Google I/O in the Foothills of the Singularity - DTNS 5272

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2:49Huyen Tue Dao: this is the daily tech news for tuesday may 19th 2026 we tell you what you need to know give you some context and try to help each other understand today google io kicks off and we have the scoop with jason howell on the scene i'm tom merit i'm quinn twit now and there we go i've unmuted i am jason howell now freshly unmuted how are you guys doing we are all over the world when is in germany i'm in germany jason's at the shoreline uh i'm still down in los angeles uh we did all of this of course to bring you the big story Google made a lot on how many tokens and queries were happening. But as you might guess, the whole Google I-O keynote was about AI.

3:33Huyen Tue Dao: We're going to skip all the numbers and summarize it as it's a lot. The graph line, it always goes up. But the big theme was AI agents everywhere. Google's entire strategy is pretty much centered around agents, ones that answer questions, but also can actively do tasks for you, even in things like search. Google is positioning this as they're ahead of chatbots now. This is the next thing beyond chatbots. These are systems that are going to monitor and organize and research and shop and do all kinds of things for you. Jason was on the scene watching the whole thing. So Jason, let's start with search.

4:13Huyen Tue Dao: Tell us some of the things you heard them talk about and what you think about them. Yeah. I mean, the only difference between me and you, Tom, is that you watched it on a screen. I was in the room so I could hear when things landed and when things didn't. And I don't know, you know, there was a mixture of that. But I think the search functionality or the search announcements is actually really interesting. I think the big announcement there, of course, is this new intelligent search box, which is, you know, of course, bringing in their Gemini model on a deeper level into search. Google was quick to say, this is the biggest change we've made to search in the last 25 years.

4:52And I guess the question that I have there is like, okay, well, that's notable. That's interesting. That's different. But do people want it? That remains to be seen before we had AI mode kind of off in its own little sandbox and AI mode still exists. But now those features are coming more into the search experience. And that just basically means multimodality from the search box itself. And not just from like, you know, what you feed into a particular search query, but actually bringing in agentic coding into the search experience as well. So it's not just this passive, like I fire off a query and see the result.

5:28Yes, that's still there and everything, but you can like do things. I mean, it goes as far as like creating dashboards, integrating agents into your search experience. So say there's a sneaker that you're really excited for, but you don't know when it's going to drop. You could potentially set up an agent that monitors the web through search to let you know that it did and that maybe now is a good time to buy. Things like that that are just taking the traditional search product and really infusing on a much deeper level this modern moment of AI.

6:00Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, I thought they positioned this backwards. And this is a developers conference that kind of explains it. They were talking a lot about agents and search can code on the fly for you. And I'm like, that sounds scary to a lot of people. If you said you can have search check back with you on something, right? Keep me updated. That's the search thing starting this summer. That plays. I'm like, oh, search can keep searching for something when I'm not there. That's cool. or you can have it create a planner for your trip and it'll just create it and then you'll be able to share it and it's interactive.

6:36Huyen Tue Dao: That sounds better than like it coded an app for you. I just feel like what it does is actually pretty useful and impressive. The way they were positioning it, I think is gonna make a lot of people turn away from it, at least at first. The proof is in the pudding though. If it works, people will use it. Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. I mean, clearly this is a developer conference. To a certain degree, Google is speaking the language of a lot of the people here. But we also know that the keynote at Google I.O. isn't always just about developers. It really is kind of announcing the next major wave of Google's efforts for the coming year and everything that they've been working on on a deeper level.

7:15So I think you're right. Some of these things, especially concepts around agentic actions and stuff like that, I think for general users beyond the people who might already be exposing themselves to these things on a regular basis that would hear that and be like, oh, that's really interesting. Other people are like, God, I don't know that I want AI to make a decision for me in that way because I've had it like make very low kind of impact decisions and it screwed it up royally. You know, there's probably a little bit of hesitancy in a lot of people when they hear it presented like that versus what you're talking about, which would be much more accessible.

