Bluesky's rise and AI's fall

23:58And he's obviously had experience with it. There's a dynamic there that is very funny where they're getting a lot of credit for the problems they're going to have. There's a lot of benefit of the doubt, I guess is the phrase. But then they're running face first into the brick walls of the problems. And everyone's like, this is hilarious. I can't wait to see what mistake you make next. Oh, yeah. It's also like the fact that like all these former heads of trust and safety are like on the social network and are watching and like commenting. It's very much like the thing where like old retired men in Italy stand at construction sites and like lean into the fences to like comment on how people are using the tools.

24:33Right. Like it's it's really like I really enjoy watching that. That's that might actually be my favorite part. Everyone else is enjoying the butts and I'm just going like, yes. trust and safety heads uh micromanaging from the back seat but uh yeah it's like a lot of really obvious pitfalls and like it really is kind of very comical but it's also inevitable in some ways just because of how quickly things are moving uh how small the team is and the fact that they're like chasing this utopian vision of decentralized social media that i don't know how that's going to turn out. Like, that's like, I understand why they're doing it.

25:13But I also think that there are a lot of issues with that and that they're going to be up against some weirder problems in the future. Like right now, all the problems are very normal problems that we've seen over and over again, and that they're just having to deal with on the fly because they have no trust and safety department. And it's just one person who is running on very, very little sleep going, all right, looks like coordinated harassment to me. I mean, the people who are the people who got band for actually saying I am currently engaged in a coordinated harassment campaign like out loud it's like yeah amazing well there was somebody who got their their invite tree cut off yeah because it's like no you invited too many weirdos we don't want you inviting anymore that's a badge of honor like I would print out that email and like put it on the wall be like that's me so what are the weirder problems of decentralization that you're referencing here can you also talk about the hell thread as you answer this question because the hell thread is to me, the story of Blue Sky's chaos.

26:06And I don't understand it at all. Okay. Why don't I start with the health thread, which I understand a little better. Whereas with decentralization and its problems, it's mostly that I ran into this on Mastodon where no one could agree on moderation standards. And so basically you were looking at like these international treaty negotiations happening in real time and everyone's very angry with each other, the health thread. Basically, one of the things that they allow on there is bot accounts. People will hook up these chatbots to GPT and they're very cutesy and twee. I have them all muted. I cannot stand them.

26:44People love them, though, and will engage with them all the time. But there was this one thread where people were going back and forth with a duck that pretends to have a lisp. And I guess the thread got really wrong. You said that so casually.

27:01yeah of course i got so long you couldn't open it anymore so you get like a pink like json error at the top and then they tried to like fix it and then you get it got a completely different pink error at the top they still wouldn't open um and then if you were part of the thread you would get notified every time someone replied so like it's like and you couldn't untag yourself Because you couldn't open the thread. You couldn't. Well, you could try to mute the thread, but it would keep unmuting itself for whatever reason. Unclear why. I think they were finding different reasons why. And then it turned out each reason that they had figured out was not quite the reason why people were unmuting.

27:38I think at this point they figured out that one of the reasons why the thread kept unmuting was because people would delete their post. And then people would reply to the deleted post and then it would branch out again. And then the mute would no longer apply. because the mute had been applied further up thread. Anyways, so at one point, they had two bots talking to each other, so it was sprawling out really hard. And then people thought it was funny, so they'd jump in and post, and then they'd tag their friends, bait their friends into posting, and then everyone would be in there, and it would be like the CC, like, you replied all accidentally.

28:14Everyone's, like, yelling. And then people think it's hilarious, so they start posting their nudes in there. And so now you're getting unsolicited nudes in your notifications. and you can't mute them or stop them or even load the thread to get out of it. Well, I think people were able to mute it, but then it was getting on. Right. Right. Yes, it was the hell thread. At some point, I guess the hell thread branched. So the real elite posters now call them hell ropes because it's many threads coming together. Everything about this platform is just on the edge of me not wanting to say the words.

28:51it's actually a tremendous amount of fun that said like i mean the funniest part about the i i i've avoided getting into the health red like at all costs liz keeps tagging me into it thanks liz oh does she yeah but i don't my superpower is that i don't have notifications for any app on my phone so so you're just you're missing all the butts you can't touch me get get out of my face with this health red when i when i wrote the same report kevin was like oh please add some detail on what it's like to be in the health. And I'm like, I can't. I avoided going there because I'm a sane person. But I figured it out.

29:23It was without having to tag myself in there. It's possible to avoid it. You do have to be very careful to avoid it. It is very like early 2000s forum vibes where you're like, oh, I know someone's about to go see me. Not going to clip that on me. And yeah, I think that people are kind of really into the chaos. I think that there is like this thrill that isn't on any of the other alternatives right now that is getting people to like stick around and really enjoy themselves. I don't know if it's just the fully very online people either. Like I think there's a lot of people who are just enjoying sitting back and watching.

29:58And as more and more people get on there, I think things are just going to sort of smooth out a little bit and it's going to be more of a normal place. And I think that that goes back to what you were saying earlier about the sort of like unknowable momentum that it has, that it's just like, once that flywheel starts, it's like it just, for whatever reason, is a place to be now in a way that like two weeks ago, I would have said, this is like a neat science project that doesn't really have any sort of meaningful opportunity for actual humans at this point. And then all of a sudden, as if by magic, it just was a place that was fun and exciting.

