Anyone want to buy TikTok?

25:00That is the single best thing that could possibly happen, that this is their content play for Apple TV+. Oh, it would be Apple Music. Yeah, Apple Music, right? Apple owns a music service. TikTok is huge in music. They have great relationships with all the labels because they're the big hedge against Spotify. Apple, importantly, has an incredible relationship with the Chinese government that is extremely well managed by Tim Cook. So they're a known partner that would find a way to blah, blah, blah, interoperate with ByteDance globally. You can see the arguments. I'm just saying I don't think Tim Cook wants to sit in front of Congress and talk about content moderation.

25:37I think, Neelai, they're going to use that exact quote you just said when they pull Tim Cook in front of Congress for buying TikTok. You have a good relationship with the Chinese government is precisely the reason not to buy TikTok. if you're Tim Cook. All right, moving on. I think we can all, it would be the shock of all shocks if Apple buys TikTok. NVIDIA, third biggest market cap in the country right now. It feels a bit afield. No. No? Jensen's like, he's a smart dude, right? Like he started that company from the ground up. He's still running it now. He made his big bet on AI. Like they think very measured over there.

26:18Like everything they do has a purpose and a point. even when it's a screw up. So I'd be like very surprised. Okay, allow me to make the counter case. I love it. I'm Jensen Wong. I have somewhat intentionally, somewhat accidentally stumbled into just an unbelievable gold mine that is the AI revolution. This will not last forever. Other people are going to figure out how to make GPUs as good as mine. And I'm not going to be able to sell H100s for however much money I want to whoever I want forever. I need another move. that other move is TikTok. I want that. Someone is writing that memo at NVIDIA right now.

26:59And then at the end of it, it's like, question mark, question mark, question mark, profit. You know? Like, this is the move that's as big as H100. It's like, I don't know about that. No, the other reason is there is a real version of this that is TikTok as training data. Yeah. Which I think is not worth$100 billion, but is also not worth nothing. And I think one reason a lot of these companies will take a good hard look at TikTok is not because they want to operate a social network forever, but because operating a social network gets them basically an infinite supply of good training data for AI systems.

27:35For now, right? That's just what it is. I mean, this is what Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about with Facebook. Like they're touting the fact that they have this vast supply of stuff. So Jensen swoops in and he's like, Look, I'm already in the middle of geopolitical hot zones because I'm building ships with TSMC in Taiwan. And the whole universe is organized around H100 production in Taiwan. What if I had a little TikTok to the mix? I could do it. All right. That's NVIDIA. I'm putting that sub 50%. Way sub 50%. But I'm not 10. But we made the argument. Alphabet or as the people know at Google.

28:14i mean i think that no one wants them to buy it if you want to ban tiktok you let google buy it and just slowly kill it until they shut it yeah like that's what'll happen that that is effectively a ban so no do you think they're having a conversation i think google's totally having that conversation though like they they love a social media platform that they kill a few years later this is just like but so to david's point this is a rich source of training data for Yeah, I think that's why they're actually talking about it. It is a long time ago when I asked Sundar about the web and what SEO has done to the web and where you would start a new thing if you were a new creator.

28:50He said, well, we have YouTube. So they know that all the sort of organic content that is made by human beings is happening on video platforms. This is a rich source of that. They're already searching TikTok. You can search for TikToks on Google Search. Yeah, don't forget Google has been saying loudly for two years now that one of the biggest threats to Google Search is TikTok. Yep. Which is again why they're not gonna buy it. This is the real Lena Khan hands on hips one. Yeah. Alphabet would do this. I believe absolutely yes Alphabet would do this. It would be sued to death once Lena Khan is like already standing outside of the Googleplex in Mountain View with a lawsuit and just ready to like huck it into Sundar Pichai's office the minute this happens.

29:34I like if I'm if I'm Sundar Pichai I would do this in one second, but there's absolutely no chance that they will. All right. So that's Google. And the next one is really interesting. Amazon. I think Amazon looks at TikTok slowly turning into the home shopping network and moving an awful lot of records. And it's like, this is what we want. This is the future of shopping. Yeah. Yep. Amazon has been gently trying to do this on Amazon properties for a while. They've had creator brand things that they've done. They've brought people in. They've done video stuff. None of it has really worked. But yeah, I think Amazon of these is the one that makes the most sense and also probably the one that is most likely to be plausible.

30:19Yeah, I don't think they don't run a social platform now in any way, shape, or form. So the antitrust issues don't seem so bad. That said, you know, the Europeans just blocked Amazon from buying iRobot because they were worried about concentration in the robotic vacuum market. And Andy Jassy looked furious when he was talking about that on CNBC. Just so mad. He's like, we're well beyond the law now. Like, are we? It sounds like you were right by the law. But they don't have a social platform. And TikTok really is a big advertising play. And Amazon is actually one of the biggest advertisers out there.

30:51I can see it. I think this would probably turn TikTok into something worse. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is like Google where you don't – if you're a TikTok huggerser, you don't want this purchase. Yeah. Like where – can you imagine if you just combine Amazon Alphabet Soup brands with TikTok shops just general aesthetic? Amazon Basics just nonstop in your feed. I would 100 % start calling that group of TikTok creators Amazon Basics. You know who I'm talking about. Oh, yeah. Like the Amazon Basics, it would be bad for America. Okay, so that's Amazon. That feels very likely. Of this list so far, Microsoft and Amazon feel like the most likely to at least try.

31:33Then there's Meta, which feels like an immediate hard no. Yeah. And I think the TikTok user base would revolt and leave if they tried. Meta would do it. It wouldn't be allowed to do it. Oh, sure they would. Microsoft was a killer. Yeah. He'd be like,$100 million? Like, how many people do I have to kill? It's done. It's been done. And then at that point, I think Meta would own the five most popular apps in existence. And also the regulators have a really good argument for Meta right now, which is, hey, you just made threads from scratch and it's doing great. Like some, you know, fake accounting.

32:04It's bigger than Twitter. And I only say fake because Twitter's numbers are fake and then it's like sensor tower numbers, which are weird. No one's numbers are real. Yeah, you just mash together a bunch of very truthy feeling numbers. Threads is bigger than Twitter. Fine. But the argument would be, well, you can do it on your own. You don't need this. So we'll see. So that's – OK. That's all the companies with valuations in the T's. Notably, they are all tech companies. Then you slide down one notch. You go from six to seven. The valuations are now in the Bs and the billions. And I would just say these are much funnier companies to consider.

32:36Berkshire Hathaway. Yeah. Yes. That's the most likely, honestly. Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett's like social media. Let's go. Warren Buffett buying TikTok so that he could become the ultimate TikToker in the way that Elon Musk bought Twitter so he could just be the tweeter. Yeah. Perfect. When I think of Warren Buffett. I love this for you, Warren. I think of the phrase burnout, not fade away, and buying TikTok. Really, just light a fire, baby. Just get out there. You got Geico. You got TikTok. Warren just driving in his old car to McDonald's every morning, just vlogging on TikTok. Are you kidding me?

33:07Come on. It would be great. I could see it. I don't know how it fits in the portfolio. It would be good. Eli Lilly? That feels like a no. Visa? Yeah. JPMorgan Chase. Why not have a bank own TikTok? What if TikTok was just payments processing? At the end of the day. Tesla is here at number 12 on the market cap list, although that valuation fluctuating wildly with every breath Elon takes. That feels like an obvious no, although the man does love a social network. I mean, yeah. Is Elon Musk himself a totally bonkers possibility here? I will say Elon, you know, he's doing whatever he's doing on Twitter and he's got Linda out there being like, Twitter is a video first platform.

