AGI is coming and nobody cares

32:49Right. And then we distribute it with ads around it. It's like an unbeatable business model. And so you have Walmart being like, well, we want to sell ads for Walmart stuff. We're going to buy Vizio and that will quote, allow us to serve our customers in new ways to enhance their shopping journeys. And it's like, I don't know what that means, but it sounds like you're going to track the shit out of me. Well, I just I think a lot about the thing Netflix keeps saying where it's it's not trying to compete with YouTube. It's basically pitting itself against YouTube as like a higher end thing. It's like, oh, do you want to be next to like, you know, crummy cat videos on YouTube?

33:26Knock yourself out, but come here and get the high end stuff. And the big question for this entire industry is how compelling that case turns out to be to advertisers. Because what is true is that there are billions and billions and billions of dollars of cable and broadcast TV advertising that are going to become available to somebody else very quickly, much faster than anybody thought. And that money has to go somewhere. And the question is going to be, do they want to plug it into YouTube because that's where the audience is? Or do they want to plug it into the most sort of similarly shiny thing to what this once was?

34:01And I don't think anybody knows yet, at least at the scale we're talking about. But that is the same bet all of these folks are making. They want you to subscribe, but mostly they want you to look at ads. And the thing they want you to do the most, especially in the next couple of years, when all of this money has to move somewhere, is look at ads. and uh i think you can feel about ad supported streaming however you want i mostly think it's fine to be totally honest i i am i am less annoyed by it every day than i expect that i'm going to be uh but that is coming it just is that is the thing i'm just gonna say this one time and then we can move on it is still way easier to watch an nfl game and what you might call the stormy seas than it is to pay for yeah and that is the real thing that they are all they are all truly competing against is the user experience of their business models are getting away the user experience to the point where it is deeply confused it's like confusing and bad and people are like whatever i'll just take it well if you remember the thing that happened right after the glory days of of the late 90s in the early internet was uh piracy and hollywood basically just fell all over itself because of it.

35:19Who knows? We'll see. By the way, if you have a telly, the TV with the TV under it, or you work a telly, you want to arrest David Pierce, let us know. I look at the ads, Eli. Don't come from me. I look at my phone during the show. The greatest episode of this podcast would be David Pierce gets arrested by the CEO of telly. We'll send a camera crew out for that. All right, we got to take a break. We're going to be back with Kylie to talk about what on earth is going on with artificial intelligence. We'll be right back. Let's be honest. Are you happy with your job? Like, really happy? The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that.

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39:39We are back. Kylie Robinson's here. Hey, Kylie. Hello. There's a lot of stuff on your beat. You're a senior AI reporter, and that means every week, just a number of people say things about our robot overlords. Yes. And this week, they just all at the same time decided that AGI was coming. That's what that feels like to me, is like, we're just going to say this is happening, and then people can interpret that to mean whatever they want. Do you think there's a group chat? Like, I remember in like the early days of the pandemic, there were a bunch of tech CEOs who were like in a WhatsApp together trying to figure out what to do and how to manage things and all that stuff.

40:17And I'm like, is there now just like a AGI when WhatsApp chat where it's just like Sundar and Sam being like, did we do it? Should we say it now? Is this the one? I hope so. I mean, by the way, the who's in, who's out of that group chat is... Oof. That's a good one. Maybe that's the problem. Just let Elon back in, all the lawsuits go away. You know how the New York Times is a subscription product, but mostly for video games? Like, we should transition our subscription to just being who's in or who's out of the AI group chat. Like a MySpace top 10 for H &M? Yeah, we just get to crowdsource that every day.

40:49And then that happens in real life. Perfect. You know, like today, the audience of the Virgins decided Sam's out of the group chat. And he, like, wakes up. He's like, I'm not in the group chat. I feel like we need to ship this immediately. Yeah, this is very good. That's worth$7 a month. Let me tell you. All right. Let's start with Sam Altman was on stage at the Dealbook Conference. He announced something that I think we had as a scoop and then he announced it. And so we just ran it. But let's start with this. OpenAi is going to do the 12 days of what they're calling shitmas. Yeah. Get it, David?

41:19I don't like it. So no, I don't get it. Explain it to me. It's hell. No. All right. There's a man who comes into your house ostensibly to give you gifts. And I ship him? You're going to eat all your cookies. And we celebrate him. Anyway, so Shitmas, that's going to include Sora, the video generator, a new reasoning model. And then Kylie today, they announced that the first thing that they were announcing as part of Shitmas is a$200 a month open AI plan. What is going on here? Yeah. And you talked about us having the scoop. I made probably a dozen calls the day before. And people are like, Shitmas?

41:56And I'm like, no, no, like shipping something. I'm sorry. Can we do this quickly? Yeah. So they just released a$200 a month plan for like a new special O1 model. And I got this heads up, like, you know, not a lot of time before. So I'm still processing it. And my first gut reaction is that feels like such a joke. Like, give us$200 and you get something so special. Just trust us. So, yeah, it's like a special O1 model. It's supposed to be better at coding, better at like, you know, aggressive research, if that's what you're into. Yeah. Is that like the, you know, when they did the Apple Watch, Shawnee, I was like, this one's made of diamonds,$5 ,000.

42:38And it just kind of didn't matter because some people just wanted to pay$5 ,000 for an Apple Watch. Is that what's going on here or is it actually more capable or do we just not know? They have internal testing that they released. I am always skeptical of internal testing, whether that's fair or not. It's just like my natural response is like I would like a lot more testing and proof. And of course, I want to try it myself and see how I feel. And I want to hear from engineers who use it for coding. They're like, oh, I do actually feel a difference. So until I see some of these markers, I'm not entirely sure myself.

43:06But they say that, yes, it is better. But being an SF and being an AI reporter, I'm imagining all the dudes in Hayes Valley who are like, oh, my God, I'm going to pay$200 a month. I would be so cool. Like, yes, it is like that diamond Apple watch. It's just to have it. I would just recently did an interview with the head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, and he was telling me that some people have multiple like paid accounts because they like they it's interesting. So some people, I don't know, they're really into it, I guess, paying more money. There's such a like FOMO fake arms race thing to all of this that I think this is just part of, right?

43:42It's like everybody's out here talking about the number of NVIDIA chips that they're buying as like a badge of honor for how cool your startup is and like we're gonna get to the point now where come work at our startup and we'll give you chat gpt pro for 200 a month to do work instead of going to that other startup that only gives you plus i guess what it's called by the way open ai remember that moment where you were like we're gonna get better at branding and our names are gonna make more sense whoops whoops you lost that real fast but anyway i like it really does again I think it's it's possible that this will be like meaningfully better but it really feels to me like open AI is just like we can we can do this thing where everybody is looking for any kind of tiny edge and there are a lot of people with a lot of money who will pay for that edge yeah let's just see what happens like the the price what's the what's the word for when you try to figure out how much people are willing to pay for something elasticity yes the price elasticity test is very much on in the AI world right now.