7:47Maybe people would be more willing to take a chance on it.

7:51Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, I think I think I saw a couple of live bloggers say, I don't know if I want my search to code for me. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, I will say just to push back on that a little bit, the way they present it is you're right. to your point. They present it as if search is coding for you. If instead they really marketed this as search can do things like, you know, create a dash or like some sort of an easy reference portal that's really useful to you. You kind of, you know, again, remove the AI from it. What is the usefulness that you're left with? And maybe lead with that because that's what people are really going to connect with.

8:30Yeah. And that kind of connects with a lot of things that we've been talking about. And we talked about the Android show like last week. Was it last week Yeah, it was last week. And the Create My Widgets. And I totally agree with you. I think, I mean, ultimately it's like the same thing, but it is how you package it. I actually, as a developer, and I can speak for several developers, and that we almost feel the opposite, that we don't feel like this is very developer-y. It honestly feels like somewhere in between, where obviously what you guys are saying is totally true, where it's not a totally consumer-centric conference because they've got a lot of check jargon, they've got the numbers and everything, which definitely, I think, appeals to certain parts of an engineer's perspective on Google things.

9:14But there are a lot of end product things. There's less things explicitly that are tools for developers. A lot of it feels like things that might, if we want to get a little fuddy about it, replace developers. But I do think that there is something here because we are in the world of VibeCobbing and mini-apps. But yet, I think it was not a missed opportunity, but they could have packaged it a little bit more, as Jason is saying, as in like not coding, but letting AI build you your dash. I mean, I don't know.

9:42Huyen Tue Dao: A richer result or something. Or maybe less having AI build it and more like have search build it. Search has this amazing capability now. And, you know, but you do also have to be, you know, people also do stress the importance of being, you know, fully disclosed on these things too. So it's probably a pretty delicate balance to walk. Yeah. uh lots of gemini announcements most of the keynote was about gemini gemini 3.5 flash is google's new flagship uh model available now faster and cheaper uh built for coding and agentic stuff uh 3.5 pro will roll out next month so we don't get the pro right away and then jason i thought gemini omni got a lot of attention they went back to it a couple of times uh it will start with video generation and editing, but eventually they said any output from any input.

10:34Yeah, which is kind of hard. Like, I heard that and I've thought about that. I'm like, okay, well then what does that actually mean? Because we already have -

10:45Huyen Tue Dao: It means you can sing and it will make an app for you. Okay. Oh, wow. That's what I've always wanted. How did you read my mind, Tom? Yeah, Omni definitely is one of the major things that they're pushing. It's not just in the Gemini app. It's kind of finding its way in all sorts of places along with 3.5 Flash. So pretty much everything that they announced today, for the most part, has kind of the fingerprints of this. I think it's interesting how Corey Kavachwaglo, DeepMind's CTO, kind of refers to this as like a true world model. And I kind of wonder if you were to talk to Jan LeCun, who is like world model, you know, powder of du jour, how he'd feel about that if this is quite to that level.

11:30But it's interesting. I mean, Omni, like I have actually had Omni on my Gemini app for the last couple of days, and I played around with it a little bit. I'm part of the early access crew. And, you know, it does about as good as you might think, right? Like even during the presentation, Ron and I, we were sitting next to each other, Ron Richards, Android Faithful, and took a picture of us and then, you know, created a, an Omni video with it. And it's hilarious and how bad, badly good or goodly bad it is, you know, but, but the fact that this is just like integrated into the tools you're already using, you know, that's, that's interesting.

12:09Google is just essentially continually on the trail of just bringing maximum everything to everything via AI.

12:17Huyen Tue Dao: So if you want to do videos using prompts, images, audio, and video inputs, uh omni flash coming to ai plus pro and ultra subscribers now and i thought it was smart for them to follow right up with synth id and content verification tools for sure which are coming to search and chrome uh and uh they announced pretty big announcement that open ai is joining the synth id uh crowd as is cacao 11 labs and nvidia uh nvidia not a small one there either right A tiny little coalition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Google also integrating Gemini into everything else. Maps, YouTube, Gmail, and Docs Live. Docs Live got a lot of attention on stage, where you can just describe what you want and interrupt yourself and correct yourself, and then it'll create a document for you with your voice.

