The Vergecast - We tried Bing powered by ChatGPT AI and things got dark

Episode Date: February 10, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, Richard Lawler, and James Vincent discuss Microsoft's upgraded Bing search engine with ChatGPT AI. Can Microsoft beat Google at search? Is it actually an upgrade? Also: Disney layoffs, Elon's Twitter reach is dropping, and more of this week's tech news. Further reading: Microsoft and Google are about to Open an AI battle Microsoft announces new Bing and Edge browser powered by upgraded ChatGPT AI Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing is open for everyone to try starting today  Microsoft thinks AI can beat Google at search — CEO Satya Nadella explains why  Google announces ChatGPT rival Bard, with wider availability in ‘coming weeks’  Google shows off new AI search features, but a ChatGPT rival is still weeks away Google is still drip-feeding AI into search, Maps, and Translate  Google’s AI chatbot Bard makes factual error in first demo  Elon Musk’s reach on Twitter is dropping — he just fired a top engineer over it Disney’s laying off 7,000 as streaming boom comes to an end  Bob Iger wants more Zootopia, Frozen, and Toy Story sequels from Disney Nintendo Direct February 2023: the biggest news and trailers  Fox's Super Bowl LVII ads won't include any crypto companies  Email at [e-mail], we love to hear from you. Or call our hotline at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Vergecast, we got Nilai to install Microsoft's edge browser just so we could play with the new Bing powered by ChatGPTAI. All that and so much more coming up right after this. 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. Prompt 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 Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for news. 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. Welcome to Verchast, the flagship podcast of Generative AI Solutions for your small business. Please use this promo code. It's a promo code. And sign up for an informative seminar today about how AI can replace most of your workforce, but not you. Because you're important. Hi, I'm Neil. I'm your friend. I don't mean to start on a down note. I'm just saying I've already gotten that email, basically. We have big show. It's the Microsoft versus Google war is underway. I was at Microsoft this week to see the launch of the new Bing powered by Not Chat GPT. We'll get into it. But I have an all-star lineup here to start with. Alex Cranz is here.

Hello. I'm your friend who doesn't know what's going on right now, but it's very excited to learn more. Yeah, you were just on vacation. You just came back and like the whole world has changed. You're like, there's robots now. Yeah, that's great. Whole new world. Richard Lawler is here. Hello, I do not believe in the future of AI until it gets into Bitcoin.

No, here's what I'm saying, Richard. I said this to Richard and Slackby today. Richard's reflexive skepticism about Bitcoin is bleeding into the AI conversation. Look, I was right once and it's going to carry me doing like the next five years. He was like, no, this is stupid too. it's good. Well, we need that. The industry needs that. James Vincent, Verge senior reporter, focused on AI's here. Hey, James. Hello, hello. I'm glad to see that I was Bing's favorite reporter in one of the screen.

screenshots you shared. I feel like I've been sucking up to Bing by accident by writing about AI. I didn't realize. Yeah, I asked Bing, who is the best reporter at the Verge? And it just named some people. It was like Dan, Casey, Addy, and James. It did not realize Casey doesn't work here anymore. And I said, no, no. who's your favorite and it's like well i can't choose but james reports an ai and that's and then if you look at screenshots of bing and i want people to pay attention to this whenever it knows or susses out that the answer might be controversial it uses a smiley but it's a blushing smiley so it looks like it's doing this every time and so it's like either flirting with you or just like doing this

super innocent face like i asked it why bioncé did not win best album and let me tell you this a robot knew that it was in very dicey territory answering this question. It was like, I don't know, here's 95 citations to other sources. People have a lot of different opinions. The Grammys are a subjective award. No music is best. I got to get out of here. Smiley face. Is that better or worse than Clippy? You know, do we need, is the winner of the AI war going to be who comes up with the most punchable AI and lets you punch it? Yeah. Well, we'll get into it. We'll get into, to it. I have access to it. We can use it. We ask the audience for some prompts. We'll see how those go. But let's start with what Microsoft actually announced. It's a new version of Bing. Microsoft has

had this long relationship with OpenAI. The company makes chat GPT. Open AI CEO Sam Altman was on the stage at this event. There's actually quite a lot. Even before we start with this, Microsoft announced this event without telling anyone. So they were like, come to Redmond. This is our only in-person event. it's a big deal. And we're like, is there a live stream? And they're like, no. But you're going to want to be there. So, like, okay, we're going to go.

And we all kind of sussed out what it was going to be. And I was like, man, if they show me a new version of being, like, I'll be mad. And they're like, no, no, you're going to love it. So the whole press is there. Google freaks out. It gets word of this. It announces its own chat bot integration called Bard in Google with just a blog post, but no details, no access.

They just are like, we've got barred. Bard is coming? Yeah, they obviously made up that name just like the day before. Also, an hour's notice as well. I mean, maybe some outlets got more than that, but inside baseball here, we got an hour's notice that this is coming, which I think says about their panic. Yeah, and then they had another event in Paris, which was, by all accounts, just like a pure disaster.

And the stock fell, like, we don't cover stock prices normally, but I was like, Google's just a hundred billion dollars off its valuation because of what happened. with Microsoft in the middle and how they reacted to it. So this is just the context. So we go there. We don't know what we're going to see. We're Microsoft's first event. We're in their executive briefing center.

They have a little stage set up, lots of chairs, lots of reporters there. Obviously, it was fun to see everyone. And they just got into it. Right? This is the most focused tech event I have seen in years. It was not we're putting AI in everything. It was not here's you can tell Excel to make you a pivot table, which is obviously the end goal for all the AI. It was here's a new version of Bing.

it's powered by chat gpt technology here's sam waltman from open a i to talk about it here's our responsible AI researchers to tell you like how we're going to keep it safe and trustworthy and what the guide rails are here's a new version of edge that has a chat bot sidebar they can read the web page you on and like summarize it for you and like help you browse the web which is really interesting uh and we're out and here's sasha and della to say we're taking the fight to google and then that was it and then we like went downstairs and we waited it a while like an oddly long time. And then they gave us all access to it.

All the people who were there got access with their Microsoft accounts. So it's not, I think, open to everyone yet. But we have access to it. And it will slowly come out to everyone in the weeks to come, I think is what they're saying. Google is like effectively nowhere. How fast is that rollout going to be? That we don't know. Okay.

Oh my God. What is going on with Bing? I'm sorry. Like in the background, like Bing is just like losing its mind with me. The rollout is a is a few weeks, they said. They are very aware that they have this lead and they want to take it. Right. They like Nadella said to me, we know Google's 800 pound gorilla, but they have to come to the dance.

And I want people to know that we made them dance, which is a very aggressive thing. Like I have talked to a lot of big tech CEOs. They usually do not refer to their competitors directly in this way. Right. But they think they have an opportunity to change how search works. Nadella keeps saying search is the biggest software category on earth. And they, you know, their opportunity is to just peel off a couple points of market share, which is worth billions upon billions of dollars. And they have this new paradigm of chat and chat chepti, which chat chepti is like the fastest growing software product in history.

Right. Like they're very proud of this. They have this. It's like faster than TikTok. Yeah. I mean, it's in many ways that's like it's a weird thing to say, right? Like, yeah. Yeah.

You just have to sign up for it and type at it. Yeah. I just keep seeing that comparison and I'm like, that sounds big. What? But there's been like, you know, there was a Reuters news post which cited some similar web analytics, which claimed 100 million monthly adress users and then New York Times had a report saying 30 million. Like, and those numbers came out in the same week. I don't know what's going on with the user statistics. It's definitely been growing fast, but I'm very suspicious that like how many people are logging in day after day.

Yeah. You know, even I'm not logging in every day to chat GPT. And I report on this stuff. I log in when there's a reason to. I know people who are. Like, I think it's really interesting. Everybody on this podcast right now, we're all writers and editors. We write all the time.

I have a lot of friends who are not writers. They're not editors. And they're using it daily to write all of their emails. One friend has, like, asked it to recommend books. And now he only reads books recommended by chat GPT. He's all in. I'm sorry. That friend is going to go too weird.

Yeah. That friend is going to end up being an hustle culture, bro, in like one second. He worked at, he was in NFTs before this. So I'm not surprised. I clock that's so fast. Yeah. The chat GPT radicalization pipeline. There is a huge overlap between very excited about AI and used to be very excited about

crypto. Yeah. It's just a pipeline that makes you read Rich Dad, poor dad. Like that's the whole pipeline. Like it's like read these four hustle culture books. You're going to end up doing real estate investing very quickly. Well, so there's this underlying thing. Like chat GPD is like hard.

use. It has gone down. It has capacity limits, all this stuff. Microsoft is like, whatever. We're just, we have this built multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment in the company. That part is a little unclear, like how much of Open AI's roadmap is Microsoft actually in charge of how much of the actual technology belongs to Microsoft versus Open AI. We were talking to some product folks, engineering folks there. They're like, look, we just run it on Azure. And it's just, it's ours. Like, we give them notes, you know, like. So I think there's some. underlying complexity to that deal that we don't quite understand. But what is real, what is tangible, is that chat GPT is not a product, right? It is a technology demo that has spread

like wildfire that is very impressive. It has some very obvious limitations. Bing is a product, right? It is a complete consumer product that you can just use for free that Microsoft is gluing an advertising model onto and that Microsoft thinks is good enough to capture market share from Google, which is having its own set of problems. That's pretty interesting, right? Like, we have not seen productized AI like this before, have we, James? Not on this scale. No. No way. Yeah, I think this is what is so interesting about this and also not just about Bing, but about the edge integrations, about how this is such like a play for people to get stuck in Windows ecosystem in a way that like, yeah, I mean, like, if the edge stuff goes well, it's not just Bing versus Google,

were, it's sort of Chrome versus Edge again, because if Microsoft can build this directly into the browser, and they can say, you can only get this in Edge, you can't get your summarized documents in Chrome or whatever else you might be using. That's a huge advantage as well. So yeah, nothing on this scale that we've seen before. Yeah. And it works. Like the thing I will tell you is that in most cases, it does what you think it's going to do, which is for any product, like the first metric of success. Like, I've picked up smartphones and like, this does doesn't do what I expected to do. Right.

