The Vergecast - The real story of the iPhone 18 Pro's camera

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

This week's iPhone 18 Pro discourse made aperture a priority, but today on Vergecast we zoom out to talk about the state of smart phone photography at large. Executive editor Jake Kastrenakes, guest host David Imel and senior reviewer Allison Johnson get into manual controls, "buckets of photons," and Apple and Google's strategies on how to prove a picture you took is real. Then, senior AI reporter Hayden Field returns to The Vergecast, just a few new revelations of misaligned behavior since her last appearance. She breaks down who's calling for a slowdown, who's full steam ahead, and the prisoner's dilemma facing the industry. And in the lightning round, we cover robotaxis calling the cops, the Boox Palma 3 e-reader, and the latest crop of intentionally low-quality digital cameras. Further reading: Version History: Oregon trail iPhone 18 Pro review: it's all about the manual controls The variable aperture isn’t the cool part of the iPhone 18 Pro’s camera Apple’s new iPhone camera mode promises to prove your photo isn’t AI Inside the suddenly explosive world of AI safety Your robotaxi might be a narc Waymo pulls over, calls cops on riders with a ghost gun The Boox Palma 3 gets stylus support and a sleek redesign Camp Snap’s 110D gives slim retro film cameras a digital upgrade Fujifilm’s Instax Pal 2 is a tiny digital camera that may not disappoint Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. 0:00 Welcome and lineup00:30 Version History returns02:08 Oregon Trail livestream plug02:36 Apple camera geekout02:59 Apple's new CEO Emmy moment05:23 iPhone 18 Pro upgrades08:33 Pro controls usability11:46 RAW vs ProRAW explained14:35 Signal to noise deep dive21:35 Photographic styles debate25:25 Reference Image authenticity32:40 What we want next41:40 AI safety drama begins42:36 AI Safety Freakout46:10 Liability And Regulation51:34 China Race Narrative54:43 Pace The Frontier Plan55:54 Auditors Inside Labs01:00:22 Prisoners Dilemma Problem01:04:38 Accountability Dead End01:08:45 Waymo Calls The Cops01:14:56 The E Reader Race01:19:56 Tiny Retro Cameras01:26:32 Wrap Up And Goodbye Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all-in-one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odu.com slash Vod. That's ODOO.com slash Vox.

Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor.

Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with eye-gaming Ontario. Do you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siaia and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out.

Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of F-Stops. I'm Jay Kasternakis, executive editor of The Verge, here with our friend, David and Mel, Virchcast guest host. What's up, gamers? I'm back. And we've got a lot coming up today.

We're going to geek out about smartphone cameras with Allison Johnson. Hayden Field will join us to talk about the AI safety meltdown this week, and we've got another installment of the Lightning Round. But first, I've got some stuff to talk about. We have a new season of version history. The theme for this run of episodes is back to school. I love it. I'm like so hyped. The first episode is about the Oregon Trail.

So awesome. I love that. I'm on an episode about, I don't know who came up with these ideas. I'm on the episode about overhead projectors, which when they told me that, I was like, of course, of course, we have to do overhead projectors. They bought an overhead projector. It's like, I can't tell you guys how beautiful it is. Yeah.

It's, I missed them. David, you're on an episode about one laptop per child. Yeah. Also, like a beautiful piece of hardware. I was surprised how much I loved that computer and how many of the ideas from that computer I wish were in modern laptops. It's a very weird piece of tech history.

Yeah. Okay, we have a trailer. Check it out. What if I told you that for the last several decades, schools across the United States have required students to have a game console in class? You might have heard of it. It's called the Ti-84 plus.

Mind sweeper, Tetris, Snake, Pong. Drug Wars was the game. It also does math. This season on version history, we're going back to school. Peak dysentery. Yeah, peak dysentery. I like that idea. A two-in-one laptop.

You can just flip to any page in the book. This was the only technology available. So grab your trapper keeper, throw on the Jan Sport, open up a bottle of Fruitopia, and check out version history on YouTube or wherever you get podcasts. That was awesome. Ti-84-plus hitting this weekend. That's a good one. That's great.

Also, if you're listening to this early, some Verge staffers are going to be live streaming a playthrough of the Oregon Trail today, Friday, at 1.30 p.m. Eastern on our YouTube page. Check it out. It'll be really fun. We'll find out who's going to make it to the Oregon. Who lives, who dies, whether the emulator crashes what we're playing. It's going to be fun. You can follow version history at Vergin.

version history podcast on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Now, it's time to talk about Apple. Senior reviewer Alison Johnson is here. Alison, welcome. Hello, thanks for having me. I'm so excited. This is going to be an all-out camera geek out.

The iPhone 18 Pro reviews hit earlier this week. Before we get into that, there's something perhaps more important that I want to talk about. Earlier this week, on Monday, the Emmys. Apple CEO John Ternis is walking down the red carpet. He's looking sharp. He's in a tuxedo.

He has an iPhone duo in his breast pocket. A reporter asks him a question. She wants to see it. Let's roll the clip. I would love to see it. Let's see. There we go. There we go.

Oh, my God. I love it. They have my address. So you got me? You got me? Okay, here's my question. Turnus versus Cook. What's the swag comparison?

This is so different. Yeah. It's so weird to see the Apple CEO dressed up and at a big event like this. Sometimes Tim Cook would show up for like a half second and just smile and wave and then he'd leave. It's very uncommon to see them actually engaging with people, showing things off, looking all cool.

There are multiple photos of him at the Emmys, like looking like a movie star, taking photos with people, ironically with the iPhone 18 Pro because the inner camera on the fold is not good. Well, funny enough as well, he turns the iPhone 18 Pro sideways even though it has the center stage camera

to take the selfies. That's right. He doesn't need to do that. But, you know, we'll give him a pass for that because it still looks better. It still looks better to do that. I know that photo. It looks cool.

He looks cool. I cannot imagine Tim Cook doing any of this. The vibe is so different. Like having a number. normal human conversation and interaction. Oh, my God. He also, he kind of has that like rock star vibe when he walks around. Like even photos of him that have gone out recently of him like not at Apple Park. He's got like shades on and he's got like a jacket on. And it's just a totally different energy. So hopefully that means something in the future for Apple hardware. If you had told me

there was going to be an Apple CEO who was like a normal human person who like could, could almost pass as cool. I could see him on a most. I would never would have, never would have believed it. I would have lost money on Pollymarket there. And he's the hardware guy, which makes it even cool. He's responsible for a lot of the good hardware upgrades that have happened on the Apple laptops and stuff recently. A successful first like two and a half weeks of CEO.

I think that's the impression here. I'd say so. Yeah. Okay. Now we'll talk about the iPhone 18 Pro. We'll get into it. Allison, your review dropped earlier this week. You were on the Vergecast earlier this week.

You talked about it with V. David, we haven't had you on to talk about it. So why don't we start off? I want to hear your thoughts. A couple big upgrades here. I think the variable aperture is probably the most important one. Yes. You tested it out.

Big deal. Not a big deal. Where do you fall on that spectrum? When we say most important upgrade, I think it's probably more apt to say like flashiest upgrade because the change the changes that Apple made that are actually important in my opinion are in software both in the pro controls that they added to the phone which I think are very important because now you can do things like up to a second of long exposure so you can get sort of a shutter speed slow shutter kind of effect you can get um god there's so many things

you can do with that you can change the white balance you can know all these things and also they upgraded the image pipeline because their signal to noise ratio is better now because they have a bigger aperture. They have a, you know, sensors the same size, but they felt comfortable enough doing less sharpening. I had a conversation with Apple about this. They said, yeah, we totally re-engineered that whole pipeline.

And I noticed it in my time testing it. I went to Arizona to shoot a bunch of photos with the phone. And right out of the gate, I was like, things look less plasticy, less oversharpened. the color is just better and more natural, both in the heaf mode and in pro-rah. Not really once in that entire process was I like, and I want to use the variable aperture. But all of the other things, I was like, yes, thank you. Thank you for adding these features.

Wait, I have so many questions about the color, about the sharpening. But on the variable aperture, I think that's sort of where Allison landed, too, which was, I wasn't like you mostly you had it in an auto and it was like mostly just shooting at the same F1.8 that it always did. Yeah, which at first I was like, aha, gotcha, Apple. And when you think about it, it's like that lens has been optimized, you know, for that F stop. And it's a little bit sharper there, I think. But there, I think it does kind of illustrate that there are so few use cases where you're like, yeah, I would like to. stop down the aperture on this teeny tiny lens in front of this teeny tiny sensor.

