AI Drake, AI friends, AI everything

24:57That's copyright infringement. We own this sample. If that sample wasn't there, this is a nightmare. I wish it wasn't there. It's a good nightmare. I can't be. I put it in as like a giant pull quote in our story. That's like, if you upload this song without the Metro Boomin tag, because I desperately want this to happen. Yeah. So the thing that you're talking about, the training data. Yeah. Someone's out there uploading a bunch of Jay-Z songs or a bunch of Eminem songs or whatever to uberduck.ai. They don't own the rights to train the AI on those songs. Of course, not just like OpenAI or any company which is scraping the internet for everything and doing the exact same thing.

25:36Are those actual rights, though? Because that's, I think, the big question right now, right, is who owns the rights to train AI? Is that something that you have to own the rights to? Because everybody's kind of saying, no, it isn't. If it's available, I can do whatever I want with that. This is the big debate. Right. Right. So right now, if you write a song, let's call it LaserBond. I did. I did. Part two. LaserBond part two. Right. You as the owner of the copy, right? You wrote the song, you recorded it, or in this case, you had Drake record it for you. Yes. That's your song. You have a bunch of exclusive rights that are listed in the law.

26:13There's a bunch of stuff you're allowed to do. One of the things you're allowed to do is sell copies of the song. And that's most people buy copies of the song for you. They get from you the right to play the song. You don't get the right to play the song in public or perform it. There are organizations that run around suing bars and restaurants because they don't have the appropriate public performance licenses. And this is just like a big system that has existed for decades. One right you definitely don't have is the right to make, if you just buy a song, you go to the store and buy a laser bong on CD and you come back and play it.

26:44You don't have the right to remix it or make a sample of it because that's a derivative work, right? That's you as the artist. Hold on to that, right? Right. I can't sell. I mean, I can make that. I just can't sell it. No, you're really not even supposed to make it. Really? Yeah. I'm learning all sorts of new things today. I mean, it's just copy. You're making copies. And so copyright law very narrowly regulates the act of making copies. Okay. And it says you cannot remix this. Is that in any meaningful way different from what's happening with like search engines right now? Like to Charlie's point, the open AI and everybody is just pulling everything it can find on the internet.

27:19making training data out of it. And now you're starting to see publishers and other companies start to get mad. Is this just exactly the same thing? It's exactly the same thing. So Getty is suing Stability and News Corp is making a lot of noise about suing Google. News Corp loves talking shit about Google. Like every Hollywood studio is going to start doing this. The idea that there are things you are allowed to make copies for and things you are not allowed to make copies for is, there it is, that's copyright law. So here they're saying, hey, making copies of our work into your computer for the purpose of training an AI is those are unauthorized copies.

27:58No one knows if that is a valid thing to say out loud. This has never happened before in the history of the world. And then they're saying, once you've trained your AI on those unauthorized copies, the songs you are making are now unauthorized derivative works of our songs or unauthorized derivative works of Getty photos or whatever it is. Yes. Charlie's going to jail. I mean, probably because you all can sue me because I stole your copyright and stole the text from The Verge. I will be suing, yes. I mean, nothing, there's nothing that could be better for this show than Universal suing us for...

28:31Laserpong. Laserpong. So I very welcome the lawyers. Parody really gets you out of anything. Parity is a great excuse. I welcome that letter from your lawyers, and we will post it so fast. So you just have this problem, right, where, okay, this step of we're going to train AI by copying all the data onto the computer, that might not be fair use. And fair use, Liam will kill me if I go into this. It's a four-factor test, whatever. It's like as political as anything, right? It's like as random as any court decision in the country, case-by-case fair use determination. So that all the creative companies are like, wait, this is not fair use.

29:13This is unauthorized copying to make training data. And Microsoft and Google and Stability and whoever else are all saying, nope, this is fair use. Alex Heath was at a conference with the CEO of Stability AI where he said, I hired the lawyer who wrote the book on fair use. Oh, OK. And Sarah Chong and I are like, who? Like, this doesn't make any sense. Sundar Pichai, in search, there's a string of cases from the early 2000s about Google and search where they found fairy sovereign again. The most famous is called Perfect 10 versus Amazon and Google. Perfect 10 is a porn publisher. And their images were showing up in Google image search and Amazon image search.

29:49And the court had to be like, yeah, Google is going to win this one. Like, but you've just got this like ancient body of law that allows these things to happen that doesn't apply one to one to this. Right. And now you're like, what are they going to do? What's Google going to do? Google has to run YouTube, where if you take that Metro Boomin tag out, the decision on whether or not this song is fair use or not is wide open. There's no thing like the DMCA for names and likenesses, right? You can't issue a that's my likeness takedown to Google. There's no mechanism. There's no law for it. It's all state law.

30:21It's not federal law. And then Google also is doing a bunch of AI stuff. so like what what you've you've got youtube which is david keeps writing about turns more and more into the cable company every day yep so it needs rights holders to be happy it needs the nfl to be happy it needs drake to be happy whoever's going to play at the next halftime show should be happy with youtube uh worth mentioning that the entire content id system exists more or less because of the multi-billion dollar lawsuits that many of these content companies went after youtube when they were a much smaller company. Yeah.

30:53And so Google's highly aware of how vulnerable it could be to huge litigation. And so all that stuff, the content that you have because of Viacom and Google basically at that time and YouTube at the time were new. And they were like, this is the cost of doing business. There's a famous scene at the end of like the social network where Mark Zuckerberg's lawyers are like, this is the price of being a success. Pay the money, settle the lawsuit and walk away. Like that is very much how Google and YouTube thought about those cases. now they're giants. Yeah. Like they're the incumbents. They're the infrastructure.

31:26They're the cable company with the deal with the NFL. And open AI is not. Stability AI is not. And it's worth noting that content ID is not the law. It's just an agreement between some companies. Yep. The way that content is treated there is very different than it is in other platforms. Yeah. Your choices basically are like you upload a song or a video and say, this is my video. And Google trusts you that you're not lying. And you're like, take all the videos that mash this video down or monetize them and send the money to me. If you don't own the song, you can't say that. So Drake can't show up and say, all uses of my voice I own, even if they're made by a robot, monetize them or take them down.

