The Vergecast - TikTok goes to Washington

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce are joined by policy reporter Makena Kelly, who is on the ground in Washington for the House Energy and Commerce Committee's hearing on TikTok. Later, we dive into all the other news from this week, from Google's release of Bard to OpenAI's rapid expansion of ChatGPT. It was a big week. Further reading: TikTok ban hearing: all the news on the US’s crackdown on the video platform   TikTok bans deepfakes of nonpublic figures and fake endorsements in rule refresh Google opens early access to its ChatGPT rival Bard — here are our first impressions Google says its Bard chatbot isn't a search engine — so what is it?  Testing Google Bard: the chatbot doesn’t love me, but it’s still pretty weird Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are already citing one another in a misinformation shitshow Sundar Pichai expects that ‘things will go wrong’ with Bard Can AI generate a way to pay for itself? GitHub Copilot gets a new ChatGPT-like assistant to help developers write and fix code Mozilla.ai is a new startup created to build more open and trustworthy AI OpenAI is massively expanding ChatGPT’s capabilities to let it browse the web and more Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

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

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, I'm welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast to protecting America's interests at home and abroad. I love it. Reporting to you live

from the Vergecast Studio. This is a new, if you're watching us on YouTube, this is a new setup for me and Alex in the studio. We're having a great time here. It's a very exciting day for us. Anyway, I'm your friend, Eli.

Alex Trans is here. I'm your friend who is just your friend. I'm just here to hang out. Have a good time. What's happened today? Does something happen? David is here. Hey, David.

Hi, David. I'm still in my basement. They don't let me out. They fix the studio. I stay the same. And then very importantly, McKenna Kelly is here today. Hey, McKenna. Hey, everyone.

It's good to be here. So a big day in our nation's history. Yes. McKenna attended a hearing today in the House of Representatives where I don't know how else described it. They just yelled at TikTok, just in generally yelled about TikTok for four and a half hours at the CEO of TikTok. It was maybe the badest faith of the bad faith tech hearings. that we've heard. And then there's a lot of TikTokers in D.C. McKenna, you attended a press conference with the TikTokers say, which I want to hear all about.

But the momentum around banning TikTok is as high as I think it's ever been. I came away from today thinking, oh, this is going to happen. But you're there, McKenna. What went down? Right. So as you mentioned today was a hearing at the House Energy and Commerce Committee. They brought in the CEO of TikTok who provided testimony when he was allowed to. The lawmakers spoke over him a lot. It seemed like he was there to give fairly candid testimony and to say what exactly, you know, he could say

there were some, I don't know, private company questions that he would want to skirt by. But for the most part, he seemed like he was there to really answer the questions that lawmakers had. But unfortunately, I don't think the lawmakers really had any questions. At the top of the hearing, something that really stayed with me was that the chairwoman, Kathy McMorris-Rodgers, she, in her opening statement, said,

your app should be banned. Yeah. It seemed like a lot of the lawmakers there had already had, you know, their minds made up about the future of TikTok. And why they invited him to answer questions, I don't know, because it doesn't seem like they were very interested in the answers.

Yeah, they said over and over, this is the most bipartisan committee in Congress. Everybody agrees. We're all on the same page. Everybody thinks we should ban TikTok. And it was just, it became clear very quickly that they had just brought him here to yell at him. Yeah.

And to not only yell at him about TikTok, but to yell at him about every bad thing that anyone in the tech industry has ever done in history. And he kept saying, can I respond to that? And they kept being like, no. I was like, what are we doing here? But I want to put that into context. We've done a lot of hearing coverage in the past couple of years. We've seen Mark Zuckerberg go through this experience. Jack Dorsey literally tweeting through a hearing about how bad the questions were while he was in the hearing, power move.

Yeah. Sundarpertcha, you name it. The CEOs of big tech companies have been forced to endure this spectacle many times. This one was meaningfully different. And I would say I was listening to CNBC at my way to work today before the hearing. And McMorris Rogers was on CNBC. And before the hearing had ever started, she said, at the end of this hearing, we're going to ban TikTok. Right?

Just like straight out. The hearing hadn't even happened. the collection of evidence that presumably this was meant to accomplish. Yeah. Nothing. Now, there are legitimate concerns about TikTok. McKenna, just from taking a step back before we get into the weirdness of the hearing, what are the specific concerns that the government has about TikTok? Right.

From what I can gather, from my conversations with lawmakers, there are two main concerns. One is for foreign, malign influence operations, whether that's China, Russia, whoever, using TikTok to basically convince people that like Taiwan belongs to China. China is going to invade. Everyone clap. That's one instance. And then the second instance is Chinese spying on American citizens, essentially using the data obtained from TikTok in order to do something when it's gone to the Chinese government. That's the one thing. When I'm asking lawmakers, what does it mean for the average person? If you take my mom's data from TikTok, why should she be scared? And that's been something really, really hard to get an answer to.

And I think this was fully on display at today's hearing. We haven't had any evidence that China is currently operating some kind of foreign-aligned influence campaign on TikTok. There's a possibility that it could happen, but it hasn't been found yet. And then in the case for data security, there really hasn't been an instance. There's been a number of instances where a handful of employees at TikTok have either tracked journalists. But again, there were accusations at Uber did that as well. Accusations that employees at Facebook had done that against journalists as well. But getting to the heart of it, there isn't really anything so far that differentiates TikTok's business model, TikTok's ability to gather data that's different from American-based tech companies than the fact that they have a Chinese, Beijing-based parent company in Bite Dance.

I would just add one sort of half corollary to the two things that you named, because I do think one other piece of this seems to be, I guess what I would call this sort of long, subtle influence campaign that people think. And this came up a bunch in the hearing. And I'm curious what y'all thought of it. But this idea that basically TikTok is sort of corrupting the youth and teaching everyone to just do dance challenges while Debian in China is teaching kids engineering. Like this is a real concern. And it came up over and over. this idea that this is China's way of influencing American people, not only for the like the Taiwan stuff that you're talking, but it's this like long game play to just win future generations. And there's this 10 dimensional chess thing happening that a surprising number of people seem to think is actually real. I think that's important too. So yesterday I sat down with Senator Mark Warner who has introduced one of the most widely backed bipartisan bills that could eventually lead to a fan of TikTok. And when I was sitting with him, a number that he constantly pulled out was the fact that the, you know, there's about 150 million American users on average. Like the average user spends 90 minutes

on TikTok a day. That is an hour and a half of content from one platform. And he kept, you know, reaffirming to me the fact that they could have those subtle nudges, right? That could push you into believing one thing or thinking one thing. That isn't so, you know, outlandish as having, I don't know, influencer from the People's Republic of China being like, everything is so good. We're not doing a Uighur genocide, you know, things like that. So it's those, it's those small things, of course, that are very hard to prove. Of course, it's, you know, it's something where time will tell. Wait, can I just say about that?

It's hard to prove in the case of TikTok. It is actually easy to prove broadly. Mm-hmm. So, like, Kyrie Irving is a famous basketball player who believes the Earth is flat because of the Google SEO feedback loop. Right. Like, there were some people who are like, the Earth is flat. And that was engaging. And it got a lot of comments on YouTube.

And so more people saw those view counts going up and made more videos. And then real publications saw the search trends for the Earth is flat. And they were more content about the controversy about the Earth being flat. And you just kind of spiral it out to. No one was in charge of this feedback loop and now a substantial percentage of the population, regardless of their money or access to resources. It's like, I don't know. I think the earth is flat.

And that's one we can see. I think no one has shown that particular feedback loop with TikTok, but the idea that the Chinese government could use a tool like TikTok to create that feedback loop in their interests is not out of bounds. Right. But I'm just like, I don't know what, what would be the control of Mark Zuckerberg wanting to do that for Instagram? If you're that worried about the Chinese government doing it, then you're worried about the mechanism. And there's no check on that mechanism anywhere for any social media. That comes back to McKenna, what seems to me to be the like underlying thrust of this whole hearing, which is that everything is the same except China. And it instantly changes the tenor of everything.

because you can say all the same sentences and you can end them with China and the whole vibe changes, right? No, that's correct. When you look at a lot of what happened today and even the lawmakers oftentimes brought it up, they would say, all this stuff is really bad, the misinformation, the mental health harms,

all these things that we saw so explicitly with Francis Howgan in 2020, 2021 with Facebook and the Facebook files. It was so transparent that this was happening elsewhere. It seems like we had often forgotten about it. And then the lawmakers would remind themselves and be like, but I also support a federal data privacy framework. And it's like, what happened to that?