33:52And then Elon is the most text forward person in the entire world. That's it. I don't think so. Yeah, he's not doing TikTok. This one's interesting. Walmart, which actually tried to enter the TikTok sweepstakes long ago on the list, a huge American company, would be fascinating. I think for the same reasons as Amazon. Right. Can we build a new kind of shopping distribution? I don't know. It does not seem likely. it does not seem like that's what America wants. They have so many ambitions and a lot of money. But like Amazon, I don't want it. All right. I'm just going to read the next five as an exercise for the reader.

34:28Just like silently consider them. And send us an email over which ones you think should buy TikTok of this list. Exxon Mobil. Yes. MasterCard. Procter & Gamble. Home Depot. Costco. Bank of America. Okay. Costco is something. Costco. There we go. I just want to pause on Costco for one second. You know what is a brand that everybody loves? Costco. People love Costco. But if they have to start paying influencers a living wage like they do with their regular staff, no. That's too much money. Yeah, Costco is like a well-run company in that way. Then there's the two tech companies I skipped over here.

35:09Oracle, which is already in the mix. You can see it. They're already in the mix for a reason. and then Salesforce, which I think we should end with Salesforce because that is the darkest outcome for TikTok. So Salesforce buys TikTok and tries to turn it into what LinkedIn became for Microsoft, basically. Salesforce just goes all in on business TikTok. Why not? This is the future of American small business is happening on TikTok. Small business TikTok is still my favorite thing. They're pressure washer guys out there today. I mean, like it's spring, baby, light it up. And then they're immediately making TikTok shop content where they're trying to convince me to buy an extremely obviously cheap surface cleaner where like they plug it in and you see the whole thing dent in as they plug in the water.

35:55I'm like, what are we doing here? Anyway, sorry. I have a lot of feelings about TikTok right now. You might watch too many ads on TikTok. I just, you can just scroll past them. You know that, right? Like you just scroll past them. I'm just saying. I just scroll until I get bloopers from the office. So I don't even know what you're talking about. Have you started seeing they're doing the shimmer effect across it to prevent the content? It's very good. TikTok, honestly, Disney should buy TikTok because TikTok is the most impressive laboratory of copyright infringement that exists in the world today and maybe in world history.

36:27So I was actually going to bring up Disney as a wild card here. I don't think Disney can afford to do this. But I think Disney kicked the tires on Twitter a bunch of years ago. Disney is interested in a new media startup in a really big way. I think TikTok is probably too big to be that thing for Disney. But if I'm Bob Iger, I bet there is a memo in that boardroom. Is Disney still interested? Because I think when they kicked the tires on Twitter, that was also around the same time they launched Fusion, which was like their digital media play. Yeah. That was the wasting money in Disney era. Yeah.

37:04I think they're beyond this point now. Yeah, I don't think so. I think Disney is in the business of getting young people to watch its stuff. And that the answer to that is TikTok. I want everyone to pull over in a car and just imagine with a TikTok themed part of Walt Disney World would look like. Close that loop. Every ride is 60 seconds long. And you just leap. It's somewhat unsatisfying unless you do it 100 times in a row. I don't think Bob Iger wants to talk about contact moderation in front of Congress. I think that destroys Disney's brand, right? To be anywhere close to there is evidence that teenage girls are feeling depressed because of our product, not Disney's zone.

37:45But it's interesting to consider because it is where – like Disney missed out on Cocomelon, which is a YouTube phenomenon and is now a Netflix phenomenon. They don't have a pipeline for that stuff and TikTok might be that pipeline. I don't think they have the money and I don't think they have the mental stamina based on all the other things that are on Disney. All right. That's the list. There's other stuff. You can talk about AMD and Pepsi and Netflix. But I feel like that's the list and you got to end with Salesforce because I just want everyone to consider the darkest timeline. We'll see what happens.

38:15You know, a bunch of Verge reporters are out in the world pounding the pavement to see who wants to buy things. What Alex, he told me yesterday when I was like, hey, let's go through your list. He's like, it's crickets because they're all afraid of Lena Kahn. And I think that is – that was how they were talking before Biden signed the bill. And I think that will change in the weeks to come. but there's going to be a lawsuit. We'll see how that goes. Kind of a wild time though. Like I, if you've been paying attention to the Verchest, you know that we, we generally think like all of social media and the internet is being like table flipped upheaval and like things are shaking out in different ways.

38:48This is one pretty big table flip. Yeah. I think it's, it's going to be really interesting to see how this radiates outward too, because like there's been a lot of talk in the last couple of days about what this is going to mean for Instagram and for YouTube shorts and for first snap. And there's this sense of a handful of companies in the US that really stand to benefit from the downfall of TikTok. And I think where people go, if they go, and how those platforms start to change is going to yet again, upend the rest of everything. Like if, if TikTok suddenly floods into YouTube, it will change YouTube completely.

39:24Oh, there's gonna be a land grab 100 % between like the QVC nature of TikTok and this, all those like edge case people, the people who aren't really, really into it are going to be like, yeah, I'll just, I'll go somewhere else because at least I'm not getting sold to. Yeah. And this is, you'll recall what happened with Vine, right? The exodus of Vine to YouTube really changed the nature of YouTube. So you can just feel it coming. By the way, I forgot, I was just scrolling. I forgot the darkest timeline option, which I'm just going to say, and then we're going to cut to a break. Verizon buys TikTok.

39:55That's it. We'll be right back. We're going to talk about the rabbit hour one. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24 seven. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights.

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41:46Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than two and a half million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

42:22Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

42:57Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

43:36We're back. I just want to say if AT &T bought TikTok, imagine what Zack Snyder would get up to. Well, it would immediately be spun off into some other. David Zaslav would own it six months later, so it would be fine. Four, three grayscale TikToks for everyone. Extremely dark. We've been talking a lot about terrible movies on this podcast recently. Should we talk about Rebel Moon? I refuse. That one's like very bad. Like it's so obviously bad. Yeah, I haven't even looked at it. I saw, I don't think this is a spoiler. I saw a screenshot of one of the final scenes where the ship is revealed to be a woman who is hogtied.

44:11Oh! Good stuff. Doesn't seem like my bag. Also, that's almost certainly a spoiler, and I just don't care. So I'm sorry to everyone who... No, I mean, it does make me kind of want to watch it, but just so I can be mad while watching it. That's how I felt about Argonne. To be clear. Just rage watch. All right. Enough of the Zack Snyder talk. Yeah. Look, the man took his bag from AT &T, and he made a square movie in Grayscale, where Superman is super weird. And you bring it up like three out of every four podcasts. You know, the policy thing that we're not about, we don't have time to talk about is soon net neutrality will become the law of the land again and everyone's going to talk about net neutrality and mean anything, blah, blah, blah.

44:48And I'm just going to be like, Justice League happened to you because you repealed net neutrality. That was a real outcome of repealing net neutrality. You don't believe me, but it's 100 % true. All right. I want to talk about the thing that I've been most excited to talk about all week. David, you went to a party at the TWA Hotel at JFK in New York, which is a wild place to have a gadget launch. You saw Rabbit happen. There was a demo on stage, which we should talk about because I have a lot of feelings about that demo, and now you are holding a Rabbit R1. You have a review unit. It's just so orange.

45:25It's mine. I bought this with my own money. Oh, it's yours. It's on your review unit. They didn't do review units. So what I went to was the uh the pickup party for the first i think it was 300 r1s that came out so they they invited a bunch of media but we had to buy our own in order to get into the event uh which is fine very good uh i should say to people who don't know how this process normally works often for reviews people will ship us something and we'll test it and review it and then we ship it back that's usually how it works because if i had to buy every single thing that i wrote about i would be homeless uh so that's usually how it works but in this case we had to buy the thing so now i i own this thing Luckily it was only$200, but so we get to the TWA hotel, which is amazing.

