AI assistants are so back

28:19And we are at, well, 20 bucks a month was a lot of money and people weren't paying for it. And now we're giving away the best model we have for free, right? Like there's a real challenge in there and you can see these companies kind of battling it out, each using their own advantage. OpenAI very much, their advantage is they can tell a compelling story about a product that everyone believes will be here a year from now. And Google's advantage is that it's huge. Yep. And you also just described basically the whole reason that Microsoft and OpenAI got so tied up. Because Microsoft promised AI that same level of scale and infrastructure.

28:52And I think if we've learned one thing, it's that it's very hard to do that in a partnership in a way that it's much easier to do it inside of your company. And I think like if you look at what we've seen across Google the last year or so, that company has just like relentlessly consolidated itself to be able to move all of that stuff faster. And that's like that was the Rick Osterloh story when they put him on top of hardware and on Android. It's to move AI into Pixel and Android more quickly. And the infrastructure stuff like one thing Demis Asaba said to me is that the fact that Google's infrastructure exists is how you get Astra to be so fast.

29:29Like he just literally tied those two things together. And he's like, that's, we spent six months taking the tech that we had and making it fast. And what that meant is putting it in the rest of Google's infrastructure. Like that becomes the job. And, and you're right. Cheap and fast are how you win. That's, that is the next phase of this is we take all of this stuff and we figure out how to do it. We figure out how to do it in a way that is like economically sustainable and doesn't have latency because latency kills all of these products just as a user. Like if it's slow, it sucks. And that's where we are.

29:57And Google has known that forever, right? I mean, Google has always known that speed is the thing. So we should talk about some of Google's news. The main one is Project Astra, which is their natively multimodal take a video of a thing, search for it, ask it questions. I did a demo of it with V song. It was weird. Like, there were Google executives there doing demos on their phones. apparently. We didn't see that. We went into a booth where we put on like a gaming headset and there was a you know top mounted camera pointing down on a big TV screen and we were asked to take objects out of like bins and like put them on the top you know so the top ten camera could see them and like ask questions about the objects which to David's point is a completely insane use case.

30:42Like you are just never going to do this. You know what? But like the idea is that it could see the things like instantly sort of latency free chat with you about them. so you know v picked three things and like said tell me a story name the stuffed animal great i broke it um just instantly broke it uh i had a spaceship a pleosaur like a like a plastic dinosaur uh and did you know it was a pleosaur or did it tell you it was a pleosaur i thought it was an ichthyosaurus and it told me it was a pleosaur all right i don't know by the way i don't know who was right i didn't have any like dinosaur people there with me you know the one dude from Jurassic Park was not there with me.

31:21But Alan, what's his name? Alan Grant? Yeah, Alan Grant was not there. Yeah. Good pull. There we go. What was it? Who's the one who played Ellie? This is what I care about. Laura Dern? Laura Dern. Yeah. Laura Dern, oh my God, I wish she'd been there with you. I just wish she's around. She's great. If Google's listening, the next time we do this demo, Laura Dern should be there. And I was like, tell me a story about these three objects where the maraca is the winner, which to be fair is like an idea that can only come from my like booze addled human brain yeah and it just it was like get ready for a story and i was like i'm ready and it was like once upon a time and it just stopped just dead in its tracks like could not predict the next word in a sentence that added up to the maraca will beat this dinosaur in the spaceship like and there is There's nothing more awkward than that specific silence.

32:16Yeah. Where you're like, is it about to happen? Is it thinking? Did it break? Is it doing? Is there a hamster on a wheel somewhere? There's a data center on fire. And the poor guy giving the demo just like hit this space bar. I was like, get out of here. He was like, we have other demos to give. I don't trust you anymore. And it's fine. That is a weird demo. It's a weird use case. It doesn't make any sense. The point is to show that it can see, you can use its camera and do text-to-speech all at the same time in the same way. Right. Natively multimodal. But right. Like you would never walk. Like if you ask a normal person, tell me a story where the maraca is a winner.

32:49They would also be like, get ready. Yeah, walk away. But I think there's just a part of this where we're asking these things to do like incredibly esoteric things just to see where their limits are, obviously. And you got to bring that back to reality. So the one demo they gave, which is coming to Google Lens. It's like an extension of Google Lens. is a video search, which is sort of related to Astra. Like Astra is a thing over here, but video search is a thing over there. And it's weird to pull them apart. So Astra, you're just like talking to a computer. You're like waving your phone around, looking at stuff and talking to it.

33:25Video search and lens is you like take a video. Like you hold down the shutter button of a thing while you're talking and you say like, why is this record player broken? Which is one of their demos. Or why doesn't the lever on this camera move? Which is another one of their demos. and they feel to me like the very related ideas, but they are separate in classic Google fashion. Like these are not the same idea. They're different, have different names. But the thing about it is the Astro demos, you know, they felt very esoteric. Can a Morocco win? The video search demos were very tactile. Like I could see how they would be useful.

34:03Right, this thing is broken. I'm just gonna take a video of it being broken. I don't even know what the parts are called. Help me fix it. So the record player one, which they did live on stage, is pretty good, right? They had a – people know about record players. There's a weight on the back of the tone arm. And if you don't have the weight balanced right, the tone arm just like skips around. Because you need some weight pushing down on the needle into the record to like hit the whole thing. If you're a record player nerd, this is like the most exciting demo that you've ever seen. If you're a normal person, you look at that and it just tells you this thing.

34:33Go watch the demo. I encourage you to watch the demo. It's like that – it identifies the model, the make and model of the turntable. It's like that's an audio-technical turntable. And the reason that Stonarm might be moving this way is because it's not counterbalanced correctly. And it has a whole list of like things you could do to counterbalance correctly. And it's like, oh, this actually isn't useful, which I thought was fascinating. It's the right answer. Straightforwardly the right answer. Like that's why it was doing that thing. But if you don't know what the Tonearm is called, you've gone two steps too deep too fast.

35:03Right? Right? You're like the information you need is like record players work by putting a needle in a groove and you need to put pressure on that needle. And this round weight at the back is called the counterbalance and you need to spin it. So you put enough weight on the thing and the amount of weight you put on it is actually dependent on your needle. It's like you fall down the rabbit hole and suddenly you realize like you own four record players. Yeah, then you're just an audio nerd. It's just a thing that happens to you. That's fine. But like, that was really interesting to me, right? It's the right answer, but sort of in a way that was like too far, too fast.

35:38Oh, I think you're totally wrong. I think, I think you're, what you just described is Google search, like, which, which is the way that it works, right? Which is that I'm saying, if you don't know what a term artist called, you couldn't follow the directions that were given to you. Right. That's, I mean, that's fair, but I think maybe a better example of the, the opposite case is, uh, one that Liz Reed, the head of search talked about when she and I were talking, which is your dishwasher is broken and there's a light blinking and you don't know what brand your dishwasher is. You don't know what model it is.