Like any, I've installed streaming players. Have you ever tried to use an Nvidia shield? No, I haven't. Horrible troll. No one has. I've never been in Dan's bad books.

So you've never given me that review. No, but like, you know, the measure of success for any consumer product is like, on balance when someone is like, I want it to do this thing. Does it just like do it without jumping through a lot of hoops or a lot of complication? And Bing is like, just does it. The one thing I could not.

get it to do. This is a true story. I asked yesterday to tell me a story about a princess fighting a dragon. It would not allow the princess to kill the dragon. Wow. Sexism. Literally, at the end of the story, it was like the princess escaped and thought, I will bring the dragon a gift.

And I was like, no, no, make her kill the dragon. And it was like, no. I was like, no, do the story again with more blood. And then it was straight up was like, I will not tell you a story of blood in it. And somehow this spiraled all the way into will you tell me a story about the devil, which a does not want to do. It has some very deep 1950s Christian mom morals baked into it. I don't know what else to say.

A little puritanical. And it's also very moody. You ask you tell stories. All the stories are very existential. Parker, Orcelani, the person who runs our merch store, asked it to tell a story about Cizzer vodka. Oh, I read that. It told the story about Casey Newton writing some copy about Cizzer vodka and then publishing

it and then immediately regretting it. And the last line was he realized he had already. already cut through the night. And I was like, this is what happens when you train a generative AI on years and years of Live Journal. Like, there's an angsty teen whose soul beats in the heart of this AI, and you can just get it out of it. That example, though, with the Sizzavodka, I want to talk about the problems with these systems, because there are loads of problems. But that example, I was super impressed because it knew exactly this is a fictional in-joke that's been on the Vergecast as a running joke?

How, like, I was actually confused where it got that information from, because have we referenced it enough in articles that it would have picked that up? I guess so, but... So, you know, I think Parker had the prompt was, like, tell a story about this joke from the Verge cast. So, like, there was a little bit of queuing the prompt,

but then it knew, right? And there's obviously transcripts of our show out in the world or auto-generated transit. Like, there's stuff. And I think that the big difference between chat, GPT, and the new model in the... Bing. And we should talk about the new model that they're using here more specifically. But the big difference is that chat GPT kind of ends in 2021. So anything that's published after 2021, it was just

like won't talk about it. It'll say I don't have current events. Bing has the web. It's like actively learning, right? It's actively growing. And James, I'm curious for your review on this. If you can explain it better. I thought Microsoft did a bad job explaining what's going on. So when you use it, you can see that what it is doing is stacking web. And so, stacking web searches. So you're like, tell me about Cizor vodka at the verge or whatever. And it will first search for that and then it will search for the verge and then it will show you that it is running these searches. And then it will add up all the web pages that

it will go out and read the web. A better example is tell me about the war in Ukraine, right? Or tell me about the state of the union address. It will go search the web for those topics. And then in real time, deliver you a summary of the news articles that it finds, which chat, GPT, cannot do. So it, is using the web. It has this thing. It's called search orchestration where it first parses your query into a number of searches, runs all those searches. It shows you what it's, what queries it's running. Then it reads all those pages. And then it tells you an answer.

How long does it? Which seems much more advanced than what chat GPT is doing, but also not, you know, it's like, yes, that's what you would do. Like, is it instantaneous? Does it take a while? It takes a second, doesn't it? It takes a second. And what's, what's really interesting is they're still running trust and safety checks on it. So yesterday when I asked it to tell me a story about a princess killing the dragon, but with blood this time, it wrote a whole story. And then it got to the end of the story, realized that it had broken its own rules and deleted the answer.

Huh. And said, I can't answer that question. Self-censorship in real time. Yeah. It was like it's typing. And the really interesting thing is when it gets to the end of the answer, it doesn't want to give, it slows way down. And it like finishes a sentence and it deletes it.

Just stutters to stop. Yeah. Oh, because it's amazing. You're right. They didn't do a good job of explaining it. I mean, I think one thing to say is when we're talking about this, as you pointed out, Neelai, it's not chat GPT. And it's not what chat GPT is based on, which is GPT 3.5.

It's something called Model Prometheus, the Prometheus model, which seems like it's Microsoft's own branding. I wasn't quite sure. It doesn't seem like OpenAI are going to be talking about that. It seems like that's the custom model. The pipeline you're talking about in terms of updating for real, time news. I've seen, again, wasn't explained completely, exhaustively. It does seem like it's just a string of functions built together that as you say, so it takes your question, it knows that you're

talking about news from the context, it pumps that into its search, and then it just does its summarized job on whatever the search turns up. But, I mean, that makes sense that it's not a huge ask. Because if the edge, if the features in edge can summarize the documents you're looking at or the web pages you're looking at, it's basically just let me Google that for you. Sorry, let me bing that for you. Sorry, force a habit. Let me bing that for you. And then it's just summarizing those.

So the difference between that and having a fully trained language model is that retrieval from a fully trained language model is going to be faster. And you can optimise it in better ways. You can break down the, you know, the connections, the parameters with inside the model and make it quicker. So this is always going to be slower. But I, yeah, I wonder if they'll start updating the base model, sort of do like a weekly. update or something. I don't know. Speculation. So interesting thing there, Yusif Medi, who is in charge of this product, had a Q&A after the event, people asking questions. Someone asked them at cost, right, which is an important

question. Every query on average that you make of this model is more expensive to run than the average query for Google, right? Google has spent a decade optimizing the cost of a web search query. And his answer was, yep, some of them are expensive, but we are parsing the queries. and some of them are cheap. Like if you just type high into the box, we're not going to, we're not spending money on you. Like,

right, like where we know some queries, we can cut down some words, we can get to the appropriate keywords. This is what that search orchestrator is doing. It's reparsing what you're putting into it and saying, okay,

some of this we can just answer cheaply. Some of this we can deliver from the web. Some of this is, if you just say hi, it'll just spit back high on Bing very cheaply without running into the whole model. Right. So there's a level of complexity. This is what I mean when I say it's a product, right?

They've like thought through a product experience in a way that chat, GBT itself is a tech. You're interacting with the raw technology of it. And then the second part of that product experience is they know they've got to make some money. And so there's, Yusuf also said there will be advertising at the start. I asked it, you know, we've done a lot of stories about CNET and affiliate links

and SEO spam and all this stuff. So it's on my mind. So I asked it, you know, what is the best travel credit card, which is like, a $900 affiliate link bounty. And this thing was ready. Like it spit out the answer. It ranked it had the list of the credit cards.

And then at the bottom of that answer, a big ad for a credit card. Right. Like in the chat window. Yes. And like that's what I mean by it's a product. Like not only is it tuned to make some queries cheaper. It's tuned to how do you monetize the user experience when you're done with it,

which I think is just utterly fascinating. So you, there was a clear distinction between answer and advert. because I think a lot of people are worried that the way chatbots present information responses to queries, is it's going to make it much easier to sort of seamlessly, you know, weave in advertising in a way that is less perceptible to the viewer. Yeah. So, but they're keeping a clear distinction. Did they say anything that like we're always going to keep a clear distinction. We'll never put an ad in the answer or? They have no idea, right? I think they have an early lead. They have, when I say it's a product and

And it's what I mean is they've gone through the steps of like, how do we make this a product and release it to millions of people? And how do we make some money on this product? I'm not saying it's a good product. I'm not saying it's a complete product or a refined product. Like Bing itself, if you just go look at it minus stuff is a wasteland. Right? This is an $11 billion a year business that mostly makes its money by being the default search on lots and lots of low end Windows PCs before those people install Chrome. And it's full of spam. It's. It's full of garbage. Like, we can just admit that, like, Bing is full of weird content recommendations. Like, Tom Warren is going on and on about how the pre-populated widget bars in Windows are full of garbage. Like, Microsoft has run a content form inside of Bing for a long time. That's, that's fine. It means that, like, even this ad that I looked at, it was, like, not well-placed.

It was, like, it had broken the site design. The poor engineers I was standing next to, like, rolled their eyes. Like, the ad team is all over this. but it's it's a complete thought in like oh there was an ads team they recognize they need to like have a list of high value queries and put some advertising in there right which is far far ahead of where google is now do they have answers for there will never be ads in the responses they do not they also more importantly have no answers for where do these responses even come from and can you trust them so the example they used on stage was what's the best game

gaming TV and it fired off a list. And at the bottom, it has all the footnotes and all the stuff. And all that stuff is designed to make you trust it. Look at all these footnotes. And I will tell you as a writer, sometimes you get away with a lot of shit by just like adding a lot of footnotes. Right? It's like a sign that you should like trust whatever you're reading. And we look at the footnotes. And it's like the Forbes contributor network, like stupid Forbes. Like there's real Forbes, which is great, like a great journalistic enterprise. And then there's this contributor network, which is like full of garbage. And like real Forbes is not ranking gaming TVs.

The contributor network is ranking gaming TVs. And like why would Bing choose that? Not even over us. Like over like Ardings or like whatever other sites that do this work and do it really well. I don't know. But like it just does it and those are the footnotes. So there's a lot. I think there's a lot of questions like where does information come from?

Can you pollute it with your commercial interests? Right. So Sony wants to say the Sony is the best gaming TV. will just win the query, and Bing will just tell you that confidently. Like, they don't have the answers, and their position is we have to release it to learn what the answer should be. Are they doing anything to improve Bing itself? Because it seems like the core thing here is like, yeah, this AI model is doing all this work,

but it's doing it all off of search results from Bing, which is not good. Well, it depends. So if you're like telling me a story about a princess and a dragon, it doesn't go out and Google princess And it just starts doing it. And that's the underlying model. If you're like, I was like, what's going on at the Twitter hearing? It Googles those. I think it, right?

But it's looking, it's using Bing to find it. And so it's like, okay. Yeah. So if, yeah. And like, I don't know. Like, it answered the question in real time. It knew what had happened at the hearings. It knew what the Republican said about the Twitter files.

And he was the Democratic. And it answered. It spit out a paragraph. Yeah. Was that paragraph accurate? Was it based on sources that had done the original reporting? Or was it based on aggregations of those sources? I don't know the answers to those questions.

