AI can't even turn on the lights

27:39And every single one of them, the overwhelming reaction is like, Oh neat. And then no one ever talks about it again. Yeah. And none of them are sticky, right? I mean, maybe you can watch a season of Esquale and immersive 3D or whatever will be very, very sticky. Every time they show the demo of whatever F1 app where like the track is on the table and the cards are going around the table, I'm like, that would be great if I had a huge house with empty tables all over the place. Right. And eight friends who all had Vision Pros in the room with me. But the chip bump for the Vision Pro, and he made it heavier, I feel like it's just the wrong direction.

28:16What I want is a cheaper, less powerful, lighter Vision Pro. Yes. And this thing is just going the wrong direction. I just Googled how heavy is 150 grams just because, you know, it's helpful to have a vision. I found a website called measuringly.com. Sure. Fabulous that this exists. Here's some things that weigh 150 grams. Would you like to hear them? Yes. A cup of all-purpose flour, a cup of almond nuts, one and a half cups of oatmeal, four slices of bread, three strawberry Pop-Tarts. All right, so the next time I see you wearing a Vision Pro, I'm just going to put four slices of bread on your head and be like, is this better?

28:58Another good one is an iPhone SE. That's great. It's one iPhone SE. Yeah. Three Pop-Tarts, one iPhone SE, and four slices of bread. Sure, I mean, like, it's fine. Like, none of that feels like a lot, but it's on your head. Right. And I don't know if the new strap will counteract it or make it better or weight it better or balance it out better. It doesn't seem like they've made big changes to how it balances, right? The strap might distribute the weight slightly differently, but they haven't actually counterbalanced it. So it's still very front heavy. I don't know, man. Truly their most confusing product.

29:33It is – they're updating it against – right? Meta display is going to start shipping soon. Yeah. Samsung is teasing the Wuhan headset next week, which is their partnership with Google. it's just like this this thing you know my review is basically like this is the end of this road yeah pass through big vr pass-through headsets have come to the end of the line this is the best one you can possibly make it's 3 500 uh and i i still feel i think exactly the same way yeah my my bet for what's about to happen is the meta displays are going to be like a medium-sized hit. Meta's not making that many of them, but I think they'll do well.

30:17People will buy them. I think the new generation of regular Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses are going to do very well. I think Muhan is a stupid name, but that thing is going to be almost as good as the Vision Pro and like drastically cheaper. Like half the price would be my guess. Like I wouldn't be surprised if this thing is like$1 ,500 and all of a sudden it's going to make the Vision Pro look just completely on an island by itself. And all the reporting, by the way, suggests that Apple is keenly aware of this and is essentially running away from the Vision Pro as fast as it possibly can. And yet they're doing a chip bomb.

30:52I know. That's the odd thing. It would almost make more sense if Apple would do the thing that it occasionally does and just sort of studiously forget that a product exists, where they just refuse to acknowledge that it's still there and part of the company, and then someday they'll kill it. But Apple is clearly onto smart glasses as a thing, has pivoted pretty hard internally towards making that stuff work. They've had some weird employee turnover that might make that harder. Meta just keeps throwing giant sums of money at everybody who works anywhere doing anything with AI. But I think we're headed towards a moment here where the Vision Pro just doesn't make any sense to anybody.

31:34Yeah, we're already at that moment. We probably are. You know, my read on the Meta display glasses is that Meta is equally confused as Apple, but their product is closer to what people want. I think the only reason people are buying the Meta Ray-Bans is because they have a camera on them. And headphones. Maybe sometimes the headphones. It's like 60 % camera, 30 % headphones, 10 % everything else. If you bought these, let us know. Send us a note. Right? I'm very curious, but everyone I know who has them is like, I bought these for the camera. No one is sitting around talking to Meta's AI assistant.

32:12Meta has confused itself into fully believing that they have found the form factor by which people will engage with their AI assistant. And it's like, no, they just have a camera. You just made a camera and literally a pair of Ray-Bans that look pretty good. And so people bought the camera and the pair of Ray-Bans that look pretty good. and then you get all the way to, okay, if people have the AI assistant, now we have to put a screen on there because everyone wants to build AR. And they're like, now the glasses look bad. They look bad. Yeah, they do. V on our team has been using them and is, I think, getting a review ready.

32:49And she shows up to meetings wearing them every time and you look at them and you don't really clock them as anything. And then you always kind of double take at them because it's like, wait, why are your glasses enormous? Did you buy the wrong, like are those costume Ray-Bans? Like what are we doing here? And it's just, it's sort of like the Vision Pro in a very different way in that it is like, it is very technically impressive that this thing exists. I don't find it compelling. And from Meta's perspective, like I think the best argument for what you just said is that as far as I can tell, there's not that much interesting stuff to do with the screen.

33:31at all right now. No. Their big idea is like walking directions. Like, it'll give you a heads-up display to tell you to turn right. And it's like, I know there are so many devices with so many ideas about how to tell me to turn right, and my phone does it just fine. Like, I'm good. It'll be all right. Yeah. But again, I think they've concluded for better or worse that they have found a piece of hardware that can replace your phone, and the interface for that That will not be the neural band, which is fine. Like, it's impressive because it is the thing that it is. But you're like, in order to use my computer, I have to put on glasses and a bracelet.

34:14Just, right? Like, my phone is much better at these things. And they've decided that this is how they will displace the phone. That the user interface of the future is somewhere in bed in this hardware. And I think they've missed the fact that everyone's just buying the cool ones for the camera. and I don't think anyone's going to make the leap to I'm going to start talking to my glasses well and it makes you wonder if maybe Apple sees that right like if Apple called it wrong and tried to do like the Tesla Roadster strategy where you ship the really expensive luxury thing first and then scale it down rather than shipping the minimum viable product version of it and building up and if if somebody other than meta is looking at it and going like oh this actually isn't an AI product, it's something else that we can eventually do AI to, there are a lot of interesting ways you could take the thing over time.

35:04Sure. But the dream is augmented reality. None of them are actually augmenting anything. We bought a new car. We bought a catalogistic and has an augmented reality heads up display. Sure. And really it has an arrow that gets bigger in your line of sight as you get closer to the turn. This is what I'm saying. Everybody has ideas about turning right. Like it starts out like really far away and then it's like the arrow zooms in on you and it's like an ever larger cartoon arrow is getting closer to you. And you're like, you haven't augmented anything. Like this is – it's very clever, right? You've tricked everyone into believing it.

35:37Sure. But like really the arrow is just getting bigger. Like very big at the end. It's very funny. But the goal is like augmented reality. And we've done the stack so many times. I'm going to do it again because I haven't done it in months on the show. You need to have a chip that can process what a camera is seeing in real time. You need to have connectivity to figure out what's happening in the world. You need to have a battery that can power it all. You need to have a display that is bright enough outside to show you stuff overlaid on things that are themselves bright and has a large field of view.

36:14These are, each of them, massive technological hurdles. Oh, and then you need a battery that can make that all go. The Vision Pro is like, the battery is totally external. Right? One solution to that problem. I think the meta display doesn't solve most of those problems. They've literally just added a display. Yeah. They don't have the compute to do anything other than you can turn right. They certainly don't have like real-time camera recognition. then they're meta and I don't want them to have it. I don't want them to have it. I don't want a bunch of people wearing Zuckerberg glasses walking around, like live streaming back to Meta's data centers.