36:06You don't know how to describe which you're just a baby. You're just like, my dishwasher is broken. Like off the top of your head. Do you know that? Do you know the model number of your dishwasher? I could make up anything. If you had confidently answered, I would have believed you. You're absolutely confident. It just makes up enough. But again, I don't, that's not information. Most people have. It's not information. Most people need. It's not information. Most people should care about. it should just say take out the filter in the bottom rinse it out and put it back you'll be fine like that that is the answer i don't need to learn about dishwashers i just want mine to work and it's the like i take my car to the mechanic some people are like oh i'd like to understand cars so that i can my i can make sure that my car runs better most people come in they go my car's going fix it right that's the end of the interaction that's great but if you're asking like what is this thing and why is it broken and it's like here's how to fix it telling you what to do is actually important, right?

36:59And here it was just like, fix your counterbalance. Yeah, but that doesn't require teaching me about it. It just says, do you see the thing there? Pull it down. Fair. I just thought that was a particularly jargon. Maybe it's because I'm a turntable person. But the answer there was particularly jargony in a way that I thought was interesting. It didn't help you understand the actual answer. Well, I think you're also someone who thinks you want to understand the thing that you're talking about and working with. We're all gadget nerds. Well, I just want to lie to David confidently. Yeah, yeah, that too.

37:28But like, we want to know how the thing works. We want to know all the processes. And it's true. Like the reason, you know, when you first used Google search 20 years ago, you would have to be really think about your search prompt, right? Like you'd have to think about what you type in. And now you just type in like, my dishwasher doesn't work. yeah and and people just don't care as much but but to your point like yeah if it said if the dishwasher said yeah go replace the filter i'd be like where the hell is the filter what the hell is that like i would still like to your credit like i would still want to know all of that and i don't think it would necessarily get me there yet well i'm just saying i think that one's interesting because that it was the right answer there's no question it was the right answer yeah that's the reason the tonearm was flying back and forth it was just is the is it a useful answer right and i think we can obviously disagree about that and we are but that's the level that we're at like is this actually useful for you to go sort of like spit out an answer like this where it's fixed the counterbalance right and you need to know some information to like take action on that instruction well and there's a really interesting sort of ai all the way down piece of that too which is that like what that indicates is that the the ai for sort of understanding what's in a video that you're sending to it is capable, right?

38:43Like it did the job, it figured out the question you had by you pointing a video. That's awesome, right? Like I actually think the video search in lens is a very good idea. And I think pointing your phone at something being like, what is this thing that's happening is an actually totally normal user behavior. So I'm like all in on that. The output thing is actually much harder, right? Because it's like, okay, in this case, is the right thing for Google to do to just sort of give me an answer about the tone arm, which is not a term that I know to your point. So if it says pull the thing on the tone arm, I'm like, what the hell is the tone arm?

39:13And you've lost me. Should it send me a YouTube video? Should it send me a compilation of stuff? Should it like superimpose AR on top? Like that is just such a different problem from the sort of search query recognition thing. And my sense is Google is getting really good at the search query recognition, right? They did it with voice. They did it with video. They did it with images. is like it google is very good at understanding what you're asking almost no matter how you ask it and then the question of how to answer is so different and so much harder and full of thorns and wildfires so the by the way this is kind of exactly what i was getting at is what it presented was like a list of words like vocab words and then in the demo uh she was like and here's a link to Audio Technica's manufacturer page, which is more words.

40:02And what you actually want is like a YouTube short where someone just does it in five seconds. Right. Somebody just reaches down and pokes the thing and it works. Right. And they're just like, here's this thing, like do this thing until it floats and then like turn the number to whatever number is on. Like that's what you, that's all you need to know. And like the actual answer to that is a video of someone doing it. And that's again, I just like, you got it right in one specific way, but it actually got it wrong. in like another way, which is like the form of the answer is not the most useful thing, which is really interesting.

40:33Then there was the other demo, which it was just wrong. Like wrong in a way where I'll just preview. The first question I asked Sundar Pichai in the decoder interview was, is language the same as intelligence? Because the question was that someone was pointing a camera at a broken film advanced lever on a SLR, like a film SLR camera. And so these cameras are really manual, right? So you take a picture and you got to move the lever to move the frame of film over in the camera. If you've never seen a film camera, this is like a very satisfying mechanical thing to do. Right? You like push the button, the big, you know, the shutter goes chachunk and then you like move.

41:11You're literally pulling, you know, the notches in the side of film. You're literally pulling the film over and winding it around. Such a good feeling. So you can expose the next shot, the next frame, the next time you open the shutter. This is great. I love, like, I'm a nerd for these things. and the answer the question was why why won't why can't i advance this thing why is this lever not moving all the way to advance the next thing this is a problem with these cameras they have them there's a million reasons you might have this problem uh one of like one of them on like old cannons is like there's a magnet at the bottom of the thing and one of the answers is like get a magnet and like run it over the bottom of the camera like there's all these there's like folk tales and superstitions like you know it's like drink the blood of a goat and like wave at a crystal and move your film advanced lever.

41:53It doesn't matter. There's just like a lot of information out on the web of how to do this. And the answer that Google delivered in its own video and highlighted is the most wrong answer. Like it's right in one way, which is as a last resort, just open the back of the camera. It will technically work. It will technically work. But if you open the back of a film camera, you expose all of the film, you ruin all of your photos, right? So when people do this, when I asked Becca and Viren and a bunch of other photographers on our staff, like when you have a broken film advance lever, would you ever just open the back of your camera?

42:28And Becca was like, no, no, no, no, no. You go into the darkest closet you can find and you pray. And then you open it and monkey with it because you don't want to expose your film. You don't want to lose your photography. And Viren was like, I've spent a lot of time in that closet, which is like a very funny thing, the most Viren thing you can say. Right. Like these cameras break. They're finicky mechanical objects. But there's not a place where anyone with even the slightest bit of intelligence about those kinds of cameras would recommend and highlight, just open the door and fix it. Because necessarily, you're going to ruin all of your photos.

43:03So I actually asked to know about this. I was like, this is not a thing. I don't see the intelligence going up. I see the language. I see the capability, right? Like David's saying, It can see in the video what's wrong. It can go search the web. It can synthesize some answer. But this answer is wrong. Like, this is not the thing you should advise people to do. And he's like, I went and talked to the team. And they're like, well, in some cases, if you were willing to destroy all of your photos, it's the right answer. Which is correct. Yeah. That is the correct response. We should just run it. We should just run that clip.