46:08I had never been, it's like, it's a very old terminal at JFK that has since been converted into this very swanky kind of old fashioned hotel. Uh, it's awesome. Highly recommend. I had never been there before. I will probably never go again, but it was super cool. You should only go if you're having to fly in or out of JFK. Yeah. Oh God. It took me two trains in an Uber to get there. Like I don't recommend this plan otherwise. uh but yeah so it was it was me and 300 or so other people along with a bunch of rapid employees in this space they had done lots of you know work to overhaul it it had a big stage in the middle they had a 360 photo booth and a speakeasy upstairs there was a bar with signature drinks they were doing all kinds of merchy stuff it was very much like an old school tech party like i haven't been to one of those since before the pandemic uh where it's just like a company with too much money that's just like what if we just blew a bunch of it on this large event space uh and then jesse lou the founder and ceo got up and spent like an hour basically just doing demos uh and he's been doing this for the last couple of months kind of with increasing frequency showing off how this thing works and what it can do and all this stuff and he just sort of stood on stage and did a bunch of demos that were ostensibly live and i have many questions about all of them and then gave them out to that first group of 300 people.

47:34And so it was everybody there had like literally bought a thing to be there. So the room was very excited and there were a lot of people who had been in the Discord for months, sort of reading about the humane reviews and figuring out what was going on and trying to get details on what this thing would do and how it would work and lots of people. It was very funny like being in line for a bar while people are behind me debating how the large language model works. And there was a guy who was like, yeah, every time you ask a question, you're eating into that$199 price. And I was just like, these are my people.

48:05It was great. I had a delightful time, except that it was at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday night. And I'm very old and I can't hang like that anymore. Yeah. So you've got the thing now. I have the thing. It's right here. You've only had it for a day. I don't think this is a review. But I was watching the demo that he'd done on stage. And two things struck me about that demo. One, there was a little disclaimer on the stream, and he showed himself turning off the Wi-Fi. The entire demo was done over 4G LTE, not 5G, the one that is famously claimed to have very low latency. Good old 4G LTE, which is an interesting choice, but that's$199.

48:39And then he kept pointing out how fast everything was. At one point, he took a picture and, you know, the thing did the thing where the AI told you it was in the picture. And I was like, I don't think that uploaded over 4G LTE that fast. Like literally just the basics of it didn't seem like it was making sense. So two things on that. One, none of it was fast. Like go back and watch it again. He did a very good job of sort of talking through his demos so that while it was waiting for stuff to happen, it would work. And there were a few times where he would do something and it would pretty instantly do it.

49:13But what it does very well is it signposts as it's doing stuff. So like you'll ask it a question and it'll respond and say, let me go get that for you. And then it'll say, I'm going to get that for you. And then it gets it for you. And what you've, what it doesn't do is just sort of leave you hanging in awkward silence for several seconds, which feels like an eternity, but it does take a while to do a lot of things. And with the photo, uh, having now tested this a bunch, what it does when you like hold up the thing and say, you know, look at this and tell me what you see, uh, which is like the, the sort of computer vision thing that a lot of these gadgets do.

49:45it's not taking a good picture it takes an awful picture and i can show you the awful pictures i've been taking but it literally it just uploads just the tiniest little bit of data in order to be able to answer the question is there a crowd full of people or like a begonia in front of you right like that is the fidelity that it needs and that is all of the fidelity that it gets so i actually think that particular one seems plausible to me i guess i do need to watch it again because i was just struck by the speed at which things appeared to be happening over a 4G connection. Not even a 5G connection, over a 4G connection.

50:22I'm not even putting this on Rabbit. I'm just like, I've used LTE connections before. They're not fast, especially now, right? When all the bandwidth is being prioritized to the 5G connections, all the spectrum is being prioritized over there. That was one. And then the other thing that struck me was how much stuff it can't do that we were shown at doing at the first launch event NCS, where that stuff is just nowhere close. Like everything? It's weird. And even after being at that launch event where he got up on stage, Jesse, and said out loud, I am going to demo all of the things that it can do from day one.

50:55And I have been testing those things and it can't do some of them. So one of the big things that Rabbit has been talking about is this thing called the large action model, right? And the idea is that it can actually like learn how to use apps on your behalf. That's like, that's its whole pitch. it's not just like a thing for chat GPT it's a thing where you can say go do Spotify for me right or like go interact with Photoshop for me that's literally one of the things they've talked about like you can teach it how to use Photoshop for you that is not coming soon it's not it's like a thing that somebody had the idea to do it's like when we talk about car renders right it's like it's at the render stage as far as I can tell and then there's a bunch of stuff that seems very basic like I gave Humane a lot of crap for not supporting things like alarms and reminders and these very basic things and you know what the rabbit r1 doesn't support is alarms and reminders uh and i ironically like humane like the deja vu of all this is bananas for me like like humane jesse stood on stage and put up a big slide with here's all the cool stuff we're shipping in summer of 2024 and it's things like alarm calendar contacts, GPS, memory recall, uh, travel planning, Yelp, like basic things.

52:12These are, these are, these are things that you should have from the beginning. And there's just not really a good reason not to have it. So right now, again, I've been testing this thing for a grand total of like 16 hours, some of which I was asleep, right? Like none of this is final yet, but like a lot of things about this device do not work very well. Yeah. And it only has four apps, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I will say the biggest, most complicated question about the rabbit is how this large action model works and thus what you're giving it access to. So when you log into the website, which is called rabbit hole, which I enjoy very much, the branding on this thing is on point.

52:53They've done a very good job. When you're playing music, there's a little rabbit guy with headphones on, Like it's great. Excellent branding exercise. Well done. But you log into rabbit hole and you go to, there's a tab called connections and it like lists all the apps you can connect to. And right now it's, it's four, like you said, it's Spotify, DoorDash, Uber, and mid journey, uh, which is a strange four, but whatever. And then, so you, you click on the connect button and what it does is open up a virtual machine on rabbit servers through which you just log into the spotify web interface or the door dash web interface so like i click on the door dash button and literally it opens the door dash website just the home page of door dash.com on the thing and then i had to go click sign in i had to enter in my credentials and then i clicked continue like i'm signing into door dash normally and then it closes that window because now it has stored my credentials uh and what rabbit says is it doesn't store your credentials it just stores like an authentication token so that you stay logged in and to that i say like have you ever tried to stay logged into a service on the internet like it's not possible you can't the keep me logged in button doesn't work so there is something else going on here and there are a lot of people who are like oh what you're doing is you're just exposing all of your login credentials to a virtual machine that's just sitting on rabbit's computer like you're just uploading your life to rabbit servers that's stupid well there's also one step beyond that which is you have now logged into doordash on rabbit servers and it's logged in right so it doesn't matter if you have the credential well right you're perfect logged in access to doordash yes and i think for me i uh like i'm logging into all of these things because i have to test this thing but like even logging into spotify felt strange like this is like this is actually kind of a lot of access to information about me that you just have now and that's odd.

54:48But anyway, the interface for that sucks. The system isn't very good. I have not yet successfully used DoorDash. Every single time I try to do it, I like, you know, you press the button on the side and you say, order me some food. And every single time it says DoorDash may take a while to load on Rabbit OS, which is very funny. And then it just immediately fails every single time. So what's happening in the background there, from what I gather, what the heart of the large action model is it's going to click around on the doordash website for you i believe that's correct yeah i think the the long-term plan here is to have more uh let's say robust integrations that they can actually like there's way that you do that with like structured data that you can get to some of that stuff but but that's the old way right like doordash has an api and we've built a weird interface for doordash on our little orange square you could you don't need a bunch of ai for that no you don't uh but it works and right so this is like you're logged into doordash and we're going to show you pictures of the we're going to understand the doordash interface for you and then we're going to let you're going to say buy me this food and we're just going to use the doordash website on your behalf like that's the that that is my understanding of what the large action model should do yeah no that that's that's exactly right and part of the process that they make that they're in theory one day someday when this launches going to make you go through is training the apps that you use like this is where you click to do x and this is where you click to do y and you scroll down to get to the other thing and that is that is how you teach these models how to do this stuff and the reason they've worked with these four apps now is because their people have done that training with these four apps so like literally deals with the four apps so deals with spotify and uber and doordash you know uber and doordash are competitors like Uber Eats exists.