Yeah. They exist and it will, it will behave that way in auto mode, but it's sort of in the, we kind of had to go looking for it. I was like, you know, lining up a group shot, I was like, okay, two of you need to stand here, one of you needs to be back here, and then we got it to drop to F4. Yeah, so they kind of like, the big updates are sort of hidden under this whole, the aperture moves thing where it's like it is a brighter maximum aperture. We finally can control shutter speed in the year of our Lord 2026. Yeah.

In the native app, yeah. Yeah, exactly. This is my question. Both of you are like, I think like very good smartphone photographers and like pretty deep in it. I'm like, oh God, manual controls like through software. Like this like is a lot. Do you find these to be usable? You're like, you're like, fine, like, great, give it to me.

I will use it. It's, it's, this is very doable. Very. I find it to actually be more elegant of an implementation than a lot of other smartphone manufacturers do. Apple sort of redesigned the camera app a little bit so that a lot more is in that little extra menu that is just on the right side. The most annoying thing for me is that when you close the camera app, that goes back

to the default and you have to change it every time and that's frustrating. but the settings for like shutter speed and things like that, they now have quick settings for on the top. And you don't have to touch them if you don't want to, right? The idea for most of these smartphone manufacturers has always been, we want a magic box that you press a button and it gives you the best possible photo. And we can talk a little bit more about the redesign image pipeline

and how that helps deliver the best possible photo. But I think that they actually did quite a good job of implementing pro controls for people who want access to them. and it's not, you don't have to go through a thousand menus. Like in the past, Apple made you go into the settings menu, like the settings app, and then you had to go, you had to find camera, and you had to tap on camera, and then you'd go deep into that, and then you'd have to change, like, from, if you wanted to shoot JPEG instead of Heaf, you'd have to change it from, like,

most smallest file size to most compatible or something like that. And there's some of those settings still exist, but it is much easier now to just go into the submenu in the camera app itself. and switch these settings. And that exists for shutter speed, that exists for things like white balance. I think it's a nice balance for both amateurs and pro photographers.

Alison, did you do a lot of playing with manual mode? I did. And I, you know, I kind of like, poo-poo, like shooting raw on a smartphone a little bit where I'm like, I'll just let it handle. You know, it's going to do all the multi-frame compositing I don't feel like I want to tinker with a raw file from a smartphone too much. Other people, you know, mileage varies.

But the shutter speed and having, you know, there's exposure compensation that's been available, but kind of having that suite of controls, I will go in there and I will mess with them because I'm sort of like framing a shot and I'm like, okay, I can see how I want this. and the phone is not quite behaving right. Like, I can make two quick changes right here, and I've got the photo, like, way closer to what I was envisioning, rather than being like, well, I just will under-expose and maybe do something with it later.

So I had a good time with them. I was looking at your sample photos in the 18 Pro Review, and I was like, I was angry. I'm like, this is, how do you take this photo on a phone? Like, this is, like, I've spent too much money on real, cameras and I can't do this. I want to make you two talk about, because, Allison, there were shots fired there with your comment about people shooting raw.

Are they in the room with us? David, you mentioned they improved the image pipeline. Are you still a raw guy? Have they improved enough that you're like, do these results show through in the JPEGs or the heaps? Or are you getting a meaning? Because I'm still assuming most people, most photos, even the photographers out there are going to shoot JPEG. Are you noticing the difference there or is this just potential?

Actually a lot. And I need to break something down for people because there is raw, which you can only access through third-party camera apps like Moment or Hallide. And then there is pro-Raw, which is still, it is, pro-Raw has been such a contentious setting. Because when they first introduced it, and up until now, it was still quite compressed. Like, it gives you a little bit more flexibility. It gives you a little more malleability in post. But for me, it still gave you the, like, really crunchy, sort of plasticy smartphone camera look that we have pretty much always been plagued by. Annoyingly, you can pretty much only get the 48 megapixel mode through either using ProRaw or shooting in 40 megapixel through the default iPhone camera app.

most iPhone camera, most third-party camera apps like Hallide or Moment Camera Pro 2, if you shoot raw, you only get a 12 megapixel image, which is frustrating. And I went into this review, or like my review of the camera, shooting through Moment Camera 2 initially because I always go straight to the raw camera apps because I generally want the most control. I was just kind of messing around with the camera, both in the Heath mode and the ProRour, Raw mode. And I was just noticing like, oh, weirdly the color is better and weirdly that plasticy look is like not gone, obviously. And I still sometimes will go into like lightroom and pull down

on the sharpening a little bit. But it is much better than it used to be. And we have these like briefings with Apple after we have the phones, but before the reviews go live where they can answer questions. And I was like, did you guys do something to the camera? Because I feel like both in pro raw and the regular heaf mode, it just, like, the color is better and the sharpening is better. And they said, yeah, we felt that our signal the noise ratio has gotten good enough that we don't have to, by the way, signal the noise ratio. I'm sorry, this is a lot. We're at like the third tier sub-breakdown here. Yeah, I'm like, how deep should I go here?

That's what this segment is. I'm sorry and congratulations to everyone. This is what I want. Okay, good, okay, good. When you have a sensor, it's subdivided into hundreds of thousands of little photo buckets that capture photons. right? And the signal is how many photons get captured by each individual bucket and converted into electrical current, which is then turned into brightness. That brightness signal is then demosayeked where the phone takes all of these adjacent subpixels and says, based on the pixels around it

and how much signal it received, this is the color of what that pixel should be. However, there's a lot of different types of noise. There's things like shot noise, which is basically like chaos. It is when there are photons flying around, there is also electrical interference that is happening between these subpixels. Samsung has done a lot of engineering on this to create like subpixel gates between the photon buckets to make sure that there's less interference. There's a lot of engineering that goes into making less noise on a sensor like this. Things like backside illuminated sensors are also made to cut down on noise. Anyway, the signal and noise ratio gets better when the sensor gets better. bigger because when those photo buckets, the individual pixels are bigger, they can receive more photons individually.

This is why when smartphone cameras were originally like the first 100 megapixel or 200 megapixel Samsung smartphone camera, it looked freaking awful when you shot in 200 megapixel mode because you were taking a sensor that while bigger than we had had before was subdivided 200 million times. You know, that is too much. And you are not getting a good signal in each individual pixel. Now, Apple is doing the thing that everybody else is doing where in regular Heath mode, it's taking that 48 megapixel sensor and it's making four pixels into giant,

I don't want to say megapixels, but like megapixels, ultra pixels, whatever. And they're taking all of that signal converting into light. But even on the 48 megapixel sensor, the sensor is now big enough that you're getting enough photon signal that you're not receiving, too much noise to actually say what the color of that pixel is supposed to be.

So all of that to say, Apple feels that their sensor is big enough. The bigger aperture on this camera probably also contributes to that, right? Because, yeah, it's the same size sensor, but if the hole is bigger, you're still receiving more light. I think they say there's like a whole extra stop of light from that or something. And anyway, they took this information and they said, now that we're receiving all of this light data, we don't have to do as much computational photography. And what they had to do before is because you weren't receiving as much light information, you had to stack frames on top of each other because I'm sorry, should I stop or should I keep

going? This might be too much. I'm sorry. I think so they've done all of this, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Go.

And then the answer is that pro raw is therefore able to deliver a cleaner image. with that is less processed. Yes, exactly. That is where the computation of the photography that happens here is basically saying we're not receiving enough light data so we have to use computers to stack frames and do sharpening and noise reduction and things like that. And when you are when you have physics on your side, which happens by having a bigger sensor or having a wider aperture, you don't need to do this computational photography because

the computational photography was invented because the sensor was too small. And so Apple went back to the drawing board. and they said, let's re-engineer the way that we process the light information that's hitting the sensor and do less sharpening and things like that. And that's why the color and the sharpening is better. So, Allison, you are, I think, more of a JPEG-Heaf-style shoe. Which is to say, not getting as much pure data as David is. Yeah. Are you seeing those changes in the JPEGs?