32:05That system doesn't exist and is also just like... I hope it does exist. I hope this is how it exists. But only for Drake. But only for Drake. I find it really interesting that you're having to go at length to explain how unusual this is, but underneath all of it, it just doesn't pass the smell test. Like, I think any human is going to be like, that sounds like Drake. Can you do that with Drake? That doesn't seem right. Like, initially, it's just like, oh, yeah, you can't do that. Can you do that? Oh, maybe we can is where we're at. The law is just not prepared for it because the law is all based on making copies of existing things.

32:42And we just have never had a robot that can take your voice away from you and then talk about car cars. Well, and that's the thing. And if you take, if you sort of take that out, like what Charlie is saying, and you say, okay, this doesn't have the smell test, let's not allow it. You've just kneecapped all of the generative AI stuff that Google has basically poured its future into. And like, you either say this is allowed to piss off the music industry, or you say everything we think is the future of our company and the internet is illegal. And I don't, it's a total losing game. And it doesn't seem like there's a middle ground here either.

33:16It really doesn't. Everyone's going to fight. No, I don't know what Google's going to do. I mean, there's one middle ground, and I got an email from a longtime BirdCast listener who said, I agree with you. I think Google's going to solve it with money. I mean, fair. Okay, sure. And maybe that's what Universal is gesturing towards. But you're not going to stop Uber duck AI by demanding money, right? And the models are just going to run on people's computers, and the training data is going to get copied. And trying to regulate the copy of Drake's catalog onto your laptop to train a program on your laptop is a ridiculous exercise.

33:50But that is like what copyright law can do. It can be like, you made a copy here and that one is illegal. But I think we are going to see some precedent because we have seen this in film and TV where they go and they take somebody's likeness and they slap it onto a model. Like all the Star Wars movies are like, you know what? Princess Leia is alive again and young. Yeah. And so, and they signed contracts. Like, there's a bunch of— Will Smith, I think, famously signed his, like, whatever—what was that horrible movie they made? I Am Legend? Was it I Am Legend? No, no, no. It was the one where he's, like, the younger version.

34:21He fights young Will Smith, yeah. It was real bad. But, yeah, like, a bunch of contracts have been written. A bunch of people have kind of agreed on this. So there's stuff there. Like, people have figured this out. And there are those smell tests. And I think it's just going to be up to the courts. One decade. This is my prediction. Yeah. It'll be one decade. We got a decade. Uh, we got to wrap this up. Alex Heath is waiting to come talk to us about Snapchat and their chatbots. Charlie, I'm curious just on the broader picture. You know, a lot of artists, you know, a lot of songwriters, you know, a lot of musicians.

34:51Switched on pop is great. You should go listen to it. Is there the flip side of excitement? Like, look at these tools are so fun. Yeah, that was really fun. I just made LaserBong. It was the best. There's so many things that are happening in AI and music, from how to mix and master your music more quickly so you can get it up on Spotify faster, to make more interesting beats. There's endless, I think, creative tools that people are doing with this. And there's also people who are creating open-source AIs that they are giving explicit permission that you can use their voice. And that's totally awesome.

35:25People are going to do some very creative stuff with it. I haven't seen a track break through like this sort of gag one yet, though. It's fishy. Because it's a crypto scam. Totally. It's all a crypto scam. It's a crypto scam. Don't invest in anything. The future of our nation's copyright law is going to happen because of a crypto scam. And that seems about right. There is something. There's definitely excitement. People are already using AI tools in small and interesting ways. but in terms of like writing whole tracks for us I have been saying since people have been asking this question is AI going to write whole songs for us when it's happening there's just way bigger issues to be worried about yeah I mean obviously I don't mean to diminish the music industry it's a big industry but when we're writing really good songs when we're placing excellently done composition and all the human creativity and the tens of thousands of choices that go into writing a song I mean we have what AI's are doing much more important things power military like i'm just i'm a whole when that happens i'm being i'm paying attention to something else all right well hit us with some laser bong and let's get out of here one more time right again with laser bong run it back it's a laser bong lasers i could not be clearer about what this is it's a laser bomb we and lasers just seem to go together like we and black, like they'll do painting so we in peanut butter.

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38:53We're back. It's a laser bong. It's a laser bong. It's catchy. I can't tell you how often we're going to play laser bong on this show. I'm really excited for that. For the rest of eternity, we're going to play that song. Thank you to Charlie. Charlie's gone now. But Alex Heath is here. Hey, Alex. Hey, guys. Good to be here. Quite a lot going on in what I would call the Alex Heath world, the world of social platforms, Snapchat and event. They talked about some AI stuff. Google is reorganizing a little bit. There's some meta layoffs. There's some Reddit API access stuff happening around like training these models, which we were just talking about at length.

39:26Let's start with Snapchat. It seems like their event was pretty fun. Like they're a weird company. They're always having a good time no matter how badly things are going. Yeah. That's actually what I was going to, the weird was the word I was going to use. Tech events are back, baby. Yeah, I was earlier this week, they had this pretty cool event at this airport in Santa Monica where Harrison Ford Parks is playing. So there's like little planes flying above us as we're outside mingling. And Snap just is like, it's this weird creative company that continues to befuddle people, but manages to also do interesting, creative things.

40:01And like you get there and they give you like a 3D bitmoji of yourself and like a little like award trophy case that you can just like set on your desk. And like they just have all these creative, interesting, weird things that they do. But yeah, I mean, the big news at that event was this MyAI thing that they're doing, this chat bot that I interviewed Evan Spiegel on the site for about. And they're really betting big on it. And they're, I think, the biggest social media company to fully embrace generative AI. and now they're opening up access to the chat bot to all of their users. And like for everyone listening, I always, every time I feel like I talk about Snap, I hear people still use Snap and they get a stat that they have 750 million monthly active users.