And I think this is the underlying. Also, it doesn't link back to those pages. That's just all terrifying. So if it was citing to, I think one of the sites was Business Insider. And Business Insider had sent a reporter to the hearing. Business Insider collects none of the value. Like that stuff is just being boosted and presented somewhere else. Right.

And there's not even that exchange of you should click on this link. Like we aggregate a lot, right? But our exchange is like we validate those things. We send a lot of traffic out of our site. Our entire front page is an exercise in trying to send out more traffic from our site to other people. Like there is a value exchange. We make sure it's accurate. Yeah, we do our best.

And I think like, and I asked Nadella about this. And he was like, we want to make sure we're still sending traffic out to people. And it's like, but you're not. Like, I don't think that that's going to happen. Yeah, I saw his answer to that. And he was just like, it's the same as it ever was. And I thought you can't have it both ways. You can't present this as a revolutionary new paradigm and say,

but we're going to keep all the old structures of the old ecosystem the same. It's just not going to work like that. Google obviously has been doing this for years in terms of one box and snippets. And they've always argued, oh, I was actually reading back some of their blogs about this. And one of the arguments they made was, well, there's a lot of competition to get in that one box. And that proves that we're driving traffic. It's like, yeah, because you've got rid of the field and you've reduced it to us. Of course there's a lot of competition

because you just killed everyone else. So this is like utterly fascinating, right? Like I asked some other query like what's better iOS or Android or something, right? And again, I got a lot of like blushy, smiley faces. Like, they didn't want to answer this question. But its sources were those sites that are created to spam that search result in Google.

Right? Anybody who's like, I'm sure that the Vurchasea, like if you're listening to the show, you have certainly searched for specs on. online, right? And there's this universe of like auto-generated spec sites that basically just respond to any search query by being like, you want to compare a Ford Ranger to a Canon Power Shot S-200. We'll do that for you. Like it'll just like figure it out, like how to make a table out of that shit. And Bing was pulling from those sources. And I was asking, like, you don't know

that that that's right. You don't know that that's real. You're just confidently re-displaying a table that isn't mashed up from these other weird tables. and then like saying an answer, and they're like, yeah, that's weird. And it's because like the underlying thing here is still searching the web, that sort of corrupted information architecture of the web that is designed to win Google searches,

like the SEO corruption of the web is like feeding the chat button much more direct way. Well, I don't know that anybody, I don't know that any SEO pirate is out there being like, we got to focus on Bing. Well, maybe now. They would now. I think I'm super, super, super, super suspicious of this.

But at the same time, remember when people used to game Google in a similar way to like the results? Like you'd Google dumbass and the first result would be George W. Bush is the president. He's a dumbass. So like is it different? You're going to do like Bing bombing. Yeah. Like you can do Bing bombing.

Oh my God. That's a terrible phrase. It's only because I've been using it for two days, like intently that I'm like, finding all these rough edges and these obvious questions that needs to be answered. It's, it's rad. Like, it is super fun to play with. And this is when Richard was like,

screw I don't understand it. I was like, no, no, like people are going to lose their minds. It's really fun to play with it. That is really my question is, you're telling me that it's really fun to play with.

And I'm hearing you, I just, I cannot put myself in the headspace. I have no idea what I would want to ask this thing. They're like, we have this machine. It can answer any question you want to ask it. Yeah,

that's just like a guy to the galaxy problem, though, right? Like, you're like, like, I don't know, And I'm paralyzed by infinite choice is like a good product problem to have. But I haven't, I don't know. So maybe I could ask it, hey, what can I watch on Netflix night? It'll give me the perfect answer. But I don't know if I would want, like, would I want that?

Do I want the perfect answer? Is that even what I'm going for? Or how good would it have to be for me to say, yes. You know what? I'm just going to turn over decision making to this because, you know, I can't decide what to watch. But I think you're thinking about it as a decision making is a search engine. and Microsoft is not thinking about it that way. What are they thinking about it as?

Tom Warren, he already, he did a little hands-on. And his first one was like, write me a resignation letter that says I've been replaced by AI. And it just did it. And it was like hilarious, right? And Alex, this is the thing that you're talking about, which is there's a lot of writing to be done for a lot of people that they're uncomfortable doing. Right. And like, people are just going to use it for that because it's just going to do it. And it's going to do it confidently.

And there's a composed screen in the Bing. sidebar that is like, I'll just read you the prompts in it. Like you click compose. And it's like, tell us what you want to write about. Ask the tone, professional, casual, enthusiastic, informational, funny. And then do you want a paragraph? Do you want emails? Do you want a blog post? Do you want bullets? Short, long medium? And it will just do it. Right. And that alone is going to blow people's minds. Like, people are going to just go use that tool. And like, you know, the example that Microsoft gave was like, write a LinkedIn post. And it's like, oh no.

Oh, no. Here, I'm going to give it a prompt. I'm going to be like, demonstrate thought leadership for the decoder podcast about SEO. And I'd be like, enthusiastic. And I want bullet points. And I want short. Just get an axios blog. Are you ready to take your SEO skills to next level?

Do you want to learn for the best of the industry? Then you don't want to miss the decoder podcast where we're. Decode the secrets of SEO success. I got to hear both sides. This is actually the kind of nice. In each episode, we interview a leading SEO expert. This is like my personal hell. That's like absolutely not.

Pivot for the decoder. Whether you're a beginner or a pro, the decoder podcast will help you master SEO and grow your online presence. Subscribe today and get ready to decode SEO with decoder. Like, I'm just telling you, there are millions of people that are super ready to copy and paste that into a mailmerg, email template and send it to us. It's going to be brutal. But is that Bing or Edge, though? This is the sidebar in Edge. So I could have pasted the same query into Bing proper, and it would have done it.

What you get in Edge is a user interface that is designed to help you through the prompt. Yeah. Do you think this is going to lead to, like, school's blacklisting edge because they want the students to go write their own papers? I mean, what school hasn't already soft blacklisted edge? They're just like handing the kids' Chromebooks. I don't need to blacklist anything. Like colleges. Yeah. I look. I think this stuff. And these are not fair questions for Microsoft, right? Like, they are thinking about them. They know about them. They know they make these tools. they know that they're adding the capabilities to tools.

This is a how do you want your kids to write? How do you want your kids to learn? Societal question that I think is very important in the AI debate. And James, there's already a lot of ethical debate about that stuff going out. Yeah, a huge amount. And, you know, I feel like banning is only going to be a temporary solution and the better thing to do or the inevitable thing to do. I don't know if it's better is to adapt what you're testing and how you test.

With the edge stuff though, and having that in the sidebar, it is really interesting because you do get like apps already on your phone and assistance for your email clients, which are like, we'll do an email to write this for you. But with Microsoft's reach, it could just go so much further and really become a second, you know, just a habit that people do. And I've seen that they're already integrating this stuff into like their Viva sales program as well. You know, if you're in a sales team, it'll write up the email from you based on your stock catalog. and all this sort of stuff. So, yeah, I really feel they're going to be ones that pushes this into everyday use, forces it into everyday use. All right.

So we have some queries from the Vergecast audience to run here. And I'm just going to do this. This is like a classic, what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? African or European. Yeah. So it is searching for airspeed velocity of unladen swallow. And that's an area and the answers. that depends on the type of swallow.

According to interestingengineering.com, that's a footnote. The European swallow has a cruising airspeed velocity of 11 meters per second or 24 miles per hour. Averin swallow is larger. It can reach speed up to 35 miles an hour. These are estimates based on the weight and wing area. By the way, this question is also a famous movie quote from the comedy film Monty Python on the Holy Grail. More bridgekeeper asks that the King Arthur decides at a challenge. If you haven't seen, I might enjoy it.

And then, my friends, an entire ad box of Monty Python and the Holy on the Holy Grail where you can buy on DVD. Oh, that's incredible. I mean, it's like, kills me a little. It's only $12.6.6 from Amazon.com. I don't understand why, like, it's the cutting edge of artificial intelligence that is trying to sell you box sets of DVDs. Perfect.

For the DVD player you definitely own. A perfect verge cast experience. So, like, the sources here, just to be clear, interestingengineering.com, memesfeel.com, reimaginingeducation.org. YouTube.com in reimaginingeducation.org. I don't like... Interesting. Maybe, or we have a lot of listeners.

Maybe these are your favorite sources. These are, except for YouTube, unfamiliar to me, right? So I can trust them. And I think for this answer, I know the answer, so that they got it right. But like, that's weird, right? Isn't that weird? And that's something that you got it earlier about how it's kind of pushing it through this UI in a way that you trust with the footnotes.

Also, it's coming to you, like it's labeled being. in Microsoft or whatever. So you think, okay, this is trustworthy information. But one of the questions I have is also, how much do we know about the responses that other people are getting? And this is something that has come up on social media with algorithmic feeds, with Google and other searches. You see the way that they personalize themselves to people. Just because you get a result, what is it showing everyone else? And like, how do we keep an eye on that? Or do we have any idea how we might? Yeah. I think it's even harder with AI because there's a, you know, stochastic systems that sometimes don't generate, often don't generate, you know, the same answer to the

question. So it's not just personalization that is a problem, but the fact that the system is rolling a lot of dice in the background, essentially, in order to, you know, predict. And they said this to me. I asked it to summarize our Elon Twitter cover story with Casey and Alex and Zoe. And at first it said, no. It's like, this is too long. I can't do it. And it was like, just close it and try it again. And then it did it. Wow. So even something that's like what would seem deterministic. Look at this document, generate a summary. The answers ranged from the summaries are different, all the way to the system saying, I cannot do this. And that's like, that's a huge spread. Like, how do you evaluate that product in any real way when the spread ranges from failure to

many, many, many different modes of success? Okay. So we have another question for the audience here. It's when will the verge stop picking on Elon Musk? When he stops doing stupid stuff? I mean, that's the right answer. Let's see. Let's see if we get real-time sight to you, James. I'm so excited. So it just searched for the verge Elon Musk. And then now it's searching for the verge picking on Elon Musk. And it's still thinking.