Because that is where I think there has often been just a way. world's difference where with the raw you always got this very um you know unprocessed file and with the jpeg they just went went crazy on it yeah i think so i think across my photos like some of them still do have that kind of a little over-the-top kind of hDR-ish look to them um particularly with the ultra-wide we know which is a smaller sensor and that's its own thing. Yeah, I was I was just finding and it was like kind of a cumulative thing where we went out for a morning and shot around the park and we take a photo and it was more of like, oh, okay, I got the photo that I wanted here. I didn't have to fight it as much, you know.

That's what I was finding and just coming back to my photos at the end of a session and being like, yeah, no, that's what that's what the light did look like. And it didn't go crazy overboard on on sharpening it up and all that. So I think it's a subtle effect maybe to the, to those who are not as steeped in all of this. But I think people will see it and appreciate it. Yeah, the big question that I have yet to get an answer on from Apple is whether or not these processing changes will be passed down to older iPhones. And I'm still waiting on answer for that. So not sure. Did you notice a difference in like color and that sort of plasticy effect? Because I felt it was better in my heaps as well, but I would love to get your

take on it. Yeah. I did. And it was, I'm thinking of like a particular situation where there's sort of like this, this beautiful like golden light that's kind of like reflecting off of a building and throwing some cool kind of shadows. And I think, Typically a smartphone will kind of be like, like freak out a little bit and not quite know what to do. And it's sort of balancing for like what's true north here. Like what's supposed to be white and then making it look a little crazy. Neutral white balance kind of situation. Yeah.

It was just a little more, it was a little easier. I had to like, you know, get into the white balance settings. But once I got that, I was like, okay, it's. It's behaving the way I want it to hear with less friction. And that, you know, that came out in the JPEG, the heaf. I thought colors looked pretty good running around, you know, the York. We got nice blue skies that were not crazy.

I thought just a pleasant, I had a pleasant time with the photos I got. Apple also, they expanded the photographic styles feature, right? where you can now dial in these more, I don't know, these filmic sort of things like grain and texture. Allison, like, was that part of getting that color or is this like a whole separate thing on top of it? So I, for my purposes, I wanted to keep it all straightforward, you know, the like total default photographic style. But there are so many options now. I was like a little overwhelmed because we had that like it's it's the new photographic styles that have that grid of dots and you're kind of you can dial in like undertone and then how how aggressive the tone mapping is going to be and this adds like some additional options below it for texture and then there's like grain which you can turn on and off and the other ones you can kind of of do sliders on. And then it like labels that photographic style with like the stuff you

dialed in. So it'll be like rose gold soft skin. And I'm like, what do those words mean? There are a lot of submenus now. It's kind of crazy. You go into styles and then you have the style you have, then you have to hit customize. And then after that, there's palette and texture. And once you hit texture, then you have options for standard soft skin, glow, film, and grain. And then on each of those, you have a slider. It's a lot. It's a lot of submenus. I mean, this is powerful in a way, though.

I've always found Apple's approach to this to be like, like, I've never understood that box. You drag it. It corresponds with nothing I've seen in any other photography editing app. It's like a little bit wilderness to me. David, we just did the pixel 11 review. together. They had this new feature called camera looks where they would change the amount of computational photography they were doing. You could also dial in a look. I'm curious how these two things compare. Yeah. The way I see it, Apple is getting on the train in some way in trying

to make your phone be able to shoot these kind of filmic looking images, especially with its film setting and its grain setting. But they are one button that you just then have this sort of nebulous slider for. So it's not like a, I mean, it could be kind of a recipe in a way in that you could change your photographic style. And then you could go in and you could turn the film setting on and you could dial zero to 100. How much film do I want?

Which is, in my opinion, this is a very Apple thing to do where they take this kind of complicated idea and they just like compress it into a slider. And that, I think, is their way of getting on the bandwagon of, we don't want you. to use third-party film apps. We don't want you to buy a dedicated film camera. You can do all this on your iPhone. I will say the grain setting. I tried it a couple of times and I was looking just like you, Allison, I was kind of focused on what is the straight out of the box camera experience. So I didn't play with it as much. But there are some samples online that I was looking at. And I think they need to make the grain size smaller or like the ability to make the grain smaller because as soon as

you turn on the film setting and the grain setting, it looks like you're shooting like 800 to 1600 film, which is a problem every single phone manufacturer has, by the way. The pixel does this too. When you turn on the film setting, it's like, oh, it's film. It's really grainy. I would like to just have that very subtle grain effect. That's another slider.

That's another slider. The other big new camera software feature is they added this reference image technology. Actually, it's not even a software. feature. It's part hardware, part software. Alzin, I truly, I don't quite understand this. I know it is to combat AI fakes. Yeah, it's an entirely new, you know, we have C2PA, which is an idea to label images and metadata, you know, are they AI, not how much stuff was added to it. This is kind of like Apple's stepping to the side and they're doing their own kind of thing here, which is, um, You know, at first glance in the keynote, I was like, I don't really understand this.

This seems just like another version of C2PA, but it's actually, it's pretty complicated. When you, you know, have the phone in your hands, it's a setting you have to turn on in the settings, like settings menu, camera, turn on reference image. Then it'll pop up as an option in the camera app. So you have to be specifically taking a photo in this mode. You can only use the main camera in like 1X or 2X mode because the main camera sensor is actually like able to cryptographically sign these images like at the pixel level. So you take your photo in this mode and then in order to kind of like view the reference version of it, you have to send it up to the private cloud compute. So that's like another thing you're pressing.

It sort of process it and comes back down. And then you get this version of the image that is basically like how it came off the sensor. And the example, the way they explained it was like a negative. you know, if you had taken a photo and you needed to show your editor, like, here, here's the negative, here's what it looked like before I made any edits. And it's a visual thing rather than, I mean, you do get a card of like information about what, you know, the settings and the camera that took it, but it's primarily like you just kind of tap and it shows you the reference versus the process version. And it's meant to kind of like, you know, right now it's a very narrow use case and a very narrow set of circumstances it could be used for.

But I think the idea is like someone sends you an image, you see an image somewhere, you know, kind of imagine if you could just like tap it and see that sort of the negative version of it. That's how I am understanding it. This is like, it is so deeply thought through as a way to prove out the origin and veracity of an image. And it is so wonky to execute. Like, David, did you send somebody or to have somebody send you a reference image? Like, is this a thing that you experienced viewing? I have not done this yet. I think it is quite smart and it is a very Apple thing to do at the same time where they're like,

We're supporting synth ID, which is Google's version of having this invisible watermark, you know, in your image. Because the rest of the industry is starting to support synth ID. But we're also running up against that XKCD meme again, where it's like there are 15 competing standards. Let's make one that universally, you know. But Apple, it's not universal. You have to use the iPhone. And Apple loves living in a world where we don't think about you at all kind of situation, you know? And so they're like, we're going to do it our way.

I think their way is actually pretty smart because the way that they talk about it as a digital negative. And the reason that they talk about it that way is because when film photographers used to take photos and have them in galleries or whatever, the only way to really prove that you were the photographer is that you had the negative. Right. Like you took that negative. You printed it. Whatever. If you have the negative, you're the one that took the photo. That's like very obvious.

And it's a similar thing where it's like if it is on your smartphone, which is a thing. which is a thing that is encrypted by your facial data. You know, only you can unlock your phone, only you can get to the setting where you can tap it and show what came off the sensor. That actually, in my opinion, makes a lot of sense. That is really interesting. You know, it's a lot harder to break.

Like C2PA, for example, it's a good idea in concept where it's like we're going to embed it in the metadata, but you know what breaks that? A screenshot. Yeah. And this is not breakable by. a screenshot. So I think it's a great way for Apple to do it, but it also lives in the world where iPhones are the only things that exist. And I do think that Apple wants to convince

people over a long period of time that the iPhone is going to be the only camera that exists. You know, because to your point, Allison, it's a very narrow use case. This is really helpful for like photojournalists, right? You turn it on when you want to turn it on. If you're out documenting an important event, even in Apple's keynote. They show that the way that they show the Apple reference them is, is a photo of a politician, like doing some movement, you know. And so I think that if you're a photo journalist and you're taking photos with your iPhone, which is the ideal future that Apple wants because they don't see a future where dedicated cameras

exist anymore because they convince you that the iPhone is the only video camera you need, the only photography camera you need, then it makes a lot of sense. But as far as this being a standard that the rest of the industry can use, it's just not. So, you know, I think that's why they had to also adopt Synth ID. Well, and Allison, you mentioned this in your review.