44:45Yeah. And I think the New York Times had reported they wanted to, you know, make tens of billions of dollars in revenue. And like now we kind of see what their plan was. They're like$200. It's Apple Watch editions. Exactly. Karl Lagerfeld is going to buy this model and never set it up. And he's just going to wear around his unset up Apple Watch as a status symbol for a while and then move on. That's really interesting. Like I just where I put that. I wanted to start there, right? They're going to ship a bunch of new products over the next 10 days, 12 days. The first one is this like outrageously expensive model and we have to see how well it works.

45:20That is in the context of, hey, a bunch of people are saying the models aren't scaling in capability the way they were last year, right? It's been two years since Chachibiti came out. They did 3.5 and 4.0 and now 0.1. These names are all horrible. And like they're plateauing, right? And there's a report that Gemini is sort of plateauing and Actually, the new Gemini is not as good as the old Gemini. Like, there's a sense that, okay, like a lot of hype happened because of the first big step up in capability. But it's not just like a linear increase in capability over time. And it feels like open eyes just kind of like running at that and being like, no, this one's so good.

45:55It's worth 10x more money. And I can't quite square those things. Right. I mean, that's how I read the deal book story that Heath did about, you know, AGI is actually not going to be that big of a deal. I just feel like they have drummed up so much hype, like an unnecessary amount of hype. And now they all have to reckon with that. So like that's that's the state. Is it plateauing? A lot of AI leaders right now, like their common thing to say is like, we've just gotten used to it. And now like companies can't keep up with like the hype and like the progress they've had in the past. But scaling laws have brought us to this point and they should take us more, you know, take us further.

46:34But that remains to be seen. I think, yeah, they are experiencing some plateauing. That's why we're seeing some incremental developments and why we're not getting like GPT-5 right now as much as they probably want to release it right now. It's clearly not ready. I just want to read you that quote that he threw it up. So Sam Altman is on stage of the Dealbook Conference this week with Andrew Osorkin. And he says, my guess is that we will hit AGI sooner than most people in the world think, and it will matter much less, which is an incredible quote, right? Because he has said on Reddit, we're going to hit AGI on current hardware, which is a remarkable claim.

47:11Because if that's what you think, we should just, again, I think we should just stop all other work and get to that. But then he's like, and also it will suck. We're going to make AGI. Artificial general intelligence is going to do any tasks as well as a person. And it will not be as good as you think it is. And it's like, so you're going to make a dumb person? is that what are you saying is going to happen here they said human intelligence not you know super intelligence sure fair but you know they throw around human intelligence a lot you know we're getting there it's right now they're saying like a smart college student right uh i don't know i feel like they have just like they've screwed themselves on this hype and that's why that's what i read when i when i saw that deal book line i'm like well you know you've got to temper some expectations now before you say that the next thing is AGI and everyone's like, this is AGI.

48:01You know, it feels like he's like, well, it's actually not going to be that big. And then some bigger context there is there's reporting that OpenAI can get out of its deal with Microsoft if it decides all by itself that it's achieved AGI, which I think was related to its like old structure where it was like a nonprofit board and all that board was there to do was decide whether to achieve AGI safely and or fire Sam Altman. And they did one and not the other. And Sam Altman got rid of them all. And now they're going to turn into a for-profit company. So Microsoft is saddled with this weird clause in their deal where if Sam Altman decides it's AGI, he gets to leave the Microsoft deal, which is weird, right?

48:42That's a weird set of incentives. By the way, I will preview that on Monday, Decoder is with Mustafa Suleiman, who is the ex-co-founder. well he is he's not the ex co-founder who co-founded deep mind which is now google deep mind and he left and started inflection and then like weird reverse aqua hired his way and now is the ceo of microsoft ai and i asked him the first question i asked him was are we gonna hit agi and current hardware and uh he did not agree yeah hmm i don't preview the whole episode but he was kind of like yeah no i mean maybe someday what he was like what do you think current hardware means which is an incredible response to that question and then he was like what do you think agi means and I was like, I am the interviewer.

49:24Good questions for you. It was a good decoder. He's fun to talk to. We like each other. We like challenging each other. That's all fine. But like, I don't think he agreed with Sam, but I do think he was also moving the goalposts for AGI. He very clearly, I was like, if we're going to build the singularity, shouldn't we just stop and work on that? And he's like, AGI is not the singularity. Yeah. Which is not the hype that we've all been experiencing for a minute, right? The hype was we have to stop this because if we make it before we're ready, we'll destroy the world. Remember, that's Elon Musk.

49:55That is why all the people are leaving OpenAI to start literally the company called Safer Superintelligence. Yeah. Ilya Suskiver, who was a big part of this whole process, in June of this year described AGI in the context of the OpenAI Charter, which presumably Sam Altman was part of and would agree with, as a computer system which can automate the great majority of intellectual labor. He called that one useful definition. It is so, we cannot let Sam Altman off the hook for doing this. We just can't. This is ridiculous. Like my man has spent a decade, he made AGI a thing. Like the fact that we all use the term AGI is Sam Altman's fault.

50:35And to now just come and try to just sort of offhandedly sit with Andrew Ross Sarkin and be like, ah, it's not that big a deal is bullshit. and we we should not let him do this it is it's a bunch of like political maneuvering because it's going to make his life easier to just declare an AGI and move on you're right that it'll help with the hype because they're I think it's very clear that whatever this moment where AI wins is not going to happen soon if it happens ever yeah it also lets them get out of the Microsoft deal so like I can see why you do this if you're Sam we just all have to keep saying out loud that this is what he's doing and it's bullshit totally i agree he also uh andrew sorkin asked him about uh open eye and microsoft disentangling actually quoted alex heath which yeah heath was very excited about this immediate text from alex when this happened live in the room um and uh sam said i don't think we're disentangling from microsoft which again i asked myself for the same thing and he's like we'll see how it goes and he said that three times until i said you said we'll see how it goes three times now.

51:37And he's like, oh, it's fine. And his real Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow being like, we didn't break up, we consciously uncoupled. That's how this will go with Microsoft and OpenAI. My own tinfoil hat that today, because I've been so wrapped up in OpenAI news, they obviously had this huge launch and a live stream, and I have all of these CEOs' notifications turned on Twitter, of course. So I get my own little feed of them, and Satya reposted a bunch of Microsoft announcements that came today as well. that I think Tom Warren, he scooped some of those. But, and like no repost from Sam, no like this is my favorite boy succession style.