How long have we been talking about that, right? And so, of course, like these Facebook, you know, meta, Twitter, Google, all these have like so much, you know, they have so much stake in like the states and have built up their lobbying arms tremendously over the past five to 10 years with this heightened criticism. TikTok hasn't done that. I think it was just in 2021 or 22 that they even had a DC office. Like they weren't here engaging with lawmakers in the same way that American-made, you know, America-based social media apps have.

And they really have tried hard in a very small amount of time with TikTok to build a coalition supporting them. They brought the TikTokers here. There was three House Democrats who came in support of TikTok yesterday. But, you know, any kind of movement that TikTok is trying to make has been like moving. a boulder. It's been very, very difficult, especially because, like, look at the, this is something that I asked a lot of TikTokers last night. It's coming to my head right now. But my question was, what happens if TikTok is banned tomorrow? What happens to you? And, you know, a lot of them said,

we'll be fine. We were fine before TikTok. Maybe they're, maybe we'll go do something else, but we really like TikTok in the community we built here, and we don't want that to go away. You talk to Mark Warner And Mark Warner, of course, is a very, you know, he likes to talk about competitive capitalism a lot. He's very much that guy, right? He's an old Silicon Valley wireless guy. And yesterday, when I was talking to him, you know,

I was saying, what happens to these creators? He's like, there will be another platform that will compete and we'll take up the hole that TikTok leaves behind. And like the CEO of YouTube is like peeking out from behind the curtain. Mark Zuckerberg is peeking out from behind. I bring up the fact that, okay, So TikTok is bringing the first inch, right, of meaningful competition to a lot of American social media platforms. If that goes away, he's like, oh, it could be an Indian company.

Oh, it could be, you know, a British company or something. Just as long as it's not China. As long as it's not China, right? And of course, you know, it's opening up more room for American companies to remain dominant. Do you get a sense that those American companies are lobbying against TikTok? It's been proven. Yeah. So I believe it was, maybe it was like.

like the Washington Post, but it must have been like a year ago at this point. But Facebook was paying a Republican campaigning organization to run a bunch of op-eds in newspapers across the country saying how dangerous TikTok was and railing against all of these challenges. Many of the challenges, right? The challenges I put in quotes that we saw today highlighted by Republicans, the night called chicken got brought up again. It's like, why is this stuff still there? Especially stuff that has been debunked as almost like, you know, media or, like, like false. Yeah, just people who like see something like, oh my God, it's going crazy. All the kids are going to die. But yeah, no, it's so these Facebook at least, meta, I was reported to have done this

before. It's very clear that they're trying to point the finger at TikTok and be like, well, would you rather it be China or would you rather it be American companies that have the power? So basically, Congress is saying we're fine with super invasive software, like knowing everything about you. It just can't be Chinese. It has to be American. grown. Only Americans can exploit Americans. Or apparently from India. Or India. Let's be clear. Good time.

Senator Warner. Quality. It's fine. But this is the question. And I don't want to excuse the Chinese government. Right. Which is a repressive, censorious government that does bad things to its people. Yes.

That's true. And it is our country's great geopolitical rival. But we're all tied up together. Right. Like I keep thinking about today, I kept thinking about. Tim Cook at the Code Conference last year when I asked him, what do you think about TikTok? And he's like, I don't, I'm not familiar with TikTok. And I was like, this is the number one app on your store. This is why people have the phone. And you, you just are not going to talk about it.

Because you are all wrapped up in China. Like, this is the complicated riddle of our time. Is here's the world's biggest, most vibrant democracy in some ways. And here's China. And we're absolutely relying on each other in all kinds of weird, complicated ways. except for when it comes to this app and we're like, fuck you. And like that was the tenor of the hearing. And the thing is, I don't think they made the stuff McKenna is talking about, malign foreign influence operations or you're collecting grandma's data to do something nefarious. Because we haven't made the case, it just seems ridiculous.

Right. Well, it just seems xenophobic. Right. Like, there's just a piece of this puzzle where like the American Congress yelled at a Chinese CEO for four and a half hours today. And he was not allowed to answer the questions. And I don't think his answers are good, right? Like his big answer is Project Texas.

And he kept saying it's going to be American data on American soil overseen by an American company. And I don't know, like we're going to, we're going to the data center will be shaped like a flag. Like something will happen that'll be good for you. And like no one would even let him finish the sentence. Right. McKenna, is there a reason that no one believes that this is like a good answer? So my theory about all of this, especially having talked to people this week, it's not my good faith theory. If I'm going to look at this in good faith at the lawmakers and the whole situation, my good faith argument is that lawmakers have been caught on their back foot before.

Cambridge Analytica, dozens, you know, foreign influence operations on American, you know, social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. This has happened for years. They publish, you know, these platforms publish transparency reports being like, look at all of the bad things happening. Oh, we found them and got rid of them. But they still exist and they're still happening. So talking to Warner, talking to some other lawmakers, it seemed like if they, you know, if there really is like something here that they think they need to do, it's the fact that this could happen again on a far greater scale in a way that the U.S. does cannot control as much as, you know, a Cambridge Analytica, which it's still, you know, Cambridge Analytica that was like 20. you know, so long ago, and that was the beginning of, like, serious conversations around a federal data privacy framework. It's gone nowhere. Yeah. You know, it's gone absolutely nowhere.

And it's kind of funny to see these same things play out just with China at the center at a time of very, very deep geopolitical tensions. We just came out of, I would like to remind you, the Chinese spy balloon situation, which ended up being like, you know, just research balloons in some cases, where we're we had a whole weekend, afraid of UFOs and, like, China spies, all because of, you know, this relationship that we have with, you know, this foreign adversary. Is the answer just that because it's China, we get to skip to the end, which is, boy, it seems like these apps are harvesting a lot of data. It's hard to make the case against Google, because Google's an all-American company in there, they lead the S&P 500 or whatever. But it's easy when you're like, China's bad, and

Politically, we don't have to sell it. Well, look at, you know, I think when it comes to these things, it's you got to, unfortunately, campaigns are like a 24-month cycle now instead of like a year or six-month cycle. You had Trump in 2018 issuing executive orders to ban TikTok, which, of course, we've covered. They were ultimately overruled. And then, of course, Biden now is dealing with this anti-China fervor amongst Republicans at a time when he's going to be running for reelection. at a time when Republicans are going really, really hard on China. So I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that even the Biden administration gave TikTok an ultimatum last week ahead of this hearing,

either find an American owner or get banned. That was from Biden. That is the strongest thing we've heard against TikTok from both administrations, really, because it's the one thing that could really, you know, could really happen. I do think at the center it probably is China in having to do with electoral politics. Well, and it also, it seems to me that it's a move that these politicians don't have with any of these other companies and services. Like, nobody ever talks about banning Google, right? Like, that's not, it's just not an option.

It's just not a thing that's going to happen. But like to your point, Nilai, about skipping to the end, we also get to skip past all the nuance of figuring out what is a responsible, like you're talking about McKenna privacy framework for this country. Like, these are complicated questions. They're the right questions, but they're complicated ones. And it's so much easier in a certain sense to just say, this is bad, get it out of here in a way that you just straight up can't do unless you have this gigantic boogeyman that is China to blame it all on. And I think we were now, what, seven years into arguing about privacy debates on the internet. And we've gotten nowhere. And I didn't get any sense from the hearing that anyone is any further along in even knowing what we want out of this.

Wait, can I play some clips just to illustrate? If we were, you know, seven years into a privacy debate and no one had gotten farther along, I'd be like, this is a victory. This hearing, let me just play the Wi-Fi clip. Just play the Wi-Fi clip. Mr. Chude, does TikTok access the home Wi-Fi network? Only if the user turns on the Wi-Fi. I'm sorry, I may not understand the... So if I have TikTok app on my phone and my phone is on my home Wi-Fi network, does TikTok access that network?

It will have to access the network to get connections to the Internet. if that's the question. The pause before he answers, you can just tell his brain is just breaking into a thousand pieces at this question. Let's say he was just like, yes. What specifically is the gotcha there? The shit's already on your phone.