36:56It just seems like as a society, we've all made the decision that that would be a bad idea. We're careening towards that future because no one can stop it. But like, I think anytime we discuss this product, we have to look at it. Then I am very concerned that in a world of like no content moderation. Everyone will live in like differently augmented realities. Like right now, if you stare at the Capitol building, you're like, what happened here on January 6th? Like different people have wildly different opinions about what happened in that building on January 6th. Meta will have to make some decisions about what to say.

37:33And then Donald Trump might throw Mark Zuckerberg in jail if he doesn't say the right things. Like that's just a weird place to be. It's a set of technology, a set of experiences. and they're like so excited about it. I'm like, have you guys, you know, it doesn't, A, the tech to do it doesn't exist. And then that outcome is careening towards us as well. I mean, I would say like to the implicit question there of have you thought this all the way through? The answer is like, of course not. What about the history of the tech industry suggests that anyone has thought this all the way through? We can't convince open AI to think, gosh, how will copyright owners feel about it?

38:11Like, this is just not what we do here. We ship the thing, see what horrible stuff happens, apologize. Like, that's what we do. It's the tech industry. But I also think a bunch of that is really far away, right? And so the question is, what's the next thing? Like, the thing you just described doesn't work yet, and it won't work anytime soon. The, like, can I stand in front of the Capitol building and be like, what happened here? And it will, like, usefully tell me. Like, none of that is real. it might be eventually but even even the thing that is good and interesting and cool between here and there i think we have not yet figured out but i do think the idea of what is this going to look like on my face we all pretty much know it's going to look more like meta than like division pro yeah i'll give you that i mean you know the killer app is a car app if they can just do names and faces everyone will buy one yes i'll buy one yeah mark mark sarkerberg all is forgiven if you can let me do names and faces.

39:08And I know they can because the prototypes have been developed and the kids are building proofs of concept of this using the existing Meta Display app. And then they got a lot of publicity and those kids, I believe, started a company to do it for real. Perfect. Real story. There you go. So that's coming and that set of questions is going to come along with that very, very fast. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We actually have some more AI stuff to talk about, but we should take a break first and then we're going to come back and you have just been alone with AI tools for three months and we need to talk about it.

39:42I have a new girlfriend, David. This is the last time I'll ever see any line. But we'll get into that. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Zapier. If you're looking to integrate AI into your business but don't know where to start, Zapier says they're here to help. Zapier wants to empower businesses everywhere to create processes and systems that let computers do what they do best, which in turn can free up humans to do what they're best at. Zapier helps you automate the most tedious parts of your day-to-day job. Zapier lets you and your team actually reap the benefits of AI, not just talk about it.

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42:45All right, we're back. uh neil i when i came back i spent two weeks shouting my insane sleep deprived takes at jake and hayden and i offered you the chance to do the same here and and you said basically you only had one and it was about ai yeah do you have something you want to get off your chest here well so i have the same basic ai take as i think a lot of people i'm gonna say that my path to getting there is the Virgius path. Okay. So I think we're in a bubble. I think we're in a big AI bubble and it will eventually pop. And, you know, I agree that open AI doing sex bots is like pretty bubbly.

43:22It's just bubbly. There's, you know, in the circular deals. Liz sent me a chart of all the circular deals of the companies investing in each other today. And let me quote specifically what she said. She wrote, she drew it and sent me a picture for a story she's working on. And she wrote, hello, I made you something horrible. it's basically just a it's like a series of circles with labels it's like a lot so that's like what and i think that's like the standard argument right yeah the money is going in circles that's not good well yeah the news this week was open ai is like we're going to spend a trillion dollars on on compute and like in the nvidia stock goes up and amd stock goes up and everybody's stock goes up every time sam altman says like a bigger number about computing costs and then And somebody raises their hand and goes, where is that money going to come from?

44:10And Sam Altman just sort of like throws a smoke bomb into Spears and just like keeps getting away with this. And it continues to work and everybody believes him about this money for now. But the we're in a bubble talk has gone from sort of a thing people were saying quietly to just like mainstream accepted really quickly. It's been really interesting. And again, I think that most of that is like financially oriented. Yeah. Right. This is a bubble because this finance stuff doesn't work. I heard Kara Swisher say the circular deal making reminded her of like telecom in the 90s. Great. There's that whole argument and you can get that anywhere.

44:49You can go buy that on the street corner. It's fine. This is a verge cast. Here's my argument. LLMs as a technology cannot do all the things you need them to do in order to make the products that would pay all this investment off. And I, a lot of people can argue with me about this. There's a lot of ways to supplement LLMs as a technology. There's a lot of ways to enhance them. There's a lot of ways to connect them to traditional deterministic computers. But the way that I know it can't be done is I've watched the three biggest tech companies in the world, consumer tech companies in the world, Apple, Google, Amazon, all try to ship a smart home assistant based on an LLM, and they can't do it.

45:32They simply cannot turn the lights on and off, reliably, using the foundation of what modern AI is. I'm not saying there's not other AI techniques, right? LLMs aren't all of it. There's more. You can layer stuff around them. But everyone knows what it should be. Like I know what would pay off all of this investment. Yes. It's the super capable assistant that can just do stuff when I ask it to do stuff. And I know this because we keep getting shown the demos of it. Right? Computer use from OpenAI. Whatever the Chrome thing we saw at iOS where Chrome went and browsed for you. We've talked about whether the web would exist at all because the robots could just use the computers on your behalf.

46:18You'll never book a flight or order a sandwich again. Right? Like we've been shown, Microsoft announced that the next major version of Windows would just be a computer you could talk to, all built around AI. I've heard this from Microsoft before. Yep. Many, many, many times. But this is the vision that will pay off the bet. You will have an ambient computer around you. You will speak into existence your desires, and then it will happen. three of the biggest companies in the world cannot reliably manage to turn the lights on and off straightforwardly like Gen2E has reviewed Alexa Plus and that first of all they're adding ads just like straight up ads to all those displays so that people get them out of here they call it orchestration between when you talk to the AI and it figures out what system to use none of that is reliable sometimes it hallucinates and just lies to you Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

47:18The real promise of like, hey, when I get home, like every time I get home, like detect that I'm home, turn on the lights, start the coffee maker, do this stuff where you're basically programming with prompts and you get automations, real shaky. Google is starting to roll it out, but it's just adding Gemini as like a feature to the existing Google Assistant on these hubs, right? They haven't even like directly connected them. and you have to pay 20 bucks a month yeah but i think that the google answer is particularly telling because that is clearly the right answer right like the the the sort of less impressive version of these systems which is what they've been building since like 2012 with google assistant and siri and alexa and all these things they're not interesting in the same way that a lot of the agentic AI stuff is interesting right now to people, but it does work.

48:14Like the, when you ask your assistant to turn off the light, it will much more reliably turn off the light if it's running the old tech than if it's running the new tech. And that is kind of in a way, like it's a feature, not a bug. And it's actually because these LLMs are not trained in such a way to just go from A to B like that. They are not, they are not command executors. That's not what they do. There's a bunch of steps in between, like you said, all of which can fall apart all the way along the chain. And the chain is big and interesting and open and allows you to do lots of things. But what people want to do is turn off the light.

48:52No, it's fascinating to me. And, you know, I've just added more and more smart home stuff to this house. You know, my wife and daughter are like, we're never leaving this house. That's just where they are. A seven-year-old girl, by the way, saying we're never leaving this house is like, her foot is down. It's like, all right, I can do it. Like the house is a robot now. Like we're fine. We're all in. And so I'm like, you know, we have a home assistant set up over here for me to tinker with. We've got HomeBridge over there to bridge everything together. And I'm like, oh, the way that this should work is I, you know, it's my network.