43:33Let's run that clip now. You know, ironically, I was talking to the team as part of making the video. They consulted with a bunch of subject matter experts who all reviewed the answer and thought it was okay. I understand the nuance. I agree with you. Obviously, you don't want to expose your film by taking it outside of a darkroom. There are certain contexts in which it makes sense to do that. If you don't want to break the camera and if what you've taken is not that valuable, it makes sense to do that. You know, it's a good example of you're right. There is a lot of nuance in it. And part of what I hope Search serves to do is to gives you a lot more context and around that answer and allows people to explore it deeply.

44:13But I think, you know, these are the kind of things for us to keep getting better at. I do see the capability frontier continuing to move forward. I think we are a bit limited if we were just training on text data, but I think we are all making it more multimodal. So I see more opportunities there. To me, that answer is like, yeah, we should have probably told you you're going to destroy all your photos, right? Like, that's the answer. Yes. Yes. But it's also like, why are we rushing into a world where the products can't quite do the thing you need them to do? And Alex, this was your piece, which is these things are hallucinating left and right and everyone's kind of like over it.

44:50Yeah. I just keep being baffled by it because people – it just screws up constantly. Like if you give me one of these things, I can probably get it to hallucinate within four to five questions fairly easily. Like consistently, I can get it to screw up. And it's just because they're not good at it yet because they're computers. They're not people. They're not actually – all of the stuff that our brains do is really hard to do. And they're not prepared. But these companies are like, well, it's really cool. We're on our way. So, like, enjoy. And this is now how we're going to have everything work.

45:22And it's like, well, no. Stop that. Like, I need my computer to know how to do my taxes. I don't need it to know, like, what a nice accountant should sound like. have you seen the one where people keep asking it how to get a man and a goat across a river and literally none of the models can like do it like the question is you have a man a boat and a goat how do you get them all across the river and it's like first you take the goat across then the man comes back and he takes himself across and it's like that's not the answer this is a bad answer yeah they don't they don't the like the ais don't think like humans do they're not meant to And that is remarkable.

46:00And it's like, it is cool that we're now effectively engaging with like, these alien thoughts and things, right? Because it doesn't think the way a human does. But it also doesn't think the way a human does. And we keep asking it to. And we keep putting it in these situations. And then we're like, don't worry about it. So it hallucinated a little bit. So it like decided that Neelai wasn't the founder of The Verge and that Alex is a man. It's fine. Keep going. And it's like, yeah, materially, those aren't harmful things to say, right? Like, I think we'll both be fine if somebody said that. But it still shouldn't say it.

46:33And that's what you want to now become the new form of search. Like, for me, it really feels like Google has lost the plot for what Google is supposed to do. And Google is supposed to get you to the information. It is not supposed to be the arbiter of the information. And increasingly, it feels that it needs to be the arbiter of the information. And that's like the whole point behind a lot of its new search products. We're just going to tell you how to think. And it's like, well, no, one, you're a company, you shouldn't tell me how to think. Two, you don't actually know because you're relying on these AIs that don't know.

47:03Just stop this. Like, this is a really bad path for them to go down. I feel like it's going to eventually bite them in the ass. But they're so financially incentivized that they just keep doing it. I mean, this is truly the competition between OpenAI and Meta and Google is ferocious. Microsoft's obviously in the mix there. Apple wants to be. Well, Apple's just going to buy some model from one of the other, right? At least for the stuff that Siri goes outside your phone. That's the rumor. We'll see. WWC is coming up. But it just feels like there's that ferocious race to get to this product that everyone has dreamed of for a long time.

47:38Whether or not the core technology can do the task reliably. And, you know, just go back and think about that phone camera example for a minute. but if you had a friend who was like you were like for some reason you're like my film camera is broken I can't move this lever and they're like yeah just open the back and then you open the back and it destroyed all the photos you've taken by the way film's not cheap which is the thing that Becca reminded me of instantly like film is expensive so you're gonna ruin all these photos you're gonna ruin your expensive piece of film you would be pissed at your friend like just as a matter of course you'd be like what dude like you could have told me to go to a dark room like I ask you because I assume you know this other piece of information and there's none of that accountability with these tools you can't just like be mad at it because you know in a market you would leave google and go to open ai and it's like it's gonna lie at you but in a way that suggests it might also have sex with you like yeah fine but I just that's the part where it's it's like everyone's building a really fast car but they're not telling you that the engine just doesn't work about 20 percent of the time and it's like okay but is there a path to stopping it that would be a bad car.

48:45I actually, I would put it slightly differently. I think it's, they're building a fast car and not telling you how to use it, right? And I think like the camera thing to me is such an interesting example because I would argue that's not a hallucination. That's a terrible UX mistake. Like it gave you a true answer without the actual bit of information you needed to know what to do with that true answer. You can open the back of your camera to get the film out. That is a true thing. And so in a certain way, the model was successful. And like, that's what I hear Sundar saying. It's like, it didn't get it wrong.

49:18It just didn't tell you what you actually needed to know. And so now we're in this place where like... I mean, that is the, you're dancing on the pins or the heads of wheels, whatever I think. I mean, there are things that are wrong. Like, Alex Kranz does not have a beard. That is wrong, right? Like, got it. Nailed. Yeah. By the way, the rest of the answer is on that list. That's the one I focused on because it was the most destructive. The rest of the answers in the list that it generates are bananas. Like one of them is just like nudge the shutter a little bit, which is like, no. Yeah. I've already done that.

49:55Don't do that. That's not going to help you. One of the things I think a lot about with Google right now is Google used to make you do a lot of work, right? And that was the job, right? Like when you did Google search, you did most of the work when you were interacting with Google. And now Google is trying to do most of the work for you. And it creates this incredibly different version of Google that needs to exist. And what Google thinks is that actually it can just put a paragraph summary at the top and then let you use Google the way you normally would. Because if you want to know more than just the paragraph, well, here's regular Google.

50:29And I think that is like woefully underestimating how differently people are going to start to use Google as a result. and so to me it's like it's making these things in such a way that is like weird and different is one thing but to just push them at people and be like this is a familiar thing that you totally understand is a disaster and that's so much of what we're getting is like this thing sounds like a person talk to it like a person it works like a person like it super doesn't not even close and it's all it's gonna do is run you into trouble yeah i mean to me this is the question that like all of these products have to answer right is what are people's expectations and can you change them fast enough i i truly do not know the answer to that because i think what people are responding to is these computers are talking to them and it turns out people confidently flirtatiously talking to you charmingly talking to you is a great way to get a lot of people to believe a lot of lies that's how you get alex kranz in a newsboy cap yeah exactly uh this is how swing dance happened to America.