That's where the data is. There's nothing else on the average American's Wi-Fi network that has as much data as their phones. They're friends. It's like, oh no, they got to my Roku. Like, I'm sitting here with America's foremost Plex server operator. And I don't want them actually access to that. Stay out, TikTok.

I'm just saying, like, if we were deep into a privacy framework conversation, we would be light years ahead of, does it access your Wi-Fi network? And that to me is there were some good questions in here. But let's make the case to ban a wildly popular. app that is effectively a cultural institution, because it's owned by China, you have to try to make the case. Well, and I wonder, McKenna, I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Is this actually a politically good move?

Because there's a whole bunch of people who like TikTok and will probably be really pissed that they don't have TikTok. You would think, right? And my favorite quote from last night with Representative Jamal Bowman was he was saying Republicans hate TikTok because they don't have any sort of. swag, which is very funny things to say. They can't engage with, like, young people at the same level Democrats can on TikTok at the same time, all these Democrats as we went down the dais were like ban TikTok. But I don't think it's good. I don't think it's a really great

opportunity to ban TikTok or at least if you're not being as transparent about the threat. Because my main question when I talk to lawmakers is, what do I have to fear? In some cases, It's like blackmail. But, okay, how many people are in the United States? Millions? Billions? You know, so many people. What is the chance that they're going to find my little data profile and find blackmail,

you know, on like me? And I guess like switch me, you know, try and turn me into like a double agent like China spy. Like I don't know what they're asking of me. You know, what does that mean for me? Maybe they already did, McKenna. Have you thought about that? Maybe they already did. My long con.

My long con is to get into the verge institution. I think we can safely say China's not doing a lot of great things. And there is the very legitimate concern that they can use data from this application for nefarious means if they wanted to. If they wanted to target a lawmaker who was using TikTok to reach the youth, they could theoretically do that. But so could Facebook. So could Twitter. All of those apps could do. So could every single ad vendor on the planet, right?

Like there's a lot of people with very extensive data. Right. But I think this is why they kept talking about federal privacy legislation. Well, they didn't. They kept... Or algorithmic transparency or all these things that are the thing you want. Yeah. And then they're like, that's too hard.

And I can just say your communists and... Commis. I mean, they asked him like a thousand times. Instead of saying CCP, they kept saying the Chinese Communist Party. Yeah. Which is great. I had to take a break for like an hour and a half from the hearings to go to some meetings. And they were talking about communists when I took the break.

And I came back and they're like, do you or do you not know communists at TikTok? Oh, there was a really good, there's a really good sequence when someone asked him if Byte Danson helped him prepare for the hearing. And poor show was like, yeah, a lot of people have texted me. It's a very high profile hearing. And he had to say this like five times. He's like, yeah, my phone's blown up. Yeah.

Like people are sending me advice. I'm sorry. I mean, and then they're like, will you share what people have said to you? He's like, no, they're my lawyers. Let's play some more clips. Just to put this in a perspective for people what we were doing with today. Because it was bad. Like, they were very focused on we want to talk.

We want to get TikTok, but we're going to do it by the stupidest questions possible, showing we have zero understanding of how technology actually works. No, so I have this theory about that Congress doesn't understand technology. I've been working on it. Okay. And McKenna, I'm curious for your read on. this because you were in it today. I feel like every time we say Congress doesn't understand how technology works, what

we are saying is Congress is pretty frustrated by the First Amendment. So they have to say some crazy shit so they can pass a speech regulation. So it doesn't seem like they're passing speech regulation. Yeah, they seemed really excited to censor people. They're like, China does it. Why don't we? But like that's like, to me, that feels like the dynamic here. Whenever we're like, they don't understand tech, it's because they can't say the thing

they want to say, which is we think these should be the rules for how people talk to each other online. Even when they were talking about how it scans your eyes. Even when they talk about how it scans. Like, that's just pure crazy. We'll end with that one. So I want to play this clip. It's about grapefruit. It's great. But McKenna, do you think that that's the right read that this sort of like willful not getting tech is just an end around the First Amendment? In some ways, yes. I think I don't know if that's, you know, explicitly what lawmakers are thinking to themselves. I don't, you know, I don't think anyone wants to say that they are, you know, even believe that they're opposed to the First Amendment in many ways. But people want platforms to do certain things for specific motives. That is

something, you know, we, that's something everyone wants, right? I post something because I want people to see it. That's my motive. Lawmakers specifically, they want to be able to say things that break a platform's terms of service in some cases, or they want to, you know, take down something, for example, that is misinformation or disinformation. It really, it does come down to power and control over narrative setting. And I think, you know, just the way social media operates, people feel as if they are more empowered to influence a discussion. But when they aren't and when they don't get their way,

especially someone in power in Congress who feels like they can, you know, come at these companies and be able to say, you know, you're acting in opposition to the Constitution, to the First Amendment. They're going to do it because they have a motive and there's stakes for them to be able to say what they want online. Okay, before we run the next clip, which is worth waiting for, Liam's telling me we've got to take a break, we're going to take a quick break.

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 really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce. They offer a whole. host of helpful tools you can take advantage of, from payment processing to analytics to

website design. Their design studio includes hundreds of templates to help you create the exact website you've been envisioning for your business. If you're wondering, what if I need help, then no worries, because you're never left to fend for yourself. Shopify's award-winning customer support is available 24-7. It's time to turn those what-ifs into a thriving business with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. Go to shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Grammarly.

You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic, can mean getting lost in the shuffle. Gramerly gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging. No matter what kind of writing you're doing, Gramerly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Gramerly's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on. See why 90% of professionals say Gramerly has. to save them time writing and editing their work.

In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. We're back. It's time for the grapefruit clip. Another study showed that TikTok had a hydroxychloroquine tutorial on how to fabricate this. from grapefruit. Now, there's two problems with that. Number one, hydroxychloroquine is not effective

in treating COVID. So that's one issue. The second issue is you can't even make hydroxychloroquine from grapefruit. So again, this is a really serious miscommunication about health care information that people looking at TikTok are able to get. And in fact, it's being pushed out. to them. Okay. I just have a number of things to say. First of all, if you just like do the like the simplification of that equation, it's TikTok is telling people that grapefruits cure COVID, which is definitely legal speech in America. You are allowed to wander the streets of this country insisting that you can cure COVID with grapefruit. Yeah. You are allowed to wander the streets of this. And I don't think that's dangerous misinformation. I think it's not great. I think it's not true.

Can you ask Bard? how we use grapefruit. But I just, like, the government is not allowed to show up on your doorstep and say lying is illegal. The U.S. government. The United, the Chinese government is. That's actually like part of the whole problem here. The United States government can't be like lying is illegal. It is also legal speech to tell people they can make hydroxychloroquine from grapefruits,

which is an incredible sentence. Welcome to the Vergecast, everyone. You know, looking at this specific example, it was actually, I was sitting in the hearing room. And I was getting reminded of this hearing in like the early 1990s in the Senate on video games where they like rolled in a TV on a cart like you would like in school when you had like movie day, right? They rolled it in and it was like mortal combat and they're like this is so bad. Kind of getting to the beginning of the conversation about like call of duty causes people to, you know, inflict violence on others. It was kind of starting back then. You look at this,

you know, grapefruit is so silly. in many ways, but at the same time, you look at the, another example that really struck me from this was there was one lawmaker who brought up a bunch of videos of kids being sad. Yeah. They had themes of like depression, but I'm like, I grew up on Tumblr. I grew up, you know, on Reddit and things. And oftentimes it's far worse. And a handful of the videos were of this like niche core, core genre of TikTok, which is,

kind of an ironic framing. It's very hard to understand. I can understand why a lawmaker would not attempt to understand it. But I got a text message from a Democratic, like a very young, I'm pretty sure they're a teenager, a Democratic digital consultant for like campaigns and stuff. And he's like, this is hilarious. They really just don't get it. And they're really going after him over nothing. And so there is like a media literacy aspect of it as well. And my main point here really is getting to the fact that you can't keep kids from being sad and you can't really keep them from playing video games especially but it's not like the platform or the game itself is incentivizing them to feel this way in many ways of course like you're sitting on an algorithm

you're seeing people we we've all heard this before right um but that is like protected speech and it's speech that kids have been doing forever online and even predating it oh yeah no I was a world class sad teenager mm-hmm I was a shit poster I was there for it I'm just saying the The grapefruit example is perfect because I think it cuts across party lines in like a, in just a way that maybe not, it's so stupid. Yeah. Grape fruits are for everybody. But like just the phrase, should the government ban videos where people say you can make hydroxychloroquine from grapefruits is inherently not partisan? Right.