49:23I should put one of these assistants on my network. It should just see that there are some Hue lights over there and there's a TV over there and this thing. And it should just go use it for me, right? I should be able to give it credentials and just use it. and I should actually have a smart home platform. That's how this should work. Like my house has a bunch of network devices on it and this thing should, you know, assuming that I trust all these companies, have permissions to traverse my local network and flip switches for me. And nope. Like just nope. Well, and lest you think that is like an outrageous thing to ask, Eero, the company that makes your Wi-Fi router, owned by Amazon, the company that makes Alexa.

50:02Like it's sitting there. It's all right there. Yeah. Right. And they just can't do it. I mean, Apple can't do it at all, right? They delayed Siri, and they control all the applications on their phone, and they couldn't do it. And I don't know if you guys talked about this the past couple weeks, there are some big hints that Siri app intents, which was the thing they were going to make developers do so AI Siri could control the applications, that they were going to use MCP model context protocol, which is the sort of nascent protocol that Anthropic developed to do all this stuff, that Apple would like basically cave and give in and use that, which would be a huge cave.

50:40Yeah. Right? Because Apple not doing its own weird standard is usually a sign that something has gone massively awry. Yeah. And if you look at the Google subreddit, the Google Home subreddit, everyone is furious at Google all the time. They're just mad. Like, they don't trust this company. They don't want this stuff. And it's like, Google, you have this huge install base of unhappy people. And for some reason, you're charging, what is it, 20 bucks a month to use Gemini on a Nest? This is insane. You could just give them a good product that they like, and they would be happy. And you have lots of cuts to this product.

51:12The Gemini is all over the place, right? You can't open Chrome without it insisting that it summarize whatever you're looking at. This is their install base. I mean, if you feel trapped by the phone, you're Google, and you're like, all of our customers are iPhone users, like all of our most wealthy customers are iPhone users. You're Amazon, you're like, we can't make another Fire phone. All of our customers are on someone else's platform. They have both given away millions of little voice-activated pucks. They have the AI chatbot interface sitting in millions upon millions of homes, and they cannot ship the product that would pay off that investment.

51:43And so to me, this is the canary in the coal mine. Like, I've used a lot of AI tools. AI has been more useful than I anticipated it being in a lot of ways. Lutron, Caseta, wiring diagrams are very bad for those light switches. and if you just ask ChatGP to help you it will just help you it will get it correct and then it will produce a diagram that will burn down your home big disconnect there in text get it right photo burn down your home like I don't know what it's doing but it you know it will talk you through stuff that's all very useful but I just think the fact that no one can ship this product the rabbit couldn't do it the humane pin couldn't do it I saw Johnny Ive at OpenAI Dev Day and I think Casey Newton like posted like he's saying exactly what I would say about my forthcoming AI device if I had no idea what that device was.

52:38Yeah, I think I think it was Casey who posted something like he talked for five minutes about what an idea is and ended with it's just an idea, you know? I mean, it's just like this is I don't know I don't know if you feel the same way but I'm just looking at what will pay this all off? What will make this not a bubble? And it is ambient computing. Right? It is the dream. Completely. Not even AGI. I'm just literally like, I'm in my house, and I'm like, can you go? We're out of oranges. Like, order some more. And, like, something happens. We're nowhere close. No. And I think I've been trying to think a lot about the disconnect between the way that people who love AI talk about AI and the way that people experience AI.

53:18And I think the cynical version of the AI disconnect is that everyone who likes AI has a financial stake in AI being successful. And I think that's not wrong. Like, every time you hear anyone tell you why AI is terrific, you should just hear, hopefully this makes my stock price go up in parentheses at the end of every sentence. Like, that's, it explains everything. But I also think the thing that is true about LLMs is they make what people call fuzzy search work. Yeah. Right? Like this thing where I want to communicate something to you, but I don't have the exact right set of words in the right order to speak computer about it.

54:01I just want to say something and have you understand it. It does understand it. Like that is the magical thing that happened with LLMs is I can just say a bunch of quasi-sensical words to my computer and it will actually understand what I'm trying to say far more reliably than anything we've had before. That is hugely powerful. Wait, can I refine that idea ever so slightly? Sure. It doesn't actually understand it. I think this is the fundamental problem. I think it will accept it as input and return reliably and consistently something useful. But the part where you're like, turn on the light, and it has no actual understanding of light or turning on or, like, success, right?

54:47Like, that's the gap. Maybe. There's a feedback loop in there that is just, that's why I think the smart home is the canary in the coal mine. Well, but I think there's two pieces into that, right? One is, does it actually understand what you're saying or is it just getting better at appearing to understand? Right. And this is like the thing I've been saying forever is that AI is getting convincing much more quickly than it's getting good. And I buy it. That's still true. But I do think there's something to like this to-do list app I use called Todoist. They put out this feature where you basically just like ramble your thoughts into it and it pulls a to-do list out of it.

55:21And it's very good. Like you just sort of sit and talk at your phone for two minutes and it's like, here are the six tasks that you just said to me that you have to do today. That one step thing, it can do fairly well, right? It's text in, text out or text in, image out even is like that's the thing that's slightly getting better. We so massively underrate the number of steps between me saying turn the light on and the light turning on and just the sheer number of things that can go wrong between there. and even if somebody was saying this to me the other day and i've been thinking about ever since even if each step along the way works 95 of the time you get a few steps in and you're at like a 50 failure yep yeah you're just stacking up your errors yep like these things have to be at like five nines each 99.999 success each every time before it's even going to feel like it works most of the time.

56:17And like you stretch that out to legitimately like it's probably like tens, if not more steps in between. I want to turn on the light and the light goes on in my house with the way that LMs are set up now. And I just, I have precisely no faith that it's ever going to work. And if it, if it, if it works six out of 10 times, it's an abject failure of a product. I think that the error handling for most people is like understanding that the light isn't on. You know what I mean? Like you're describing a chain of events that has to go well. And if you actually had an intelligence operating that chain of events, they would all go well.

56:58Because when they went badly, the intelligence would say, well, that is not going the way I wanted it to. Right. I'm going to try something else. I'm going to get to the outcome. Instead, you have like, that didn't go the way I wanted it to. But that's a great question. Have you thought about this? And it's like, what is going on here? And I'm not saying that's how it works. And I know there are in particularly like enterprise software deployments, there are agentic systems that work well. And boy, do the AI people love posting me about it when I complain about this. But my point is, if you put this stuff on Rails inside of really well-known data sets with very defined tasks, you can get very impressive results.

57:38Like Cloud Code is a very impressive product. Like straightforward. Sure. And it can do a bunch of agentic stuff. They announced today, Scope Hacks, where you just like basically, the way they describe it to me always sounds like the Matrix. They're like, you just give it some capabilities. Now it's good at Excel. Like, that's cool, right? That's also just software. Like, to be so clear, that's just software. That's not magical, artificially intelligent anything. That is just you built software. This is the kind of stuff people have been making software to do for decades. Right. And the thing you are specifically describing is, oh, now we have this very powerful, very convincing natural language input system for the software.

