God will be declared by a panel of experts

26:24like that's what meta is doing with ads especially but increasingly also with just content all over facebook it's what youtube seems to be running rapidly towards like this this idea of oh we can own the whole stack and then we can just do it for you and all you do is press the i don't know the do it button and just assume that this stuff will happen at such scale that it'll work anyway that like I think the underpinning theory of so much of this is like the internet is so big and there is so much opportunity that your stuff doesn't have to be that good. We will just spray it so efficiently around the internet that the volume will outweigh the quality and you will get paid.

27:05And because you don't see any of it, you'll never see any of your ads. You'll never see how they look in context. It all just happens in the background and money pours into your account. And what a perfect, terrific, creative outcome that would be. There's a quote from Zuckerberg a few months ago where he's like, the future of meta is you give us some money and we generate you some business results. Yeah. And what he means by that is you give us some money and maybe a picture of your product and we will just generate ads until you sell as many products as you told us you want to sell. Yeah. And that is fine.

27:37Like in one sense, it's already meta's business model, right? like you pay them for to target some ads and then you make some money and you can direct sell as much stuff as you want sure the part where you take all the creatives out of the loop and meta's just generating infinite creative to the point where nvidia gives demos of just we'll just 3d model the shampoo for you we'll never even take a photo of the shampoo bottle we'll just do we'll just generate the shampoo bottle and then generate the ads around it that stuff is wild and i look at Adobe here. And I'm like, oh, it's very cool that you do the denoise in Lightroom.

28:11Very cool. But their business model is create the image, distribute the image, track the image to help you make money. And they're like, we're going to automate that. And things like Project Moonlight are as clear of a statement of how they want it to go as anyone. I think the challenge, and I think the really interesting next turn of the social internet is all the social platforms are like, we don't need Adobe for that. We'll just do it ourselves. And then that leads us directly into, boy, a bunch of these companies had gigantic earnings this quarter. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how, I don't really care about earnings, but boy, does that make me worry that the slot factory is just cranked to high.

28:50Yeah. I mean, the two that really jumped out to me on this front were Meta, which had like a weird earnings call because they took some giant stock hit that I'm not interested in or care about. But I mean, Mark Zuckerberg just got on the earnings call and was basically like, we think the next era of Facebook is AI-generated content. Just in as many words, that's what it is. And I think I keep wanting to draw this line between it's fine if we're going to do this for ads. A perfectly efficient advertising system that doesn't involve good creative is like fine right like i don't know that that affects me in a huge way and and the fact that all these companies spent all this time saying perfectly targeted really great ads are actually good for users and are now on to this is just like thank you for admitting the thing you told me for 20 years was a lie mark zuckerberg but it's like i'm tempted to leave that to the side and be like the actual problem is when we're pointing these tools at like people doing creative expression sort of for its own sake.

29:54But then I look at TikTok and all of that is the same thing, right? Like half the TikTok videos I see are ads. And so it's like, all of this stuff is just running directly at each other. And it's like, okay, if everybody is trying to sell me something, what is the difference? And is, does that line between somebody doing art and somebody doing ads even exist on these platforms anymore? And I think the platforms think it doesn't. All right. Well, you know, my hottest tick is that the creator economy is about to implode. And the pressure on any individual creator is so high that I have nothing but sympathy for individual creators.

30:27You thought you were going to run a business on YouTube. And at any moment, YouTube can take your business away from you. Right? My joke is that every YouTuber gets their wings when they make the video about how pissed off they are at YouTube, because they realize that they have no power in that relationship whatsoever. And YouTube can just destroy them on a whim. And that's been true for years and years and years. And what's coming now is the platforms are going to destroy the creators. It is just coming. The pressure on any individual creator to do brand deals to pay the rent because the platforms don't pay them enough money is so high that, and I mean this with a lot of love towards all the creators that we are friends with.

31:08Most creators, if you look at their business, they're just ad agencies. You're just running a bunch of single person ad agencies across the internet and you are starting to, you know, cut off your like authentic relationship with your audience because the ad agencies and the brands are telling you what to say. And because the platforms aren't paying you enough money, that's the revenue you rely on. And you're going to start making compromises to preserve that revenue. That's bad. And increasingly there's no other move. And there's no other move. Right. And we hear it from creators over and over and over again.

31:41And the brands and the companies are so aggressive that they are starting to turn the screws over tighter. Like I have heard a million stories that are like, we'll give you this product in exchange for a good review. And that's how you're going to get your brand deal. Millions of these stories everywhere. Again, I have nothing but sympathy for like the individual creators. I just see the pressure across that market broadly. So that's bad. Then you add in the pressure of, well, what if you don't need a creator? What if YouTube can just make a synthetic creator who will say whatever you want and generate millions of clips of this fake creator saying that your camera is the best and then you can just pay to put that on everyone's feeds?