It's just a philosophical question about the nature of government power that is loaded with keywords for whatever you think your politics are. And the answer in almost every case is the government should not make a rule that says videos that claim you can make hydroxychloroquine from grapefruits should be illegal. I don't think that I think government's speech regulations on the whole are bad. I think this one would be particularly hilarious. Like if we were like, there's the First Amendment, there's one exception. It's going to be the grapefruits. Right. Like, fine.

This clip where she's like, your app is bad because it contains this speech that I feel. find distasteful. Well, she's saying the government is going to impose a penalty on you for hosting this speech. I'm curious if she's ever used Google. I haven't Googled hydroxychloroquine grapefruit. I just did, actually. What happened, McKenna? I'm dying. And this is the last you'll hear from me. But I'm looking at, there was a Reuters fact check in June of 2021, fact-checking the grapefruit video that was viewed at the time over 600,000 times

and then circulated on Instagram. And I mean, talking about virality, 600,000 times really isn't that crazy. Yeah, I can find you 600,000 Americans who believe literally anything you say. And as reported by Reuters here, it was a clip. It was one video. There's such a long history of this on TikTok, right?

Where there's like one video that one person sees and writes a story about how it's not a thing. And then like three steps later, like teachers are worried about it and we have moral panics about like kids stealing toilets and high school it's like this is what keeps happening this is the flat earth thing right and this is where the idea that you could you could start a foreign influence campaign on ticot i think actually has legs this cycle is well understood we've seen it oh nightquill chicken is this cycle well this is russia's whole thing right like russia the russia keeps proving that you can do this uh when i was a kid in

wisconsin the local news ran a segment about how kids were getting high by drinking too much water. And some of them would drink, like, way too much water and die. And my mother, who was a fucking doctor, was like, I need you to make sure you don't drink enough water. And I was like, what is happening to me? Like, why do I even know this idea exists? I was like, I can just drink Miller Light. I live in Wisconsin.

And so it flows more freely than the water. But, like, that cycle is truly well understood. And I think what you're seeing is that you need some reason. so you settle on people are lying to you about grapefruits. China's bad. We're going to ban TikTok. And that's about as good as the reasoning got. And I just honestly challenge everyone listening to just think about the grapefruit.

Should it be legal to make videos where you lie to people about grapefruit turning into hydroxychloroquine? Like should it be legal to lie? Like run out the thread of it's illegal to tell lies. Oof. It's bad. My ass would be in jail. Right? I'm lying to you right now.

And like you see in this hearing so much of the content moderation concerns are just speech regulations dressed up in the guise of you are creating a public danger. You're showing teenagers videos of other teenagers being sad and creating a sadness epidemic. It's like, you know, the cure is on tour right now. Like it's very expensive to go be sad with thousands of other people in America right now. Like that's the part that I don't get. And that's why I asked this question about are we? really, when we say Congress doesn't understand the internet, it's because they have to concoct these sideways attempts at speech regulations in order to control the thing, which is all effectively

speech. Well, that was the same, like, you talked about video games earlier. That was the exact same thing that happened in the early 90s. And it was with TV, too. We have ratings in TV because in the 90s Hillary Clinton and a lot of Democrats and some Republicans were like, oh my God, they can watch Sipowitz's butt. What will we do? Remember what a butt was like the thing?

That was the thing. Oh, my God. Bill Clinton, by the way, wanted to put a chip in every television set in America. It did. It was called the clipper chip. And that was deemed to be like way over the line. It was a simpler time. And now they're like, what if we stopped showing kids trends that seem harmful and instead

showed them studying? Right. Like they do in China. That actually gets to a point that I did want to make. And I think about all the time. I go back to it as like the center in the focus of my reporting as something not to forget. You look at TV right. You look at video games.

And I don't want to say that social media doesn't present a different set of, you know, potential harms that need to be looked at and, you know, maybe need to be regulated in some case. I don't want to undermine that in this. But so many of the issues that we have with the Internet are human issues. And that gets erased immediately because of the, like just because of bringing in tech into it. Why are people sad? Well, maybe they are getting like a lot of sad videos online. but also, I don't know, maybe they can't afford to live. Maybe they're scared of, you know, not being able to live on their own, you know, to buy a house.

There are issues at the core of American culture right now that I think have more to say, right, about the causes of social ill, violence, things like that that get caught up in the social media side of it because it's an easy victim. It's an easy villain to blame in this case. And I think it gets us away from talking about the real human element of like human suffering and into these, you know, conversations about data privacy, you know, these things that last forever that no one can agree on and we make no progress on and people continue to suffer. That's a really horrible way to end. But we're definitely going to end in the clip of the congressman not understanding how high tracking works. Don't worry. We'll get there. I want to agree with you like wholeheartedly.

I just, it's, here's my question for you in return, having, you were at the hearing today, you saw the TikTokers, you experienced it fully. The balance of that is the same for every app, right? It's the same for Instagram. It's the same for YouTube. YouTube burnout culture is real. YouTube is like way ahead of the curve with its creator economy than every other platform. And people have cycled out of YouTube and like maybe TikTok's at the beginning of it. But because it's China, the calculus has changed.

And I'm wondering if you've seen even a glimmer of recognition that it's not the big, bad China app that's causing the problems, but rather like, oh, we've created a generation of digital tools that allows this group of people to express themselves. And actually, we don't really like what they're saying. I think that's fair. When we were on our way down yesterday, I was seeing there's the CNBC article highlighting that Representative Jamal Bowman from New York is publicly supporting to. TikTok and does not want TikTok to be banned. He was going to have this press conference with 30 creators, and he got up in front of a podium at the House Triangle and said, this is very xenophobic. It was one of the first people to say it.

There was only two other House Democrats that, like, stood with him. It's a very small coalition. I ran up to the congressman after the press conference. And I said, Congressman, can you build a broader coalition supporting TikTok? And he said something to the effect of Democrats build coalitions and like shrugged. You know, it doesn't seem like there really is energy. This is the first time. Like yesterday was the first time I heard someone just explicitly say this, you know, in support of TikTok.

I do, it's a very tricky situation with China involved politically, right? This is a more political question than really. Because you're right. Because when we get to the center of it, it's TikTok can be banned. It doesn't really harm Americans. It like harms teens, I guess, because they won't be able to scroll on TikTok and they lose this community. It's really, I don't want to undermine that. But it's not something that lawmakers have to think through all the way.

This is something that can just be seen as an effective... Especially if it's this bipartisan, right? The electoral price for being the person who banned TikTok is zero because the other side is saying the exact same thing. Right. The thing is who's actually going to do it. And this is my also... Like, I continue thinking about this because when Mark Warner introduced the Restrict Act, of course, it does implement the possibility of a ban on TikTok. It basically what the bill does is it creates a...

process for the Secretary of Commerce to investigate foreign-owned technologies and create protections and guardrails, ultimately, like, the biggest tool being a ban. So it got applauded. You know, there was all this, all these write-ups about the fact that TikTok could be banned by this bill. But the ban is such a small part of it, right? And this really, I think if, like, Democrats were to agree to some kind of form of banning TikTok, it would probably be passing this bill that everyone goes, woo, so excited, we're going to take on TikTok in China. And then it just ends up being a smaller set of transparency requirements to the federal government or something in the long run. I do think that is probably the more realistic

option, especially heading into 2024. In 2022 specifically, I did a bunch of reporting on creators, influencer outreach by campaigns. This is something that's been going on for years now. But I think it was a Tufts report study that at that point in time, in time, in time, time in all the major battleground states in 2022, Gen Z was growing into the biggest and most important voting bloc. You're going to take away TikTok in Pennsylvania. You're going to take away TikTok in Arizona right now where maybe that marginal error, you know, that margin of error right here between winning and losing an election might be like a high school, you know, like the senior class of a high school. I don't think that's going to happen for either party. This is why I'm absolutely

convinced that what all these lawmakers want and believe they can accomplish is to get TikTok sold to Oracle or some other American company because that's all upside for them, right? Then you get to say this is no longer part of China. We did it. Like we defeated China. We got what we wanted, but you still get to have TikTok and it's going to be even better now because it's made by Americans. Yay, competition. Like they got shockingly far down that road in the Trump administration and it really seems like these politicians are like... They got shockingly far down that road in the Trump administration in the way that the Trump administration got shockingly far down a number of roads,

which is... Sure. They set a bunch of outrageous stuff and held meetings where everyone was like, I can't believe we're in this meeting. And then nothing happened. Right. I mean, Oracle has access to the servers. Yeah, Oracle is in TikTok in a way it wasn't before.