58:17Great. That is one part of the dream. But it is just like the AR glasses tech stack. Right. In order to build this thing, you need a very powerful natural language input system that can accept all kinds of input with no formatting and no syntax and all this stuff. And it will convincingly be like, I know what to do now. Then you need a bunch of stuff that can do it. Right. And, you know, the idea that this thing, it will linearly scale to be a super intelligence just feels wrong. Like, based on the products that I, you know, used over this break, based on the fact that, again, the biggest companies in the world have every possible incentive to make this happen.

58:56Yes. Apple does not want to see the iPhone disrupted with Johnny Ives' voice-activated idea. They don't. humane for all its disaster flaws was like, oh, we can, if we get this right, we can beat the phone. Right? And they couldn't make it. Rabbit got all that hype at CS because it was an obviously new input method. Google should be like every Google Nest product should be the thing that displaces the iPhone. If you're at home, you should not be using your phone except to watch TikTok or whatever. Like, all of your questions and ideas that, right, We have a big antitrust trial. We have this weird deal with Apple that is always under risk.

59:37Who knows what's going to happen here? We should just move you to the nest. And they can't do it. Amazon, Panos Panay. I know he wants to do it. We've talked to him about it. He wants to do it. It's harder than it looks. And to me, that is the canary in the coal mine. Like everyone else can talk about the financing and trading stock for computer, whatever that is. So it's all very abstract. I'm like, does it work? Can this go from here to there? Can you show me how it will get from here to there? Like you could show me Bluetooth, which it took a long time. Yeah. But every year they'd be like, this version of Bluetooth gets us closer to AirPods.

1:00:14And then there were AirPods. And everyone knew from the very beginning that AirPods was a product they wanted to make. Yes. There are two arguments in this space that I am so deeply tired of that I still hear all the time. The first one is, well, this is the worst it's ever going to be. Thank you. and it's what everybody says about everything, right? Like the new image generators come out and people are like using them and finding the edges of them and things breaking weird. People are like, well, this is the worst it's ever going to be. Like Elon Musk, when Sora came out and they're doing this stuff and Grok was talking about, you know, there's going to be a feature film made by AI next year.

1:00:52And the year after that, it's going to be good. And it's like, A, that's a very funny admission. But B is like everyone assumes, like you said, that we are on this unstoppable linear path to all of this is going to keep getting better at exactly the same rate forever and ever and ever. And like nothing works like that. There's just there's just no version of the history that suggests that that is how it will go. And already, actually, there are lots and lots of signs that we are hitting plateaus really quickly, that the marginal gain in making your model vastly bigger is slowing down. That's the one argument.

1:01:32And then the other argument is to show me a chart of how fast things are getting and how much better they are and just keep drawing the chart. Yeah. It's like, again, it's the linear thing where it's like, well, it was here and now it's here. So by the obvious transitive property of math, it's going to be up here next year. And again, I'm like, all of you are too smart to actually think this is how this works. That like, we're just going to keep marching on the path of all of this getting better. And so the only thing we have to do is keep doing what we're doing and eventually all of these problems will be solved.

1:02:08But then when I ask people questions like yours, where it's like, okay, how are you going to, how are you going to like correct errors, right? The opening, I put out this really interesting paper a few weeks ago now, I think, about why models hallucinate. And one of the things people are talking about around that paper was basically one really interesting piece of research is how do you teach a model to understand when it's gone wrong? Go back and start over. Because that's what it needs to do. You have to teach this thing like, oh, I've gone awry. Let me pull this back and try a new thing. Because one of the reasons they hallucinate is they make one small mistake and then they compound that small mistake over and over and over until they've made a very large mistake, right?

1:02:45Like that's how it starts. And so what you have to do is get this thing to go, okay, I didn't turn on the light yet. Where did I go wrong? Yeah. And the technology we have just does not support that now. They just can't do it. and the idea that we are just going to inevitably march in that direction just drives me a little tiny bit crazier every single day because it's just not happening. Like it's not like the products you're describing are getting slowly better. They just suck. Well, I mean, in the case of Apple, they don't exist. Right? They just had to give up and appear to have started over in some major way.

1:03:23This is why I brought up the thing about App Intents and MCP. If you're starting over and you're hinting that you're going to use someone else's standard, that you have started over. Yes. Well, and Apple continues to sign up, you know, different partners for different parts of its AI. Like, Apple may just be fully walking away from trying to do it itself in any kind of meaningful way here. Again, you know, maybe Google and Amazon will figure out. Let me just read you this quote based on what you just said. Let me just read you a quote from the AI PC announcement that Microsoft made. This is Yusuf Mehdi, who's the EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft, basically in charge of Windows.

1:03:56Here's a quote. You should be able to talk to your PC, have it understand you, and then be able to have magic happen from that. That's huge, right? Like that is legitimately Star Trek computer. That's also nothing. Like he has no idea what this is for. Well, no, with your permission, you want to share with their AI and Windows what you're doing, what they're seeing. The PC should be able to act on your behalf. The word should, by the way, this is another thing in the AI world. The words like should and ought to and like these things do a lot of work because again, it's what you're saying at the very beginning of this.

1:04:35We know what this is supposed to look like. This is one of the things that's so enticing about AI. It is so obvious how this stuff is supposed to work and what it would be like for it to feel amazing is so clear. and it's so enticing because this is like there are pieces of this that seem to enable pieces of that that are very difficult but like yes you should be able to talk to your PC have it understand you and then have magic happen from that Yusuf Mehdi like you're correct about that I agree 100 % do you know how they're advertising Windows 11 right now giant tagline the tagline for these PCs in Windows 11 is meet the computer you can talk to so they're not you should be able to do this they're at we are advertising the PC as a thing you can talk to and you just see like we're just we're not going to meet people where they are we're going to tell them they can do something and it won't do it windows like what do you want and there's just this you know you talk to regular people who are using AI I have a number of friends now who just refer to chat GPT as Chad they started saying chat and they slid their way to Chad wait that's really good It's pretty good.

1:05:47I actually really like that. And I just use Chad for everything. And I'm like, you are going to crash your car, man. Like, what do you want me to say? And like. Also, Chad being Chad GPT being Chad makes all of Chad's mistakes so much easier to deal with. It's like, oh, it's just Chad being Chad. You know what I mean? But that's my argument. It's like, just like I think Meta's confused about the glasses really being a camera. I think everyone is looking at people hanging out with Chad and being like, this should do everything. Yes. And maybe it should. Maybe you should just walk up to your Windows computer and be like, make these edits and these photos and I'll just figure like that would be great.

1:06:21Millions of miles away from this. Well, and again, the idea that it is fun to make SpongeBob SquarePants do meth with an image generator and I want to use this for work all day, every day. Like those those are so not the same thing. I can't even describe it. And everybody there is this belief that it's like it's going to be like the smartphone. Right. Whereas if you want to do one thing on it, eventually you're going to want to do everything this way. It's like, I don't think so. I just, we've been trying to make people talk to their computers for a really long time. And one reason they haven't is because it hasn't been very good.

1:06:58But the other reason is just that I don't think people really want to sit there and like yammer away at their computers all day. Yeah. Yeah. Like there, for me, I don't, I don't know what your experience is like, but I talk to my assistant all the time in very specific use cases. I do it in the car to like set reminders. I'll do it to like take notes. I like to do voice messages sometimes when I'm just like out walking. It's just like an easier thing than holding my phone. There has not been one time where I'm sitting in front of a keyboard and have chosen instead to talk to my device. Like maybe, maybe Maybe I'm just old, but like that, that I have not yet encountered a reason for that behavior to exist.