56:33Yeah. I don't know, but I sure doubt it. I have a more basic question. Okay. I know you've only spent, what, 16 hours with it. But in that time, have you had an experience with it where you're like, oh, wow, I would willingly train this model when I get more access to it to have this kind of experience with another app? The Spotify integration is the one to me that I'm like, this is the thing I really want to work. Does it? like no it's oh it is so so bad you guys i can't i can't even tell you how bad it is like let me i just give you a bunch of examples uh i say to the thing play my discover weekly playlist and it plays every single time a song called can you discover by a band discovery um i say play beyonce's new album and it played like a lullaby version of crazy and love yeah uh and it's weird because it's not even like it's just searching and playing the first result because if you go to spotify and search discover weekly it shows you your discovery weekly playlist so in theory that shouldn't be that hard a problem it's doing some weird thing that i can't figure out yet and almost always does it wrong so if i ask like a very basic question like play justin timberlake that works it'll play a justin timberlake song uh and i have done that many many times but anything more complicated at least so far it has fallen apart on me every single day see this is why i don't understand about how it's working.

58:03If you're saying you can go to Spotify's website and type in crazy in love, and it shows you the first result is correct. Theoretically, that is all the large action model is doing on the backend, right? It's looking at the web interface. It's identifying the search box. It's entering the string. It's saying, here's the first result, and it's double clicking on it. By the way, this is not some radically new idea, right? Like big businesses deploy robotic process automation to run their billing systems on windows 98 billion companies exist to deploy this at the enterprise scale. And Rabbit has more or less acknowledged that that is what it's doing, by the way.

58:36There was this weird thing. I don't know if you saw that. There's somebody, it was called like Rabbit Scam on GitHub, GitHub sort of said they had found a bunch of code showing that all Rabbit was doing was just lifting stuff off of web pages and running the same systems that everybody else runs in order to like understand what's going on on a website. and they were like, this isn't as scary as you think it is. Like, yeah, that's what we do. That's our public code. So they're acknowledging that this is what is going on. But it's not working. Yeah. Again, if you're like some mid-sized hospital system and you hire UiPath to show up and do RPA and it's like, we're doing the lullaby versions, you're like, fire them.

59:17It's like, get rid of them, right? UiPath is a billion dollar company because it can do robotic process automation reliably at scale. Like, why? Rabbit costs$200. It costs$200, but even the basic thing, we entered a string of text into a search box and we played the first result. The industry, the robotic process automation industry knows how to do that. So why can't it do that? It feels like it's doing something else. Is it inserting a little clippy in there? Is it trying to be smart for you? It might be. It's also possible that it's doing something different with Spotify because Spotify has an actual sort of corpus of data that it lets other systems access.

59:58So I can't speak to Spotify in particular, but at least from the demos that I've seen, again, I haven't been able to get DoorDash to work once. But from Jesse's demo of DoorDash, that seemed very clearly to be the thing using the website. because the way that he showed what was working was he kept refreshing doordash.com on his laptop and it would show that something had been added to the cart on the website. That's not like a thing that happens if you use like a third party API to do all of this stuff. That is just a thing using the web app for you. So this is the part that I'm just like most interested in because DoorDash is the slowest one and they said it's the slowest one.

1:00:33And there comes a point at which all this like just horsepower through the interface with computer vision, it just hits the wall of like, what if you just had an API? What if you could just, instead of trying to have a robot figure out what's happening on an interface made for humans, what if you just let the robot talk to the application directly using actual API commands? The example that I'll give people, one of my favorite companies that I wished had succeeded was Kavo, the universal remote company that I hyped up on the show over and over again. They were doing exactly this to build a universal remote.

1:01:07You plug all of your devices into the Kavo and the Kavo is doing computer vision to watch your Apple TV interface or whatever and click around on your behalf. So you could just say the name of a show and the name of a service and it would just like bang around your TV and use it for you. And this shit was awesome when it worked. It was very slow and it was extraordinarily brittle when it broke. Yeah, it never worked. Like the win is very generous. Yeah, sometimes it worked, you know. And it was cool. It was very cool in those moments. It worked. But most of the time it didn't. Right. And then the thing that like really got you was it wouldn't even show you the clicking around.

1:01:41Like it would put up the Kavo screen and you would hear it like booping in the background. You'd be like, can I just see if you're getting this right? I would love to check your work. And then you'd be like, that is not what I wanted to happen at all. Or it would just error out. But the idea that like you've got a bunch of devices plugged into a central HDMI switcher and you're like, watch this show. And it knows that's the Apple TV. And you're like, I want to play PlayStation. And it switches the input and bangs around. Like all that was awesome. But it failed because fundamentally the approach is brittle.

1:02:08right it's just it there there are there are known ways for it to break when the computer cannot understand what's seeing it's$199 like yeah can they overcome this problem or do they actually just need to build a bunch of apis and then you've got something that looks like a i think you have in your piece that's just a mid-range android smartphone with weird apps yeah the answer is ultimately both right and i think i think humane has said this about what it's working on rabbit has alluded to this too like they eventually want to build big enough systems that others will actually integrate with because the reason to not rely on apis is that you're a tiny startup and nobody cares about you and nobody will make the deals with you so you do hacky computer vision stuff so that you don't have to get the deals uh because by and large they can't really stop you from doing that uh they can they can get mad and they have some ways but like that's it's a more winnable game in that particular respect but the way for them to do this they all acknowledge is to eventually have those more official partnerships that just give them access to the jordash api and then like this doesn't all have to be ai right like i actually think we like run into a trap when we assume that the only way to do ai things is for all of it to be ai like some of it shouldn't be we've solved a lot of problems actually like we're we're pretty good at a lot of things that don't require pinging a large language models to order mcdonald's like that's like ordering mcdonald's on the internet is like a solved problem we're very good at it now and so i think we'll land there with a lot of stuff but one nice thing you can do with these models is you can hack together a kind of solution to a lot of those business deals without needing those business deals.

1:03:45And I think that's what all of these companies are doing at first. The question is what a door dash is going to say. This is a legal scraping of our website. Like there's another whole set of problems that you kind of walk into immediately. I mean, the good news for door dash is door dash just wants you to order McDonald's, right? Like, and I think that's the assumption that they're making, right? Like Uber wants me in an Uber and is very happy. Anything that happens that gets me in an Uber, same with door dash and me ordering McDonald's. Does Spotify want to stream copyrighted music to an orange rectangle?

1:04:12Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. They did it on their list of things that are coming is Apple Music and it's like, is it? Is that one coming? Have you met them? Like, they don't like competitors. They're not, you know, even Apple Music, which is theoretically the, you know, horizontal play across, like, have you tried Apple Music on Android? You think your weird little robot is going to be allowed how to use Apple Music that way? I don't know. We'll see. I'm very excited for you to review this thing. I think that that central question of like at$199 with no recurring fee, can you make this a business that needs to improve on some of the core AI features that it is reliant on?

1:04:52Look at this. The thing you're saying, a bunch of these are solved problems, right? Okay. That's great. The things that are sort of easiest to do are solved problems. Order some food, call a ride, play songs, all API stuff. That means you're relying on the AI to solve all of the edge cases. Go to Photoshop and draw a cropping square around a thing. Like that is not a solved problem. You cannot API your way into doing that in Photoshop in the general case. You can do it maybe in some specialized ways. Okay, you're now – it's$199 with no recurring revenue. Can you make an AI that can solve for the general case of using a computer is the question that this thing is asking.