52:15Like it's like just, I was like, that's really weird timing that they're doing this. And Satya's like, it seems like he's ignoring the whole opening. Out of the group chat, man. Seven dollars a month, you can kick Sam Altman out of the group chat. These things are not accidents. Like that is definitely a tinfoil hat theory. But like when you're Satya Nadella, you do not do that stuff. Right. Without thought. Yeah. the only person who tweets without thinking is elon musk uh most other tech ceos are doing stuff on purpose right uh that's actually a very good point um okay so this is like we're like laying up the context right open ai is going to announce 12 days worth of stuff including a model that they think is so good that's worth 200 a year sam altman is moving the agi goalposts to like tomorrow Right.

53:00He's like, I can do this. I can do this on a NVIDIA 4060 for 20 bucks. Like, it doesn't matter. Like, he's like, you give me an Xbox and enough gasoline. I'll give you AGI. Like, that's where his head's at. And then the reality of the products right now is that they're nowhere near good enough. Yeah. So the Columbia Tao Center for Digital Journalism released a report this week. And it basically asked Chachapiti to identify the source of 200 quotes from 20 publications. and it just couldn't do it. Like it just hallucinated its way through that. It produced partially or entirely incorrect responses on 153 occasions.

53:38And it only acknowledged an inability to accurately respond, an inability to accurately respond seven times. It asked it, just to say it again, it asked it 200 questions and it got 153 of them wrong. Yeah. And it only admitted that it might be wrong seven times. Right. Didn't admit that it was wrong. admitted like the possibility that potentially maybe it could be seven times and then in the culture people are using these tools without a second thought so liz lopato uh this is just a banger like i think she turned this around in five minutes i think there's all just poured out of her head in one stream of consciousness because i didn't know she was writing the story it just went up today um but it's very good because i get to say the following phrase on cnn anna navarro cardenas cited a list of presidential family members who have been pardoned by presidents and she said president woodrow wilson pardoned his brother-in-law hunter debuts which i like it's like i know the internet made the robots say hunter debuts like there's a hundred debuts i'm like that's not real like when the internet produces the words hunter debuts i'm like i know what happened here a hundred of a hundred times like there's a reddit thread it's like hunter debuts there's a full there's like lore you know it's like all that happened oh yeah and the robots are confused so liz went through this exhaustively to figure out where this came from um and she found out that like chat basically doesn't can't answer the question which presidents have pardoned their family members like you just read the piece Anna Navarro-Cardenas says, take it up with chat GPT.

55:15I said this thing, wrong thing on cable news, about the words Hunter debuts. Wow. And she's like, take it up with chat GPT. And it's like, no, that's not correct, first of all. No. So she tweeted it and then she got it wrong and then she just take it up with chat GPT. I'm just saying that is crazy. We are racing towards replacing all of our search engines with these tools, answer engines, which is what Google has long wanted to think of it, Google as Google as a search engine, the 10 blue links was like, here are sources, go read these sources. You can trust them or not. And now they're now it's, here's an answer.

55:51And they're out is here are some links to footnotes. And it's like, no one's ever going to click the links. They're just going to, they're just going to tweet the words hunter to butts. I click the links. I have to defend myself because I went on the verge on our YouTube and I said, I really like, um, AI search because I I think it helps me get my answers quickly, but I'm not I'm not paying. I don't think I'm even really paying close attention to what it's saying. I'm clicking the relevant links because Google is so bad at just telling me who said what, who reported what. And then I can just go and look.

56:23I guess I'm never really paying attention to the answers. And that's and that's important with what we saw with that report. I had again, I just talked to the head of ChatGBT and I'm writing about this, the story of how they started and how they started. they were like no one's gonna like this product because it is wrong and so confidently wrong they're like we shouldn't release this no one's gonna like this they're gonna hate it actually because it hallucinates so often and they decided to go for it and release it as a research preview to see how people would use it and people really loved it and two years later it is still confidently wrong and it is making billions of dollars in revenue obviously it's not profitable but still like all of that besides the point it still hallucinates like crazy and people still love it and i can't really figure out why that's the case if you'll recall a year ago everyone was like we'll solve hallucinations right oh yeah it was waved away yeah like we got this we got this under control we know what to do and it's like no you super don't have this under control because the words hunter debuts have now appeared on the internet and it's a totally sincere way um which is you know like if anybody had any sense i'd be like okay we should hit pause before we declare that this thing is agi right and i think this to me is just the fundamental question of all of these tools.

57:35Can this technology actually do the things that the people say it can do? And right now it can't even like deduce what is true and what is fake and what is just a pure hallucination. Right. Well, and I think this is why the search piece of this is so interesting to me, because if you just take chat GPT as a whole, right, and you say, okay, the idea that it gives you the incorrect answer to this one specific question is a bummer, but it is so sort of ancillary to what most people are using chat GPT for. Fine. I don't necessarily buy that argument, but it is an argument, right? That it's like, and this is what we hear with a lot of AI stuff.

58:13People do a test with it and they're like, well, real users aren't doing that. So we're not actually that concerned with it. Feel about that however you want. But that is a thing you can say. When it comes to search, the whole damn job is to find relevant and true information on the internet. And so the fact that they've pivoted from like, this is a good tool for writing code, which is a real thing that is true. And it makes mistakes, but it also writes good, fast code. And that seems to be a trade worth making for a lot of people who write code for a living. Like when the whole job is correct information retrieval and you are presenting it as I have answered your question about the web, then the stakes are different.

58:55And the idea that like this this thing sometimes makes mistakes, I think, just no longer becomes acceptable because you've now built a product on the idea that it can do this thing that it just demonstrably can't do. I don't think it's acceptable, but it's like also the people who are coding and using it want it to produce correct code. And then like I've been told junior engineers shouldn't be using it, but senior engineers can because they know what's wrong and they can fix it and the output that it's given. So as like a senior reporter, I'm like, I know all of this. I just need to find this information quickly.

59:26And Google is just absolute garbage at this. So, I mean, I don't know. It just takes like knowing that. And that's something I'm going to keep referencing this one interview. The head of ChatGPT said he was like, you know, the users at the beginning knew that they were going to have to check this information. They knew how to prompt around things and they're fine with that. So like that's the people using ChatGPT to be clear. But I agree. I don't think it's acceptable to be like we have the answers. And we literally like 90 percent of the time don't actually have an accurate answer. I think that's also unacceptable.