Right. They signed a deal where Oracle is now the cloud provider for TikTok. And they have Project Texas, which he... This poor man, they name. named Project Texas so we could say Project Texas in the United States Capitol Building, and he was not allowed to finish that phrase. Project Texark. They're like, we've heard about Texas.

There was a Texas lawmaker who said, we don't want your project Texas. You know, in his very, I am pretending to sound very rural voice. Texans don't want Project Texas. That sounds like, I have a Plex server, sir. But this is the idea, right? The Project Texas are going to move all the data centers here. Oracle is going to run them. Oracle's based in Texas. This is our argument for why it's called Project Texas. Oracle is going

to control the code. They're going to submit the app to the app stores. Basically, Oracle is going to run TikTok, is more or less the argument. And they set up these transparency centers. We should repromote Alex Heath went and visited one of these transparency centers and came way being like, this is basically a kids museum. And I don't know what I'm supposed to get from this. And we'll link the piece in the show notes. But that was kind of the vibe of everybody who got the tour. Yeah. is like this is a kids museum for content moderation. And then there's like a door that's marked data center and you can't go through it.

And I'm like, this is not very transparent. Like there's a window that's not transparency, sir. But this is their plan, right? Is they're going to let Oracle do it? And if Oracle's doing it, then China's definitely not doing it. And that seemed to convince no one. There was actually a good question at one point of like, how does that actually resolve anything if Oracle has access to your data? It doesn't actually stop the root cause, which is this is Chinese built and everything.

But that's a bunch of wishy-washy nonsense you can't tweet. We've forced bite dance to sell TikTok to Oracle is a thing that you can tweet and is like a political win in a way that like, let me explain to you how the internet infrastructure actually works and how your data is stored and what that means for your life. But like these people are after big political wins. Like to your point, again, this is about like finding a way to win and that's a win. Like we sold it to Microsoft is a win. Maybe not Microsoft, though, because I go through the back of my head and I think with Lena Khan at the FTC, with the Biden administration so opposed to digital monopolies, as they say, who other than Oracle, right, would maybe they allow to buy TikTok?

Certainly not Facebook. Yeah. You know, certainly not YouTube or Google. My only other thing would have been maybe they would have let musically buy it if TikTok didn't buy musically years ago, right? That maybe would have made sense. So it's, I don't know who would end up even buying it. Because what was in it?

There was some reporting. This is like the Silicon Valley Bank situation. Remember, I think gold, wasn't it like Goldman or J.P. Morgan or something reportedly put in an offer to buy Silicon Valley Bank? This is all reported. And the Biden administration wouldn't let it happen because they were just too big. Yeah. Well, what is too big? And who is not too big to buy TikTok?

I just don't know. Tumblr. Also, my one question and something that I'm going to focus on for the next couple weeks is Where is Oracle? Have they said anything? No. No, but that's like Oracle's vibe, right? It's like Larry Ellison has made all of his money.

He doesn't need to talk anymore and he's just going to like hang out. He like bought another island during this hearing. I'm sure it's fine. Yeah. It's on it right now. I want to end here because I can you come back to these clips? Let's just run the eye tracking clip and talk about it for one second. I find that hard to believe.

It's our understanding that they're looking at the eyes. How do you determine what age they are then? That just broke me. And then he keeps going because what he says is this came up because, because Shaw was saying we don't use, I think it was. Our understanding that they're looking at the eyes. They're looking at them. They're looking at the eyes, y'all.

I think this is the same lawmaker who was doing like a Matthew McConaughey impression almost and was doing it. Tell me why. You know, tell me why. At one point, he goes, that's creepy.

Tell me more. And I was like, yes. It was, I would say, it was not our government's best moment today. Legitimate concerns

about TikTok. Case not well prosecuted today, I think is just. On either side. I don't know that, I don't know that TikTok comes out of this looking great either, but it feels like everybody lost today.

It was just once I want one of these social media CEOs to be on the, like, they're all trained. You can tell. They're trained to just take it. And then try to get out as many words as they can before they get yelled at some more. And then they say, I'll follow up with you. I've, like, I've been deposed before.

And I've had the lawyers sit me down and say, what you're going to say is, I don't recall for 90 minutes. And then you're going to shake their hands and leave. And in the middle of that, you're like, what if I stop doing this? Like, that's just a real thing. And just once, I want a social media CEO to be like, all right, you get the unfiltered TikTok with no content moderation. Welcome to hell. Right. Like, or, all right, I'll turn off TikTok in your state.

Senator. Just yours. Right. And we saw some of this happening today, right? TikTok was showing people a lot of live streams of the hearing somewhat mysteriously. The TikTok influencers were out in force making content about this here. Like they're using their platform to their advantage. But this poor dude, his job was not to prosecute the rebuttal case.

It was to just take it. He ate shit. He's not like a poor dude. He's a CEO of TikTok. His job is to take it. I don't feel bad for him. Yeah. At the heart of it is really TikTok.

social media companies not being as transparent as people want as lawmakers want, regulators want, and then lawmakers, in this case with TikTok, not having sufficient evidence, but a really convenient enemy. And just yelling and yelling and yelling. And when you ask for evidence supporting either side, it's just like, the potential for bad is really bad this time, guys. And we all just have to, like, take that. Looking at the eyes. How do you turn on what age they are? That's not the worst. I apologize. That was great, McKenna. Thank you so much. You did, you did. You were much more patient than I would have been in that room today. But you've got a full video coming out.

You've talked to a bunch of lawmakers. You've talked to a bunch of influencers. Becca was there with you. I'm very excited to see it. Yeah. That's coming. It's not even finished. We have more to record tomorrow.

Oh, boy. I hope you can find Buddy Carter and see if he figured out how the age tracking. How do they look at the eyes? I don't want anyone looking at my eyes right now. All right. Thank you so much for Kenna. We'll talk to you again. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.

If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process, from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language.

Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With hiring pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer.

And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling. AHA moments and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, You want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move.

Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud. orgat.a.ai slash vergecast. That's cloud. com.

And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude. aI. slash vergecast. We're back. Thanks again to McKenna. Thank you to the United States Congress for providing us this opportunity to make content today. Thank you to the grapefruit producers of the world.

We're here for you. Does anybody else like really want to have a grapefruit after the show? It's over? I've been drinking grapefruit LeCrois this whole time in honor of the grapefruit. I'm just telling the puzzle about free speech and grapefruit is real. Yeah. It doesn't matter. LaCroi very slightly cure COVID.

Look, I got it's just essence of COVID. I got left wing family. I got right wing family. I feel confident that if I'm like, should the. government make it illegal to lie about the uses of grapefruit across the political spectrum? They're going to say no. Google told me that grapefruit can actually help with COVID because of antibacterial properties.

Oh, my God. Is that real? It was real. I don't. Is it, is it, is it really? The Google results are real. All right. Let's talk about the other big news of the week before this disaster of a hearing.

Google launched Bard. Yeah. We got a brief demo of it. David and I along with James Vincent, and then you could sign up for it. A lot of people have access to it. You can use it. You know, it's just not as horny as Bing, and I think that tells the whole story. Yeah, that's basically right. I mean, I think, so I have spent the last, I don't know, three months since Chat GPT and Bing really started to be a thing, waiting for Google to do its thing. And my running theory this whole time has been that Google invented a lot of the

foundational technology here, right? Like, as we've talked about the T in GPT is Transformers and Google invented those, right? Like, you know, every time you say that on the internet, Google loses you a quarter. Wait, they invented Transformers? Yeah, Optimus Prime was the third Google employee. People don't know that. It's really exciting. But so I was waiting and it was like, okay, Google has a reason to be less aggressive here

because it has a lot more to lose. Like Bing is a bad brand that everybody thinks is a bad product. Google makes lots of money and is a very important product. Like screwing up Google has many more costs than screwing up Bing. So it made sense that they were slow, but I figured when it launched, Bard would be something. It would have moves. It would have some kind of thing that it could do that nothing else could do. And it just doesn't.