40:44So they continue to grow users despite people continuing not to understand them or what they do. And now they're betting big on AI. New people turn 13 every day, man. And it's like, that's what happens when you turn 13 is like, you just get Snap. It's a strategy. And like to just kind of like summarize how weird this company is, they spent three years developing this AI selfie mirror that I tried at the event that they're not even shipping. It's just R &D and the camera is inside the mirror and it's like lenses and AR shopping stuff when you walk up to it. And you could see its applications in stores.

41:17I have no idea if they're actually going to do that. But like they're a SaaS company now. They're selling AR shopping software to companies. They're going to have some of these mirrors as like tests in men's warehouse. they're doing tests with nike where you can try on a nike shoe on your foot with like a mirror can we just back up to men's warehouse i'm not no shade of people i i've shopped at a men's warehouse in my life i'm just saying men's clothing is the least ar necessary clothing yeah you're like you're gonna wear a jacket yeah what if the jacket was blue it's like you don't i don't know you just doesn't seem like you just precisely exactly described the promotional gift for the men's warehouse.

41:57It's a guy trying on what looks to be like a prom tux. And the one, the AR one he's wearing is blue. And then he like dramatically presses a button and then it's black. That's the whole thing. All right, fair enough. I just, it's men's clothing. Like I'm wearing a new black jacket, you guys. Looks great. It just doesn't seem like that's what, whatever, good luck to everyone of your men's warehouse SaaS business. Are they doing all this stuff? because Snap is a company, they adpocalypse because of Apple, just like everybody else, and they need to branch out? Yeah, they want to diversify revenue.

42:32I would point people back to, I leaked this Evan Spiegel memo late last year, kind of outlining the plan for all this and all the metrics they want to hit. They're behind on some of it, but yeah, they want to diversify. So they've also got Snapchat Plus, which is their subscription product where you basically pay for early access features. So MyAI initially was gated to Plus, and they've got 3 million paid subs for that, which is a little bit behind what Evan wanted to be the goal, but it's still growing. They want to try to get to$10 million this year. You know, Snap is an actual super app. You know, when we talk about Twitter and Elon's goals to build X and build a super app, it's already what Snap is.

43:10And it's kind of confusing to talk about and understand. And they're still trying to figure out how to make money out of it because the main reason that people come to Snap is to chat. And they don't make money off of chat. So that's been their inherent struggle as a company. is they sell ads against stories, which are declining in usage, and Discover, which remains kind of like a tabloidy looking thing that hasn't really changed much over the years. And long term, they think AR advertising is going to be a thing, but I don't think that's going to be a meaningful thing on mobile. I think they're waiting for wearables.

43:41So they're in this really weird spot where they're not big enough to get the ad dollars that they think they deserve, even with that user base of 750 million monthly users, which is like a huge user base, right? And that was kind of the background of everything was like the stock is like below the IPO price. Revenue is not growing like they had hoped, but they keep shipping interesting stuff. And they're still kind of the product R &D factory for the rest of social media. And, you know, when you when I've seen a lot of tech events over the years, I really would put them maybe second to Apple in terms of the kind of polish and creativity that they put into these moments where they announce all this stuff.

44:18And you could hear it and feel it in the audience there. People were genuinely energized by what they were doing. It's just everyone's also going like, when are they going to make money? And that's a problem when you're an independent, publicly traded company and you're not profitable yet. But, you know, you have all these employees. They have like over 5 ,000 employees. So the Twitter thing kind of hangs over them as an example of like what could go wrong. Yeah. Do you think there's a chance that Evin cuts half the company like Elon? I think more layoffs could happen. Kara Swisher actually interviewed him on their stage at the end of the day and asked him about selling the company.

44:54And he's never budged on that question. He's always said, we'll never sell. And he did actually kind of hint to that. Basically, if we aren't able to get the company more efficient and profitable through this tough time, it would make sense for us to entertain some kind of discussion. But he acted like they had already done that, even though the stock market does not think that they have. And so I thought that was interesting. It was the first time I've ever heard him not totally dismiss that idea. But, you know, he controls the company fully. I don't see that happening. I don't see who the acquirer would be even.

45:27But yeah, I could see more layoffs happening. I mean, they are a lot bigger than Twitter and they have more users, but they're not profitable either. And that's a problem. Yeah, Snap is trying to play this weird game, I feel like. And I was thinking about this watching the Partner Summit this week where Snap's like big long-term bet is on AR, right? Like they've been saying this for years that fundamentally - Everyone's big long-term bet is on AR. But hear me out. This thing that Snap is trying to do, I think, and I can't, is get so many people used to AR that it can then sell all of that AR to businesses because all of those businesses will have to give people AR features because customers will demand them when they walk into a men's warehouse so that they will buy them from Snapchat.

46:07You're gonna love the way these AR pants look. I guarantee it. And that to me is just like, some of the, I think they are genuinely ahead of everybody else in AR. Like from what we've seen in the world, like more people use Snap to do cooler stuff than any other AR platform that exists. They showed the like crying lens in the audience during the keynote where they just like pointed the camera at people in the audience and they were just like crying or they look like Pixar characters. And it's hilarious. It's great. I mean, the lenses, the face lenses still remain the best current mobile consumer application of AR that exists.

46:37Oh, absolutely. The problem is, is like it's goofy and dumb and it's it's funny but it's not a business right and so they're starting to introduce like lenses you can transact with using like snap tokens and like unlock things like games but like it all comes back to these like tabletop demos that we've seen yeah of like pointing your phone at a table or whatever and there's like a game like no one does that in real life yeah it's like ios every stylist demo is like circling things yeah like for a while ios every I have to say, whatever you just said about AR lenses that you shop with with Snap Tokens, like, I rarely feel old on this show.

47:10And that made me feel like an ancient wizard who had just stumbled out of a cave. Like, what are you talking about? Yeah, I mean, I felt old many times during the day. Like, they were doing, like, they're like, we're going to have a story where it only, you can only post to it at night and then watch it the next day. It's like an after dark story. We got to stop doing this. This thing where we invent times of day. Let's talk about the chatbot itself because that's actually the news. It is interesting that they're the first social platform that's like, you can just talk to a bot in our app in this way.