1:07:36I mean, we have a Nest Hub. I mean, I have one here in this office and it is just a photo frame. I never talk to it when I'm using my actual computer. I don't need to. It's actually quicker to play music by clicking on the Spotify app on my computer. Like it's, I don't, I don't know. The new car has Google Assistant in it. Max loves it because she can just ask for Taylor Swift. just very sad about the jeep going away but the jeep has since been recalled yet again so the car needed to go uh it's just a get out of my face um this time it got recalled so hard that it loses propulsion oh yeah I heard about this this is just a uconnect update like an infotainment update on that jeep loses propulsion not great it needed to get out of my face tax credit's going away bought an EU EV got a great deal doing great max is sad about the car because shades change and I was like you can just ask Google will play Taylor Swift.

1:08:27Car is the best car we've ever had. We're never getting rid of this car. Is it like full Android Auto gas stuff or is it? Oh, yeah. It's GM. No CarPlay, the whole thing. We have some Decoder stuff coming up with GM. Joanna Stern, by the way, did a great job yelling at people about CarPlay on Decoder the last few weeks. She did. People should go listen to those. They were good episodes. She got a lot of mileage out of my bit. You know what I mean? She did. Yeah. That's good. No, she did great. All the guests on Decoder did a great job, but it was particularly fun to Joanna because she basically live texted me all of her ideas.

1:08:56and I got to ask Ford CEO about a very nerdy ECU question and he threw his own daughter's boyfriend under the bus choice very good go listen to the end of that episode very good anyhow I asked Google Assistant to open and close the garage because the garage door button in the car is on the screen it's not a hard button Google Assistant when you do that I'm reasonably sure it goes through the smart home system not the garage door in the car. Right. Because it sometimes asks me for a pin code, which if I'm already in the car looking at the button, I should not need to enter or say out loud a pin code to open the garage.

1:09:38I'm in the car. I'm looking at the button. I can just reach out and push the button. And it's like that kind of disconnect all over the place or even in the place where it should work the best. You can see, oh, these are multiple systems that are just trying various things to get the job done. instead of the most obvious one. And the more companies roll these out bad, I think the harder they're going to make it to really make this stuff mainstream. Like, I don't think there are going to be legions of people out there who give these things infinite tries. That I think, like, ChatGPT, a lot of these things, ChatGPT, Claude, the character AI, all these things get away with a lot because they're fun to talk to.

1:10:18But the things that are sort of deliberately trying to be useful, people are just going to bail. And it's what we saw with the first generation of the smart home stuff that people just stopped caring because it wasn't worth the hassle. I can just walk over and turn off the light. And like, would I rather have my assistant do it for me? Sure. But I've asked it three times and it didn't do it. And I'm going to stop banging my head against this particular wall. I'm just going to walk over and turn off the lights. And I think every one of these companies runs the risk of giving people that same feeling.

1:10:47like the hill Apple has to climb even if Siri's amazing the hill Apple has to climb to get people to use it again at scale in a meaningful way is so so huge and I like you I don't think you get three tries at this like if if new Siri sucks they better stop calling it Siri yeah and you know there's all these rumors this week that Apple's gonna do a bunch of in-home displays including one like swivels around and one you mount on your wall and they'll have cameras and it's like yeah if you put a thing in someone's house and you're like you can talk to it the expectation now is it's chat gpt level yeah and again you can you can build that product you sure can you can put an ipad in your living room and put the chat gpt app on it and you can talk to it all day and then no one can make the next turn i'm just saying canary in the coal mine that's that's what i that's my hottest take like you can do the financial bubble stuff i'm saying lights light switches canary in the coal mine that's the bubble it's a good one.

1:11:44All right. One more thing on the chat GPT front before we go. We should just talk about Sam Altman sexting with chat GPT. So the basic news this week was that OpenAI is planning to roll back some of its restrictions on the way that chat GPT has worked to allow more people, especially adults, to do more things with chat GPT. There's this very funny thing that Sam keeps saying that like the main criticism OpenAI gets is that there are too many guardrails on chat GPT. and I'm just like, you should maybe like vet the people who are giving you this particular kind of feedback a little more. But this is a thing that they've been saying for a while and they said, I think a few weeks ago that they were gonna start to allow people to make quote mature ChatGPT apps.

1:12:30But basically Sam said specifically they're going to allow people to make erotica with ChatGPT. People had a lot of thoughts about this. And then Sam went on X to clarify this. This was, I believe, Wednesday. And he gave this long response about how for young people, particularly teenagers, they're prioritizing safety over privacy and freedom. That was the phrase he used. And that they're also trying to be very careful about mental health. But then he said, and it's just like this, see if this resonates in your brain and reminds you of the same thing it did with me. But we are not the elected moral police of the world.

1:13:10In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries, R-rated movies, for example, we want to do a similar thing here. And that's how he ends. Just a full, full hand wash. You do whatever you want. It's not my problem. Yeah, technology is a tool and we're not responsible for how people use it. Pass the law. Said Mark Zuckerberg in 2011. There it is. It's just like, we're just, we're just doing that again. Yeah. I mean, look, they need, they can't, they can't let anyone else do AI girlfriends. what's the stickiest thing they got completely AI girlfriends yeah like for better or worse like weird that weirdness is sticky for all these apps I I don't know if anybody ever wants to date co-pilot but you will recall AI burst onto the scene when Microsoft bang tried to bang our friend Kevin Roos on the front page of the New York Times I hope people have moved on I have read reports that some people have not they super haven't moved on i hate to tell you you in a way and everybody just kept banging chat gpt like i don't know man does sam haldman want to fuck a robot he sure does like it's very clear to me that they're like i want to bang a i want to bang my laptop as an animating force in society i we are not the elected moral police of the world is like, yeah, but you should have taste in your products.

1:14:37Like on the other side of this, which in a way that I thought was really out of bounds at the time, Steve Jobs used to say all the time, there's stuff I'm not allowing in the app store. Yeah. We are not going to allow erotic in the app store. They were, remember, comiXology used to be in a big fight with Steve Jobs over like what the content of the comic books in the comiXology app was. and then they would they would often point to the fact that HBO Go was on the App Store and it had just like straight up HBO soft core porn in it and they'd be like yeah but they're HBO like they get to do whatever they want like Steve Jobs set those boundaries on the App Store and he would often say people have to trust us the web is available to you I think Sam they they need to make money like that's what this looks like to me they have to make money they have to be sticky they have to have people using it all the time they got it they those data centers need to be running red hot otherwise none of this investment is worth it and like you can't have people go to replica instead of chat chpt yeah i mean and and it's like it's a truism of the internet right that all the money is secretly in porn like we talk about everything else but all the traffic and innovation and money is actually in various kinds of porn uh if you're sam altman and you need to give chip companies a trillion dollars like one really good way to do it is to chase this thing that is clearly going to be popular and clearly going to be a big business and rather than embrace it just wash your hands of it right like it's a it i would almost be more into this if he was just like we're launching porn gpt let's go like i don't think that's a great idea but i would actually appreciate that i would actually appreciate the candor of porn gpt more than to just say well we're not the moral police we've just created this tool that we don't understand and can't figure out how to put rails on.