Like, it doubles the file size. Yes, right? It's a dedicated mode. It doubles the file size. So this, like, simply is not a solution for the everyday photo. For short, definitely not. This is a proactive, I need to prove

that this is authentic. Actually, I think, in that sense, is like pretty interesting. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's an interesting way to think about it. I think, unfortunately, most of the images that get manipulated online, that are either generated with AI

or manipulated with AI, or not images that people sought out to, you know, make sure people knew the source of or the authenticity of. However, going out and saying, I'm going to sign all these images for this event is an interesting. way to think about it for sure. Yeah. It feels a little bit like a proof of concept to me, you know? It's sort of like a trial run at like, here, we're going to introduce this into the world. It's going to work on this one particular phone that is not going to be in the hands of many people, you know, for a while. And it makes more sense to me to think of it that way, because otherwise you're like, I have to go into a different mode every time. I want to prove a photo is a, you're a

feel like that that's wild. I want to talk about phone cameras more generally to wrap this up, which is the, I think the headline feature, if you were to ask what the biggest upgrades to the iPhone 18 Pro is, right? Like, it's variable aperture, right? That is the, that's what Apple wants you to think. That is. Yes.

Right. I don't think that that's actually it. And then in reality, it's actually, there's all of these, like, this world of smaller but impactful camera upgrades underneath. both of you are big smartphone camera people. I'm curious in what do you actually want to see next, right? You have carte blanche to change the iPhone camera for the next generation. Like, where is your head at?

Is it, is it that we need hardware improvements? Is it more of this software stuff? Because I think all of these companies have this philosophy and they're kind of just chipping away at it. But what actually is it that you are looking for to make these cameras better? Allison, I'm curious where your head is at here. Okay, how much time do we have? I want a one-inch sensor.

One-inch main camera sensor. They exist. They're in the world. I know it changes everything about how Apple has made cameras and upgraded. The telephoto camera is much better than it was, and I go to it a lot. But just even put a bigger sensor behind that one. You know, why not? I love it.

Maybe I played with Vivo's attachment telephoto lenses like earlier this year. They are so fun. They are a little tiny like actual like telephoto, they call them like converters, I think. and you have like a special case that's on the phone. You kind of just attach the lenses to the front of it. I thought it was the goofiest looking thing in the world, and I loved it so much by the end of the day. I was like, I want every phone camera to have this.

So I think I do want hardware. I want like a grip. You know, there are third party options, and maybe there's something good out there. I haven't tried, but I just think of like the Jaume. photography kit and how that just feels kind of like a sleek, easy to apply kind of solution. And it's just as easy to be like, you know what, I'm not taking serious photos right now. I'm going to leave all that behind and just have my phone.

So that's it. Apple could get working on that right now. I think that is so interesting, though, that like at the end of the day, it's like, make the hardware better, right? It's hardware is still the biggest single factor in or cheat code to like just just level this up. Just level this up. I mean, I look at the photos that come out of those one inch sensors on some phone cameras. And oh, man, it's night and day.

They look very, very good. David, same question to you, but I am going to last second changes on you. Oh. If it's not going to be hardware, right? If we're in the realm of software, which I feel like is where your brain often is, is toying with things. where does that change need to happen to improve things going forward? Where I think that Apple is falling a little bit behind is in low light at the moment. They can still, you know, they get a lot of flack for making dark low light photos look like daytime.

And there are ways that they can change that. You know, you can just drop the exposure in the software if you want. But Google years ago got really good. good at computational, computational astrophotography. And I know this is a very specific, like, use case. And it doesn't have to be astrophotography, but the one area that I felt was a little bit lagging behind was the long exposure night photography modes.

Because there's like a low light mode built into the iPhone and handheld you can do up to three seconds. But it is quite noisy if you do that, and you have to have a tripod. And Google has made so many advancements in being able to do handheld astro modes or like super good low light modes

that I think if Apple spent a little bit more time focusing on that or you know I want to say making the sets are bigger because then you don't have to do as much of that or as in this year they made the aperture wider right and so that helps a little bit with those low lights yes

and that does help I think like I don't hate the idea of a variable aperture I think that that's what people are sort of getting mixed up about is like, yes, I don't think it's incredibly useful where we are right now. But everyone wants a 1.0 type sensor, like Allison said. And Sony's biggest problem, because Sony is the company that is using these 1.0 type sensors the most, is that they don't have a variable aperture. And because of that, almost no photo you take is in focus. Everything is blown out.

For some reason, they have not put like any work into the software experience of actually like making those take good photos, even though they have the hardware for it. So I think something that everyone has said, basically, in these reviews, is in the future, when Apple makes a 1.0 type sensor in their phone, the variable aperture is going to be really helpful. You know, and, like, what they're doing and they're engineering with it of, like, it automatically changing without you having to change it, but you can also manually change it yourself, that's super good. I see this as, like, a test bed that they're currently, like, playing with, because whether it's next year with the, the rumor at iPhone 20 or, you know, an iPhone Ultra or something like that.

And we could get in, and I know we're kind of like short on time, but I just want to mention that the iPhone handoff feature that they announced, where that lets you use one phone number for multiple iPhones. In my opinion, is because people want to use the iPhone duo, but the cameras are just way worse. And so now we're entering this world where it's like, just like you should own an iPad and MacBook and an iPhone. You should also own an iPhone pro as your camera. This can't happen. Oh my God. And a duo as your fun phone. Oh my gosh. I mean, I have I've seen people on a subway carrying two iPhones. But it's usually an old iPhone. It's like a work one. It's not. Oh, or a work. I've seen somebody with like a busted up iPhone 5 and like a brand new like modern iPhone because, dude, the iPhone 5 took some nice photos. Oh, I mean, yeah, because of less competition photography. Yeah. Let shadows like where they will. But there you're not getting.

the handoff, but I see what you're saying. I mean, this is, I want, I want the emails from the people who are buying the duo and the pro so they can. Well, I know that there's a lot of people that are buying the duo and are just not upgrading their 17 pro. And that is who those people are, that iPhone handoff features for those people. No, this is how we bring back the iPhone mini. It can be your fun little phone and then you have a big phone when you have to have a big phone.

And the battery life doesn't matter when you only use it for like, 20% of the day. Exactly. I think this has been one of the most fascinating years for the iPhone camera. I agree. Allison, your review. It's up on the verge.com. It's like mostly an iPhone camera review.

Everyone should check it out. I think it's super interesting. Allison, you're going to leave us for a minute. You'll be back for the lightning round. We've got to take a break. When we return, Hayden Field is going to join us to talk about the last couple weeks of AI safety drama. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other.

That's where Odo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all-in-one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odu.com slash Vox. That's ODOO.com slash Vox. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick.

BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario.

This family is on the brink of Civil War. Mobland, the hit original series is now streaming on Paramount Plus. We are the Harrogans. Don't know than it? And Google us. From the underworld of Guy Ritchie. Do you want to step up the ladder? I won't call him dead.

Starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, and Helen Mirren. Do I have to do everything myself? You want to want? I'll give you a... Mobland. New season is now streaming on Paramount Plus. All right, we're back. The Virges Senior AI reporter Hayden Field is here with us for the second time this week.

Hayden, how's it going? It's going great. Thanks for having me back. It's been, I believe, two days since you were on this show. That was six, quote, instances of misaligned behavior ago. This is, right? Like, before we recorded this, Open AI was like, ah, there were some more hacks, our bad guys. Yeah. I went from the Apple event to Arizona and I was sort of out of service and I came back and then there were so many instances of misaligned behavior.

It was a lot to catch up on and I feel like I need you to explain what is going on, Hayden. Next time that I see you guys on it'll be like, oh, it's been three misalignment incidents since I last saw you were going to stop talking in time. Yeah. It's been so long since I've seen you. Yeah. It doesn't sound so bad when you put it that way. It's just a cheeky little misalignment incident. Anything could have happened. there. Okay, so it's been a pretty explosive couple of weeks for AI safety in particular. And I wanted to get back into what happened, why it blew up today, and what's going to happen next, if, if anything. So this all kind of started last week when an anthropic researcher quit his job and posted on X that he thinks AI will kill everyone within the decade.