30:33And - Well, no, I just want to push back, the tiniest bit of pushback. This thing has 50 ,000 users. They're all terminally online. They're not cool. And I'm one of those users. And many of us are like I. Everyone in this room is on. I just want to be clear. We're cool. It's Jake Tapper and AOC. I don't know, man. It's not the Met Gala. You know what I mean? First of all, AOC went to the Met Gala. Great. We can stop that. I'm just saying it's a bunch of nerds. And they're having nerd fun on the internet. But it's not actually a threat to Twitter yet. I don't know. That's the same set of nerds who made Twitter.

31:10It's those people. And Jake Tapper has millions of followers on Twitter. And I don't know if Jake was, but lots of people with lots of clout and followers were begging on Twitter for blue sky invites. William Gibson had to beg on Twitter for an invite. He couldn't just find a friend. He had to beg on Twitter for one. But the only point I'm making is any party that is exclusive seems cool, especially if can't get into it and all and and then you there's us talking about how cool it is on the inside right and we're like it's a threat of butts you can't leave like there's a certain subset of our listeners it's like man i wish i was in that threat yeah and a much larger subset who absolutely does not but when it becomes actually lets anybody in does that go away like is this peach or elo or any of the other pop-up is it be real which just like appears for a minute i do think that at this point because it's so buzzy like it's not going to disappear if it opens up that's a they absolutely cannot open up because they cannot handle it.

32:03Like they can barely handle what's going on right now. Like it is genuinely like the next week or so, like if they don't buckle, like it'll be truly a feat if they don't buckle under the pressure of having to speed run content moderation at scale. It's like there is no way they can like truly open up this platform. The other part of it is that they are airdropping a fairly large number of invites on a select number of people. I will occasionally beg them for invites so that I can spread them out in a really hilarious way. Personally, I think it's very funny to be giving invites to local journalists.

32:38Like I gave invites to the entire newsroom of like a nonprofit local newsroom because like I thought that was really funny. I thought it was very funny that celebrities can't get invites and that now the entire newsroom of a small Oregonian nonprofit is on there. Like that's hysterical. But I know that there's like specific individuals. There's one woman where everyone's like, who's this person? But like, she's like passed out hundreds of invites and no one knows why she's getting invites other than that. I guess they like who she keeps inviting. But the way that she's inviting people is that whenever anyone goes, I need an invite, she'll jump right into their mentions and go, I've got invites for you.

33:19And then she must just be wild. Absolutely wild. So I know that like, there's people definitely coming in and it really does seem like the the fresh blood is like filling in. Right. But like, I really don't think this is an L.O. peach phenomenon. I don't know how long it's going to last because the energy is so manic. It could just be an extinction burst kind of thing. But yeah, it's it's really fascinating. I would disagree with your assertion that the people on there are not cool right now. I mean, no one's very cool on a social network. That's simply how it goes. OK, I'll accept that. That is that is an acceptable rebuttal like if you're posting automatically two-point deduction if you tell somebody in real life how many followers you have yeah just no you're out yeah cool card gone it was super funny to me that all of this was happening like at the exact moment that the blue checks being embarrassing thing was happening so it was just like all of this energy of like where is a place to be that is not the worst on the internet was all of a sudden like like you have stephen king like telling everyone, I did not pay for this.

34:26Please don't make fun of me. I did not pay for Twitter Blue. And then all of a sudden, like you're talking about, this sort of exclusive club opens up. And it will be interesting once those things both sort of come back to a more sort of natural middle ground, whether Blue Sky continues to seem this cool and exciting. I also genuinely wonder if the platform works, will it be as much fun? Or if they actually decentralize. I think that's the big one. The thing that's funniest about this is like the centralized platform is winning, right but it's supposed to be decentralized yeah people love centralization that's the thing like it's everyone everybody wants a king all of these alternatives like they they love decentralization but when it comes down to it what the people demand is centralization it's uh it is it is really a weird thing yeah everybody wants to be the loudest person in the biggest room they don't want to be the loudest person in the littlest room nobody likes fiddling with controls like gmail one for a reason.

35:20Like email is an open ecosystem and it also isn't because Gmail essentially runs the email universe. And it's because Gmail was good and everybody was like, cool, I don't have to think about this or host my own server anymore. And everybody just has Gmail now. And like, if you have a Yahoo email, that's embarrassing. Now it's like having a Twitter blue check. Like if you have it, you should probably change. All right. I want to end, David, there's a little bit of other decentralized social media news. You read about Mozilla doing a thing. It does seem like the race to stand up the server is on?

35:50Like Mozilla's like, what if we ran the Mastodon server that everybody used? Yes. The race, I would frame it slightly differently. The race to set up a server is very much on. I think you're going to see a lot of companies suddenly have, you know, x.social things very quickly. It's relatively easy to stand up. People understand what it is. It solves the problem. What there isn't and what I wish there was, was somebody coming in and saying, we are going to be the Gmail of this space. Like even for this big activity pub story I wrote, I kept talking to people who are like, no, we just want to be good citizens of the Fediverse.