32:23Right. Which is the promise that these companies are making to these companies about their AI advertising tools. We will make you infinite creative, infinitely targeted and deliver you business results. Well, that sucks. Right. The pressure on the creator rates is going to be incredible. Once that happens. Yeah. So that's one more pressure. Well, and then as a creator, you're forced to play that exact same game, right? Because you're like, well, now what I need to do is run a perfectly efficient content targeting business or else I know literally no one's ever going to see my videos. Or I need to play to the algorithm even more to build a channel big enough so I can generate these results, which means I'm going to be even less authentic and do whatever the algorithm is.

33:00Mr. Beast. But then the algorithm is now flooded with AI content made by the platforms at massive scale because they think that that will keep people more engaged than their creator content. So you see the pressure from an individual creator standpoint is the platforms have never paid enough money. Your standard purview rate on YouTube or TikTok or whatever has never been worth the damn. The pressure to cave to marketer demands for your sponsorship deals is higher than ever, but those rates are going to drop because the AI influencers are coming for those dollars. and then to get a big enough audience, you have to compete in the algorithm with AI content generated by the platforms itself.

33:42That is all a mess. And I just see that pressure on the whole creator economy and it feels very bad. And again, on an individual basis, every creator is making the right choices. They're rationally responding to a bunch of pressure that they face. But we are not part of that economy. We don't do that stuff. And so we can just step outside of it and say, boy, the creator economy as it is currently composed is about to implode under the triple pressures of AI. Yeah. Like Zuckerberg is not being shy about it. We have a clip from him from the earnings call where he's just straight up like, I'm going to dump a bunch of AI slop on you.

34:22We should just run the clip. Social media has gone through two eras so far. First was when all content was from friends, family, and accounts that you followed directly. The second was when we added all of the creator content. Now, as AI makes it easier to create and remix content, we're going to add yet another huge corpus of content on top of those. The thing he says essentially over and over that he doesn't say there, but clearly believes is that that third thing will just wipe out all of the first and second and that that's okay. Well, here's I mean, like there's only so many people in the world, Mark.

34:58And they only have so much time in the day. So just supply and demand dictates that you add much more content to the feeds. The attention will be taken from something else. Yeah. I know where the attention will be taken from because you're not paying friends, family and the elementary school parents group. You're paying the creators. you're going to take the money away from the creators with your you know universe of free your corpus you're going to take the money away from the creators with your corpus of ai content by the way whenever anybody opens instagram i know what they're thinking is i can't wait to access a third corpus of content i've been meaning to get a new corpus but what i think is interesting about that and this is like we should talk about this big youtube reorganization that I think you're really interested in too is the platform bet is that it won't cost the platform anything, right?

35:56Like I think there's a certain feeling that I have as a user that like at the end of the process you just described, not only is there nothing left on those platforms for creators, there's nothing left for me except like AI generated ads. And you don't get any sense that any of these platforms fear that outcome at all. In fact, they're organizing themselves around making it happen more quickly. Yeah. And I can't tell if that's just because they don't have any taste. Like, I can tell it's because Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have any taste. You can look at Zuck's, like, T-shirts and his, like, UFC phase and his haircut.

36:33And you can be like, I can maybe identify taste here. But you can't actually, you can't tell me what Zuck likes. He doesn't have this, like, forward taste that dictates what's good and what's bad. Zuck's taste is that he wants to win. That's it. He just doesn't want to miss another era and he wants to win whatever he thinks nice. Even his t-shirts often communicate that fact. Yeah. That that is what he wants to do is win. YouTube says we can talk about YouTube. YouTube actively tries not to have taste. They describe themselves as infrastructure and pipes. Right. And I think organizing themselves around distributing AI is very much just in keeping with Google, but also in keeping with the sense that this is happening and we better we had better make sure our infrastructure can support it and there's a lot to say about youtube in that way but like that's interesting that's youtube's self-conception so whether or not the people who run youtube have a whole bunch of like individual taste sort of secondary effect they constantly describe themselves as infrastructure i think youtube wants you to believe it's infrastructure i think the experience of being a viewer or creator on youtube suggests that it is oh yeah far from infrastructure.

37:40Like it is not a dumb pipe in any way, shape or form, but it desperately wants you to think that it is. And I think like you talk about Adobe as a company that gets undercover. I think YouTube gets vastly undercovered for that reason, because YouTube is like, we're just a website people post videos on. What do you mean? The only website people post videos. But now, especially with this AI stuff, YouTube is getting so much more proactive and involved, like you said, in this whole process. Like there's a whole new thing in Adobe Premiere that just lets you one click publish directly to YouTube Shorts.

38:17Like they've just, they just, they had built a partnership. They built this pipeline and it is like, YouTube has gone from being a place you upload a video you already made to like, they're increasingly taking that whole pipeline you just described and pulling it into YouTube. And that changes what that platform is. And when it's AI, you can just do it because there's nothing else there. You make whatever you want inside of the YouTube studio app and you're good to go. Why do I keep saying the creator economy is going to implode? Because there's some analysis of Google's earnings this quarter that suggests YouTube Shorts now makes more money than YouTube proper.