47:44What's the play there? What's the idea? So Evan, I think, remains one of the most thoughtful product thinkers in consumer internet. And he is really bullish on generative AI, which is interesting. He doesn't usually quickly jump to these kind of trends. I haven't seen him do that over the years. I've interviewed him a lot. And he's really into this. Like this was his idea. Like I've heard he was like personally writing my prompts, like responses, like he's very into it. Wow. And, you know, he thinks he told me that these LLMs are better suited for creativity than information retrieval and accuracy, which we see, right?

48:18When we, when we, as you guys have talked about and we'll talk about, like we're constantly finding out that these chatbots are actually, they suck at search. They suck at recalling specific information. And so that's accurate that you can count on. And so he's treating it and wanting people to think of it more as like a person, like a persona. So they're anthropomorphizing it and letting you make a bit emoji and all of it and then change the name and introduce it into group chats. Like at mention the AI. Your chaotic liar friend. Isn't that just the worst? Well, look, go ahead. Well, he told me he was I was like, how do you use it?

48:53And he was like, well, I use it to help plan my wife, Miranda Kerr's like birthday weekend in L.A. And he was also like, I use it to tell my kids a bedtime story every time when I get home from work. But wait. So gender-to-day bedtime stories. I don't know. That's bleak, man. That's terrible. That's horrible. That's not horrible. I mean, sorry. I'm not saying that I've done it. I would do it. I'm just saying, abstractly, you often read your child's stories written by something else. You often read your child's stories. I don't know if Dr. Seuss is a robot. He was a dude. He was a real man. Who knows?

49:28history this is the hill you want to die on is who knows who people are I'm sorry I just had Drake rapping laser bong on this show the future is wide open that's very fair but this turn right you introduced this new chaotic it's Snapchat so it must be said occasionally corny element into your chat this is just clippy this is the most clippy thing anyone has done yet including Microsoft which is running away from doing clippy. Well, yeah, it is clippy because they're also, so my AI will start recommending lenses. Like if you ask it there and where this gets really wild is I hear you want to do crying face.

50:08Yeah, they're doing generative photo snaps back. So they showed on stage, this is just going to be for plus subscribers to start. Eventually it'll be video too, but like you'll literally have visual like snaps being sent back to you generated based on what you send it, which is wild. Oh yeah. The example was like, you send it a picture of a bunch of tomatoes and say like, what should I make for dinner? And it sends back like a beautiful picture of tomato soup. Right. Right? Yeah. With a recipe or whatever. So there's a couple things here. Snap is, they can't really like lose more business. I mean, I guess they can, but like they're kind of at the bottom in terms of like where they can go from a revenue profit perspective.

50:48So they don't have a ton to lose. When you look at what Meta, Meta has all this tech in-house, they could do something like this. They could have done it 18 months ago and they wouldn't even need an open AI. We should also say Snap is using open AI for all this. Google, same thing. We've been talking about how Google's been just like slowly forced to ship stuff because of open AI. These big companies, they have, everything is a reputational disaster for them potentially. So that's like lawyers just saying, you can't ship this, right? Snap is in this spot where they're huge and they have a very young audience, which also is a even potentially bigger reputational issue for them.

51:20But they can ship faster. And so Evan was very clear that like, they don't know exactly how my eye is going to be either misused or what's going to happen with it. But they're thinking like the benefits outweigh the risk for a company at our state. I mean, I just want to like, this is, before you go to Alex, this is a company that right before Evan did the interview with Kara, they had Matt Friend, who's this hilarious creator who does this Trump impersonation. He's like this TikToker Snapchat star, do like a standup thing. right but I've never seen something like this at a big tech conference where he like impersonated Trump made jokes about like China and TikTok and impersonated Evan impersonated Tim Cook like at a snap event like sanctioned like right outside of the main stage I'm like they they are just in a different mode where they can like just YOLO it a little bit and so I think that's why they're doing this and it may I think it has the risk of being the biggest like potential you know reputational disaster for them from a new product they've shipped though because this is no because Because you've got, you just said they had the youngest audience, right?

52:22So they have all the people who are young and cannot tell, probably have the most difficulty telling reality from fiction. And now you're giving them a fiction bot that you want them to personify that has already, I think, told a 13-year-old how to seduce a 31-year-old. And they're saying, we just want to move fast and break things. That all seems like a recipe for horrible things to happen. Which gets to a bigger thing about Snap right now, which is I feel like they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. A lot of the presentation was also about creators and how they're trying to pay creators more and give them more visibility.

52:57And Spotlight, which is their TikTok competitor that is growing, has 350 million MAUs, hasn't managed to break out into pop culture, right? You don't see like spotlights on late night or anything like that. But they have this public thing that they're trying to do because they need to have that consumption and inventory and time spent to make money from ads because ads are not in chat. And then they also have the chat experience. And the same thing goes with AI. They're trying to say, this is a creative thing. Like, don't rely on it. But also, like, we're going to pin it to the top of your friend list.

53:28We're going to let you name it. And it's based on OpenAI's models, which we continue to see how people are jailbreaking them. We don't fully understand what they can do, how they can interact with us. And so I've never seen Snap kind of just rush into something like this. I mean, this literally was like from January to now, they're releasing this thing to everyone. Yeah, this just seems like it has the potential for like catastrophic backlash. Like you've already had it do it once where it had, again, teach a 13-year-old how to seduce a 31-year-old. Is it a real 13-year-old? Yeah, that was something that was in your piece.

54:02It was somebody from the Center for Humane Technology, Tristan Harris' thing, trying to get it to say bad things. But they still, like, that was capable. The safeguards aren't there. Yeah, the safeguards aren't there. And now you're going to unleash it on 750 million people, many of whom are children. And, like, I don't want to be one of those people that says, think of the children, because that's usually, like, the worst thing in the world. Think of all of the video games that were shipped in the 90s. but also at the same time that seems just really dangerous if you if you've got this untested thing that you don't know what it's going to do and now you're going to say okay 13 year olds have fun and also you're personifying it which means like it'll kill us all i don't know i kind of feel like the the reputational damage gets lower with every one of these that comes out and it's now like like bing is just right there right like you can go make bing be real horny if you're 13 like it's not that hard and i don't know that snap is uniquely all-time verge cast quote i think we might that might be the end of the show i think the police are coming to our houses right now uh but but what is interesting about it to me is this is so completely unlike the way snap has ever done anything like the company has been like thoughtful to a fault over the years it has been really slow and really deliberate it's like you think about like the the speed it has gone with spectacles like Jesus Christ release something uh but and but they've been very careful to say like we want to get this stuff right we want to do it well we want to be thoughtful we want to make sure the technology is good and then with this kind of like the whole tech industry's brain broke when chat gpt launched it really did i want to use that to change the subject ever so slightly right yes snap is like here's a thing you can chat with it we can sign up for the open ai api and you can chat with it in our app too.

