Well, there's lumpy. But even just like the way the materials look and feel. Yeah. They still are soft kind of plastic. It doesn't feel like hard glass. Yeah. Yeah.

And that was, there was some, there was a lot of talk about bendy glass in the beginning. Do you remember this? Yes. Ultra thin glass. Yeah. Yeah. Where is it? Well, it's all in there.

It just, the way they work is there's a layer of ultra thin glass. And then on top of that is a soft plastic screen protector. And that's what you touch. And that's what provides that kind of not so great tactile experience. As with the most things technology, kind of like make it better and keep the cost the same. Or you can make, keep it the same and keep bringing the cost down. We are very much on the keep at the same, bring the cost down part of the curve. There's not the step change into the...

Particularly for the flip designs. The fold designs are still very expensive. The One Plus Open came out earlier this year, and that is available for around $1,500. That's kind of like the low price for these folding phones. But the flip phones, and I think it's part of who these are marketed to, Folding phones are marketed to Uber do everything nerds like me, and then the flip phones are marketed to people who want something a little bit more fashionable, a little bit more compact, discreet,

don't want to spend 10 to 12 hours a day staring at their phone like I do and want to make it more of like an intentional device. And so they don't need the fastest processor. They don't need the highest end camera system. They don't need the bills and whistles to run decks and things like that. Even though I think Motorola lets you run its version of decks, which is called Ready For, on its flip phones.

So that's the thing you could do, Delano. Hey. I want to see that next doc with a Motorola flick. Yeah. Let's do it. Bad camera, slow processor. Great. Okay, you all knew this was going to be my lightning round.

You knew it. There was no choice except for this story to be my lightning round item, which is the photo of the woman in the bridled gown. Like, I saw it. And as soon as the news broke, what, earlier this week, I was like, I know what I'm talking about. The news broke a couple weeks ago. Did you a couple of weeks ago?

And then opening I happened and we forgot about it. So this photo, there's a photo of a woman. She's trying on a wedding dress. She's in the bridal shots. One of those. There's mirrors all around her like you do. So you can see yourself from all the angles. And she's making a different pose in all the mirrors and then in person.

She's a British comedian. She posted her Instagram story. She said, this is crazy. I've never read anything like this happened. The immediate theorizing about AI photo composites. started happening, smart HDR. She said she went to the Apple store store. Someone, some Apple store employee told her this was Apple beta testing, a competitor

of Best Take on Google, which makes no sense. This is all true. This all happened. This is all in her Instagram stories and Instagram post. Tom Warren, because she's in the UK, Tom Warren reached out to her. I was like, we got to get the actual photo. Then he reached out to her. He got the photo.

We were talking about it. Then the opening high news broke. Tom is our Microsoft reporter. He and I got very distressed. Very busy. We stopped paying attention to the woman in our wedding dress for a minute. The post came back this week. People saw it again.

The same amount of theorizing happened. People calling it fake, a publicity stunt at social media interested. And we had the file. And nothing about the file indicates that it's fake. Tom was sent the uncompressed, seemingly unaltered original photo off the iPhone. and we were looking at it, we were trying to figure out, we were like gone to Ask Apple because it is very odd

that she's making three different poses of the mirrors. And so everyone's trying to like figure this out, again, a lot of people claiming it's fake. It turns out someone else had taken the photo and they had the camera accidentally in panorama mode. Oh yeah. So it actually did stitch together several frames across to make it panorama.

But if you don't move the camera enough and you don't get a wide enough, picture, the iPhone does not append the panorama label. Yeah. The only tell, and I think there's a YouTuber, IFondo. His name is Farouk. He's the one who kind of popularized or told the world about this reasoning, how it worked. But the only tell is that the resolution of the final image is not the same as a resolution

that is captured by the sensor. And so the Photosap does not say panorama because it's not a panoramic. view, it's too tall and narrow. It's a vertically composed shot, but the pixels are different. And so that is like the tell there that is in panoramic mode. Farouk was able to replicate this very quickly as soon as he figured that out by putting his phone in panoramic mode and like doing a very, like another shot just that same way and was able to replicate it instantly.

So it's kind of fascinating. What's really fascinating to me is like the stitching is like perfect, which is like awesome. Because the camera isn't moving. Yeah, I didn't know you could do that. I thought like you, because it always is like, move the camera. That's what my phone sounds like to me. But it's always telling me to move the camera. So I'm always like, do it.

Alex, that tells you how well people follow directions on their devices. Can I just ignore that? You could just ignore it. One, Apple should just label all panorama photos as panoramas. That seems like an easy fix to the solution. But two, the expectation that AI is just going to munge with reality is everywhere now. Well, I don't think the expectation is, the reality is, like, that's the reality of the situation. But, like, I think people are still, because that's why everybody thought it was a fake, because everybody was like, you're a liar, you did this on purpose.

You used Photoshop or panorama or whatever. And it's like, no, she just accidentally did it. Yeah. Like. But even if you think this is the world's greatest publicity stunt. Yeah. Targeted to a very small community. Very small group.

