[Music] hello and welcome to vergecast the flagship podcast of the arm architecture that’d be great and then if if anyone knows of a rival podcast that is a flagship podcast of like Risk V I would love to know who they are so we can start a fake beef but only risk fee right no no one wants an x86 podcast yeah no one wants that we only want the cool weird ones arm if anyone knows of the flagship podcast of the x86 AR I would we we’ll send him a gift basket I mean they’re you know someone ought to be nice to them hi I’m your friend Eli Alex CR is here hi Alex Heath is here not David Pierce hi Alex hi I’m not David what but but happy to be here David is off this week but we’ve got Alex which is g to be great there’s a lot of AI news there’s much of VR news including some some Scoops out of meta in the reality Labs division that Alex is here to talk about and have some insight into but we should start with like the news which is a weird bit of news in that half of the news got delayed weird Microsoft’s co-pilot plus PCS are now shipping they have Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips inside them this is the beginning of what might be the end of the Intel dominance the x86 dominance for Windows machines but Microsoft had to delay recall which was the flagship feature of the co-pilot plus PC because of horrible security concerns just a weird moment CR right like yeah a weird stutter even the review units like didn’t arrive on time because they were disabling recall yeah like this is wild we were expecting to get these a week ago to start kind of reviewing them before the Embargo list and we got them the day of the Embargo like Tom’s got both the elite and the plus and is checking those out and and a whole bunch of other people on the team all have them and are just we are all in this one room just furiously benchmarking constantly work it’s they’re having a lot of fun doing it but we’ve still got a lot of work to do so far we figured out that some stuff is working some stuff isn’t there’s still a lot of weird like emulation bugs and stuff I think Adobe Premiere was having a weird issue where it would work with the elite processor but not necessarily with the plus processor some games crashing some of this might be like alleviated with more updates from everybody but what was supposed to be this big Monumental moment for Microsoft and Qualcomm and everybody instead was like we did it yeah here it is we turned off half of it even in Best Buy there’s like signs that say recall coming later on the demo units because so if you don’t know if you weren’t listening to show uh in the previous weeks Microsoft announced these PCS and the flagship feature was recall which even if it was working in a Totally Secure way is weird the computer watches everything you do on the computer like Windows watches everything you do takes screenshots of it uses a local generative AI model to understand what’s in those screenshots and then you can just be like what there was a website I thought I liked do you remember what it and the computer will tell you or I was working on this document do you remember what it was and the you can talk to the computer about what you’ve done with it which some people David Pierce very excited about because David would like to be friends with the computer it’s that’s my understanding of Personality just friends just just friends David is happily married and has a child other people would like to be more than friends with a computer as we have learned time and time again as the AI industry has dominated the headlines Microsoft was storing those screenshots in basically plain text so there’s just like open database of everything you’ve done on your computer on your computer huge security hole Microsoft has had a history of security problems recently uh nadela sent out a memo to everyone being like if you have to choose between shipping fast and security I want you to pick security and then they announced recall and everyone’s like this is a huge security fault and they just delay it so they thought they could fix it in time they issued a blog post about fixing in time and then they’d realize they couldn’t and they delayed it CR does that feel like I feel like that’s only half of the story here right that’s just the background that’s part of the stutter step and part of why it’s not as flashy a launch like recall is a great feature for what I think of is like the local news right like yeah this is a great demo for the local news and that is how you get a lot of mainstream attention on new things but the real thing here on all these Snapdragon PCS is performance in battery life where they have not been competitive with M series chips on MacBooks for a long time and now they think they are yeah yeah that is absolutely the big the big moment here and like the other part was going to be really cool and that was going to be what got people really excited to to maybe upgrade but for the rest of us it’s okay is this finally the moment where arm on Windows works because we’ve seen it so many times before and every time it has fallen super short of the Mark at this time like from the early benchmarks battery life looking pretty good batteries in that like that that that M chip range we’re we’re still testing so I don’t want to say which M chip but it’s in that like M chip range uh the the speed is looking pretty good gaming is like possible we still got some work to do there to figure it out but it’s a surprise it definitely doesn’t seem like this is going to be a moment where just Qualcomm blows everybody away kind of like how Apple did with the M1 chip where we were like holy crap Apple actually did it doesn’t seem like we’re going to have that moment but it’s still kind of too early to tell well it’s interesting because Apple hasn’t even had the incremental moments after the M1 like the M2 to M1 it’s faster but it wasn’t the big step from Intel to arm right M3 to M2 was faster but it wasn’t the same kind of revelatory experience so qualcom is coming into just a very different set of expectations yeah right like if you can match the M1 you’ve done great that’s a big step forward over intel if you can beat the M3 or the M2 you’re it’s the same incremental progress as everyone else has made yeah I think it’s kind of normal we sometimes expect everybody to just blow each other out of the water but these like Windows is hugely complicated to run it is not an easy thing to run it has there’s so many like dependencies code for old code that it has to work through and stuff and then a lot of times that’s that stuff isn’t built for arm and so they’re having to do all this emulation more so than like an a Mac would because a Mac just it’s all built from Apple and so not all of it but most of it’s built by Apple for apple and it can kind of run and knows what to do that big like translation moment hasn’t quite happened for for window they’ve been trying for a long time they’ve been trying and nobody’s wanted to do it because it’s like well you don’t make nobody makes good arm chip so why should I build my my programs for arm and now it’s like this could change that this this could change that but it is so so so early to tell yeah I get the chip story underneath this but does Microsoft actually think that anyone is going to switch from Mac to Windows because of this AI stuff cuz I look at this and it’s like you basically need to tell me that I never have to actually understand or know how to use Windows to actually Switch to Windows that’s how I feel about Windows like an a needs it needs to be so dramatically different from what I expect from a laptop as a lifelong Mac apple lockin blue bubble guy and like this recall thing sounds cool but it’s like I you you would literally have to say AI is running your laptop for you for me to consider switching because of the software lock in this is a pressure dressing right like this is just for them to be like no we can’t lose any more windows people to Chrome or or Max like we have to keep them here with cool features like that that’s pretty it’s not like let’s entice these people back it’s please don’t leave yeah well no actually I wonder about that you know I or at least how I feel about it I’ve heard a lot of CEOs Alex I’m sure you have to describe AI as a platform shift MH and I’m always like from what to where like what platform are you talking about and what they want what what they’re trying to invoke is mobile right this is a platform shift on the order of mobile we went from laptops to smartphones and not smartphones dominate Computing and what they what they’re trying to say is this is another platform shift on that scale and it’s like is it like where like you still have to have a phone to use the chatbot like is it that and I think part of this Windows stuff for Microsoft is very much okay we own this entire stack we have this giant investment in open AI we’ve built co-pilot we have all these ideas about what a computer can be here it like here’s a new way to use a computer that is meaningfully different than before also you have to pre-install Edge or whatever like also will push you towards our browser I don’t know that Apple has different ideas we we we talked about it in the show after wwc like Apple’s ideas for what AI can do in its operating system are basically the same as Microsoft’s ideas so the idea that it’s a platform shift I think is under some pressure but I know that’s how these companies think about it that this will entice you to switch platforms right now it’s like I still have to look at the windows nav bar and figure that thing out right and it’s like I’m just not going to do that I’m sorry Tom Warren like I’m just not so yes I think they think of it that way but it shows I think this recall thing shows where the real platforms are and it’s like building two decades of software lock in on top of Hardware which is not AI right AI is software that you’re putting on existing Hardware at least right now yeah and I’m curious you know people listening if you have an idea of where this platform shift is I’m dying to know what people think but it is what it is what Nadella has told me it’s what sunar Pai has told me like down the line the CEOs of the biggest companies are like this is a platform shift we cannot get left behind like in particular with Microsoft there’s like a fear that they got left behind in Mobile and they can’t get left behind this time and so you see them kind of I mean they have been ahead of the curve at every single step you didn’t hearon say it’s going to be trillions of dollars worth of of Optimus robotss that’s that’s the platform shift I mean that’s the true platform shift is kicking back with a bruski and letting Optimus do all your computer for you it’d be great if AI Express itself not as AI integrated into the operating system but you have an Optimus robot that knows how to use Windows and that that’s actually what happen love that that would be Alex te and like Tom Warren would get the one that knows how to use max yeah and Eli you joke about how you know uh you would love to not have to use software at work you know you just have an Optimus us your software for you yeah I need an I need a full fully complete Optimus robot that can use OCTA and if you can just get me there I’ll do it if you can f if Optimus can file my expenses oh my God those codes they suck the CEOs of these companies will not come on decoder where I will just ask them to look at their own software um we’ll see we’re going to test them out I will say that there there I have a running list of my favorites CL rooms at the company and it’s the ones where people have developed their own language so my number one favorite is uh we have a support room for our finance team where people just file tickets and some people have discovered um and well some people come in there and they ask very nice questions like hello I need help with that and some people have discovered that this room is staffed by a bot that just files tickets and they just yell nouns they’re just like invoice 