The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss announcements from Microsoft Build, the OpenAI's trouble with Scarlett Johansson, new Sonos headphones, and more.
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00:00Hello and welcome to Vertichast, the flagship podcast of computers that remember everything
00:00:06about you, no matter what.
00:00:09It's going to be great.
00:00:10This is the future.
00:00:11It's been the dream of every person in computing forever, to make sure that the computer never
00:00:16forgets every single thing you looked at ever.
00:00:19What could possibly go wrong?
00:00:20And then talks to you in a slightly sensual way.
00:00:23Hi, I'm Eli, I'm your friend, David Pierce is here.
00:00:27Hello.
00:00:28Alex Kranz is here.
00:00:30A lot of, just a weird week.
00:00:33Can I tell you what I think the theme of the week is?
00:00:36Sure.
00:00:37It's probably broken and I don't believe you.
00:00:39Oh, that's good.
00:00:41That's a good thing.
00:00:42That's kind of where we are in the tech landscape right now, is you can make your videos, you
00:00:47can tweet your tweets, and then we're going to get your products and the truth is going
00:00:54to come out.
00:00:55Right?
00:00:56Like that's the cycle that we're in.
00:00:57It's great.
00:00:59It's a super great video.
00:01:01I'm glad you paid all the influencers.
00:01:04I'm going to put your face computer on my face, man.
00:01:07And then we're going to know.
00:01:08I'm going to hold your, I'm going to hold your teenager engineering box and then we're
00:01:12going to know.
00:01:13I like it because it's one timeline darker than the, is this anything timeline?
00:01:18And I feel like we were in the, is this anything timeline for a while and now it's, it's getting
00:01:23slightly bleaker.
00:01:24Yeah.
00:01:25It's probably broken and I don't believe we're going to put AI in Google search and Google
00:01:28search is going to tell you to put glue in your pizza, which is a real headline.
00:01:32By the time you are listening to this, I think Kylie will have that headline up, which is
00:01:36AI previews and Google search are overwhelmingly stupid.
00:01:42Mostly because they're reading Reddit and Reddit is full of jokes and people are now
00:01:47like willfully trying to, like Google bombing is back because you ask Google like what mammal
00:01:56has the most bones, which is something people are doing and it goes and finds a Reddit joke
00:02:01from five years ago that's like, it's snakes and it makes you realize like the, the running
00:02:08joke on the internet is that sarcasm and jokes are very hard to understand.
00:02:12It turns out that like people still better at it than Google, which is real, real bad
00:02:17at it.
00:02:18It's probably broken and I don't believe you again, the theme of the week, there's some
00:02:22exciting news this week, like legitimately cool news this week, uh, David, you talk to
00:02:27Tom about everything that happened at Microsoft build and the surface event, legitimately
00:02:31cool news.
00:02:32If that stuff works, the Mac versus PC race is fully back on, uh, the processor wars are
00:02:38back on with a new metric, right?
00:02:40Like they have, Microsoft has NPUs now with the Qualcomm chips doing AI.
00:02:44Apple has neural engines.
00:02:46That's all really exciting.
00:02:49Boy, do I want that stuff to work, right?
00:02:52Like it's just a week.
00:02:54Do you not feel like open this week, we're going to talk about open and Scarlett Johansson
00:02:58and it's like, yeah, I don't believe what a weird place to be.
00:03:05It is.
00:03:06And it also, you end up in this place of like questioning everybody's intentions all the
00:03:10time to like with, with Microsoft, it's like, Oh, windows on arm.
00:03:14You did it.
00:03:15That's so exciting.
00:03:16Do you remember all the other times that you told me that you did it?
00:03:17That that's really interesting.
00:03:19And then with all this open AI stuff, the timelines are weird.
00:03:23Everybody is saying things that don't all make sense simultaneously.
00:03:27And it's just, you get to the point where it's like, does anyone know what they're talking
00:03:31about?
00:03:32And it's, it's just very strange, but I agree with you in the Microsoft stuff in particular,
00:03:37I thought was, uh, both substantially nerdier and substantially more exciting than I expected
00:03:43it to be.
00:03:44Like it was a wonky build in like the best way.
00:03:47Yeah.
00:03:48So we, we are going to talk about opening eye and Scarlett Johansson later.
00:03:51We're going to have a lightning round unsponsored for now.
00:03:56We got to start a shoe company.
00:03:57It's called unsponsored and then have the lightning round sponsored by unsponsored.
00:04:01That's pretty good.
00:04:02If you're a shoe investor, call me, um, is it all the logos or is it no logos?
00:04:06No.
00:04:07On the shoe.
00:04:08I think it might be all the logos.
00:04:09Oh, right.
00:04:10You like bring it all the way back around.
00:04:11Yeah.
00:04:12It's every shoe logo on it.
00:04:13And it's called unsponsored.
00:04:14Please.
00:04:15Like somebody at mischief is building that right now.
00:04:17Yeah.
00:04:18They just heard me.
00:04:19You can have that mischief.
00:04:20Enjoy.
00:04:21If you sponsor the lightning round.
00:04:22If you sponsor the lightning round.
00:04:23Look, I'm not saying we're a bunch of IP experts on this show.
00:04:25I'm just saying if you give us cash, we'll give you that idea.
00:04:28Okay.
00:04:29Let's start with build because it was a nerdy build and I think you guys only really scratched
00:04:33the surface with Tom who was there.
00:04:35Great job covering it.
00:04:37The big news is obviously that the copilot PCs, right?
00:04:40Copilot plus PCs, which have the NPU, which are running on the new Snapdragon X processors.
00:04:47It should be noted that the team that built those processors at Qualcomm is from a company
00:04:52called Nuvia, which Qualcomm acquired Nuvia is a bunch of X Apple chip designers.
00:04:58You can see how they caught up.
00:04:59Yep.
00:05:00It's a pretty straight line, right?
00:05:03You're losing the Apple, the Apple chip designers leave, you buy them.
00:05:07So you're competitive with Apple again.
00:05:09We got to run the benchmarks.
00:05:11We got to get the things, but Kranz, I mean, you're a, you're a chip nerd.
00:05:14Do you, do you buy it right now?
00:05:16I mean, I think it's the Nuvia part of it that makes me kind of cautiously optimistic.
00:05:21And also the fact that laptop makers actually want us to try the laptops.
00:05:25Generally speaking.
00:05:26Oh yeah.
00:05:27That's a big one.
00:05:28They do not.
00:05:29When it sucks, they're like, are you sure you want this?
00:05:32And they slow roll you, right?
00:05:33Like they wait a while to get it to you and then you end up having to buy it and review
00:05:36it yourself.
00:05:37And this time they're like, when do you want it?
00:05:39We'll get it to you next week.
00:05:41They're really eager about it.
00:05:42And in a way that like surprised me, I took a few briefings on the laptops and I was like,
00:05:47oh, you guys are like pumped.
00:05:49I'm not used to that.
00:05:50And it reminds me a lot of when AMD was like coming back when it was making its big comeback,
00:05:54what, in like 2017, where suddenly people were like, do you care about AMD?
00:05:58Like get excited.
00:05:59And I was like, oh, oh, this is weird.
00:06:02But yeah, the, the, the MPUs is the big, is the big deal here.
00:06:06I think like Microsoft said, if you want to take advantage of the, the most stuff that's
00:06:12going to be on Windows now, you probably want an MPU in that computer.
00:06:16And MPUs have been around for a while.
00:06:18Like Intel's had them, they're, they're called neural processing units.
00:06:21Everybody's been doing it, you know, Apple calls it a neural engine, whatever, but they've
00:06:24all been doing it.
00:06:25And it's basically just another processor to offload those like tasks that generally
00:06:30you would have put on your GPU or like major CPU kind of brute force.
00:06:35And now it's like, okay, just for this.
00:06:38And it's like when Intel introduced it a couple of years ago, it was one of those things
00:06:43where you're like, okay, do I care about this?
00:06:45Like I'm not an AI researcher, why should I care about this?
00:06:48And that's still kind of the question.
00:06:52Unless now I think the big change is that like Adobe is going to be using it and a lot
00:06:56of these like film processing companies and stuff are doing it.
00:06:59So it's like, okay, I guess it makes a little more sense now than it did, you know, six
00:07:03years ago.
00:07:04What do you guys feel about that?
00:07:05Well, I'm curious.
00:07:07I'm curious.
00:07:08I mean, a lot of what they announced in Windows is fairly interesting.
00:07:14Some of it, I think people have had really strong reactions to like recall, but some
00:07:17of it is just straightforwardly cool, right?
00:07:19Like you can draw stick figures in Microsoft paint and it will generate more photorealistic
00:07:25images as you draw.
00:07:27That's cool.
00:07:28That's neat.
00:07:29That's one of the first examples of like a cool local AI workload beyond the light rooms
00:07:37and premieres of the world that I can think of because most of the other AI workloads
00:07:42like happen in the cloud.
00:07:43Yeah.
00:07:44Right.
00:07:45You like, you'd talk to a chat bot and they happen in the cloud or you're coding and GitHub
00:07:48and copilot and GitHub is happening in the cloud and now you've got some cool stuff that's
00:07:53happening locally.
00:07:54We should talk about recall, which is the other big thing that's happening on the NPU.
00:07:58But they're not more of those that I mean, like on, like they're not more of those.
00:08:02There's the other stuff that's like you're playing Minecraft and the computer is watching
00:08:06with you and talking you through how to play Minecraft.
00:08:09But I suspect there's a little bit of hybrid local cloud happening there.
00:08:15I know it's happening with paint because there are things paint won't let you generate because
00:08:21Microsoft's commitment to AI safety, which is weird because if you turn off the AI, you
00:08:27can draw any kind of dongs you want in paint.
00:08:30Yeah.
00:08:31Yeah.
00:08:32So there is like a little bit of push and pull between the cloud and local, right.
00:08:35And just in terms of safety, which is really interesting to think about, like Google Docs
00:08:40is a cloud application.
00:08:41You can type anything you want in Google Docs.
00:08:43Microsoft Word 365 can be expressed as a cloud application.
00:08:46You can type anything you want in Microsoft Word 365.
00:08:50You turn on AI features in Microsoft Paint, it's like you can't draw some stuff.
00:08:55Weird.
00:08:56Yeah.
00:08:57And like, I suspect we're going to have a long conversation about those kinds of lines
00:09:01for years to come.
00:09:02But that part, just the other part of it where it's like, where's the AI happening?
00:09:07Is it in the cloud or is it here on the machine?
00:09:09It's kind of interesting that Microsoft's answer is very much like both.
00:09:12Yeah.
00:09:13Well, and I think that's the right answer, right?
00:09:16Again, the where one ends and the other begins is, I think, forever going to be complicated.
00:09:21But everyone I talk to says that the place we have to get to is both because the stuff
00:09:26that you do on device is private and fast in a way that anything that happens off device
00:09:32just can't be.
00:09:33And I think about like the translation stuff Microsoft is trying to do, like there's a
00:09:38chunk of that that if you don't do it locally, it's going to suck because real time translation
00:09:43that has to go to the cloud is by definition, not real time translation.
00:09:47It just breaks.
00:09:48And so the thing that they launched where like it, you can be in edge and it can translate
00:09:53a YouTube video while you're watching the YouTube video.
00:09:57Very cool in theory, awful with a half second delay.
00:10:01It's the sort of thing that I think is that tuning that they're going to have to do to
00:10:06get those two pieces right is actually like the whole ballgame.
00:10:09Yeah.
00:10:10But I think it's very cool that Microsoft is deep in this idea of we're going to start
00:10:13on your device.
00:10:14And I think that's smart and right.
00:10:17And I think the other interesting part there is obviously we're, you know, we're barreling
00:10:20towards WWDC where we expect Apple to announce many, many similar kinds of things or at least
00:10:26a similar kind of focus on AI.
00:10:29Microsoft has the big AI part.
00:10:33They've got Azure and the big open AI relationship and they are integrating all this stuff and
00:10:38they have their own models that they're running at all sorts of scales.
00:10:41And so I think they're able to just like take more shots across windows and devices and
00:10:46their suite of applications that runs everywhere.
00:10:49And that to me, that to me is like the interesting part.
00:10:51Like there isn't another company that kind of has all the pieces, whether Microsoft can
00:10:58execute, whether it can deliver finished applications that people like to use, whether it can make
00:11:03people interested in windows, like consumers interested in windows outside of a gaming
00:11:07context again.
00:11:09I think it's broken.
00:11:10And I don't believe you.
00:11:11Like that's, that's where I'm at.
00:11:12You know, it's like you got to, we have to get the machines.