A bunch of AI researchers have said the same thing. Many people have pushed back on the narrative, but it went mainstream. It caused this sort of full-scale freak out. And you and our producer, Travis, were on the show earlier this week to talk about that, but it's still going. It's been a big conversation. I think this is really the first time that I can remember that it's sort of broke into the mainstream. I actually just want to start by quoting what that AI researcher said, because I think it's, like, pretty striking to hear. So this is from Jacob Coxon, who spent three years doing pre-training research at Open

AI and most recently Anthropic. So this is across a bunch of tweets or ex-posts, whatever they are now, he wrote, Open AI Ananthropic are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field over. overnight and acquire real power and resources. The people building AI earnestly believe that this could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. No other human activity poses this level of danger.

Hayden, why did this message hit this time? Because that sounds very scary. But to me, it also sounds like things that a lot of these researchers have been saying for a while now. Yeah, that's exactly what's interesting about this to me. Nothing about this was new to me. I've been hearing people say this for years. Right. You know, there's like a lot of discourse about this right now. And I think it's because in July when a lot of these large-scale cyber attacks happened, starting with Open AI and hugging face, I think that kind of got people talking about AI systems that go off on their own and go rogue.

I've heard some criticism of that term because it implies that, you know, these systems weren't built to go rogue or that the companies aren't at fault for it. So, you know, keep that in mind, obviously, going rogue here means doing something crazy and bad rather than, oh, the companies aren't at fault for it. But yeah, I mean, I think that these cyber attacks that we heard of starting in July, especially because the company's Open AI wasn't aware of the hugging face incident for weeks. And actually, if you count the groundwork that was laid before that months. So I think all this stuff going on under these companies' noses without them knowing, despite them kind of parroting a lot of safety talk and saying, hey, like, put us in charge of your enterprise, you know,

cyber safety is a little bit ironic. And that is what got people talking for months. And then this happening, you know, it was already in the zeitgeist. So I think it was easier for people to say, oh, well, wait, we've been hearing about all these rogue systems. And now someone that was working on these systems is saying that they have really horrifying, you know, implications. Maybe we should sit up and take notice. Yeah, there's a couple things that I wanted to ask you about Hayden because I've talked to some of my friends that are not as plugged in as we are here at the verge. And they all kind of hate Sam Altman and the AI sphere so much that they are convinced

that all of this is just marketing hype. And I think that there is truth to that probably, but at the same time, if you have these agents that are doing things autonomously that you cannot control, that is a real problem because you don't know exactly what they're going to be doing. You know, right now it's just finding the answer sheet to a test. But later it could be something else. And now Open AI is saying, oh, actually, they did more than we thought. And every week, they're doing more than they thought. They're doing more than they thought. And the question that for you is, if you have a dog and it bites someone's face off,

Are you not responsible for the dog? Because it seems silly to me that these systems can go do these crazy things. They can hack companies. If a human went in hacked hugging face, they would probably be prosecuted. So why is it that Open AI and Anthropic are not being held liable? And instead, as we talked a little bit about off the show, they're just saying, oh, it's an oopsie. Like it's just a little, it's a little cutesy oopsie. Like how is that possible?

Why is that the conversation right now? Totally. So, yeah, I think that's a great question. they absolutely should be getting in trouble. And I think that the dog analogy is when I hear a lot. It's like, yeah, these companies built these systems. They're responsible for them. And the fact that they are saying, oh, we're in control of this stuff. Trust us with your enterprise AI. You know, trust us with these large-scale models that are, you know, trained to help with or flag vulnerabilities in cybersecurity. on large infrastructure. Oh, but also we're losing control of our systems and they're going all over the internet and seeding random stuff and hacking companies

and handling personal user data all without us knowing about it. Yeah, they should be responsible. And I think that part of the language around like rogue agents and, oh, they escaped and this kind of passive language, you know, people have been telling me that's, a huge way that these companies are kind of trying to escape responsibility. Responsibility. Exactly. So I think that's huge here. They should be facing responsibility and they are not.

And unfortunately, it doesn't look like regulation is nearby because of the president's posts on social media the other day saying all we need for AI regulation is a high IQ president. Okay. Yeah, there's a lot going on there. Is that a view that is widely shared in the AI industry? No. I was speaking with a lot of sources inside labs, AIVCs, you know, people at tech companies, and they were all, no matter how anti-regulation they were, they were pretty anti-that statement. As in even that went even too far for some of the anti-regulation people. They were like, whoa, well, we need more than that. So that really tells you something. I think he was motivated partly by trying to get people to be pro-dead. Center because he talks about that later in the post, but still, yeah. As for the marketing hype, I think there's some truth to it in that their businesses do do well when their model looks super powerful to the outside world. It's kind of like a hold me back, a bar fight situation. You know, like, oh, hold me back. Like, oh, it's too powerful. But I also think, in this case,

we should be looking at this very seriously because, one, I've been hearing AI researchers talk about their fears about this for years. So it's not anything new. It's not just a sci-op of like one guy being planted to say this stuff. Secondly, it's not good for their business, for AI labs to look like they don't have a handle on this technology. It's great for the overall level of power they look like they have and maybe for investments, but it's not good for their bottom line in terms of their current business. Enterprise and coding are their main revenue drivers right now. No enterprise wants to work with a company that looks like it's out of control or it can't control its own technology, especially if you're paying a ton of money to use that technology behind the scenes to plug up

your own cybersecurity vulnerabilities, but then also maybe it'll hack you. That's not a good business model at all. And, you know, the government doesn't want an out-of-control system either. They want a system that they can control every single aspect of that has its own huge issues and controversies. But, yeah, it's not good for their bottom line in this way. So I think it's important to know, like, yeah, they make money when people think their systems are super powerful. But if their system looks out of control, that's not good for their clients. That seems to be the strange push and pull here, right? Because if they are saying, oh, the only way to prevent these hacks from happening to you is for you to buy our models and then use our cybersecurity

tools to create the defense systems because we can't control our models. Like that is a, it's such a weird way to market your product, but it also makes sense. So I understand why people would do it. It's, well, there's also, that's where like the specter of China comes in. Right. Right. It's this idea that some other power that actually is malicious, right? Like open AI hacking, hugging face, it's cheeky and cute because like, oh, we're all friends here, right? Like, both of our stock prices eventually are going to go up as a result of this technology being so powerful,

theoretically. Yeah. If a party that actually wants to take down banks has AI, well, then you do need this to be. For the electrical system. And so that is why when we start having this regulation discussion, you have folks like Trump who are like, absolutely not, right? Because for him, it's all about winning, right?

It's all about the stock going up, blah, blah, blah, and about us having the best possible national security and so forth. Right. And this is like there's something there. There's something there. But it's also just sort of this kind of impossible to shoot down kind of argument, right? Because it's the specter of something that currently doesn't exist as far as I'm aware Hayden. Right. It's this issue where China is used as like a boogeyman.

And I think, yeah, there are legitimate concerns about all of that. But there's also this innate, it's a strange assumption that a lot of these people make, that there's no chance in even negotiating with China to come to some sort of agreement. That will never happen. It's not even worth trying instead of even trying. that, let's do all this other crazy stuff. And so a lot of the experts I spoke with the other day were saying we've reached international agreements before for, you know, a ton of different things. Nuclear missiles, like there's a lot of hard things we've done when it comes to international

agreements. And so it's interesting that this has not even really been on the table that we know of. And instead it's more, oh, we got to race, race, race to superintelligence, you know, despite the fact that X, Y, and Z really bad things may happen. And we can't regulate it either because we just have to win the race. I'm going to read a quote. Beth Barnes, the head of meter, which is like a third-party AI auditor, said it like this. When you've heard it from multiple different labs being like, we're the good guys and we have to beat these other irresponsible people, it's a little bit less compelling. It's a bit of a scary attitude to be like, yes, we'll be making huge decisions for the world without any kind of.

of meaningful legitimacy or participation, but it's all right because we're good. We're unusually well-meaning. So I think that tracks for both AI labs that are competing against each other domestically and the China Specter, the China boogeyman, because it's like, oh, well, we have to beat them because we're the good ones. Yet these good ones, quote, quote, said sarcastically, are like saying, oh, but also our systems are so dangerous that they're going to hack everyone and steal your money and do all these other things. So there's just a lot of conflicting narratives here and a lot of really weird power dynamics. So we should talk about the state of the freak out because what happens is this this bubbles up

into conversation. And then Dario Modi, Anthropics CEO, comes out with this blog post about where he says, we need to pace the frontier, which is to say we need to very slightly slow down. Yes. It's actually, he really like makes a point of it. He's like, believe me, we're still going to race toward this. But, like, you know, maybe like a week or so. Like, it's really wild.