245 like that’s all they’re just and other people are very po it’s the greatest room in the entire company because people have realized they can just yell at a robot um the other one is The Verge benchmarks room where it’s just people communicating in increasingly Arcane benchmarks Y and they’ve developed their own language about Windows on arm benchmarks and they’re not they’re not using the normal rule like no llm can figure out what’s going on in this room statistically this language has never existed before it’s very good uh I’m excited for it they’re going to come we’re going to have all the reviews I think David is going to do a full show with Tom and Nathan our reviews editor just running down all this stuff on on Tuesday I believe right Alex yeah okay so we’ll we’ll we’ll come back around with that stuff I’m Qualcomm has made a lot of promises here right they they they bought that company nuvia which was a bunch of EX Apple Engineers on the chip team who were making server chips and they said no make a consumer chip in set because Apple didn’t want to use its arm architecture to make server chips and they thought there was this big opportunity there but then qualcom bought them and said no make the next generation of Snapdragon so they shifted them I don’t know if you know there’s some backstory here uh arm decided that qualcomm’s license didn’t cover this and so arm is suing Qualcomm right now and qualcom suing arm back over these chips which is bananas uh it’s gonna come to some resolution there’s no way this actually like ends up in anything but payments but these chips are like very very controversial in their way because it’s a bunch of X Apple designers who left and started a company and Qualcomm snapped them up to go compete with Apple’s consumer chips can they deliver is a big question I’m excited to see our reviews and see if that’s true same also this lawsuit is just the funniest lawsuit the world it’s a good lawsuit like if your arm like screw it let’s Sue Qualcomm I feel like Qualcomm gets sued a lot like every time you turn around somebody’s like no I hate you broadcom’s like I’m suing you Apple like I’m suing you yeah this company is under Fire and by the way we talk a lot about 5G on the show The the level of interest in 6G is at least partially driven by people wanting to get away from qualcomm’s 5G patents like what if what if there wasn’t a dominant player in Wireless that we could get away from and so you there’s already talk about 6G just to get away from qualcon like apple bought all of Intel’s modem Division and they still haven’t produced a radio that can compete with qualcom and its Pats get ready for the 6G hyp that’s all I’m saying is people love suing this company and that’s going to drive the 6G hype cycle uh some other stuff we should talk about this is kind of like a like a gadget rapid fire round yeah that’s we want to call it it’s not quite a lightning round um we’ve learned some new stuff out of wwc about various Apple products uh Jen had a pretty good Scoop um apple is extending home kit to use the ultra wide man chip in its phones to automatically unlock doors which is cool so a combination of ultra wideband and Bluetooth low energy it can sense when you are 6 feet away from your door on the outside and walking towards it and automatically unlock the door which is just sick it didn’t work uh but if you have a smart door lock you need a new door lock to enable this yeah none of them work with it this is it’s a lot Alex is he was making the face I got two Alex’s now this is last last name only this reminds me of the digital ID the driver’s license thing like it just seems like a bad idea like I get that it sounds cool like you’re in a product meeting in copertino and it’s like oh we should digitize this but I don’t really want my device automatically unlocking my house yeah yeah yeah you’re SI well so the argument I felt this way about um the feature where you can just point your phone at a door lock and it unlocks like in Express mode same way that if you use mass transit you can just like beep your phone at a Turn Style on the subway and it just pays and like whatever and I was like I don’t know I definitely want to authenticate before and I was like no if you steal my house key you’re in my house like level of security is the same and I think one good question is like whether that is an acceptable level of security mhm it is I guess is the answer like if you have my phone can should you be able to get in my house it’s like a good question everyone should ask and then you can adjust that setting however you want if you have my phone you’re six feet away from my house and you’re walking towards it should the house automatically walk it’s like a different question like that that’s a new I would like this feature if you could set it to where if face ID hadn’t been used in say an hour or two hours then it doesn’t work but something like that something where like the recency of me unlocking the device means that it’s definitely in my hand you know yeah or you you your phone has been stolen and another iPhone detects you shrieking void and your house locks down like the bizarre use of the fine my network um it’s interesting because Apple has put a lot of chips and a lot of radios and a lot of things recently and hasn’t really done a lot with them so these Ultra wideband chips have been in a lot of Apple devices for quite a while now and some of the uses are cool right like fine my is a little bit more precise if you have the right selection of ultra wideband devices uh you can like Point your phone at a homod and send the music to it which is you know supposedly like magic it it it works half the time I said supposedly like magic like if you were a [ __ ] magician yeah it works about that I did Magic that would be my magic trick like you know you know those people are like I’m floating and they’re really just like standing on their tiptoes that’s me that’s what I’m saying but if you always doing that at sort of the wrong angle and someone’s like you’re just standing on your tip toes that’s about how well the homep Pod thing works um then they added thread radios J that was the other gen sco from a couple weeks ago like now they’re adding other radios to these devices you see that they’re like okay Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can’t do all the things we want to do they can’t do it at the power level at the location Precision level whatever it is that just can’t do it so we need to add more radius to this thing and then you see the animations for the new Siri and you’re like oh they are super getting ready to take all the ports and buttons off these oh yeah stop time there’s like there’s 45 different radios for every level of like Precision location and power that you can think of none of them aren’t able to do much and then the buttons are going to be capacitive very soon The Arc of phones is that they just become panes of glass that then start to curve that we then put in front of our eyes like that is that is the next 10 years of Technology uh I want to come back I want to come back to that when we talk about met um and The Vision Pro to some extent so that’s the uwb chip we’re seeing Apple start to use it in more interesting ways especially around the home I’m very curious if they ever acknowledge these thread radios we were kind of hoping they will at wwc but it’s interesting that there’s a bunch of thread radios in these devices you could do all kinds of things with in a smart home uh cuz it Ed basically no power compared to everything else and then the other thing we found out which is really interesting so you can apple and wireless uh is that the next generation of carplay that no one has shipped yet will only be Wireless which is fascinating so I you know I’m obviously obsessed with carplay car Coos are always on decoder I’m always asking they’re going to use it they’re always like we’ll see um so as you just to set just to reset everyone’s like understanding of carplay because it’s very confusing right now there’s the carplay you have right now which is basically just like a second monitor for your phone that’s very much what’s going on so you plug into your car even Wireless carplay your phone sends out another video stream and receives touch input from your car and you’ve got a second monitor for your phone and if you think about it almost everything that’s happening on that screen is just phone stuff right it’s music it’s Maps but it’s all just running on your phone and showing up on this display not a lot of car stuff over there Apple has lightly extended this to be able to send a map to some instrument clusters so they can send multiple video streams out from a phone but it’s still phone stuff like everything’s local on the phone without any understanding of the data from the car the next generation of carplay which they showed two years ago I didn’t even realize this was two years ago I thought this was last year two years ago wwc 2022 they showed that mockup of like a giant screen and another screen and it’s all carplay and there was like 4 five clocks on it cuz no one knows what to do with all that screen the weather in 10 different cities which you definitely need when you’re driving and they’re like this is the next generation of carplay and then they showed a bunch of car maker logos you remember this they showed a bunch of car maker logos and all those car makers like what that was basically what happened Porsche and Aston Martin announced last year they would ship cars this year haven’t heard a word about those cars no idea when they’re coming out and that’s it so Apple had sessions at this year wwec uh and I ran around talking to a bunch of people there just about carplay and what’s going on um and I can’t tell if this is a change in strategy if this has always been the approach or if this is just Apple softening its language but Apple’s basically saying to car makers look people have iPhones they love carplay what if you used our design tool kit to redesign all of the stuff in your car so it all looked really good together and then you need an i is it the context here that Apple just abandoned project Titan so if they’re not doing a fully integrated vehicle wouldn’t it make sense for them to make this more of an open this to me is like them going the route of Apple TV plus and AirPlay realizing that we are not going to make a TV uh and so therefore we want TV plus everywhere is that not a fair analogy here I can’t necessarily tell how much Titan played into it right like this is what I’m saying I can’t tell if this was always the approach and now they’re just softening the language like the technical approach is that you have an iPhone you connect to carplay your iPhone will go download a bunch of Apple car maker co-branded assets like in the videos they have posted they refer to this as a co-branded experience one of you ever heard Apple describe anything as a co-branded experience that’s bananas red sure project red windows on the Mac like at the very beginning that wasn’t co-branded so like there’s some element of Apple designers and carmaker designers like working together to design speedometers for carplay cars weird and like in the this is public I’m not this isn’t like some deep dark reporting this is me saying you can go watch the videos they’re public and they’re calling it a co-branded experience where we’re going to work together to express your car maker brand identity inside of the apple design toolkit weird it makes sense in that all the cars uis are terrible it does so the idea is you have an iPhone and you get this like upgrade to your car UI so everything looks like carplay yeah weird how is Apple gonna make any money doing this no I think I think that’s like a I mean for a super wealthy company like this this is just like really good branding right like you can go and show your I mean you can show your your dominance in design and and show these companies like how the specific way they’re going to show their dominance in design