59:56Like forget all the like bigger philosophical stakes. That's just a bad product. Like, what if you went to Google and it just gave you a bunch of links that had nothing to do with your search? That would just be a bad product. Doesn't it already kind of do that? More cooler, more fun links that make you feel good about yourself. Yeah. Right. It's just, like, slightly nicer to you than it should be. Let me just give you an example of bad product. This also happened this week. And I just want to put this all in the context of we're defining AGI down so we can say it happened. Right? Yeah. And we're going to charge$200 a month for some of our models.

1:00:26The same week, a misinformation researcher, the founder of the Stanford Social Media Lab, got in trouble because he wrote an affidavit in support of an anti-deepfake law in Minnesota that is being challenged by court. So, like, there's a law in Minnesota that says you can't deepfake politicians during a political campaign. Nice. It seems reasonable. There's a lot of, like, First Amendment-y stuff, whatever. It's being challenged in court by a bunch of conservatives. And this guy, founder of the Stanford Social Media Lab, wrote an affidavit in support of this law to the court. And it turns out he used chat GPT to help him organize the citations and it hallucinated the citations.

1:00:59Nice. And it's like, what are you doing? You of all people know. Right. Right. You know that the duals hallucinate, but they're so confident and you're like, screw it. Here it is. Here's a quote. I wrote and reviewed the substance of the declaration and I stand firmly behind each of the claims of many of it, all which are supported by the most recent scholarly research in the field and reflect my opinion as an expert regarding the impact of AI technology and misinformation and societal effects. Oh, God. And then he goes on to say that he used Google Scholar and ChatGPD 4.0 to, quote, identify articles that were likely to be relevant to declaration so I could merge that which I already knew with new scholarship.

1:01:32And it's like the new scholarship was made up. Right. First of all, why? I asked a robot to hallucinate and then I added my ideas to it. It's like, you know, that's not correct. Yeah. I also just I'm convinced, like somewhat sincerely, that this is just a bit like it's all it's all too perfect for this to have. earnestly happened to this person. Not only, it's like he hit it at the bottom just to see if anybody would notice, and somebody noticed. Brown M &Ms. This is the real theme of the Verge House, is when Halen shows up and says, don't put brown M &Ms in the dressing room to see if you're paying attention so that you know the pyro's right, and everything in the world is explained by brown M &Ms.

1:02:12Honestly, potentially. I hallucinate these citations. Were you reading, did you read my affidavit, Judge? But also, I will say, my wife is currently in grad school and is spending an enormous amount of time doing things like putting together perfectly formatted citations and actually got knocked off points on a paper she turned in because everything was right, but she like put the page number and the source in the wrong order and so lost points. And so she, I've had like a year and a half now of her just like raging against citation systems. And so I'm like, listen, if AI just wants to cite some stuff for me and I don't even have to worry about it.

1:02:45Great. Done. Lock it in. The David Pierce experience. Does it have to be real? Probably not. Nobody's going to check anyway. No one cares. Last, well, last couple ones I want to put in the context of Sam Altman to find Adrian Nam, but the robots are just drunk. Right. That's right. Is that, that's basically the shape of this segment. That's right. Google Sundar Pichai, also on Sage Dealbook, interview basically Andrew Osirkin being like, are you doing a good job? And he was like, I'm doing a great job. That's the whole interview. You can watch it. I mean, they're both very chill people. so even that was like five ticks more hostile than the actual interview was but that's basically the shape are you doing a good job i'm doing a great job okay and then he says sundar says i would love to do a side-by-side comparison of microsoft's own models and our models any day any time they're using someone else's models which is very catty and what he means is microsoft's own models suck and they have to use models the girls are fighting means that if sam altman thinks OpenAI models are about to be AGI.

1:03:49Sort of definitionally, so are Google's. I think they've all admitted that like they're going to like Elon said like if if we were to hit AGI like we're all hitting AGI at the same time. Someone asked like, are you going to get it to it first? He's like, probably not. We're probably like all in lockstep going to get to it at the same time. Yeah, if the last two years are any indication, they're all within like four weeks of each other on every development. Truly, like it just keeps happening. Like OpenAI does something and then Anthropic does something that's, you know, 10 % better on benchmarks and then Meta does something that's 10 % better on benchmarks and then Google's like, what's up, Gemini?

1:04:24And then we just start the cycle over again. And then Apple's like, there's 10 people at your front door. front door back door and outside yeah and this is just like it it this stuff is both the most competitive and the most rapidly commoditizing thing i can remember it's very strange and so i think this is where you get to what all of these companies are desperately trying to convince you that they either have some thing in the works that is so much bigger and better that it's going to change it or that they're going to productize it so much faster. And I think for Google, their whole move here is we can build these products faster than everybody else.

1:05:06Right. Like if it's Sundar is out here just being like, our models are great. They're going to ship more stuff this year, we think. But they're like, he's like, whatever, we're Google. I built it into Gmail and Google Drive. Like, what do you got, Sam? Totally. I think it's interesting, these incumbents, like Amazon has its own new set of models. And there is reports about OpenAI trying to make ChatGPT a customizable enterprise product for people to use. so it's like they're they're competing in the in this way um and the incumbent and the incumbents have a huge advantage obviously um but in terms of like this this hype cycle this constant hype cycle that's like the only thing i've learned as an ai journalist is like just do not trust a single thing just don't trust a single thing they're going to tell you you know we're not going to raise prices we're close to agi we're like all of these things and i just only trust what is released and you can use in front of you at the very least.

1:06:05If Sam Altman really wanted to be cool, the thing he should have said is like, oh yeah, we hit AGI like two years ago. ChatGPT was AGI. Like who's going to, who's going to stop him? And people believe that it is. I honestly think they're very much trading on a bunch of people who just love smooth talkers. You know what I mean? Like if you can talk real fast and real confidently, you can get pretty far in America and chat gb is like how fast and how smooth you know like it can just do it and people just buy it um my niece just by the way refers to it just as chat so it's home for thanksgiving and she just kept saying let me ask chat and i'm like you know it's just lying to you she's like whatever like close enough which is terrifying um but it's also just like that's the relationship people have with this product and at some point they're trading on it hasn't done enough damage yet But something will happen.

1:07:00Another researcher will get caught. Another lawyer will show up with a fake citation. Enough people are getting in trouble that the markets that have the money to spend will stop spending the money until they can guarantee reliability or accuracy or even just efficacy. And I think what we've made is a bunch of natural language tools that feel like the next wave of interfaces, but we haven't actually made products. right right which is why kylie to your point i think we're about to see this huge like cloud provider fight really take off uh amazon launched the nova stuff this week like you're talking about uh that's where all the money is for the foreseeable future and maybe forever is being the cloud provider of ai tools and and it's the familiar faces right it's google against amazon against microsoft against like kind of open ai even though it's sort of weird because its relationship with Microsoft.