51:35I don't know if that's true. But like Google knows this because it operates YouTube. It knows this problem intimately, right? There's a lot of charming liars. Here we are, we're on YouTube. But it's interesting that it's like running full force into making the problem. And like you said, Alex, owning those search results, like that's Google's fault that they told you that answer. Whether or not you think that it's appropriate to pop open the back of the camera, that's Google's answers now. It's not some answer in a Reddit thread. It's not some answer from a friend that you're kind of mad at. It's just Google's problem now.

52:04It's going to be opening ass problem. There's a lot more to talk about. We should talk about search very briefly. We should talk about everything else Google has. We got to take a break though. We've been at this for a minute. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24 seven. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place.

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55:52all right we're back existential crisis about banging an ipad is on pause for the rest of this I know you wanted more of it. I thought you were going to say over and I was like, well, that's a lie, but on pause we can live. Kevin Roos still wanders these streets, David. By the way, we're good friends with both Kevin and Casey at Hard Fork. That's why we out of love. Although I do worry out of love. All right. Just not as much as we love our iPads.

56:22It's like my wife, my iPad, Kevin Roos is like, I would say the big three. Man, the dog just got a little job. He's a child. He's there. He's fine. He doesn't play me any YouTube videos. Fair enough. Look, the OpenAI stuff and the Google stuff, right? These, like, video multimodal search chat interfaces. Those are the main events. Google announced 10 million other things at I.O., all of which were named Gemini, basically, or variations of it. It's very confusing. David, can you just run us down the stuff? Sure. So basically, the theme of Google I.O. is just Gemini in everything. There was Gemini Google Photos, which powers a feature called Ask Photos that lets you ask questions of the photos in your Google Photos.

57:14The example they gave was you can just search what's my license plate number and it'll find your license plate number in your license plate in a photo in your Google Photos, which as somebody who only knows my driver's license number because it's in my Google Photos rules all about that. feature. By the way, that might be the single most important thing that they announced was AI searching Google Photos. Oh, it also, as far as I could tell, I wasn't there live, but it got a big reaction as far as I could tell, both live on the live stream and just in our office, people being like, yes, license plate search.

57:47Turns out no one knows what their license plate is. You know what I think it is? It's Google Photos is so close to being able to do that now. So is Apple Photos in its way that you start to ask it things it can't do so if you ever search your google photos you quickly start to ask for things that it can't do because it's so close to being able to do that now right so you can just ask it for like show me all the people wearing a blue shirt on this day in the past and like we'll figure it out right because it has some ability of that knowledge um uh i personally search for the word truck a lot uh just to gaze my now departed pickup truck i needed to know my vin number for when I traded in the truck and I just searched for the words of in number and just like found it.

58:27Right. Cause I'd taken a picture of it. The idea that you can extend that. I think people responded to it cause you're, they're already trying. Yeah. So now you're going to give the people what they want. It's like very good. Yeah. Yeah. So that was one thing that got a lot of excitement, um, all sort of in the same vein of like things you already kind of want to do. Uh, they announced a bunch of Gemini stuff in workspace. There's a, there's a thing where you can like ask similar questions of your email uh the example they gave was if you have concert tickets or i think it was nick's tickets was one of the examples they used uh you can just say like what time do the doors open at the next game tonight and it'll actually look in your email for your ticket to find that information that kind of stuff is neat uh there was a bunch of stuff in just the kind of general model universe there was a new version of the imagine model which is one of the ones that developers can use for creative tools.

59:21There was VO, which is Google's answer to Sora, which is a text to video model, which seemed really cool, but like, yeah, it's even better than Sora in a lot of ways. It also debatable whether either of them actually exist in the world. So we'll see. There was a new thing called Gemini Live, which was like a always on voice chatty thing, basically very similar to the one that OpenAI announced. uh project astra is the big like long-term vision gemini live is that just sort of specific voice thing there were up there was an update to synth id which is uh how google is attempting to figure out a way to watermark ai generated stuff they're now doing it with uh text which i thought was really interesting but also with videos uh which goes along with vo and all the stuff they're doing there bunch of stuff for gemini advanced and gemini nano and gemini 1.5 flash which is a new models just designed for all of it to be like it's the names are insane and i'm sure i've gotten two-thirds of them wrong and i don't care because i it's google's fault you've gotten them all right so the names are dumb there was a new one there's a new ai thing in youtube called music ai sandbox which i confess i don't totally understand because there's been a bunch of kind of overlapping ai music things inside of youtube and they glossed over it so quickly that i think it might just be kind of an amalgam of some of those things already but that's the thing that exists they're working with musicians on that stuff uh new gemma models which are google's open sourced ai models uh circle to search is in android doing more stuff they had a bunch of little things in android designed to make kind of gemini all over the operating system in interesting ways so the android piece is really interesting to me uh like in a big way i don't know if any of it will come true because Google, but Dave Burke got on stage and started demoing AI features in Android.

1:01:16And he's like, this works as we control the operating system. And you put that sort of right next to, we've combined the Android team and the Pixel team under Rick Osterloh. And you're like, oh, like this is the, like if you make this really good, this is the thing that is actually compelling to switch from a Samsung phone or iPhone. This is how Google thinks it wins for sure. both with pixel specifically and with android in general like i think this is true or false the thing they have identified as their chance to leapfrog apple in a really good way but they've always thought ai was their way yeah but now it's like the user interface for the operating system is ai like they've built like a super rabbit you know it's like that's the thing that they're getting at is like you can just be on your phone and like circle a thing and like the robot will like go do it for you or like you can just talk to it and like use the apps for you and unlike rabbit uh google has some ai technology yeah well and there was one thing that they talked about where uh the sort of context awareness where it'll actually understand what's on the screen as you're talking to your phone that's the kind of thing that you genuinely only can do if you control the operating system like no one else has that access but also uh google has been trying to do this for forever.

1:02:31Do you remember Google Now, which was just the same damn thing? Like the promise of so much of the large language model stuff right now is all this stuff we've been trying to do for 15 years we can do now because the tech is better. Like these ideas are not new. It's so funny. They just think we have the tech to do it now. Or the tech to do it convincingly. I just have to keep putting that asterisk there to do it convincingly. Maybe not to do it. yeah that's fair to at least make you want to try it yeah is is as far as they have to go uh there's more there's a bunch of search stuff that we should talk about but it was basically like they made all the models better and are starting to introduce some more specific models like i think gemini 1.5 pro flash in addition to being an unbelievably stupid name is really interesting because it's just a different version of gemini that is just designed for speed its whole job is we just paired everything down and made it as fast as we possibly could.