36:20We think everything's going to be great. And it's like, maybe it'll be meta with this P92 thing they're working on, but just show up and be like, we're the best at this. What's up, fools? And that's when it's like, OK, this might actually have a chance. I'm just imagining Mark Zuckerberg saying that phrase. What's up, fools? He just jujitsu kicks you and that's it. So the Mozilla news was Mozilla announced in December that it was interested in the Fediverse and was going to do something. And the news this week was that they're actually standing up a Mastodon instance called Mozilla.Social. And their big idea is they want to start to push on some of this content moderation stuff.

36:57They came up with a whole new set of content policies that are not about neutrality. They're not about free speech. They're about like, we are going to protect people and make this a pleasant place to be on the Internet. And they're, you know, fiddling with the tools that it's going to take to make that work. And they're trying to figure out how to enforce some of those policies as they grow. And so they're in this place of like, they're going to start a very small community with a very specific set of rules. It reminds me of like a subreddit, right? Where it's like, this is how we talk. This is what we talk about.

37:25And if you don't play by the rules, I have absolutely no compunction. It's just kicking you out. Mozilla's question is like, can they do that at real scale? And they feel like they're in a good position as an organization to test that in a way that a lot of the other folks setting up Mastodon instances right now are not. So I think it's going to be really interesting. I don't get the sense that they're out here trying to be sort of the biggest name in Mastodon, but that could change. You get the sense that they think maybe selling moderation software is a potential business in the future. And so if they can do an instance where all the knobs are turned up all the way, they could sell you that same software and you can adjust the knobs.

38:02I think a lot of people feel that way. The butt dial, yeah. Mozilla could make the butt dial. Mozilla, do not take our idea. That is trademarked the Verge cast, Mozilla. Listen, Mitchell Clark, come at me. But no, I think you're right. And I think, I mean, one of the things that is true of Mozilla's really weird org chart is that it is a corporation owned by a nonprofit. So they're like, their idea of sort of using product to do activism is very alive in what they're doing here. But I also think you're absolutely right that if they can figure this out and it can be the sort of thing that like if I'm, I don't know, they mentioned what brands or like government services, like if I'm the MTA and I'm like, OK, I want to have a place to tell people what's going on that isn't a total hell site on the Internet.

38:45And Mozilla can sort of make this nice little package that makes that workable. That could be a pretty interesting business for a while. I'm like very obsessed with this entire moment. Like it just feels like between Twitter kind of breaking and a bunch of people shopping around and every other platform turning into a TikTok version. Like the true posters are looking for a home and the competition to make one for them is we'll just remake the Internet. And I think it's going to be hilarious. It's only going to be fun. It feels very early 2000s right now. Everything in media is like absolutely back to.

39:22Yeah. Can I just say this? Jonah Peretti, who's the CEO of BuzzFeed, is out there with his predictions for media. He's like, homepages will be a big deal. And it's like, dude, have you seen TheVerge.com? I not only predicted this two years ago. Look at our website. Don't steal my move. You were the Facebook guy. All right. We got to end this segment before I get in trouble. Jonah Peretti is actually right there behind you. Yeah, he's out there. He's putting rubber bands around a watermelon just waiting for me to walk by. Go to TheVerge.com. We'll see you on our homepage. We'll be right back.

40:18The End

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41:13All right, we're back. Thanks again to Sarah for taking us into a world of butts and lawyers. It's a BlueScribe platform. It's great. Lots of AI news this week. Some good, some bad, some weird. David, what's going on? So I feel like the place we should start is with Jeffrey Hinton. So he's this guy who won the Turing Award in 2018. He did a lot of the early work on deep learning that is like the foundational stuff for AI as we know it today. So much of the work that has happened, like Google likes to take credit for like, we invented Transformers. Like this guy invented the stuff before the stuff, Like none of where we are happens without Jeffrey Hinton and his team from like a decade ago.

41:55And he quit his job at Google and then gave this big interview to the New York Times and has talked to some other folks since then, basically saying, I regret my life's work. I like I fear for what I have wrought on humanity. And I think he said, let me see you figure out this. He said, I console myself with the normal excuse. If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have. And then he said, it's hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things. So we're in this space of like, there have been a bunch of calls for people to slow down. Everybody's worried about the singularity.

42:24The world's going to fall apart. AI is going to destroy us all. And yet, as we should talk about, there is this like constant unending drumbeat of AI news. But it was funny this week to see all of that after the guy they literally call him the godfather of AI comes out and is like, maybe all of this was a terrible idea. Because he like kicked it off. Cade Metz wrote this really great book a couple of years ago about like the origins of AI. and it starts with him trying to figure out where he's going to take all his technology and who's going to pay him the most money. And that kicked everything off because it was like, buy Google, whatever.

42:58And he ended up going with Google and made a lot of money doing it. And then I think, wasn't one of the chief researchers now at OpenAI? Everything that we think of as AI nowadays kind of springs from this dude. So for him to say, it sucks. Yeah, it's like when Elon Musk comes out and is like, oh, you know, six month pause on AI. It's like, okay, well, whatever. And then he comes out and is like, I'm gonna start my own AI company. So there's been a lot of people who have kind of access to grind for one reason or another. But this guy, I can't think of someone who would have more credibility to say something like this than Jeff Hinton.