1:07:55But like, that's the fight. And in many ways, it's less sexy, but that is like the actual business of AI is wrapped up in those companies competing with each other. Totally. As someone whose first beat in journalism was on the cloud and enterprise team, I love it. I love what comes up. You're just back at it now. All roads lead back to SaaS is where it is. Yeah. I mean, like, that's the fight. That's where all of the money is. And if they want to make tens and billions of dollars and train their $100 billion models, they're going to need some big chumps to pay up for these enterprise contracts.

1:08:27Seriously. I guess I could, let me just end here. One, I feel like we should go back and find all the quotes of CS saying that it's all hallucinations. We're like, did this happen? Right. And then two, when whatever, however we define AGI, we should be like, if you made a somewhat smart college student that just made shit up 40 % of the time, 153 times out of 200, just lied to you. would you be like you drive a submarine right like there's something there there's a disconnect there that still feels like the most important thing as much fun as these tools are uh there's just a meaningful disconnect where they don't actually know anything we'll see totally kyle what's your sense on like 12 days of shipments are coming what's your sense on the next turn here is it just open AI barrels towards being a for-profit next year.

1:09:19Oh, yes. That's it? Like, that's the main thing? This whole time, my mind has just been screaming about defense contracts and how if these AIs are consistently wrong and now they're, like, signing, like, deals with Andrel, it's like, oh, my God, like, that's coming. That's coming. And it's, you know, like, the stakes are getting higher. And I don't know if the models are ready for the stakes that are coming. And that's really stressful. I mean, if they want to throw agents onto the payroll of major companies and, yeah, get even deeper into defense and then build all these data centers. I mean, 2025, yeah, the stakes are just going to keep getting higher and these people are going to keep making money.

1:09:56And I think we are going to see, as you said, some of these serious consequences that I don't think. I mean, obviously, we have seen a lot of serious consequences, but I don't think it's really snapped anyone in the industry out of what they're building, if that makes sense. by the way andrew is uh this is nothing with andrew it's more palmer lucky palmer lucky made a game boy do you know this game boy and sean holster has the game boy he like put up a video of it on like our tiktok or something and he was like writing a review of this game boy and uh jake castranakis for exactly better like you realize that your story is lockheed martin made a game boy right like that's a it's a very verge story but you just take another run at it from that so soon we'll run like it's a real art versus artist story you know it's like can you listen to ignition remix anymore no lockheed martin made a gameboy like they're the same those are the same ideas uh so we'll soon publish it i don't know if you call it a review we'll what if it's like a really pretty gameboy a moral it's a really pretty game of this game boy at some point good point as soon as you wrestle with the essential nature of art versus the artist uh all right we gotta wrap it up here uh the ai is telling me our time has come to a close kyle this is great thanks for joining us thanks for having me all right we'll be right back with flying around and wait till you hear who the sponsor is.

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1:13:33We're back with the lightning round. Liam, tell the people who sponsored the lightning round this week. This week's lightning round is presented by Amazon Q, the new generative AI assistant from AWS. Feels just as good the second time. It does. It does. It has not lost its shine. Say it again, Liam. This week's lightning round is presented by Amazon Q, the new generative AI assistant from AWS. I don't even think we get more money for that. It just feels so good. It just feels so good. I don't care. We're going to find ways as part of the subscription to let, to let you, the people sponsor the lightning round.

1:14:06This is one of the, one of the ideas we have, but that's pretty good. Do you think people would like our ads more if they were all read by Vertecast listeners every time? It's like, you can come perform the ads on our podcast. Right. Cause I, David, I won't do it. Right. I got that pesky journalism, which will make Liam do it. It's pretty good, But readers can do whatever they want. Yeah. I guess I did just like steal an idea from every NPR show ever. So I probably shouldn't be as proud of myself for that as I am. NPR lets the listeners read the ads? Yeah. Like Radiolab like does the credits at the end and it's like the, it's a, it's a thing.

1:14:44People do it. Like whatever. They're brought to you by the, somebody's Sloan foundation. That's like, people call it. And people like it. We could do this. Sure. i'm saying lightning round sponsored oh we got a subscription going the lightning round sponsored uh we spend this money by the way on making journalism it's you know this is who we are but one day i'm gonna skim a little off the top and we're gonna get a boat i'm gonna i'm gonna turn this into a real basketball hoop one day it's gonna blow minds you're you're gonna be the guy who buys michael jordan's house in chicago it's just been on sale that's the new verge in the suburbs of Chicago for years.

1:15:24So you go to Highland Park, you just drive by the gates. And part of the problem is the gates say 23 on this. Nobody wants to buy this house. It's like too much house for Highland Park, you know? Because no one else there is Michael Jordan. It's true. It's just been on sale for years. You can look at the pictures. You also have to commit to living in Michael Jordan's house, which does, by the way, David, have a basketball court in it. And also a room where Michael Jordan definitely got drunk and smoked cigars and played poker. But then the price keeps going down. You just keep saying good things.

1:15:54And I don't understand the problem. Look, when we were looking for a house, when it was time to leave the woods, you know, and like get Max in the school, I was like, what if we lived in Michael Jordan's house? And that idea was quickly rejected. That's what I have to say. It wasn't on the table for a variety of reasons. All right. It's the lightning round. Again, sponsored by whoever Liam said it was sponsored by because I'm too precious to say it. But think about it. Rewind it and listen to it one more time. Okay. So here's the thing. We got a lot of feedback that our other segment, which whose name was show and tell, was too much like the lightning round.

1:16:27So to separate these - Good solid feedback, by the way. Yeah. It was fundamentally correct. So our idea here is the lightning round. We're just going to run through headlines as fast as we can, lightning style. And hopefully that is perceptually different than everything else we do on the show. Yeah. Which is we talk about headlines. All right. So here's number one. Bitcoin just hit$100 ,000. I have nothing to say I cannot describe to you how little I have to say about this I will just I will say the two things I've always said about Bitcoin I've said them on CNBC to an audience of people who did not want to hear them from me one, the only reason people care about Bitcoin is dollars which is why this headline is Bitcoin is now worth$100 ,000 not it's useful not more transactions are taking place in Bitcoin you only care about this because of dollars so at some point you've just given up the game that Bitcoin is worth anything.