it’s actually my favorite part of this whole thing only font you’re allowed to use in next generation carplay is Apple San Francisco you can you can change how wide it is you can change how stretchy it is you can italicize it you can make it really thin you know like and they’re like look at all these different things you can do with this font it’s a variable type face and it’s like yeah but it’s only one like Porsche and GM don’t get to use different fonts comic Sands get get right like that’s weird like so there’s an element of control where they’re just they’re doing a very Apple thing and then there’s an element of complete chaos which I think is really fast which they have not talked about at all which is they will when you have like the Next Generation carplay interface up and you’re like I want to control my massaging seats in my Aston Martin you can push the button that says control the Apple San Francisco labeled button and instead of showing you the next nice carplay thing it’ll do a thing called punching through the automaker UI and it’ll just show you whatever garbage Aston Martin never mind I take it all back this is crazy that’s like this is this is the concession to make it all okay because what car makers have been worried about is they have to build everything three times they have to build their own native one because you need to have something you need to operate the entire car without a phone right non-negotiable if you buy a car then you need the Next Generation carplay version of everything and then presumably Google will do something for Android right so what are you going to do and they don’t want to build things three times so Apple’s solution is like well build it once and then you know for some stuff we’ll just let you show them weird stuff I I can’t wait for Siri powered by cha PT in my car to just like open the doors like while I’m driving when I request the massage seat to turn on and it just hallucinates and you know it just like goes in reverse just ejects you and then to bring this around Apple wants this to only work wirelessly because their goal is that carplay will be connected active and operating the interface of your car by the time you open the door and if not by the time you open the the door by the time the screens light up right so you get in the car you sit down the screens light up it’s carplay it should not be sit down in your car turn it on and then like you have some like loading process and so you can only accomplish that over Wireless so carplay is only going to be Wireless for whatever car maker adopt the Next Generation car I’m hesitant to say this because I am very against this move but isn’t that also just a precursor to them removing all the ports they’re like it’s got to be Wireless because we’re going to it’s not not a precursor to them removing all and it’s funny because to make this work Apple also has to give up some control of what runs where right you don’t want your speedometer running on the phone so Apple your Apple designed speedometer or delightful co-branded experience to be more accurate needs to run locally on the car so this is the first time I can think of that any Apple assets are going to get loaded onto somebody else’s computer system in that way outside of to your point e the Apple TV Plus app on like Roku right which is where Apple ships an app and this is the the the split is kind of the same it’s like okay you’re going we’re going to give you an asset package of Apple things to run locally on the car for things that we cannot risk if there’s a disconnect the speedometer the turn signals da d right and there’s some differentiation in how that stuff works like the truly critical stuff cannot be touched they call that the overlay layer that’s your turn signals and Hazard indicators the spit ometer and stuff like the needles that’s those assets can get refreshed over time so those run in a different layer called local UI and then there’s everything that runs on the phone and then in the middle there’s like I don’t know you want to like mess with your sports settings in the in your fast car like that’ll just be the weird automaker youi shining through carplay and it’s like oh this kind of feels like a mess right it’s unclear who will take this and who will use all of carplay like redesign the entire car to be carplay to be apple and who will say okay we took Next Generation carplay we fun cool new speedometer every other part of the car controls will be the existing UI because we can punch through carplay and honestly based on the feedback we get on the show it’s like some of our audience will pick the car makers that use all carplay like they will make an affirmative decision to be like you know what that car maker Toyota uses all of carplay we’re going with them over Honda which is like here’s your weird well the third path is rivan or Tesla right where it’s totally controlled by the automaker and like rivan is a great example of I think you and I both test driven rivian and Eli like I think their interface is great um it’s very Snappy obviously I miss some of the iPhone connection but I could also see more automakers going that direction yeah but they have to make good user interfaces that was a big difference between yeah no like rivan and in t made good user interfaces for the most part everybody else get Weir and weirder I would say most Tesla like you turn the car do you want to like play a game on Netflix you know it’s it’s a lovely experience uh so rivian just upgraded and the the rivian the generation 2 R1 trucks just came out um they’ve changed the the AR the Computing architecture of those is different but then they also updated the interface to be more self shaded I mean they like Unreal Engine and they they’re like using it that said I looked to the parking lot at Apple Park when we were at wwc a lot of those people have Riv right and there’s all these rumors about Apple and rivan doing stuff together uh Apple music just came to the rivian interface if if Tesla’s never gonna break I feel confident about that one just a prediction I’ll make based on nothing I the Tesla UI is going to be x.com in a few years that’s the direction tesl come it’ll be Brock like fully just like telling dir jokes we tried to dri the car rivan is still in the place where they might try some other stuff to claw back some market share to win some new buyers and there are an awful lot of rivan in it’s California people like people like trucks there but it’s something I noticed all right moving on think the see it’s like a fast round not quite lightning we’re just moving uh CR tell me about this remote because you’re very excited about a home remote and I you know I love a home remote I’m still sad about Logitech I still have the like the fanciest of the Logitech remotes and it had soft touch plastic oh my God which means it’s starting to rot I have I have a to remote in the corner of this house it’s like not a good like the rot on that soft touch is so gross but there’s a there’s a Kickstarter happening right now for the haptiq rs90 and the RS 90x and they promise all the stuff all the big universal remotes promise which is like you can control stuff via Bluetooth you can control it via IR you can control it via Wi-Fi uh usually that requires some sort of Hub that you have to plug in somewhere in your house this appears to require no Hub and also it’s just got a big screen on it so it’s instantly the coolest remote you can have in your house uh and they can it’s supposed to be able to control all your spart homes and stuff and like I said Logitech did this I’ve got a control that does this doesn’t have the cool screen and it required a hub so this is instantly cooler and this also is going to come soon rather than disc Kickstarter are they actually going to ship Kickstarter the there’s like the kickstarter part of this is the really big heavy caveat because there’s a whole bunch of Integrations that they’re promising no not there yet uh there’s no matter support there’s there’s no support for some of the other smaller like radios and stuff like that so this is like cool neat we’re like 2 minutes away from Samsung being like Bigby Ai and your TV will now do everything for you I don’t want it we are though we are it’s coming yeah like AI is probably you know the reason Logitech got out of this business was because they said nobody wants these no and and me and four other people were like oh I want my phone to be my Universal home remote that’s it I don’t want another remote I want fewer remotes can we make that happen yeah I just I that’s how I use my phone but like just getting like who is this for I guess is the question for me it’s me me what show it’s it’s me and four other people it’s the four people who are still sad that our Logitech remotes whenever I see a screen like this I just think about how slow it will be I think touching a button and nothing happening right like and I love it I’m like yeah I want a screen like this but you know that thing you do with a touch screen where you touch it and the button looks like something happened but nothing happened that’s this product yeah almost like a guarantee that that is this product it is I will say it is I love that it’s called the hapte rs90 great name great name for a universal remote fully good name uh I just worry that actually people just use the apps on their Smart TV and what this thing is trying to solve is not I mean that’s why Logitech got out of business we we can’t control the apps on your TV we can’t see your TV yep yeah Will so we’ll see how this does it it’s it looks like it’s going to be funded it looks like enough people have invested in going to be funed this is like hot on the heels of that company brilliant going out of business yeah which Jen covered and they were like we’re going out of business but like the thing we put in your wall will still work so brilliant put like a touchcreen in your wall that can control everything which I was super hype on because the idea of having an in-wall Sonos controller screen seems sick right you walk in a room you’re like I’m going to pick a song boop I’m not using my phone like the whole thing and then they just like went out of business and it’s like that is always the worry I have with all these things yeah speaking this is going to be like almost $400 probably when it comes out that’s too much all right speaking let’s do one more Gadget and then I want to talk about what’s going on arvr with Heath uh we mentioned risk V at the top and we mentioned companies in my Goa business uh framework is shipping the laptop 13 which is fascinating because they’re going to have a risk V chip in it this is the competitor arm right this is the open source competitor arm that has the performance per watt characteristics I’m kind of dying to try it out I’m also have no idea what software I could run also I I think one guy pointed out that it runs it’ll run about as fast as a Rasberry Pi 4 yes you got to start somewhere baby steps baby steps baby steps yeah I have no idea what can run this but I want to like this just is cool this is the kind of thing I just want to have one um I like how the the actual line from the company in the pr is is the main board is extremely compelling but we should be clear that in this generation it is focused primarily on enabling developers tinkerers and hobbyists to start testing and creating un risky like don’t use this the the peripheral set in performance aren’t yet competitive with our Intel and AMD powered framework main boards it’s like uh yeah this is just to play with will say storage uh the risk the nerds in our audience have been very EXC risky for a very long time because arm is a like dominant quasi monopolis now like the arm architecture license is the thing and there hasn’t been anything to compete with it which is why everybody is moving to it including Microsoft because if you want performance for what you end up on this architecture which means companies like Qualcomm to dominate the market right next to Apple and you need an