00:11:15It's interesting, Alex, that you're saying that the companies are excited, but there's
00:11:18a lot of investment in like Intel chips in the world and x86 applications.
00:11:23And that transition is going to be slow, not fast.
00:11:25I think they did say, they did say stuff about emulation, right?
00:11:28Intel chips have had MPUs in them for a very long time.
00:11:31They introduced a couple of years ago.
00:11:33So the big difference is now copilot has like kind of a minimum amount of what your MPU
00:11:38should be able to process.
00:11:40So the deal is that before, you know, an MPU would do it like, what, 18 tops or something,
00:11:47which is like trillion operations per second.
00:11:49So, so it would do like 18 and now they're saying, okay, it has to be 40, it has to be
00:11:5345.
00:11:54And, and that was one of the things like Apple was bringing up tops in their M4 presentation
00:11:58back with the iPad, where they were like, we can do 30, 38 tops.
00:12:03And you're like, cool.
00:12:04What does that mean?
00:12:05And, and then Microsoft was like, you got to do 40.
00:12:08And we're like, cool.
00:12:09I love it.
00:12:10Thomas used to do megapixels in my favorite possible, this rule.
00:12:15We're back to like the megahertz wars or whatever.
00:12:18It's going to be super goofy, but they're like, they're really leaning on that.
00:12:22Cause I guess you'd need, they like, they're saying, you know, a lot of the stuff that's,
00:12:26that's coming to Windows will work okay on older Windows PCs, but like, you're really
00:12:32going to need those, the, the neuro processors and really good ones.
00:12:36Importantly, also your computer will be good, which is not a small thing, right?
00:12:42The idea of all of these things, like Alex, you said this before, like if you're an AI
00:12:47researcher, it's a, it's a nice to have, but it is going to in other ways, make your computer
00:12:52worse.
00:12:53And the promise that Microsoft came out with, with the copilot plus PCs is these computers
00:12:57are going to be fast.
00:12:58They're going to do AI stuff.
00:12:59They're going to have long battery life and they're going to be good computers.
00:13:03And that is not a small thing in the Windows world right now, in which you've kind of had
00:13:08to choose one or two of those three things for a really long time.
00:13:13And especially with this Qualcomm stuff, if they can get the battery life there to the
00:13:17point where AI is not like, you don't have to buy an AI computer, the way you buy a gaming
00:13:22computer and you like make a bunch of sacrifices in exchange for this one thing you want to
00:13:26work really well.
00:13:27If they can actually have solved these three things together, that to me is where the stuff
00:13:32gets really powerful.
00:13:34And then you get the whole scale of Microsoft and the fact that it has the app store and
00:13:39the browser and the OS and the models and the cloud service, like that's when that becomes
00:13:44really powerful if and only if the devices don't suck and maybe possibly the devices
00:13:49don't suck.
00:13:50Well, if they don't suck and they're, they're affordable enough, right?
00:13:53Like most people are spending $700 on a laptop and most of these laptops are in the $1,200
00:13:58range, which is intentional.
00:14:00They're meant to go after the MacBook Air because MacBook Airs sell a lot better than
00:14:05everybody else's laptops.
00:14:06Right.
00:14:07Right.
00:14:08And what's interesting is, you know, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, talked to Joanna
00:14:11Stern at the Wall Street Journal, notable Verge expat, Joanna Stern, I might add.
00:14:17And basically it was like, yeah, we're going to beat the MacBook Air.
00:14:19Yusuf Mehdi, who is executive vice president of Microsoft, basically is like a MacBook
00:14:24Air with an M3.
00:14:25These computers will beat those by 50% on Cinebench.
00:14:28So they are making huge performance claims on these PCs.
00:14:32They're also thin and light.
00:14:33There's some question I think John Gruber raised about whether they have fans, as though
00:14:36people care.
00:14:37They do.
00:14:38Some of them have fans.
00:14:39Some of them are going to have fans.
00:14:40Yeah.
00:14:41Fine.
00:14:42But MacBooks have thermal throttling issues, particularly the Air, right?
00:14:45They do slow down.
00:14:46So if you want to run these computers really hard with AI workloads, which are essentially
00:14:50on a GPU-like piece of the processor, they'll make it hot.
00:14:55But we're expecting good battery life.
00:14:58And then the list of manufacturers here is Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, HP, Acer, Asus.
00:15:05It's everybody.
00:15:06Microsoft obviously has a Surface Pro and the Surface.
00:15:10That's the suite, right?
00:15:11Yeah.
00:15:12Alex, you've been taking the briefings.
00:15:15How are they differentiating these?
00:15:16It's just like, are you a Dell fanboy or an Asus fanboy, and they're the same consumer?
00:15:21I mean, yeah, kind of.
00:15:22Everybody's bringing up their own thing.
00:15:24I took an HP briefing, and they rebranded their whole thing, right?
00:15:28Because you had the HP Spectre and the HP Pavilion and the HP something you've never
00:15:33heard of.
00:15:34It was just a mess.
00:15:36And they redid their whole portfolio into the Elite book and the Pro book for corporate
00:15:43stuff, and then the Omni book, which is for the rest of us.
00:15:46And the Omni book is like, I got to play around with one.
00:15:49It was really nice.
00:15:50I didn't get to benchmark it or anything like that.
00:15:52So again, we're going to have to wait and see.
00:15:54But it was a nice laptop.
00:15:55It felt exciting and good in a way.
00:15:59It felt kind of like my iPad Pro with the thing on it, the Magic Keyboard, only lighter
00:16:07and better.
00:16:08The Surface keyboard looks awesome, right, because it's totally wireless.
00:16:11Yeah.
00:16:12That's always kind of the way, right?
00:16:13Like, Microsoft has done this before, where they go and they say, all you OEMs, you're
00:16:17going to have to swarm around this.
00:16:19It's going to be the Netbooker or touch computers or whatever, but you're going to have to start
00:16:22making these.
00:16:23Touch computers?
00:16:24Yeah.
00:16:25You got to touch the screen, right?
00:16:26And in this case, this is the swarm around the dumbest name alive.
00:16:32But they recognize Apple's coming for us.
00:16:36Everybody to your point, Nealey, you say this all the time.
00:16:39The computer is no longer about the rest of the computer.
00:16:41It's about the browser, and Microsoft has to compete with that.
00:16:46That is an existential crisis for Microsoft, right?
00:16:49If everybody just says, OK, I just need a Chromebook or whatever or my phone, that's
00:16:53bad for them.
00:16:54That's why they've put all this AI in.
00:16:56That's why they're really glomming on to this trend at the moment.
00:17:01And I don't know.
00:17:02These things will be really interesting.
00:17:03I'm really curious to see how fast they are, because Qualcomm's made these promises before,
00:17:08but this time they've got this whole new team behind it, which HP was like, well, you know,
00:17:12because I was like, what's different this time?
00:17:14You guys have released some real dog shit.
00:17:16It's probably broken, and I don't believe you.
00:17:18Yeah.
00:17:19And HP was like, well, it's a new team over there, so we're feeling confident.
00:17:23And I was like, OK, well, that's different.
00:17:25I mean, but we'll see, right?
00:17:26You just kind of have to hold your breath.
00:17:29Look, this is the thing about tech coverage, and I feel like we have said this many, many
00:17:34times, but this is like a new era and we just need to repeat ourselves.
00:17:38Eventually the products ship and then there's no hiding.
00:17:42And there's only two kinds of coverage in the world where the truth just outs.
00:17:47It's sports where one team wins and another team loses.
00:17:52And it's tech where you can hold the thing in your hand and it's it works or it doesn't.
00:17:59And like a lot of things have not worked recently.
00:18:03We are on an all time run of things not working.
00:18:06And a lot of the reason that things don't work is the underlying AI models are not
00:18:11reliable, which is something else you've been pointing out now for a couple of weeks.
00:18:15It you were making these huge bets and like it's like betting on a toddler.
00:18:22Like, are you going to are you going to stand up for a long time?
00:18:24Are you just going to tip over?
00:18:25Like, let's build the business around you.
00:18:28What was interesting was like some of the AI stuff that Microsoft was doing is stuff
00:18:32that we've already seen before.
00:18:33Right. Like like HP and a lot of these companies said, OK, you're going to buy one of
00:18:37these AI PCs.
00:18:38What the hell does that actually mean practically?
00:18:41And in HP's case, they were like, we've slapped it.
00:18:43We've like thrown in the chat GPT prompt window so you can talk to chat GPT 3.5 on an
00:18:50HP computer. And I was like, cool.
00:18:51I don't I don't care about that's not the answer.
00:18:53That's so definitively not the answer.
00:18:56But then the other thing they were doing was they were like, OK, well, you can also
00:18:58like we we can learn more about the computer to better optimize it.
00:19:02And that's something that we've seen from NVIDIA has been doing that for years now
00:19:05with DLSS. And so it's like, OK, well, that's actually useful and like a use of AI
00:19:12that I've seen in practice and seen at work.
00:19:14So I could almost get excited about that.
00:19:17I also think that's where recall comes in and is actually really important to this
00:19:20whole thing, because what I think Microsoft did well, both at the surface event on
00:19:25Monday and it build on Tuesday, is give people examples of what I can do on their
00:19:31computer. Yes.
00:19:32And the answer is not a chat bot that you could find at a website like that isn't
00:19:37that's nothing you have accomplished nothing if that's what you've done.
00:19:41But what Microsoft said is they and it was a lot of little things in spots, right,
00:19:44where they're like, I copy and paste, copy in one language, paste in another.
00:19:48Like it's you kind of have to do a million of those in order to make this case.
00:19:53But I think recall was the big swing where it was like, OK, here is one genuinely
00:19:58new thing you can do on an A.I.
00:20:00PC that you couldn't before.
00:20:01That is better because of A.I.
00:20:03And like in the whole A.I.
00:20:05world, we are severely lacking in that type of thing.
00:20:10Yes. And I feel like whether recall is any good, whether people want it, what we do
00:20:14with the privacy implications, all that aside, just the fact that Microsoft is like
00:20:18we found a new thing we can do now because of this felt really good to me.
00:20:23That is like, OK, you understand what this is actually for, which is things like it's
00:20:28for doing things.
00:20:29It's not for talking to a chat bot I can talk to in a web browser.
00:20:33It's not for a bunch of random nonsense that doesn't help anybody like it's for
00:20:38things. Yeah, I think Ryan Broderick, who writes the Garbage Day newsletter, has
00:20:42been consistently pointing out that the A.I.
00:20:45industry has to talk about A.G.I.
00:20:48in destroying the world to make their extremely boring demos have stakes.
00:20:54That's very true. You have to be like, it can see an orange.
00:20:58This will lead to the end of the world like you just find.
00:21:03But you're right that Microsoft laid out a particular vision of computing, which is
00:21:09you're using a computer all day.
00:21:11What if you could then interact with a computer in a way that remembered all of the
00:21:15things you were doing and that became your companion?
00:21:20And we should get into the reaction and the reality of that and how it might work in
00:21:24the privacy implications.
00:21:25I think all those things are really important.
00:21:26I just want to spend one second on Adele saying this is one of the two dreams people
00:21:30have had for a long time in the keynote because he's not wrong.
00:21:34Right. The idea that you live your life on the computer and all the things you do on
00:21:39your computer comprise your experiences and it would be cool if
00:21:44the computer could help you sort those out is in fact a dream.
00:21:48Yeah. Yes. And it requires like one bit of a philosophical shift, which is I think
00:21:53most people think about that dream in terms of just like walking around the world.
00:21:57Like what if you had an ambient computer or the A.R.
00:22:00glasses and you were just like asking questions and your your sort of IRL experiences
00:22:05were that thing. And Microsoft has been like, all right, we're like with HoloLens
00:22:09aside, like actually you live your life on the screen.
00:22:13So we can just build the thing on this on the screen and then we'll get to your eyes
00:22:17later. We'll put the computer on your face at a later time.
00:22:20What about the computer that's in front of your face?
00:22:22What if we made that do the thing that everyone wants?
00:22:25And that is a leap.
00:22:27It's actually kind of an interesting leap that Microsoft took first in this way that
00:22:32whereas everyone else has been chasing these glasses.
00:22:35And I just like it should be I think noting that he called it one of the two dreams
00:22:39everyone had. And I think people are like, is that the dream?
00:22:42And it's like, oh, actually, we've been talking to A.R.
00:22:43glasses for like a decade.
00:22:45And this is just that.
00:22:47But just digitally.
00:22:48And so once Microsoft is the company that actually like lives in the real world, unlike
00:22:52everybody else. Yeah.