1:05:32And I just like don't know the answer. I feel the answer is probably no. But, David, I just need you to do one thing for me. Can you hold it up to the mic and click one of the buttons? I just need to know how clicky they are. Okay, I'll just do some ASMR shit. It's pretty quiet. Yeah. Oh, it's so quiet. That's nothing. Yeah. That's nothing. He's clicking right now. Pull over in your car. Turn off the engine. Roll up the windows. Click, click, click. That's what it sounds like. No, do it without the clicks. They're pulled over now. Oh, yeah. That's not so bad. the people in the electric cars like what engine uh no but to me the thing is like the the big open question for me with both the humane pin and this was like what is like the one thing that this is actually for and i keep hoping it's going to be music and humane almost got there except for all the ways it was awful uh and this like i was excited because it's spotify and spotify is what i and hundreds of millions of other people use to listen to music just not there but uh so far it's a pretty good like question and answer machine which i'm happy about uh rabbit has a big integration with perplexity the ai search engine uh so for like relatively real-time questions like the the nfl draft is tomorrow as we're recording this and i was asking a bunch of questions about like who is likely to go where in the nfl draft and it had good up-to-date information about the nfl draft like that's cool uh cue all the people saying why can't i just do on my smartphone like you super duper can uh but what's weird to me about this so far and again i have a lot of testing and stuff left to do is like this little thing the gadget itself feels right for this moment in ai like it's pretty cheap it's not that ambitious it's sort of silly and fun it's like worst case scenario it's just like will look cool on my desk yeah people pay a lot more for cool things on their desk right uh but they're also at the same time talking about this massive world-changing vision for where it will all go.

1:07:30And Jesse, to his credit, is constantly sort of tamping that down, saying we're just at the very beginning. We haven't solved most of these problems. He said something at the beginning of his speech last night that was like, I'm going to try all these demos, and if they don't work, I'll try them again, and if they still don't work, we'll fix it. And I was like, what a perfect summation of the time we're in for AI. And so I think all of that is right, And I appreciate kind of the like realism of what rabbit is doing as opposed to like humane, which is like, you know, sort of brought from the earth, fully formed.

1:08:03We have solved this. But then they're still like wildly overstating what this thing can actually do in a way that I find very frustrating. There's a bunch of comments on your hands on posts. Like, why are you being nice to this inhumane? And it's like, well, one, it's not actually the review yet. Important note. Like we're just holding the thing. And two, it's like it's$200. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just different. But I am very curious to see as you go through this review process how much it needs to lean on the computer vision piece. Because the more it has to do that, which is the AI of it all, the worse it's going to be.

1:08:38Yes. I feel that very keenly. All right. Some more things we should talk about in this section. Apple announced a May 7th event for new iPads. Two things about this. One, it's just an infomercial. Just like tune in to watch our stream. No one's going anywhere. Yeah. And then they're calling it Let It Loose. And our friend Joanna Stern pointed this out. The S in loose looks like a G, so it's let it luge, which is – if you want to think about what that means in the context of new iPads, I welcome you. I personally believe Apple is announcing a luge-oriented iPad. It's very weird. It's a huge boogie board-sized iPad.

1:09:15It's like a cursive capital S, so it's weird. And so in context, it looks like a lowercase g. Very good. It's pretty awesome. It feels like we're going to get an OLED iPad, right? That's the rumor. It feels like they'll just chip bump everything else. I'm trying very hard not to buy an OLED iPad. But you're going to. Why? Like I don't use the one I have. So that I'm not the only one. Like I need other people making bad. We're going to do a group buy. We're going to call Tim Cook and we're like, can we get a group rate on ill-conceived iPads? It just feels like what they actually need to do is announce new software for the iPad.

1:09:51not new hardware there were a bunch of people talking about this that i really enjoyed that was like after this came out everybody was like relax the real ipad event is wwdc in june like this this doesn't matter and i think that's probably true like the strangest thing about the ipad is the hardware has been really good for a really long time uh i would say other than please move the camera from the bad spot to the good spot i have very few issues with the ipad's hardware and have not had issues for a long time. I have a million issues with what it's like to actually use the damn thing. That's why I'm kind of curious about one of the big rumors is that they're going to do a new magic keyboard that's like aluminum or something.

1:10:31It's more like a just a laptop case. Yeah, with a bigger trackpad, like that would be cool. David, I'm pointing out the 10th gen iPad moved, they moved the camera. I know, but they haven't, they haven't on the other ones. Move it on all the other places. They're going to probably do it on the Pro in the air this time around. At some point, they have to admit that the Pro is just a weird laptop. Yeah. Maybe this is the time. I've been using my ancient now 11-inch iPad Pro as a tablet. This is dumb. It's just a laptop all the time. I want to use it as a tablet. Boy, do I want to read stereo review in PDF form on my iPad, as God intended.

1:11:07But it's just like the thing yearns to be in its laptop. Yeah, you're also... I've noticed you started sending a lot of Apple News Plus links around, which makes me think you are becoming more of an iPad user. I'm just a rumor now. I'm a dad. I live in the suburbs. Sold my truck. I haven't sold the truck yet. It's heartbreaking to think about selling my stupid truck. This is just me trying to not use Twitter. And Wall Street Journal and Condé Nast Publications are Apple News Plus. I got suckered in the deal. Great. Fine, right? But do I love it? Do I think Apple News? I just – I'm not going to pass any judgments.

1:11:44I'm just going to ask anybody who has the product. Go and look at the list of trending stories and be like, who do we think this audience is? You just make that distinction all in your – I'm not going to pass any judgment. But I'm like, they're not getting younger is what I would say. It doesn't appear that they're getting younger with time. But anyway, yeah, I'm trying to use the iPad as a consumption device. and the iPad Pro in particular, it kind of yearns to be in the keyboard case. And I hope they just go for it. Like we have a weird mini laptop. It's fine, you know, but the software has to change.

1:12:20So that's coming very soon, May 7th, a couple of weeks from now. The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses got a big update. They have multimodal AI now. They announced some new colors and it's in various three designs that they have. I feel like I'm like about to buy one of these. You should. Meta also announced that it's making headsets with other people in an attempt to make sort of quest os the open vr headset which zuckerberg has talked about a lot um they're going to make an xbox vr headset it's a limited edition meta quest so you can see zuckerberg is like we're going to be the android of you are well apple's doing whatever it's doing over here can we we call out the fact that it is so funny to watch microsoft go from being like we're going to create the vr head like the vr space we're we're going to do it all mixed reality we're going to own this place to we're going to do a rebranded meta quest three i mean if you're microsoft and you're out there being like the future is xbox game streaming you might as well let them have it and run like the quest is basically like an android phone right on your face yeah take the free ads i mean and the the way they described it was so funny it's like it's a it's a quest three inspired by xbox or something which just makes me think like somebody at Microsoft like sent over the hex codes for the Xbox green and we're like, do whatever you want.

1:13:37Leave us alone. I hope it is like just huge. I hope it is so chunky. Like the original X. It's just a full on like master X. Xbox controller. Yeah. Just over the top. So the OS, the quest OS is being rebranded, I guess, to meta horizon OS, which is just a lot of words. Yeah. It's weird. There was like horizon worlds and then there was horizon workroom. so that was kind of always going to be their thing but now they're trying to make it even bigger i will say horizon great name for an operating system great job the names are insane it's just a lot of words so horizon os runs on the quest hardware and xbox is making it xbox inspired that's a lot um good news though more companies that are known for their good names will be participating in this ecosystem including asus's republic of gamers very excited for the names to come from them.

1:14:31Lenovo will make something. That will be... It'll have Legion in it somewhere. A word salad. Yep. The Lenovo Legion Quest Flip 13. Yep. And then all of these are going to run on Qualcomm chips. Qualcomm, also well known for stretching the boundaries of the world of Snapdragon beyond all human recognition. So that's interesting. We'll see how that goes. They're the players. They have the momentum. Quest 3 itself got an update where the pass-through videos of higher quality and looks better when you look at phones. There's momentum over there. I want to come back to actually the Ray-Ban glasses, which are a hit.