architecture license from arm to expand Beyond it and arm isn’t giving this up anymore which is part of the reason they’re suing Qualcomm because is saying the nuvia chips fall under its architecture license and arm says no so there’s all this stuff that’s wrapped up when you have one dominant architecture that is owned by a company and risk V is the thing yeah the open source not quite as fast as a raspberry pi4 but it’s the thing that might break it was it Nvidia that tried to buy arm a couple years ago yeah yeah yeah so arm was um I mean the the finances of arm are hilarious right like it was it’s a weird English company that started licensing these designs it got SoftBank bought it right it was part of the vision fund they in the heady days of the SoftBank Vision fund where masaan was like everything I touch will be a monopoly it didn’t work out you might recall wework blew that entire business up they tried to they they started divesting of assets they were going to sell arm Nvidia wanted to buy it basically everyone yelled like everyone yelled Apple yelled qu like all the architecture were like you cannot let our competitor buy this company they said no arm is now public instead which is a good outcome MERS are bad um fun fact armgo public made up for all the losses the vision fund has had for the last 10 years that’s crazy H somewhere somewhere the wework people are like godamn it they’re just launching a new product don’t wor like I could have changed the world lifestyle I watched one episode of we crash I was like I can’t live this again I Hon I cannot be a part of this again all right let’s wrap up by talking about AR and VR Heath you’ve got a scoop uh meta just reorganized reality Labs talk about that the vision pro team is trying to make a cheaper headset there’s a lot of action here what’s going on yeah I maybe we’ll start with Vision Pro um the information had a good story out uh confirming and putting more details on what German and others have reported that apple is indeed working on a cheaper Vision Pro they hope to release it by the end of next year and they have shelved a future iteration a V2 of the Vision Pro as it is today so another high-end very expensive one they are trying to get this cheaper one more into the ballpark of a you know premium top- of line iPhone price so we’re talking $ 122 to $1,500 I had heard even before the Vision Pro came out that Apple was already working on this cheaper version um apparently when Mark Zuckerberg was talking to me and others and basically saying I’m going to Scorch the Earth with cheap headsets forever and not really care about making a business which we will get to in the next story um Apple was like oh okay we need to like really work on a on a cheap one uh and get it out so they’ve been working on it for already a couple years um I do expect we’ll see it next year um whether it ships next year or TBD and I think you know I’ve only used the evision pro once in that initial demo that we all had at WWDC last year Nei but I was think that you know if it was in the ballpark of $1,500 um I would maybe pull the trigger even if the OS and the software hadn’t meaningfully um gotten better just because of you know the immersiveness of it I kind of it’s just at 3000 it’s just like it’s it’s out of touch for most people and it’s still out of touch at 1500 but it’s much more of a almost impulse buy for some people at 1500 um so yeah and it will get hopefully more developers interested um but yeah Apple’s plugging away on and and I think what we’re what the the other part of this the fact that they are cancelling the more expensive one or shelving it just goes to show that they packed so much Tech into this thing that um it may not actually be a good product and they may and we kind of like have found that out uh already Nei you talk about how you don’t use the Vision Pro anymore um it’s a great demo honestly it was probably top three demos I’ve ever done of Technology uh and it’s something that I consistently hear people do not use after the first couple weeks so would you say this was a homer car no I mean it’s not like that ridiculous right like like it had some Focus they wanted it to be something I think about the fact there was a great demo I so much of Technology right now is like great demos to fall part of this product right and that was the Vision Pro to a te and I every AI demo so far has been that from unless you have some very narrow use case where AI can solve a problem consistently for you every other demo is like what what I don’t know if I would do that the Vision Pro they have to make a big decision and here is the thing that I noticed at wwc that I’ve been thinking about in that opening keynote video when they were like start jumping off the plane yeah and they were like doing the introduction and everyone was wearing their flight suits do you remember this vividly ridiculous bombastic opening they had Mike Rockwell on the plane who’s the he’s in charge of the Vision Pro and and he turns to the camera with the eyes on and they played it for Laughs the eyes were a joke and those eyes those eyes aren’t shipping anymore I can tell you that that’s what this is what I’m saying the idea if you remember the initial Vision Pro stuff was like the eyes will place you in the environment they’re very they were so serious about the eyes so serious like dead serious about the eyes I asked in one of our briefings uh cuz you the only question I asked anybody during our Vision Pro briefings were um have two of you ever looked at each other with the eyes like have have two people ever existed in the same room wearing a Vision Pro and if when you looked at each other with your eyes did you laugh and they were like that’s not funny um because they were dead serious that this thing would bring you into the Environ they meant it they were very it was sincere in that Apple New Age sincerity way like when you go to Apple Park and you walk towards the theater they play new age music at you and they’re dead sincere about it and I’m like this makes me feel like I’m in a there’s a gap there between like how sincere Apple can be in then the world and they were super sincere that these eyes would be the thing that enabled you to wear a headset all the time no let’s be real they did the eyes because they wanted to be able to not call it a VR headset right well so this is what I’m getting at this next version this cheaper version they have to decide if this is a VR headset or an AR headset and playing the Eyes For Laughs was the thing that signaled to me okay this is going to be a I will bet m uh strongly that there will not be the eyes in any future Vision Pro product and I’ll tell you why yeah it’s just a bunch of cost no one’s taking you on that bet we like our money I’ll take the bet the eyes stay it was a Johnny eye thing I know this from talking to people who worked on the The Vision Pro it was Johnny I who insisted that the eyes ship I don’t know the exact dollar amount but it added an absurd amount of cost and Manufacturing comple uh complexity to The Vision Pro um cuz do that curved glass well the curved the curved glass was that curved glass in the display was having the front facing OLED um I think it’s an O OLED right Neway um with the with the eyes um very low it added an absurd amount of cost no one wanted to ship it except Johnny and his people and they’ve all left and so um and they’re making a joke about it in keynote videos so um yeah I don’t think I don’t think the eyes are long for this world but so if you get rid of that and you’re like you’re not now you cannot be perceived by other people the thing is a VR headset yep right and that to me is concession in one way right like they talked about this thing as ar ar ar ar but if you can’t wear it with other people like it’s a VR headset and then everything they’ve announced since is immersive right new immersive videos new experiences new immersive games and it’s like oh this is becoming a VR headset and a $1,500 VR headset right now the state of the state-of-the-art there is a pretty good product right like you can make something great for $1,500 in V yeah and I guess that maybe brings us to meta right should we should we go to that so yeah meta obviously was first to this bought Oculus a long time ago they restructured um reality Labs the division that does all of their Hardware uh and Horizon that cursed uh platform um this week I had the scoop and command line they are forming two new groups so reality Labs is now metaverse and wearables so you will notice there’s no VR in those two phrases right uh the the the rift I’m sorry God look how the rift wow the quest is now Under metaverse reporting to Vall Shaw who used to run ads at Instagram and is a software guy so you basically have the the thing that created this whole org that the company really bet its future on is a subdivision of a software org meanwhile wearables uh I’m told is leaning heavily into the rayb bands um I published this internal Memo from bos the CTO basically saying that the ray bands have been a much bigger hit than any of us anticipated uh Zuckerberg and others have been kind of alluding to this throughout the year I’ve heard that it’s somewhere in the ballpark of a million-ish units that they’ve sold which is 3 to 4X the first version of the rayb bands and they’re seeing really good retention on the product so people are actually using it consistently um I have them uh I had I have the AI turned on in them I wrote uh in command line a few few weeks ago I’m not trying to Pat myself in the back but I will just saying that meta is quietly winning the AI wearable race here because the rayb bands are uh something that meta has not done in a while you could argue um maybe ever but shipped a really good consumer product yeah you’re you’re 100% right something that like normal people like something that tech people like because it’s got the AI and yeah the AI still hallucinates but it’s very fast and it’s um right like maybe half the time right so like I pointed at a tree in my backyard and I say what is this tree and how do I water it it got it right so like that’s not it’s still a demo right it’s not like I’m it’s not going to like change the world but in a couple years you can see where that’s going and it’s like oh if I have reliable visual AI in rayb bands I may not you I may use my phone less which is the reason met is doing all this by the way um so they are putting way more resources behind the Rayband line um and they also have these full-fledged AR glasses that they’ve been working on since 2018 code named Orion which are insanely expensive they cost thousands of dollars to make um I have heard from people inside meta that it’s a again incredible demo um they really feel like they’ve gotten there on the on the hardware they’re not sure what the software use cases will be yet um they’re doing a lot of reviews of it right now I expect we’ll get a tease of that later this year at connect their conference um so they have these two lines that they’re doing with glasses they’ve got the AR glasses which I leaked the whole road map for meta’s uh Hardware uh a year or so ago so we know that the rayb bands are going to be updated uh next year with a little heads up display so think more Google Glass less full AR magic leap um and they’re going to come with a wristband that uses neural uh interface technology from the startup metabot Cog control labs to control the display and to control some of the inputs because you can also like play podcasts through the they have um speakers and the frames right um that’s shipping next year that’s going to be interesting um and then the AR glasses the full-fledged ones that are going to be more expensive and also have the band will be 2027 so this is the path meta on they’re going full on glasses and really deprioritizing they hate when I say this but it feels like that the quest because the quest is still really struggling they’re not really they have some early product Market fit with gaming but the retention is still