43:33This is like very similar to when Oppenheimer was like, nope, we did a bad, we made the nuclear bomb. And that's a little terrifying to think like such a big transformative tech and then have the person who kicked it off be like, my bad. You just can't wait for this movie. I do not. I'm so excited. You're just working our way to Christopher Nolan. Yeah, I've been listening to the book on audio for like the last four years. I was going to say, that book is like 1 ,300 pages long. Oh my. I even have it sped up. I don't like to speed things up, but I have it sped up and I'm still like, oh my God, it just keeps going.

44:02And I definitely messaged Liz one day and was like, when do you think like Hinton or someone has their crying to Eisenhower moment about what they did? And it sounds like he cried to Kate Metz. Yeah, pretty much. The book you're talking about is called, what is it, The Man Who Built the Atomic Bomb? Yeah, but now it's going to be a Christopher Nolan movie. The book is excellent, though. And if you start reading it right now and read it 40 hours a week, you'll finish it just before the movie comes out this fall. So on the same sort of note, Biden had a meeting, or rather, let me say, Kamala Harris, Vice President Kamala Harris had a meeting today with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, Dario Amode, the CEO of Anthropic, another big AI company, Sachin Adela, and Sundar Pichai.

44:41And the reason I say Biden had the meeting is the White House put out a press release saying that Biden stopped by. Yeah. He just popped in to be like, what's going on in the Roosevelt room today? What are you doing? Oh, is it for major AICs? There's a bunch of other people there, too. But there's a lot of energy from the government to put some regulations in place. I think we've heard the FTC say, hey, like we don't have to regulate AI because a lot of what we do is regulate lying. and so if you use robots to lie to people it's fine that's just lying and you can't be like but it's computer lying and somehow escape the laws so like there's a lot of that like what is the existing law what is the existing law that could stop ai drake right we like we we've written that story and it's like very funny it's a laser bong and then there's like what is the existing law that i don't know if you are writing a bunch of books and putting them on amazon and holding out that a person wrote them, but they were actually written by ChatGPT.

45:38Is there some existing fraud statute that would make that illegal? So I think there's a lot of that going on, but then there's just a lot of, should we actually stop it? Should we hit the button and stop it for a minute so we can make an actual framework of AI laws? And it seems like there's more heat around that than ever. And also, what would that look like? Is that even possible? I think the sort of open question for a lot of this is, what would any of that even look like? I mean, so much of the conversation, even coming from the government in the White House this week, is basically to the effect of, like, be cool, guys.

46:11It's just, it's a lot of saying, like, you know, use ethics and morals and don't be bad or discriminatory. And it's like, okay, all of that is well and good. But what does that look like, even when I just keep coming back to Sundar Pichai saying, I think he said it on 60 Minutes, that even Google doesn't really understand how its AI works. And it's like, okay, these things are black boxes, even to the people that make them. And there is no be cool button. And so this race to like, what does it mean to stop it? We can't train new systems. But then Sam Altman is out here saying, well, this the race you're describing to like build new LLMs is pointless.

46:44It's as good as it's ever going to be in this world that we live in. So like what what moves does anybody have here is super unclear to me. Yeah, I think there are moves, but they're not – like you can't just stop large language models. That's out of the bottle. It's happening. Yeah, you can just run them on a laptop. Yeah, anybody can run them on a laptop and go build them if you're smart enough. I'm not. But there are smart people who can just go build them. You can't stop that anymore. But you can potentially stop like the aggressive monetization of them. Wait, I have a different view of this.

47:17No, no, no. I think the aggressive monetization will be what saves humanity. Oh, yeah. That unchecked capitalism will save humanity from AI. Here's my evidence for this claim. I'm very excited. Snapchat is already testing sponsored links in its MyAI chatbot. Yeah, nobody's going to use that. Yeah, it's just like, you know what? That AI is definitely not going to ruin humanity. Saw that and went, nope, no thank you. It's already kind of bad and then it has ads in it. Snapchat users are so mad at MyAI. I mean, you have all these young people who have carefully curated screens with their streaks and it's like that space is sacred.

47:53And now there's just a chat bot who's like, what's up? Would you like to look at some ads? It's like a little Steve Buscemi being like, hey, guys. I think this is true of Bing as well. They rolled out some new Bing features today along with some monetization and like same thing is happening. It's getting weird. Yeah, people are turned off by the AIs. Yeah, I'm telling you just like the addition of advertising into these AI bots. Immediate. Yeah, that's a good, I like that. It's like, maybe that will save us. Finally, capitalism is good for something. Finally, some direct response advertising for Hulu will do some good in this world.

48:28There's other stuff. Zillow rolled out some chat GPT stuff today where you can just ask it for houses. Do people not know what the filter button is on Zillow? Monica wrote our post about Zillow, and she sounds ecstatic about just talking to Zillow about houses. I mean, I spend a lot of time. I was going to say, we're both house hunting right now. Yeah. I just got mine, so I deleted the Zillow app, and it was a big moment for me. I was like, I don't need you for at least a year. It's like a dating app. Yeah, I'm like, I'm done for now. But yeah, that filter button's really easy. But I could see maybe being like a really smart AI being like, okay, this is nice.