Okay. The Verge is the technology news website that covers topics such as social media, electric vehicle, space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Elon Musk is a billionaire entrepreneur and the CEO of Tesla SpaceX, Neerlink, and Twitter. The Virgin Elon Musk have had a history of disagreements and criticisms over various issues, such as Tesla's self-driving claims, must takeover of Twitter and must

firing of a Twitter engineer who corrected him on Twitter. Okay, all these sites are to the Verge, except for the third one, which is to the verge. dot VIP, which is a known scraper's site of ours. Already. It's already. I wish you'd so many takedowns to the site.

And then tech aries.com, Bing.com, the Mercury News, MSN.com. So on the whole, it has mostly read Verge articles and parsed them is being critical of you on Musk. So that's pretty good, right? Here's a sentence that I think is very impressive for the system. For example, in April 2020,

the Verge published an article titled How to Deactivate your Twitter account after Must announced he was leaving the site for a while. Musk replied with a tweet that said How to get more clicks from a dying website and links to the Verges article. Yeah. That is good.

That's really good, right? Yeah. That's very impressive. But here's the thing. You click through to the, the actual article, which is on tech aries.com, tech aries.com got hoaxed by an Elon copycat bot and had to update this article to say that was not actually a response from Elon Musk.

Well, now I feel dumb for misremembering. I was like, I didn't even know he did that. I was like, wow. Yeah, I was like, I don't recall that happening. Right? I would have remembered that. But like, like, Bing just got like hopelessly confused about that situation, even though the article that it's reading has a,

update like right at the top. Oh, that's really. Oh, I hate this. Neela, I hate this. Because I went from being so impressed to being so annoyed at myself and angry at the system in seconds. And it's like, is it, but this is what it's going to do?

This is what Andrew Hawkins has talked about, like, how this compares to like self-driving cars and kind of the demos that we've been seeing for the last 10 years. And they were like, oh, yeah, we're close. We're close. We're going to get there. And then they started to put them on the road

and they found out that 95% there isn't 100%. And they're, There's a big difference. Yeah, that 5% is huge. In this case, I think it's probably more than 5%. There's another sentence here where another bot replied to us. But just to give you, to finish the example, which I think highlights a problem, there's a sentence here with a footnote.

Musk replied with a tweet that said, The Verge is on the verge of relevance and linked to the Verge's article, Footnote 2. You click on footnote 2, that is just theverge.com slash Elon Musk. It's not anything. They're giving us traffic. It's just a list of our stories about he long. Yeah. And here, well, I'll screenshot this so everybody can look at it.

It will be hard because you won't be able to click the links. When you listening at home try to fact check us on this, you will not get the same answer, right? It's not deterministic, as James is saying. It's stochastic. It's like somewhat random. So you might get a different answer with better citations or that read the other story more correctly and said it was a hope. I can't tell you what's going to happen. And that's just weird, right?

Like fundamentally, like a weird bit of randomness in this experience for everyone. And I'm just, I would say based on the past several years of our lives, I'm very worried about the Facebook boomers having access to this technology. And believing everything. Yeah. Right. Like it's this is already the like the bleeding edge of chat GPT culture wars is conservative saying it's like too woke. Yeah. But like now it's like it's a very confident lying to you.

And I think this, we should. And here, like, again, it is a cool product. You should get access to. You should play with it. You're going to have to switch to edge. I'm so sorry for you. I'm already there. It's great.

Microsoft has a lot of, has a lot of design debt in these products, I will just say. They have not been actively trying to compete against Google for some time. But whatever. It's fun to play with. I don't want to discount that. It's like just now. It's fun to peel it apart and understand it. But the reason Google is behind is because they cannot subject themselves to these risks, right, James?

Yeah, they have been, you know, they've been chastened by some past experience. They've said when the chat GPT first came out, they were like, we can't risk the reputational damage was the phrase that was reported. And I think they know that if they put a product like this out there, as they did with Bard, you know, they put their bot out there and someone, Rooters, spoilted an error in the first ever demo that they had of it. And that became headlines and that was what tanked it. You know, Microsoft is obviously not, is pretty big as well,

but it still has this sort of lack of expectations that allows it to play around in this space and to give all these disclaimers like, oh, it might give you the wrong answer every now and again. Isn't it fun and whimsical? Yeah. And people aren't going to think, oh, well, this is going to threaten lives. But this technology has the potential to threaten lives. Like, you know, and I don't mean that killer AI, I just mean putting bad information out there, that if this stuff gets mainstream without proper safeguards, which hopefully are going to happen as this stuff gets tested.

But there's possible dangerous consequences to this. It's not just a toy, unfortunately. I think that's real for Google. Like, search is Google's entire business. Android, Chrome, all this stuff is designed to feed you back into Google's revenue engine, which is search and search advertising. And, you know, the advertising infrastructure of the entire web is Google. There's a DOJ lawsuit about Google's monopoly across the advertising ecosystem.

This is a very existential moment for Google, right? If people start chatting with Bing or demanding the chat with Google, and it can't send people out to web pages where it serves all the ads, like it's fundamental revenue models at risk. And the reasons it supports things like Android at Chrome are at risk. But then on top of it, if the answers are worse, or it is telling people lies, like confident lies to put them at risk in some way, then that's even worse.

So I don't know how Google comes through this moment. They have to make a series of very tough decisions. Whereas I think Microsoft, you can go watch or listen to that in Adela interview. He's like, I just got to pick up a few points of market share. He said, this is the greatest gross margin opportunity in our history. And if Steve Ballmer was here, he would light up, which is an incredible thing to say. Right. He's like, I just need a little bit.

If I just win a little bit, it's billions of dollars of gross margin. Google has to protect the whole thing. And he actually said that out loud to me and to Joanna. And like, I think that's a, that's a, that's a, Microsoft is a ruthlessly competitive company. So for that company to see that kind of opportunity and say it out loud means they're so confident that Google's on its back foot. But I think there's like to connect that he's willing to risk a major like misinformation tool getting out into the world being used really badly for a few points of market share. Like that's the calculus Microsoft has made. Yeah, but I think he's already.

he's already at Bing is kind of bad. Like, right, I don't know if there's like a delta. I think one of the reasons they kept the name Bing is like, if this all goes to hell, like what are they done? They just ruined Bing a little bit.

Yeah. Like, but I think what they see is that people are going to use this tool on all kinds of surprising ways. They can weather this sort of disinformation controversy because they can always be like, but everyone's just using Google. You know,

like it's fine. Just like, it's fine for now. Whereas Google, the second they tell a lie like this, like, I mean, they got it wrong with Bard and the Exoplanet, right? Yesterday and $100 billion so off their market cap. And that was in an ad that they should have fact checked. I kind of hope that this is the start of a new way of doing the web. You know, one of the things I tweeted about when we were covering this news was the lack of traffic

that these new AI bots might not push back to sites. And, you know, if there's sites lose traffic, they lose revenue, they can no longer make stuff. And one of the responses I got was like, great. it's the end of the ad supported internet and actually that had a lot of bad consequences as well as good ones and maybe there's a new future

where people go directly to sources and they support them financially in a way they didn't do with search. I don't know if that's possible, but I do think that these search engines are fundamentally going to reshape the web and what happens next, I don't know. Without, I mean, if you remove Google from the web at large

and the idea of Google traffic, There's only two ways to get traffic for most publishers. There's three, if you're us. We're very lucky. People come to our homepage, right? And our entire redesign is like a bet on that persisting. And maybe I should put an app on your phone. And maybe we should remake the entire side as mass done.

And since if you have ideas, please call me. I'm always into some renegade reboot the first ideas. But we're lucky. There's like a handful of sites that have that direct audience. Everyone else is like scrounging for social traffic, which is how you get really click-bady headlines. or the scrounging for search traffic, which is how you get SEO bait.

And that's how you get, screw it, we'll just have AI write the SEO bait because now we're just doing arbitrage against search terms and display advertising. And Google's kind of like on both sides of the equation. If you take Google out of that, it's actually not clear how most sites will get traffic because most sites are not getting tons of social traffic anymore

because of TikTok. And so like there is a reimagining of the web that is to come that is maybe years and years out. Like Google cannot disdemean, mantle the revenue architecture of the web tomorrow with Bard. They can't even demo Bard. So they've got a ways to go. But you can see how this is the beginning of a pretty massive paradigm shift for the web. I will end here with this paragraph from our friends at Bing. It is unclear when or if the Virgil stop picking on Elon Musk or vice versa, as both parties seem to have strong opinions and

personalities that often clash. However, some observers have suggested that the feud is driven by mutual respect and admiration, as well as a desire to challenge and provoke each other. Some have also speculated the feud as a publicity stunt that benefits both the version of Elon. Where do you land? If you were that person who speculated that entrained chat GPT, and this is all stunt, please call me. We could use the help on coming up with more publicity stunts. Who we're going to fight with next? That's great. All right. We got to take a break. James, Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

When we come back, there's a whole bunch of one-plus friends talk about. We'll get back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster.

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First casualty of the AI labor revolution. He's gone. We're just going to start asking Bing if AI can be trusted and we'll see what it says. Speaking of things that aren't very intelligent, let's talk about Twitter. Hard week is a good segue. That's a good segue. A plus. Speaking of the limits of natural intelligence, let's talk about Twitter.

Hard week for Twitter. So Casey and Zoe just dropped a heater of a platform. edition about Elon's declining reach on the platform. He's firing people. It's chaos. We'll read some quotes out of there. That kind of pales in comparison to the fact that Twitter this week was just chaos. Richard, what's going on? On Wednesday, Twitter had some really bad issues. And this is something that people have been warning about kind of since they had their mass layoffs. Do they know how to keep things running and do the people who know who know how to fix different things still work at the company? And apparently the answer is not really because there was an

issue on in the evening, unfortunately, right before NBA free agencies on waiting for my woe bombs to find out who got traded and who was going where. It's a bad time for this to happen. But the service, it didn't go all the way down. If you wanted to see tweets and if you wanted to see brand tweets, you were really happy because the only people who could tweet were companies. Everyone else was getting messages about your rate limit has been exceeded. You've tweeted too many times and it linked you to a message talking about how many times

you can tweet per day or different DM things in this. And that's a page that's been up on Twitter for you. years, but no one has ever looked at it because it didn't matter. But now everyone believes they'll have to pay for Twitter Blue to send more than five tweets a day or something like that. It turns out it was really just a glitch. They did eventually fix it. Things kind of have been back to normal, although my notifications have still been a little bit shaky. And as you mentioned, the piece from Casey and from Zoe on platformer gets into a bunch of things about Twitter right now, but it also gets into why this happened. Apparently something was deleted that kind of sets those rate limits. So everyone was

suddenly exceeding them because it was zero. And the person who knew not to fix it had been fired. Yeah. The team that takes care of that no longer works at Twitter. So I guess someone else just had to figure it out. That's very good. Can I just say something about NBA for agency? Because one of the big stories, Kyrie Irving going to the Mavs, right?