not very good I’ve heard um and the quest 3 they they got a lot of really good things about the mixed reality right but it just it’s just not I don’t know why I want to put it on whereas the ray bands it’s like I get it I have audio on all the time I can take calls I can take photos and videos and I have ai that is starting to work more and more and by the way they look like normal glasses right um so it’s just obvious that this is the direction uh they should go they seem to now be realizing that and they’re putting all their chips there and laying off some people as a result so that was the news out of meta this week so what’s really interesting about Quest 3 is the rate of innovation on the quest 3 or Improvement I guess in the quest 3 skyrocketed after the Vision Pro came out they’re like oh we should ship a bunch of these features like I guess there’s some competition like here’s here’s travel mode we took it away it’s back um they increase the Fidelity of the pass through right like just stuff that they should have done but they’re still not it’s not winning and even Apple if they come out with a $1,500 version of The Vision Pro they still have to make the case for VR right which like meta has been trying for a long time and now if meta is saying all right it’s these glass it’s the thing that everyone always knew was the thing right it’s augmented reality glasses where actual light passes through the display and you’re looking at actual things instead of screens and then we can put some information near or around or over those real things turns out that’s the thing everybody has wanted the whole time like why would Apple continue to Boondoggle its way towards the Vision Pro even at $1,500 well because they’re on this path right Apple was working on AR glasses like Orion at meta and they basically sheld it uh semi- recently in the last year or two for the headset route they think that if they can keep iterating on the headsets they’ll figure out glasses eventually whereas meta is like no we are going to have glasses out in a few years and uh Apple’s fine they’re always late to this like we all know that so they’ll come in late like they usually do um I don’t know if it’ll be as late as they were with the Vision Pro but they’re going to be late and that’s fine but yeah I think they’re they’re betting on uh productivity and being at home and coding and all these things with division Pro and meta’s like no we want you to Lo meta’s goal is to use your phone less because they hate being under apple and Google’s thumb whereas apple is like let’s just extend what we do and I think there’s the big strategic difference yeah I will say that I have a a friend like from the Brooklyn years who in the pandemic became one of those people who like doesn’t live anywhere like she just lives on beaches I know one of those folks yeah it’s she’s great like did she work did she work in Nvidia or what she does not work in Nidia um uh and she was the first normal person adopter of the metag glasses with the ray bands like all of her Instagram pictures are a beach taken met bands now and you can you can just see like oh this thing worked like the thing worked it looks like she’s wearing wafs and all the pictures but there it’s the metag glasses and like it it work it’s like so much there’s no chance that any of these people are wearing Vision Pros as they like pneumatically travel the world or the quest 3 but there’s 100% chance that hey your camera is now in your sunglasses and you’re looking at cool stuff and you want to share on Instagram is a loop that met can close I was at a very fancy Tech conference where I’m not even allowed to say the name earlier this week but it was a lot of tech CEOs and there were several of them wearing the the ray bands like walking around CEOs of companies that it would be very funny for me to say who they were wearing the ray bands um and you’re not supposed to record anything here but like they’re they’re wearing them and it’s like oh like yeah this is like catching on it’s catching on with tech people uh powerful people and it’s catching on with normal people which is like that is a circle that meta has not been able to draw in its entirety of existence as a hardware player how how good Did Jensen look in the glasses I I I can’t comment I’m telling you I think it VR is interesting there’s stuff in VR like Supernatural they keep promoting as a hit and there was Supernatural just commissioned some study where they claimed that waving bats and vrs a stros is running it feels like it sure like sure whatever man to if you can claim that that fancy pelaton beat saber is the same as a as like a a swift run like more power to you but that the only thing they have that’s sticky right and I Apple doesn’t anything that sticky yet except for the the monitors we’ll see I just think Apple moving away the compromise of the Vision Pro was they built a VR headset with all this pass through and the eyes and stuff to make it closer to AR and if what they’re going to do is drop the eyes and go head more towards VR that feels like a turn that is notable because the real platform you want to talk the real platform shift has always been V they everybody knows this Tim Cook has talked about that that is being the big platform shift and to go to we just made it the best VR headset would very different all right we’ve been gone way we’re way too long this is out of control does this show ever go on I didn’t think that ever happened no I don’t have tear here to hold me in that’s that’s what’s going on here we got to take a break we’ll be right back more on the road chest after this all right we’re back this time we got to talk about AI this will just take two minutes there’s nothing going on AI this week actually quite a lot going on AI and a lot of his just as all as ever confounding Decisions by AI companies let’s start with a confounding branding decision there’s a new company it’s called safe super intelligence SSI uh good name uh this is ilas H who if you recall was a CTO of open AI who participated in a coup against Sam Alman and then changed his mind MH there’s some safe super intelligence right there whether or not you have belief in that decision uh then they couldn’t figure out how to bring him back to the company and now he’s left to start doing Al what is going on here yeah I mean Ilia not just the CTO the co-founder and really the one who is driving the research agenda at open a it was his decision to lean into the Transformer the T and chpt so um I think I’ve heard one of the larger individual shareholders like incredibly influential he’s someone that AI researchers look to as like a Demag God right and he has been totally quiet there’s been this meme of like where’s Ilia for the last you know six to eight months really since the November coup attempt and yeah he’s back um with a company that they will not describe anything about except that they’re going to invent super safe AGI whatever the hell that means um his co-founder is Daniel gross who used to run AI at Apple which is interesting and is now I would consider uh one of if not the most plugged in Venture capitalists in AI who’s been raising a ton of money and and deploying it into startups um and they are putting the call out for people to join um and I’m sure we’ll be raing Ila’s former Oregon open AI in very due time um and the key thing here is Ilia saying we are going to be free from I for ex I forget the exact wording but we’re going to be free from the products and management day-to-day uh and only focus on long-term aligned AGI research and we will not release anything until weit AGI so it’s this is a this is a pure research lab which is what Ilia has been known for his entire career I’m going to read this paragraph to you yeah read it because anybody who has ever worked anywhere is will I think have the same reaction to this paragraph our singular Focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles and our business model means safety security and progress are all insulated from short-term commercial pressures I I like what well that the business model is we just raised uh an ungodly amount of money and we’re going to keep raising ungodly amounts of money it but that means you don’t have a business right yeah like that’s how you get to do these things is like you don’t you don’t have the pre you don’t like you don’t have the pressure of a business yes isn’t that just all a really pointed jab at Sam hman but I but yes sure I figured it was more that than actually in this case I was assuming that he was going less like I’m here to make money because he’s made it very clear he doesn’t care about money and more like I’m here to like say I I don’t like what Sam ultman did and so I want to make a company where we’re going to do the co I’m saying is I watch Max and two of her six-year-old friends from kindergarten try to play Lemonade Stand and they are distracted by management overhead and product Cycles in their business model means they often compromise on safety security and progress like there’s just like no way you can put any group of people together and not have management over like it it is not possible especially if you’re trying to hire the most highly paid sought-after talent that exists in technology today and that’s what I it’s like I don’t I read this paragraph I’m like this doesn’t you can’t do this like this you can’t keep the VC math here is simple we will give you whatever you want and when you invent AGI it will change everything it will be the new Fire and we’ll figure it out out that’s I guarantee you that’s the extent of the diligence I I was going to ask like where where is the money coming from to recruit all of these very highly paid well they won’t say where they’ve raised money from so if you know uh let me know but if you’re listening to this uh I want to find out Daniel is they’re they’re all super wealthy um and they will have no trouble raising whatever they want because when you co-founded open AI um you can raise whatever you want and then in particular participated in the notable management overhead of doing a hug coup against the CEO yes a failed coup yeah it’s like your track record of not having management overhead is very bad also like a question I have is what is safe AGI I keep hearing this super intelligence it’s not AGI or super intelligence which is actually now the new word for what comes after AGI apparently is the thing I keep hearing um and so we keep inventing new terms because they realize like the terms they had no one understands or they don’t actually even understand what they are um what is safe AGI what does this mean like Ila’s whole thing at open AI was alignments right he set up this alignment group that was going to get 20% of open ai’s compute budget apparently they never did that led to a lot of infighting and I think per you know helped him try to kick Sam out um but I always hear this and I’m like aligning for who and under what values are we aligning and they don’t seem to have an answer and that’s been like a consistent problem with AI right is is that they’re always like yeah this is going to be for everyone but we only trained it with these certain data sets we only trained it using like the pre-established knowledge of the certain people creating it so it’s actually fairly insular and doesn’t work for everyone and there are enormous edge cases every time we deploy it yeah and you know as Neila and I uncovered when we were reporting on the coup attempt like this gets kind of uh portrayed in the media as this you know acceleration versus deceleration almost like religious uh faction War that’s happening and I do think there’s part of that I do think Ilia is almost like religious in his like fervor here but a lot of this is just like boring company stuff business stuff it’s like you wanted budget you didn’t get it you got layered therefore you don’t want to work there anymore uh open AI just hired a CPO who used to run product at Instagram and a CFO who was the CEO of NEX door a public company it’s