1:03:25And I think you're going to start to see more little things like that as they tune to these kinds of specific use cases over time. So it really top to bottom was just, here's the thing we Gemini'd it. Is it better now? Do you like it? That was the whole vibe. So I will say, I think the most important one is Google photos. It's the one that will hit the most people, the fastest and change how people use the application, which I think is cool. Like really cool. Then there's the rest of it, which, you know, I think the major criticism I was like, there's too much stuff. It was too unfocused. Like they just said the word Gemini.

1:03:56Like if you just read that list of things named Gemini, Gemini 1.5 pro Gemini 1.5 flash Gemini live Gemini now Gemini. Like it's insane. Yeah. They announced the thing where they're like, here's a prototype and idea where you have an AI teammate who has their own Gmail address. She's like yell at it. No, this name was chip. That's like, this is a ridiculous, like this is pure vapor. Yeah. Like you are announcing vaporware. There's no reason to do this. Like you're just, why, right? You could pare it down to like, here's our product and here's all the things it can do. And that'd be more focused.

1:04:27But I think Google thinks it has to like cover the waterfront of every idea you might have with AI. And be like, we had that idea too. And we have the infrastructure to pull it off. And we have Google Workspace. So we can just deploy 100 AI teammates to your Google Workspace tomorrow. Startups, don't you dare. Yeah, I mean, I really like, the way I've come to think about all of these things is that they used to be kind of half for developers and half for like the general public to sort of show the world what you've been working on. Now it's like a third for Wall Street. Yep. So that you can make sure investors trust that you have a real AI strategy.

1:05:06Because fundamentally, that's what a lot of this is about. Google is still fighting the idea that it got caught off guard by OpenAI and ChatGPT and is still trying to assert itself to investors specifically as a big player in the AI future, which means trillions of dollars if you can convince everybody that that's the case. So it's like, it's a third Wall Street. It's like 50 % developers. And then it's just a little teeny tiny slice left for regular people. You almost did the rest of that math and you just walked away from our end. 17 % regular people. There you go. And it's just like, you could just feel Google getting up there over and over and being like, we are good at AI.

1:05:49Yeah. That was so much of it. Yeah. Like we did it. That's how I felt about Apple at the iPad event. They were just like the best AI piece. It's like, what are you talking about? Yeah. And it's like, this is made for analysts. So the one thing that's really interesting there, specifically in the context of Wall Street, is AI overviews in search, which they announced very quickly. So Google has had this thing called search generative experience, sort of in testing for a long time now, a year, where you search for something and there's like an AI answer. And it's like, here's this stuff. And they've been tweaking it and messing with it and seeing how it works for a while.

1:06:22And what they announced at I.O., which is a huge deal, is it's rolling out to everyone in the U.S. Like this week, it's going to be called AI Overviews. And that's it. This is Search now. And on earnings calls last year, Sindar was saying this is the future of Search. Like Search will be this thing. This is where we're going. And here we are where you search for something on Google. And depending on the query, Google just reads the web and delivers the answer for you. And next to that, they have this thing, AI-powered, like, search page, which is basically what ARC browser is doing, right? Where you, like, go ask ARC a question and it, like, reads the web and it, like, makes a little web page for you with all the answers in it.

1:07:03Google is going to do that now as the search engine results page, the SERP. instead of 10 blue links, it will just like make a little custom webpage of like best anniversary restaurants in Dallas and be like, we've concocted this webpage for you. That's wild, right? This is like flip the table on how the internet works in a big way. I would say the response from the media industry in particular is apocalyptic. Like that's the word I would use. Fair. The CEO of the News Media Alliance, which I think we have to disclose, like I think Fox Media is in it. It's like not my thing. But someone's in it.

1:07:38Sure. We are in the media ourselves. We are in the news media. Yeah. We run, we operate in the media business, and our executives are in various media business organizations. That's their side of the house. I just complain. But there's a disclosure. But the CEO of the news media line said to CNN, this is catastrophic to our traffic. Like, Google's going to keep all the traffic, and they're not going to send us any traffic. We've been talking a lot about little sites that are already seeing Google traffic go to zero. I've been talking for years about this thing I call Google Zero, which if you've been listening to Verge has for a long time, you know that like our first big refer when we started was Yahoo.

1:08:12And we would like write stories about Phish technology because the Yahoo algorithm loved Phish. And we would just like do that on Fridays to fuck with Yahoo. And it worked. I don't know. That's how I built this business. Like, I'm sorry. And then, you know, there's like Facebook traffic for a while and it went away. And I'm always like the thing, it will go away. That's like my inherent paranoia after all this time in the media. and I'm like, that number will go down. And that's Google. And that's the last referrer of note across the entire industry. I've been calling this Google Zero for years.

1:08:40Like, what are you going to do if your Google traffic goes to zero? On Decoder, I ask media executives all this time. And this is the moment where I think it clicked into reality for a lot of those executives that Google is going to start answering the questions by reading their sites and delivering an AI summary of the answer. And Google's response to this, and again, we can move through this quickly because I talked about this with Zundar and Decoder quite a bit. That's coming on Monday. But Google's answer to this, Liz's answer to this, Liz Reed, you run search, is actually the links in the AI overviews get more clicks.

1:09:11That's their answer. Like, straight up, they're like, actually, we're going to send more traffic this way. No one knows if that is true. The only people who have the data to evaluate that are Sunor Pichai and Liz Reed. And it's like, well, if that's true, that's great. If it's not true or worse, if the haves get bigger, like you send more traffic to the big corporate sites and no traffic at all to anyone else, that's bad for the – like that's bad, right? That will reshape the internet in particular ways. And maybe you think this is great. Like maybe you think that indie media or whatever small sites should build their own network of traffic and their own – this is our belief, right?

1:09:53My belief very strongly is we should have our own audience away from platforms. But if you are operating today and you're like, oh, my traffic is going to go to zero, my Google traffic is going to go to zero, you don't have the runway to do the thing. Right. They just turned it on. It's just on now. Yeah. Yeah. Your business is going to go away. And that is the thing that I think the pressure from open AI, the competitive pressure from open AI and all these other companies, it pushed Google to do a thing very quickly that's going to reshape the Internet in almost indescribable ways. Because the traffic flows of search traffic are about to table flip.

1:10:31Yeah, I do think the example that most immediately keeps coming to mind for me for this is the what time does the Super Bowl start kind of thing. and that to some extent has already died thanks to the knowledge graph which now is just like a it just pops up a thing at the top but what i talked to liz reed a few days before io and one of the things that she said almost in as many words is that there is a type of information on the internet that google just views as commodity information that i shouldn't need to go to another website to know the answer to right like before if you wanted to know the years that abraham lincoln was the president.