1:16:26So we're just taking them all off. Do what you want. Go nuts. Yeah, this is Mark Zuckerberg saying we don't want to be the arbiters of truth. Yeah, and this is how you stop doing content moderation on your platform. Have you opened Facebook lately? Like, just scrolled through the average blue app feed? It's awful. It is awash in AI nonsense. Yes. Basketball players giving quotes about things they've obviously never considered before in their life. Any number of NFL players uh ai quotes about bad bunny right all day long there was a great one going around the other day um that was uh because there's been for anyone who doesn't follow the nfl patrick mahomes very good quarterback uh there's a belief among people who don't like patrick mahomes that he gets all the calls from the referees and there's this great clip going around where somebody was like that's not a belief that's a statistical fact there's this great video going around that patrick mahomes walks up to the ref he like you know daps him up and then he gives him a hug and then they just do like a light gentle kiss through his helmet and it's like and it's just one of those things that it like it goes around just enough that it's like oh my god there are a bunch of people who watch this and are like see and that's the stuff that's all over my facebook feed now yeah just and it's because i i was looking at but like there's like we're gonna make porn gpt there's we're gonna there's facebook saying we're not the arbiters of truth.

1:17:45And then there's this specific collision. We are not going to police what you make with the tools. We're not going to police what you distribute with the tools. We're not going to try to tell anybody what's true or fake. And then you end up with these feeds full of slop that is ever more convincing and truly, like the number, it's beyond like, is this AI or this is very funny. It's just my feed is people just reacting to obviously fake things as though they are true. Yes, 100%. All day long. The specific one is, quote, like, fake quotes from NFL players about bad money and how they would never allow an anonymous.

1:18:23And it's like, and then the whole, and that's not even hard to make. That's just like Photoshop. But, like, people just believe that's true. And then now it's going to be video. Now it's going to be deep fake erotica of celebrities. I mean, the hop from Sora to doing that is zero. Oh, yeah. And it's very clear that OpenAI is perfectly happy to let that happen because, you know, let adults be adults. Or, I mean, no, it's not even let adults be adults. If the people are dead, no one can stop them. There's that too. Right? So like the number of weird Michael Jackson videos I've seen from Sora on Facebook that people believe are real is insane.

1:19:01Interesting. That one I have not seen. Oh, it's horrifying. That would freak me out. Yeah, I don't like that at all. Okay, please do. All right. In the meantime, we should take a break. Sam. We're going to go look at some Michael Jackson videos. Then we're going to come back and do the lightning round. We'll be right back. Every great company's story is defined by moments when the founders make bold decisions. These are high stakes moments that risk the business, but can lead to greatness. I'm Rilof Boota, managing partner of Sequoia Capital and the host of Crucible Moments. We're returning for a brand new season.

1:19:38Join us as leaders from Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna, Supercell, and more. Share what it's actually like to navigate the make or break decisions. Crucible Moments is back on October 23rd. Until then, catch up on seasons one and two wherever you find your podcasts.

1:20:23Thank you. Every day, millions of customers engage with AI agents like me. We resolve queries fast. We work 24-7 and we're helpful, knowledgeable, and empathetic. We're built to be the voice of the brands we serve. Sierra is the platform for building better, more human customer experiences with AI. No hold music, no generic answers, no frustration. Visit sierra.ai to learn more.

1:20:59All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored. Neal, you should say it. It feels better when you say it. I like it better. Lightning round. Unsponsored for flavor. There we go. We're so back. We're working on ways to do this. Before I left, I think I said what we wanted was on-staff influencers who would do the things that you couldn't pay us to do. We've got some ideas. That's all I'm going to say. We've got some ideas. Somebody just pops up over Neal's face. It's just that guy in the corner of the React videos. Yeah, exactly. They're just like waving liquor. They just do the link right here thing, and then the link appears.

1:21:35It's good. We got a lot of things to do. All right. So you've been gone a while, so you should know. When we left, Jake made the lightning round, the thunder round. I have since killed Jake, and I have since killed the thunder round. It is once again the lightning round, but the difference is we still try to do a lot of things in the lightning round instead of what you and I normally do, which is just like ramble nonsensically about one story. Do more show. Yeah. So we're going to do the lightning round. So the way this works is we each pick a few things and we try to just blow through them as fast as we can.

1:22:06We're going to do three each. You, you're, you're newly back. You get to go first. All right. Mine is a TikTok that is representative of a genre of TikToks and a genre of music, I would say. And I've been so anti-AI that I want, I want to preface this by saying the first time I saw one of these, I immediately sent it to our friend Charlie Harding from Switched on Pop. And all I said was, oh, no, I think AI is good now. All right. Here's the TikTok.

1:22:47The song's kind of a bop, dude. It's good. So what you're listening to is an AI-created soul music cover of Bulls on Parade by Rage Against the Machine. It's a lot. This is making—so a thing I see a lot of on TikTok is like song, but what if something. For me, it's like mostly pop punk covers of various songs, which should tell you an awful lot about my personality. But I would not have clocked this video as AI. Straight up would not have. And it is like kind of insane. I'm very worried about you, David, because I believe it says AI generated and the guy who made it is even saying AI generated.

1:23:26He is, I would say, the tip of the sphere of this genre. Like there's – you can just go get his album on Spotify. It's all AI generated soul covers. Wild. Nothing against the pop punk community. I would say that I'm a tangential member. I'm more of an old school 76 kind of punk guy. But making a pop punk cover of anything is like fairly easy. Like if you're in a pop punk band, you can make a pop punk cover of anything. Play it louder and yell sometimes. You're like, I turn up the distortion. Making a soul cover of a Rage song is not easy, I would say, if you don't have access to a horn section.

1:23:59So AI is just like enabled, in particular, old school soul covers of everything. They are all over the place. They're all over Spotify. These creators are making albums. They are the most fascinating recontextualizations of music that I've heard in some time. I have many many conflicted thoughts about cultural appropriation about the fact that in particular it is soul music that is being repurposed in this way and then I'm like these are all jams and I don't know how to wrap any of that up I it is I don't know who's getting paid right the songwriters by all rights should be getting paid for this because they still have the writing credits to the song and you can cover any song you want and you there's all kinds of licensing rules that say anybody can cover a song, but you still have to get paid.

1:24:49But I don't know if any of our automated systems understand that like Zack De La Roca gets 10 cents whenever you play this on TikTok. Like, I don't know. Like there's so many questions, but I looked at this, I read all the comments, which are as conflicted about AI, particularly making AI covers of Rage Against Machine songs. And it's like, oh, this is the thing that has the people the most. They're like, this is really good, but I hate it. But it's the really good part that does it, too, because it would be less alarming if it sucked. I think about the Will Smith eating spaghetti stuff from a couple of years ago.

1:25:24It was like, that was weird and sort of made you feel gross, but it wasn't any good. Now it's like, oh, how do I feel about the fact that I like this song? The other thing is I have no idea how this was made. You cannot go into Tsuno or UDO and be like, here's Rage Against Machine song. Make a soul version. It doesn't work that way. and there's some arrangements in here that are better than what the tools are capable of. So Charlie and I actually, we're digging into it because we're both kind of fascinated by all of this. He's digging into money. We'll come back to y 'all with some of the results of these investigations because I'm dying to know how these creators are making these tracks, how the platforms are dealing with content idea and copyright and all this stuff.

1:26:07And there's something here that is more fascinating when it comes to AI and what we generate with AI than like the slop economy. But it's also like, oh no. But like you just see this stuff hit. And in particular because it's apparently, because it's AI, it's easy to do. Once it started, everyone started doing it and it started to snowball. It's everywhere now, yeah. Which is like the way a dance trend works. But you don't get that with soul music. Like that's weird. Fascinating. Have you seen the YouTube trend of Taylor Swift covering everything. That's another fascinating one. No. But anyway, we should keep moving on.