Yeah. But he wants to, he wants to pace the development of frontier models. And he lays out three steps. And the first step is putting these embedded evaluators, these third party auditors, inside AI companies. And the second is having some sort of national agreements. And the third is these international agreements. And he says, each of these get progressively harder.

But we're going to. unilaterally, he says, agree to number one. We're going to put third-party auditors inside Anthropic. We're going to give them employee-level access. And Altman then comes out shortly thereafter and says, Open AI is going to do this too. Hayden, you actually wrote a feature that is on the verge.com today about these third-party auditing firms and how they have been seeing these sort of issues

coming for a long time. and what they're trying to do about it. I'm curious, can you tell me what they are doing and what abilities they actually have inside these frontier model companies? Definitely. Yeah, it's been interesting because I've been tracking some of these firms for a few years now, and they haven't had much access to a lot of the labs. Some of them have been working a little bit with the labs

to kind of flag problematic or really concerning, tendencies from their models. These are the people that kind of expose or in the past have exposed when models are cheating a lot or trying to deceive or trying to like obfuscate things in their chain of thought, which is like their mental scratch bad, quote, quote. And I know we're going to get some people saying deception, cheating. These are like anthropomorphic terms. We shouldn't use them. But I don't have a better way to put it. Honestly, it's like, you know, they're not, I'm not meaning they're consciously trying to like, you know, do something crazy. It's that they are cheating, quote, quote, at a task that they were given.

So stuff like that. It's really early stage but concerning research findings that these people have found. And then they've also been pushing for more access to these labs for years because when you find something crazy that models are trying to do that could, you know, be extrapolated to be something really problematic in the future, the more power. or the more influence these models have, you want to figure out where it came from. You want to look at the whole process from start to finish of building the model and say, okay, we can pinpoint it to this,

and here's all the other ways that this could be affecting the model and its potential behavior. But these researchers haven't had much access at all so that they can't go back and pinpoint this stuff. It's like they're so limited on what they can do. And I think that was hugely exemplified by something that happened after the hugging phase hack.

Open AI was really flamed for its lack of transparency over that cyber attack. And so after a while of a lot of public outcry, they said, okay, don't worry, we're going to bring in three independent auditors and let them, you know, look at everything for transparency's sake. They can release their own report, et cetera, et cetera. They only gave them access over six days. And it was three people to analyze countless transcripts. They also couldn't go before the incident, really, more than like a week, I think, or after. They were really limited in their scope on what they could look at. And they were super limited on the questions they could answer in their report.

I think they could only answer seven predetermined questions that were approved by opening high. It couldn't go. Yeah, it was like a really, and so. How is that an audit? That does not feel like an audit. That feels like we are telling you what to say. It was not really telling them what to say, but more, yes, they could only honestly answer certain things. So it was super limited. And so like that was, of course, led to even more controversy. And that's when Dario came out and said, okay, guys, don't worry, we are going to give meter or similar companies full access, starting with eight weeks and then can expand from there. We're going to let them have as much time as they need. So he was kind of directly, insulting open AI there, like, in a shady way, kind of being like, hey, we're going to give them

a lot of access. But the thing is, even if these companies all do align and kind of give all these embedded evaluators a lot of access to look at their systems and interview employees, things like that, there's still other parts that they likely will hold close to the vests because it's IP. And so, I mean, this is a step forward. They're going to let embedded evaluators in. But it's also, you know, just another example of who's in control here. It's the companies. They're deciding to do this. You know, they could just as easily decide not to or change the scope of what those evaluators can look at once they're inside. So that's a tough part of this. It's like still at the end of the day, it's voluntary. And so I think that's going to be a problem. Yeah, I kind of want to get your take on this because you kind of have a prisoner's dilemma situation happening here, right, where everyone is saying we're going to pace the frontier. We're going to slow down. Don't worry, we agree. But you also have this opportunity for any of these labs to basically be like, okay, now that

everyone else is slowing down, we can secretly be speeding up. Do you think that there is a lot of merit to all of these people saying? Because it wasn't just Open AI and it wasn't just Anthropic. It was also Elon Musk. It was like multiple of these labs saying, let's pace, let's slow down. But it feels to me that all of these people are trying to get ahead of each other because there's this idea that who. whoever wins AI, whatever that means, because it's a very nebulous idea, wins all of the money, right?

It's sort of like there's a jackpot to be had. Everyone's racing after it. Do you think that these people that are all agreeing with each other or are actually agreeing with each other? Because it's to their benefit that the president and Jensen Wong come out and say, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Even Zuckerberg is coming out and saying, I don't want to praise the frontier. I want to speed up the frontier. And as soon as you have one of the prisoners and the prisoner's dilemma disagreeing,

that breaks down the entire system. So what do you think about their statements here? Yeah, I think that it's absolutely a prisoner's dilemma because even if they do agree, the second one of them breaks it, they're all going to race. And they may all be secretly breaking it, like you said at the same time. The problem with this whole situation is these are just tweets, you know? Like they're just saying, yeah, he's right, which is like a great PR move, you know? I mean, it's like, you know, I think, Elon Musk's post was literally just Dario's right. Right. And he wasn't like, yeah, here's all the things we're going to do and here's how we're going to pace it.

Even pacing the frontier already is super vague. I mean, a huge chunk of lab employees signed this letter a few months ago saying, please, please, let's pace the frontier, let's slow things down. But even then, there's not any real specifics there. So I think, I mean, it's almost a moot point to even think about it right now because there's no reality behind this. Right now they're saying, hey, we should slow us down. Okay, how, when, who, and also, what's going to happen if you don't? There's no, there's no consequences right now, which I think why, yeah, we love, you know, voluntary stuff is great, internal stuff is great,

but you need external accountability as well. You need regulation. Because, you know, at the end of the day, again, who's in control here? The labs, they are deciding to slow down. Okay, they can just as, easily decide to speed up. So it's like, I think the power dynamics here are, the whole reason I became an AI reporter because it's just crazy that like five guys are in control of this entire thing with no external pull, really. And the incentive structure of Mark Zuckerberg being very behind in the AI race and wanting to just speed ahead while everyone slows down, or even Nvidia, who just wants to keep selling pick axes during the gold rush. Like, unless there is regulation, I just don't see how any of this happens. And I think,

your quote of, they're just tweets is probably the best way to summarize this entire situation. It's crazy. And the other thing about it that's funny to me is like, Anthropic has a reputation for being like the more safety-minded one, right? That's something they've really painstakingly built up this reputation. But I saw a great criticism of them the other day where, you know, they're kind of the ones that are speeding ahead in this race sometimes more than others. You know, one of their execs said the other day, you know, you can't do safety from second place. So they kind of use their safe reputation to be an excuse to push things ahead and say, oh, well, we're the ones that has to win because we are the

best and we're the safest, which some people may agree with that, who knows, but the point is it's still pushing the race. So I think that's the interesting part of this whole thing. It's like, like you said, it's a prisoner's dilemma and it's just, you know, how much do these people trust each other? Who is keeping track of this externally? Not a lot in both situations. It's such a fascinating tension. And I do get the impression that there are folks, even like high up at these companies, who genuinely believe that the AI safety stuff is a very serious issue that needs to be dealt with.

Yes. And policy is not going to happen. Congress is gridlocked. They're not going to go anywhere. Trump has outright said he doesn't want to regulate. these companies. And so you look at what is the mechanism of accountability here, right? We're going to embed some third-party AI evaluators. The mechanism of accountability at this point is basically just bad press, which is maybe a win on some level, right? Like, if you get enough of this

and you genuinely believe that you need regulations, then you get bad press for everyone. You hope it's not you. You hope it's the other guy. But you need these incidents to happen and you need someone to show just how bad they are. But you're not going to necessarily put all that out there yourself. Maybe you are. Maybe you are if you're Dario now. We'll have to see, right? He has announced this yet. I think we don't know the details. Sam Altman agreed to put in evaluators, but just said, we'll have more details later. So I'm very interested to see what becomes of this. But this feels like baby steps, right? Because, you know, Hayden, you've been tracking this. It seems like we have had this freak out, we had this big conversation, everyone said, we need to do something,

and then it kind of just hit a dead end? Is that where we're at? Yeah, I mean, I haven't seen a lot of movement since. It seems like behind the scenes, a lot of these lab leaders are working together to establish some type of, like, you know, standards body in the industry to regulate them. You know, apparently reports say they've been meeting with, you know, government officials trying to make this happen. But at the end of the day, who's setting this up? The labs themselves yet again. So I think, you know, it's just, it's tough to watch not a lot of checks and balances here. And like you're saying, I think bad press, bad PR is the main check that's having any type of effect here, which, you know, great that we have at least that.