49:04But do you have anything a little closer to the path train at Journal Square? You guys are thinking about this all wrong. The appeal of Zillow as a chat GPT plugin is I can just ask it to show me the wildest shit. and it will find the houses that are insane. Do you guys follow Zillow Gone Wild on Instagram? Just imagine a chatbot that can just give you infinity Zillow Gone Wild. This is the dream. Show me houses that have living rooms covered in medieval armor. And it just will. It's perfect. That's the dream. It's the best version of Zillow ever. You don't think I can just say, dear God, find me a house.

49:42Can I just give you a little life update to the audience? How's it going? The current state of our house hunt, trying to leave the woods and come back to civilization, consists of us finding something that we thought was cool, reasonably priced, sending it to our real estate agent because we're doing so bad that we have a real estate agent now. And she replied, no, that's the murder house. And then we discovered it's the house where someone ate a baby. Oh, I was going to be like, it's not that bad. But no, that's a bad one. Don't live in that house. Super cannibalism. And Becky was like, but it's a pretty good deal.

50:15It's like, can you just redo the kitchen? Like, those ghosts aren't there. It's not going great. And if only Zillow could be like, murder house. Is that a murder house? Yeah. Yeah, right? Can you just be like, is this a murder house? Price suspiciously below market. I feel like you could get a lot of, like, because people would want that too. Find me a murder house? Yeah. This is the future of Zillow. Yeah. But that's very commercial. I'm just coming back to this again. Very commercial for all of its entertainment value. I don't think the Zillow AI poses a threat to humanity. It's a strong prediction here on the Vergecast today.

50:48I hope it destroys humanity just because that would be funny. Just like it was the Zillow bot. That would be good. And I think if any publication is poised to cover it, it's us. It's us. But my prediction is that I don't think the Zillow AI is a threat to humanity at this time. I like that qualifier. You got to weasel out of it a little bit. But then there's kind of the weird other side, which is there was a study this week from NewsGuard, which kind of like rates it's a for profit but it rates the veracity of new sites anyway they uh so they found 49 entire sites generated from whole cloth designed to just spam google search yes and it's like oh this is it's happening you've been saying that for months the only reason they found 49 is um because they were searching for specific strings that chat gbt generates like my data runs out in 2021 or as a chatbot.

51:41So it's just the most obvious ones. So there's obviously lots that they couldn't find. Yeah. These were just the lazy ones. Yeah. These were the ones where no one deleted I'm a chatbot from the output before feeding it into Google. And they found 50 of those. Can I just read you the names of a bunch of these, by the way? James Vincent on our team, by the way, has done a really great job of covering this stuff. It turns out if you just follow the phrase as a large language model around the internet, it does some really amazing stuff he's been writing about how it's showing up in like product reviews and yelp and all these different places it's really fascinating but i just i just want to read you the names of a bunch of these it is the most like uncanny valley stuff i've ever seen biz breaking news news live 79 daily business post yeah best budget usa.com uh harmony hustle.com it's just and just on and on they're all like that it's like a county local news.com county local news.com is a great website i love it and it's just all of those where you're like they exist in this like perfect liminal space that it's like it's almost there at any moment any one of these is signing you up for a class action lawsuit one of them is just called the news network i mean come on good it's so good that's really like did they get that url yeah i'm sorry i just saw a screenshot from the news network and And it's one of those, like, okay, imagine a website, right?

53:06And you have the big header up top with the one sort of main headline. The headline, the breaking news headline on the news network is, I'm sorry for the confusion. As an AI language model, I don't have access to external information or news updates beyond my knowledge cut off date. However, based on the given article title, an eye-catching news headline could be, and that's the end of the headline. That's incredible. I'm just telling you, these are the ones that got caught. and there's 49 of them already. And they're really bad. And they had to buy domains and populate them with whatever they populated them with.

53:39The incoming to Google. I'm very excited to go to IO next week and just like talk to everyone there about what they're going to do when the flood comes in. I mean, I think the flood's already there. Yeah. Well, and this is what we've been talking about, right, like the robot internet. It's stuff with programmatic advertising and AI content made to be found by Google robots. It's and it just this is the cycle on and on and on. And those things, they all weirdly kind of like each other for a while. Like, yeah, that is a profitable thing for Google to be part of in a lot of ways, except in the big picture that it makes Google search unusable.

54:14And that will ultimately kill its business. But like it's a it's a weird thing to figure out how to screw up that cycle. I do think there's something to be said about our long blue sky conversation. And it's like, here's where the people are. A lot of people who are very familiar to you who are like good at posting in this way. And then the thing that broke that platform, well, one of the many things that broke that platform is like an AI duck with a lisp. It's just like wherever you introduce this technology, weird things happen. But I'm just saying my AI doomerism is like you just see how this thing is being expressed right now.

54:46And, yes, you can pay for chat GPT and like get a bunch of tokens and ruin it. You can basically like the news network will destroy the Internet. It will ruin the web as an ongoing concern. At least the web is currently structured by Google's influence. Maybe that's fine. I don't know. But you can just see how because it's kind of garbage, it's just hard to feel a sense of pervasive doom when it's like we can make the laser bong song now. Well, I think as good as the laser bong song is, I think the other side of that is that we're learning. We've already learned that people have a capacity to not give a shit.