13:11Huyen Tue Dao: It doesn't have to be text. That's coming to pro and ultra users this summer. What did you think of all of that stuff? Yeah, I mean, you know, that actually kind of reminds me of last week's news, right? When we were talking about the Android news and Rambler and everything, you start to see these kind of recurring patterns appearing here and there. And again, it goes back to my point, like, you know, some of this stuff isn't new, conceptually speaking, but it's just, it's just essentially Google saying, we can do all these things. And now we can do all these things in all the places. And that continues to be where they're headed.

13:42that what comes to mind for all of this, and maybe it's a tangent, but I don't care because it certainly came up to mind for me, is the more that we as users rely on these systems and rely on these tools to do all things, like help us with our personal life, and oh, it's integrated in my docs now, I'm going to use that more and everything. The more we rely on these things, the more difficult it is to peel them away because they become integrated into our lives, and that goes into how those companies are pricing their models. Although Google did lower the top tier price of its major model down from$250 to$200 every month.

14:17So there's a little bit of price reduction there. But I'm curious to see over the next couple of years, as Google continues this process of integrating everything into everything, do those prices start to creep up? Because, hey, we're locked in now. We're too reliant on this stuff. It's going to be hard to unpeel that onion.

14:34Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, it's that race of building out capacity to bring the price down, building out efficiency. We'll talk about their TPUs in a minute. You know, and then adding enough users that you get the scale that you need to make this all work. Oh, 100%. Yeah. I guess the other big Gemini thing was Spark, which is the agent that can work for you in Gemini. And so if you use personal intelligence, it can tap into your calendar and your email and your docs and your sheets and do background tests continuously. That's in beta for trusted testers coming to ultra subscribers next week. Jason, you sounded pretty excited about that just now.

15:12Yeah, I am. Because I have been, you know, I talked about it on this show like probably a month ago. I've been getting deeper and deeper into CloudCo work and a little bit into CloudCo. And just this idea of having a machine that I have always running my Mac Studio that can kind of, you know, have agents that I set up. And it's never as easy as it sounds, but, you know, I've definitely had success with it. That are kind of doing things for me at different times of the day or the evening. The more I do that, the more my eyes open up to the possibilities of this. But I've also kind of run into issues with co-work where it's very device dependent.

15:45And I have been the one, as we talked about, I think last week, Tom, to sometimes walk around with my laptop open because I've got an agent doing something. I don't want to close it. So this idea of Spark being in the cloud 24-7, agents, you don't need to keep your laptop open. You can just assign those agents and let them do the work, MCP support. I'm really curious to play around with that just to kind of see, like, does that always-on capability kind of change how I use it and what I use it for? Looking forward to it.

16:17Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah. More coming this summer to Spark as well. But that'll be something to play around in your app if you get access to it. The app also has neural expressive design rolling out right now with new animations, better formatting, faster interactions, and Daily Brief, which is their competitor for what OpenAI does on the top level of JetGPT, summarizes your inbox, calendar, your tasks, prioritizes information. That's for PlusPro and Ultra subscribers in the US. So a little shot over the bow to OpenAI where they keep that for their top tier levels, people. yeah i mean you're you're gonna open up your gemini app and you're gonna see that it's designed a little differently it's yeah it's not the biggest deal in the world that they that they redesigned but they are you know they did also just roll out their icon refresh and so i think this is kind of part of it is like all right we've we've made some sort of a signature around gemini we need to kind of like commit ourselves to this across the company's products because as we know gemini is integrated into all of it so there you go um so many other little things in here anti-gravity 2.0 now launched globally.