very clear where open AI is going they’re going to IPO they want to build a massive business they’re going to get rid of being a nonprofit it’s very clear and so made some noises about not being a nonprofit right and so if that’s the direction they’re going you’re Ilia it’s like you just want to do research right and that’s where a lot of these researchers still are is they just want to do Cutting Edge Frontier Model development and this is him saying come here we’ll do it and uh we should also note this is now the third offshoot of open AI that was has been created to create safer AI uh from open AI whose mission is also to create safe AI it’s not a great look yeah so you have anthropic I would I would actually put xai in this Camp Elon was the co-founder of an of open AI uh now you have SSI which is also I feel like it’s a medical term or something what am I yeah um I got this once it was it was you take a pill for it it’s fine Soo zic SSI yeah um look I just it’s great that everybody thinks they can accomplish these things I actually think it’s unclear at all whether Transformers and llms can ever do the things that people want them to do and in fact over time it has been more and more clear that perhaps they cannot and so what I’m dying to know is if SSI or any of the other companies that think they can build AGI if they have another idea yeah because if the only idea is we’re going to make a slightly better llm I actually don’t I there I’m not you’re not going to make I’m not worried about whether it’ll be safe because it’s not going to be super intelligent I’m just why are people trying to build an GI like these people are nerds they they they watch M why you just answered your own question no but they they watch the movies they play the games like this man is setting out to be the the audio clips you hear when you’re walking through the ruins a thousand years later in a video game of the guy being like I don’t know what’s happening why is my AI going and killing the world like that’s what he’s setting himself up for if he was actually successful in his Grand Ambitions and I’m just like why because the industry thinks that we they have invented a new form of intelligence and that hasn’t happened before and so it’s I think the natural progression of this is that it’s all smarter than us and replaces us and right it seems inevitable to the people building this stuff what we see is like chat PT can’t get a math equation right right that’s like what we see what they’re seeing we got to keep in mind like they gate this stuff like gp4 was in existence for like over a year before open AI actually deployed it in the world so they’re seeing things we’re not I’m not going to like give them too much of the credit there but I do think there’s uh you know Yan laon who’s the chief AI researcher at meta has been saying what you just said in Eli that lolms are not the path to AGI so his group is actually working on what comes after the Transformer what what is the architecture we need um because these are parrots right these LMS are are fancy prediction engines right and you you don’t really unlock intelligence that way yeah no I mean I yesterday I assigned our futures team to rate languages not intelligence like I I feel like we just need to say some very explicit declarative sentences that are true like dogs are very intelligent and cannot generate a PowerPoint the way like you know what I mean like we’re getting confused about what intelligence is at a very high level um I’m I’ve been lately thinking a lot about the the Steve Jobs slide of technology and liberal arts you know it’s like oh you guys forgot about this whole street this whole Street’s missing from this conversation right now um and there’s just a piece of this puzzle where it you can bet on the stuff to get better at an infinite rate but like most curves level off and it is unclear to me what actually makes things intelligent that said well you know good luck good luck building your company with no management overhead come on decoder if you pull that off boy do I have a podcast for you right I I spent an hour talking about management overhead every week with people but like it turns out it always like three six-year-old girls have management overhead I I promise you maybe more than any company in America uh speaking of confounding Decisions by AI companies perplexity started out so hot man MH they were the ones right you can pick any model you can ask these questions it was better searching Google and it turns out boy have they been awful shady along the way what is going on here well yeah so perplexity for those who don’t know is trying to unseat Google with an AI search engine it’s actually a good product most of the time I would say that I like their AI answers more than Google’s on average and now we kind of know why it’s because they’re stealing a bunch of content um and um yeah so wied did some good reporting uh and found out that they were going around their crawler blocker uh I’ve heard rumors that perplexity has been doing this at an even grander scale with even much larger uh corpuses of data um and this is the this is the the open AI Playbook on steroids a little bit which is just run fast and beg for forgiveness and um that’s what they’re doing they’re basically going around people who have said no you are not allowed to summarize this and doing it anyway and the way they’re doing it is both shady and hilarious so they publish some IP ranges of their crawlers and they publish the name of their crawler so poor robots.txt a text file that should not bear the way of all intellectual property law on the internet but which currently does you can set it to disallow all these crawlers you can set it to disallow GPT bot which is open AI there’s googlebot plus I think so there’s googlebot which is the regular search index and there’s the other one which is Google’s AI crawler I feel like I need to disclose here we used to disclose GPT bot at VOX media and then our company signed a deal and now we don’t there you go there’s your disclosure um and you could just you could disallow perplexity and on on top of that they did this thing where like here are IP ranges like if you don’t trust robots you can disallow these IPS and then what wired found and then the folks at Mac stories which a great Indie Apple site um they found that their content was showing up anyway in perplexity and then the investigations basically revealed these IP ranges were fake and the crawler was fake and they were setting up headless Windows 10 machines to BR the web yes like you know those pictures of like the the streaming fraud Farms where hot dogs just swiping Android phones there’s your VC money I love it just swiping away on a Windows 10 browser just imagine if those windows machines had recall it’s just like crazy um and you know and the CEO flexity has talked a lot of [ __ ] about Google like yeah why are these results so bad and like Google For Better or Worse is trying to play by the rules it’s still pissing everybody off but they’re attempting to play by the rules the Publishers they have to Google is under consent decrees they’re a massively regulated Mega cap tech company so they can’t do this kind of stuff yeah and here’s a startup being like what if lied yeah what if we just didn’t do any of that and to be clear I keep making this comparison you called it the opening eye Playbook this was the Google Playbook 20 years ago yep right Google just allowed all of viacom’s content to be on YouTube Google indexed every book in the world without permission Google did image search which it got suit over um and it won all those lawsuits because those products were new so they would show up in court and be like judge YouTube and the judge be like YouTube’s sick and Viacom would be like our marketing staffers are using this anyway because it’s sick Google image search so useful it’s concocted it’s nothing like this has ever existed before let’s concoct some reasoning to allow Google to take all this stuff for free because the theory is that you’ll go by the image from Getty once you found it on go it’s unclear what that theory really came out to the end I never did that uh yeah Alex is not like I opened a Getty Library the next day um a Getty account the next day uh but that those are the theories back then Google books that might have worked right you can search all the books maybe you’ll actually buy the book in the end did it work out totally well I don’t know but those are the theories back then because the products were so new the experiences were so new perplexity is just like yeah we stole a bunch of stuff and what we’ve delivered is an incremental Improvement on Google search m and I just I don’t think that’s going to win this time maybe I I am shocked at how little the people inside these AI companies and their investors again I was just at a very fancy Tech conference with a lot of these people how little they actually care about this problem how it is really just like this is a this is a bunch of speed bumps that will go over uh to getting where we’re going to go um and maybe it’s because of the the fact that Google is Google and they did all this 20 years ago and they’re a trillion multi- trillion dollar company um the pro in history shows that yeah I was going to say I think it’s what Nei said about liberal artarts education they just don’t have any like historical context so they’re like yeah this is going to work they didn’t take any history classes I didn’t I don’t need to know about Google this is fine no these are systems people yeah they don’t think in terms of um these the values that we get mad about when it’s like hey I I made a thing uh I charged people for it and you took it that’s not okay uh with with intellectual property with writing and stuff like that for some reason it’s just not a thing that a lot of of tech people that I know it doesn’t register for them uh I don’t know why right because they didn’t take liberal arts they’re like what is an English class I want to spend more time I don’t have I don’t have a view of this I haven’t locked this into my brain yet so people have thoughts send them to me because I need the help but I can feel this weird shift that I’ve been calling the copyright apocalypse because some people care about it a lot now more than ever before the this is mine and you took it between influencers on social media platforms rages out of control now right I’m a Taylor schliff fan and those three notes of a song sound like three notes an Olivia Rodrigo fan we have to do fandom War now yeah until the music industry dos out writing credits is a real thing that happens like at at the craziest level this is a real thing that happens and that is copyright maximalism by really young people and then over here you have nobody owns anything it’s just something you know I should get it for free and those things are just in tension in a way that it feels unresolved and un potentially unresolvable like you can’t you can’t have a bunch of YouTubers being like I made this YouTube video first and anybody who even makes a video that looks like it is stealing from me right next to everything in the internet should be free maybe that’s it maybe there’s not a lot of love for media companies as we all know and the fact that it’s scraping wired or The Verge or whatever is like whatever they’re fine but when it’s like your favorite influencer your favorite Creator and they’re on their feed going hey like this model don’t use it because they trained on my stuff I do think you’re right I think people feel a lot more viscerally about that than they do oh like companies right I think it’s when it becomes the individual and and again what Google was up against what Napster was up against was the big bad right like the only face of the anti Napster movement was Lars olich from Metallica and for him but really the face was like Hollywood in the music industry and no one ever feels any sympathy towards Hollywood in the music industry like Hollywood could be like you wouldn’t steal