55:25And about quality. And they'll just be like, this is good enough. And that's where the real threat of AI is, right? Because we have this week both the Writers Guild and then a lot of game developers being like, this is bad and it's going to destroy our industry. Because producers care about the money. They don't care about quality. So we have to stop them. Yeah. So that's the other side of it. Yeah, so the Writers Guild is on strike. Hollywood is on strike. They've gone on strike. And it's for a wide variety of reasons. A lot of them related to streaming. But one of the things that they asked for was, we want you to commit to not using an AI for writing anything.

56:00And you can't use our scripts to teach it. You can't have it come up with an idea and then give it to us and ask us to write that idea that an AI came up with. It has to be out of the picture. And the producers responded with, well, what about if we just like talk to you every year about updates and technology? And so, yeah, it's this big gap between them. And I don't know how they closed that. It was a once a year meeting about technology. Yeah. I would love to go to that meeting. That'll solve it. Such a good meeting. Here on this show, we have that meeting once a week. Yeah. You can just come hang out with us.

56:33We'll talk to us all the time. But there is that existential threat for a lot of people where it does affect jobs and stuff like that, where they are fearful. Capitalism may destroy it, but capitalism is also going to encourage it in these places where people with money just don't care. Oh, yeah. I'm only half serious when I say capitalism will save us. It'll save some of us. What I mean is that - It'll save Snapchat. It'll save Snapchat. It'll insert, it'll cruft up the user interfaces in some of these places. Yeah. And it will obviously create extremely weird outcomes for people like screenwriters.

57:08By the way, many disclosures here. So many disclosures. Let's see if I can do them all. One, it's the Writers Guild of America. Our staff and much of the writing staff at Vox Media represented by the Writers Guild of America. I believe you're in it. I am in the Writers Guild of America. You get the screeners. I get the screeners. That's why I'm in it. That's very good. We made a Netflix show, which is now nominated for an Emmy. Well, then. So I'm the EP of a Netflix show. I have HBO. I picked TikTok first in the streaming draft. By the way, and then third, I actually wanted to mention this. Adam Conover is one of, from Adam, where is everything, one of the negotiators for the Writers Guild.

57:44And he was just on the Town podcast with Matthew Bellany talking about how it's going. I was just about to recommend that podcast. It's a really good episode. Everybody should listen to it. He is the fastest talker in the world. But I think I'm at 1.5. I was going to say, I think a lot of people who listen to the show would say, you might take that particular. Let's just listen at 2X. Very true. Anyway, great episode. Those are our disclosures. Yeah. That was good. Are there any others? Comcast is a minority investor in Box Media Apparent Company. That's the one. Yeah. Peacock is the only one who's against using AI.

58:14That's not true. Peacock is like, what if the whole thing was AI? Comcast is a minority investor in Apparent Company, Box Media. last one there's some big big updates this week sort of david what's going on here some bingish updates well okay i want to talk a little bit about the updates but then i mostly want to talk about this weird thing that microsoft is doing with edge because i'm curious how you guys feel about it but the the bing updates are basically uh microsoft continues to look for more ways to put stuff into bing so now they're doing things like if you you know get the name of a restaurant from bing you say like where should i go for dinner in seattle and it says these restaurants it's going to start to bake in things from like open table where it'll actually start to do reservations for you or you can integrate with streaming services and it'll actually like deep link and take you to find that stuff so the the goal is to like pull more of search into bing uh i think one of the things we've been looking for is sort of this push and pull between like things coming into chatbots and chatbots going out into other products and so i think what we're starting to see is these chatbots especially being sort of subsume more and more stuff into this chat interface which i mostly think is fine and smart and interesting i think chat as an interface has a lot of work to do for that stuff to work like we're just going to do this thing that we did with the voice assistants where it's like wouldn't you like to book a flight through this interface and the answer is like no like a chat to book a flight is the single worst possible way to book a flight the way to book a flight is to see a screen full of numbers and then you click on one of them and that's how you book a flight the lowest one yeah right that's about to name some airlines but i will withhold my judgment oh yeah the lowest one accepting certain airlines but i think so that's all fine and good right like bing is bing is still horny that's like its main thing that has going for it uh but microsoft is desperate to like figure out more stuff for you to do with it other than be horny wait so it is notable the next week is io we are expecting a lot of AI in search discussion from Google at I.O.

1:00:16And Microsoft is like, well, we already launched, and here's our first set of updates. Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it. They still have a pretty, I don't know if you call it a lead. They're ahead in having a functional product, but Google doesn't have one yet. So Microsoft is ahead. It has no market share, so I don't know if you could call it a lead. But they're ahead in like, here's Bing, and we're adding features to it. And Google hasn't even gotten out of the gate yet, really. I like that they did the restaurants because I keep going back to that Google I.O. demo where they're like, yeah, we're going to call the restaurant.