00:22:53They're not just showing some weird concept videos of like the Microsoft kin, like
00:22:58whatever that is or the what was it?
00:23:00The papyrus. What was that thing called?
00:23:02The courier.
00:23:03Oh, the R.I.P.
00:23:05The courier. They probably made a thing called the papyrus at one point.
00:23:08I'm sure they will.
00:23:10Can I tell you an early story about Neil Patel's experiences with copyright
00:23:15infringement? You don't nobody remembers the kin.
00:23:18This is like a thing that happened to a small number of us on the Internet.
00:23:21But Microsoft, in the early iPhone days, instead of releasing a smartphone, released a
00:23:26teen focused feature phone called the Microsoft Kin.
00:23:29This is real. There is a kin one and a kin two.
00:23:32They were like, I don't know why they did this and they were not smartphones.
00:23:36They were legitimately feature phones that could like send MSN messages.
00:23:41And their marketing campaign was like beautiful young people in hip art districts of
00:23:45cities like skateboarding, talking on their feature phones.
00:23:48And I remixed their ads to the song Too Drunk to Fuck by the Dead Kennedys.
00:23:55And Microsoft immediately had YouTube take them down.
00:23:58Amazing. And I'm like, I'm like, that would just be a great TikTok now.
00:24:02Like, no one would even ask this question now.
00:24:04Anyway, if you're out there, do your thing, TikTok.
00:24:07The kin, by the way, we gave them horrible reviews before they even came out.
00:24:10Microsoft canceled them. This is a real victory of the Engadget days.
00:24:15Well, I don't know what we're talking about. Anyway, though, the products are real.
00:24:17That's what we're talking about. Not the Microsoft Kin.
00:24:19The products are real. You can, like, use it.
00:24:21And then the reaction to them is, I don't trust this at all.
00:24:25It's probably broken. I don't believe you.
00:24:27Yeah. Yeah.
00:24:29The reaction to Recall in particular was surprising to me because, like, I edited our
00:24:33story on it and I was like, this is cool.
00:24:35I'm really excited about this.
00:24:36Like, didn't think of the privacy stuff at all because I operate under the assumption if
00:24:41someone physically has your computer, then you're boned.
00:24:44Like, like you're screwed.
00:24:46If someone has your computer, you're done.
00:24:47It's the same word.
00:24:48Yeah, they're the same.
00:24:51Just in case people didn't understand what bone what means, I want to make sure our
00:24:55entire audience understands.
00:24:58But I just didn't.
00:24:59I was like, OK, cool.
00:25:00This is this is really neat.
00:25:02And I'm excited for my computer to be a better archive of things because that's what I
00:25:05use a computer for.
00:25:07And then a friend was like, have you heard about how pissed people are about Recall?
00:25:10And I was like, why?
00:25:11And they're like, because it records everything you do.
00:25:13And I was like, that's literally what a computer does.
00:25:15Yeah, that's like the point of the history tab of your browser.
00:25:18I was just about to say this is one of my favorite things to do to people is like people
00:25:22don't understand the extent to which this stuff is already being recorded.
00:25:26Like, go look at the cache files on your computer for what happens in all the apps on
00:25:31your computer like they already know.
00:25:34But I think, Kranz, to your point, the the thing about privacy, there are real
00:25:39interesting privacy implications here about like what happens if somebody gets hold of
00:25:42this? What if there are there going to be new kinds of malware that can get onto my
00:25:45computer and chase this stuff down?
00:25:46Like the stakes that go up slightly.
00:25:48But I do think part of the reaction was just reminding people of how much these
00:25:54devices already know.
00:25:56And the just the thing where it's like I'm I'm doing all of the stuff on here.
00:26:02Like this is in a very real way my life.
00:26:06And just the fact that that's being collected somewhere feels gross to be reminded
00:26:12of. Like, even though sort of intellectually, I understand that that's already the
00:26:16case. It's like when you realize that your ISP has access to every website that you go
00:26:22to on your phone, even if you're on like incognito, like no, like Verizon still
00:26:26knows it's still there.
00:26:27Like it's just people hate being reminded of that.
00:26:30And it is just such an unavoidable fact of being alive right now that it is how it is
00:26:35that I think it every time it comes up again, you're made to feel sort of powerless
00:26:39and helpless against this like incredible tide of all these electronics that know too
00:26:44much about me.
00:26:45Well, I think it's also the fact that it's got it's it's using A.I.
00:26:48Right. Like like that's a big part of it.
00:26:50And people are having this weird moment, especially this week.
00:26:53We're going to talk about it more with like what's going on with Scarlett Johansson
00:26:56later. But people are just having this sudden visceral reaction to A.I.
00:27:00And so this thing was like, yes, computers archive all your data.
00:27:04They have done that since the beginning of time.
00:27:06This is just more efficient at it.
00:27:09They were like that might have gone over a little easier if they hadn't also said, and
00:27:12we're going to use A.I.
00:27:13to do it all. Because even though the A.I.
00:27:15everything is happening, according to Microsoft, you know, security researchers will do
00:27:19their thing. Everything is happening on the computer.
00:27:22It is not going into the cloud.
00:27:24None of this is being shared anywhere.
00:27:25The it's using the MPU to process this stuff.
00:27:28All of it's happening there.
00:27:29So theoretically, it is no different than just using your computer as normal.
00:27:33Only now, if a bad person gets a hold of your computer, they're going to have a little
00:27:38easier time recovering everything you do.
00:27:42That's it. But that you put A.I.
00:27:44in there and people are like, burn it to the ground.
00:27:46Well, the whole road of that is so fascinating to me because I was talking to Danceroker,
00:27:50the CEO of this company called Rewind, which has been doing a third party version of this
00:27:54on Macs for the last, I think, year or so now.
00:27:57It's another one that it uses basically like screen recording and your device audio to
00:28:02pull out a lot of this same information.
00:28:04And they actually just launched a new version that syncs in the cloud because the
00:28:10overwhelming feedback from people was either hell no or hell yes, the hell no people
00:28:16you're never going to get. And what the hell yes, people wanted was for all of this to
00:28:21be available to them in more places.
00:28:22And so it's like we're actually in this bonkers divide where there is a set of people
00:28:26who, like as soon as you present them, the beginning of the road are like, absolutely
00:28:30not. And just like nope their way out of this whole technological transition.
00:28:34And then there are a bunch of people for whom the privacy stuff is actually going to be
00:28:39a hindrance.
00:28:40Yeah, more than anything else.
00:28:41And they're going to be people who are like, well, why can't I access everything that I
00:28:44did on my other computer from my work computer?
00:28:47And then Microsoft is going to be in this horrible position of being like, well, we
00:28:50have to do the less private thing because it's actually what our users want.
00:28:53And it is just it just like exacerbates that divide further and further.
00:28:58And it just I don't know, it just feels crazy to me.
00:29:00Like the Rewind folks were like, I don't know what you want from us.
00:29:03We tried to do it as private as we could.
00:29:04And the people who used it didn't want that anymore.
00:29:06So there's two things about that that I think are fascinating and they are expressed
00:29:10sort of in very tangible ways than I think in very esoteric ways.
00:29:15So the very tangible way I did the thing when I interviewed Sundar where I handed him
00:29:19my phone to look at Google search results and we ran that clip.
00:29:22The clip is like doing bonkers on TikTok.
00:29:24And in the clip, as a joke, I say to Sundar Pichai, don't dig through my phone.
00:29:32Like of all the things you were ever going to say to a CEO, like a billionaire CEO of
00:29:36the largest company, don't dig through like, literally, like, who am I?
00:29:39Of course, I said, like, I couldn't resist it, you know, but it was just a joke.
00:29:44It's just like a way to be human when you hand someone your phone.
00:29:48And the people in the comments are like, he already knows everything.
00:29:53Like, why would you tell him not to dig through your phone?
00:29:55Like he's he's the CEO of Google.
00:29:56Like if you want, he can just he can already dig through your phone.
00:29:59And I think that's nihilism, right?
00:30:02Like there's an element of nihilism there, which is like it's already over.
00:30:05Like you might as well embrace it and be excited about it.
00:30:07And then there's an element of nihilism that's like, well, I can't stop it.
00:30:10I'm going to live off the grid for the rest of my life.
00:30:12And that's one thing.
00:30:13The more esoteric thing that I think about all the time is as more and more of these
00:30:18companies get more and more into AI content generation, the thing that they are promising
00:30:25the people who pay the money, which is in large part advertisers, is that they will make
00:30:29auto-generated ads on their platforms.
00:30:32So like Google will make auto-generated AI-created ads on YouTube.
00:30:37Meta will do it on Instagram.
00:30:38TikTok will do it on TikTok.
00:30:39TikTok actually announced AI-generated ads this week.
00:30:43And Mia Sato is writing with them.
00:30:47You're going to get to a place where you get extremely well-targeted custom content, and
00:30:52the people who are like Facebook is listening to me are going to lose their minds.
00:30:56Yes.
00:30:57Right?
00:30:57Like the idea that you have privacy then is like out the window.
00:31:02Right now people think Facebook is listening to them because it can target you based on
00:31:06your Wi-Fi networks, which is the simplest thing.
00:31:09It just knows what IP address you're on.
00:31:10It knows that your friends have been on that IP address.
00:31:13And it'll serve some ads across based on interest targeting.
00:31:18It's not smart.
00:31:19It's not stupid.
00:31:20It's like somewhere in the middle.
00:31:22It's a pretty blunt instrument.
00:31:24But people are convinced that Facebook is listening to them.
00:31:27You're going to get to a place where it knows a whole lot about you.
00:31:31And then it knows that you're on the same Wi-Fi network as your friend that you talked
00:31:34to about vacations in Mexico.
00:31:36And then it delivers you a video of you in Mexico.
00:31:41What?
00:31:43Like people are going to lose their minds.
00:31:45And then I think that, well, I don't have any privacy anyway.
00:31:47I might as well just give the cloud provider of recall or rewind everything.
00:31:52I think that might actually change in a dramatic way very quickly at that point.
00:31:57Maybe.
00:31:59It really does seem like either the pendulum is going to swing aggressively at some point soon.
00:32:04Or the pendulum is just going to burst through the side.
00:32:09No, you know what's going to happen.
00:32:10Yeah, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory style.
00:32:12Just launch through the ceiling and be gone.
00:32:16One thing.
00:32:22What's going to happen to the privacy pendulum?
00:32:23It's going to space.
00:32:28One thing I will note, you mentioned that the ISPs can see everything.
00:32:32You would think that there would be a federal privacy bill, which there is not.
00:32:35One of the first things that the Republican Congress in Trump's first term did,
00:32:40literally one of the first things,
00:32:42was they threw out a privacy bill that would have kept your data private from ISPs.
00:32:46Yep.
00:32:47It was just like, hey, we're here.
00:32:48What should we do?
00:32:49We should make it so AT&T can read all your shit.
00:32:52Like immediate.
00:32:54It was an outrage.
00:32:56And we have just not fixed that.
00:32:58In years.
00:32:58I tend to feel like that tension is only going to be resolved
00:33:03when Congress actually knows what a computer is, how it works, how to use it.
00:33:10Well, here's what a computer is.
00:33:11It is an AI-powered device that, if you say the right words, will bang you.
00:33:18Yeah.
00:33:18And I think Congress will react to that idea.
00:33:23But it will also, if you say the wrong words, share all the photos of you banging it.
00:33:28If you want to get something done in this United States Congress, it's blackmail and booty.
00:33:32Those are your choices.
00:33:34It's real.
00:33:36So honestly, this is a great thing, right?
00:33:39I think this tension has been there for a very long time.
00:33:42And I think you're right that we are coming to a point where something's going to have to give.
00:33:47These companies like Microsoft are really pushing for stuff that is just completely
00:33:52counter to what we understand of privacy and security and what we want.
00:33:55And the only way that's going to change is if someone else says, hey, you can't do that.
00:34:01Yeah.
00:34:01I think the recall stuff is really interesting.
00:34:03I think it's, to your point, David, it can't see what you're doing on your phone, right?
00:34:07So this promise that you have this companion that is sort of living your digital life with you,
00:34:11except for what you do on your phone, that's weird, right?
00:34:15And then you get into, should this be a cloud service?
00:34:17Are you running a background app on an Android phone?
00:34:19Like, Apple's not going to let them do it, right?
00:34:22No.
00:34:22Maybe Apple does it on its own on iOS in a couple weeks.
00:34:25We're, they're going to have to bridge that gap, I think, for this to be truly successful.
00:34:30But then there's the piece where, yeah, we're going to have to hold them accountable to this
00:34:35thing being totally local.