1:17:21Like a Bitcoin qua Bitcoin means nothing because you only care about how many dollars it's worth. Second, if you have a Bitcoin, your incentive to spend it is effectively zero. Why would you ever spend a Bitcoin if the number is just going to go up? It's an asset class. And like, that's fine, right? And I think the thing that I have come to appreciate over the last couple of years is that the number of people who want to talk to me about how this is the future of the internet has gone way down. And the number of people who just want to talk about how much money they're making has gone way up. And to me, I'm fine with that.

1:17:55We should talk about the price of Bitcoin the way that we talk about the price of baseball cards. It's a thing that you have - A fake idea for children. I wasn't going to say quite those words, but basically, yeah. And congrats to everybody who has made a lot of money on Bitcoin. Sincerely. Great job. I'm happy for all of you. I am increasingly unconvinced that there is any kind of tech story in Bitcoin. And I am more suspicious every day of people who tell me that there is. Because there's no reason to spend one. Right. It is a fundamentally untransactable thing because you are just wasting money because all you care about is dollars.

1:18:30The only good stories about Bitcoin are the people who like spent a bunch of stuff on one 12 years ago. And now it's like we are those people. I want to also want to be very clear. You can assign us a disclosure. We might be bitter because one time Adrian Jeffries bought pizza with Bitcoin. Oh, that's right. I forgot that. You can go look up that story. It was a great story. It's tough. Adrienne was one of our best reporters. She's a great writer, and she went to a bar and bought pizza Bitcoin. And every day I think, boy, we could have sponsored our own lightning round. We could have afforded the lightning round if we just held on to those Bitcoins.

1:19:04I would just say, and even like, you know, I think then Trump too is going to, there's going to be a lot of crypto talk. And the crypto lobby is all very excited. and fundamentally it's all because of dollars they're just excited about how many dollars they will be they will the things will be worth we'll see what that means okay this one david i need you to explain to me okay dia is the browser company's ai powered follow-up to arc yeah so the browser company made a browser called arc uh it's very good and very cool and a lot of people liked it so of course the browser company decided to stop making it uh that's that's that entire story uh and now they're on to their second product which they are trying to make into something that is like thoroughly everyday mainstream uh and they just put up a video this week that was like half recruiting video half kind of vision video uh released the name of the thing showed off a little bit about what they're talking about but it is like this thing is still in its very early days but basically they're making a browser that is like mostly AI.

1:20:10And there's some neat stuff in here. Like you can, anywhere there's a text box, and this is the thing you can do when you're building a browser, right? Is you, you just have access to the whole web, as long as somebody has loaded it in a tab, which is a very powerful thing to be able to do. And so they're, they're doing a thing where you can like click on the cursor in any text box to bring up like a contextual AI menu. And it'll do stuff inside of that page on that text box, like whatever you want. And the big idea here again is to like reimagine the way that you do all of the things that you want to do online with AI.

1:20:45I will say the reaction to this launch has not been super positive. The two threads that I've seen most are why couldn't you build this into Arc, the browser that lots of people already like, and no thank you, I am not interested in having more AI things pop up every time I go to a web page. I have to say, I find both of those arguments very compelling. Yeah. I mean, this is a hint at we're going to do agents, right? You're going to say, order me a sandwich, and then something is going to go browse the web and order a sandwich on their behalf. Yeah. And you can make a pretty good argument that the best way to do that is with a web browser, right?

1:21:20Because it's like... Right. Because you have the web. Right. But only like you, you have the web and also you have me to work with you, right? Like you can, I can open it. You can open up a tab and show it to me. That's like, is this the thing that you want? And I say, yeah. And it orders the thing for me. So like there's a, there's a useful feedback loop inside of the browser that can actually really work. It's also just a way to get access to everything without having to build APIs, right? Like we've talked about the things that the rabbits and humains of the world are having to jump through to get access to DoorDash.

1:21:50My browser can just go to DoorDash.com. Like it just can do it. And so I think I have always thought the browser company is like directionally interested in the right things. But I am I'm I don't know, somewhere between curious and skeptical that branching off to build this whole other thing that is just like an AI bot on top of your browser is actually the thing that they think it is. Yeah. And it's funny. Josh Miller was just on Decoder. He's a browser company is like, our goal is to make an operating system for the web that runs your web apps in it, which is a big idea. Yeah. Right? Most of my apps are web apps anyway.

1:22:25The browser will be more operating system-y and connect all those apps. And this is like a totally different idea. Right. And this is what they've been saying. Like, you could sort of push this towards that thing you're describing. And that vision you're describing has been their vision all along. Right? And in a way, Arc became like a diversion on that. It's like a power user redesign of a browser, which is not an operating system for the internet. Yeah. So we don't know a ton about what this browser is actually going to be. they didn't show that much. It was just a lot of like high-minded talk about the internet.

1:22:56So we'll see. But I will say the large number of people out there who are not psyched about what is happening to ARK did not seem to be satisfied by what Dia looks like so far. All right, next one. Threads continues to respond to Blue Sky in a variety of ways. But then also, just on their own pace, another big step towards Fediverse integration. Now you can follow people from Asdun servers. Kind of. Fediverse servers. which is 99 % activity pub servers 99 % masked on yeah so they won't the post won't show in your feeds but their profile and posts do appear on threads and you can get notifications and they publish this one is so funny to me because it is genuine I think I've been hard on the threads team for not doing this better and faster but like credit where credit's due they continue to do the work and I believe sincerely that this is a thing that they want to do right and well but the middle phases are so weird yeah and it's so this thing where it's like you can follow somebody on the fediverse but you'll never see it unless you go to their profile page like it's like 2006 era facebook is just a very weird solution to a problem and you get the sense they only announced this publicly because somebody would have noticed it and it would have been a confusing thing otherwise you know what i mean uh but again like this is a signal that they've done the hardest part, right?

1:24:19Which is pull that stuff into threads. How to co-mingle it with everything else that's being posted to threads is a difficult problem, but that's like a thread specific problem. It's a big sign that they've done a lot of the like really important protocol work that it shows up in threads at all. So I think that's really exciting. Yeah. And so, you know, we want to federate QuickPosts and we are figuring out how to do that. We actually don't want to federate Thrill, so I don't know how we're doing any of that. And our people, they call what you're describing the inbox. so like outbox is easy right like everyone has solved rss that's outbox it's when somebody hits likes and it comes to you or you're pulling in posts from other sites right so the inbox is really hard and they've obviously gotten there and meta has like big data regulatory problems as well right so i'm excited for them to do it a big question i have is whether they will find a way to bridge activity pub with app protocol such that threads can interoperate with blue sky because once you build that bridge it kind of doesn't matter like all bets are off you know and you got to figure if threads is truly threatened by the rise of blue sky that is one way to uh if not kneecap blue sky to at least like enrich yourself on its gains yeah if you're meta like why do you care about what protocol you've chosen to support yeah i think that that work gets done either way right like there are already people bridging at protocol and activity pub in some interesting ways but uh it would be interesting to see meta just try to try to eat the whole thing all at once yeah uh they've also announced a search feature with filters but like whatever baby steps we made search usable it was literally that announcement like great i'm i am happy to be able to finally find a thing i was looking for on threads yeah also on threads meta nick clegg came out and said they're moderating too much i don't know what to say about that he's like we mistakenly moderate too much which is true threads is like a notoriously over moderated place he says too often harmless content gets taken down or restricted and too many people will get penalized unfairly this is a true like many people have had this experience particularly on threads at the same time donald trump is president margaret is at mar-a-lago elon musk probably also just skulking around mar-a-lago as he is want to do talking about free speech while suing his critics, as he is wont to do.