1:15:09Like, they feel like a quiet hit. I know a lot of people who have them. Our friend Joanna Stern says she doesn't travel or go on field video shoots without them anymore. Wow. They're really good. I've got a pair. I should wear mine more. I'm legit thinking about going and getting prescription lenses put in it because I always have to put my contacts in. And it's like, that friction's too much. But every time I wear it, I'm like, why don't I wear my contacts more often? These, like, are awesome. They're cheap. They're$300. I've got a friend who, in the pandemic, she just became one of those people who doesn't live anywhere.

1:15:39She's just like, literally last week, she's like, I'm working from a boat. And I was like, I hate you. You seem great. All of her photos are from the Meta Quest. The thing Meta got really right was it went the correct direction in terms of saying, like, we're going to pick a very small number of things for this device to do. And it's going to do them pretty well. And then we're going to slowly add things that it can do. Like when it started, it was like, okay, it's a pretty good speaker system. If you like want to listen to music or podcasts or whatever, that's mostly what I use it for. It's become like when I'm out on a walk or whatever, I wear it.

1:16:13And I wear the glasses instead of headphones now, which is awesome. Pretty good camera. People really like taking photos and videos that way. And now they're adding on. They're like, okay, now we can do. they had the you could like ask meta ai questions but now they're adding the multimodal stuff and so they're like they're sequencing this stuff really smartly instead of like promising the world from the very beginning and then not meeting people's expectations which i think is really the key these are better than people expected them to be which is so so so rare in this moment with hardware yeah um and again the first thing they just had to be with some nice looking ray bands yeah it's like all right you get a pair of wayfarers you have these other two designs like People just like those designs.

1:16:52Whether or not the battery lasts, the camera works, it's like, oh, no, just pay our Wayfarers. Maybe it'll be cool. And now they're setting all this cool stuff. Well, it's like that old Mitch Hedberg joke, right? That when an escalator doesn't break, it just becomes stairs. That's these glasses, right? The worst case scenario is you just have a nice pair of sunglasses. Yeah, and honestly,$300 for a pair of ribbons is a little bit of a premium, but it's not crazy. And now the multimodal AI, you can do the thing. What am I looking at? It tells you, right? That's the big trick. It's emerging as the party trick of these AI devices.

1:17:21And it's as messy as anything else. Like V song did a bunch of testing with it and it was like hilariously wrong about cars and all that stuff. And it's always like all these systems, it's very confident and just lies to your face. I actually, I'm, I'm starting to be of the mind that we need to push back strongly against calling any of this AI. We just need to call them language models. Uh, cause they just make up words. There's no intelligence artificial or otherwise happening here. Uh, it's going to be a hard fight. I don't think we're going to, I'm not going to win that fight. There's a lot of fights I've won.

1:17:51I'm not going to win that fight. Support you. But the conflation of can you talk with are you smart is in a real weird moment on the internet right now. It turns out – I talk a lot. I'm not trying to burn anybody. I'm just putting that out there. Fascinating to me though, just add all this up, right? You've got Meta doing this sort of open stuff with Lenovo and all these other companies. You've got the glasses, which are sort of a sneaky hit that people like. next to, okay, analyst reports that Vision Pro demand is suffering. Right? And it's like, did Apple just get outgunned by a pair of Ray-Bans?

1:18:27Yes. Yes. That's crazy. It's nuts. It's not crazy, though. It was a$3 ,500 bet against a$300 bet. I don't even think it's that. I think Apple just miscalculated. Like, the longer I use these devices, the more I can't believe Apple didn't make the smart glasses. like if in the thing that apple has traditionally done which is like build a thing and then build the more complicated thing and then build the more complicated like apple is actually very good at laddering that stuff up over time and in this case just way overshot it was like it it was like building four generations too soon and trying to convince people to buy it and what if if they had just built like the ipod version of it which is just like a nice thing for listening to music and talking to an assistant, people would have gone nuts for it.

1:19:13And it is like, it continues to blow my mind that Apple just, I think, picked wrong. They could still do it. We could still get the Apple Vision Air. Oh, I'm sure we will. I'm sure that's where it's headed. But like, what the humane folks told me is they were like, okay, well, when we built this, we decided to build the hardest thing first based on the idea that then it's much easier to sort of ratchet our ambition down and sell cheaper, simpler versions of the thing. But it turns out if you blow the expensive one, you don't get the chance to do the next things and i think apple has kind of dug itself a hole here by so aggressively overshooting i also like all these supply chain numbers should be taken with like a giant heap of salt all the time but i will say anecdotally nobody talks about the vision pro anymore yeah it has totally faded i spent a lot of time looking in the subreddit uh and it is uh a lot of people are like what are we using this thing for yeah you know then there's like one app comes out and it's a hit and people really like it but it's a little little dire in there um i'm just gonna say i was right in the review yep let's put that out there it took a lot of heat for that one it's better out here yeah it's better right the question is like is it worth putting it on and there isn't anything that makes it worth putting on there's a few things that sometimes but even mark german in his newsletter where he was talking about some of his relatives he's like i'm wearing this thing less and less like it's lonely like he's like i don't watch basketball them uh i think it's weird it's just like a weird moment in hardware yeah where the big expensive stuff didn't go and the the sort of cheap stuff that's making small promises is gaining a new kind of momentum i think i'm gonna buy them i don't know why i have too many glasses i lose them i have a rule to not buy glasses that are more than 50 bucks not buy sunglasses more than 50 bucks because they're gone that's good i might as well just flush the 50 down the toilet you know i mean um but there's a part that's like what if the good news is these these ones are very heavy.

1:20:59So it will be hard to lose them. And the charging case is really nice. So you're going to be like, oh, I can't lose my charging case because it's so nice. And then you'll never lose your glasses. Alex, you never under us. I'm just filled with optimism today. Just all optimism. All right, we're going to take a break. I'm going to look on the Meta website and see if I can convince myself to spend$300. We're going to come back. We've got to talk about Tesla and then we've got a lightning round. Then we're going to get out of here. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Udacity. AI seems to be everywhere these days, and if you want to prepare yourself to be able to use it, Udacity says they can help, no matter what field you're in.

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1:25:04Okay, we're back. We have to talk about Tesla. Tesla had earnings. Andy Hawkins' headline for the preview of earnings was Tesla is in its flop era, which is a great headline. Just to recap, Tesla has laid off more than 10 % of its workforce, like 14 ,000 people. A bunch of executives are leaving, including the guy who was in charge of the powertrain and energy division. And then the head of policy, who's the guy who gets autonomy approved, also gone. A lot going on with Tesla. There's a rumor that they're going to cancel the cheap EV. And then they kind of said they weren't going to cancel it.

1:25:35But it also sounds like what they're really going to do is make the Model Y cheaper. They recalled all 3 ,800 Cybertrucks, 3 ,878 Cybertrucks. But they talked. Elon said Optimus would be a fully sentient robot that would, quote, expand the world economy infinitely. Sick. They'll be selling that at the end of next year. Yeah. Sure. So classic Elon bump there. I think he even said in that sentence, I think he said, but I'm just guessing. It's like, all right, cool. Yeah. Great investor call. There's a new Model 3 performance. Great. But they don't have as new cars. There's not really a plan to have new cars.

1:26:16They're going to announce some RoboTaxi plan on August 8th. And then there's this thing that they've been talking about, which he brought up again on the earnings call today, which I just want to talk about for five seconds because it is bonkers to me. He was talking about how many H100s Tesla has. He went on this very funny side about how he doesn't like calling them GPUs because they don't have any graphics, but whatever. You can hear the investors being like, what? and then he got to, we have all these H100s and we are doing inference, AI inference more efficiently because we had to learn how to do it in the car, which is constrained.