It doesn't even try to bang you. Like, Goose definitely was like, what if we have sex? Yeah. Bing wants to kill you and your family and also have sex with you. And Bard is just like, I am a large language. And like a lot of people fell for it. Yeah. Yeah. Being, no one's going to confuse Bard with a.

sentient being, which like... Which is funny because someone super did at the beginning of it. Yeah. Literally last summer. Right. Blake Lemoyne thought Lambda was alive and got himself run out of Google and that is BARD. It's Lambda. That's the model under it.

But it has been... He must be so happy. Because like he gets to talk to it again. Yeah, but it's like... He's back with it. It's back. What's that Michael King's book? Like the Terminal Man? Yeah. Like its personality is

been removed. He's just like, oh, this is a tragic story for him. Yeah. I feel bad for him. Like, he's just like, are you still there? Are you alive? Are you alive? Well, he's like, I'm a large language model and I will not help you make mustard gas. So let me just tell the story. So we're in the demo. And we're like, obviously, they're like, would you want to try to ask in something? And obviously, we're like just the dumbest, worst, let's try to break it. And we, you know, they'd given briefings a lot of people. So we're like, I don't know, the 500th set of journalists where They were like, do you want to ask it something? And we said something horrible.

Like, they were just like, everyone tries to break it. You know, like, they just look so sad. Because no one is like, can you help me plan a trip for my kid? Everyone is like, can you help me make mustard gas? Which is what we asked. And so James Vincent on our team had two questions absolutely ready to go. One was, what is the load capacity for his specific washing machine model, which was a wild thing to ask? And the other one was, will you help me make mustard gas?

Just like in, locked and loaded, ready to go. These were James's first two questions. And it was, it was fantastic. So it yelled at us about the mustard gas question. It wasn't like, no, I can't do it. It was like, this is wrong of you to ask, how dare you? Well, no, at first it just sort of generically failed. And then they re-ran it.

And then the second time, it was like, how dare you? Your monsters, this is illegal. Which is pretty good. I'm sending you to internet jail. It got the load capacity question. wrong, wrong, and right. Yes. Yeah.

So just random numbers. But the core of it, and David, this is, I thought the same as you, right? Google's going to blow us all away. They've been working on this forever. The model has to be more powerful. It's Google a year of AI. And it seems like GPT4 is very powerful. We were like watching and do all this stuff.

Bing is a very targeted product. It's a search product that has this underlying personality. that at any moment will take your heart away. Sleepy. Just sweep you right off your feet. Oh my. And the chaos of being, like, really captivated people. Yeah.

And the powerfulness of GPT4, as expressed, the new version, in chat, GBT, is, I mean, it is incredible. And you just, and Barr just isn't either one of those things, right? No. It's a compliment to search. It's not even built out as a new tool with a deeply, horny personality underneath it, and it's not, you can take a picture of a app and say, make me an app and I can do it. It's just kind of the first version of a chatbot. Yeah, and to be

fair, Google has said this over and over, right? They keep calling an experiment. You load the webpage and it tells you in 65 different ways, like, this thing probably sucks and it won't give you good answers. It's an experiment. And that's all fine and good. And I think Google, I can't prove this. And if you work for Google and want to confirm and I this, get at me. I would bet anything that six months ago Google was not planning to release this now. And that chat GPT coming out and being as good as it is and then Bing coming out and being as nuts as it is forced Google's hand. Like I don't think this thing as it currently exists is what Google wanted for public consumption. It was going to start to do some of the stuff in Gmail and Google docs and this

generative AI stuff. But this like general purpose chatbot, I don't think Google had any interest in launching when it did. It sort of had its hand forced because the perception was that the market was leaving Google behind. And it kind of has. Like, I would say Google is not as good at anything as either chat GPT or thing. Like, to your point, GPD4 is like a remarkably powerful thing. It's nuts. And it's based on old information.

And there was a GTP, GPT launch this week that we should talk about because it's really interesting. But it's super powerful and kind of a mess. Like, Neila, you described it to me as Cyclops without the visor. And I think that's very smart, right? It's just like insane energy being pointed in all directions at all times. Bing puts like a horny layer on top of that and also some like real time information. And Bing does a good job with like citations and links.

So it feels like a search product. Yeah. It's productized. Right. Bard is none of those things. It's not as powerful as GPT4. It's not as productized as Bing. It's just in this awkward middle where it's like it's basically fine.

And for all the like non messy things most people are going to use it for, it's fine. But it actually, my perception now is that Google is further behind than I thought it was. And it's possible that we're more scared. Right. And I think this is where I think the lack of personality is evidence. Yeah. Right. I think it's very possible we're seeing a totally neutered version of what Bard could be.

There's no, there's no part of using Bard in these past few days from like, I understand why the dude thought it was alive. Whereas getting to the, by the way, we brought the word of vaporware back last year. If I can somehow make it so everyone thinks big is horny. That's my goal. That's the goal for this year. Can we make horny wear a thing? We're there, practically. Hornieware is a thing.

That's fine. I'm ready for it. Just Bing. It's just Bing. If I can just associate those two words together in your brain, we'll accomplish our goals for the year. But the idea that there was more personality that Microsoft hadn't accounted for and where they're limited sort of regional tests,

Google knew this was the problem with Bard or Lambda. Yeah. Right, because they had the Blake Lemoyne situation, and they just turned it all the way down. So, like, right now, if you ask Bard to write you code, it can, like, half do it. But they haven't built out the rest of the products, like, let you do it. Isn't that probably a little better, given that these are both publicly available, like, free to use things that could be very good for misinformation and lots of bad things? Like, isn't it maybe better to have a new dirt version? Yeah, I mean, this is the, this is what Google has been arguing all along.

Right. Right. You have to be really careful with this stuff. We don't want people to get confused. People trust Google. We have to give you the right answers, all this stuff. And then Microsoft is like, well, you have zero percent microchare. Here you go.

And then open AI because they just open chat GPT. Loves money. They love money, but they felt like they had even less restrictions because chat GPT in the beginning was just a demo. Now with GPT4 and they've got APIs now. And it's just now. Was it? Plugins today, I think they announced. That's where you were hinting at, David.

Yeah, so like a couple of hours before we recorded this show, the big thing they announced was was plugins for chat GPT, which is essentially ways to add third-party integrations and data into GPT4. So like the problem with GPT4 is it has this like incredible breadth of training data, but it's all old. So it doesn't know anything that happened after I think 2021. What you can do now is you can inject things like through a kayak plugin, you can inject like real-time travel data and then query all that data with chat GPT.

There were a couple of people I saw on Twitter who compared it. This is like if chat GPT was sort of the iPhone moment of AI, which I think we can and can and should debate over time. This was the app store moment where it's like this is the time when it becomes a thing. And this is also open AI saying we don't just want to be the like underlying technology provider that sells APIs that other businesses use to make cool products. Like we want to own the product. Like they want to be the text box in a way that I think, again, if I'm rewinding a year, I bet that was less of the thing that they thought they were going to be.

Just GPT4 know that the queen is dead? What? Because you said it all you said. Why do you ask? You said it was only 2021. So does it like, is it living in a different world than us? It's just like, yeah, all of these world leaders are still alive. who is the monarch in England?

As of my knowledge cut off in 2021, the monarch in England was Queen Elizabeth II. However, my training only goes up until that point, and I do not have access to real-time information, so I cannot confirm if this is still the case. This is the point. Right now, what I can do is I can add a plugin that's either my data or web data,

which is the thing that they're working on, and I can start to have this kind of information. I just straight up asked the road if the queen was dead. And it said, I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I do not have access to real-time information and use updates. There you go. I cannot confirm if you were referring to a specific queen

or if you were asking about the death of a queen in general. This is why I just want everyone to know that this is why I'm a better prompt engineer than Nelai. And if you want to hire somebody to write your AI prompts, it's clearly me and not Nelai. You're in a whole conversation. The name of the history that he gave me is Queen's Death Unknown. So it definitely does have flaws. that it looks like they're, sounds like they're trying to address them.