1:26:36If you're Mark Zuckerberg, you're like, we're going to moderate a little less, not only free speech for everybody. There's also a really interesting pandemic era apology in this stuff from Nick Clegg talking about, I think Facebook in particular was really aggressive about moderating what was perceived for one reason or another to be incorrect information about the pandemic in the early days of the pandemic. And it was super controversial. And it wasn't that long ago that Zuckerberg basically said the Biden administration told him to do that or pressured him. Yeah, I mean, again. Just give a thumbs down.

1:27:14If you're in your car, just imagine me giving a thumbs down. Yeah. That is a pure sop to this administration. So that's what I mean, right? But this is like, it's pretty clear what this push is. It is like, we take no responsibility for what happened during COVID. And there is like a giant strain of the right wing that is like furious about how information was shared during the early days of the pandemic and radicalized a lot of people in a lot of directions hey uh just a quick question david remind me who was president in 2020 uh who's to say who can remember so long ago uh biden biden made him do it is i think what showed up he's like come to delaware there's a real flattening i don't want to it's the lightning round you know it's like this is a good time we got a sponsor today uh we don't want to get into it it's painful to relitigate but there's there's some real smashing of ideas down into stories that don't make sense correct and all of these platforms in the early part of the pandemic all took the same steps and you can love them or hate them but they biden was not the president at that time and that is the thing they're apologizing for is their early steps, not the later ones.

1:28:28But it is also very clear that Facebook is not the only company that is essentially just going to walk away from caring about content moderation. Yeah. That's just where we're headed. And what's funny about that is Blue Sky, right? They moderate pretty aggressively, I would say, but their out is that if you want just the full firehose, you can have it and you can experience an unmoderated Blue Sky. Right. Or if you want an even more moderated Blue Sky, you can have it. And that is a very powerful out that I think is ultimately going to be the future. And part of the reason I think they're doing activity pub.

1:28:58Right. So you can leave, but people here can still find you over there. Right. All right. We should talk about Intel for one second. Sean has a big explainer of what happened with Pat Gelsinger, the Intel CEO, out after three years. David, you buy this conspiracy theory that they were like, you have to spin off the foundry. And he basically was like, no. I mean, I'm a proud Intel man and no. It certainly makes sense. I don't pretend to be like America's most sourced chip reporter, but the thing that I think is most odd about the way this is going is that if you want something that feels like a stable company and stable transition, this is not how you get rid of your CEO.

1:29:38It's just not. Like, he quote unquote retired, effective immediately, and then a source who pretty clearly was like on or near the board of directors just ran around telling reporters that they fired him. Like, that's just what happened. That's how I'm going to go, by the way. When it's my time, it's going to be exactly that. John Legend, board member of Vox Media, is going to go tell people how he fired Eli. but so and so the the conclusion that a lot of people including sean have drawn is that there must have been a fork in the road somewhere right and if you're if you're intel that is the biggest fork sitting in front of you is we've spent all of pat galsinger's 10 years so far spending i mean spending like money is going out of style on becoming a foundry reshaping the way that we make chips reshaping the kinds of chips that we make like they've bet on everything simultaneously all at once.

1:30:30And there is a real case to be made that actually splitting it into two so that you have a company that designs chips and a company that makes them and having those be separate things can be really useful. And Pat Gessinger has pretty loudly said he thinks Intel needs to be both of those things at the same time. So it certainly holds up to like a logical reasoning that that would be the thing where eventually they're like, well, Intel is running into the ground faster than you can turn it around. We have to make this change. And he was like, no, I have to finish the plan. Like, I don't know the answer, but boy, does it make sense?

1:31:04It does feel like he also got caught holding the bag for a bunch of bad decisions that happened before he showed up. Yeah. I mean, yes, he, I think the mistake he made was he gave himself four years and he should have given himself 10. Seriously. Like he came in guns blazing and was like, we're going to do, we're going to do five nodes in four years, which would have, which is like an unprecedented outrageous pace of chip development uh and did pretty well well also a bunch of the chips had a bunch of bugs in them yeah right we we made some chips that self-destruct is a thing that happened on the yeah right pretty well is pretty well was too kind he did some things right their best chips are i believe made by tsmc yes uh and and there's a bunch of really interesting history in uh both sean's piece which links to an interview you did on decoder a while ago with the author of a book called chip war which gets into all of this stuff and there's like some intel tsmc history that's really fascinating uh we'll put all that stuff in the show notes people should go see it but uh it really i just keep coming back to the idea that like ceos of companies where things are going well and they are stable don't resign effective immediately yeah it just doesn't happen and then and then i'm never sleep i can't find Right, to everyone who will listen.

1:32:21All right, I'm going to smash these two together. All right. Trump has picked his SEC head and his antitrust enforcement head of the DOJ. SEC head is Paul Atkins. He likes crypto. Everyone's very excited. By the way, I love it when the crypto industry says they oppose regulation by enforcement, which is a great phrase. If you really unpack it, it means we're doing crimes. They're enforcing the laws against the crimes. And they're like, what if you made real laws that said these weren't crimes? It's very good. And there's more nuance there. It's just every time they say it, like the next time I get caught speeding, I'm like, officer, you're doing regulation by enforcement.

1:32:55Like, I don't know what you're talking about. Anyway, Gail Slater is a more important one. And I trust person. You know, there's a big case against Google. There's a big case against Apple. There's a lot of antitrust in this world. Microsoft lingering. Yep. Gail Slater was on J.D. Vance's team. Is pretty well respected. I have been told that a bunch of the antitrust folks in the world, like the antitrust agitators, are pretty happy about her. The reason I bring up J.D. Vance, he has given speeches where he's like, Lena Khan's doing a good job. Google is a threat to the kinds of companies that I'm aware of in his two-year fake job as a VC.