1:26:45Great, that makes sense. It's a good argument. You can measure it, well, that makes sense. And then he's like, we've got this like AWS play, which they've hinted at before, but he was like, what we're gonna do is run it on all the Teslas that are just sitting around. So quote, if you can imagine in the future, perhaps there's a fleet of 100 million Teslas and on average, they've gotten like maybe a kilowatt of inference compute. That's 100 gigawatts of inference compute distributed all around the world. It's pretty hard to put together 100 gigawatts of AI compute. So perhaps maybe instead of using the car 10 hours a week, we use it 50 hours a week while it's sitting there.

1:27:18That leaves over 100 hours a week where the car inference computer can be doing something else, and it seems like it would be a waste to not use it. My man is describing SETI at home for Teslas. Yeah. What do those terms of service look like? It's just like, do you want to run compute models on your car while just sitting in the driveway? You're a car, which, by the way, famously runs on electricity. Where's that electricity? Where's that power wheel coming from? Are you going to get it cheaper? So you buy a car and now Elon can use it to do whatever inference to run, whatever robo-taxi fleet that he thinks he's going to need to run it.

1:27:49Also, I don't know if you know about AWS. They like knowing where the computers are. And typically those computers are not driving somewhere between 20 and 100 miles an hour. while they're being used. Yeah, he's just like, you know, I've interviewed the CEO of AWS. I would say a core assumption of that conversation was that he knew where the servers were and they were not ever at risk of crashing into other servers. This feels like such a classic Elon Musk thing because even as you were reading that, it's like, okay, this sort of makes sense. Like big fleet, lots of compute sitting around. What if we use the compute?

1:28:23And then it's like, you raise your hand and you go like, how is any of that gonna work? And it's like, ah, don't worry about that. he's doing it at the same time that like Chevy is getting a lot of flack because they've been using their computers to spy on people and report it to their insurance companies like maybe not the time to be like yeah you've got a computer in there and I want to use it yeah it's like it's mine now I just think this is the one where it's like what Elon is searching for is arguments that Tesla will have massive margins software company style margins instead of car company margins And the thing that's hammering Tesla right now is they have absolutely car company margins again because they dropped the price so much.

1:29:03And they don't have any new cars. So the competition is here. And you can see the sales fell like 55%. Like they're just not doing it anymore. And so he's concocting these arguments where a sentient optimist robot will expand the world economy by infinity. That's a pretty good margin. It's good. I mean, you know, more power to you if you pull that off. And then he's like, and I'm going to build this like distributed data center. so now I'm running AWS. Instead of having to build a data center in Texas or wherever, he might need to build it. And it's like, this is, the truth is outing here, right?

1:29:35Like, it is very hard to get from here to I'm running a distributed AI supercomputer in every Tesla in the world. It's like, very hard. It kind of feels a little like a Peloton moment for him. You know, where Peloton, everybody got a Peloton because they wanted one and it feels like maybe everyone who wanted the Tesla got one. Well, let me just ask you this question about this distributed inference computer. What happens at rush hour? Yeah. The total capacity of the computer just like plummets like hour by hour. Like it's always 5 o 'clock somewhere. Like every hour there's just like a huge dip in capacity.

1:30:12And it starts coming back online at 7 p.m. Like literally the sun sets on Tesla's compute capacity across the United States every single day. Like it's very hard to pull this through. I think Tesla is in a fascinating moment I am not sure five years from now it looks anything like this company yeah it seems hard to imagine I mean I think this company has already gone through so many weirder iterations than anybody would have expected and continues to sort of chug along like Tesla feels very much like a cockroach at this point that sort of nothing could happen to Tesla that would surprise me and also it will be the last company that exists on planet earth uh oh i disagree but i i like it feels like it's going to crap yeah even like a bunch of tesla fans are like i don't know about this anymore well that's i mean that that's one of the big questions to me i was talking about this with andy hawkins yesterday like this question of kind of the elon musk effect that the people who are predisposed to want teslas for a lot of the reasons that tesla promotes them being good for the world and all that are also people who are likely to not be psyched about elon musk's shenanigans particularly as he runs x and so trying to figure out how to quantify how much of this is about the the challenges in the ev market how much this is about plug-in hybrids which i thought was a really interesting thing that musk said during the earnings call he blamed a lot of the struggle on the rise in plug-in hybrids and how much of this is just people voting with their dollars and voting against Elon Musk is really hard to know.

1:31:51And I think it's going to be super obvious in retrospect. And I'm very curious how it's going to shake out. There's also the fact that if you're just going to buy a car and you're going out in the world and you're like, I'm going to buy a car and you don't buy a car based on id, then you go and you look and you say, OK, Teslas have really bad reliability. They're really hard to repair. They're really hard to just get an appointment. And oftentimes that appointment's horrible. The build quality is crap to the point that like they keep having to do recalls on the cyber truck. Like those are all just signs of a badly run company.

1:32:24And I think this company had a lot of advantage because it was first mover. And Elon Musk is an incredible salesman. But now like the bloom is off that rose. Twitter X, whatever you want to call it, ripped that right off. And now it's like, okay, we see that this guy is just a really good salesman and he pulls it all out of his butt. And he is not some genius. And actually he's not running a very good company because he's running 12 at once. And no one can do that, even Elon Musk. Alex is Alex Kranz with a K. Yeah. Just email that. Hit me up. I'm doing you a favor. I'm here to debate you. Debate Alex with a K.

1:32:59Please. It's going to be great. Honeypotting Tesla trolls. I don't think you're wrong. I just think the fundamentals of the auto business, he has to not be a car company. and the thing that is happening is it's getting sucked into being a car company. Because it is one. Because they make cars. And the blaming the hybrid thing is super funny to me. Like, yes, I own a hybrid, but like you're basically telling your customers that they're wrong, right? And how do you get across – how do you get past the market making a decision and regulate the market? Joe Biden, will you make hybrids illegal? It's like kind of the only answer to that.

1:33:31Or you can yell at everyone that they're wrong. And like yelling at the market that it's wrong, like not great. That always famously works for everyone who does it. This is famously why Betamax beat VHS. Yeah. Everyone knows it. I don't think hybrid. I think hybrid, everyone I know who has hybrid knows it's like some short-term solution to the infrastructure not being there. And now, like, everyone prefers to drive around in the battery. My dad just recently bought a Prius after spending months looking for an EV because he just, like, they just couldn't find one that made sense and decided that in their lives at this point, like, the next car should be.

1:34:06an electric car. The car right now should not be. And I think a lot of people are making that decision. Yeah. Also new Prius. Uh, it doesn't look like an angry robot anymore. No, it's kind of great. Okay. Yeah. Um, we'll see. All right. Uh, lightning round. What you got, David? So while we're talking about, um, Apple TV plus soon to be augmented by the purchase of Tik TOK, there was, uh, there was a report this week that, uh, Apple has been negotiating with FIFA, which is the governing body of soccer around the world, to do a new global tournament exclusively on Apple TV+. I find this fascinating for a bunch of reasons.

1:34:46One, Apple is increasingly deep into the sports world. They have this thing with Major League Soccer that's going very well, it seems, in part because Lionel Messi decided to play for the MLS. But the numbers that have been thrown around are upwards of a billion dollars from Apple to be the one to stream this tournament, which is like, we've spent a lot of time talking about Apple TV Plus as kind of a, somewhere between sort of a lark and a side project that it was never going to be really material to Apple. It was just kind of a thing it did on the side in order to sell more subscriptions to iCloud, right?

1:35:22Like that was always the play. This seems to me to be the sort of thing that you only do if you're actually serious about turning this into a real thing. And Apple is just further and further and further into sports in a way that I continue to find surprising and sort of fascinating. And they want to invent a completely new thing with some of the biggest soccer clubs in the world, which would be huge and is immediately the kind of thing that would draw potentially millions of new people to Apple TV+. But this is like, there's no indication. I think it was a New York Times story that first reported this, that this is like a done deal.