38:53That's bad news for the creator economy, right? The way YouTube Shorts is monetized is vastly different than the way traditional YouTube is monetized. Second, YouTube Shorts, just like like TikTok or Instagram Reels, not built on a follow model. So to the extent that any creator owned an audience on YouTube by having lots of followers and notifications, all that goes out the window and it's just algorithmic swiping content. And maybe you'll get some followers, probably you won't. Like the vast majority of people who see your stuff are not going to be your followers. This is a huge problem. And then you're like, and then we can flood that algorithm with AI content generated directly by marketers in Adobe Premiere.

39:27All that's bad. like it is just it's it's bad in the sense that i think aesthetically it will be a disaster i think we're all just going to look at a lot of weird slop and i think it's it's just bad for the creator economy it's bad for all the creators that people actually like on these platforms and to your point i don't think the platforms have thought through what happens when they kill the creators i really don't i think they think that people are going to just open instagram no matter what's there i think that's right there is a there is a like there is a real sense among all of these apps that they are too big to delete, right?

40:00That like the muscle memory of opening Instagram is so big 25 times a day that you're gonna keep doing it even if there's nothing there for you. And it might be true. Like it honestly, it might be true. I still go on TikTok a lot, even though the TikTok shop is 60 % of the videos I see and I don't like that. I still open TikTok more often than I'm, like the inertia is super, super strong, but it feels like eventually eventually it's going to break except all of them are reacting to Sora being the number one app in the app store and it's full of nothing but slop yes which suggests that there is a version of it I actually give Sora a lot of credit because it is the most interesting idea in this space that anyone has had by a mile like the cameo thing feel however you want to feel about it in like grand terms the idea of like I can upload a video and then put myself in other videos Fabulous idea.

40:53It's such a good growth hack. Like it's the whole thing where like what everybody wanted when Instagram came around was to take pictures of themselves, right? And then when we made videos, it's people made videos of themselves and being able to post that thing becomes very sticky and very valuable and very important. I think anecdotally the sense I get is the soil novelty is already kind of wearing off because the like, I can make myself an astronaut thing is like fun once and then not anymore because it's like not that fun to be a fake astronaut i don't know but i i can do disinformation at massive scale uh very useful to a pretty fun i will say the videos of mr rogers talking shit with tupac shakur are incredible i feel very bad about all of your feeds are so much more fun than mine it's i mean listening to mr rogers just do D's nuts joke after D's nuts joke with Tupac Chikor is very wrong.

41:51I want to be clear. I feel bad when I consume this content. I also laugh my ass off every single time. It is bad for the world and very funny. Like it's like both of those things can be true. You know when, you don't know because you're a goody-two-shoes. You know when you smoke your first cigarette in like eighth grade? Eighth grade. God. Racine, Wisconsin. What are they doing up there? We had more bars per capita than anywhere else in the country. that's that's my town's claim fair enough it's like exactly that feeling like i know this is bad i know my parents will be mad i should feel ashamed also this rules and whatever that swirl of emotions is is mr rogers and tupac deep face yeah that sounds right you will go go find and let me know what you think about if you if you're a person who made those videos make another one where neil is just ripping a cig in the background and send it to me that's all i want in the whole world.

42:46Every now and again, someone asks me, like, did you play sports in high school? I'm like, no, I smoke cigarettes. That's what I did. You were too cool for sports. That's what everybody says about Neelai. If you want a link to Neelai's band on YouTube, get at me. I'll happily send it to you at any time. All right. Well, so the reason underneath all of this is money. Yeah. And at At least at this moment, there is a whole lot of money in saying AI out loud on earnings calls. And there's a particular version of the money story that I think we should tell here. But first, I think we should take a break.

43:22And then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about open AI and the swirling trillions of dollars in all of this. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Indeed. Indeed wants to share this hiring tip. 73 % of tech workers rank flexibility, that's hours, location, or workload, as one of the top benefits they value most. So if your job ad doesn't highlight flexible policies, you're cutting out three and four candidates. In today's market, hiring tech professionals isn't just about filling roles. It's about outpacing competitors. But with niche skills, hybrid preferences, and high salary expectations, it's never been more challenging to cut through the noise and connect with the right people.

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45:54what i want you to know upon return is that i played a number of mr rogers and tupac clips for david and now david is broken this is how am i supposed to podcast now oh god that was this is really something uh i'm just i'm it's gonna i'm gonna end up just like word vomiting the things from that video in the middle here. Okay. From Mr. Rogers to OpenAI. This is what we do on the first cast. This is OpenAI's entire evaluation is Mr. Rogers doing Deez Not Strokes with EZE and Tupac Shakur. That's real. So the big business news of the week was that OpenAI finished its restructuring into a for-profit company.

46:35This has been, what, 18 months in the works and had a pretty hard deadline of the end of this year. It's been a big controversial thing. Elon Musk is suing. Everybody's mad. The details are whatever. But essentially now, OpenAI is a for-profit company sort of theoretically controlled by a nonprofit called the OpenAI Foundation. The OpenAI Foundation owns 26%, which according to OpenAI is worth about$130 billion. All the numbers are fake and they're about to get much bigger, as we will talk about. But that's what the OpenAI Foundation has. Microsoft has a little more, about 27%. And then the rest is basically split between existing investors and OpenAI employees.