17:21Huyen Tue Dao: CodeMender API for selected test experts. Google Picks, an image editor that uses Nano Banana coming this summer to pro and ultra subscribers. Stitch for building your website. Google Flow getting Omni. And as you mentioned, top tier plan reduced from$250 a month to$200 a month. And a new ultra plan at$100 a month. You just get fewer tokens, but it has all the same access as the top tier plan. And then Demis Hassabis came out and talked about Gemini for science and turned everyone's head when he said, we are standing in the foothills of the singularity right after he claimed we were close to solving all disease.

17:57Okay. Yeah, you go, Demis. You keep talking like that. I still have instances where I pull up an LLM and try and have it do the simplest things, and it doesn't. That's the easy retort. But I do think that AI integrated with science, with medicine, you know, these things, it's hard for me to look at that and completely poo-poo the ambition because I think in some ways the technology is really great for those angles, for those aspects. I'll be curious to see what he comes up with. But, yeah, kind of overstating it, I think, a little bit with the scene. Yeah.

18:35Huyen Tue Dao: Shoot high, right? Aim high. Yeah, I suppose so. Yeah. All right. A couple other things here in commerce, which I know is important for Google because they have a lot of companies that use advertising for commerce and they want to show that there's still a way to help them, even if search advertising is a different business than it used to be. So there's universal commerce protocol, an open standard that just was joined by Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and Stripe. so an open standard for agent-based commerce. There's also agent payments protocol so that your agent using UCP doesn't run amok and bankrupt you.

19:16Huyen Tue Dao: These are the guidelines, your user-defined guardrails, your budgets. That's coming to Gemini Spark in the coming months. And then they made a big deal out of Universal Cart, which is basically the agent going and buying things for you, but not buying them, putting them in the cart for you. It can track deals like, oh, if this falls below$50, buy it, put it in my cart. You can use your Google wallet, your Google pay to buy things that's coming to the U S this summer. All of this, just, you know, Google infrastructure for shopping and payments. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I'm not very surprising. I suppose it'd be really surprising if suddenly they were saying, and by the way, it can purchase for you.

19:54I'm happy that they're not necessarily committing to that quite yet, but man, you see it on the horizon. You see the setup happening where they're like...

20:01Huyen Tue Dao: Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe on board with UCP though is a pretty big test. So that's a good standard. We got a preview of Android XR's design from GentleMonster and Warby Parker. Still won't get details on that till the fall, they said, but they look nice. Yeah, I mean, they're nice. They only showed off a couple of frames. They said there's more frames coming, like you said, later in the fall. Apparently they have a sandbox here where i think the project aura xr glasses the collaboration with xreal is going to be on display is my understanding here somewhere so i'm hearing people buzzing about that a little bit getting the chance to check those out because they were kind of teased you know handful of months ago i didn't get to check them out then so i'm curious to see how it's changed but yeah um yeah you know it's it's about time like google's been talking about these ai glasses and what they called uh what do they call them audio glasses i think was their term yes i thought that was But they've been touting these for the last couple of years at Google I.O.

20:59Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah. So one of these days, we'll actually, you know, get to buy them, hopefully by the end of the year. And then new TPUs, the Tensor Processing Units. These are competitors to some of the chips that NVIDIA makes. So the TPU-8 T for training, the TPU-8i for inferencing, T for training, I for inference. They can scale more than a million TPUs globally, twice the performance per watt. That's the big selling point here is they're more efficient. But yeah, Google's message here was pretty much like, we already have you using us. So since we have your data, let us make better use of it with agents and Gemini and stuff like that.

21:35Huyen Tue Dao: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And definitely leaning into what we're hearing more and more, which is, you know, this the agentic moment. If every year is defined by something in AI the last three to four years, it feels like 2026 is really all about agents. What does that mean for next year? We'll find out. stay tuned to google yeah all right any any other thoughts on this before we let jason go not not any thoughts uh from me i'm just excited to get some lunch because i am hungry so i'm going to eat and then we're going to go in the ai sandbox and check out some things then we got a full afternoon so you know it's gonna be a ton of fun well thank you jason uh appreciate you taking the time and even delaying lunch that is dedication we will not keep you from it any longer and get fed.