1:11:10You would search that on Google, and then you would click on a link. And Google at some point has decided that that is just commoditized information that belongs to no one. And so I should have to go nowhere to get it. And then if you go all the way down the spectrum, you get down to like, human perspectives and original stuff and really beautiful art, right? And that is the stuff that I think Google earnestly believes should still belong to those people and that Google's job is still to send you as the user to those places. And I think Google would like you to believe that it is very obvious where one of those things ends and the other begins.

1:11:45And in fact, the whole middle ground, which is most of the internet is some is is somewhere in between. And there is just no line that it is possible to draw between what what is it just sort of out there in the ether that everyone can know and the idea that you and I both used some of our time to write a story hoping we'd get some clicks and some ad sense that that's actually like a unnecessary thing for the enjoyment of the internet and maybe that should go away i'm somewhat receptive to that version of the conversation where that ends and good things that deserve to exist begins is now up to google and that is what scares me about yeah and they have not really articulated anything beyond like the cream or ice the top you know like yeah they say high quality information and human perspectives and a bunch of just like vague buzzwords that don't give anybody anything isn't this like just what ask jeeves was doing for decades yeah yeah like with a better name decide that that was a stupid way to interact with the internet and that's why ask you still exists but way fewer people use it now i think it still exists it's ask.com now.

1:12:55Sorry. Jeeves was fired. Jeeves got canceled. Some old tweets surfaced and Jeeves is no longer with us. But again, Alex, that's a perfect example of none of these are new ideas. The only thing that's new is that everyone has decided it's now possible to do this well. Ask.com does TV show reviews now. Oh my god. Sure. That's pure Google bait. Perfect example. I mean, this is like why we spent a year last year covering the SEO industry. Because I think it's important to describe the thing as it was before you can understand how it changed. So we're like, these are the glory days of the SEO industry as it exists today, which is you buy Ask.com and you search for which TV shows are trending and you shove a bunch of content onto a high-ranking domain to collect some pennies.

1:13:52This is happening, by the way, across the media industry, and that's happening at, like, AI scale. Like, you buy Sports Illustrated and you shove a bunch of AI content on it. It's a real thing that has happened. Yep. Yep. Right? You buy these, like, zombie domain names. What's the last one? The All. Gizmodo. The All. Gizmodo. Oh, no. Was it The Hairpin? The Hairpin. It is The Hairpin. That's what I'm thinking of. Like, this beloved women's blog, and you shove a bunch of AI content on it. Like, that's already happening. This should wipe all that out, right? That's, I think, what Google would like is to wipe all that noise out.

1:14:24That implies, by the way, that Google can make good determinations about what's good and what's bad, which the current state of Google does not provide a huge amount of evidence for. It also implies that Google will prioritize the beautiful human content over the AI content when a huge part of Google's business is making the AI content. Weird. And monetizing the AI content. Yeah. Yeah, that actually Google has an incentive for that content to exist at giant scale. It also kind of pulls the curtain back on like, Google, probably more than Google should want it to, right? Like, we, especially in our industry, we know that Google is an enormously powerful thing that really controls a lot of conversations and stuff, simply by virtue of the fact that if you want to engage in these conversations, you first go search for them.

1:15:13And the first place you go search for them is Google. And so Google kind of dictates how you perceive these things. if Google just starts answering the questions, it is like the theater of, oh, I search Google to figure this out and I have the agency of finding the answers is gone. It's just Google. Dude, this is the phrase. Yeah. They use this on stage. Let Google do the Googling for you. This was the frame for having talked about search. Horrible way to do it. It's a lot there. We can talk about this forever. Yeah. I mean, I personally can talk about this forever in tiresome ways. And I assure you that if you work at Vox Media, you have heard me talk about nothing else for four years.

1:15:49Like a lot of the verge is designed around Google Zero. And the point is I don't think anyone deserves traffic from Google, right? That expectation I think has actually been really unhealthy for the media industry that like we're entitled to traffic from platforms. Especially for us because we cover the platforms. Like I would like some distance there in a real way and also just like I'm a brat and I don't want to be dependent on anyone ever for anything. but this is a pivotal moment like google waving through we're going to do ai overview and search for everyone in the u.s and then sort of immediately pivoting to oh and also you can search your google photos that was they like lit a bomb and they're like and you can find your license plates and they spent no time on it it does not appear that anybody knew they were going to do this we'll see how it shakes out i think the next 12 to 18 months are going to be an absolutely bananas time in media.

1:16:43I think this is the thing that's going to – I would predict that there are some lawsuits filed over this from the various media lobbying groups the same way that they've already started suing OpenAI. There's going to be a big shakeout from AI overviews. And a huge part of it, and this is just what I'll focus on, is Google's claim is that it will send more traffic. You cannot measure that claim inside of Google's own tools today or with any data that Google is providing. And if they want to close that loop, they have to make it testable that this is true. You have to be able to see the data for yourself and say, okay, we were the one that showed up in the AI overview box, and we got way more traffic from it than when we were getting – you cannot measure that today.

1:17:26So we'll see. But I – listen to the decoder or sindar because we talked about it a lot. That's going on Monday. But we're going to be talking about this, I guarantee you, for about 18 months because the internet is going to get reshaped around this particular feature in search. and it's going to change a lot between now and then like there there are the the weirdest thing about this is like sge changed a ton in a year and i think google is maybe going to be surprised at how different it looks once you give it to everybody yeah it's it's gonna be weird all right we should take a break we're gonna come back with the lightning round which as of yet is unsponsored but the bites they're coming it's gonna happen one of these days we'll be right back Support for the show comes from Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital.

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1:21:34All right, we're back. It's the lightning round. Sponsored by me, Neil Apatow. Thank you. I didn't get any of that money. I don't know. You're so generous. Where is it? I'm just moving money around my own house. I'm just doing tax fraud. There's kind of a lot in lightning round. David, you're first. So there's a Microsoft Surface event on Monday, which there's been a lot of hype for because Qualcomm and Microsoft and others have been kind of quietly intimating that they were about to get a new generation of Snapdragon chips that are going to be like as good as the M series Apple chips. And the war between Mac and PC is about to go on.

1:22:14And then we got a huge leak from Dell. I think it was a 311 page document detailing the next xp xps 13 which is dell's best laptop it's like the default which windows laptop should most people buy it's the xps 13 uh and the the things that they're saying on here are pretty unbelievable uh 12 hours of battery life 13 hours of battery life on the lower spec models uh local video playback for 29 hours tons of power that like at least according to the marketing copy, the things that we've been thinking might be true of this run of Snapdragon processors might actually be true of these Snapdragon processors.