47:19It's a lot of money. But the reason we have brought this up is because, Nilay, I would say this announcement elicited your favorite press release of 2025. Easily. Would you say that's fair? Easily. But can I start by just laying some meditation here? Walt Mossberg is as close to a mentor as I've ever had. And there's a story about Walt in his heydays reviewer that I think about maybe every single day. It is a profile of Walt in Wired Magazine from years and years and years ago. And it opens with him walking through the Consumer Electronics Show, CES in Vegas. And the CEO of SiriusXM is screaming at Walt in the trade show about how a bad review of the latest SiriusXM radio tanked their stock price.

48:04And he's like screaming at Walt and Walt's not paying attention. He's screaming at Walt. And finally, Walt, and this is literally in the story. It's in the Wired story. So it's the last sentence of the first paragraph of the Wired story. Walt screams back at the CEO of SiriusXM, I don't give a fuck about your stock price. Iconic, iconic moment for Walt Mossberg. You know, I say a lot of things are the mission statement of The Verge, but I don't give a fuck about your stock price is like as close to being the beating heart of our mission here. And I bring this up because it's so easy to get lost in the numbers.

48:36It's so easy to get lost in the idea that any given quarter is the win or the loss. It's so easy to treat the entire economy like gambling. We don't, you know, like our ethics policy forbids us from having investments in these companies. Like whatever, we're just not tied up in their financial returns. We are very focused on are these products good? And in many ways, are these press releases written by a rational brain that is not on drugs? you know like i don't i don't care about your stock price i don't care what you're saying about the diluted value on an as convert what who cares it's interesting in the sense that it affects your products and who builds them and who's winning fine right but i don't actually care about that the reason i bring it up i just the only frame i would add to this is the reason i bring this up in this way is that i think you can explain a vast amount of the ai focus of the tech industry just by the fact that there is so much money in it.

49:36Like if you open your mouth in downtown San Francisco and say AI technologies, somebody just hands you a billion dollars. Right. And it's been a long time since we have had that specific thing. And so I think the money is all fake. The money is all insane. I continue to be on the record that I think OpenAI is like a house of cards that is going to tear itself and the economy down with it. But the money is the thing. And the money in so many ways is the story of... this thing that they've dressed up in the funniest press release of 2025 right and the gap is that the products can't do what the money suggested is that that's what i'm trying to point out like everyone is so focused on the money and the stock prices that the heart of i don't give a fuck about your stock prices but your product was bad right great okay i'm only i'm bringing this up just like set the stage for i read this press release which is just about the conversion of open ai from one structure to another and Microsoft's new deal terms with open AI.

50:34And I was like, did anyone sane read this press release? Because it sounds like the rantings of someone who is fully high and drunk. Yeah, I mean, it does. But in like a very lawyerly way, you know what I mean? It's like a high and drunk lawyer. Well, that's most lawyers. It's not a sober profession. Should we just dramatically read this press release together? But what I want to say is, yes, we should. And the thing to know as we read it is that the heart of the disagreement between Microsoft and OpenAI in the past was that OpenAI had a get-out-of-jail-free card where when they developed AGI, the exclusivity of Microsoft was over.

51:11So this is really what they've been negotiating the whole time. Yeah. OpenAI was like, we are beholden to you until we do AGI. And that was vague and complicated. And Sam Altman has spent the last couple of years like kind of rapidly bringing down the bar for what qualified as AGI. But it's still they all still call it the thing like the world will change when we get to AGI. So anyway, let's let's let's do this press release. So why don't you read the press release and I'll just read it another way that you can interpret it. OK, just line by line. Just let's start with what has evolved. Stop me when you'd like to.

51:45Yeah. So they talk about the money and then here's a bulleted list of what has evolved. Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. Once Jesus has been developed by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel. Right? What are you talking about? Once we develop digital God, a verified panel of experts will be like, yep, there he is. That's God. What? That's the first bullet. Who's on your panel? other gods the pope like what are you talking about once agi is developed it will bring several it doesn't even religious leaders it says declared declared you're right i just keep seeing that picture from the office of steve carell saying i declare bankruptcy like what are you talking about this is the first bullet wait oh man okay so it's it's it's sam altman standing up saying, I declare AGI.

52:47And then Satya and Adela just off to the side going, you can't just say that and expect something to happen. Right. He's like, okay, call the Pope and the Dalai Lama. You know, like who else is cool? Should we invite Adela Adid? What are you talking? How is this the first bullet? And I know that this is the first bullet because in the minds of the people who crafted this press release, the verification by an independent expert panel is the win. Right. Because they didn't have that before. That's the thing they've clawed back from OpenAI. Right. You can't just declare AGI. All right. That's the first one.

53:24That's the first one. Okay. Number two. Microsoft's IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now include models post-AGI with appropriate safety guardrails. Microsoft's IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now include models post-Jesus with appropriate safety guardrails. What? like oh my oh good i'm glad that we have appropriate safety guardrails after we've invented digital god once once technology has subsumed us all what are the appropriate safety guardrails for the post agi models like are you just going to be like no i you know you're you're very powerful vishnu but i don't think you should destroy the world like there's just a button that says please don't do that this is the second bullet point and it's You just look at it, you're like, this is nonsense.