00:34:37And a bunch of other AI stuff on this device is hybridized, right?
00:34:40Like the paint example is hybridized.
00:34:43I don't know.
00:34:43And that's why I don't want to seem overly skeptical.
00:34:45I really, I can see the jump that Microsoft made from AR glasses are too hard.
00:34:51We have a bunch of AI.
00:34:52We can basically do AR on Windows.
00:34:56AR is not the right word, but this sort of augmented experience in Windows for your digital
00:35:01life.
00:35:02Multimodal, you mean?
00:35:04Yeah.
00:35:04Yeah, there's something there.
00:35:06Copilot's almost exactly the right word, right?
00:35:10You're just doing stuff on a computer, and you're asking questions about the experiences
00:35:13you're having.
00:35:15A lot of people have thought that would happen first in glasses on your face.
00:35:17And Microsoft is like, what if it happens on the screen in front of you?
00:35:20Great.
00:35:21I love this.
00:35:21I just want to point out, you said copilot is the right word.
00:35:23Where do you stand on copilot plus PCs?
00:35:26Awful.
00:35:27Awful, awful, awful.
00:35:31Even Microsoft has trouble saying the phrase copilot plus PCs.
00:35:36Like, if you go back and watch, there are a bunch of people who clearly practice very
00:35:40hard who still occasionally struggle to say the phrase copilot plus PCs.
00:35:45It's terrible.
00:35:46Yeah.
00:35:46Cool product, bad name.
00:35:48I just want to figure out.
00:35:50Why didn't they just call them AI PCs?
00:35:52Like, did HP get there first?
00:35:52Just call them copilot PCs.
00:35:54What the hell is the plus doing there?
00:35:57It's not a streaming service.
00:35:59What are we doing here?
00:36:01Do any of these features on Windows have a monthly fee?
00:36:04No, I don't think so, yeah.
00:36:05Not as far as we know, I don't think.
00:36:07Some of it requires an open AI API key, which you have to pay for.
00:36:15Like, some of the copy and paste stuff you can only do if you have the,
00:36:19I think, the GPT-4 key or something.
00:36:21But most of this stuff seems like it's going to come baked into Windows,
00:36:25which itself is rapidly becoming a subscription service.
00:36:28So I think that's where you end up getting charged for it,
00:36:30is like as a Microsoft 365 thing rather than a specific AI thing.
00:36:36I do love the mental image of like three to five years from now,
00:36:39the extremely cheap Acer PC in a Walmart with like the dented cardboard sign that's like
00:36:44copy and paste in multiple languages.
00:36:46And it's just like sitting in Racine, Wisconsin.
00:36:50And everyone's like, why?
00:36:52And that costs a monthly fee.
00:36:53And they're like, why aren't these computers selling?
00:36:55Like, that's going to be great for everybody.
00:36:57We should take a break.
00:36:58That's just Build.
00:37:00There's more.
00:37:02There's yet more AI news this week.
00:37:04We'll come back.
00:37:05We'll talk about Scarlett Johansson.
00:37:07It's really what we're going to do here on The Verge cast.
00:37:08We'll be right back.
00:37:13Okay, we're back.
00:37:14There are two things I forgot to say about Build.
00:37:16One of which was the only reason I wanted to talk about Build.
00:37:20So I'll get to it.
00:37:20The second, though, I should just point out in the scheme of it's probably broken.
00:37:25I don't believe you.
00:37:26There was a Microsoft Services outage that took down CoPilot,
00:37:30ChatGPT Search, and DuckDuckGo.
00:37:34Because it relies on the Bing index.
00:37:37Well, Bing and ChatGPT Search are the same.
00:37:40Right?
00:37:40There was like a Bing outage.
00:37:42Like the Bing API went down and everything else next to it went down.
00:37:46It's like when AWS goes down and all of a sudden all the apps that everyone uses
00:37:50just disappear off the internet.
00:37:52It's nice to be reminded that the internet basically only exists in like four places.
00:37:57I'm sure the Bing team was like, people noticed Bing was down.
00:38:01Just because DuckDuckGo was down.
00:38:04So that's good.
00:38:05The second thing I want to note, and again, I think this is the most important news of the week,
00:38:11is, yes, many of the traditional PC companies announced CoPilot Plus PCs, including Samsung.
00:38:19And if you have been tracking Samsung, you will know that Samsung recently instituted
00:38:24six-day work weeks for its executives to, quote, inject a sense of crisis into the company.
00:38:31Not into, they did not institute six-day work weeks for their engineers or for the executives.
00:38:38You get a bunch of executives working on Saturdays, you get crazy ideas.
00:38:44Which I have taken to calling Saturday Samsung.
00:38:48So Samsung's CoPilot PC.
00:38:49This is a real thing.
00:38:51So if you buy the new Galaxy Book 4 Edge, by the way, there's no space between book and 4,
00:38:56but a space between 4 and Edge.
00:38:59All right.
00:38:59Do you realize that the name of that is the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge CoPilot Plus PC?
00:39:05That makes me want to throw things.
00:39:07I'm saying you had the extra day on Saturday.
00:39:09You could have gotten rid of a couple words.
00:39:11All right.
00:39:13But the people at Samsung, in their quest to inject a sense of crisis into the company,
00:39:20have decided that their single best idea is to just give away TVs.
00:39:25Yeah.
00:39:27So the previous one of these we covered, the previous iteration of Saturday Samsung
00:39:31was that if you bought a frame TV, you got another TV, which is perfect.
00:39:35But if you buy a Galaxy Book 4 Edge, again, there's no space between book and 4,
00:39:40but a space between 4 and Edge.
00:39:42A Galaxy Book 4 Edge CoPilot Plus PC, you do receive a 50-inch crystal UHD 4K TV.
00:39:50Sick.
00:39:51This is the plan.
00:39:52I don't know what to say.
00:39:53What's the MSRP on that?
00:39:54It's $379.
00:39:56They're just throwing you a $300 TV.
00:39:58I'm sure it looks like absolute trash.
00:40:00I'm sure it's the same panel as a frame TV.
00:40:02I was going to say.
00:40:04Just a single LED backlight, just shining gray in the dark.
00:40:09But I just love that Samsung, they've got all the executives that are there on Saturday.
00:40:13Just how are we going to...
00:40:14It's a crisis, you guys.
00:40:17How are we going to bring the stock price back up?
00:40:19And they're like, here's what we're going to do.
00:40:21Everybody gets a 50-inch TV, no matter what.
00:40:24Well, you know that before that, somebody was like,
00:40:27what if we made them cheaper?
00:40:28Someone's like, no, no, no, no, no.
00:40:30No, no, just get rid of them.
00:40:32We're going to go the other way.
00:40:33But you also get a television.
00:40:35We're going to find the $380 of margin in every other product.
00:40:39And you know what everybody loves is a free garbage 50-inch TV.
00:40:44If you buy a TV, you get another TV.
00:40:46You buy Chromebook, you get a TV.
00:40:48You buy our brand new state-of-the-art Copilot Plus laptop, free TV.
00:40:53That'll do it.
00:40:55You're considering a Surface?
00:40:56Does a Surface come with a free TV?
00:40:59I'm telling you, it's great.
00:41:03This year of Saturdays is going to be amazing.
00:41:05OK, sorry.
00:41:07Literally, I said to David and Alex before we started the show,
00:41:10the only thing I wanted to talk about was Saturday Samsung, and we forgot.
00:41:14It's my fault.
00:41:15I'm just excited.
00:41:16I could keep going another hour on Saturday Samsung.
00:41:19All right, we should talk about OpenAI, who I would say did not have
00:41:23as successful of a week in AI as Microsoft.
00:41:29That's fair, right?
00:41:29Even though they're Microsoft's big partner, Sam Altman was on stage at Build.
00:41:34But I would characterize OpenAI's week as definite.
00:41:39Yeah.
00:41:40Own goal was a phrase I heard used a lot.
00:41:44And it really is like a record week for don't tweet as advice to give on the internet.
00:41:51Really one of the all-time what-if-you-just-didn't-tweet moments from Sam Altman this week.
00:41:57All right, let's run through it.
00:41:59It's not a complicated story.
00:42:00It is getting more and more complicated as more people talk, which is bad.
00:42:04That is a bad sign.
00:42:06If a seemingly simple story starts to get more and more complicated, lawyers are going to get money.
00:42:13I will remind you what my contracts professor in law school used to say.
00:42:18Stuart McCauley, why did this case get filed?
00:42:20And we'd all say some idealistic first-year law school bullshit.
00:42:23And he would say, no, the lawyers wanted a BMW.
00:42:27A lot of lawyers are getting BMWs at the end of this train.
00:42:30Charlotte Johansson's lawyer is going to be driving a really nice car.
00:42:34He's like, I'm good.
00:42:35He bought it from Disney.
00:42:36Yeah, he pre-purchased the BMW.
00:42:38He's getting a Rivian this time.
00:42:39He's like, just put a standing tab at the BMW dealership.
00:42:44Just whatever M is coming out next, just give me one of those.
00:42:47Although I've heard the XM is not great.
00:42:49Anyway, OK, so here's the basic rundown.
00:42:53They announced GPT 4.0, which in classic, I think it's broken.
00:42:57I don't believe you appears to hallucinate more than GPT 4.0.
00:43:01Great.
00:43:02But the headline feature of 4.0 is it's multimodal.
00:43:06O is for Omni.
00:43:07It can look at stuff.
00:43:08It can talk to you.
00:43:09You can talk to it.
00:43:10And it has these because it's multimodal.
00:43:13A lot of the demos are people chatting to it.
00:43:16And then OpenAI had these voices.
00:43:19They already had them.
00:43:21One of them was called Sky.
00:43:23Which was a woman.
00:43:25But because of these demos, which were very voice heavy and very personality driven,
00:43:30because that's the other big feature of 4.0.
00:43:33A lot of people noticed that the Sky voice sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson.
00:43:38And that Sky in particular made a lot of people feel flirtatious.
00:43:43Right, Alex?
00:43:44I would say that's like.
00:43:45I think that's an accurate assessment of things.
00:43:47People got a little horny for Sky there.
00:43:49Yeah, a lot of people thought they could bang an iPad last week.
00:43:51Yeah, it was uncomfortable for everyone.
00:43:53That's just.
00:43:53I mean, I don't know how else to characterize the way people feel about AI right now.
00:43:57Except an awful lot of people want to bang an iPad.
00:44:01It's fine.
00:44:02You know, it's like some people want to give all their privacy away to a cloud.
00:44:05Other people, they have a particular dream.
00:44:07Okay, that's fine.
00:44:08You can.
00:44:08That was the other dream Satya Nadella was talking about.
00:44:11Dream number two.
00:44:12Yeah.
00:44:12What if you could tag an iPad?
00:44:15All right.
00:44:16So there's a lot of conversation about this voice.
00:44:20Whether it sounds like Scarlett Johansson or not.
00:44:22And there's like a reasonable debate.
00:44:24Some people are like, absolutely not.
00:44:25Some people like it does.
00:44:27People have asked open AI executives very directly.
00:44:30Our own Kylie Robinson asked Mira Marotti directly.
00:44:33And she said, no, it was not our intention.
00:44:35No thought of this whatsoever.
00:44:37And then Sam Altman tweets the word her, which is the movie from Spike Jonze.
00:44:42It stars Scarlett Johansson.
00:44:43Which he says is one of his favorite movies of all time and an inspiration.
00:44:47Yeah, great.
00:44:49Great.
00:44:50So now he's undone his poor executive who was saying this was not the point.
00:44:55And then a very strange thing happens.
00:44:57Open AI sort of out of nowhere publishes a blog post.
00:44:59It's like, here's how we selected our voices.
00:45:02That's a weird time to do it.
00:45:03And it's just a very anodyne corporate blog post.
00:45:07It's like, we had a process.
00:45:08We did casting directors, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:45:10Then they had our Mia David, our AI reporter Mia David,
00:45:14talk to one of their executives to go through it.
00:45:17They would not say that.
00:45:19No, they pulled it first.
00:45:21They pulled it before they explained it.
00:45:23Yeah.
00:45:24Okay.
00:45:25So it's like a very normal corporate anodyne blog post.
00:45:29Then they pull the voice.
00:45:31Like almost immediately after that, they pull the voice.
00:45:33Sky.
00:45:34Sky and say, based on concerns we've heard, we're pulling this voice.
00:45:39Which is interesting because there's only one person's concern that matters.
00:45:44And she is a very powerful actress in Hollywood
00:45:46who was married to the head writer of Saturday Night Live.