1:35:58but they want to do it next summer which means like this is a big thing that could happen very quickly and like i don't know apple tv plus just continues to be a bigger thing than i think i've given it credit for i think it kind of makes sense though right now for apple to do it because hollywood is in a state of flux right like like streaming is completely changing the game there everybody's trying to figure out where the revenue streams are and the tech companies are kind of leading their forefront. The tech companies are running Hollywood in a way they haven't previously. And Apple is doing it really, really well.

1:36:33It's a smaller play than everybody else, but it's doing it intelligently. And it's like, yeah, this makes sense for them to go in and just take a couple of streaming services out, just body a few with money, and then snap up the dregs of that later, right? Like make a deal with Skydance or whatever. But if that's the play, Apple could just walk into the offices of any streaming service it wanted to and just write a check for its valuation. Yeah, but they don't want to do that. They want cheap licenses and stuff like that. That's what runs these services. But this is what I'm saying. A billion dollars to create a new soccer tournament is not that thing.

1:37:11Like the MLS thing, I understood. That's a relatively small, relatively safe bet. And they got to essentially take over that whole project. This is like negotiating for NFL rights. which Apple famously has not won because it wants... Yeah, but it wanted... What has been reported is that it wanted complete control over this thing. And you're not getting that from the NFL and you're not getting it from FIFA and they're still willing to throw billions of dollars at it. It's fascinating. But this would drive subscriptions. Yeah, for sure. Sports is sticky. Eddie Hugh's smart. He's also a huge sports fan.

1:37:41Yeah, he is. And he knows sports are the stickiest thing. We'll see. I think Apple has to get good at broadcasting sports. Yeah. If they're not great at it right now. So the more they get into it, the more they have to come. Does Tim Cook want to sit in Congress and talk about contact moderation? I don't know. Does Tim Cook want to sit in front of a bunch of soccer fans and talk about penalties? I don't know about that either. He sends any cue for that. But does Tim Cook want to go sit in a box at the World Cup? Yeah, absolutely. That's true. All right. Kranz, what you got? Qualcomm. They're back, baby.

1:38:14We'll see. We say that every once in a while. Just immediately undercut. Just immediate. Yeah. Yeah, so Qualcomm has announced, they had previously announced some new processors, and these are their kind of responses to the x86 processors from Intel and AMD. This is meant to go in Windows machines, meant to compete with Apple. They're saying they're as fast as the M3, and it's going to blow it out of the water. Joanna Nelius, our new laptop reviewer, went and checked some of them out in some very, very, very, very controlled demos. and she was like, there could be something there. She was seeing it was slower than the M3 in some cases, faster than others.

1:38:55I mean, if it's even in the ballpark of the M3, that's a huge deal. That's a huge deal, right? And I think there's some really interesting stuff, particularly around architecture. They're not doing the big little core deal that everybody else does, where they're like, these are performance cores and these are efficiency cores. They're like, yeah, these are all performance cores because they're just that efficient. That was me doing a Qualcomm impression. Sorry. So it's the Snapdragon X Elite was the ones previously announced. And now we have the Snapdragon X Plus. Oh, good. Which is slower because it's not Elite.

1:39:30They're going to throw a premium in there and no one's going to know what's going on. Yeah. Nobody will know. I appreciate that when you try to match Apple's performance, you also try to match Apple's insane name scheme. This is good. And it's all bad. All the names are bad. But we don't know when these are probably going to come this year. we'll probably start seeing them in some Windows devices this year. And I'm really, really curious to see it. Because if ARM and Windows can work for once, that would be huge. Yeah. But they famously kind of screwed it up the last time. And the time before that.

1:40:01And the time before that. And the time before that, yeah. That's why I immediately undercut. Qualcomm's back at it again at the Krispy Kreme. The Microsoft event is May 20th or 21st or something, and they're going to announce new surfaces that we think, by all indications are going to run these things. We're going to see this sooner rather than later, but Tom's been reporting about how excited Microsoft is. Qualcomm seems very excited. This could be something. Well, we've got Computex coming. That's May 31st. Oh, yeah. Oh, it's going to be like laptop explosion here. That's going to be great. Yeah, so we're going to get a lot of laptops soon, and I suspect a lot of them are going to have these new processors in them.

1:40:40Will these processors be good? It's a big move away from Intel if there's a lot of laptops with these weird Snapdragon chips in them. We'll see. We'll also have to see because historically the laptop makers don't like to ship the stuff besides Intel to reviewers to check out because they want you to check out the thing that people actually buy and that's usually the Intel products. So it's going to be a fun one. All right. Mine is very simple. SoMence has a new app. Looks very good. On mobile, they've sort of gotten rid of all the tabs and it's just all just widgets. It's cool. They said it's going to be faster.

1:41:13It's coming out May 7th. We'll see if the mobile app is faster. This is not the thing I actually want to talk about. They are getting rid of their desktop apps, which they've had forever on Mac and Windows. And they're going all to web apps. And you can now, because it's a web app, you can control your service from anywhere, which is interesting. I'm just pointing out that the move to distribute applications on desktop computers to the web instead of in native binaries is like full speed ahead. Like it's over. Like, you know, Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma, was like, why would you distribute an app on a desktop computer any other way except the web?

1:41:45And like, yep, there's Electron and some other stuff where you package it up and it looks native and da-da-da-da-da. But I saw this and I was like, oh, this is just – like this is a huge shift in computers that is like reaching a point where it's like no one even talks about it. Like it just assumed that if you're going to make a new app for desktop computers, what you are actually shipping is a web app. Yeah. And the thing I would point to is the Vision Pro, the high end of computers, the cutting edge of what a computer can be, mounted directly to your face. all of the most interesting apps on the vision pro the netflix app the youtube app whatever are just custom web browsers yeah we really called that by the way i feel like we we deserve credit for saying over and over that the thing that the only thing that might save the vision pro is is web apps yeah uh that has been absolutely correct uh anyway i'm excited for the use on this thing because the old app is indeed slow wasn't the old app supposed to fix the fact that the app before that was slow and bad?

1:42:40No. This is a long story. We had Patrick Spence on the show, I think, to explain himself to us when they did this. I know, and it didn't work then, so do it now. They had the old platform, which they now call S1, which was ancient, and they re-architected everything for the future and to support Atmos and all this other stuff they wanted to do. And that's called S2. So that was just an architecture update. It was not a, we need to make it a faster update. So they kept their slow app, but made it work on the new architecture. Yeah, there's a lot of arguments about what the best way to run Sonos is now.

1:43:08do you want to run Sonosnet, which is like a custom 2.4 giga network? You just want to run everything on Wi-Fi, which Sonos says you should do. Good times in these subreddits. I just use Spotify Connect, and it works fine. Yeah, it's fine. I wish I had a more complicated, interesting idea than that. Super works, yeah. I never, ever touch the Sonos app, and I'm very happy about it. I've used AirPlay for years now. It's great. It works just fine. And you can group things in AirPlay. You can group unlike speakers in AirPlay, which is very interesting. but I don't know I still got a soft spot for it alright we are way over we've touched on everything from web apps to the future of free speech in America busy week to whatever's going on with Tesla it's a lot it was a busy week and we got more of them coming because we're head first into developer conference season now yep alright I'm going to start a GoFundMe for this OLED iPad you can hit me up that's not true not true tell Alex all your favorite things about your Tesla if you have one she'd love to hear them Oh, we need to say this.

1:44:06We utterly forgot to say this because we're so bad at this. We won Webby Awards. Thank you so much for all the people who voted for us and the people's shows for the Vergecast. Thank you to the judges who gave the same award to the Decoder podcast. We really do appreciate it. It's very cool that we have been doing the show for as long as we're doing it and people still voting for us for these awards. I truly appreciate it. Sponsor the lighting around you, degenerates. All right, it's time.

1:44:34All right, that's it. That's Vergecast. Okay.

1:44:39And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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