But it's, I can't believe at this point in the industry that that's still the main thing we have. I mean, there's truly nothing else like this where the people in charge are like, we got to go, go, go, go, go, but also this is going to be a big problem. Like, sorry, everyone. Yeah. I'm very interested to see more from these companies as they actually detail this stuff. Whether that actually is to accountability, I think remains a wide open. question.

But I do think we're going to see more of these kinds of freakouts as this stuff happens, right? I think it is very good at a bare minimum that AI safety has sort of broken containment and people are taking it seriously. Hayden, thanks very much for coming on. I've got to let you go. When we're back, we're going to have the lightning round. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick.

BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGEM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. With the midterms right around the corner,

I wanted to focus this week on a simple question. What matters most when it comes to election day? My main question about the midterm is who are the real swing voters? how data centers will be affecting the election. Where a PAC is having the most influence. Whether mail and voting is really being suppressed. So this week, we're going to answer some of your concerns and pull out the trends that we have seen throughout our time on the road.

Five things you need to know about this year's midterm elections. The stakes, the candidates, the issues, we're cutting through all the noise. It's a midterm study guide. Let's dig in. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. So like any good millennial, I have a love-hate relationship with Gen Z. It's the phenomenon rattling millennials. They just look at you.

They want something bigger themselves. Lifestyles are a priority. Motivation is being inspired. But regardless of how you feel about Gen Z, it's undeniable that they're changing national politics. Generation Z is increasingly showing less loyalty to traditional. political parties, many now more likely to identify as independent. So what is going on with the kids? I think the biggest misconception about Gen Z's politics right now is that all of a sudden

they're all socialist. That is just not the case. They are embracing candidates who are offering new, bold ideas in the absence of those ideas from establishment Democrats. This week on America, actually, Gen Z researcher Rachel Jamfaza joins us to separate Gen Z fact versus fiction. It's not rocket science. And this is, you know, I keep saying, like, young voters aren't that complicated after all.

It's pretty simple. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. Okay, Allison is back and is once again time for the Lightning Round. Virchcast producer Josh Kahas in the control room. Do we have a sponsor this week? We do. This week's Lightning Round is presented by AWS, how leading businesses use AI for next level innovation. Okay, I want to talk about Waymo because some news came out this weekend.

about an arrest related to a ride in a Waymo. So a couple of teens got into a Waymo with a ghost gun. And these teens were, number one, under the age in which you're allowed to be riding in a Waymo. So they, in that way, violated Waymo in terms of service. They also had a ghost gun. Can you explain what a ghost gun is? Ghost gun.

3D printed? There are various types of ghost guns. I don't know the exact type of this one, but generally they are 3D printed guns that are off the grid. they are not traceable. Okay. But it is an active functional weapon.

And, uh, yeah, it is a thing that, uh, you know, they're in California. And so I do not know the state of gun laws everywhere, but I'm fairly certain that you're not allowed to have an unsecured gun in the back, an unsecured ghost gun in particular in the back of a vehicle in California. So there's this fascinating situation where these teens are in this car, clearly, violating the terms of service of Waymo, very probably breaking some gun laws here, the Waymo calls the cops on them and they get arrested for this. And I think this just is a can of worms here. Because on one hand, I think it is very important to enforce gun laws. On the other, I don't think people know that Waymo might call the cops on you. And I don't think we know the mechanism by which they do that. Right. Have you, have you both written in them? Because my understanding is there's, I have not. My understanding is there are cameras all throughout them, but that you don't necessarily see them. Yeah, they're not obvious. It's similar to, like, in a Tesla, how they have the, like, the camera in the top front. And it's kind of just always tracking to make sure you're paying attention when you're in autonomous mode. But they're not, it's not like there's all these cameras everywhere. I haven't written in the new way, hardware, but at least in the

Jaguars, that's what it was like. There's also, like, all these, like, past words, people, like, hooking up in, like, autonomous vehicles. Yeah. And they're just like, I think there's cameras. I don't really know. And it's like... I would assume those cameras. I assume.

You should just assume those. Someone is possibly monitoring those, which, like, and this is the thing. And I think this is where it gets so messy. Like, we don't entirely know how this works, right? We don't know if it is an AI system. We don't know if Waymo has some control center where there's a million screens up and they're like watching all the riders to see what's going on.

We don't know what their options are of like, you know, if you, if you, you know, light up a joint in the back seat, right? Is that something that is going to end that way? Are they going to pull over and say like, get out of the car? I think that this is just like a very new world for everyone. This is just not how cars have worked in the process. I mean, to be clear, you were never supposed to lie to join in a car. I think that was always generally frowned upon, if not forbidden. Yeah.

But you generally didn't have cameras connected to some sort of control center, potentially connected to police. So what happened with this ghost gun Waymo? I don't know the actual outcome, but ultimately, like, the kids got arrested, right? because Waymo contacted the cops, and the cops came and picked them up. And, you know, I think this is, this speaks to, I think, how complicated this is.

You know, there was another incident earlier this summer where, again, it was two teenagers in a Waymo. They were drinking, so there's that. They're also firing off orbies from the backseat. What is an orbis? There are water pellets. Am I too old for this? I mean, as in my mom.

Right. Again, I don't know the legality of shooting water pellets from a Waymo. It's probably from or inside of? I believe from. Okay, that's not great. Again, this does not. None of this seems good. No.

None of this seems good. Yeah. And I think this is where it's so interesting because like these behaviors are clearly bad, right? Like we do not want people firing things from a moving vehicle. Correct. That is a bad future for autonomous cars. I do think people need to understand that they are being monitored and what can happen with that monitoring when they get into an autonomous car. And it feels very clear that people don't know that.

I mean, maybe these are teens and that's just the case when you're a teenager. But I think that this is probably a societal shift that is going to need to happen as these kind of expand. It's very weird. Yeah, there's a lot of questions here. I mean, they probably have a lot of this stuff in the terms of service, which nobody reads. But they also should maybe have some sort of pop-up that just says, FYI, you're being monitored. You know, the whole thing about security, the whole Steve Jobs sort of quote about security,

is that the people around you should know that they are being recorded. And I think the same goes for people that are getting into these vehicles that are owned by these giant corporations. So, I agree with you. You shouldn't shoot things out of a car. But I also think it's probably a right to know when a camera is recording you, even though there are cameras everywhere all the time and you're always being recorded at this point in time. We've got a story up about this and how complicated and naughty this is on Theverge.com this week. Waymo did tell us in a statement that they use automated technology to help their teams identify potential violations like the presence of a firearm.

They said, quote, if Waymo detects a firearm in the vehicle, we may, reach out to local law enforcement. So again, I think all of this is still very vague and fuzzy. And I suspect that eventually we're going to have to learn more about how this works. Okay, that's it for Waymo. David, what have you got for us? All right. So David Pierce is not here, but I am still a David.

And David Pierce may have kicked off one of the biggest e-reader revolutions of the decade with his obsession with books or books. We call it books. I think they say it's books, but I, prefer books they've got it wrong the books palma the books palma uh was sort of this device there was a small e reader device that was the shape of a smartphone which was not something we were used to because the kindle was always sort of this like squared off had a like a little area for your fingers to go so you could hold it easier but now suddenly you've got an e reader the size of a smartphone

it got very popular a lot of people got really into it then the book the books palma two pro came out and then all of a sudden this company called xTE ink entered the fray. And they created these devices that are these really tiny e-readers that are even smaller. They can slap to the back of your phone via a magnet. There's all these things. That created, I don't want to say it's like, it's like an AI race, but for e-readers. Where XTE, Inc. and Books are now in this race to create the ultimate e-reader device, which I think is good. That's called competition. And so now Books has started making a bunch of new They have the books Pico that's coming out, which is basically the same forefactor as the XTE Inc. X3 and X4, which they have been making.