00:45:49So can I just pause you on that moment?
00:45:52I'm curious if you guys had the same reaction that I did in that moment,
00:45:56which is obviously Scarlett Johansson is mad.
00:46:00I just couldn't think of any other,
00:46:02because this happened on Sunday night or like overnight into Monday morning.
00:46:06I could not imagine a world in which they pulled this voice
00:46:11and put up this long blog post, which essentially amounted to one of those,
00:46:14like my, we didn't copy Scarlett Johansson t-shirt is raising a lot of questions
00:46:19answered by my, we didn't copy Scarlett Johansson t-shirt.
00:46:22One of those moments.
00:46:23And we were, we were covering this thing.
00:46:25Like, okay.
00:46:26They were, they say they're just trying to allay confusion.
00:46:28Like I couldn't think of another plausible reason other than Scarlett is yelling.
00:46:34Yes.
00:46:34Right.
00:46:35Like, was that your reaction?
00:46:35That's the only thing that's happening here.
00:46:38Yeah.
00:46:38Okay.
00:46:38Then they called me and David, one of our reporters.
00:46:41And so we have an interview with our executive.
00:46:44They would not tell Mia the timeline.
00:46:47The only question is, did Scarlett call you?
00:46:50And then you pulled the voice.
00:46:51Right.
00:46:51Legitimately the only question here.
00:46:53And they're like, we heard these concerns.
00:46:54We want to get out.
00:46:55We pulled the voice.
00:46:56And they just like, wouldn't say the timeline weird.
00:46:58So we run the story.
00:46:59They said, here's the headline.
00:47:02Our headline is like pretty anodyne, right?
00:47:04It's also just like more open AI talking.
00:47:07We pulled this voice out of concerns.
00:47:09Here's, here's some more color on that, except they won't say what the timeline is.
00:47:15Hours later, Scarlett Janssen has a statement out first to Bobby Allen at NPR.
00:47:18And then widely to everyone that says, basically like Sam Altman called me to be the voice.
00:47:25Of chat GBT.
00:47:26And I said, no.
00:47:27And then, you know, several weeks later, I'm listening to these demos and it sounds like my
00:47:32voice, I lawyered up and I want to know exactly how this happened.
00:47:37Well, he called her like two days before the launch.
00:47:40Like he called her initially his, her timeline that she outlines is like, they talked, they
00:47:45chatted a while ago about it.
00:47:46And she thought about it.
00:47:47And then she said, no, I don't want to do the voice.
00:47:49And he's like, cool.
00:47:50Didn't hear from him for a while.
00:47:51Two days before the demo, Sam Altman calls her and is like, Hey, you reconsidered?
00:47:56And she's like, no, I don't want to do it.
00:47:58And he's like, cool.
00:47:59And then she hears voice.
00:48:00It sounds like her.
00:48:01Yeah.
00:48:01That was a perfect Sam Altman impression, by the way, Alex.
00:48:03Like I know you've been working on that for a while.
00:48:05It's really good.
00:48:07It sounded like it was in all lowercase.
00:48:12Then there's just one last piece of reporting from Natasha Tiku, another former verge reporter
00:48:16at the Washington Post.
00:48:17She has talked to the agent of the voice actress that OpenAI cast for the Sky Voice.
00:48:21Both the actress and the agent wish to remain anonymous.
00:48:25I have a lot of feelings about that, but they wish to remain anonymous.
00:48:27And she's seen some documents that lay out a version of the timeline that says OpenAI
00:48:32actually recorded all this and never said to this actress, sound like Swarovski Hanson.
00:48:36Maybe there's some blurriness here.
00:48:38There's some old case law in the mix here.
00:48:41We did a story where we talked to some lawyers.
00:48:43There's a very famous case with Tom Waits, who has a very distinctive voice.
00:48:48By the way, Heath Ledger was basically doing Tom Waits impression in the dark night, which
00:48:52is very funny.
00:48:53But that's the voice.
00:48:54If you think about Heath Ledger in the dark night, Tom Waits has this very distinctive
00:48:57voice.
00:48:57There's a very famous commercial where they asked the singer to sound like Tom Waits.
00:49:01Tom Waits sued, won.
00:49:03There are other cases like this where people's likeness get used without their permission.
00:49:08My favorite one of this is Vanna White v.
00:49:11Samsung.
00:49:13Maybe the best of these cases that exists.
00:49:15Samsung ran a commercial that looked like Wheel of Fortune, where a robot was turning
00:49:20the letters and Vanna White said, that robot is me.
00:49:24And won.
00:49:25Wow.
00:49:25Yeah.
00:49:27She's got like a monopoly.
00:49:28It is one of all of the cases I ever read in law school.
00:49:31I was like, this is why I came here.
00:49:33Vanna White v.
00:49:34Samsung Electronics.
00:49:36So there's like a lot of these weird cases.
00:49:37Like you are not allowed to trade in particular in New York and California, which is where
00:49:42most of the celebrities are.
00:49:44The state law does not allow you to trade on the license of celebrities to sell your
00:49:48products.
00:49:49That's just a thing.
00:49:50We have not gotten to, we cloned a voice using another actress and everyone got confused.
00:49:57That's new.
00:49:58That's a new problem for our court system that I'm very much looking forward to seeing
00:50:01litigated.
00:50:03But, but we're in this place where we've expanded the boundary of what you can take.
00:50:08Right.
00:50:09And the AI companies are really just taking a lot of stuff without asking for a lot of
00:50:13permission.
00:50:14And I think this one with Scarlett Johansson and Sam Altman in this completely insane timeline
00:50:19that is getting complicated, the more anyone talks is, I think really, you know, we talked
00:50:24about in the earlier segment, people have really, really like antagonistic feelings
00:50:29towards AI because it feels like it's taking stuff from us.
00:50:33And a famous actress who was in a bunch of Marvel movies, she's not the right adversary
00:50:40for Oprah.
00:50:40Who sued Disney.
00:50:42Who sued Disney, right?
00:50:43Like, I don't know, man.
00:50:45That's not the person you want to like mess with.
00:50:48Yeah, I was just kind of gobsmacked by this because, you know, I think like Lake Bell
00:50:53plays, does a really good Scarlett Johansson impression on an animated show where she's
00:50:59playing Black Widow and it's, she sounds a lot like her.
00:51:02It's great.
00:51:02But also she's playing Black Widow and there's a whole, there's like agreements in place
00:51:08and that's why it's allowed.
00:51:09This is, she, this person sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson.
00:51:14And then Sam Altman tweeted her clearly referencing this.
00:51:19He's talked about how much affection he has for that voice, for that concept.
00:51:24It's just like, oh, you really just kept walking into rakes on this one, dude.
00:51:29Just stop, stand still for a moment.
00:51:32Because yeah, they probably did hire this woman and she probably didn't know that she
00:51:37sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson or that that's why they hired her, right?
00:51:41There are so many weird twists and turns of all of this, right?
00:51:43Because then there's the question of, was this voice made to sound like Samantha from
00:51:50her or does it sound like Scarlett Johansson?
00:51:52And is there a distinction between those two things?
00:51:55And is that meaningful?
00:51:56And how much do people associate the voice of Samantha and the role of Samantha with
00:51:59Scarlett Johansson?
00:52:00That's just like, all of this is unprecedented in such bizarre ways.
00:52:04But the thing that keeps jumping out to me is that the immediate response was that, of
00:52:11course, open AI is wrong.
00:52:15Because of course, open AI would have just gone and ingested the movie and use that.
00:52:21I mean, we've seen the technology now that you can use five minutes of somebody's voice
00:52:24and spit out a pretty passable version of that voice.
00:52:28Just the immediate assumption that that's what open AI did was either find a person
00:52:33and tell them to do a Scarlett Johansson impression or screw all that, just train your
00:52:38model on Samantha in her and call it a day.
00:52:42This company has so aggressively lost the benefit of the doubt.
00:52:44It made me think of the iPad crush commercial in the same way.
00:52:48It's just like, this is a company that people do not trust and people think the worst of
00:52:54now and believe that their intentions are bad.
00:52:56And the thing with the open AI thing is I think the answer is probably some weird middle
00:53:02sketchy thing.
00:53:03And it seems like the open AI version of the story is that open AI ran a pretty normal
00:53:06process.
00:53:07And then Sam Altman, who is the CEO of open AI, just like weird, went rogue and started
00:53:12calling Scarlett Johansson.
00:53:13And now there are all these things out there about how Sam just desperately wants to be
00:53:17famous and it's making him make mistakes.
00:53:19And we've gone in all of these weird directions.
00:53:22Wait, hold on.
00:53:23Can I just say, I hate it when companies pretend their CEOs are idiots.
00:53:29Totally fair.
00:53:30Sam Altman is a billionaire.
00:53:32He is the founder of open AI.
00:53:34He is so much in charge of open AI that when the board of open AI fired him for being reckless
00:53:40and manipulative, the employees all staged a reverse coup and brought him back.
00:53:45That's like, yeah, that's a real thing that happened just a little bit ago.
00:53:51The board of directors was like, we don't trust Sam Altman and fired him.
00:53:57And he got his way back in the company.
00:53:59He has a new board of directors.
00:54:00And now a bunch of employees are quitting because open AI is generally abandoning its
00:54:05safety culture.
00:54:06And he's doing this reckless stuff.
00:54:08And I just don't buy it that the company is like, yeah, we are running responsibly.
00:54:11There's just this hothead that we reverse cooed back into the CEO role that we can't
00:54:16control.
00:54:17You can't.
00:54:18It's just a full lie on their part to be like, we have no control over him.
00:54:22It's like, well, he runs the company.
00:54:24So I agree with that.
00:54:25And yet I also find it absolutely plausible that the billionaire CEO who is kind of feeling
00:54:32himself would call Scarlett Johansson on the side and try to get rid of him.
00:54:35If I had a billion dollars and I was like, my robot can plausibly make Kevin Reuss think
00:54:39it's in love with him, I would call Scarlett Johansson.
00:54:41Yeah.
00:54:42You don't see what would happen.
00:54:43You don't tell these people who are doing the casting process who then you are happy
00:54:47to throw to the wolves after the fact.
00:54:50But like the bones of that version of the story do not seem implausible to me at all.
00:54:56But it also doesn't matter.
00:54:57He's the CEO of the company.
00:54:59It doesn't matter.
00:55:00Right.
00:55:00The part where they ultimately shipped the voice that sounded like her in every sense
00:55:05of that word.
00:55:07And he knew about it.
00:55:08And those were the demos.
00:55:09And I'm confident that he watched every second of those demos.
00:55:12He was in the tweeted word her.
00:55:15Yeah.
00:55:16Those are his choices.
00:55:17Yeah.
00:55:17He tweeted the word her.
00:55:19Like, it's so hard to undo that.
00:55:20By the way, your question about whether it's the movie her or Scarlett Johansson, I will
00:55:23offer you the 1995 case, Metro Goldwyn-Mayer v. American Honda Company, where Honda made
00:55:31an ad for the Civic Del Sol that looked a little bit too much like a James Bond movie
00:55:36and lost to MGM.
00:55:38Yes.
00:55:39It was not James Bond.
00:55:40They made too good a commercial.
00:55:41It was a guy in a suit jumping out.
00:55:44I don't remember the Civic Del Sol.
00:55:45That's not a high watermark in Civic design.
00:55:49But it was a Civic with a top that you could take off.
00:55:53And so the ad was like, a James Bond-like character is driving a Honda Civic.
00:55:58Very plausible.
00:55:59And he blows the top off and jumps out of the car and does some James Bond stuff.
00:56:03And MGM said, that is James Bond.
00:56:05You made James Bond.
00:56:06Wow.
00:56:07You can't have it.
00:56:08And they won.
00:56:09Yes.
00:56:10That's so dumb.
00:56:12I'm excited for us to go to court against OpenAI and say, you're a robot.
00:56:18The precedent by which we are suing you is MGM v. American.
00:56:22Have you seen the Civic Del Sol, Judge?
00:56:25MGM, by the way, also now owned by Amazon.
00:56:28Just one of those things.
00:56:30Just a weird moment in time.
00:56:34Because again, most of these cases took place in New York and California ages ago.
00:56:39Most of them are pretty normal ads.
00:56:43That's why you appropriate a celebrity's likeness to try to sell something.
00:56:46Those days are over.
00:56:48TikTok is full of weird, deepfake celebrities and just pure copyright infringement.
00:56:54The number of companies...
00:56:55Right now, if you run a regular company and you want to buy a regular ad and you're like,
00:56:59I'd like to use Taylor Swift to sell my towels.
00:57:02You can't.