54:14Like, truly, what are the appropriate safety guardrails? Also, through 2032 and now models post-AGI. So you've already sort of said, we don't think there's going to be AGI by 2032. Right? Our IP rights for models and products extended through 2032 and now include models post-AGI. so somewhere in this time frame is sam altman standing up and saying i i declare we've made digital god i think microsoft thinks that's about to happen really soon and they're like we're he he thinks that's his get out of jail free card and we're going to make sure that it's not i'm just saying these are the first two bullets and both of them require open ai to say that they've achieved the singularity like in a real way here's an even better version of the timeline Microsoft's IP rates to research, defined as the confidential methods used in the development of models and systems, will remain until either the expert panel verifies AGI or through 2030, whichever is first.

55:16so not only are we doing god we're doing god in the next five years Yeah, whichever's first. Whichever's first. By the way, the expert panel has to get called in and verify AGI on this timeline. So let's say Sam Altman declares that he's developed Digital God in, I don't know, mid-2029. You got to get the Pope, the Dalai Lama, you know, whoever else, Melania, whoever you're going to throw on your panel and be like, is this Digital God? You've got six months to decide. Who of the two of us do you think would be a fairer panelist on the AGI verification panel? I mean, your dad's a minister. I feel like, you know, you can phone a friend.

56:03What does that god think of the—or is it—did they do the same? Do you know him? Does this seem familiar? Yeah, exactly. He's making a lot of AI slop. That doesn't—you know, WWJD? It's just—okay, fine. Here's a free idea. Somebody make WWAGID bracelets and I will wear them. Like a Livestrong bracelet for AGI. Yeah, like a sort of rope braided bracelet. Yeah, this is, you're going to kill on the streets of San Francisco. Okay, and then there's a bunch of stuff about research IP and it's essentially like all Microsoft gets to do whatever it wants. It's the two, the ones you should wear are Microsoft can independently pursue AGI and Microsoft uses IP to develop AGI.

56:47Yeah. So, okay. Well, one we have to do is Microsoft's IP rights now exclude OpenAI's consumer hardware. Sure. Johnny Ives. I'm going to guess Microsoft gave that one up pretty easily. It's the one where you're just like, sure, you can have this win so that I can get all the stuff that I actually want. Also, Microsoft is like, when we do consumer hardware, everyone around it dies. Yeah. That's just a barren wasteland of ideas. um okay let's see except for the mice the mice are very good couple more here that we should get to um oh here's one this this is my maybe the most matter of fact delightful one of all of them microsoft can now independently pursue agi alone or in partnership with third parties microsoft can now independently pursue jesus alone or in partnership with third parties sure sure microsoft's walk with christ is now its own it's fine i hope everyone is pursuing the singularity.

57:44I really do. And we're going to come out on the other side and, you know, the real AGI is the partnership with third parties we made along the way. Yeah. Okay. And then very next, if Microsoft uses OpenAI's IP to develop AGI prior to AGI being declared, you want to just take that one before I even finish this sentence? What are you talking about? Like no normal person like going about their day in America is like, man, I'm happy Microsoft and OpenAI clarified what happens if they invented Digital God. But yes, if Microsoft uses OpenAI's IP to develop Digital God prior to Digital God being declared, the models will be subject to compute thresholds.

58:29Yes, very important term. Digital God only gets one GPU. Can't wait. Can't wait for the meeting after the Dalai Lama declares Sam Altman has developed Digital God being like, all right, we've got to subject everyone to compute thresholds. How many NVIDIA racks do you get for Digital God? Okay, and then two associated ones here. The revenue share agreement remains until the expert panel verifies AGI, though payments will be made over a longer period of time, which is Microsoft's way of saying you are going to continue to give us a tremendous amount of money no matter what happens. And then another way of saying exactly that, OpenAI has contracted to purchase an incremental$250 billion of Azure services, and Microsoft will no longer have a right of first refusal to be OpenAI's compute provider, which is to say OpenAI wrote us a$250 billion IOU in exchange.

59:23It can go write other people IOUs for digital God. Sure. Like all of this is fine. Like they needed to restructure the company. And I, you know, if I'm doing like the business analyst stuff, I'm like Microsoft got a bunch of commitments that they will preserve the agreement in a way that makes the money until OpenAI decides that it's achieved its mission, which is to develop HEI. Right. And then you're like, okay, but if I look at what they're saying, it's we will invent digital God and the revenue share will take place over a longer period of time. And like, you're just like, what? I mean, I think you're right that there's one way to read this that is a high end drunk lawyer.

1:00:09There's also another way to read this that is like so deeply spectacularly like eye rollingly cynical about this whole thing where they're like, this is a Microsoft person being like, these clowns think they know what they're doing. And we're just like, oh, AGI, like, great job. We're so proud of you and your AGI. That's so cool. Oh, yeah. Nadella totally took Altman for a ride here. Like, again, if you want to do winners and losers in stock prices, yes. Right. That's how I would read this, that I don't think LLM technology is presently deployed. You can do it. But then you actually, these are some of the richest companies in the world, and they put out this press release totally straightforwardly, totally seriously to be like, we've done it.