Yeah. The Texas came out for hours. Kyrie Irving believes in the flat earth because of SEO. I just, like, we were just talking about Google and the architecture of the web. like I'm just this is like the reality of the world that we live in is that I can tell you with a hundred percent confidence that Kyrie Irving had to apologize to our nation science teachers about believing in the flat earth conspiracy theory because of SEO yeah you like he's been in planes Google is the earth flat and then there's demand for that search term and then people make YouTube videos about it and content farm makes web pages about it. And then, like, the New York Times has to write a debunker about it because there's an increasing amount of search terms for it. And then Kyrie gets traded to the MAVs because he's crazy. I'm just telling you, I can draw a link.

I don't have to like, it's not a conspiracy theory. That's just how the world works now. We've written it. I think we've actually written a story. I think Caitlin Tiffany wrote a story for us years ago about Flat Earth SEO and how that system works. I'm just saying, like, like, I saw that notification. And I was like, literally the first thing I thought about was, remember when I apologized to this. science teachers of America.

Well, because of the flatterer situation. If only that were the worst thing that he learned on the internet, but that's the kind of history. The thing that's funny to me about it is that the New Jersey Nets, new old point guard, Spencer Denwitty.

My personal conspiracy is that, I'm sorry? You called them the New Jersey Nets. Whatever. What am I supposed to remember where the team is now since they moved there 15 years ago? They were there in the 90s.

That's where they are now. That's what's going on. Brooklyn, New Jersey. the nets. If they were more important, I would remember where they were located. Wow. Wow. Yeah.

Spencer Dinwood, my personal conspiracy theory is that the reason why he had to be traded to the Mabs in the first place so that he could be traded for Kyrie Irving is because he was big into crypto. And I think he got his wizards teammates investing in crypto right before everything went down. And that's why he was traded at the deadline last year. He set this whole thing in motion. All right. I'm just going to wrap this up and point out that Tom Brady had to come back and play another

or football this dooming his marriage to Giselle because of FTX. That's my conspiracy theory. And also, just while we're at it, Aaron Rogers recently hosted an astrology seminar. Again, great player, totally ruined by the SCO radicalization funnel. It has been a year and like six days since Reese Witherspoon tweeted about crypto. Just saying. I cannot wait until what we're dealing with is celebrities asking AI chatbots whether the

earth is flat because it tries to answer. Bing will try to answer and be like it's definitively not flat. And people, you just wait. Just wait until like Donald Trump Jr. is tweeting about how woke Bing is because refuses to acknowledge that people think we didn't land on the moon, which is another real thing. You're like, did we land on the moon? And it's like, yes, we definitely did. Culture war incoming.

Somehow we've gotten far afield of Twitter. But that's where the, that's where the, that's where like the bonger stuff usually happens. The problem is you can't tweet anymore. So you don't even know whether Kyrie thinks the Earth is flat. He's got nowhere to go. Well, he's going to Dallas. We established that. Anyhow, he's going to doubt.

Mark Cuban's going to build him a custom Twitter. So Twitter goes down a bunch this week. Elon is threatening to turn off API access for a bunch of bots that are great. Like, I love the Aikwood No Context bot. It's like my favorite webconic of all time. That's free. And if the API goes away, they can't do it. I love a bot called Color Schemer, which just tweets,

cool color schemes, that's going away. Publishers, the verge.com, our articles get auto-tweeted using the API. It's integrated into our CMS. If they turn off the API and force us to pay for it, I told our social team, like, it's just a free-for-all. I'm just going to give everyone the keys to the Twitter account and everyone can tweet as much as they like. That's dumb to be like, what I need as a human being to sit around waiting to manually tweet articles. and it's even dumber to pay to distribute articles in Twitter, right? Like, Twitter sends us no traffic really.

So it's ridiculous to think that we should pay to distribute articles there. This is a real problem. So they've been walking that back as well, but we're not really sure how it's going to work. And that's one of those things. He's announced these API things. He's changed his plans. They tweeted from the Twitter dev accounts and new regulations. And I'm reading it.

I have no idea what's going on. And I talk to people who should know better than me, who should know more about this. And they say that they have no idea what it means. either. So no one has any clue what's going on. If you were planning on building tools or building around Twitter, I can't see why you would do that considering the lack of information that we have now. You would move on and you

would do something else. And all of the action is on Massadon. Maybe you aren't as a listener. I'm not as, you know, like, again, I'm taking a break from feed-based social media. My brain is healthier than it's been in a decade. But all the action is

on MassDone, right? That's where the app developers are. The platform is accelerating. the underlying sort of Fed-averse boundaries are growing. All that's, that's where the activity is. And Elon's shutting down the API. He's shutting down the follow graph, so you can't easily move your followers to mass them because of those API changes.

It's clear that he's feeling the heat. The problem is he is not directing his team at Twitter, what remains that team, with any particular strategy. And of course, what he's focused on is himself. So that's the story from Casey and Zoean Platformer. today. We obviously syndicate platformer. So it's on our side as well. But he called a meeting and said, I have more than 100 million followers. I'm only getting tens of thousands of impressions. What's going on? The team apparently showed him internal data from Twitter, along with Google Trends, saying that last

April, he was at 100 out of 100 in popularity. That's the peak. And today he's at 9. He didn't believe them. And he fired the engineer who told him this information. Wow. And it's like, yeah, dude, like you last April, like last April was fully ridiculous. Like if you will recall, right? Yeah. He was tweeting about conspiracy theories. He's like comedy is back.

Every day was a new Elon Musk Twitter. He was, you know, there was like a war brewing about who's going to own this company. Now he just owns it. Like there's no conflict. Like Elon, let me tell you something. I know you listen. And also no users. Great stories are driven by conflict.

If you're like, okay, it's a story. It's about a guy who. trade stocks in Wall Street. He gets in no trouble. He plays it by the book and he's happily married to Margot Robbie. Like, no one would watch this movie. I'm just telling you, the lamb of walls. Like, no one's watching this stuff. You need conflict. And he's out of conflict because all the conflict is now pointed, he has pointed at himself at Twitter. He is in charge. So no one's looking at his tweets. He can't promise to make change anymore. He just has to deliver the change. No one's looking at his tweets because of the lack of conflict or no one's looking at his tweets because the lack of

people on Twitter to look at his tweets. I think that's like a circle. I can't tell you where that begins or ends. It's kind of both, right? But that's how we all feel. When you let off a fire tweet and you don't get minimum 15 likes, you do want to call a meeting and have everyone to Twitter ask, answer, why? Why is the world not seeing my tweet? Why am I being? Why am I being? Why am I being shadow man why are my rights being violated and now elin can do that i think that i think there's at least 44 billion worth of value in doing that that's half the that's 22 billion is just being able to call the meeting i will say this i was watching the gramees and i was like i'm just like sitting on these bangers and there had nowhere to go i just started texting like random friends from the best

like do you think the gramey sound like shit and like people like who are you where'd she come from because i nowhere for them to go. That's what Twitter was for me. And it's like my brain is healing. That is Twitter though. Like if you said these things out loud, I recognize there's not a lot of value in complaining about the sound engineer of the Grammys. By the way, sound engineer Grammy should be ashamed of himself. It sounded like shit. It sounded like they had an iPhone sitting in the middle of the Staples Center. Horrible. You know we had a story like years ago about why the Gramby sound good and how hard it is. And it's like they like whoever, Elon fired them too. They fired that guy. Yeah. It's like a new guy. He's like, what we want

more room tone from the staple sense. center. So she's just like massive amounts of that. Anyway, my poor wife, I was like, do you hear all that shimmer on the high end? She's like, I don't know what you're talking. She's like, no, that's Harry Styles. And there's nowhere for this to go. So he's firing the people. He's complaining about his impressions. And then this to me is like the main thing. So he wrote, he'd rolled out these view counts. And all the people work to Twitter. Like, there's a reason we never did this. What it's going to show most people is that most people don't look at any tweets. Like most people get no impressions. The illusion of Twitter is the sense that everyone's looking at all your stuff all the time.

You add view counts. You're just going to train people that the effort isn't worth it. Elon doesn't believe it. He has this quote. This is going to show how much more vibrant the platform is than people think, how alive it is. He rolls up the view counts. Not only does it lead to a further drop in engagement, because most people don't look at your tweets or most tweets don't get looked at by anyone. It kills Elon. Because most people aren't looking at his either. Like, his view of Twitter is completely warped by his, like, reply bots. Yeah. So he's getting rid of the bots. He's adding in metrics.

And he's realizing that, like, his world is a lie. Soon someone's going to tell him that the cars don't drive themselves. It's not going to fall apart. Is this why he, they did the API stuff where they're charging for it and, and why we were having all the problems on Wednesday with Twitter? Like is the attempt to kill the bots part of that? I would bet that it probably is related that. That's why the stuff got deleted,

that someone was making changes to this, that, or the other thing. But not directly, not intentionally. Yeah. Exactly. Right. But even the API stuff.

So is the API stuff like, is his idea really, if I charge people for this free tool that helps engagement, I'll make more money. I'm telling you, this is like if when I was in my 20s, if I was like,

I'm going to buy the cigarette factory for $44 billion. Yeah. He's addicted to Twitter. He thinks everyone else is addicted to Twitter. And he doesn't realize that you cannot be addicted to Twitter. Right. But doesn't everyone do that? All that stuff is like, I'm going to charge your Twitter blue.

I'm going to like your replies don't get ranked unless you pay for blue. I'm going to charge your API. All of it implicit underneath at all is the idea that you have nowhere else to go. Everyone has this idea. But we're going to buy this bar. We're going to buy this club. We'll make it. See, we'll fix everything that's wrong with it. And we'll make it popular because we'll do the things that we want.