1:33:36um but you know uh when trump appointed gail slater long rambly trump posted true social and he said big tech is out of control and it's hurting americans and little tech and little tech is words straight out of mark andreessen's mouth yeah andreessen horowitz right now it's i think their whole thing is the little tech agenda like that's what they branded it as so you have and they're railing against google and apple as well so you just have this person We don't know her. We're going to try to talk to her, but she's inheriting a very aggressive antitrust program. The people in and around that program, it seems like, are reasonably happy with this choice.

1:34:15We're doing some reporting. It's just a vibe. I'm not going to source that too much. Just a vibe I've caught. and then you have donald trump himself using the words of his many many wealthy benefactors saying uh who have like long since been critical of the power that apple and google wield it's going to be weird in large part because it makes it harder for them to fund companies that are hugely successful like just just to pull that thought all the way i'm not saying any of this is like some good faith dealing i'm saying this is about to be some of the most gangster tech regulation that any of us have ever experienced and the horse trading is out of control right Right.

1:34:49Like if one of the if you are a crypto salesman, what you want to do is sell NFTs on the iPhone. That would be a huge market. If you could unlock buying and selling NFTs on mobile, that'd be great. Right now, Apple is going to take 30 percent of every digital transaction. You want that to go away. You know how you can do that? A big antitrust case against Apple. Apple does not want tariffs on every iPhone. Tim Cook needs to go walk up. don't like that's just we're all going to sit around the table at mar-a-lago and reshape the american economy yep somehow like i don't know and that it's not going to be like a process-based evidence-based agency rulemaking it's it's going to be whoever talks to trump last yeah like truly sitting around a table making these decisions is is a not particularly like euphemistic way to describe what's about to happen like that that is how it's going to happen in so many ways i think a lot of people assumed that Trump would come into office and pro-business, pro-big business especially, he would install an antitrust person that took all these cases away.

1:35:55And I think there's a greater than even odds that these cases continue and remain as aggressive as there. Yeah, I would say the early signals on this do push more towards that than I would have expected. And let me just wrap all this together. Let me just bring this together. In Trump's first term, Makan Dalrahim was his antitrust enforcer. And you recall that instead of preventing T-Mobile from buying Sprint, he brokered a deal in which T-Mobile was allowed to buy Sprint, thus reducing the number of national carriers from four to three in America. And he sold Sprint's assets to Dish Network, America's vibrant fourth carrier.

1:36:29And that has resulted in this week, Verizon just raising its prices because there's no competition. A marked turn, I would say. yeah all right well we're dangerously close to a snyder cut conversation here so uh last one all right gail what are you gonna let zach snyder do in your antitrust regime yeah that's the the big questions we ask here on the first cast um how was your spotify wrapped this year uh it was mostly full of the moana soundtrack uh little incanto uh and more frozen too than anyone has the the right to, to really deal with. Boy, do we love Frozen 2. There's a straight Peter Cetera song on the Frozen 2 song.

1:37:11I don't want to get into it, but I listened to it and I was like, that's just Peter Cetera. And then, yeah, it turns out they were very inspired by the musical stylings of Chicago. There you go. Mine, my number one artist was the Wiggles, which was pretty exciting. So was my wife's. And between us, we were both top 3 % Wiggles listeners. Very good. Yeah. Mine was all kids music. and then one unreleased Broadway show song that I got really obsessed with because I found it on TikTok. And that's been my year in music. But anyway, I bring this up to say two things. One, sincere thank you to every single person who sends us their Spotify wrapped with us on it.

1:37:47It is the best. Every single one of them just rules. And like, we've gotten people who are like, I spent five days listening to The Verge Cast last year and like, I cannot, it's the best. That is like the best feeling every year is when people are like, you're at the top, unless we're second to hard fork. And then how dare you? You're dead to me. But the second thing is everybody's doing Wrapped now. Like Reddit has the thing. The other music services have it. Podcast services have it. Like they're all kind of doing their year interview thing. Spotify, for its new innovation this year, partnered with Notebook LM from Google to do an AI podcast of your Wrapped.

1:38:29Have you listened to yours? No. They're very funny. Mine is like four and a half minutes long and it's both awful and delightful. It's just like, imagine a sort of bouncy stranger just reading your raps to you who has never met you before. It's so fun and so funny. And you come out of it being like, this is somehow the person that Spotify thinks I am. And I don't know what to do about that. But like, we're in a real like wrapped arms race now and I'm extremely here for it. It's funny how most of the time people are like, don't surveil me. And at the end of the year, they're like, tell me everything about myself.

1:39:02Yeah. Listen, if you're going to collect all this data on me, at least give it back to me once a year in a funny way. I'm very excited for the Vizio Walmart wrapped. Here are all the ads you engaged with this year. That's actually a good idea. Here's exactly how much laundry detergent we prodded you into buying. Here's how much you overspent on Amazon this year. Mid-year, you switched car insurance providers. That was us.

1:39:30I mean, you know they do that for their advertisers. You're right. All the clients are getting wrapped right now. All right. I just looked at my Apple Music wrapped, and my number one playlist was Taylor Swift Essentials, and my number two playlist was 2000's Indie Rock. And you can really tell that there's a battle in our house of who gets to ask for music. It's very good. Very good. All right, that's it. We're way over. We're like six hours over. We've been podcasting for a full year now. We're also both sick right now. So I just want to say congratulations to both of us. If you've heard us about sniffling and coughing and Max just like screaming in the hallway.

1:40:06Yeah. It's just one of those VirgFast at the end of the year. It's a time. Once again, I want to say thank you to everybody who has subscribed, particularly VirgFast listeners who are telling us they're subscribing just to support us. That means a lot. Like we've been doing this for a long time. 13 years is a long time to be doing a thing. and to have so many of you say, I can't believe I wasn't paying for this already, which is a real note we have gotten mind-blowing. So thank you. We're going to keep at it. We're very stubborn. No one can pay to tell us what to do, except for you, apparently.

1:40:33So we're going to figure that out. Also, send us more questions. Call the hotline. Send us emails. Yeah, Helen's on next week. So send us questions. We'll answer them. We're going to be as transparent with our business as we can be. We think that's an important part of the whole puzzle here. And then we have a big launch feature for the subscription. Josh Trezza wrote about like falling in love with AI and the companies that do it and the people that actually fall in love go read that it is incredible it is easily worth your$7 like oh unquestionably just straightforwardly reading that story is worth$7 so go check that out it's good and the art is amazing oh and you haven't read our magazine content goblins yeah subscribe for that it's good the photos are amazing alright that's it that's VergeCast and that's it for the VergeCast this week Hey, we'd love to hear from you.

1:41:19Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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