1:00:50We've run this by the attorneys general of both California and Delaware and they approved our plan that is all basically like this deal until Sam Altman declares AGI and an expert panel verifies that it's true. And you're like, I don't, that really turns on what Sam Altman thinks AGI is, first of all. But second of all, it depends on him convincing that his definition is the one this expert panel should use. and no one has told us who's on this panel or who gets to appoint them. Right. This is all just silly. This is just silly talk to pump up these valuations. It is kind of just nothing. Like everything you just said amounts to essentially nothing.

1:01:27And I think even Sam Altman is out here undercutting that. And I think like for a long time, he was at the forefront of like, we are building God. Like the thing that we are making will be the thing that when we declare AGI, everything immediately will change. Like he was out here talking about universal basic income, right? Like the economy is going to change. The day-to-day ways that we live our lives will change when we do AGI. And he has just walked that back in the biggest ways that he possibly can. He did actually, he did a live stream this week alongside this announcement and actually talked about this.

1:02:04Can we just play this one short clip where he talks about AGI? Yeah. I would say I think it's the AGI term has become hugely overloaded. I think it's much more useful to say our intention, our goal is by March of 2028 to have a true automated AI researcher and define what that means than it is to sort of try to, you know, satisfy everyone with a definition of AGI. What? So he said this like maybe an hour after Microsoft released that press release saying that their deal terms changed when Sam Altman declares AGI and the time limit on that is 2030. So who do you think has overloaded the term AGI, Sam?

1:02:41Yeah, right. This is not me. I mean, but I think the difference between artificial general intelligence and truly automated AI researcher is so vast. And he says, even in the sentence, he says a true automated AI researcher and define what that means. So even we're in this phase of like, oh, I've come up with a much less interesting word for what this thing is that we're building. And also, we're not going to define that yet until 2028. Like, the meaningless buzzword count is just absolutely off the charts with all of this stuff. Right. But again, just this bonkers press release. Microsoft has the IP rights to research that will remain until either the expert panel verifies AGI or through 2030, whichever is first.

1:03:34And Sam is saying in 2028, we'll have an automated researcher. so that gives him another two-year window to have a panel verify that he's made digital guy a panel that no one has ever met and no one knows who will be appointed to or how they will get like what are you talking about i'm imagining this uh this panel is like the the american idol judges and and satya nadella is going to make sure that like he is the simon cowell who is just like sitting there leaning back in his chair and he's always just like no what's the bojack horseman celebrities do they know anything what do they know let's find out like that's the agi panel yes yeah and as long as you have the one person who sati is gonna just like slip him 100 every time to just be like no that's not it yeah you're not very smart at all actually i don't think the answer is not 42 like you doesn't seem like god i'm just saying like the this press release until the expert panel verifies agi or through 2030 whichever is first those are words in a press release that open and microsoft put out together.

1:04:34An hour later, Sam Altman is saying, our goal is by March of 28 to have a truly automated AI researcher and define what that means, then to sort of satisfy everyone with the definition of AGI. So he's already lost, right? I mean, the implication is that an expert panel could potentially validate the existence of AGI before 23rd. You wouldn't put in a term that says one or the other, whichever is first, unless you thought either one was likely. and Sam's like no it's not likely yeah I mean I do think the lesson he seems to be learning pretty quickly is the dangers of being overhyped right and like even as we've gone through the sort of GPT levels he has started to be louder and louder about like you shouldn't expect the leap from 4 to 5 to be the same as the leap from 3 to 4 was like this stuff is not linear it's not just magically going to get vastly better forever.

1:05:32And yet at the same time, if you're Sam Altman or Dario Amadei at Anthropic or Sundar Pichai or any of these people, you have to be out there in earnings calls talking about how this is going to change everything that you do. And I mean, Amazon goes out and lays off 14 ,000 people and is blaming AI for doing it. And I think there are lots of reads of that. But one thing that happens when you do that is you fire a bunch of people who say, AI is going to change the way that we do everything and the stock price goes up and it's like again i don't care about the stock price but like the reason these things happen is because the more you talk about ai the more money there is in it for you at this particular moment in time and so if you're sam altman and you're the you're the face of this movement in a very real way and also running a private company that hasn't already turned into like the unbelievable money fountain you want it to be uh it you have to do both things at the same time.

1:06:29Like he has to both sandbag the AI movement and champion it louder than anybody at exactly the same time because otherwise stuff just gets really messy. And I think he's put himself in this really hard and potentially untenable place going forward. Oh, I mean, I talked to finance people who are like, yep, there's two economies. There's what everyone else feels, which is there are layoffs and the economy's in tatters and there are tariffs and main prices high. and then there's the nvidia economy right yep there are two economies and they're like the entire ai economy will fall apart if open ai doesn't pull it off and then i'm like what does pull it off mean like we don't know yet well yeah and now open ai is uh reuters had a report this week that open ai is already starting to talk to people about a trillion dollar ipo uh which would be one of the biggest ever like it it only works if it keeps getting this much bigger but ironically it can only keep getting this much bigger if there isn't some spectacular disappointment coming, right?