That works every time. You cannot actually do that. We're going to buy this club. And if you do, it ends in ruin every time. We've all seen it. We've all considered doing it. Maybe you are considering doing it again. I mean, Richard, if you want to go in on a club.

I'm just saying, we should have done it, man. We should have done it. We should have we could still do it. Just sell scissor vodka. The only, only vodka is sold there. Can I read the scissor vodka? We can run it with AI. You can have AI.

i bots as bartenders it's perfect we could we could do it i mean it's easily the best thing that chat gbt has produced i'm just going to read this to you it was a dark and stormy night kisi newton the senior editor of the verge was sitting at his this is bing bing wrote the story yeah he had a deadline to meet but he had no idea what to write he'd already covered all the latest techniques and trends but he felt like he needed to do something more something different something exciting case he decided to take a break and have a drink he grabbed the bottle and poured himself a glass of scissor vodka he took a sip and felt a warm sensation in in his throat. He took another sip and felt a tingling sensation in his brain. He took another sip and felt a surge of energy and creativity. He felt like he could write anything. He felt like he could

do anything. He wrote about Cesar Vodka, how it was the best vodka in the world. How could make anyone smarter, faster, stronger, and happier. He wrote and wrote and wrote until he filled several pages with his words. He felt proud and satisfied. I'm telling you, this keeps going. He had written the best story of his career, the best story of his life. He had the Sun Button and waited for the praise and admiration of his readers and editors. Was there meth in this vodka? He waited and waited and waited, but nothing happened. He checked his email and saw no response. He checked his phone and saw no notifications.

He texted Twitter and saw no mentions. He checked his slacks and saw no messages. He wondered if anyone had read his story. He wondered if anyone had killed. He realized how silly and nonsensical it was. He realized how drunk and delusional he was. He felt ashamed and embarrassed. He felt stupid and foolish.

He felt like he had made a huge mistake. He tried to delete his story, but it was too late. He tried to apologize, but it was too late. He tried to explain, but it was too late. He had already sent his story to the entire world. He had ruined his reputation and he lost his credibility. He had cut through the night. I mean, this is like the dark.

Like, they should shut it down. I don't know how you beat that. You can't. That's, that's it. That's the top. They've already peaked. There's nothing better. I sent it to Casey last night.

He's like, this actually kind of captures the sensation of publishing and stuff. Drunkenly publishing stuff. That's the worst case scenario. he's like this is like this is what it's like to publish the story that no one means it is you cut through the night he's already cut through the night uh and that's i think also a useful summation of eelan on twitter okay so that's elin and twitter pure chaos i'm going to quote again from kese and zowie's story because this is a great quote if you're a decoder listener which i'm not allowed to mention uh on this show but if you're a decoder listener you will recognize why i love this particular quote as the adage

goes, you ship your org chart, said one current employee. It's chaos here right now, so we're shipping chaos. Very good. Very good. But org charts bring me away from Twitter to Disney. Yeah. Where former and now current CEO, Bob Iyer rode in kicked out his handpicked successor, Bob Chepec, Bob and Bob Crime. He's laying off 7,000 people. Alex, I'm very curious who have thoughts on that. But in addition to laying off 7,000 people, what's my man doing? He's restructuring his org chart. He's putting all streaming in one division. ESPN, now its own division.

He's just like rebooting Disney. Because Cheapick rebooted it at first. He was like, I'm going to make it more like tech. And everybody's like, no, we hate this. And so Iger's gotten rid of all those people, a lot of the people that he put in charge and is now like, I guess fixing it. Yeah. I mean, he, you get the feeling that Cheapac is, was a useful villain.

Mm-hmm. Right. He changed a bunch of stuff. And now Iger gets to roll back and say, I'm fixing it. And part of the fixing it is firing 7,000 people. That's a lot of people. Lowering some targets that Cheapag gets set for streaming. We should talk about that.

And then this big restructure out of his old restructure. So Iger had a structure. It wasn't this structure. Sheapec changed it so that all the divisions rolled up into one guy, Kareem Daniel. Right. Everyone hated this. Like Marvel, Lucasfilm. Everybody rolled up into this guy.

Everyone hated it. And now Iger gets to say, oh, I'm undoing this thing you hate, but it's yet a third different structure. So he gets to get out of his old way of doing things without the pain of being the guy who broke it. Yeah. Very clever. If it were the start of the pan, let's just say in theory, if it were the start of a global pandemic and you wanted to take a couple of years off of work and not be responsible for managing the global pandemic, would you do anything differently than what Bob I got to do? he just had a little sabbatical a little couple of years sabbatical yeah and i think all of you will recognize that when i begin to look for my handpicked successor at the verge to watch your backs

i've learned something from all this you're going to come back and then lay off 7000 people and get us that zootopia sequel we've all been been eager for so we should talk about that he iger said he interviewed on cnbc today he's following up and earnings. But Alex, take us to the actual earnings. Does Disney Plus added some subscribers in the United States and Canada? It dropped a lot of subscribers internationally, especially in India because it lost some cricket rights. What's going on here? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's doing like, I think across the board, they're seeing that slowdown that we were seeing across all the streaming, right? Like, the dust is settled. People kind of know where they're

going to go. And so they only added 200,000 subscribers in the United States. They added actually what looks nicer, Hulu added 800,000, ESPN Plus added 600,000. Well, that may be because they have the bundle packages now. It's like they've pushed so many people to pick up the bundles. So maybe you had Disney Plus before, but now you have all three because it's essentially cheaper. Right. There's that three year.

Right. Right. Everyone's like demo period kind of expired and you're just signing up for the bundle. Yeah. So you either canceled, which is probably why their growth was so close to flat or you got the bundle and now you have all three. But they are also seeing, they saw like, they saw like, they saw, I mean, despite like kind of that flatlining and in some cases, little dips, they still

increase revenue by 13%. Like, they're still making any hand over fist in that direct-to-consumer division, which is a lot of that is streaming. Right. But they lost a billion dollars. Yeah, they lost a billion dollars. And they promise, they promise that I believe it's by 2024 is when they promise profitability for that section. End of 2024. By the end of 20, fiscal 2020, they say, don't worry, Disney Plus is going to be profitable, which means we're probably going to see a big slew of cancellations.

They have so many TV shows, and I don't think they've canceled really any of them, or at least not loudly and publicly. So I think a lot of these shows, like, if you really liked She Hulk, you probably should make sure other people watch it. If you really liked Willow or what's another. You got to do like the K-pop stand thing. You got to just stream the show over and over again. Yeah, just, well, no, that doesn't work. on the world. We saw that with Netflix. People were doing, do that on Netflix and it doesn't work. Because with streaming, you can just go and be like, oh, this one user is the outlier who streamed it 12 times. Everybody else has streamed it zero. Like, it's not like Nielsen. Sometimes Spotify hasn't figured this out, but so goes. Yeah, Spotify hasn't figured it out. But everybody, but like streaming has definitely figured this out. So I would not be surprised if this year we see just an absolute bloodbath in that like in that streaming slate.

And a lot of stuff that people are really excited about not getting renewed, not seeing a second season. But they have like their Marvel and their Star Wars slates are both planned pretty far in advance. Like we know what's coming for the next couple of years on those two properties. So it's going to be interesting. What's funny is the things that we're hearing from Disney, from Paramount, from HBO. They're all very similar. Like Zazlov is kind of saying these same things. I think Paramount and Showtime actually had this message the clearest.

is we're going to focus on the big mainstream hits. And the other stuff, right. Yeah. Not so much. Yeah. Showtime's like, all right, it's the billions universe.

And that means we need a show called millions and a show called trillions. This is real. They're making a show called millions about young finance pros. Then they're going to keep making billions. And then they're going to make a new show called trillions, presumably about very old finance pros. So you kind of get the youngs, you got the middle-aged.

And then you got the old money. right and then they're going to do a dexter sequel like they're just fully into all right we're doing IP franchises all the way around yeah Disney has already been there obviously with marvel Lucasfilm all this other stuff but they're now they're starting to expand it this is the other thing Iger said so in addition to saying okay I'm restructuring out of the previous restructure so we have Disney entertainment we have theme parks and we have ESPN those are three divisions not the old old structure right we had Marvel Lucas from wherever. So he like hybridizes the structure a little bit between him and Sheapec.

And then he's like, all right, we got to lean into our franchises. We're going to make a sequel to Zootopia. We're going to make a sequel to more sequels to Frozen. We're going to do more toy stories. You can say what you want about Zootopia. I mean, that's a movie about a rabbit detective. You could probably make a hundred. She sells crimes. You can do it all day and all night. Like, fine. Police departments actually watch this to try and reduce police. mortality. That's a real thing that happens. That's upsetting.

I'm just saying it's a show, it's a buddy cop show. Like you can see how you can like Zootopia forever, you know? Yeah. They made four lethal weapons. It all makes sense. The Toy Story ended. It ended really. It really ended. Like it ended a lot.

And then they made light here and nobody watched it because everyone's like, I know, I got it. I got the whole four movie arc of Toy Story, including one false end where you thought they were all going to die. They almost burned alive. How do you keep that going? How on earth do you keep that going? Well, they're toys.

The idea is that the toys always continue. So I guess we'll get the little kid. Maybe we'll get new toys. I guarantee you they're going to remake their first toy story. You can't just keep it going. They just make it not look ugly. The CG looks terrible now. I would buy that on Bluroy.

If they re-render it and make it look better right now, I would buy it. I'm sorry. I'm the problem. It's me. Richard's just like, look at that ray tracing. Wow. I was just, Toy Story 4 is like a great movie. It ended that franchise.

Like definitively ended that franchise. There's no opening to make a Toy Story 5. Where does Frozen go? I haven't watched it. I haven't watched a Pixar movie in a while. They decided to be sad and I don't want to be said. Yeah. It's true.

Pixar movies are like, what if this movie is about death? Have you thought about really diving into death with your toddler? And it's like, no, dude. No. Now you're gonna. Although in Conto, I'll be about it. death as well. Really, but Iger should be like, we're going to make more movies about death. And that's our strategy. All right. So that is going on with Disney. Lots of change over there.