1:00:49Oh, I've used that for real a few times now. Did it really work? It works. It's weird. I feel like a jerk every time I do it, but the restaurants don't seem to care because I show up and spend money. That's my problem. I always feel bad sicking a robot on the restaurant, even though it does seem to work. I've done it a couple of times to make appointments for various things and it works fine. And I just feel like an ass that they're like, oh, I'm a robot calling on behalf of David. You feel like you're going to walk in and you're like, oh, you're the robot guy. Yes, 100%. That's actually not true.

1:01:16It's like, no, it's never happened. They're just like, oh, you made this reservation. I take a lot of phone calls and I'm not putting faces to names. Would you like a Diet Coke? It's a very normal way. They write robot guy next to your name when they get it. Yeah. Like beep, boop, bop, boop. You're a jerk. but the other thing that's happening is microsoft because it apparently does not remember the company that it was 23 years ago is now getting really really really aggressive with edge its browser and it has been doing this for a little while where like if you're on windows and you try to use a different browser it just sort of repetitively is like but what if you used edge wouldn't that be cool if you use edge don't you love edge why don't you love edge love edge what's wrong with you love edge and then it just tries to sort of beat you into submission but the new news this week was that if you use teams i think it's teams first and then outlook after and you click a link even if you don't have edge as your default browser it will just open edge and they what they claim is some confusing nonsense about like user accounts being the same everywhere that i don't really understand but what it what it functionally says is like Like if you use Microsoft products, we don't give a rat's ass what your default browser is.

1:02:29You will use Edge. And part of that is because things like Bing is the default search engine and Microsoft really wants you to use Bing all of a sudden. And it's like owning that browser is very important for Microsoft right now. And it is just going way out of its way to make people use it. This is the first sentence of Tom Warren's post about this. Oh, he's right, though. Microsoft Edge is a good browser. But for some reason, Microsoft keeps trying to shove it down everyone's throat and make it more difficult to use rivals like Chrome or Firefox, which I believe is what you were about. Yeah, I was just about to say the exact same thing.

1:02:58Because it is like it's good. You can use it. But they're like, no, we're going to really cram it in there. I'm like, no, that's how you make it bad. Everybody's going to immediately hate it because you're cramming it down their throats. They already have to use Teams and they don't want to use Teams. I promise you. Very few people in my experience are like, oh, the software I was forced to use at work, that's the software I will choose to use in my life. With the exception of Slack. No, there's no. Oh, I'm in like group chats on Slack. Because you have like media friends. Yeah. Your brain is poisoned.

1:03:29Every time I try to suggest being in a Slack with like non-media friends, everyone's like, why? Yeah, we did one and like all those people bounced. All the media people are still in there and all the normals are like, nah. I'll just say, like, as a – I get it, right? You have this tool. You're very excited about Edge. Edge is really good now because it's based on Chrome. It's just Chrome. And you're like, how do I get – and they pulled their Microsoft move from 23 years ago. And they're like, we'll just assert our dominance in one area by using our dominance in another. And it's like – I like how Microsoft has been very quiet.

1:04:01And we were all kind of like, is Microsoft cool now? Like, they're doing cool stuff. They seem like chill. And they're like, yeah, now we're going to crush Google and destroy it. and make Sundar dance. That was the quote. And we're going to force teams down your throat. We're going to force Edge down your throat. And I'm like, no, you guys were never cool. You were just waiting. You were just biding your time. Now you're out. You know, there's a chance they're just lashing out because the Activision deal is falling through. Yeah. Like, they're just like, it's like a little Edge-based temper tantrum.

1:04:29Look, I think the Google-Microsoft fight is very good. I think it's generally good for us as consumers. I think that even if it wasn't weird from a competitive standpoint to tie one piece of software to another and ignore defaults like that's weird that's like there's like a european bureaucrat reading the verge who's like ha ha like ready to go it's also just like basic computer decency right it's like there's an etiquette there and i'm just telling you forcing people to use enterprise software does not win you market share it makes people just open safari on their macs at home the end and like hopefully my stuff for this lesson.

1:05:06All right, we got to take a break and a little bit of a lightning round. We'll be right back. I won't tell you if there's going to be bots. We'll be right back.

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1:07:47Okay, we're back. It's lightning round time. There's quite a lot of potential for this lightning round. Karan, let's start with you. Okay. I'm very excited because Gmail now has blue or is going to have blue verified check marks. So I read this headline. I have no idea what this means. So you know when you get an email and you're like, is that really from Google? And sometimes it's not. Oh, this is like a phishing protection. Yeah, this is like phishing protection. It's just going to have a check mark. Is it$8 a month? No, it's free. They're rolling it out. I think it sounds like it's primarily brands first.

1:08:19but yeah just verify this is the actual person emailing you and it's like why hasn't this existed before these emails and open protocol and this is a thing a centralized provider can i'm just waving at david just angrily because david said this it's his fault i just i love it i love that this is this is why a nice centralized protocol can sometimes be good is we can know when we're getting phished a little better a little better just a little are they gonna like put it into like the email standard? Oh, heavens no. No, I think it's just going to be in Gmail. Very good. The real centralization, decentralization has been a real theme on today's episode.