1:07:31Like if Sam Altman is like, I've made God and it's not God, the bubble bursts like that. Well, we have, again, the expert panel will verify. If Simon Cowell tells me it's God. I would love to hear it. You tell me. This is like, it's so funny. They said an expert panel will verify it without even a whiff of how you might compose such a panel. Email us, You call us, whatever it is. Tell us, let's say it's five people. Five is a good number, right? That's the number of voice judges, I believe. That's how I'm going with it. Did you tell us who you think those five people should be? Like, do you think Blake Shelton should be on a panel that verifies CGI?

1:08:09Like, who is it? Who would you put on it? Because you can't just be other AI researchers. Yeah. That immediately invalidates the claim that an expert panel has verified CGI. Right? A bunch of the world's best drunks to verify that you made whiskey is not a thing that you can do. You have to have people outside of the industry say, okay, this big claim, the singularity. This is, oh God, what's the contact when Jerry Foster should have sent a poet? Who's the poet? Right? Give me your list. What's the number? 866-VERGE11, vergecastattheverge.com. Cast the expert panel for us. I love this idea. Give us one name, give us five names.

1:08:52We're gonna, we will come up with the correct answer and we will figure it out. I will point out, you know, somebody who's spent a lot of time in Chicago, the Pope is from Chicago and having Chicago Pope verify that Sam Altman made digital cheeses is like very funny to me.

1:09:07That's all I want in the world. Listen, there are a lot of people out there with conspiracy theories about who's winning the World Series because of the Chicago Pope. Like there's a lot going on right now. It's good stuff. All right, we should take a break and then we should come back. We have like a lot of lightning round to do this week. So we're going to give ourselves lots of time to lightning round. We'll be right back. When it comes to what your family eats and drinks, you know your choices matter. You're the expert because you know what fits your life. And getting it right starts with good information.

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1:10:30all right we're back time for the lightning round the lightning round just to be clear everybody stop emailing me about the thunder round i get it i've heard i've heard all of your complaints tell them to chat gpt leave me alone what are the complaints i don't know there's just some people who I think like Jake better than me is essentially what I'm reading from this. And that's fine. I also fully understand that. He's very charming. Jake's delightful. It's the lightning round. You and I have a bunch of things each that we're very excited to talk about. So we're going to try to go through this very quickly.

1:11:02Nei, I'm just going to guess. Is your first one, is it what I think it is? You know what it is. Okay. It's time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. He's such a dummy. He's such a dummy. How does he keep doing this? Every week I'm like, it can't possibly be time for Brennan Carr as a dummy. I will say this week he's a dummy in like classic dummy. You know, like. Playing the hits. I don't have to like tie you into metaphysical knots to explain why he's a dummy. This is just straightforward sort of like corruption. You know, like he's just doing a bad, dumb thing that no one likes because he can't help himself.

1:11:43Okay. He's like, what if I was even less popular? I'm Brendan Carr. So in the Biden administration, the FCC passed rules that said broadband providers had to put labels. They called them nutrition labels. They modeled them after the labels on food. Just laying out how much things cost. Because, you know, if you've ever paid for mobile Internet access or home Internet access, you know that there's just like a litany of weird fees. Yeah. And taxes just glommed onto your bill. And so they will advertise that it's$79.99 a month for a gig. And you actually end up paying$150. It's like a universal experience.

1:12:21Because there's like a sidewalk fee. And you're like, what does that mean? And they're like, who's to say? Yeah. And they'll blame the government no matter what. Like, that's how they do it. So in the Biden administration, the former chair of the FCC under Biden, Jessica Rosemore, still led the charge where to put nutrition labels on broadband service. So when you go to buy broadband, there's going to be a standardized label that says how much it costs, what you get, what the maximum speed is, all the extra fees, however you thought. You've probably seen one because you bought broadband recently.

1:12:48You have been forced to see a broadband label. It's hard to find fault with this idea. In the free market, consumers should know how much things cost. And then you can, even in a market as anti-competitive as broadband, where you have very few options, you'll at least be able to compare. Again, I don't know how you can find fault with this idea. This not only seems fine, it seems incredibly boring and uninteresting to talk about. This is just like, it's fine. Yeah. And this is about as much as the Biden FCC was able to accomplish. Right. Like for a variety of reasons, they were not able to accomplish much.

1:13:23They kept their heads down and they got to, we'll put labels on the prices. We're going to put price tags on the products. That's what Joe Biden did not accomplish a lot in the broadband arena. He accomplished price tags. great brendan carr our man is like you know consumers hate is price tags passed a notice to propose room making just this week saying they're going away we're getting we're gutting the broadband labels and his reasoning is that the service providers find them too onerous and complicated to figure out it's too hard to write down a list of dollar figures we can't possibly find all the fees that we might charge you we can find them when we bill you for some reason that's very easy to do.