55:47Great. And they're the first big consumer platform to like out and do it, which is interesting. But it's still just like you can chat with it and you should be able to talk to it. And the thing is everywhere. I just want to flip this to Google for one second, which has released approximately nothing. There was a report this week that Google's own employees said don't release Bard. It's horrible. It's a pathological liar. I would not say Bard has inspired the level of fervor the chat GPT is inspired. Not even Bing. Like when you're getting outdone by horny Bing, like something really weird has happened to your company.

56:20And just today, Google announced, Sunar Pichai had a memo out their two rival AI development centers, Google Brain and DeepMind are now being merged. Alex, do you know what's going on there? Because it seems like Google for all of its previous perceived leadership is now just way behind. Well, yeah, this is like the opposite side of the coin from Snap where Google has like probably 15 different teams building a version of my AI in parallel and they don't even know it, right? And the DeepMind Google separation is the ultimate example where they bought DeepMind many years ago, which is this cutting edge AI research lab in London.

56:57And it's been largely separate from Google doing a lot of parallel work in terms of AI development. Google has Google Brain led by Jeff Dean, who's doing a lot of like the stuff that you see in Google products. What this signals to me is that Google realizes it needs to ship more. And so it's combining all of these, you know, researchers and scientists that it has together so that they're not doing. There's also like the power grab here of like, you know, DeepMind is its own company. It's like when Kevin Sistrom was still at Instagram and Instagram was like, we're still a separate company within Meta, right?

57:31And Zuckerberg was like, no, you're not. And it's a similar thing that Sundar is doing this week, which is like, no, we need to actually be shipping collectively and putting our minds together and not have these fiefdoms, right? And that's the big tech side of it where like they're still doing like org chart changes to try to just like catch up to where the industry is moving. And Snap is like, we're just going to like use OpenAI and put a bot out and figure it out later because we can. And so that's the problem you have when you're that big and you have all the scrutiny as Google is that, you know, first we see all these huge org changes before there's even a product.

58:07But the funny part of this is like, I would not say DeepMind is like famously a great shipper of products. Like it's been a really impressive research arm for more than a decade. But basically the only thing people would know DeepMind for is that it built like AlphaGo and is like incredible at games, right? And it's like, I think to me, what this says is that the work that DeepMind is doing is better and more advanced and more likely to help Google products than what's happening in Google brand. Yeah, and it just doesn't make sense to have them running separately. I mean, it's like Meta went through this with Instagram.

58:40I mean, it's a similar thing. So yeah, that is the other side of the coin, right? And it's, you know, I think when we see IO here in the next couple of weeks, you're going to see a lot of all this kind of come to a head. IO is going to be fascinating. Yeah. And before we move off Snap quickly, there's a business thing I wanted to touch on that I think, and I wrote about this in Command Line, the newsletter this week, is that I think the reason Snap is moving so quickly here is that my AI to them is the first time they're getting, and why these interfaces in general are taking over the industry, it's this really high intent interface where you can know exactly what someone's trying to get out of your product.

59:18and for Snap they need that desperately because they're not monetizing chat with friends they're not monitoring those messages for ad targeting so you chat with a robot and then you can target the ads based on that I mean the people at Snap are frothing at the mouth about advertised responses in this thing tying the data from my eye into ad targeting throughout the app now I don't feel old anymore now I feel appropriately aged so like this all comes around to like ad targeting and business models at the end of the day. They're going to make you a robot friend and then heavily surveil your interactions with the robot friend.

59:53And then the robot friend is going to be like, have you thought about the men's warehouse? That's creepy. I mean, I don't know. Like if I'm asking my eye to help me plan a vacation to Japan and it like then shows me an ad for like a cool hotel in Japan when I'm like in spotlight, I don't mind. You know, it just depends on how they do it. No one's tried this yet. I mean, Bing is trying it, but they haven't really scaled it yet. But the thing is, like, how people interact with these large language models may just be terrible for ads. It may not be at all what you want, and we don't know, but Snap's going to try.

1:00:23She's going to be like, do you love me? Do you love me over and over and over again? This person is desperate for affection. Let's show them dating app ads. I would say that is more likely the outcome than not. Last little pieces I want to end on here. In the previous segment with Charlie, we were talking about training data and the copyright disasters that are associated with it. Reddit started charging for API access because people are training on Reddit, which is fascinating. Elon threatened to sue Microsoft for something, which we can talk about in a minute. I'm not quite sure how that would work.

1:00:56In general, the training data problem is real. We're seeing the tech industry react to it from the other side of the coin. What are you hearing? Are people worried about this at all? I think the companies that have these valuable data sets of user-generated, interesting, relevant content that also applies to a search type context, which Reddit is probably at the top of that stack, are going to find that they have an incredibly lucrative business of just licensing that data in this new world we're headed in, where these models need to train on something. And so the companies that are going to succeed are either the ones who have all the data in-house, which is actually, by the way, a long-term bullish thing for Snap on the visual side.

1:01:35They probably have more visual data to train on than just about any company their size. But for Reddit, it makes total sense that they would start charging. I'm surprised they haven't already been doing this because you know that OpenAI has used Reddit data to train its models. And if you're Reddit, it's like it's the same thing with copyright. It's like, you got to pay me for this. You can't just like take this. And, you know, Reddit wants to go public, maybe potentially at the back half of this year. I wouldn't be surprised if this is like a huge part of their going public narrative is that we're this valuable data source for this new wave of AI companies.