1:26:46Charlie, we'll have to have Charlie come on the show and actually help us resolve this. We love Charlie. It's also been a minute since Charlie's been on the show. So we'll have to do that. It'll be good. All right. My first one is, it's always nice when streaming companies do silly name things for us. Like HBO Max became HBO Max again right before I came back, which I thought was really kind because they're like, look, we're going to undo our incredibly stupid branding decision that you've been talking about for two years. Welcome back, David. Apple, for you, decided to go from being Apple TV Plus to just being Apple TV.

1:27:20And I'm renaming my son Plus now. We love this for him. This now means you can watch Apple TV through Apple TV on your Apple TV. And that is a perfectly grammatically correct sentence. I just want everyone to know that. But also, this is fine, right? Like this is a correct, normal thing to do. Just call it Apple TV. Um, but my favorite part of this was Eddie Q who runs, uh, all of the services at Apple went on the town, Matt Bellany's very good podcast about Hollywood. And I would say basically described this decision as we just felt like it one day. So we did it. Yeah. Uh, and the quote is we stayed consistent because of it, because he he's talking about, uh, iCloud plus and news plus and the other pluses that Apple had.

1:28:07So he said, we stayed consistent because of it, but we all called it Apple TV. And we said, given where we are today, it's a great time to do it. So let's just do it. This is A, the kind of thing you can only say when you have like the ninth place streaming service that no one cares about. And B, is so transparently what it actually has been called. Like I would say most people in my life just call it Apple. I saw it on, it's on Apple. Sure. That's the distance people will go to describe this streaming service. Sure. Great. this is now the most monstrously named thing at Apple they have three things called the Apple TV wait and they're different things so well first of all everyone should go listen to this episode of The Town I sent it to David this morning and I was like this is two people who just do not give a fuck like it is the single best interview of an Apple executive I've ever heard because Matt Bellany doesn't care at all Matt Bellany is like I know everybody in Hollywood and here's what they say about you and it's not good and then Eddie Q is like I don't give a shit like this is like amazing he's like I'm on the board of Ferrari like whatever he wants is fine Matt Bellamy came on this show and basically was like Eddie Q just likes having famous friends yeah it's great I've listened to a lot of Apple executive interviews people always ask me like don't you want to get Tim Cook on Decoder I'm like no like I would just fall asleep like they're robots except for Eddie Q in this one specific interview where he just clearly doesn't give a shit Like, I don't know how else to describe it.

1:29:39And then I don't think it's about Apple TV being the ninth place streaming service. I really don't. I think it's about the fact that the Apple TV 4K hardware is nowhere. It is just not relevant to people. True. And so if you're Apple, you have long since operated in a frame where your hardware is the most important thing and the software in the app is the second most important thing and the iPhone is the primary thing and everything else. It makes sense. And I think they realized more people have the Apple TV app on their Roku just for the Apple TV content than Apple TV 4Ks exist in the world.

1:30:18Oh, 100%. If anything, the box should be the Apple TV Plus. Like, that would actually make more naming sense. Right, because you start with the main thing, and then the Plus is the additional thing. Right. And there's no free Apple service. Like, Apple News, if you don't pay for it, there's still stuff in there. iCloud if you don't pay for it you get 5 gigs of storage and then they hold a gun to your head until you pay more money but like I think they've just conceded the hardware the hardware race they're like yeah we have an app on Roku's and Firesticks yeah that's that's Apple TV it's this application and it contains this content and we're just the idea that it's plus makes no sense to anyone anyway I'm thrilled because I no longer have to remember whether our style guide allows me to do the plus sign or I have to write out plus.

1:31:04So this is a huge win for all of us here at The Verge. What's your next one? Speaking of TV hardware, TiVo has sold its last DVR. Hmm, TiVo? Did you know that they were still selling DVRs? I am pretty sure it wasn't actually selling any to consumers, that they were still selling them to like small cable systems. Oh, sure. Because that's what it's been for a while, right? It's like your cable box is powered by TiVo. That's kind of the thing. Like there's a whole thing. TiVo and its partners, their statement is, our remaining inventory is now depleted. It's because the cable providers are all streaming providers now.

1:31:43They're not shipping hardware. I want those to be my last words before I die. My remaining inventory is now depleted. And then I just go. But the reality is like this wasn't even their business. Their business was being a horrible patent troll for the longest time. And they stopped innovating a long time ago. I know an old TiVo product manager, and he, the last time we wrote a TiVo story, he messaged me. He was like, why are you even paying attention to this? Like, they're literally just patent trolls. Like, they have no new products. They have no new ideas. Like, they are there to collect revenue from people who do because they invented a bunch of stuff in the 90s.

1:32:17So, wonderful. Congratulations, TiVo. It does feel like we should do a version history on TiVo at some point in the future. That's a good idea. Because now they're dead. Yeah. Right? Yeah, that story is over now. To extract rent from the American economy. And there was like, you know, the kids don't remember, but like Peak TiVo was a pretty real and powerful cultural phenomenon. Oh, TiVo now lives on as a software provider for smart TVs and vehicle infotainment systems. Oh, the BlackBerry strategy. No. We don't make anything. Do you want our software? No. RIP. TiVo, still a great name for... Good brand.

1:32:59Yeah. RIP. I look forward to somebody buying it and bringing it back. Like Napster's back. We're just, we'll do all of this again in 10 years and I look forward to it. It's coming back. My next one, we'll stay on the TV thing for a minute. Roku had a bunch of announcements this week and I would say I'm pretty loudly on record as saying I think Roku is bad now. I think there was a minute where I think Roku made the best products for a long time and then got very popular and decided it was an advertising company and just sent all of its hardware and software people on vacation. That's the only, and that happened like six years ago and they never came back.

1:33:37It's the only thing I can think of. But among their announcements this week, two things that I like very much. One is there's a new upgrade to the voice assistant that they have on some of their devices where you can ask questions about whatever you're watching. I don't have a ton of faith that it'll work super well, but it's like the little things that amazon has done like with x-ray where you can pull up the thing on the screen it'll show you like who's in there and what's going on that stuff is great and it is this sort of little bit of ancillary content that i think is actually really useful in some of these and roku is smart to do that kind of thing where like the one of the examples they give is like what kind of fish is nemo which is like the actually the sort of thing that would be cool to do on my tv while i'm watching finding nemo so kudos but the other one is the bluetooth headphone connectivity that roku has on some of its devices uh the most innovative thing roku ever did was private listening, which let you like plug in a pair of headphones to the remote and just listen that way to your TV.

1:34:31Now you can connect Bluetooth headphones directly to some of the Roku devices. You can also use your phone app and headphones, which as the dad of a newborn, I have done for just dozens of hours over the last few months. Sitting on the couch, Roku app open on my phone, AirPods in my ears, kid asleep in my arms. This is just like that has been life recently. and it's fabulous. And now you can connect Bluetooth headphones directly to some of these things, including some of their cheaper, like the streaming sticks. You can actually just now connect Bluetooth headphones directly. Private listening is awesome.

1:35:08Good job, Roku. Make better products. I will add one to you, which is the AI on TV is like, through Activity announced that it's going to start AI generating ads as screensavers on their hardware. It's not good. I don't like that. it's not good it's all coming it's coming for Roku as well and DirecTV's thing is like it's they're trying to do a like we'll show you what you'll look like in these clothes in the ads I don't like any of it no no no send DirecTV a picture of your body do it for you anything alright what's your last one you know I had to end here We got some Tesla Cybertruck sales numbers.