22:23Huyen Tue Dao: Say hi to Ron and Michelle and everybody else that we know there. I really appreciate you taking the time, man. I will. And thank you, everybody, for your patience with my audio setup. It didn't work out the way I anticipated. Let's just say that. Hey, man, this is life live on the fly. Yes, indeed. You can, of course, get more of Jason's thoughts on this on AI Insider and also Android Faithful as well. so check those out as well bye Jason bye alright well we may be on the footholds of singularity where we can probably thank y 'all in the virtual space in person but for now we're just going to kind of do the old fashioned way and thank you guys via audio for being listeners because of course you can estimate possible while you let's take the time to thank D.

23:10Laser Brad, Kevin Morgan and Glenn Hopper thanks y 'all

23:18This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Have you looked at your utility bill recently and thought, how is it this high? You're not the only one.

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25:58Huyen Tue Dao: All right, there is still some non-IO stuff today, so let's get to the briefest of briefs. Starting with yesterday, right after Jason and Rob did the show, a jury in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI found that the claims were filed outside the statute of limitations. In other words, he should have filed them earlier, but he didn't. There was a part of the court case that was debating whether that was true. The jury said it was, and District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers immediately adopted the jury recommendation. It's a long story. This is a different kind of trial than some jury trials that you might be familiar with.

26:38Huyen Tue Dao: In this particular case, the jury recommends a decision and the judge approves it. And Judge Gonzalez said, I'm going to approve this. Musk's claim of breach of charitable trust, therefore, was not evaluated by the court. So the court could have found that there was a breach, but the jury said he filed it too late, so we can't evaluate it. Musk's lawyers plan to appeal, though the judge said there's a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury's finding. indicating that an appeal might actually be denied. You might have a judge look at this and go, you have no grounds for appeal. Not much to discuss here, Wynn, I know, but at least now we know where that ended up.

27:18Yeah, for sure. Well, Microsoft wouldn't let Google I.O. Day go without some of its own kind of announcements released beforehand. Well, first, Microsoft released its first Linux distro, Azure Linux 4.0, which you can run in Azure, of course, but also soon on a desktop in the Windows subsystem for Linux. It's built on Fedora and available on GitHub. And Micro also announced an upgraded Surface Pro and Surface Laptop for Business line. They now included an integrated privacy screen with anti-glare, a more responsive haptic system, and range from$1 ,300 on up with Intel Core's Ultra Series 3 processors.

27:58However, Microsoft says you will also be able to get models with Snapdragon X2 chips in a few months.

28:03Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, these are enterprise level laptops that you could buy, but they're really meant for companies to buy in bulk. But I noticed a lot of reviewers were saying they thought they were nice. They thought they're worth paying attention to. And yeah, just another moment for us to go, wow, Steve Ballmer once said Linux was a cancer. And look at things now. I mean, it's a virtual, it's a distro meant for virtual, you know, but still. It's Linux. Yeah. It's a Microsoft Red Hat. I mean, it's a Fedora. They said they worked with Red Hat. It's a Fedora distro. That's wild. We also got news from Apple. Nobody's leaving Google alone today.

28:48Huyen Tue Dao: Global Accessibility Awareness Day is Thursday, May 21st. And ahead of that, and on the same day as I.O., Apple announced new accessibility features coming later this year. Among them, voiceover will get better at describing things. So it can use the camera to look at your surroundings or look at a document, whatever you have in front of it. And then you'll be able to ask questions about what the camera can see. The magnifier is also getting voice controls. And speaking of voice controls, that will get better at handling more natural language requests. Before voice control required you to kind of know what it would understand.