1:02:09I could see also a similar thing for Quora. We don't talk about Quora a lot on the show, but Adam D 'Angelo, who's also on the board of OpenAI, their CEO is very smart about this stuff and they've kept their data off of the internet. It's not easily scraped by Google. That kind of data set is valuable as well. Medium is another interesting example. There are some... Medium, right? We can talk about Medium later. But I'm just listing these examples of these companies that have all this UGC content that's not easily scraped. It's incredibly valuable. Yeah. The Twitter one is interesting because Microsoft turned off compatibility with Twitter ads.

1:02:41And someone just posted the headline and Elon replied to it. And it was like, they trained using Twitter data lawsuit incoming. And it's like, whoa, hold on. first of all, Microsoft's not opening high. Well, we got to parse the Elon speak here, right? Like he said, Substack was downloading part of the Twitter database or whatever, which is not even possible. I don't know what that even means. But yeah, so like, yeah, the Twitter thing is interesting because Twitter was very, I wouldn't say lazy, but they let people scrape the data and they had to deal with Google where tweets were indexed in search.

1:03:17I doubt, I don't think they were getting paid much for that. Elon is realizing this is whether it's increasingly becoming less valuable, but throughout history, it has been a valuable data source. And now with these models, and he wants to build his own large language model and woke whatever counteract open it. Woke GPT. No, not woke. Sleepy GPT. Yeah. So sleepy GPT. So that's the opposite of woke, right? Yeah. So he's wielding Twitter's data as a weapon and something to hoard instead of how it was kind of viewed before. But so what's fascinating about this is he doesn't own the data. You just go look at Twitter's terms of service or X.com's terms of service for whatever the company is called now.

1:03:53Like the line is like, you own your data and we take a license to it. And so there's just this like more copyright law stuff. Sorry. But it's just weird. Like there's a whole thing that's going to happen here where these platforms realize like, oh, we have a thing that is, we take a license from all of our users. But then if someone goes and does something bad, we actually have very little recourse. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Because we don't own the data. The users could retain, like when you tweet, that is yours. Except when you just give Twitter license to use it. Except when Twitter takes it, goes offline suddenly, like when Elon pulls the plug and it's not yours, right?

1:04:29I'm not trying to do an activity pub segue, by the way, with that. But like that. I'm ready. Laser ball activity pub, the new Verge Cast hit single. But yeah, that's, I mean, you're right. There is that interesting copyright question. But, you know, Elon, I remember him tweeting several months ago that OpenAI was crawling Twitter for their model and he blocked that. So, yeah, I think these sources of data, Twitter, Reddit, Medium, Quora, will just become closed off unless you pay. And that's their long-term strategic value for all these models to train on. I think the one I would add to that is Wikipedia, which I think is the other one along with Reddit and Wikipedia to me are like by far the two most interesting because I think like I've been talking to search engines for years who like are trying to figure out what to do with the fact that smart people just put Reddit at the end of their search query because like Reddit is literally like structured data that answers every question anyone has ever had on the internet, right?

1:05:24Like it knows which ones are most liked. It has comments. It's like it is if you can mine Reddit successfully, which is why it's so insane that Reddit is not a better product. You can learn anything about anything. And in the search engine days, you would do all of that and get a bunch of data from Reddit, but you would end up back on Reddit. And the theory was like, we can figure out how to make money as long as we can get you to Reddit. We'll give this data to other people because it eventually accretes back to us because you come to Reddit. And with all of these models, that's no longer the case, right?

1:05:51Like my interaction with Reddit ends in my chatbot now. It's data from Reddit. It's information from Reddit, from people on Reddit that I am never once touching Reddit or even knowing that it's Reddit. So like I kind of agree, Alex, that like they should have woken up to this a while ago. And like that paywall should be big and it should be expensive. Yeah, there's just no, it's like hard to wake up to a thing that doesn't exist. You know, it's like until chat GBT hit, what are you doing with all this data was not making consumer products. Oh, sure. It was doing demos to collect venture capital, which I think is like Google's problem.

1:06:24Like fundamentally, Google's problem was like, we don't have to make products. We're just going to baby step our way to AGI. No, I think I think it's the opposite. Google said we have to make good products or nobody will use them. And OpenAI came out and said, we made a crappy product. Do you want it? And everybody said, yes. People love crap. This is the reputational thing we were talking about earlier with Snap versus big companies like Google and Meta. They have had all this tech. Like, based on my understanding, like, yes, OpenAI has done some innovative stuff on like the foundational research, but really their innovation was productizing this stuff and not caring if it got stuff wrong and just putting it out in the world.

1:07:01And that shocked everyone in big tech that, oh, wow, like it doesn't matter if this thing is like not perfect. Like people just want to play with this. But if you're Google and your mission is to index the world's information and make it easily accessible, it's a huge problem if you put a model out that just spits out bad information and you're Google. And yet they did it anyway. It's barred, Eli. It's not Google. But yeah, I know what you mean. It's garbage. All right. We got to take a break. Alex, you want to stick around for the lightning round? I should probably piece. I need to finish the newsletter.

1:07:32We got to take a break. We are going to run over. I'm just letting you know this is going to happen. Alex, thank you so much. Thanks, guys. See you. We'll be right back.

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1:10:00we're back it's a laser bomb it's a bomb now my lasers I could not be clever about what this is it's a laser bomb it's true it's very good it's very good it's very good I just we're gonna run that for the last 10 minutes of the show and that'll be the Vergecast everybody Drake if you wanna come on the show and try to do better at wrapping laser bong we would love to have you anytime I'll bring the laser bong in the thing is Charlie's like actually a very good musician so he's like I did a bad job with this it's like no you did a very good job yeah like this is a banger listening to this all right home we got to do a quick lightning round David you are very taken with the fact that Netflix is shutting down its DVD business yeah well this is a very fun story to me because yeah this is it's going to be the 25th anniversary this year is the 25th anniversary of Netflix shipping DVDs and on this the 25th anniversary netflix is going to stop selling dvds which is the obviously correct thing to do it's been a bad business for a really long time it was so bad that they tried to spin it off and name it quickster uh which was a super bad idea and then they made it dvd.com which is fine and it has existed forever and now it's gone and i just like i go back to i had this nostalgia fest with a bunch of people on the internet over the last few days of like do you remember how awesome it was when you first got Netflix, the DVD thing, and you could just say, I want a DVD, and it just appeared at your house.