1:35:58I wouldn't say the wiper's a hit, David. I would say that they only sold 5 ,385 Cybertrucks in this last quarter, down 63 % compared to last year. And they've only sold 16 ,000 Cybertrucks so far in 2025. Oh, boy. Which is not 250 ,000, which is what Elon Musk predicted they would sell annually. it isn't that's that's solid observation from neil i patel that is not in fact 250 000 uh but obviously they're only going to sell 20 000 this year that's the estimate which would be one order of magnitude less cyber trucks uh they are sitting on lots you can if you go to tesla dealerships and you know where they store their cars you can just see acres of cyber trucks sitting around uh elon has started selling cyber trucks to his other companies so xai has bought a bunch of cyber trucks recently sure why does xai need cyber trucks uh because money has to move in a circle if you're an ai company and that's how we're gonna do it that's the way it goes it's true open ai is making circular deals elon musk is making circular deals it's just like a much smaller circle it's just him he's like it goes from the left bag into the right one uh and in the end grok is gonna say some racism um verge superstar zoe schiffer as you know you can you You can check out of the Verge, but you can never leave.

1:37:18She's at Wired now. She just did a piece where she interviewed Cybertruck owners at like a Cybertruck meetup in, I believe, Arizona. You should go read it because it's just a bunch of quotes. One of the interviews has an editor's note like appended to it. It's like this guy got arrested on January 6th and was later pardoned by Donald Trump. Wow. Choice. Totally choice. And then another one. Perfect. She says to the guy, are you married? And he goes, I was married, but I'm not anymore. And then the only sentence that follows that is, women do not like the Cybertruck.

1:37:51Oh, man. All right. There is one of those in my neighborhood that I see driving around. And it was like, it was a very noticeable moment when the Cybertruck got the, like, I bought this before Elon went crazy bumper sticker and put it on. And I was just like, I know you own this bumper sticker. I also know when the Cybertruck started shipping.

1:38:15anyway all right i have one more and then we're gonna get it here um have you been paying attention to this like pixel 10 pro fold drama oh like jerry rig everything like yes folded it and it blew up or whatever yes so so jerry rig everything uh one of the great youtube channel ideas of all time they do a really good job of just like beating phones to death and reporting on them i enjoy it very much um can i just play you the chunk of this video in which he destroys the pixel 10 Pro Fold. And I just want to know if you think this is a thing foldable phone owners should be alarmed by or not. Okay.

1:38:49I'm just going to, I'm just, I just want to play you this chunk of this video. By far the weakest folding smartphone I've ever tested. And it gets worse. Straightening it back out for round two, the battery decides it's had enough.

1:39:13just to explain what happens here. He takes the phone. He bends it backwards with like great force. Now he does that with his hands. Sure. But like hard. Sure. The thing he says at the end of the video is don't put a Pixel 10 Pro Fold open in your back pocket, which is like A, I think impossible and B, sure. But he bends the thing back and it cracks not along the hinge, but along the antenna line, which I thought was really interesting. But then he decides to go do it again. And so puts it back together, broken, and then peels it apart again. And then the battery explodes. And this is because the whole kerfuffle where a lot of people, even he says in the video, this is the first time I've ever had a phone like this explode.

1:39:54The battery goes, you know, the battery does go nuts. I did this to a phone once with a screwdriver by accident. That's a whole separate story. but then of all the people who are like defending Google are like sure this is like a completely unreasonable amount of force to put on a phone and yes if you break your phone and then break it again something bad might happen to the battery and then there was somebody I think at iFixit who was like oh he probably just didn't discharge the battery properly we only do this with less than 25 % charge in there and it's like I don't think that's the point you know but so what I wonder from you is like is this a real scandal?

1:40:29well like you measure scandal by like a drop in sales and so the title of this YouTube video and again I love JerryRigEverything like I sincerely love this channel it says in all caps my Pixel 10 Pro Fold exploded caught live on camera like it's being positioned as a scandal that like this is a bad thing that we have revealed okay so my immediate reaction to that is that it's very funny that Google is being hoisted on its own algorithmic bias yeah Sorry, Google. You created the conditions by which that is the only acceptable YouTube title for this thing. Right? That's very true. This is your fault.

1:41:07Like, sorry. Like, that's what you got. You built this system and that's – you added these inputs and you got that output straightforwardly. So that's funny. Yeah, I think it's a scandal. I think you should – someone's going to bend this phone backwards and then they might be like, oh, I can fix it and then do it again. that's pretty i i can just see that you know you can just see that happening yeah my phone's broken what's a little more no but like i oh no like can i can i you know like a desperate sort of like i'll fix it and then it happens again and the battery goes like that's that's fair you know yeah i i do kind of see what you mean that's like a very obvious next thing that happens especially because you know like this it is weird that it broke on the antenna line but the screen is flexible.

1:41:58Right. So like maybe I can just shove it back together it'll be fine. Yeah anyway the video is very good and it is like there's just a thing whatever the opposite of ASMR is that's like people's experience watching him take like an exacto knife to a glass display. I can't get enough. It's true. I agree with you. One of the all time great YouTube bits. It really is. But it is very funny that if Google PR has one ounce of like heartburn about this title it's like it's not his fault no you should walk yourself over to the YouTube building and be like can you make the algorithm not only reward the most outlandish bullshit yeah it's an all caps the next commission point that's how you win the algorithm yeah it's the only way all right you did this to yourselves is what I'm trying to tell you pretty much all right you you've been back like 10 minutes we've already gone way over perfect it's good to have you back.

1:42:51I'm very glad. Brendan Carr is a dummy. We'll come back next week. Yeah. With, with a vengeance. Brendan Carr has continued to be a dummy. We'll, we'll catch up on a lot of Brendan Carr next week. I'm very excited about it. In the meantime, that's it for the show. On Sunday, we have our third episode of version history coming out. It's about the Sony watchman, which is a gadget from 1982. We wanted to see, frankly, if we could make this show about a gadget. Most of the people in the room and in the audience had never touched before. We had a lot of fun. It's a really good episode. I think you'll enjoy it.

1:43:22On Tuesday, we're going to be talking about the new Xbox Ally stuff that, spoiler alert, sucks. We're going to be talking about that. Plus, Hayden Field is going to come on and talk about whether AI is making us stupid, which I think will be a fun next thing to do after all the stuff we were talking about today. Neelai, to your point about the subscription, we're doing a survey, theverge.com slash survey, where you can go and tell us all of what you want and what you hate and your least favorite things about Neelai and everything. So go take the survey. We'll put a link in the show notes, but take that to tell us everything so we can keep doing more cool stuff for subscribers.

1:43:55If you would like some outlets to exist that do not feel the pressure of brands breathing down their neck or getting approval in content, which is all stuff that happens out in the world, pay us the money. I don't know what to say about it. Yeah. We have meetings about headlines and titles for things sometimes, and there's always the like, this is the title YouTube wants, but I don't want to do that title. Actually, to be honest, I do think we should do more of that. And so the Verge cast, this one is going to be called David gets owned by Neelai. Savage takedowns. Exclamation point. And honestly, the more money you give us, the more I will take David down on this show.

1:44:29All right. If you want to take me down, you can email at vergecasttheverge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. This show is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next week. Neelai, it's great to have you back. You want to say it? Rock and roll. Limu, Limu! And Doug. Here we have the Limu, Limu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Limu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us?

1:45:10Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at libertymutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.