00:57:03That's too expensive.
00:57:04If you're a super shady distributor of Alibaba towels and you're on TikTok,
00:57:10it's all Taylor Swift all day long.
00:57:11Deepfakes, baby.
00:57:13It's crazy.
00:57:14There's a gap here that's happening where the law has absolutely not caught up to reality
00:57:19because most of these cases are about big ad agencies and big companies with big budgets
00:57:23running ads.
00:57:25I don't know that...
00:57:27We're just in for a moment of chaos because the reality of what's happening on the ground is
00:57:32people do not care about the law.
00:57:33That's particularly IP law.
00:57:35And the big companies, Google, OpenAI, they are...
00:57:39The next generation of their technology is just founded on taken stuff,
00:57:44which is why OpenAI does not have the benefit of the doubt.
00:57:46Everyone believes they took whatever they want.
00:57:49And if they wanted to, they would just make a clone of Scarlett Johansson's voice.
00:57:54Whether or not they cast an actress who sounded just like her, it doesn't matter because
00:57:57the technology exists for them to just do it.
00:57:59And no one thinks they have the control to not do it.
00:58:02Weird.
00:58:03Yeah.
00:58:03A weird moment for them.
00:58:04Yeah.
00:58:05And at least from what I've heard so far the last couple of days,
00:58:09I'm curious if y'all have heard anything different, is that
00:58:13there's no indication so far that Scarlett Johansson is actually going to take real legal
00:58:18action.
00:58:19Here she put out that one statement and we don't know what's going to happen next.
00:58:22But that if she did, this would have a real chance of
00:58:27going somewhere and being pretty important and precedent-setting.
00:58:32In terms of like, it just feels like in so many ways we're itching for like the one
00:58:37weird AI lawsuit and like maybe it's the New York Times one,
00:58:40but it would be frankly a lot like wilder and weirder and more fun if it was Scarlett Johansson.
00:58:46Well, I think they're probably kind of different cases.
00:58:48Like they're targeting different things, but they get the same
00:58:51thrust of things, which is, can you just take shit?
00:58:54Yeah, like what are you allowed to do in the name of AI?
00:58:58Ultimately, it's can you just do stuff?
00:59:00Yeah, right.
00:59:01I mean, if I do it with a computer, it's fine, right?
00:59:04It's like, that's the answer.
00:59:05And look, there are very meaningful differences between what you can do at a computer and
00:59:09what you can do in real life.
00:59:09Like, for example, Alex, if I came to your house and took one of your Blu-rays away,
00:59:14that would be a crime for many reasons.
00:59:16One, just a crime against our friendship, you know?
00:59:18Right, I'd be very upset.
00:59:19But importantly, you would not have the Blu-ray anymore.
00:59:22Whereas if I came to your house and copied a file off your Plex server and left,
00:59:25I think you'd be like, one, our friendship is strengthened.
00:59:28And you would also have the original copy, your very legal copy of whatever content.
00:59:34I would have the Blu-ray still in my closet.
00:59:36Yes, that's correct.
00:59:39This is like a meaningful thing in copyright law.
00:59:41Whereas, you know, it's all founded on physical scarcity.
00:59:44It has not translated to the world of digital very well.
00:59:48On the other hand, I can just do whatever I want,
00:59:51because it's a computer is not a workable strategy either.
00:59:56You know, like there's some middle ground here that no one has ever really thought through.
01:00:00And I think that AI conversations, you know, this is a conversation I had with Sundar.
01:00:04Like, do you feel great about open AI training on YouTube?
01:00:07Okay, the web doesn't feel that way about you.
01:00:10And he was like, that's weird.
01:00:11You know, like everyone has to wrestle with those two ideas at the same time.
01:00:16While we're saying, hey, some of this technology is like really cool.
01:00:19Like you want some of this technology.
01:00:21Some of this stuff is really great for people who are differently abled, right?
01:00:25Like, how are we going to solve these problems?
01:00:28And Alex, I think you're definitely right that like the training lawsuit is a copyright lawsuit.
01:00:35And this other stuff is like a likeness lawsuit, a right of publicity lawsuit.
01:00:39They're different bodies of law that are very hard to distinguish for normal people.
01:00:44Normal people can't tell you the difference between a copyright and a trademark and a patent,
01:00:47right?
01:00:47Like, this is even more esoteric than that.
01:00:51And on top of it, sort of the inherent nature of it is that these are celebrities.
01:00:55Like you can't, you don't have a right of publicity if you don't have publicity, right?
01:01:00And like all of the law is built around celebrity.
01:01:03And so you're just going to get a sequence of people, of plaintiffs who are just the
01:01:08most sympathetic because they are going to be celebrities.
01:01:11Yep.
01:01:12And at some point, you know, like we did an episode, Sarah Jong and I did an episode
01:01:17of Decoder where we talked about the copyright law.
01:01:18And like, that feels like a time bomb waiting to go off.
01:01:21Something's going to happen with copyright law and training data.
01:01:24It is inevitable that one of those cases goes the wrong way because there's so many of them now.
01:01:29It feels inevitable that particularly these companies want to trade on famous voices.
01:01:35Even if it's not this case, I don't know, man, like Kevin Hart is going to be like,
01:01:40that sounds too much like me.
01:01:41I'm just like, it's Stu Amazon.
01:01:42Like, it's like one of those kinds of things is going to happen.
01:01:45I mean, it's the music thing, right?
01:01:47Like this, it's, it's all of the, the like copyright trolls coming after anyone who
01:01:52writes a song with power chords in guitars now.
01:01:56Like, we're going to do that again at a crazy scale.
01:01:58I feel it's a little, almost simpler than that because it's kind of straightforward
01:02:04that if Amazon had gone and released an Alexa voice, that was Kevin Hart,
01:02:08and it wasn't actually Kevin Hart, he would have sued.
01:02:10But Amazon went and said, Hey, Kevin Hart or Samuel L. Jackson or whoever,
01:02:14do you want to be a voice?
01:02:15No.
01:02:15But they helped him out.
01:02:16Samuel L. Jackson is a voice on Alexa.
01:02:18Yeah, no, yeah, they paid him.
01:02:20And so like, like, I think in this case, there's a lot of precedent of like,
01:02:24everybody else knew how to do this business.
01:02:26And OpenAI was like, YOLO.
01:02:30Yeah.
01:02:30By the way, I don't know what's wrong with me that I had to immediately think of it,
01:02:33that I had to quickly think of a very distinctive voice.
01:02:35And my mind went immediately to Kevin Hart.
01:02:38I wasn't going to comment on it, but I was going to comment on it to you later in Slack.
01:02:42It's a very distinctive voice.
01:02:43I just don't, I just don't know.
01:02:46I often think of you as the Kevin Hart of the Verge cast.
01:02:48It's time to take a break, David.
01:02:53And we'll see if you're back when we come back for the lightning round.
01:02:59Weird time.
01:03:00It's kind of broken, and I don't know if I believe you.
01:03:02We'll be right back.
01:03:07All right, we're back.
01:03:08It's time for the lightning round, sponsored by Kevin Hart.
01:03:12Kevin, if you're listening, you can send your lawyers at us,
01:03:15and we'll just ask you to sponsor the lightning round.
01:03:17That would be great content, actually.
01:03:19I'm confident you can afford it, Kevin.
01:03:21Two people on totally different planets, me and Kevin Hart's lawyer.
01:03:27Sir, you've been lying about Kevin Hart sponsoring your podcast,
01:03:30and me saying, would you like to?
01:03:32Let's make it true.
01:03:36These lies can be real between me and you.
01:03:40It's beautiful.
01:03:41Dreams do come true.
01:03:44All right, lightning round.
01:03:45We got to start with this one.
01:03:46It's maybe the most important lightning round item.
01:03:48The United States government, the Department of Justice,
01:03:50has sued Ticketmaster, Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster.
01:03:53They want to break it up.
01:03:55This has been a long time coming, I would say.
01:03:59This is Taylor Swift's lawsuit.
01:04:01It feels fully like Taylor Swift's lawsuit.
01:04:03Yeah, it really is.
01:04:05And this has been, I think, kind of in the wind ever since the merger happened.
01:04:11I mean, in 2010 was when the merger was.
01:04:14And even then, if I remember right, there was real, this should not be allowed energy.
01:04:19Oh, this was fully, if you want to ever make the case that Barack Obama was
01:04:23kind of like a bad president, his competition policy, where he just let this stuff slide,
01:04:28like his DOJ and his FTC just let this stuff slide all over the place, like full Reagan.
01:04:34This is the core of that argument.
01:04:36When people make it, like Obama presided over the Great Recession and all this other stuff
01:04:41in their recovery, part of it was, we are just going to let these mergers slide to bring the
01:04:46economy back.
01:04:47And now we're on the other side of it.
01:04:49You can also blame Ronald Reagan.
01:04:50I prefer to blame Ronald Reagan.
01:04:51We made an entire Decoder video blaming Ronald Reagan for Ticketmaster.
01:04:56You can watch that video.
01:04:57But basically, the heart of the argument is Ticketmaster, Live Nation, owns ticket sales,
01:05:02obviously promotion, artist management.
01:05:04They own all the venues.
01:05:05They own 60 of the top 100 venues in the United States.
01:05:08And so you just have this vertically integrated monopoly.
01:05:11And if an artist tries to screw with it, Ticketmaster crushes them, which means prices go up because
01:05:16there's no competition.
01:05:18It's actually, in a very funny way, it is sort of perfect textbook monopoly stuff.
01:05:24The allegations are so simple to understand.
01:05:27I actually encourage people to go read the lawsuit because it really is like, if you
01:05:30want to understand what a monopoly looks like, it is what these allegations say Live Nation
01:05:36and Ticketmaster does, which is own everything and just use that to beat the hell out of
01:05:41anybody who tries to own anything and come at you.
01:05:44And the threats that they are alleged to make against artists and venues who don't work
01:05:49with them, the ways that they raise fees to keep everybody out and self-deal to each other,
01:05:54it is pure monopoly stuff if all of these allegations are true.
01:05:57And at the end of it, at the very bottom of it, yep, prices are high, but service quality
01:06:02is low, right?
01:06:03They don't have to invest in the ticketing platform or the app or the website because
01:06:08who cares?
01:06:09Right.
01:06:09Which is why Ticketmaster broke.
01:06:11Yeah, which is why there's a crush of demand for Taylor Swift tickets, even after she told
01:06:14them there will be a crush of demand, can you handle it?
01:06:17And it still crashed and they didn't have to do anything because where are you going
01:06:20to go, Taylor?
01:06:22And I think once the United States government is like, where are you going to go, Taylor?
01:06:26She doesn't have choice.
01:06:29If Taylor Swift doesn't have options, there's a monopoly happening here.
01:06:33Then maybe we'll do something.
01:06:35But anyway, you can go read the lawsuit.
01:06:36And like I said, we'll drop the link.
01:06:38We made a long decoder about the whole buildup of this with a lot of great interviews in
01:06:42it.
01:06:42It was a pilot of our Explainer episode.
01:06:47So it was a fun one.
01:06:48All right, we got to say that one.
01:06:50Alex, what's your lightning round?
01:06:51Salt Spoon.
01:06:53Totally different move.
01:06:56Totally different.
01:06:56I actually have two and I feel this one is almost more important.
01:06:59Salt Spoon is the new Mad Max movie, right?
01:07:02That's what that's called.
01:07:03It's exactly what it's called.
01:07:04But we've talked before on the Verge cast about how you can use electricity to make
01:07:11people taste things a little differently.
01:07:13Andrew Marino did a really good Verge cast on it.
01:07:17Somebody else was like, what if we put those electrodes into a spoon?
01:07:20And so we could take things that aren't salty and make them more salty.
01:07:23And as someone who grew up low sodium because of their mom, hell yes.
01:07:28I am so excited for this.
01:07:30I didn't know what salt tasted like until I was like 16.
01:07:34This is incredible.
01:07:34I'm so excited.
01:07:36But they're only selling like 200 of them.
01:07:40And it doesn't work if you have heart problems, which most people on low sodium diets, that's
01:07:46why they're on them.
01:07:47It doesn't work if you're pregnant.
01:07:49So a lot of the people who might want to be on low sodium diets, this won't actually work
01:07:54for, but it's a salt spoon and that's cool.
01:07:58Yeah.
01:07:58When I read this, I thought it was a spoon that just dumped salt.
01:08:03No, I've got one of those in my kitchen right now.
01:08:06That's just called a spoon.
01:08:07Yeah.
01:08:08No, but that's just a real CES local news gadget.
01:08:11Like here's a spoon that precisely delivers.