1:11:28And then when you're done, you put it in the mailbox, and it's gone. And then the next one arrives. That was so much better than anything that had ever existed beforehand. I feel like it sounds ridiculous now, like two decades after streaming is a thing, but it was magical. And I just want people to remember, that was the best Netflix ever was. Screw house of cards, forget all this other stuff. That was the best thing Netflix ever did. It was when your cue mattered. And so like sometimes you would maybe have a really fun time in college and then you'd wake up the next day and you'd get some stuff from Netflix and you'd be like.

1:11:59I feel like I understand now why you said sometimes you'd have a really fun time in college with a slight amount of hesitation. Yeah. And then you'd be like, I don't remember this. You definitely hit the laser bong and mess with your Netflix cue. And then you'd just be like, oh no, the Netflix cue chaos after like Saturday nights. You'd do like your Sunday morning double check. It was a good time. I missed that. I never sent anything back. Let's be honest. You still have all of them. I've got the first three in the mail and I was like, well, I guess these are the only three movies I'll ever own.

1:12:29So here's an interesting stat that came out of the same earnings call that I just want to point out. Netflix now makes more money from its ad customers than its premium customers. So here's a quote. Our ads plan already has a total annual revenue per member greater than our standard plan. So they're adding features to the ads plan. Right. So if you are a Netflix with ads person, you make Netflix more money than if you're a premium customer. This makes me real twitchy about the ads coming to every other part of Netflix. Oh, it's coming. This is the last phase of Netflix killing television. They're coming for everybody.

1:13:03They ate Blockbuster and now they're eating basic cable. This is what Netflix has always wanted is to be the size of the entertainment business. And this is like the only way you get there is with a really, really, really, really big ads business. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I have written here, it's a laser bong. It's true. Today is 420. It's true. A national holiday. The most important holiday. The most important day on Elon Musk's calendar. And here are the three Elon headlines. The Starship launched after a multi-year delay. You should actually go watch the documentary Lauren Grush made with our video team while she was still here before she went to Bloomberg about the people who've just been living at Starbase for years waiting for this launch.

1:13:48It's just really good. It's like just – it's good. It's like one of the best things we've ever made. Our video team did an incredible job with it. Go watch that on YouTube. But it launched today. Those people are all very happy. And then it promptly exploded. And they were still happy apparently. They were still happy. And I – if you watch the live stream, they were all cheering when it exploded. and I couldn't for a minute figure out if they were just instinctively cheering in an explosion the way that I would instinctively cheer in an explosion. Or they like, yeah! They're like, yes! You're just waiting for that turn where they realize, like, ooh!

1:14:19No, SpaceX defined anything as clearing the tower as a success. So they did it. So they did it. The thing went in the air, all the Raptor engines fired. Are they going to pick up the mess? They're going to pick up that. Did it like vaporize? It's unclear what happened to cause it to explode. There was a phrase they used. David, what was the phrase they used? I can't remember. I'm going to look this up now. It was super delightful, though. It made me think of conscious uncoupling, like when Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow broke up. Oh, look at that explosion. It's real good. That's a good one.

1:14:51Rapid unscheduled disassembly. That's what it was. Yeah. It's very good. It's a very good phrase. So that happened. Congratulations to the SpaceX team. Hopefully we'll launch again soon. But then today is also the day that Elon began removing the blue tracks from Twitter. Do you still have yours? Mine's gone. I think mine's gone now. There was a period there where they were flickering. Yes. Which is very good. I've never felt less. I just have no feelings. I was like. You want to talk about copyrighted again? I get ramped up. Yeah. It was one of those things where you're just like, okay, cool.

1:15:22Yeah, it's over. And not to make this about ActivityPub, this is also the day that BuzzFeed News shut down. earlier this week, we ran a post from Ellis Hamburger about the sort of inevitable life cycle of every social media platform. And while they're all kind of doomed to repeat all the same mistakes, I would say that the Twitter blue check day, BuzzFeed shutting down, BuzzFeed news shutting down, that piece, David's like, it's all kind of the same story for me, which is this era of the internet has come to a close. How would you name that era? I've been trying to figure this out. The social era.

1:15:54That's good. Or the social media era. Yeah, the era of the social web has come to a close. Oh, I don't agree with that. No. No, I think if anything, the internet keeps getting more and more social. I think it's like, this is like the era of big social is coming to a close, right? Yeah, it's desingularized. Sure, I'll give you the platform era that I'm good with. Okay, so there's something along the social platform era, the platform era, this thing that we all talked about where it was all settled for a minute. Yeah. Yeah. Right? It's like, it's come to a close. I'll just read you this line from Ben Smith, who now runs Semaphore.

1:16:26He was a former editor of BuzzFeed News. He's got a new book out called Traffic. It's very good. Whatever. Here's his line he wrote of BuzzFeed News. BuzzFeed never found a new path when the trend turned against us, when consumers found their Facebook feeds toxic, not delightful, when platforms decided news was poison, and when Facebook, Twitter, and the rest simply stopped distributing links to websites. You could replace BuzzFeed with a lot of things in that sentence. There's a lot of wreckage in that review. And I think the next one to turn is Google and all of the SEO farms that exist in this world.

1:16:59It's just a weird moment. And it's like the blue checks thing is whatever. But you combine that with the BuzzFeed News thing and just sort of this recognition, this sort of like dull recognition that the platform era has like wound itself to whatever this end is. Yeah. If you run a tech website like we do, you're like, oh, there's a bunch of cool new stuff to write about. but it's worth taking a beat to be like okay like this thing is over yep and i think there's just going to be a lot more fallout yeah and i think this this next period i don't know how long it's going to be but it's going to be really messy because there are there are a lot of people looking for where to go you also forgot about like the impending possibility of a tiktok ban which is like an existential crisis to a huge number of creators and so we're now in this place where like where do you go where do you spend your time on the internet is is a open question And yeah, the first idea is the best possible answer.