1:22:59I just want to highlight that Apple last week, like in kind of a surprising move, announced their M4 processor in an iPad. And I don't think that's an accident, right? Like, like, Neela, you were talking earlier about how a lot of these things are for Wall Street. Apple did it for Wall Street because it is very aware that this is happening right now. We'll see. I would be remiss if I didn't note two things. One, boy, we've heard this story before. Who knows? But two, a lot of what we have, a lot of our coverage is in Tom Warren's newsletter, Notepad by Tom Warren, which is his new newsletter about all things Microsoft, particularly AI, the future of PCs in this particular way, and whatever Microsoft is doing in gaming, which I won't even continue to talk about because it will immediately be another hour of the first test.

1:23:53You can sign up for Notepad now. You can get it in a bundle with Command Line. We have two paid newsletters. See? You see our empires growing? I hope there's some arrows pointing down saying, buy now. Subscribe to Tom's newsletter so that he can buy one of these new XPS 13s. That's really what Eli is saying here. Tom needs the battery life so he can write his newsletter. please subscribe to notepad yeah he's gotta he's gotta write a lot of those every week now okay alex what's first uh have you heard of pss that's a great name otherwise known as

1:24:27ppss pp you could say it like that which is how it's supposed to be because it's it's psp lure cats right you go yeah you just keep saying it until somebody tells you to shut up and then And you're like, yeah, do you want to play it? It's a new emulation software. It's the PSP. Do you guys remember the PSP? Oh, yeah. I had a PSP. They had one of the great cartridges of all time. I broke one of those cartridges, but I loved the game. And I was poor. So I couldn't go get a new one. And I'd always have to be flicking the plastic just to get it just right. And then putting it back in. Only Sony invents minidisc and then invents another minidisc for the PSP.

1:25:07But somehow a little worse. but now this now you can play it on the iphone which is really exciting because it was like a tank game and i really want to play that tank game i'm going to be able to play it on my iphone now uh and also retroarch which is like the emulator software so retroarch lets you basically play just about any kind of if if somebody out there has created emulation software for a console you have never heard of you can probably find it in retroarch nice yeah that's The software itself is a little, it is not the most user-friendly. It is not going to be as neat and easy. It's hideous.

1:25:43Just saying that. It is the ugliest app of all time. It's real ugly. Yeah. But it works. It does the job. I just put it on my Apple TV, and almost as soon as we are done recording, I will be putting a bunch of games on my Apple TV and testing it for work, and definitely just for work. But it's cool, and it's just remarkable, because even a couple of years ago, you you're like trying to figure out how to get all of these emulated games onto your TV. And it was really limited and you could do it like a Raspberry Pi. You could mess around with Android, all of that. And now you can just do it on an Apple TV.

1:26:20And it's like, welcome Apple. I've been here for 10 years, but I'm excited you're here because I kind of like my Apple TV more than my shield TV. I'm so sorry to all the shield people. I'm sorry. Dude. It's in the guest bedroom now. Wow. I have been stewing on the idea and being increasingly angry about it. The Apple TV is the only good set-top box left. They're all bad, but it is the least bad because it is the one least destroyed by ads and scams and all kinds of other nonsense. I watched Palm Royale because it was like, do you want to watch Palm Royale? And I was like, yeah, Carol Burnett. Apple has figured out that it can just be a Roku.

1:27:02It's headed there in extra. It's infuriating. But I will say RetroArch in particular being on the Apple TV, it's like a native Apple TV app. Native is strong. But it exists on the Apple TV. And some of the others work with like AirPlay and stuff and are starting to be pretty good. But the Apple TV as a like retro console thing is going to be a big deal. Yeah, you can just do it now. Like there's going to be a lot more that will probably be much more user friendly. But RetroArch is the big one. You can just go play it now. And that's dope. I keep thinking about something David said a couple weeks ago, which was all of this regulatory stuff was really hard to understand.

1:27:40And then the emulators happened and now everyone gets it. A little bit of regulatory pressure opened up the application model and it's like, oh, everyone wants this. Yeah. And it's like, particularly for the Apple TV, Apple has insisted that you do its dumb stuff and has not won. Like that product has not won and it's by far the smallest install base. it has the least, like, the idea that everyone's going to be playing games on their Apple TV usually did not come true. And now it's like, oh shit, everyone's going to be playing games on their Apple TV. Yeah. I have never wanted to actually hook up a controller to an Apple TV before today.

1:28:16Like, every other time, they'd be like, you want to play this game on your Apple TV? No. Don't ask me that. I'm not going to lie to you. Like, no. And now I'm like, okay, I want to do that. I want to play Chrono Trigger on my TV. I honestly think the emulator stuff is just the biggest indictment of Apple's closed-fistedness that you can get. Because it's like the second you let people do good stuff, they're more excited about these products than they have been a long time. I have two in my lightning round. One of them is just telling David to talk about his iPad reviews, which I know you already talked about earlier this week, but I wasn't here.

1:28:50So it feels like everyone landed in exactly the same place, which is, boy, I hope WWDC involves an iPad OS update. So yes and no. The conversation around this has actually been really interesting because the most of the reviews, including mine, basically say that like it is a I actually worried I was going overboard gushing about the hardware. There were others who went much further, like the iBed Pro in particular, like it is a spectacular piece of engineering and design. But the question forever is like, what is this thing actually for? And I think what has come true this week is there's been a subset of people who are like, yeah, this thing needs to be more like a Mac.

1:29:32Let me run Mac apps, open it up. Let me do whatever I want. Like, give me a Mac in this body and I will be happy. And then there's a much different set of people who are louder than I thought, who are like, no, this is that is not the point. I like maybe I want a touchscreen Mac. We'll have that conversation separately. But the iPad is supposed to be different. And one of the things I said in my review is that like after talking to people at Apple and about the iPad and I've just been covering this a long time, like Apple's running theory is that it can do like whatever the opposite of death by a thousand cuts is that like rather than have sort of one big thing that makes the iPad for everybody, it can have one that is for you, Eli, and one that is for you, Alex, and one that is for me, David, and we'll all buy iPads and we'll use them differently.

1:30:18and that that for apple is like the ideal outcome and there are a lot of people for whom that idea is like really compelling and really romantic those people tend to be people who have that specific thing in the ipad already people who love the pencil or people who like do the insane architect thing of like holding up the ipad and walking around the table to show somebody your designs which i'm not convinced is real we got an email from someone who uh i don't remember the email specifically but they're either they are an interior designer or they're their partner's an interior designer and they're like we just run the ipad to the ground like every day it's a thing it's a great great yeah so i think the the question then for apple is like okay do you try to find the big mainstreamy thing which i think the obvious answer is make it more laptopy or just like open it up so that people can do more stuff on it or do you keep just chipping away at this thing like one tiny use case at a time until you've built the magic.