01:08:13No, this one just shocks you into believing.
01:08:15There's salt, a different approach.
01:08:18I love that for them.
01:08:19And it's from the people who do like soy sauce.
01:08:20It's Kirin.
01:08:21Oh, nice.
01:08:22So they know salt.
01:08:24They should make a sriracha spoon.
01:08:26Oh my God.
01:08:27More work.
01:08:27They should just continue electrocuting my brain into flavor.
01:08:31Just trick my brain constantly, please.
01:08:34Yeah.
01:08:34All right, David, what you got?
01:08:37We have to talk about Humane, right?
01:08:40Everyone's favorite startup.
01:08:43There was a Bloomberg report this week that Humane is now looking for a buyer.
01:08:47And I believe the price it's looking for is somewhere between $750 million and a billion.
01:08:52It also was in that story that the company has raised $230 million.
01:08:57So it wants a 4X valuation.
01:08:59Yeah.
01:09:00At the top end.
01:09:01And I would remind you that it's that Humane.
01:09:05It's the one we've talked about.
01:09:07It's not a different B2B Humane that is very successful.
01:09:12Truly bold strategy to come out and say,
01:09:14I'm not surprised this company is looking for a buyer, right?
01:09:16I think the thing you hope for with your first product
01:09:20is that it gets you money to get to the second product,
01:09:23and then the second product is the one where you start to win,
01:09:25and that's where you go.
01:09:26That's the strategy.
01:09:27But if you flop on the first one,
01:09:30and holy God, does it look like they flopped on the first one,
01:09:34it's very hard to get out of that.
01:09:35So I'm not shocked that Humane is looking for a way out.
01:09:38I think, A, it's going to have a lot of trouble finding a buyer
01:09:41because this company is not full of people
01:09:43who are beloved in the tech industry, I would say.
01:09:48At the top.
01:09:49Yeah, at the top.
01:09:51Imran Chowdhury in particular, I would say,
01:09:53left Apple not beloved by people still at Apple.
01:09:59That's about as much as I can report on that,
01:10:01but I feel pretty good saying that.
01:10:05The rest of it is just, it is truly wild
01:10:09for this company to come out and say,
01:10:11we think we should get 4X what we've raised,
01:10:13and everyone who works here should get rich
01:10:15because of this terrible product that we've made.
01:10:17Okay, so two things.
01:10:19One, it's probably broken and I don't believe you.
01:10:24Real theme, I'm just telling you.
01:10:26Well, that one's definitely broken.
01:10:27Yeah, it's super broken and I don't believe you.
01:10:31I'm just saying, we caught a lot of heat
01:10:32for being mean at the TED Talk.
01:10:36Here we are.
01:10:37Second, let's go through the list, right?
01:10:39So Apple is out, they're not going to pay them the money,
01:10:42and I concur with your reporting,
01:10:45and that is also about as much as I can say.
01:10:47But if you're out in the mix, it's just out there.
01:10:51That's just information.
01:10:51Apple's not going to buy this company,
01:10:53especially because their entire pitch
01:10:55was we're going to obsolete the iPhone.
01:10:57Doesn't seem like the sort of thing
01:10:58Apple's going to invest in.
01:10:59Apple has the Apple Watch, they're going to be fine.
01:11:03They have Siri, which is a little shakeshare,
01:11:04but they've got the Apple Watch.
01:11:07Google, no, right?
01:11:08That feels like a no.
01:11:09They're still struggling to integrate Fitbit,
01:11:11and they don't need a laser projector.
01:11:13More hardware, both more hardware chops
01:11:16and more hardware issues than it can deal with.
01:11:20Google, for example, I'll just give you this,
01:11:21they just merged Android and the Pixel team
01:11:24under Rick Osterloh, who formerly ran the Pixel team,
01:11:28and all of hardware,
01:11:29and now he runs all the platforms too.
01:11:31So Rick has to keep Samsung happy, right?
01:11:35He now manages the whole ecosystem,
01:11:37which is really interesting, right?
01:11:40But can you, and he's got to figure out
01:11:42the rest of Fitbit, which is still messy,
01:11:45from what I understand, from V,
01:11:47you can't just throw a bunch of ex-Apple designers
01:11:49you thought they were good,
01:11:51running not your AI platform.
01:11:54Right, and a big part of what Humane, I suspect,
01:11:56is trying to sell is the operating system, right?
01:11:59Like they've always said,
01:12:01we are not just about the AI pin,
01:12:03like they want to be a platform.
01:12:05And this is a pitch you hear from everybody,
01:12:06but I suspect if you're going to pay anything
01:12:09like the price that they want,
01:12:11you think you're buying what has the potential
01:12:13to be a winning platform,
01:12:14not a bunch of hardware engineers.
01:12:16Like Google doesn't actually need more hardware engineers
01:12:18at this moment in time.
01:12:19Is it not just them trying to be like,
01:12:22everybody's really hot for AI right now,
01:12:24we shipped an AI thing, buy our AI thing.
01:12:28But their AI thing is open AI.
01:12:30Yeah, but Samsung's got Saturdays.
01:12:35If they wanted to do that,
01:12:36they should have sold four months ago, right?
01:12:39If you're just trying to capitalize,
01:12:41you sell before you ship and not after.
01:12:43Yeah, well, unless you're greedy
01:12:45and you think you actually like...
01:12:47Or they thought they were going to win.
01:12:48Yeah, they thought they were going to win.
01:12:50Which is fine, companies are allowed to work hard.
01:12:55How do I put this?
01:12:56There's no lack of sincerity in the Humane ecosystem, right?
01:13:01There might be some confusion, some delusion, but not...
01:13:05But they're not kidding.
01:13:06They're not insincere, right?
01:13:09Google's out, right?
01:13:10And I think Google's out just because
01:13:11the stuff runs on OpenAI's stack
01:13:13and Google doesn't run that.
01:13:15And they don't need more complication.
01:13:16Google, if anything, is trying to streamline, right?
01:13:19Microsoft is interesting.
01:13:20Microsoft runs a bunch of OpenAI stuff.
01:13:22They don't have mobile, right?
01:13:23There's lots of rumors.
01:13:25I think Satya Nadella is smarter than this.
01:13:28That's frankly just my belief there.
01:13:31I don't think he's like,
01:13:32yeah, we'll take a flyer on this nonsense.
01:13:35They're winning.
01:13:36He's like, I'm going to take on the MacBook Air.
01:13:39Yeah.
01:13:40But of all the possibles, Microsoft at the top,
01:13:43I just think Nadella is smarter than this distraction.
01:13:46Samsung loves bad, unfocused ideas.
01:13:49Yeah!
01:13:51They're in the mix.
01:13:52Love goofy hardware.
01:13:54A bunch of executives sitting around on Saturdays
01:13:56with nothing to do except do M&A deals.
01:13:58They're going to see that story on Saturday and be like, got it.
01:14:02Can you imagine the Humane team just being given Bali?
01:14:05Yeah, right?
01:14:05Bali?
01:14:06Go figure out Bali.
01:14:07Now the laser projector rolls around.
01:14:10Huh?
01:14:11Is that something?
01:14:15I could actually see it.
01:14:16And Samsung, like smart things,
01:14:18is always an interesting version of that.
01:14:19Samsung actually is.
01:14:21The Humane team running smart things is like a pure nightmare.
01:14:25Just a pure, absolute nightmare.
01:14:29Yeah, agreed.
01:14:30But Samsung has a history of
01:14:34actually following through on pretty big acquisitions
01:14:37in a way that I think could be interesting.
01:14:39I suspect the Humane team
01:14:41would not be psyched about working for Samsung.
01:14:44I don't think most of them would.
01:14:44But that is maybe the funniest possible outcome.
01:14:48They don't get laid off.
01:14:49I'm just stuck on Samsung as a history of falling for Apple.
01:14:51Have you used smart things, sir?
01:14:54It's still there.
01:14:55That's true.
01:14:56It's there.
01:14:56It's around.
01:14:57And I will say, for as much as I talk about the frame TV,
01:15:00the people who run the services are the boxy people
01:15:05because Samsung bought them a lot of boxes.
01:15:06Oh, yeah.
01:15:07Oh, boxy.
01:15:09RIP.
01:15:10I'm not saying this is great.
01:15:14I'm just saying it's true that Samsung buys things
01:15:17and then the people continue working there.
01:15:19Yeah.
01:15:20All right.
01:15:20So LG, I think, is the same, right?
01:15:23But they're not doing Saturdays.
01:15:25Right, but yeah, Samsung's ahead
01:15:26because they're in the office on Saturday.
01:15:28But if LG gets a whiff that Samsung might do,
01:15:30LG might buy it.
01:15:31LG famously bought WebOS,
01:15:34so a history of betting on doomed platforms
01:15:37and then turning them into television operating systems.
01:15:40You could see the humane.
01:15:42Cosmos.
01:15:42What if your TV had a laser projector
01:15:44and it projected under your hand?
01:15:47Pretty good.
01:15:48Amazon feels like a hard no.
01:15:51Right?
01:15:52That company is bringing,
01:15:55it's like getting smaller, not bigger.
01:15:57Panos is running all of hardware now.
01:15:59Yeah.
01:16:00Panos is there.
01:16:01Yeah, Panos is there.
01:16:02Panos Panay is in charge of Amazon devices and services.
01:16:06He's not going to go and be like,
01:16:08yeah, let's buy that
01:16:10and integrate that into Amazon's tech stack.
01:16:12If your question was which of these companies
01:16:15is most likely to ship something
01:16:17that resembles the AI pin in the next three years,
01:16:20I think it might be Amazon.
01:16:21I would agree.
01:16:22But I don't think Amazon would get to that point
01:16:26by acquiring humane.
01:16:27No, my question is,
01:16:28who will spend a billion dollars on humane?
01:16:32The answer to that is like Steve Mnuchin or something.
01:16:34Like, it's some weird AI pin.
01:16:38Exactly.
01:16:39I'm just saying my list is Samsung,
01:16:42LG if they get a whiff of Saturday Samsung,
01:16:47and then like distant 5,000th place third Microsoft.
01:16:52I think that's probably right.
01:16:54Who else has a billion dollars?
01:16:55Costco.
01:16:57It's Walmart.
01:16:58I'm just thinking like to be Oracle.
01:17:01Who thought about buying TikTok
01:17:02but would buy humane instead?
01:17:04It'll end up being like Verizon or Comcast
01:17:06who's just like really excited about a new...
01:17:10They're going to be like,
01:17:10this is your TV remote on your lapel
01:17:13and everybody's going to be like, no thank you.
01:17:15The idea of the humane design team
01:17:19bringing that energy to launching like
01:17:21the next FiOS remote.
01:17:26It's very good.
01:17:27That's compelling.
01:17:28Just like on stage at TED being like,
01:17:31you can turn the volume up and down.
01:17:34I do want to know though, by the way,
01:17:35if you're listening and you have an idea of a company
01:17:37that either might or should buy humane, tell us.
01:17:42Exxon.
01:17:42Vergecast at theverge.com.
01:17:44Call the hotline 866-VERGE11.
01:17:46I genuinely want to know
01:17:47because I bet there is an interesting match or two
01:17:50that we're not thinking of.
01:17:52Ford?
01:17:52I would love to know what they are.
01:17:53Ford.
01:17:53Ford, there you go.
01:17:55Drive your car with your,
01:17:57oh no, it's going to be Elon Musk
01:17:59and it's going to be Grok
01:18:00and it's just going to be the Grok hardware.
01:18:02Don't summon that.
01:18:03Rough.
01:18:04All right.
01:18:06We'll see what happens.
01:18:07Again, it's just a Bloomberg report.
01:18:09Humane itself has not said anything,
01:18:11but I strongly suspect they need to get out the game.
01:18:13I also suspect Rabbit's going to end up
01:18:15in the same spot very soon.
01:18:16All right.
01:18:17I got to do one more.
01:18:18I got to do one more.
01:18:20Apple.
01:18:22Sometimes you get photos on your phone
01:18:24and you're like, that's a terrible photo.
01:18:25You need to delete it.
01:18:26Or you're like, oh, that's too spicy to keep here
01:18:28in case my mom sees my photos and you delete it.
01:18:31And there was an unfortunate bug
01:18:33where those photos just popped back up
01:18:35into people's things, into their phones.
01:18:38And Apple said nothing,
01:18:41but they corrected it just with the latest OS update.
01:18:45So you should no longer have reappearing nudes
01:18:47or whatever else.
01:18:49And Apple has said nothing about that too.
01:18:52Yeah.