1:17:51Neil, I will be in the comments yelling about CarPlay. I can absolutely guarantee that. Being very wrong. Hey. But it feels unsettled for the first time in like, I don't know, 10 years, 15 years maybe, that it was like ever since Facebook became sort of the place that everybody was, the common denominators have been there and now they're gone. And the threat of the rest of them being gone looms just as large as the ones that are going away. And it's weird. This next phase is going to be really, really weird. Yeah. I'm honestly excited. As somebody who grew up in that first like wild web phase, I'm like, yeah, let's get back to some of that.

1:18:29Yeah. But with less of the porn, remember anytime you would – let me elaborate. Anytime you would go on like a search engine and you type anything in, the first result was always just like triple X. Do you remember that? Again, I feel like you and I had very different collegiate experiences. So this is like – Alex was like, here's what I did. I ripped the laser bong. I fucked with my Netflix queue and I did some porn searches you'd be like game cheats and it'd be like I'll show you some game cheats and you're like sir no I wanted to know about video games I think I was the only one alright nobody else used search engines can we feed Alex saying I'll show you some game cheats into the Drake generator please we'll hit up Charlie after that that feels very important to me I don't know how to respond to this without triggering some sort of HR seminar.

1:19:18So we're just going to move on. They just actually appeared in the window.

1:19:25Last few lightning round items. It seems like the pre-Google I.O. run-up has begun. Yeah. So the Pixel Fold is leaking all over the place. It looks nice. A weird camera bump. Huge, huge camera bump. Yeah, I don't. They're like, what if the camera bump was also a kickstand? Do you know how there's the argument that Apple makes the phones and they know people do cases, so they make the cases, but they design the phones to not have a case? Yeah. Apple fans argue about this all the time. Google is absolutely designing these phones to be put in cases. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Anytime they don't have it in a case, they're like, oh, something's wrong with this.

1:20:06Yeah. What if it was as ugly as possible? Don't worry about it. We're going to stick it in case. But actually, the Fold does have, it has a way about it, at least in these photos, in the way that the Pixel 7 does not. Yeah. We'll see. It's supposed to have a great battery life. We'll see how it goes. And then there's this other rumor that we're hearing along the same, I don't know if it's pre-IO run-up, but it's just in the mix, is that Samsung's deal to use Google Search as default on its phones is up. And Google's in a panic because Samsung might go with Bing, which is, when I say we're like back to the future, I could have read that headline to you in 2008.

1:20:43Incredible. You know what I'm saying? Where's Bixby in all this? Bing will be the default on Samsung phones. That is some 2008 information. I take it back. I don't welcome this new era. Welcome it. I'm bored. I'm bored. Never mind. You're worried about horny search engines. Have you met Bing, my friend? Bing's going to show things. We'll see. But iOS come in. The leaks are out. We've got a story stream with all the leaks. It'll be neat. We got another story stream about Apple headset rumors. Check that out. And then last one, this is just my favorite one of the entire week. We actually, this story got an unexpectedly huge amount of traffic.

1:21:19Google Fi has been renamed. Yeah. To Google Fi Wireless. And I just want to point out that that is Google Fi. Why? What do we do over there? It's a new era, man. It's the new era. Anything goes. Look, I'm one of the last Google Fi subscribers. Although I will say, Again, the story got a wild amount of traffic. Yeah. So we were out there. There are dozens of us. People did read it. I have it because you can just turn it off for 90 days at a time. You have it as like an eSIM? Yeah, I have an eSIM. And like whenever I'm doing the two phone thing, I like light it up and put that one. It's T-Mobile 5G.

1:21:54It's all fine. And then I turn it off. It's great. Love that. Which is another thing. But it's like Google 5Y. Which is good because they were clearly trying to change it so it didn't sound so much like Google Fiber. But instead they made it sound like Google Wi-Fi. So they solved nothing. they didn't make it better but also a question google fi why why but it's all very good the thing about google fi why that i think is exciting this is just the official name now we're just calling it google fi why i will hear no other names is that you can now put your smartwatch or some smartwatches on your google fi why plan for free which i think is a good and excellent thing that everyone should do uh this this thing where it's like ten dollars a month to add all your ancillary devices to your plan is nonsense and it should go away.

1:22:37And Amazon Sidewalk is sort of undoing that a little bit. Google Flyway is sort of undoing that a little bit. We're just going to crack this thing open and I'm very excited. Verizon will be furious. We got an email this week from someone who basically accused us of tricking them into believing that Bixby was actually a dog with shoes. And I truly hope we can do that for Google Flyway as well. We can. I really, really hope that. I think we can. It's good. And look, I appreciate that you believe that it was a dog with shoes. And I don't apologize because that was my goal all along. And also it was one.

1:23:10Bing is horny. Bixby's a dog with shoes. And it's Google Fiway. You don't stand for much on this show. But there it is. Those are our tenets. All right, Alex. Finally, we've talked about the laser bomb quite a bit. And have actually explained zero what is going on. I think that the song really covers it. What more is there to say? I reviewed a laser bong. Because I got the request. They're like, do you want to check out our laser bong? And I was like, yes. Every time, yes. It is a very, very expensive bong. 99.9 % of people don't need it. But that 0.1 % is like, it's a laser bong, of course. That 0.1 % is in this podcast studio right now.

1:23:56And if you've ever been like, I want to see weed get heated with a laser. That's what it does. That's it. It's a laser bomb. It's a bomb. There are lasers. I could not be clearer about what this is. It's a laser bomb. We and lasers just seem to go together like we. Liam is so mad at me. This episode has gone so fully off the rails. That's it. We are way over whatever you thought it was going to be. We're over that. Yeah. That's the Vergecast. The site was incredible this week. It was just a very fun week to work here. We're back to basics. We're just blogging again. Never went away. Never went out of style.

1:24:33It's all here. You know what's at the verge.com? Real people talking about their feelings and laser bones. Yes. That's what we sell here every day. That's it. That's a Vergecast. Rock and roll.

1:24:49And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at Vergecast at the verge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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