a cigarette whatever they would say you wouldn’t what was it you wouldn’t download a you wouldn’t you wouldn’t download a car right so Hollywood can put up the banners that say you wouldn’t download a car and everyone’s like screw you I’m super going to download a movie and if I could download a car I would that’d be sick yeah rules I’ve had this 3D printer for years not making cars um but they were the big bats influencers are like people like influencers like people you know what I mean influencers are actual people that you have parasocial relationships with yeah and like there’s something very emotional there that is not resolved and it’s going to come to AE because you know the next story we have in our list here is a bunch of social networks that want to introduce AI in various ways Alex you played with one and before we get to that I just want to call out Tik Tok is now letting people make AI avatars of creators yeah right and saying this is your ad creative and this is going to come for every social platform yeah that’s right like in a massive way like if you are a Creator and you feel the burnout and you can make 50 more ads during your brand deal using you you might do it yeah no this is happening so yeah I wrote about this new app which was you know I get a lot of test flights to try things and this is the first test flight I’ve gotten in a while that made me feel something very strongly where I was like oh when I opened it um and it’s it is like Instagram it meets character AI where basically it’s a bunch of AIS in a feed commenting and posting together and there’s humans but they don’t need to be there and like it’s actually in some cases not most but in some cases hard to tell who is human and who is not um and they just raised a bunch of money it’s an X snap X snap people um and the reason I wrote about it is because meta is about to do the exact same thing um Zuckerberg told me so uh last September and I think later this year we’re going to see them start to roll this out where basically anyone can create their own AIS send them into Instagram send them into Facebook um and same thing with businesses and the idea is that if you’re an influencer and you feel overwhelmed by your DMs maybe an AI handles that for you or maybe an AI actually posts on your behalf Zuckerberg is super excited about this I know because he’s talked to me about it um it’s very freaky to imagine what this actually does to our social networks it’s coming way faster than we think so well it’s interesting cuz like in South Korea they’ve been doing a little bit of something like this right with with K-pop Stars where you can engage with K-pop stars on sites owned by the K-Pop Stars companies and it’s not always that sometimes it’s them it’s not always that usually it’s it’s a bot it’s it’s a it’s a person pretending to be them and so like that that parasocial how do we automate that parasocial stuff has been happening in Korea for a long time but I think the difference here is that was gated to okay you have to go download this app for this publisher and use it whereas this would be on meta Instagram this would be like you open Instagram and it’s like oh is that account an AI they may have three arms okay maybe then yeah no that’s coming so there then there’s the other part which is you send agents out on your behalf as an influencer of someone where like someone wants to pay money to subscribe and one of the things I offer is like DMS with me yeah and then my my agent will just like do that yeah and I won’t do it and infinitely scalable which if you an individual Creator and all these platforms are organized towards tearing down collectives and enhancing individual creators if you’re an individual Creator your ability to scale is limited by your emotional capacity to do this work and your minutes in the day yeah and so of course you’re going to let the robot talk to your fans for like it is the biggest no-brainer in the history of the world of course you’re going to say okay you want to your Brand X wants to do an integration with me but they want 50 different versions of this creative I will make one and let the AI deep fake me into five more and that is already happening like at Tik Tok is enabling the feature like it’s it’s happening now yeah well Alex to your question about why like I was talking to vran the SEO of butterflies this new app about this the why cuz I showed this app to my wife and she was like just like it was an immediate just like um I’m like I I think you’re going to meet a lot of people like that who are like why does this need to exist like why do need to like fill our time with just empty AI social media and his point was like yes it feels kind of broken right now and I wrote about this it feels like when the hosts in Westworld break a little bit it’s like not there but he was like you know I I got into Tech by like making friends on forums talking to people that I never met I only knew their username he’s like we will get the models quickly to that quality um and as someone who also came up and got into Tech in a similar way like through like making friends on forums like what happened when like I never met those people right I don’t know a lot of their names ever so if they were AI would it have made a difference I mean we had a whole like philosophical conversation about this but he was like you don’t actually want to talk to people there’s traits of Being Human that you like and AI will quickly copy all those traits and I’m like disagree mind blown and also no uh no thank you but is it inevitable that’s the question it ignores like in the in in the 80s and 90s there were the 900 numbers and you could like call like the Crypt Keeper was one like Corey hay and stuff like that and Cory ha was not answering the phone to talk to a little 12-year-old girl who had a crush on him right like that was a voice actor pretending to be him and quickly did we just learned something very important about what you spent your money on when you were a child it was not me because if I had called a 900 number I would have not had a good time my dad super caught me calling you nter number one is like you’re never using the phone again but that was like part of why I mean it was one it was the cost of 900 numbers but that was the other part of it where it was like 900 numbers were a little sketchy as a kid you weren’t really supposed to call them and it was because like yeah it was a bunch of like not con artists but basically licensed con artists pretending to be other people and it’s like that’s that’s gross this the the the you hear this from tech people all the time you’re like this is just the same as this other small problem that we had in the past you’re like but now you’re doing it at scale yeah like now you’re doing it at scale that’s like what if we took a small problem and made it Global it’s like I think maybe there’s something different here this thing by the way that you just mentioned it’s come up several times now it is this unshakable belief that these models are going to get better yeah and like on the rate of like Moors law we’ll get better and I don’t that metric doesn’t exist like there isn’t a Moors law of llm models yet you know we’ve only really experien 3.5 to four in the in the public mhm but I and I understand they’ve all got stuff they’re looking at that we can’t see sure but someone’s got to give me the number like give me the rate of change before I believe that this model will be able to simulate whatever happened to me on forums when I was a child like you know like he wouldn’t a minute in the Asylum when they raised me it’s like I don’t think so well so yeah there’s no Moors law there’s that’s I mean there there’s no Moors law there’s scaling law and the idea is that as you continue to put more dat data compute into these models they get exponentially better that continues to hold true if you compare the output the creative output of like gpt2 or gp3 gpt3 to four it’s a massive difference so but they’re also running you’re saying that line is not linear that’s what I’m saying like I’m saying everyone who works in I believes that it is still linear yeah but it’s not because we’ve just seen multiple stories about how they’re all desperate for data to the point that they’re like what if we make AI machines to just create more content for us that can’t go wrong oh the thing I’m hearing is going to be synthetic data for training so literally you’re you’re going to have the AIS get good enough that they start talking and then the AIS train on the AIS that’s where we’re going all right we got we we got end this here I can’t I can’t stay here make I’m just saying make real friends go to the forums while you can all right get get in there while the getting’s good get past the username get their actual name cuz they may be an AI in a year request to driver’s license immediately we’re taking a break we’ll be right back with the lightning roundout all right we’re back it’s a lightning round I will say the first segment of the show was much more like a lightning round and this is just gonna be different it’s fine this lighting round remains unsponsored but many options exist for you the potential Advertiser but you can’t do AI ads yeah you have to let me do it you can do AI ads if they’re trained on nei’s voice what’s the most dangerous advertising you can buy it’s letting me do the ads all right CR let’s start with you uh Nvidia is super rich can I say so the story right is nvidia’s overtook Microsoft and Apple as the world’s most valuable company Microsoft and Apple been going back and forth on market cap for a while Nvidia is not bigger than both of them the crazy thing about this whole story to me is one Nvidia has been around for a million years y uh video game fans exist right y like people put Nvidia cards in their PCS all over the place it has been on this run for a long time right yeah like this is years now of Nvidia stock skyrocketing and the way CNN covered it the headline in CNN was this company whose name you can’t pronounce is now the world’s most riches company it’s like yeah it’s actually pretty easy to pronounce I feel like yeah it’s not one it’s not that hard easier than SSI an editor and a writer together and they’re both like I don’t know what this is we got this it’s just like at some point like I I understand we run a tech publication and we like swim in the water but like they’ve been headed here for at least two years yeah yeah we we had to hear about them like cryptocurrency right Nvidia had this big all these big stock jumps because of cryptocurrency because everybody was buying the gpus because that was the best way to trade oh my God this was completely out of my brain I I this was gone this information deleted yeah because it was it was 2020 like crypto we don’t think about 2020 and and so that was happening to Nvidia and so it was like steadily ticking up and it was like oh boy AMD and Intel might be able to beat it and then it was like we’re going to take all the crypto stuff out of our our gpus and then everybody was like Hey AI Is Here Yeah Yeah and and and others have Minds the effect of this the effect of this inside Nvidia is fascinating um I have heard and there’s been some reporting and I want to keep doing more reporting on it so if you have stories if you’re listening to this and you have gotten fabulously wealthy at Nvidia hit me up we can talk off the Record they have a retirement problem inside Nvidia there’s there was a a post I saw where it said if you join as a mid-level software engineer 5 years ago and your total comp was 700,000 which is a lot right but intact that’s actually pretty middle of the road for a good engineer your compensation yearly now is $10 million so rules um they actually have people just retiring like in mass and so like the the question for NVIDIA is like how what do you do to motivate people when people have gotten so fabulously wealthy so fast and it’s obvious there’s going to be a correction it’s obvious Nvidia is not going to St the richest the most