29:23Huyen Tue Dao: Now you can just speak the way you would normally speak. The accessibility reader will be able to handle tables and columns now, which is always something that would trip it up a little. You can now generate subtitles for a video on the fly. And Apple Vision Pro getting a wheelchair control feature that uses eye tracking. So for someone who can't handle a joystick, they could use eye tracking with the Apple Vision Pro. That'll work with the Tolt and Lucy alternative drive systems in the U.S. name recognition in more than 50 languages, an API for adding human sign language interpreters to FaceTime, and a product in the Apple Store today, the Hikawa Grip and Stand for iPhone, which attaches to your MagSafe part of your phone and is an adaptable grip.

30:10Huyen Tue Dao: So if you have a hand disability or low grip strength or mobility issues, you'll be able to hold the phone better with this grip. Lots of good things coming from Apple. Two days, two days ahead of Accessibility Awareness Day. Good job, Apple. Yeah, well done. Well, you can join in the conversation about this and anything else we talk about on the show in Discord. Go there by linking your Patreon account. Just link your Patreon at patreon.com slash DTNS.

30:44This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade and value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

31:17Huyen Tue Dao: If you've used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation-based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55 % off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com slash acast. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash acast. Rules and restrictions may apply.

31:55Huyen Tue Dao: All right, we got some quick headlines, kind of things that are just good to know. All right, we'll get your Fortnite dances ready because five years after Epic began its legal contest with Apple, Fortnite is back in the iOS app store. A US federal court is yet to rule on a transparency requirement for its app store fees, but it's back in the store. Not so for Australia, where the dispute continues over Apple store terms there. Yeah, so not quite complete peace across the, but almost there, almost there. Apple also sent out official invites to the press for the opening keynote at WWDC on the day of IO.

32:33Huyen Tue Dao: Very catty, Apple. We already know that WWDC kicks off June 8th, but we now know that the keynote will be when it usually is, June 8th at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific, and we'll stream from Apple and YouTube. All right, well, Sony raised the price of its PS Plus subscription service. The essential tier goes up by$1 to$11 a month. Three-month subscriptions also went up by$1 a month, but annual plans did not increase. Oh, okay. OpenAI has so many co-founders, one of them suing the company. we talked about earlier. Another named Andre Carpathie used to run AI for Tesla, then went back to open AI, then started his own educational company and is now joining Anthropic to work on pre-training research and development.

33:18And back and forth and back and forth. LG and Samsung both introduced new monitors. LG's new 24.5-inch UltraGear claims to be the first full 1080p monitor capable of a 1 ,000 hertz refresh rate. That's a lot of hertzes. Meanwhile, Samsung released six new displays, including the Odyssey G8, which is a 6K gaming monitor.

33:43Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, and worth repeating, that's not just 1 ,000 hertz with a dual situation. That is 1080p and 1 ,000 hertz all in one. Yeah. Yeah. First laptops with Intel's efficient Wildcat Lake chips are showing up now in laptops in China. Apparently, they all have 16 gigs of RAM and 512 gigabytes of storage and are priced competitively with the MacBook Neo. All right. Well, thanks to NCB on the subreddit for noting this one. starting on July 1st, Plex will increase the price of its lifetime pass from$250 to$750. Plex said it considered eliminating the lifetime plan, but settled on the higher price instead.

34:29Huyen Tue Dao: Pray they don't alter it further. No, basically what they said is like the lifetime plan, you know, the recurring revenue of a subscription is obviously better for the company and its development. So they thought maybe we should just not do a lifetime plan. But instead, they're like, well, we're just going to have to make it really expensive, but at least we can still have. Blackstone Capital is starting an AI-specific data center business that will compete with CoreWeave, if you know them. And as Google, as a major investor, the majority owner will be Blackstone, but Google will own pretty much the rest of it.

35:01Huyen Tue Dao: And that, of course, means it's going to use Google TPUs, software, and services. Well, Nikkei Asia reports that Intel is directing its Intel 7 capacity to server and industrial customers and encouraging PC makers to use 18A-based processors. That's one way to bootstrap your 18A sales. Just don't sell the other ones to them. And thanks to Motang for noting this one from Tom's Hardware on our subreddit. HighCloud and the Chinese government, as a partner, have announced the launch of an undersea data center off the coast of Shanghai. The 24 megawatt facility has 2 ,000 servers, and China claims it is the first undersea data center powered by wind.