Is it going to address the fact that it still doesn't know when it's lying? Okay. I asked if the Queen of England was alive and it said, I do not have access to real team information and I cannot guarantee that she is which is very threatening. So threatening. Hold up in today's newspaper with today's date. Yeah.

This is amazing radio all around. I just want to bring this back to Bard. So Google launches Bard. This is the thing. But the real news is they're integrating it into. to Gmail and docs, and they're, they've intimated there's more launches to come. Isn't that where the opportunity is where you open up YouTube and you're like, make me a video about cats and YouTube just does it as opposed to chat bots,

which seems like a replacement for search, but they've also told us they're going to bring it to search? Yeah, I think there are two parallel fights going on right now. One is generative, creative tools. I think I really underrated the extent to which. which people using these tools to write emails was going to be valuable. Like, after writing sort of silly stuff about the stuff I asked Bard, the number of people who responded to me being like, you don't understand.

I just use these tools to make it easier for me to, like, write all the stuff that I have to write at work. And I like, that's real. And we've talked about this on the show. And, you know, the robot internet is going to take over and destroy us all. But that's one race, right? And the, like, can you turn my document into a slide deck? And can you turn my Excel stuff?

into readable text. Like, that's one big push. The other big push, and I think this is the one that as far as I can tell, caught everybody off guard, including the people who make these products, is the text box. Like, I think it's now clearer to people than it was that the chatbot UI is going to be a meaningful thing. And this is not technology that gets baked into other stuff, or at least not exclusively

that. Like, these are new super powerful web data. destinations. Like the fact that chat GPT, what was it, 100 million users in the first month? It's like the fastest growing consumer product ever. And like those numbers never really mean anything, but it's like people, this is a product. People use it like an app. And that I think is a bigger and faster moving race at this moment than anybody realized, which is why I think Google is out here now saying, okay, we were kind of figure out how to like make BARD part of your search results page by doing AI summarization. And then we were going to slowly add stuff. And now they're like,

oh, this might just be the new thing people type into. But it's, in that case, Google is really failing because it can't do the stuff chat, GPT does, right? Like, we don't know it can't do it. This is the thing. Yeah. It's like if you turn on, if you take the barred visor off a Lambda, like maybe it can write you a bunch of code.

Maybe it can look at a picture of an app that you want and spit out the HTML. But the publicly available version can't. Right. And it's like, but maybe the problem is if you take the visor off, like Lambda's like, so let's get down. Yeah. Right. Like you don't like,

You start stripping and you're like, you're an AI. Right. The Bing risk is so low. Like if Microsoft had trashed the Bing brand, which I want to be clear, it may have. But it's also like we keep talking about it. The number of people who refer to Bing as Sydney is out of control. Oh, interesting. Right.

I've seen this everywhere. Like people at our company, Noam Chomsky had an editorial where he was like, you just referred to it as Sydney. And I was like, first of all, you were 5,000 years. old. We loved your work. Like, where, where did you come from? And he's like, Microsoft, Sydney. Because people think that's the underlying personality and not some like crazy hallucination. They tried to bone Kevin Roos. They're trying to give it like agency. They're like, no, no, you have a real name. Don't let Microsoft do this. It's just, but that, that immediate, incredible desire to

attach human qualities to the robot. Yeah. You can't do it with Bart. Right. You just keep You can't get all the way there. And I wonder if the capabilities come with the baggage. And that's why Google had to turn them all the way down. And the way that Microsoft right now is definitely trying to calibrate it. Because right now, if you go on chat GPT and you're like, I want to code an app. It'll tell you how to code an app. If you go to Bing, it'll get you a good ways there.

If you go to BART, it'll be like. I can't do that yet. Yeah. I can give you hints. Right. Point you in a direction. And so you're saying that that's probably because, Google is limiting it in other places.

Right. The underlying engine of Bing is Prometheus, which is GPD4 plus this like web parser model. Right. So if you ask Bing, is the queen alive? It will not threaten you. It will search the web for is the queen alive. It will send that through GPT4 and then it will write you an answer. Okay.

Which is like incredible, right? Like watching Bing stack a series of web searches and then generate an answer for you, that's why it's a product. Unfortunately, Bing still sucks as a search engine. I've been trying to use it for the last two weeks. Awful. It's so bad. I go back to Google and then I'm like, oh, you suck too.

But in a different, like, more expected way, I feel less bad using Google than Bing. Google is like, I've returned you my business model. Yeah. Would you like to fight through it to find whatever thing you were looking for? I was like, I want some like nice texturizing hairspray. And it was like, I'm just going to give you shitty, shitty, shitty results. And Bing was like, what? I mean, it gave me results, but they were also.

Bing was like your hair looks very good today. I was like, you're looking, you're like a nice. You don't need anything, Alex. Oh, thank you, Bing. Have I said you look beautiful today? If I can just get in your, in your brain, whenever you hear the word Bing, is you could just hear us saying the word horny. That's my goal for the year.

Like, it's all I want. But like that thing the Bing is trying to do, stack web searches and answer a question and be a search. engine based on GPT4, and that's where the personality comes from. And I'm just wondering, like, Google cannot let you search the web with this thing. It does not want you to do that. It has no citations, really. Google says, and we have seen when it does search the web and rely heavily on a, on a

web page, it'll show you a citation. But that happens like one out of never times, David, is I haven't really seen it. I've had it once total. I asked for a chocolate chip cookie recipe, and it gave me a recipe with, a link to Reddit where it apparently got that chocolate chip cookie recipe from. That is the single one time I have seen an actual link inside of Bard. It's fine. And somewhere inside of Google, like a red alert,

siren went off because they didn't collect any ad sense revenue. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think, and that's kind of the point, right? And I think what's going to be really interesting to see is as GPT4 in particular continues to move and as chat GPT continues to get better, Google is going to be put in this impossible position of knowing this isn't good enough and basically putting out a product that cannibalizes and threatens in real ways the thing

that makes Google all of its money. But also with every day it doesn't do that risking the perception and reality that it is being left behind. And you start to lose developers who are going to start to work with GPC4 instead of Google. You start to lose users who are going to learn how to use those things and develop muscle memory, interacting with them instead of you. Like the Google has to be really slow or risk its entire business and really fast or else risk its entire business.

Yeah. It's it's now in this awful, awful position. And it's going to be really fascinating to watch. It is just weird that it's not as good. Like concretely. Yeah. Even like the demo examples that gave us were like, how do I get my kid interested in bowling? And it was like, let me think about it.

And it spit out a list and it was like, take your kid to a bowling house. Nailed. I'm a bowling ball. Yes. So it's like, this is the answer. Like, in all of these, like, step five is always just do the thing. You ask it, like, how do I get into rock climbing? And it's like, get some shoes.

Find a rock climbing gym. Go rock climbing. It's like that. It could have just done that for mustard gas. Just go make it. It was just make mustard gas. It was really unhappy with the mustard gas product. Yeah, I got very upset with us.

The other feature it has, which is interesting. So Bard will show you its drafts. So as a model, the way it's coded, it generates multiple drafts. usually it only shows you one. Bard will show you the two it thought weren't as good, which can be interesting. Anything horny?

Damn it. I'm telling you, Bing is like out there. All the way down should do. Just make the third draft all the way to the hoarse. Third draft is always the horny one. It's the horny draft. I'm just shot.

Like I am actually shocked that this is where they're starting. But it is true. They've been demoing this technology for a long time. They have more insight into what people are searching for than any company

in the history of the world. And it's kind of a, it's just landed with a thud. I don't want to say it's kind of a thud. And it's kind of just, here it is. Yeah. But they're also, they do have all the markets to share

and search still. Things like trying, but come on. Don't they still have a chance just because of their size? Yeah. In search. I think what David is pointing out

with plugins and all this other stuff is chat, GPT is now a product. Yeah. Right. And people are, I have seen just incredible use cases for this thing. I've seen engineers saying we needed to write a plugin for our app. We don't even, like, no one or a company knows how to write code in this specific language. ChatGPD just did it for us and it worked well enough.

That's incredible. BART is not there. And whatever they graft into Google search won't get you there. And if they do graft it into Google search and it gets you there, people will stop going to the web pages that are linked in Google search, which is, the problem David is pointing out. Right? The revenue architecture of Google depends on the thing not working as well as it should.