valuable company in the world right so how does that collapse happen is it a slow collapse is it a fast one and what happens to the employee base is fascinating well you get rid of management overhead in product Cycles there you go that’s it’s obvious what you do merge with SSI like it’s going to last a while right because they are the only ones making the really good AI processors for Server levels right well they have software lock in too with K Google Google Google’s their main primary competitor right yeah yeah arm uh AMD I would say AMD is like an arms dealer is probably the biggest one Google doesn’t sell tpus really as much but but nvidia’s got a big head start this is one of the things that like has kept Intel propped up for years was because Intel had this huge Head Start in the server space 99% of of the server space so you know they can bomb a couple of years um against Qualcomm and be fine because they got the servers and I think nvidia’s kind of feels like not quite as cushy a position but similarly cushy yeah I mean they have Cuda like what they have is a software layer that makes their gpus more valuable yeah which AMD does not but if you run Azure I mean we’ve had all these people on the show and Alex talks them all if you run Azure or AWS or Google cloud or whatever you do not want to be beholden Tuda and Nvidia yeah you you you want all kinds of things to happen so that’s why apple and Nvidia don’t look at each other anymore it is very funny that apple and Nvidia hate each other it is it used to be just like a little funny because Apple would insist that bad graphics cards were good graphics cards um I mean that was just funny like in its way now it’s deeply funny extremely good uh cuz all that open AI integration is happening in h100s that apple does not want to talk about all and doesn’t want to pay for and that’s the thing Market forces will ensure that Nvidia does not stay the top GPU supplier in the world because they are too expensive and that no one wants Jensen being the the king of gpus right everyone wants to have options and so nvidia’s challenge to justify this valuation and to keep growing is to build lockin it is like it would make a lot of sense for them to start competing directly with Google cloud and Azure to become a One-Stop shop because otherwise um people will out ship them that’s just going to happen it may time we’ve been seeing that for years with them and and and their like like on the gaming side they got really really good at the Lock in they got really good at being like you can’t use these AMD processors because we went out to every single game developer and made sure they were using our tools so you had to use our like we get the better stuff so they’re this is going to be really interesting over the next couple of years is as they just like absolutely duke it out with some of these other companies and I think a lot of people are going to be surprised at how vicious they get oh yeah but it’s like one step down from that right Al yeah Heath was saying these things are free like Apple’s not paying for it if there’s no business model one step down from we paid all of the money in the world for h100 the price of the h100 will just fall like if the demand is there right now because everyone thinks they’re going to monopolize something yeah what it is is remains to be seen but that’s what that’s why the price is high we’ll see all right I’m gonna go next because I want Heath to end the lightning round with his uh we just continue to track Tech litigation the United States Department of Justice has sued Adobe for deceiving subscription pricing in creative class and it’s it actually is deceiving it is deceiving in one specific way which is when you sign up for Creative Cloud you can pick annually build annually build monthly or monthly annually build monthly is the default choice so that means you pay for a year but they charge you per month and you’ve signed a one-year contract and if you try to cancel early they just charge you the rest of the year or you can sign up for monthly or you can just cancel after every month because it’s the default because it’s the cheapest uh people pick it and they think it’s a monthly subp there’s no fine print it doesn’t actually disclose that this will happen they try to cancel they get stuck with the rest of the bill this is bad this is straightforwardly bad for a company with basically a monopoly market share in these tools MH it is also just beyond the pit like this is ply [ __ ] what are you doing like people are going to buy Photoshop man like that’s a local gym move on their part yeah I really think I’ve been thinking about this a lot with Adobe I I’ve basically insist assisted The Verge over cover Adobe over the past few years cuz I they’re such a central player in everything that’s going on like influencer media depends on the existence of adobe that’s weird right Premiere runs YouTube like YouTube never built creative tools which is one of the weirdest things about YouTube they had that one app on the phone once but they’ve never built a video editor the success of Tik Tok is they made a video editor that’s really good and they made all those templates and they made it easy to do all stuff YouTube never did that they like upload some videos and then people built the entire Creator ecosystem on the back of Premiere largely a little bit of Final Cut because there’s so many creators to use max but mostly Premiere um and you the Google never built that stuff so you just like look at this industry like adobe’s at the center of everything they’re at the center of all these uh uh all these AI creativity battles right because they have Adobe stock and people use Photoshop and general fill and the more you cover Adobe the more you realize there’s a massive difference in how the company perceives itself and what it does and the tools it makes and how everyone else perceives Adobe it’s yawning Gap uh I’ve said this before we had shanton Ryan on decoder he never talks to anyone really he’s show up on CNBC after earnings reports it never gives wide ranging interviews I was so excited for That interview this guy never talks we asked him all the questions some of those questions were pretty harsh the audience was mad at me just for paying attention to Adobe they’re like why would you platform Adobe which is an incredible question because it’s Adobe I don’t think I’ve seen a company burn that this much Goodwill ever right and then on top of it they had their terms of service debacle where we’ve covered terms of service changes like this so many times like I could barely even pay attention to it where they change their terms of service to let them do content moderation on their cloud services so if you have if you run a cloud service people will put bad things on your cloud service that is just as true a fact of nature as there is like horrific [ __ ] will end up on your cloud storage system if you have a scaled cloud storage system and what you don’t want to do is give a bunch of contractors PTSD which is a real thing that has happened that we have covered by making them look through stuff on cloud services or look through reports so you build automated systems to go through your cloud services and find the child abuse material like that’s what you do so Adobe changes its terms to let people know it’s going to do this in Creative Cloud people assume that they’re going to train on AI and they freak out at Adobe and that adobe has so so little Goodwill that even as they tried to explain this people are like we don’t believe you and so now they’ve updated their terms of service again and you just connect that directly to oh you’re getting sued by the government because annual paid monthly was not clear to people and you charge them the rest of the money when they canel it’s just like to it’s crazy to me that this company is so important but does not realize that it needs to maintain the Goodwill of the the people that depend on it well you don’t have to when you’re a monopoly you can just be a mon Monopoly it but it doesn’t make you like I I’ve met all their Executives they’re not dumb you know yeah it’s like baffling to me yeah but they’re you know they can do what they want they’re Monopoly what are you gonna do go to go to Da Vinci yeah maybe yeah maybe photo get out there uh them not acquiring figma I think will go down we’re going to come back on the failed figma deal um one because figma will turn into a different company and we’ll see if they can compete with Adobe but that was driven as much by some of this burned Goodwill as anything and I think we’re going to see the creative tools industry bifurcate on that moment over the course of history because if they had acquired figma a lot of a lot of things would have been a lot different I think all right last lightning round one we got to end here Heath this is like the best story in history okay yeah the San Francisco standard has a fun story where techies are increasingly paying up to 1,200 an hour for fashion consultants because of Co like Mark Zuckerberg deciding to wear chains um and I just encourage everyone to read this story there’s a sidebyside photo of a guy who’s gone through one of these fashion consultants I would argue he looked better before I’m not going to like I’m not going to judge like you know whatever they or at least the same it’s just like as my grandfather would say you know money doesn’t buy sense and like reading this like like Tech’s like just be who you are you don’t need to like try to look cool you don’t need to pay 1,200 an hour to try to look cool like the internet is there like you could just research side photo is brutal it’s brutal it’s it’s not brutal because he looks better or worse he looks the same yeah the same um and then it’s both of them are kind of just baggy outfits yeah and then like it’s perfect because at the end like the story they’re like interviewing a Founder who’s done this and then he’s like I’m making an AI app that will do this for people for $20 a month and it’s like the circle just completes it that’s amazing you know Amazon tried to do that with their weird camera yeah super didn’t work yeah you’re paying someone this much money to take you to Bloomingdales you can do better than this photo that’s what I’m saying like it’s don’t think he went to Blooming Dales he that’s a say it yeah this is he’s in the he’s in the dressing room at bloomies oh my gosh get out leave sorer no that’s a bad look if that’s what you’re pulling out of blooming Dales that’s like you get that Dillards that’s brutal all right we got to end it here before we before we do more streaming sorry for your is fine shop where you can look cool no matter where you shop I love a Dillard everyone is constantly asking me where the jackets come from and all of them were pandemic purchases at either Home Depot or Walmart I’m just telling you that’s like that I had money to spend and there are only two stores to spend it at it’s like you can look cool no matter where you shop just know who you are that’s a quote he just know who you just be that person as loudly as you all right that’s it and also make an agent of yourself and have it flirt with other people on Instagram for money that’s the future more gold chains more gold chains all right we’ll be back on Tuesday with more of the windows arm laptop benchmark scores that’s a big deal I’m excited for those reviews to come out and then we got all kinds of stuff it’s a summer it’s like wild time in Tech and then we’re going to get rid of all of our management overhead and product Cycles just pure intelligence thanks to Heath for filling in good luck to David doing whatever he’s doing that’s it that’s R Chast rock and roll and that’s it for the Verge cast this week hey we’d love to hear from you give us a call at 866 Verge 111 the vergecast is a production of The Verge and VOX media podcast Network our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James that’s it we’ll see you next week

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