35:43Huyen Tue Dao: Not the first undersea data center, but the first one powered by wind. Under the sea. All right. Is all of your data. All right. We end every episode of DTS with some shared perspectives. Today, Huyen has some insights on the Whoop Fitness Band. What a coincidence. Wow. Who knew there would be two people with the same name? uh when writes long time listener first time writer following up on the discussion regarding the upcoming fitbit air and comparing it to whoop i discovered last week that whoop is suing a company called bevel bevel is an ai powered app that imports and synthesizes health data from various sources like apple watch garmin or about a month ago bevel ceo greg nguyen posted a video about whoop filing a lawsuit against bevel for infringing upon whoops trade dress copyrights and patents.

36:32Huyen Tue Dao: While there is definitely overlap in terminology used by Whoop and Bevel, the front page highlights strain, recovery, and sleep. At least two out of the three of those terms are incredibly common words for what they describe. The dashboards of both Whoop and Bevel represent these as colored rings filled to a percentage of maximum value. Colored rings. That sounds familiar. The lawsuit also tries to point out that Bevel uses, quote, a crescent moon icon to denote sleep. a crescent moon to denote sleep. Surely no one except Whoop has ever done that. For this app developer, the thing that made me finally throw my Whoop into the drawer was the demand for Bevel to remove dark mode.

37:12Huyen Tue Dao: For those unfamiliar with Whoop, its design is all dark mode. Light text on dark backgrounds, newsflash, Whoop. No one owns the concept of dark mode. It's a feature offered by the operating system and almost a requirement for high quality apps these days. It's already bad enough that Whoop is gouging us on accessories and unnecessarily invalidating the money I spent as well as inadequately addressing customer complaints. But I draw the line at spurious lawsuits and bullying smaller competitors. I'm out. Hwensweidao, Denver, Colorado. That, of course, is you. It was me. Yeah. No, yeah. So this is a follow-up from last week.

37:45I literally have not worn my Whoop since, and I was so mad about it. I really wanted to bring it back up because, yeah, that really sucks. My bad, actually, the CEO is Gray Nguyen. I it was it's gray I think you said great but oh did I I'm sorry I apologize sir yeah no no um but yeah um it's really funny because I was holding on to my boot for gamification reasons for all kinds of reasons but actually it was the dark mode thing that I was like you know what eff it I don't need to I don't need to wear this anymore so I've been whoopless for like literally since that day forward so I'm yeah I'm gonna try Fitbit or Garmin or whoever else comes

38:20Huyen Tue Dao: down the pipe but I'm kind of done trademark law is weird what you can get away with but I think I think what you're objecting to is not whether there's merit to the case, but like, hey, you didn't need to do it. Right. No. And what I didn't mention in my overly long email was that Grayingwin claims that also a representative from Whoop, who they don't name, actually emailed them like about a month or two before the lawsuit saying, hey, we'd like to collaborate with you. So, yeah. So there's plenty of things you could speculate there. So I just feel like it doesn't really feel like a good – doesn't feel good.

38:56The vibes are bad. So since there's more options coming out, you have the whoop's in the drawer. Yeah.

39:03Huyen Tue Dao: Well, whoop. There it is. Well, what are you thinking about? Do you have complaints, qualms, and quandaries about spurious lawsuits like myself? Share it with us. Please write us feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Big thanks to Jason and Wen for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You are the folks that keep us in business. Become a patron. We got all kinds of cool stuff, not just the Discord. We get bonus episodes. We get insights, a lot of chatter. Talk to other folks. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Go check it out.

39:41The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand.

39:46Huyen Tue Dao: Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

40:16value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they sack. That's technology at Capital One.

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