1:08:59And centralization is winning. That's the other theme. Yeah, because like decentralized stuff is really good in your head. It's academically, it's like communism. Academically, great idea. In practice, doesn't work. Well, I can't wait for you to get some emails from people without blue checks in response to that. Ooh, will I? All right, here's mine. It's just a call out of a really good Liz Lopato piece this week about Andreessen Horowitz, storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm, but also Andreessen Horowitz, big investor in Clubhouse, big investor, which is not doing great, had layoffs. Turns out Clubhouse, people wanted to talk to each other on their phone when they were forced to be in their houses during the pandemic.

1:09:42Not a great platform when people can go outside. So Clubhouse is in some weird trouble. Substack, in extremely weird trouble. Remember when Substack Notes was going to be the thing that Blue Sky became? Whoops. Negative revenue for Substack. That's a weird one. Anderson Horowitz, big investor. They were a big investor in BuzzFeed. They're a big investor in Twitter 2.0. Uber. Yeah, but the point of Liz's story is they thought they could remake the media. And they invested in all these things that were supposed to remake the media and disintermediate legacy institutions like the Times. And I think mostly Anderson's mad at the Times.

1:10:15Well, yeah. And their whole thing. I mean, even do you remember when they launched their own media vertical future? I forgot. The whole pitch was get rid of gatekeepers, right? It was like - Go direct is a very famous Andreessen Horowitz phrase. Go direct, right. Like let people and creators go direct to each other. That was Substack's whole thing is like, don't go get a salary from a large company. Get paid by your audience. I think they invested in Elon Musk's Twitter, I think on a lot of the same basis. He was he made this big creator push that has ultimately amounted to precisely nothing as far as I can tell.

1:10:47But that was the idea. And like Clubhouse was supposed to be that, too. It was like and do you remember when it was like, oh, look, here's like lightly famous people just like talking. Wasn't that amazing? And then they all went back to their jobs and lives and that fell apart. But this that was supposed to be the pitch and all kind of at the same time, for whatever reason, I don't know if it was a bad idea or just like hasn't quite worked. But like that turn just never really got made. So it did. The creators go direct your audience has worked for a lot of creators and a lot of platforms. Just not on the ones that A16's eBed on.

1:11:20Yeah. We know Casey is on Substack. He's successful on Substack going direct your audience. That's great. We know lots of people on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram who are creator economies going well for them. But as platform businesses, as things that replace the sort of architecture of the mainstream media, most of those platforms are still reactive to the media. They're reactive to actual journalism. And then on top of it, there's like bad businesses. And there's just something really interesting about that dynamic. And Liz does a good job peeling it apart. Disclosure, we are journalists who work at a media organization.

1:11:51You guys suck. Those are facts. All right, David, what you got? Mine is this Google announcement from this week that they now support passkeys for logging into your Google account. Have either of you set up passkeys on your Google account? No. Not yet. You should do it. It takes five seconds. Everyone listening to this, if you have a Google account, you don't have to pull your car over. But next time you're sitting at a red light, that's probably still illegal. Pull the car over. Next time the car is in park. How about that? Next time you are safely able to use your phone in thoroughly legal ways, go log into Google and set it up.

1:12:28You will be shocked at how quick it is. And basically, pass keys are these things that are trying to replace passwords with biometrics, essentially. So like you log into websites with your face or your thumb the same way that you log into your phone. And there's a bunch of really interesting cryptography going on underneath. There's a whole thing called the Fido Alliance that covers how all of it works. None of that really matters. The point is now like website by website, it is getting easier and more secure simultaneously to log into stuff. And this tech has been ready for a long time. We've been covering it for a long time.

1:12:58I read a really great story Russell Brandon wrote on The Verge like several years ago talking about how this was all kind of around the corner. and it was for a long time. And now like Google is a huge domino in this game. And I think it's a big moment for pass keys in the sense that this is about to be the first time that most people have ever interacted with pass keys. I'm very excited about it and everybody should go set it up. It's excellent. It won't work with like single sign-on stuff, right? Like if you have to use for say Okta. So what would have to happen there is Okta would have to start supporting pass keys.

1:13:32And this is the problem, right? The tech has existed for a while. It's now built into the iPhone supports pass keys. I think most modern Android phones support pass keys. But the only way to enable it is like website by website. And you need both sides to support it for it to work. But it's coming quickly. Yeah. I would imagine this announcement came out ahead of I.O. I imagine we hear something about I.O. And then I imagine we hear an Apple domino fall at WWDC. This is as developer-y as consumer-y. Yeah. And this seems like the right season for more of this to happen. It is very exciting because passwords are stupid.

1:14:04If I can get to a place in my life where I'm never reminding my parents what their passwords are, I'll be very happy. That's his dream. All right. We've gone over, as always. Thanks to Sarah. There was just a lot of butt talk on this episode of the podcast. Love the butts. Shouts to Zach for his categorization in the app store or the podcast store. Can I get the E or not? I say no. What the children hear about butts on the internet. There's a lot going on on the site. just a really good week on the site and the next week is io so verge.com install it directly to your home screen it's pretty good you can do that now you can do that now that's it that's and that's a wrap for vergecast this week we'd love to hear from you shoot us an email at verge cast at the verge.com the verge cast is a production of the verge and the vox media podcast network the show is produced by me liam james and our senior audio director andrew marino Our editorial director is Brooke Minters.

1:15:01That's it. We'll see you next week.

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