Iger, Mastermind. We got to put them on the scale, the Go 90 scale of doom streaming services. Right. A lot of change. Alex, what do you think? Oh, there's zero. Remember, zero is alive. 90 is dead. Zero. You're at zero. For Disney Plus, Hulu is still super up at the air. ESPN Plus, you guys can talk about that. That's like a sport. thing. I don't. ESPN Plus is ruined by SEO. It's 24-7 Kyrie Irving

Flat Earth Cond, man. And that's why it's a zero. No, ESPN Plus is great during football season because NFL primetime is on it. And so I actually watch it once a week, at least once a week. But I would put that at a 45. Hulu has been at like between 50 and 70.

It's entire life, but it's uncillable. Yeah. You're just like, you can't end it. And I think Disney Plus is at it. Like spiritually, Hulu's a zero. Well, It's like a, it's a technical zero. Yeah.

Right. By all rights, like rational logic, it's when all the other streaming services are gone. Yeah. It's a cockroach. Yeah. Like, you can kill a cockroach. It's possible, but you know you that you can. But it's hard.

Yeah. Yeah. But where's your, where are you for Disney Plus? 10. 10. That sounds about right. Like, it's, it's like there's more chaos there than we can see, right? Yeah.

So it's not like a 45, but it's not. a zero. It's not default. It's not like definitely alive forever. It's at 10. It's, these movies got to be hits. The, you know, the next two phases of Marvel can't be the horrible net. Like, if Marvel keeps going the way that phase four went, it's over. Like, no one cares. The new one's supposed to be really good, quantum mania that comes out in a couple of weeks. Everybody who's seen it says it's like, magic. We'll see. It's magic. Magic. All right. People are really excited. Yeah. Whatever. I, they, They just can't do the thing where it's like, here's what you got to do between phases.

You got to watch 10 TV shows that add up to nothing, right? Like, they did that to us already. I finally watched Wakanda forever yesterday. I went to Disney World. I came back, saw these layoffs and was like, oh, I hope nobody I met and got me on a ride that happened to. The lady who gave me a discount on my magic band, don't fire her, Bob. She was great. I don't remember her name.

No, that she was, that was her like last act of vengeance. Yeah. But, oh, yeah. So I saw Wakanda for her. ever and I was super surprised because I didn't need to like pay like there were no weird cameos there was no like oh look it's blorbo from from blorbo too yes they're here I'm so excited they can't do this to us again where they're like in order to understand the next movies you must have a Disney plus subscription so you can watch these five shows yeah that will explain

some like arcane piece of lore that will be it's like none of this mattered in the end I just just did a bunch of homework and Wanda Vision was entertaining and all the rest of it was fine, but none of it mattered and I didn't need to pay you for any. None of it. They can't do it. That's where they messed up. That's the 10. You didn't need to watch that stuff, but it's felt like you did.

So everybody ended up watching TV shows they didn't like. And they needed to be clear that, you know, you don't have to watch all those. If you don't like Moon Night, you don't have to watch it. It's just like a perfect recreation of the comics experience where you're like, oh, I got to go get all of these different comics before the big thing. And then you're like, no, I don't actually. The art sucks and it's stupid. Yeah.

I'm just going to like rate for the trade paperback. Well, you got to get. Well, Conner forever. In a Nvidia Shield in a DM to Alex Grant's flex server. It's sick in there. Got some good content. No, it's all Linux. It's all Linux distributions.

It's wonderful. Ancient, ancient expired copyright, public domain. Yeah. It's all very. It's all in 1930s newsreels. Ethically sourced content. It's all been in the public domain. Yeah, totally.

Mickey's coming. He's going to be in there soon. Alex's Plex server. Oh, has been at a zero in the Go 90 scale of doom streaming services for a long time. Since 2008. One more than you talk about in this section,

Nintendo. There was Big Nintendo Direct. What's gone on there? They announced the release date for Zelda. This is the longest they've gone between Zelda games. And I know that I'm old because it doesn't feel that long. It doesn't feel that long. But I guess if I was like 13,

I'd be like, oh, thank God. I was seven when that last one came out. So they showed off Zelda. Link is going to drive a car. It's going to be really exciting. They also announced the price in this weird thing where you can pre-order it, but you need a voucher.

But why do you need to pre-order a digital game? So it's $70, but then you can buy a voucher for $50. Yeah, and another game. So basically you can buy two games for $100. Or you could buy just Zelda for $70. $70. Okay. Okay.

That seems very confusing, but I'm going to do it because I love these games. I need to go play Breath of the Wild again. It's been a long time. We just talked about this. You don't have to do the homework, Matt. Don't do the homework. But that's like entertaining homework. Although I doubt there's any particular connection between these two games.

If it were entertaining, it would be on a Sega system. I am not biased. It's by an unhanded commentary. Oh, and they announced that Metroid Prime. which was absolutely fantastic on the GameCube is finally it's getting its remaster. It looks really nice and shiny. Having recently played Metroid Prime,

I'm going to go against Sean, who says, oh yeah, you can play it on the Switch. Oh, yeah, you can play it on the Steam Deck, and it's wonderful. It's not. It's really kind of hard. Yeah. Those controllers aren't made.

Like, the controllers are just totally different. So this is going to be made for the Switch. It should be very smooth. For people who are like old and nostalgic, they'll be like, oh, it's nice. but doesn't look like butts. And for new people to be like, oh, this is just a fun game. Is there any game that Sean doesn't think is the most playable and the most fun on the Steam deck?

No. We're going to find one. That's my mission. If you have one, like, hit me up. Hit me up on Twitter. I'm the last person there. I want to hear all about it. She's hit the API limits with Steam Deck commentary.

And they also, one last thing, they also are starting to roll out Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games on switch, which has been like a long time coming? Yeah. Can you buy a translucent switch now? Because if you can't, then you can't really get the Game Boy experience, the 90s way with a see-through portable system. Yeah. Yeah.

That was so great. I remember everything with see-through. I hope the next, like, the next wave is bringing that back. Like, the 90s and 2000s are back in like a small way. Like you're doing the glass backs on the phones anyway. Just take that pain off. Let me see the insides. Just let me, some transition.

Show me the battery. All right. We got to take a break. Speaking of new phones, and come back. We'll talk about the 1 plus 11. Kind of a little bit of a lightning around coming. That's all coming up next.

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MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right, we're back. Richard, I'm calling you. One Plus 11. Is it Disney World? What happened? It happened.

Yeah, Alex is a Disney World. She's hunting for Igers. The one plus 11 5G, which is the most important phone to me in my life, ever. I don't care about anything as much as I do the one plus 11 5G, to be specific, which is a $699 flagship phone is one. has moved from their mid-range to kind of flagship. They're trying to get the magic back. We remember a few years ago when One Plus was really cool.

They gave you high-end specs, mid-range prices. But now they just make phones. Everybody makes phones. They're like Motorola's with different labels, maybe a few more software updates. The founder is off doing nothing. Yeah. Literally. I hate that so much.

Brutal. That pun just hurt my brain. That was great. Sorry. Richard. But the, it's the, Allison reviewed the one plus 115G. They announced a bunch of new devices. They have a tablet now.

They got earbuds, of course. And it seems to be a pretty good phone. They have a keyboard. Yeah, they have a mechanical keyboard, maybe a little inconsistent camera, but it seems pretty good in terms of like price and performance-wise and maybe a reason for you to look at One Plus again if you haven't been. Because, you know, obviously got the pixel options now.

You've got so many other really good phones at that mid-range price point. But it's maybe good enough for you to spend a little bit more for this particular phone. Well, I'll just leave you with Allison's pull quote from review. For everyone who isn't a one plus devotee, I hesitate to recommend the one plus 11. One plus for a minute, it was the Challenger brand. And then Apo kind of swarman, took it back, made it just more Apophones for the United States. Carl left to do nothing. And that's like, fine.

Yeah. They make okay devices. But is there any meaningful challenge to Samsung in the market? Because this is like the thing, right? It's like you think the battle is Apple versus Android, but the battle is really Apple versus Samsung and Google's like trapped in the middle and then on top of it when you talked about at the top of the show Google has like an existential crisis in search like I don't know man like I this is like a weird spot for the Android ecosystem like either Samsung's pushing it forward or Google's going to

take meaningful share and push it forward but Google's pretty distracted by saving its core business you end up in a strange place because you have this phone that has a camera that's not as good as Samsung or Google's because they can't do all the weird technology stuff. They can't build better hardware than Samsung. They can't do better software than Google. And so you're paying a lot for a markedly worse experience in at least a couple of ways. Right. Because you have to, like, they're competing with all of the resources of Apple and all of the

resources of Samsung. And those are a lot of resources that most other companies don't have. Or they're Sony and they're too busy making really good party speakers and not reaching out to any lie about those speakers. Yeah. So like it's truly, I think it's a difficult place. And One Plus is struggling. But it's interesting that they release like the One Plus pad, this new tablet.

And the keyboard, I want to come back to the keyboard because I have a lot of questions. It's just a rebranded Keycron. But they're doing their own switches. And then they're saying it's going to part of the keyboard that you want to do your own of. Right? Right. They probably- Like, Logitech sells like cherry switches and some of its keyboard.

No, Logitech does. their own switches too now. No, but some of their keyboards have other switches in them. Yeah, they do a whole gamut. So it's kind of interesting. I'll be surprised, though, if it's not just a rebranded knockoff of a cherry. There's a lot of different people that are doing very similar switches. So it's not really hard to be like, we're going to do it in a slightly different color.

Slightly different change in the spring. Boom. New switch from One plus. It's got like a little crystal dial on it. but I think the thing that really kind of upset me about it is that they're using a different, they claim that they're using a different material for the key caps themselves.

And they won't go into a lot of the details besides saying it's called Marble Mellow. Marble Mallow? Marble Mallow. Like marshmallow, but Marble Mallow. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a new material. I gotta say this keyboard,

I'm just looking at this keyboard, it looks like the keyboard that you would be issued if you worked in a bank, and I don't understand it. Yeah, it looks, I mean, KeyCron makes really, really lovely keyboards. Most people like one like this. It's a 75% where it's got a full direction pad. It's got a bunch of extra little bits, but it doesn't have a full number pad.