It relies on an understanding that AI exists. And is doing photo stuff. That's true. That's true. Right? It's not like it's either ghosts in the building. Like, no, no. It's like, oh, the iPhone cameras, AI took this completely unbelievable picture.

And it, AI generated you. And, like, people will believe that that's true. And a lot of people believe that it's true, such that other people were debunking it, like, the whole thing. And in the meantime, it was a totally different lane. Yeah. Of photography. Yeah, because a lot of the theories were around. It was doing that thing where it changed.

chooses the best shot of you. And it just happened to assume she was three different people. Right. The mirror had confused some sort of like best take. Yeah. But Apple Smarty Shared does not work like this at all. And even Google Best Take does not work like this at all. Apple Smarty Shard stacks seven frames in like half a second.

She would have had to move her hands so fast. Like totally insanely too fast. Like that's why I was like, we got to get the original file. There's no way that an iPhone just generates this because I was not thinking about panorama mode. Yeah. So it's a Photoshop we might have been able to tell. But the thing that got me was she sent it to Tom right away. Yeah.

Tom reached out and she was like, here you go. And that like to me, like you are reported long enough. Like, oh, there are some things where if there's a hesitation there. Yeah. It's like, you only get a compressed one. And you're like, is this off the record? And then you blame what's that. Like there's all this stuff that usually happens when you request an original.

And she was like, here go. Okay. So I was like, all right, there's something here that I understand. And the panorama of it is interesting. The thing that is truly fascinating to me is that the culture is ready to receive AI fakery as an explanation for anything. Yeah.

And like I'm just talking, the what is the photo apocalypse is like well and truly here because you can tell anyone that a photo has been AI faked and the chances of them believing you are just steadily going up. Yeah. Even if it doesn't turn out to be the case.

That's when all my photos now are going to be fakes. You don't know. They already are. They already are. I haven't taken a real. photo in 20 years. All right. I've got a couple other ones just to go through quickly. One, this is maybe my favorite story of the year. Windows has an issue that is just renaming printers to HP LaserJet across the board. It's the only printer you need. It's just very good.

It's like, will AI kill us all or will the HP smart app worm its away under literally every computer on the planet and begin taking out centrifuges? And buying ink. Like the problem is in paper clips. The problem is in cartridges. So Microsoft says it's looking into it. It's Windows 10-11. Prenter is being randomly renamed to HP LaserJet. Some issues related to printer configurations are being observed in Windows devices,

which have access to the store. It's just very good. It's so good. Everyone just has the HP Smart app now. Your printer is an HP LaserJet, and that's, you're going to like it. Yeah. We do say buy a laser printer, but we usually say, brother, not. Official statement.

Most printers are being named as HP Laserjet M101-M106. The icons might also be changed. It's so good. It's very good. Then just real quickly, we are going to cover Epic v. Google in much more detail on the Wednesday show. Sean Hollister will be on the show. He's been in the courtroom. But this is really important for this case.

Google has gotten itself into an enormous amount of trouble with this judge for deleting records throughout this case. Oh, that's a no-no. Like an enormous, the judge is furious. Last Friday, he said he would investigate Google personally for, quote, intentionally and systematically suppressing evidence. He called it a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice. And he said, I'm going to get to the bottom of who is responsible on my own outside this trial. Yo. I don't know what kind of.

I've been in enough companies that are, like, getting lawsuits and stuff when you're told to retain all your records. that you just never think to not. You're just like, yeah, my mess is going to be out there. And Sundar was asking, like, can I set this chat to auto delete? They were deleting stuff left and right. They admitted in court that they were just deleting stuff. At one point, the judge called in Google's general counsel and made him answer to why these policies were – he's furious about this.

That's great. I will investigate this on my own outside this trial. It's a very funny threat. Like, he's going to get a magnifying glass. Takes his ropes off. He puts on a leather jacket. Yeah. A little fedora and he's like, let's go.

He's like a 70s bad cop. You know, it's going to be hearing. Driving his old ass car. Exactly. He's got a muscle. He's got a GTO and a magnifying glass. He's like, where are the records? I don't know what that will lead to.

But importantly, he has told the jury, not that they have to, but they may infer wrongdoing on the part of Google, if there's a question that the missing records would have answered. Okay. Right. So he's in, and that's like a pretty loaded suggestion. It was like that. I mean, it's like, well, that's fair, but also, ooh, that's bad for Google. Right. So the idea here is that the jury is going to consider. And it really, it really seems like Google might lose this case. In a way that maybe at the end of Apple, you know, I still think Epic walked away with one important, just the way the legal system works. They want a bunch of stuff and they want to appeal, whatever. But Apple is like, we just run our business and that's it.

Google, there's all this evidence, and there's much deleted evidence, all this stuff. It really seems like Epic mounted a much stronger case with Google. Yeah. And now the jury is being sent, and they are allowed to infer whatever Google was hiding was bad, which is just a big deal. It might come to nothing. It might not come to nothing. It's just worth noting the judge is furious.