01:18:52It's weird to confirm a bug like this
01:18:55by issuing an iOS update and then saying nothing else.
01:18:59Yeah.
01:18:59Yeah.
01:19:00And they were like old.
01:19:02My understanding is it's like,
01:19:04not just, oh, a photo you deleted last night.
01:19:06It's like-
01:19:06So people are getting like years old photos, right?
01:19:08Yeah.
01:19:09So that's terrifying.
01:19:12But at the same time, with recall,
01:19:14I would have loved that.
01:19:15So I don't know where I stand on this,
01:19:17but I do stand on like, yeah,
01:19:19if I delete something, I generally want it
01:19:21deleted.
01:19:22Do you believe it's deleted, right?
01:19:24Yeah.
01:19:24Yeah.
01:19:24I want to believe it's deleted.
01:19:25I want to know where that data goes
01:19:27when I make a choice about it.
01:19:29And I think that's the difference
01:19:30between recall and this.
01:19:31Like recall, you will know where the data,
01:19:32theoretically, where the data goes
01:19:34once the security researchers actually figure that out.
01:19:37This we don't know.
01:19:38Big caveat.
01:19:39Big caveat.
01:19:41Yeah.
01:19:41This is weird.
01:19:42I think, you know, we are,
01:19:44part of our job is holding big companies accountable.
01:19:47And it is truly irresponsible
01:19:50for Apple to not say why this happened
01:19:52and what they did to fix it.
01:19:53There's a bunch of people on Reddit
01:19:55who love to argue with me on threads
01:19:56who are like, we figured it out
01:19:57and you're overhyping this.
01:19:58And it doesn't matter
01:20:00because we didn't cause the bug.
01:20:02We didn't fix the bug.
01:20:04It's great that you have a theory
01:20:05about why it happened.
01:20:07The theory sounds wonderfully plausible.
01:20:08I love it.
01:20:10I don't know what happened.
01:20:11Right.
01:20:11There's one party that knows what happened
01:20:13and they should be accountable for their mistake
01:20:15because this is a big mistake.
01:20:17And it's weird that we give them a pass.
01:20:19Yep.
01:20:19And so, you know, we can't force them to...
01:20:22All we can do is send emails.
01:20:24That's the...
01:20:26Sheriff Neely has got MimeStream
01:20:28and he pushes that button every day.
01:20:30Yep.
01:20:31That's all we can do.
01:20:32And we just can tell you
01:20:33they have not responded to any of our emails
01:20:35or any of our phone calls about this.
01:20:36And I think that's fundamentally irresponsible.
01:20:38Because you're playing with people's...
01:20:41Like some of the most personal data that exists.
01:20:44Anyway, hopefully they say something soon.
01:20:46If not, I'll just keep sending emails.
01:20:48What else is there to do?
01:20:49Yeah.
01:20:51In my administration, they would go straight to jail.
01:20:53Vote for Teller.
01:20:56Last one.
01:20:56I'm actually excited about this.
01:20:57Sonos Ace headphones are out.
01:20:59A shout out to Chris Welch,
01:21:00who covers every square inch of the Sonos beat
01:21:04to the point where I think Sonos...
01:21:06Like the Sonos Reddit waits for Chris to come around.
01:21:09And then Sonos itself is just like,
01:21:11oh no, Chris is here.
01:21:13It's great.
01:21:13He scooped the headphones, obviously.
01:21:15They look great.
01:21:17They're like a cross between the Sony vibe
01:21:20and an AirPods Max vibe.
01:21:21The $450 is expensive.
01:21:24The headline feature is,
01:21:25if you're watching TV on a Sonos soundbar,
01:21:26you can push a button
01:21:27and the audio will come to your headphones.
01:21:31I want this to be compelling to me.
01:21:33And it's not my use case for these things.
01:21:36I think that's really compelling if you are married
01:21:39and you live in a small home
01:21:42and you want to stay up late playing video games
01:21:44or you want to stay up late watching TV.
01:21:47Yeah.
01:21:47Nilay in his cavernous mansion wouldn't understand.
01:21:51Your house is just too big to fully appreciate.
01:21:55No, it's the real-time switching.
01:21:58I understand that sometimes you want to watch TV
01:22:00and listen to headphones.
01:22:01I got you.
01:22:02But the part where you're like,
01:22:02well, I started with the soundbar.
01:22:05Because they walk out of the room.
01:22:07They say, I'm going to bed.
01:22:08And now you're just like, boop, yeah.
01:22:10Oh yeah, I can see it.
01:22:11But that's the headline feature.
01:22:12By the way, that feature, oddly, is iOS only right now.
01:22:15Soon coming to Android, weird.
01:22:18Special audio, APTX, if you have Android as well.
01:22:21No high-res anywhere else.
01:22:23It's Bluetooth everywhere,
01:22:25except if you're doing the weird TV thing.
01:22:30Probably for battery life.
01:22:31And then obviously this all comes on the heels
01:22:34of the disastrous app launch,
01:22:36which Sonos won't come out and say,
01:22:38but it feels very obvious that they set the timing
01:22:41of the headphone launch.
01:22:42They needed the app for the headphones.
01:22:45And so then the app came out before it was ready.
01:22:49If any other sequence of events occurred
01:22:51to make the app come out before it was ready,
01:22:53I would be shocked.
01:22:54I wish Sonos would just say it.
01:22:57Chris talked to Patrick Spence, CEO of Sonos,
01:23:00and he was like, well, the app was just ready.
01:23:01And it's like, why didn't you just say
01:23:02we put out the app because the headphones were coming out?
01:23:05That would be fine.
01:23:06Or give people a choice.
01:23:07Don't update the app yet.
01:23:09Right, yeah, ship it as if you buy the headphones,
01:23:12here's the new version of our app.
01:23:14It's going to be rolled out to everybody before long.
01:23:16It's not a hard sequence of events to do.
01:23:20But instead, Sonos was like,
01:23:21oh, this doesn't have queue management,
01:23:23which is what everyone wants.
01:23:25Let's ship it anyway.
01:23:26So I don't, actually, I have no problems with this app.
01:23:28I'm the only person in America
01:23:29who has no problems with this app.
01:23:31Because we don't use the queue.
01:23:33We use playlists.
01:23:34Our playlists are in Spotify and Apple Music.
01:23:37And so, like, whatever.
01:23:40I just don't use the Sonos app.
01:23:42Right, that's what I mean.
01:23:43Like, Becky just uses AirPlay for our Sonos.
01:23:47It's fine.
01:23:48It is a little bit faster.
01:23:49I know other people have wild problems.
01:23:51Like, Casey Newton is like,
01:23:52I can't even set the volume on my speakers anymore.
01:23:56It's really bad if you have a local music collection
01:23:58that you care about a lot too, which is like,
01:24:00and Chris and I talked about this a couple weeks ago,
01:24:02that like, those are the core Sonos people,
01:24:05and have been for two decades.
01:24:07And Sonos just continues to try to drive them away
01:24:10in very strange ways.
01:24:11The headphones look sick, though.
01:24:13Because there's six of them.
01:24:15Yeah, right.
01:24:16This is the classic story.
01:24:17The company is chasing the bigger consumer market
01:24:19where the money is and the growth is.
01:24:21And then you've got these, like, very passionate users
01:24:24who are like, my entire life is one button app from 2004.
01:24:28And we are the people in the reddit.
01:24:30Yeah.
01:24:30Well, like, there's a dynamic there that I'm,
01:24:34as a person who redesigned our website,
01:24:35I'm aware of the people who are mad.
01:24:37Yeah.
01:24:38They've released apps before concurrently.
01:24:40They had the two versions of the last one.
01:24:42No, that was a disaster.
01:24:43It was horrible, but they had two.
01:24:45No, that's a disaster.
01:24:46Like, Sonos now-
01:24:47It's all bad.
01:24:47Sonos is just bad ass.
01:24:48Patrick has been on the show a bunch of times.
01:24:51We've talked to him about a lot of things,
01:24:52everything from spatial audio
01:24:54and like, how they design speakers,
01:24:57all the way to like, antitrust.
01:24:58Like, he's been on the show.
01:25:01They have mismanaged, in particular,
01:25:04these apps and what the apps do
01:25:06and how the apps work.
01:25:07Like, the S1 to S2 transition, disaster.
01:25:10The Sonos, like, we're going to trade in your old speakers
01:25:14ever, and then like, we're going to break the old ones
01:25:16and they undid it.
01:25:17That was bad.
01:25:17Like, there's this thing that they're,
01:25:20in particular, not good at.
01:25:22Which is wild because that's-
01:25:23They should get better at it.
01:25:24The magic of Sonos is how it works with all your stuff
01:25:28and it just talks to each other.
01:25:30It's supposed to be super smart
01:25:31and yet the app continues to be kind of dumb.
01:25:33Yeah, and again, I have not had-
01:25:37Because I don't use some of these features,
01:25:38like, what was it?
01:25:39Timers and alarm clocks are broken in this app.
01:25:42And the idea that I would set my alarm clock
01:25:43using the Sonos app is just, what?
01:25:46But like, if you are the person-
01:25:47But a lot of people do, yeah.
01:25:48Yeah, if you're the person whose alarm clock broke,
01:25:51like, you are mad.
01:25:52Yeah.
01:25:53That's a problem, right?
01:25:54Like, you should find a way to be like,
01:25:56okay, these core features,
01:25:58there's some of these core features
01:25:59where people just, like, build their lives.
01:26:01Like, alarm clocks, people build their lives around it.
01:26:04You have to respect it.
01:26:05And like, in this case, I think Sonos
01:26:08as they've gotten more and more consumer,
01:26:11they've sort of, like, gotten away from it.
01:26:12And they should just recalibrate that a little bit.
01:26:14That said, I have like 9,000 Sonos speakers.
01:26:16Like, I'm trapped in this ecosystem.
01:26:18Like, what are you gonna do?
01:26:19It's fine.
01:26:21All right, I think that's it.
01:26:24That's it.
01:26:24David, do you have another one?
01:26:25Nope, that's it.
01:26:27We're done.
01:26:27We gotta wrap this up.
01:26:28Spotify has a font.
01:26:30Spotify has a font.
01:26:31That's all, that's, I have, I have,
01:26:32that's all the information I have for you.
01:26:34Yeah, they might, Amazon might make you pay
01:26:37for Alexa once they add AI to it.
01:26:38It's like, that kind of stuff.
01:26:40Yeah.
01:26:40The big thing is that I'm gonna go
01:26:42try to call Scarlett Johansson now
01:26:44and see if she will voice Verge's AI as revenge.
01:26:48Do you like AI calling Jost to call her?
01:26:51Yeah.
01:26:51I will say a friend of mine was like,
01:26:54Google should just take this voice.
01:26:55They should just pay her
01:26:56whatever amount of money she wants now.
01:26:59Yeah.
01:27:00If there's like an arms race for celebrity AI voices,
01:27:02I would be, that would be very entertaining.
01:27:05All right, that's it.
01:27:05Also, my voice is available
01:27:07for cheaper than Scarlett Johansson's,
01:27:09in case you're wondering.
01:27:10It's hard to reproduce.
01:27:10Is she the most expensive?
01:27:12Like, who do you, is it, is it like,
01:27:14I feel like it's either like Scarlett Johansson
01:27:15or Ryan Reynolds.
01:27:16This is a whole other hour of the Verge cast we could do.
01:27:18No way.
01:27:19In terms of like, no, James Earl Jones.
01:27:21James Earl Jones, Mufasa, and Darth Vader.
01:27:23It's important to everyone that I remind you
01:27:25that Alex Cranes is 66 years old.
01:27:28And if you've never heard of any of those words
01:27:30that she just said, don't worry.
01:27:32They all know who that is.
01:27:34I mean, aren't there, there's like,
01:27:36Amazon, hasn't Amazon set the mark?
01:27:37I guess the rates are going higher,
01:27:38but this is a thing that exists.
01:27:40You can just buy other voices from Amazon, right?
01:27:43Yep, you can.
01:27:45All right, send us your notes
01:27:46with who you think the most expensive voice would be.
01:27:49I don't want to, I don't, we'll read,
01:27:50we'll read your ideas.
01:27:52Everyone's going to agree with me.
01:27:53It's David at TheVerge.com, everybody.
01:27:55All right, that's it.
01:27:55That's The Vergecast, rock and roll.
01:28:01And that's it for The Vergecast this week.
01:28:03Hey, we'd love to hear from you.
01:28:04Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11.
01:28:07The Vergecast is a production of The Verge
01:28:08and Vox Media Podcast Network.
01:28:10Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James.
01:28:13That's it, we'll see you next week.