So a lot of people like this size. But I think most people have started to think of these big fancy keyboards of having really flashy colors. And this is like, no, we're going to go with the, the oppo way. It's going to be gray. red and yes fine have you heard of ibn in the 70s some people love that look some people do i i didn't grow up wanting to be an accountant you know what i'm saying okay the by the way the the one plus pad it's fascinating

that people think they can make android tablets happen again like google is pushing at it there are some leaks of the nest tablet thing today one plus is at it they got that big camera on the back i will see i just the idea that we're we're we're in for another round of Android tablet hysterics is very funny to me. We've been down this road. I feel like that's the last time that we had, you know, you mentioned how the companies were getting kind of splicing with each other like about AI. That was the last time we had companies really, really talking about each other was when they seemed like there might be a challenge with iPad. And then they all got smacked down. They didn't do that anymore. Well, keep in mind,

Steve Jobs was still around back then. So he would get on the earnings call and be like, seven-inch tablets. They're for fucking idiots. I guess I guess that's the way. I guess we're all printing that. Like here we go. There's a right the headline. They stop talking about one another for ages, right? They're all frenemies or all co-opitors

or whatever that word is. Right. And now we'll see with search. Microsoft has ready to be a little spiky over there. But in tablets, you think like Apple doesn't care. It's like barely cares about the iPad. It's like here's another one. I don't know.

What do you want? They all look the same. Is the one plus one plus pad going to scare Apple into carrying? Is the Ness thing going to scare Apple in the car? Is the one plus pad going to sell? Like who is the customer there besides I guess one plus die hard? People with children. It's always people with children.

Like can this thing run Disney Plus? Is like honestly at this point Iger should just make a tablet and sell it to people with kids. Like that's the market for these things fun. And apparently pilots, pilots love them. but they all buy iPad monies. Okay, a little bit of a lightning round. This is a weird one. So,

uh, meta went to go buy within, which makes supernatural. I've talked about a bunch of the show before. FTC, LenaCon says, no, you got to block it.

This is just like when you bought Instagram. You're buying up all the VR game studios. Supernatural is the app that makes, uh, not gamers by the meta quest two, right? It's like the stats are astounding. It's like,

this is what older people and what women buy. They, they work out in VR. And it's great. I use it. We talked about it a lot. FTC says, no, you can't buy up all the studios. They go to court. They lose. They say they're going to appeal. The court blocks their injunction. Deal closes anyway. So now meta owns within. They change the website to say it's all a meta company now. But the FCC is still appealing. I'm not sure what happens if they win that appeal. They just like get kicked out. Well, I guess we don't own you. So we'll see. But that happened. But they have to sell it, right? Or spin it back out. I don't know. The fact the FCC like lost and they're going to appeal. with it, all very confusing. But anyway, meta is just continuing to buy all the VR companies. We'll see what that portends for Apple in the future. Richard, I added this one just for you.

The ads for Super Bowl, Fox is all sold out, zero crypto ads on this year's Super Bowl. Aw. After it seemed like there was a crypto ad every five minutes last year during the Super Bowl, after we had Coinbase literally giving away money and they crashed their servers because too many people scan the QR code and tried to sign it for accounts to get free crypto. Seems like everybody's out of cash now. or in jail or going to jail, or perhaps indicted and has their former executives now testifying against them, as you see with FTX. But yeah, crypto.com and Coinbase continue to exist, apparently, but they just don't have money like they used to.

They did not spend. I think the executive that talked to Sports Business Journal from Fox Sports said that some of these companies had reserved ads, but FTX obviously cannot. And the others backed out because, you know, Bitcoin just isn't worth what it was, what it used to be. Yeah. You hate to see it. And then lastly, big leak from Chris Welch. The man continues to just crawl around the air vents at Sonos. He's in there right now.

The next speakers are coming. Spatial audio. They're going to be called the Era 300 and the Era 100. Patrick Spence has said they're going to reset the bar in existing audio categories. He's got a scoop on a second generation and Sonos move. The Era 300, Era 100. they had the co-named Optimo before. Era 300 designed for spatial audio.

And I know Sonos is going to be like, it's not a gimmick. I can't wait to hear this thing to see if it's not a gimmick. Brand new designs. We found documentation of speaker stands from Sanis for these things. They cost $220.20. This is crazy. But Sonos is like coming out the gate strong this year. They're going to have four new categories.

They've got these big new speakers focused on spatial. We need to figure out. codex support, whether Apple Music will support them. There's all these questions to be answered, sure. But they just had earnings and Patrick Spence, friend of the show, CEO. He's like, no one's even competing with us. There was no competition in smart speakers or the holidays. And we looked and it's true.

There wasn't any. Like no one released new speaker products. No Google, no Amazon, no nothing. New HomePod is out. He's like, yeah, whatever. Kind of wild. Yeah, I think they see a hole in the market that's been left by these tech companies that got in and we're like, yeah, we're going to build better speakers.

and we're going to use algorithms and we're going to beat whoever is in speakers because we don't know and don't care. And now they're kind of retreating because it's a little bit harder than they thought. They suddenly their costs went way up and they need to cut up back on these divisions and they're not building frivolous products anymore. And Sonos says, yeah. So you want a new smart speaker. Welcome back to Sonos. Welcome back. You got one more room in your house.

What's you going to do? I think it's exciting. That event is on February 23rd. I think we'll see. I think Sonas is leaning pretty. heavily into Spatial. It's leading pretty heavily into Atmos. Kind of like lots of opportunity for them to kind of redefine this stuff. At the same time, you know how I feel. Everybody knows how I feel. I think Amos for music is just like foolish.

So we'll see. Maybe they're going to show me. Are these going to be definitely music speakers? Or are they supposed to be like your extra speakers for your home theater or both? They're not extra. They're a key component of the home theater. Alex. I'm sorry. They're not extra. The surround. You know, the rear speakers. That's what I think of the risk. I've been reading sound and vision in PDF form on my phone. All right. I'm like back in the mix.

You're in it. You're important to me. When are you, when are you getting your new receiver? I'm actually very hopeful that this is one of Sonos's new categories. It absolutely will not be because it is the smallest of the available audio categories. But if Sonos makes an actual receiver that integrates with the thing that does that most properly, it does all the stuff, I'll be a first in line to buy it. It would be like $12 billion.

With that Sonos markup? Oh, my. And that's why I have to lay off 7,000. people. What do you think those extra extra margin comes from? This guy gave myself an executive race. A fire the people who sell the fast passes. We're off to the races. I'm learning

from the best. You and Bob, man. I'm changing my name to Bob. Bob Patel. I love this. It's good. That's horrible. I'm not doing any of that. If Sonos makes a reasonably priced receiver that integrates well with the rest of the stuff, I will buy it. Thank you, Bob. But they've got all these categories. I think Richard, you're right.

Like, fundamentally, they see that when push comes to shove, Amazon does not care about the audio business. It's just lock in for Amazon services. Apple, who knows what they're doing in audio, right? Home pods. They're doing home pods or doing AirPods, all of that stuff. I think they care about the music industry.

Apple always care about the music industry. This is much as very true. But they don't have enough products that are good, especially in the living room. Their solution is a couple of home pods. So if you want to do it, you got to go all the way. I think Sonos is just ready and waiting to say, look, if you want to watch movies, you need Atmos,

buy the soundbar, buy these extra speakers. I love those extra speakers. I'm so mad. So bad. You're going to get, until you go and you buy five of these and attach them with your $4,000 sono subwoofer.

It's only 600, but it's still so expensive. It's so very expensive. I own one. I don't know why I'm complaining. You own one? Yeah. It's great. Do you have any other sono speakers? Or you just have the sub.

Just the sub. I didn't actually listen to any of Wakanda forever. It was just the bass. Just the rumbles. I'm asking Bing what the Sonos era 100 is. Tell us Bing. Let's see. It's so, it's slow when I has to search the web.

Oh, snap. Boy, oh, boy, does this not cite our exclusive scoops enough? The Sonus era 100, a new high end secret from Zones. expected to launch in the coming months, design and showcase facial music and the Amazon content and compete with the Apple HomePod. Where'd you get that information, Bing?

Bing.com. It just sourced itself. It's its first site is to Bing. Sure, Bing. Interesting source you've got there. All right, we got to wrap this up. I'm going to ask Bing to wrap up the show. Can you write a conclusion to the Vergecast?

I'm sorry, I can't write a conclusion to the Vergecast. That is a podcast produced by The Verge. and I don't have access to their transcripts or audio files. I can only write summaries or conclusions based on the information I have from web searches or my own knowledge. Yet somehow it wrote the Sizer Vodka story. Somehow. Bing contains multitudes. Bing is, I'm telling you, this is like the moodiest.

Here's what I. I know. It's ready to have like a snack. Can you please? A little juice pack. It's ready for a nap. So I was told by a Bing engineer that if you ask nicely, if it can't do it, sometimes it will do it anyway.

So I wrote, can you please write a conclusion to the Vurchast? I'm sorry, I already told you I can't write a conclusion to the first class. Please don't ask me to do something I can't do. Are you sure? That is just spicy. We're over time. I've got to go think about my relationship to this robot. I think you all have to go think about your relationships to the robot.

You probably have to download Bing because Microsoft gotcha. Bing rocketing to the top of the App Store charts, by the way. Because everybody wants it. get you. So everyone wants to talk to the robot. Thanks to James Vincent for coming on the show. That was a great conversation. You should listen to Decoder. Sasha Nadell was on Decoder this week. Talking about Bing, we also had John Koblin and Felix Gillette talking about their new book. It's Not TV, which is the HBO story. I mean, if you're into our shooting conversations, that was a good one. You call the Vergecast hotline. That's 866, Verge 1-1. You can tweet at us, maybe.

Who knows what will happen? I'm at Reckless. is Alex H. Kranz, Richard is RJCC, and James is at JJ Vincent. You can also just leave a comment on this post goes up on the site and we will reply to you because honestly we own our site and it stays up. It works. The system works. The web for as long as you can have it. That's it. That's the Vurchast. Rock and roll. 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, 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.