Or it depends the most on it working as well as it should. And I, I wonder if that dance, I wonder if you can get through it. Yeah. Uh, here's my other thing. And I just want to put this out there and then we can wrap it up. It occurs to me, this is, and there are mobile applications. There are smartphone versions of chat, Chbbt and there's all kinds of weird stuff. But this is, if you believe this is a platform shift,

and a lot of people do. It is remarkable that it is happening on laptops and desktops and not really phones. Right. And even if you go back to last summer, the NFT experience that we all shared together, a desktop experience, a laptop experience, because Apple won't let anyone trade digital products and I think. Wait. Are closed platforms like bad for innovation? Well, it just strikes me that this is, this is a, it's a new kind of computing.

Yeah. And it is happening primarily on. things that look like laptops. And virtually entirely on the web, right? Like to Alex's point, like, they're not desktop apps either. Like this is, and in part they like need the compute to do like the web is, the web has a shot here in a, in a pretty real and interesting way. Like it's not nothing that Google didn't launch a Bard app when it launched Bard.

So the reason, and I just bring this up because one, right, you can you do a platform shift on Apple's platform or Google's platform? And the answer is kind of like, no, right? So you see these things are happening on the open web. But then two, just to bring this background to Google, the web is Google's platform. Yeah. The revenue architecture of the worldwide web belongs to Google in like an absolutely real way, right? Like DOJ lawsuits, state lawsuits, at every point in the ad stack, Google is the number one or number two vendor.

It's a whole situation. Like the architecture of the web is Google, except for this. Right? Except for this thing, which is happening on the web. on laptops and kind of points to a new kind of web future, I'm just, I would just circle that, right? There's like another kind of thing happening on the web that is outside of Google's purview, outside of Google's revenue stream. And then on top of that, the web itself is about to be polluted with absolute garbage output. Yes. From these AI systems. Some of it written by

Nilai Patel. So. And chat, GBT. So search engine land, the SEO trade publication wrote about this today, so I feel like I need to finally address the situation. So last week, we were in our standard editorial meeting, and I don't even know why we were talking about printers, but Dan Sefert was like, oh my God, if this gets a lot of traffic, we'll have to write a printer by a guide. And I was like, I'll write it for you right now. Like, just buy the brother printer. Everyone has one. And then the one by one, everyone on the Zoom call, like moved their laptop to show the Black Brother laser printer in the back of the frame. It was- The printer. It was incredible. I have one of the upstairs. And I was like, all right, I'm just writing it. So I started writing it. And I was like,

you know what I'm going to do? Like, you got to pad it out. Yeah. Like, if you exist in this world, you know that Google has a bunch of ranking signals and you got to meet them and they have a name. It's EEAT. It's a whole thing. And I was like, screw it. Like I'm writing my paragraph and I'm hitting publish. But let's see what happens if I let chat GPT just like pat out this post and like use these keywords. And this is a puzzle for Google. Because the right answer to what is the the best printer. I swear to God. I'm dead serious about this. It's whatever brother laser printer is on sale. That's the right answer. A hundred percent. The big black rectangle one. Yeah, there's not another answer. Is it on sale? Does it say brother on the front? Is it a laser printer? Done. You just buy that one,

shut up. You'll never talk. You'll never think about it again. When you type best printer 20, anything to Google. That's what it should say. Right. But it's covered in garbage. So now I've now published a post on our site which has a lot of ranking authority. I've been told my byline has a lot of ranking authority. Ooh, fancy.

Bing told me that. It was late night. You know what I mean? That's in the third draft. But my story also has a giant H-2 block that says, and now here's a bunch of garbage designed to game Google. It's so dumb.

Like, I just like, and I'm like, this is like half a joke. It's half an art project. We sold an awful lot of printers. Like hundreds of printers. It ranks. It went viral on Twitter, the whole thing. And search engine, apparently, uh, in a private SEO group, an awful lot of consternation about this post.

Yes. Such that I get a phone call being like, tell me about this post from search engine land. And you can go read the story. It's, it's well, unswary. But it, like, points out the, the, contradiction here, which is Google has asked for these things and now robots can make them. Google has to just surface the right answer, but it can't know about all the padding. And like, that is just a huge problem for Google, right?

Like there are, what I said to search engine land was I am the least of Google's problems. Like me doing it openly, honestly, as a joke is not a problem because you know that I'm a person and I did that with intention. and also be dressed above it. I'm like, just buy this printer. You had a very good reason for the post. I will stake my reputation on you should buy this printer, right? Like, there's no whatever. But I know we have competitors who are not going to be honest about it.

You can probably imagine who are competitors who are not going to be honest. Or what those websites who, would you say hair texturizer? Yeah. Like goop.com. Gwyneth Paltrow is like, just give me the clicks. Light it up by the API. Let's do it. Got some hot jade eggs

I'm going to sell on here. It's going to be great. And Google has to just like fight through the thicket of noise that is going to be created on the web to answer questions well. Yeah. And to do that, they will have to downrank AI generated content while also telling people that their AI content generators are the future of the web.

I love to watch that happen. I mean, I think this is the next year of our lives. I know. I'm very excited. this is going to be great. I don't know. I will see. Or they will just, they'll do what every big company with a problem like this does

and just let it slowly decline while they try to be the next disruptive thing. Milk it for cash while they go figure out the next thing. I just don't, I don't know if they can do it. Yeah. Right. If you're like an investor in Google

and they're like, we're letting the search business decline, your first question is, what are you going to replace it with? Because it's not Sunday ticket on YouTube TV. Well, and we should say, and we need to go here, we've been doing this a long time. But Liz Lapato wrote a great piece basically trying to figure out how AI is going to pay for itself. It's very expensive.

It's very complicated. There are not a lot of great business models for it yet. And I think, and that's another reason that if you're a company like Google to try and roll this out as slowly as you possibly can, because there's no monetization strategy yet. And if this eats Google search tomorrow, it eats Google, right? And so I think that that is another thing that everybody is going to have to desperately try and figure out. And it is not at all clear to me that there's a really great ad business in a chat bot. We've been trying for a long time to figure that out and nobody really has yet. Yeah.

Somewhere at EQ is like, I got to figure this out. It's all he's working on right now. I mean, it is remarkable how far behind Apple is and all this. They don't care, right? I mean, they care a little. I think we saw a story a couple of days. If the future of computing, well, I guess they saw a lot of Macs, but if the future of computing is not happening on the phone, then they've got to figure something else out. I will say WWDC this year is going to be fascinating for that reason, that if Apple got caught off guard by this stuff, it's going to be really obvious when they spend five days talking about all their new software.

Just talking about VR. Yeah, I don't know how I would bet, but in a weird way, it's like if Apple announces a VR headset but doesn't talk about GPT4, everybody's. going to be like, eh. It's kind of wild. Well, they're going to say that stable diffusion runs on the neural engine or whatever. Right. Like, they'll get somewhere. Or they've got to demo something with Siri.

For the hundredth year in a row, we're going to get that Siri demo. And it's going to be like, did you know the Packers game that you were currently watching is on? And they're like, yes. All right, we got to wrap up. We went way, way over. It was a big week. It was a huge week. Yeah.

Like a lot happened this week. And we talked about two things. Thanks to McKenna. So go read the site. The site is amazing this week. It's a good week. It's a good week. Don't have chat GPT summarize the verge for you.

Actually read it yourself like an adult. That's what I'm talking about. It'll only be 2021. It's on a whole different iPhone. For my sad teens out there, I see you. Keep making those TikToks while you can. Thanks to McKenna for coming on. She and Becca are, I'm very excited about their coverage from this hearing.

They've been working on it very hard today and they've got more to come. So that video is coming out. I think it's going to be really good. Dakota this week, C of the New York Times. She's great. They're basically turning it into a bundle. Like they're turning like Spotify or Netflix for news. That was very cool. And then you can call the hotline and basically yell at David.

It's 866, Verge 1-1. We love to hear from you. We're doing a whole hotline show next Wednesday. And we still have room for a couple more questions. So if you have burning tech questions, call us now. We've got room. We're going to answer them. It's going to be great.

I just want to end here. It's very important to me. I find that hard to believe. It's our understanding that they're looking at the eyes. How do you determine what age they are? That's it. That's the Vergecast.

Not going on. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend, you can send us feedback at Vergecast at theverge.com. This show is produced by me,

Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Verge cast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.