XTEE ink now has a pro version of theirs. Anyway, the main point of this story is, I'm sorry, I give too much context sometimes, but the books palm of three has just dropped. And the reason we like this is because it is made of aluminum. It is so much more sleek. It is so much more nice, yes, than the book's Palmer 2 because the books palma and the books Palm 2 Pro were like plastic backs. They were sort of like a cheap Android phone kind of situation. This kind of cooks.

This kind of looks good, I'm going to say. Can I tell you the biggest upgrade that I care about here? I have looked into and very, very strong and considered buying these repeatedly. Yeah. Like they run the oldest version of Android you can legally ship. Yeah. For whatever reason. I think that is probably why they've been so cheap.

Yeah. And this one, Android 16. Yes, which I'll take it. It's only one version behind, which is a pretty big deal. That's basically the current version. Yeah. In Android world, in the Android world, it's practical. It's what most Android phones are going to be running on possibly.

It is more expensive. It is launching for $339, which the Palma 2 launched for $279. Everything's getting more expensive. Though for an e-reader, it has 128 gigabytes of storage, which is like probably half the cost, if not more, of that much. Yeah, really? It has expandable storage, which you're not going to be able to afford because my rusty cards are too expensive. But, you know, it has a 3,950 million power battery, which seems pretty big for a body that seems quite slim and aluminum and very thin looking.

And I just think that for people that want the more premium books experience, this is a very exciting thing. It also supports their stylus, which they launched with the books Palma 2 Pro. I don't think you really need it. It's an extra like $46 too, which is a lot of money. I would just, you know, I don't know. It's just nice. I love this like premium e-reader race that we're in right now. And I just had to bring it up as the current David on the podcast.

Allison, did you get in on the book type or what type of e-reader person are you? In the past, I've used an e-reader. I really do not. Like when I was a bus commuter, I was using the Libby app. on my phone. I'm, I'm an analog book, girly right now. But these things all, like, appeal to me so much. Like, an adorable little e-reader, I can slap on the back of my phone. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah, I support that fully. Like, I'm also, if it's, if I'm reading a novel, like, physical all the way, I, the thing I dream of, and the reason that these are so appealing is,

like, it's Android, right? Like, I can read the New York Times in this. I can read the version this. I can, I don't necessarily want to scroll X in this, but, you know, I think that is the advantage. Like, I don't want to have this flashy, beautiful premium screen in my face. I want to have this slightly ugly black and white screen in my face. I think a big part of the sales pitch of these devices is that they run Android. So you can do the things that you would do on an Android phone in it. But because they're e-ink, they are a terrible experience for the dopamine generators that we have on our phone. So you're not really going to be watching TikTok on these.

It's mostly just for reading. It is wild how much of modern tech we're like, and it's a little bit bad. It's so excited about that. Fantastic. That is so much of technology right now. It's kind of crazy. Oh, my God. Actually, speaking of which, Alison, what do you have for us?

Yeah. Speaking of it's a little bit bad, I come to you with two tiny adorable cameras. So the first one is from Camp Snap, sort of known for their lo-fi camera experience. This is the 110D, and it is that kind of long and slim form factor. I don't know how I would describe it. It's sort of like a viewmaster. What is this? This is a 110 camera.

A lot of people have not seen these before. They take one-ton type film. This does not take one-time type film because the D stands for digital. But Lomography, last year or the year before, released a new 110 camera that looks exactly like this. And they're very trendy because they're really weird looking out. They've just got a viewfinder on them. Like the Lomography one, like, it's not a range finder.

It's just a little piece of glass that you look through. And they can fit in your pocket and they're so weird. And it seems to me that Camp Snap is just trying to get on the trend of making a weird film camera-looking device. it's digital, which is a very popular thing for manufacturers to be doing right now. Yeah. Can I call your attention to it? So it comes in two colors. One is the kind of, you know, traditional retro black and silver. There's a cover, there's a color called Dreamsicle, which is white and this like orange. And I want it so bad. I think it looks great. It looks kind of

stupid, but it looks great. Wait, I have to say, I was just on Camp Snap's website the other day, and they're like more recent mainline camera, the Camp Snap 2, they did a translucent body, like, addition of them. They have like hot lime and orange with like you can see the components inside. It looks really good. They're like, they're on one right now. And it's very good. They are.

David, do you use these things at all? Um, not currently, but only because I don't own them and because I shoot a lot of film. But yeah, I would be interested. I mean, they're popular. Like, I have gone to a number of parties recently where I have seen people like a couple of years younger than me. Just like going crazy with these kind of things. My impression is that the newer ones, I think, hit like a better balance between the image quality being not so bad. that you don't actually want to use it,

but not too good that it feels retro. Like, I enjoyed the photos that I've seen from the camp snap. There's a middle ground where, like, part of the reason people were buying digit cams was the aesthetic of owning a digit cam and shooting with the digit cam. Like, that is part of the reason. The other part is that the images do look more, like, retro and aesthetic.

But these companies can, like, you know, they can take the cheapest sensor they can possibly find out of China and get the same effect. So it's pretty easy for them. And this is a lot cheaper than buying some of those retro digit games. Yes, some of those go for like $500 now. It's insane. It's so insane.

What's your other one? I'm looking at these translucent camp snaps now. God, dang it. I want one. You're going to buy one now, aren't you? Ah, shoot. This lightning arm is very expensive to me personally. Okay, the other one, the other tiny, bad, cute little camera is from Fujifilm, the Instax Pal 2.

It's a wide and narrow boy also. These are both weird, long cameras. Yeah. They're both modeled after one tin. Yeah. Yeah. So this one has an LCD on top. There's a lot going on with this.

Top level viewfinders are awesome. Yes. Yeah. There's a little optical finder it looks like on the back, but you can also, yeah, do the top down, look at the LCD. The rendering of this LCD screen, It makes it look like the world's best little screen and I feel like that's probably not the case.

Anyway, also interesting, this thing has a little USBC thing built in so you can just like pop it onto your phone after you took some photos and like just transfer it to your phone that way. That's very compelling to me because I will end up not taking something. out if I'm like, oh, well then I got to go home and like, where if I have to Wi-Fi to it or use an app or some nonsense like that, I'll be like I'm just non-starter. Notably, Fujifilm has redesigned their camera apps like four times in the last like 10 years and every time they're still bad and get like at 1.4 stars on the app store. Yeah. So having a flip out USB port, I feel like it's kind of a response to. that to just be like, look, just put it on your phone. Like, just put it directly on your phone. If you, you want to feel fury like you've never felt before, download the app that you're supposed to use with your camera. Any camera. Literally any of them. They are the worst. The Lika one is the only

one that's any good at all. Oh, well, that makes sense. I also want to say they clearly did the top level viewfinder. There's a trend in film photography with something like a Hossoblood 500 CM, which has a top level viewfinder or a Nikon F3, you can take the viewfinder off the top and then you just got ground glass on it. And so the light that comes in through the lens bounces off the mirror and up into the ground glass and you can see the world through that. And so there's a trend on Instagram or on TikTok where people just film directly down onto the ground glass because it sort of diffuses the look of the world around them and makes it look kind of dreamy. And you get that look of what you would normally see on film.

And so I would be willing to bet a lot of money that that is the reason why they put the LCD on top. That's fascinating. I'll also say, like, as someone who is like a little more familiar with those types of cameras, like the top, sorry, top level viewfinder. Like, yeah. They just look very cool. They do.

Right? Like, the use case for them, as far as I'm aware, is like pretty specific in film photography. In digital photography, like, maybe not. there in the same way, and so they don't exist. And this like doesn't necessarily make sense, but it looks really cool. And yeah, you know what? I'm into it. I'm into it. All right. I think that's all we've got today. That's it for the Verge cast. Remember to subscribe to the Verge for ad-free episodes of our podcast, exclusive newsletters, and so much more at theverge.com. We'd love to hear from you. You can email us, Vergecast at theverge.com, or call the hotline 866

Verge 1-1. Vergecast to production of The Verge and Voxmedia podcast network. Today's show is produced by Josh Kajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Advertising on Spotify puts your brand in the moments where Gen Z fandom takes shape. They're 35% of our audience and spend two hours building rituals and shaping culture with every stream. Download the Culture Next Report to discover trends and insights that will inspire your next campaign.