Like, this is the shadiest thing Google has done, and the judge is furious about it, and he's told the jury about it. And it's going to make all the appeals really messy, too. Because I just assume they will all be appealed. Whatever the decision is. Oh, whatever the decision is appealed. It all just, what you appeal is the law. Yeah.

So the facts remain the facts. And so. And this is why you don't delete your records, right? Yeah. Because this will happen. Right. But an appeals court does not get to go back and say the jury's finding a fact. We're wrong.

Right. They get to say the law is wrong. And we should change the law or like this other thing. So that's a little, it's a little law. law school. I see it. I see it. I see it. But so here the inference of the jury was, you might appeal this was a wrong inference to get the jury

or whatever. But he didn't. He didn't instruct them to think one way or another. He said they were just allowed to, which is a very important instruction. Anyway, I would just say the epic v. Google case we're going to talk about much more with Sean on Wednesday. Get into it. But that was the one that stuck out to me this week. It's like,

there's something there. All right. And then the last one I just want to call out. Allison Johnson and second call for her today, has a big piece as part of our infrastructure package about just 5G and the fact that it hasn't paid off for anyone. So you basically listen

to all the big carriers' earnings calls and how they're talking about their investments, what the investors want. There's nothing there. It's basically like they might compete with fixed broadband. So instead of having whatever ISP you have, you might get a 5G fixed wireless device.

They seem excited about that. They're excited about enterprise customers buying fixed 5G networks, which is hard because you've got to have an enterprise sales team, which many of them don't. And then they can do what Verizon is calling pricing actions, which means one thing. I hate it. The action is turning the price up. That's the action you can take. You know who we can do. You got faster internet.

Now you pay $100 more. Enjoy. I will remind everyone. We actually had a note this week about Project J. Gen. Five, sis, the ill-fated attempt to turn DISH Network into a mobile carrier. Still technically it. They have it. They've, I believe, Allison points us out, they've technically hit their coverage goals,

but they've done it by leasing space on AT&T and T-Mobile's network. So they have not actually built nationwide wireless network. It's just Mitchell. It's just Mitchell. He's out there on the trail, our own wonderful Mitchell Clark, who tried desperately to used Project Gena 5 sis. This whole thing was a boondoggle. Yeah.

It costs a lot of money. It put all these carriers in debt. It consolidated us down from four to three. Well, three in Project Gena 5 sis. And now we're doing pricing actions. Like, we should just see it for what it is. You should read Allison's piece, but willing to it. It is great.

It is very clear-eyed and direct about what has happened in a way that is not just me ranting and raving. It makes the argument really well. It's good. You should read it. Send it to all your friends. And then whatever carrier you have, switch to. another one. That's my advice. That's my end of the year advice for Vouchat's listeners.

Whatever you have, just switch to another one. Make them all feel it. Be like, why is this happening? Oh, just do the churn. Yeah, just turn them up. Turn moment. It's a turn moment. I'm just saying we just got to create the appearance of some competition. Yeah, yeah. I really am excited to go to AT&T. I'm not. No, I mean, I'm just thinking about this advice that seems hard. You're like, no, don't actually do that. Just do whatever feels right in your heart. That's the Vergecast. everybody. That's my message. It's holiday season. Whatever's in your heart, do it. Oh, speaking of the holidays, by the way. Yeah. Holiday Spectacular. Coming up again, we've done

HTML. We've done Bluetooth. Failed at Jeopardy. We did not do a good job with Bluetooth Jeopardy. This year, by just popular demand, just a wave of demand, the Vergecast Holiday Spectacular is USBC. We've got the guests lined up. We got the ideas. We got the plug fest coming and we're going to do another game show this year because Andrew insists that we do a game show. I believe it's the price is right. Are we allowed to say the, yeah, we're allowed to say it's a game show that is not, it's not the price is right. If I don't have a, a giant wheel. We're going to up the ante this year. All of us are going to be playing for one of you, a Vergecast listener, and whoever wins gets a big bag of swag. So here's what we need from you. Call the

hotline. [phone]. Tell us your name and your favorite USBC gadget. We'll put all the names in a hat. We'll pick them out. We'll play. We'll do it. We're going to compete for you.

Yeah. I'll represent you. Alex will represent someone else. I'm so sorry. And then whoever wins gets a big bag of Verge March. I'm actually doing a lot of USB research right now. Actually, this just says some verge march. So whoever with some verge merch.

It depends on how bad your person does. I've seen the merch. The merch is good. It's quality merch. So it'll be a good price. Are you prepping to help your listener? Yeah. Yeah.

I'm reading it all up. I'm going to know some specs. Oh, boy. I'm going to know what Oms mean. All right. She's got it. I'm ready. Let's go.

I got you. Alex is going to do some high school level electrical research. It's going to be amazing. No, that's it. That's coming up. The USBC Holiday Spectacular, one of our silliest yearly traditions, back and force, the USBC. Tell us your favorite USBC gadget, 866 for Verge 1-1. We'll pick some people. We'll play for them. The winner. Get some merch. Sounds pretty good. Call the number. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Verge is a production of the Verge and box media podcast network. The show is produced. by Andrew Marino and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by

Zander Adams. And that's it. We'll see you next week.