1:31:16And I think like that second approach is way more fun and interesting and leads to something very cool in the long run. We're also 14 years into this and Apple has found two. Yeah. And to me, the thing that I got, I was, you know, like on planes all week, basically just like watching people angrily posted each other on the iPad. And I was like, I, these are, these are the same iPad reviews we've been writing for years. Yeah. It's the same iPad. Like I forgot that I wrote this iPad review in 2013 when the first iPad came out. Like the same exact review running iOS 7. Like, boy, it would be cool if I could do stuff with this.

1:31:51And then I wrote a version of that review in 2018. And then, David, you wrote a version of that review yesterday. And then I just saw Dieter at the Google event. He's like, I wrote these iPad reviews. Like Dieter is the one, I believe, who coined the phrase, it's an iPad. So I look directly to camera and be like, it's an iPad. And you know exactly what that means. That's us. We did that here. And the thing that gets me about it, the thing that I've – The reason I want to talk about it right after emulators is it's Apple's business model that is holding this computer back. Yes. It is not the capabilities of the iPad or some idealism or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

1:32:22It is Apple's business model is preventing application developers from using the full power of the iPad. The fact that this thing cannot actually run a desktop web browser, they say it's desktop class. It absolutely is not. No. Nope. It just isn't. Also, if you go to docs.google.com in the browser on an iPad, it will punt you to the Google Docs app. It's the most miserable experience in the world. So what's really interesting is the Google Docs app. This is, you know, all of our years reviewing the iPad, we would complain about this. And Apple would always be like, who cares? Only journalists use Google Docs.

1:32:54And then they realized the journalists who review the iPad use Google Docs. And so they fixed it by faking the user agent in mobile Safari to tell Google Docs that it's desktop Safari. So you can run the good Google Docs in Safari and the iPad. What they did not do was make mobile Safari good. Right. Or fix it in Chrome or any of the other browsers that you can run on the iPad. Right. And the reason for that is straightforwardly a business model reason. It's not that the thing isn't powerful enough to run the regular Safari that you can run on a laptop. Right? Yeah. I have an Intel Mac downstairs.

1:33:30I have a 2015 iMac sitting right over there that is one-tenth as powerful as the iPad Pro. It runs regular Safari just fine. It runs Chrome in a way that suggests that I should buy a new computer, but it runs Chrome. The reason Apple doesn't allow that to happen on the iPad is because the web is now the most powerful application distribution mechanism that has ever existed. It is by far the most popular in the world. And if you bring that to the iPad, the app store goes away because now you just have a laptop. You have a Chromebook. Really nice Chromebook. A really beautiful Chromebook. And Apple's business will not allow that to happen.

1:34:09And so this product is just absolutely held back by a business decision that maybe it's fair. I don't think, fine, make your business decisions. But we should be honest that this isn't a technical limitation or an idealistic limitation or blah, blah, blah. Apple is making a hard business decision about the application models on its products. Regulators are starting to crack that open and people are starting to see, oh, emulators are great. Like all this other stuff that we could do is great. And the last one to fall, I promise you, is they will put a desktop class browser on the iPad and it will suddenly become 100 times more powerful as a computer.

1:34:39And more and more people will be like, I can just use this all the time. It's not the file system, although I love a file system. It's literally the application environment is completely neutered. Yeah. No, I absolutely agree. And I think the browser solves a much bigger set of problems than like, you know, x86 interoperability with the old apps that you want to use. Because like, I'm fine. There's going to be a bunch of apps you can never use on the iPad. So be it. The web, there's no good excuse for that to not be one of those things. That doesn't even work anymore because all the laptops are ARM-based.

1:35:14I mean, that's true. Including Apple. Yeah. Like the most powerful laptop processor line is now in the iPad first. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just saying the thing about the iPad, the thing that it's been missing to me from the discourse from the beginning is like Apple designs every inch of this product. Right. That they are. They make the screen and the input devices and the operating system. And they're like, there's not a thing in this that is not an Apple choice. And this is the thing that they want. Yes. Fine. but then you have to be like apple chose to limit this this specific way and i think there's a version of that trade that is more palatable at you know 349 for the 10th gen ipad than it like yes i mean i saw people spending two and three thousand dollars on these and i just like i think the the argument that this should be a different device that it it's meant for different things it does different things well like no at that price it should do everything well that it is physically capable of doing and it just can't and it is it is like you're not i do need to fight you on one thing david because i was one of those people that spent way too much money on an ipad pro this week yeah oh yeah i got the 11 inch it's first one i've that first ipad pro i've had since the 2018 one that magic keyboard case even though it's the new one and it's all much better is horrible really it's so thick it is so like as soon as you you drop that ipad into it all of the magic of it goes away and i was like okay so it's the exact same as my 2018 ipad but the screen's better like that was the immediate feeling i had in a really like demoralizing way there is something there is something to that i mean it doubles the size of the ipad like the keyboard at this point i think is both thicker and heavier than yeah the actual ipad which is bonkers and probably says more about how thin the iPad is than anything else.

1:37:05But also, like, if it were a little thinner, it would be floppier even than it is. It's just an unsolvable problem. Yeah, I mean, it's the same feeling you get when you use, like, those inexpensive Chromebooks that are convertible Chromebooks or whatever, right? And it's like, okay, what do you want? And, like, yes, realistically, having it feel like a laptop is more satisfying, but also, I hate it. Fix that. Yeah. the surface does it better i'm gonna play with yours else because i really thought i'll bring it in for you the surface having a built-in kickstand and then all you have to do is attach the keyboard is the correct way yep i believe that with every fiber of my being man look mac versus pc is back on subscribe to notepad by tom warren for all the latest on the newly resurgent mac versus pc battle everything old is new again that was my lightning round one the other one i was going to point out is Andy Hawkins wrote a great piece about just like self-driving cars have hit a wall.

1:38:03And I was going to make the same comparison to AI, which is everyone got really excited about that technology. And then it just didn't do the thing. And I would just caution everyone. Like, can they actually do the thing? But you should go read that piece by Andy because it's very good. I think we were like five hours over. Yeah, we should go. Should we talk about search for a little bit? All right. There's much more to come on Monday. Again, we had the interview with Sundar. He and I got into it. I like talking to Sundar. I've talked to him once a year for a long time now, basically. He was fire in this one.

1:38:35So stay tuned for that on Monday. And then it says here on Sunday, we're going to do the five senses of gaming smell and taste. I don't know what that means. I'm very worried about what Liam and David are doing with the Ruchast. It sounds great. This face on David is just there. You officially know everything I need you to know. It's going to be great. All right, that's it. That's Ruchast. Rock and roll.

1:38:59And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give 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 Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.