1:14:05We have no problems with that. But telling you what they are beforehand, oh my God, the broadband, I mean, we just, the letters and the calls, I'm out in the field on the polls of the service workers and they're complaining about these nutrition labels. And he truly expects us to believe this. As if every Comcast employee, disclosure, you know, Comcast is, NBCUniversal is a minority investor in Vox Media, they're a big fan of ours. as if every Comcast employee has to carry around like huge, like Moses on the mountaintop stone tablets with the nutrition label on it. He's like, this is just cruelty to employees.

1:14:43How could they? It's on the side of the Xfinity vans. Yeah, exactly. No, it's just like on the website. And he's like, it's too honest. It's too complicated. We've heard all these complaints. No mention of the fact that when the broadband providers charge you money, it is not too complicated for them to find all of the taxes and fees that they tack onto your bill. There's not a broadband provider in the world that's ever been like, you know what, our billing system is too complicated. We should simplify it for the benefit of the concern. No, they're like, we can find all of the fees. You whispered at the wrong app on your phone, you're signed up for text killer.

1:15:13Like, they'll just do it. But telling you beforehand, too onerous. So they passed this rule during the open commission meeting. The FCC is stacked with Republicans right now. That's the way it goes. The only dissent, Ana Gomez, the sole remaining Democratic commissioner on FCC, who is, I would say, pretty fiery in what is usually a very boring, like, government open commission meeting. We have a clip. Let's run it. This is one of the most anti-consumer proposals I have yet to see. The broadband labels are about empowering consumers. The goal of the label is to inform you, consumer at home, so that you know clearly what is included on your bill.

1:15:51And what adds insult to injury is that the FCC does not even explain why this proposal is necessary. Make it make sense. The more information is available to consumers, the less there is a need for regulation. Make it make sense feels like Ana Gomez's slogan right now. The official notice of proposed rulemaking from Brendan Carr reads, We believe that itemizing can lead to a proliferation of labels and of labels so lengthy that the fees overwhelm the other important elements of the label. So broadband providers have created so many fees to itemize that they've made the labels too complicated to read.

1:16:30Make it make sense. Listen, Brendan Carr, you're now obligated to go after CVS for having receipts that are too long. And then we can talk. He's a dummy, Brendan Carr. as always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on the show the Google results for your name are polluted by my ranting at you, and I know it's true, and I know you read it, I know you look at it, so you're welcome anytime you want this show, the other show if you want to just do a live stream on Twitch mono-y-mono let's go, buddy because I don't think you can defend this one there's not a consumer in the world who thinks more opaque pricing is good, and somehow you're such a dummy that you've convinced yourself that you've done everyone a favor.

1:17:11That's been Brendan Carr's a dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast. It's good to be back. For my first one, I'm going to, do you know how when you play beer pong, sometimes you bring in your friend to take a shot for you and just throw the ball in and see if they can do something cool? That's what I'm going to do with our producer, Travis Larshuk, who is going to take one of my lightning round stories. Hi, Travis. Hello. Travis, you were fired up this week and I would like to know why. I was so fired up on Monday. This is the most important thing that happened on the internet. To me and tens of other people.

1:17:43So do either of you play Connections, the New York Times puzzle? I probably play like five days a week, I would say. Not enough to have like a streak, but I play a lot. The setup of it, there's a four by four grid of words. The words, you need to put them into four separate categories. So you need to figure out like what the categories are and the groups of the four words that belong to them. So this was Monday's connections puzzle. I'm going to share it with you. The first row only connect all of branch. That is a secret message to a very specific subset of people who play New York Times connections and are also fans of a British quiz show that premiered in 2008 and still runs today.

1:18:31And I just want to play you this first clip from the show and see if it sounds familiar to you. Time now for the connecting wall. 16 jumbled up clues that need sorting into four connected groups of four. There are red herrings. There are clues that might fit into more than one category. But there is only one correct solution. That's just a British person describing connections. So this has been a round of this British quiz show called Only Connect since 2008. 2008 has been essentially the same game that the New York Times launched in 2023 with no credit, no acknowledgement. And they have been very sure to say that this was developed independently.

1:19:16Meanwhile, the day after it launched, the host of the show, who we just heard from Victoria Corrin Mitchell, tweeted at the puzzle editor. Do you know that this has been a TV show in the UK since 2008? It's so similar, I guess you must. So I believe that what this message on Monday, this olive branch is responding to, was that about a month ago on Only Connect, they finally acknowledged the existence of Connections on the show, and Victoria said this. Have you played Connections, the New York Times game? I mean, I must say, obviously I would say this, because it's just our format. Do you not find it annoyingly weak?

1:20:00Like, the connections don't really hold. I'm good at it now because I figured out where they cheat and where they go, that'll do. Do you not find that frustrating? Yeah, it's definitely inferior. It is inferior. You can say any shit you want if you have a British accent. Yes. I believe her 100%. I reached out to the New York Times for comment. They have not responded to my email. I just love it that you can dunk on someone. They made our thing for stupid people. But if you have a British accent, you're like, it's inferior. And it's like, fine. No wonder these people had an empire. It's all I'm saying.

1:20:40Anyway. It's very good. I love that for you, Travis. Thank you. Thank you. Did you get connections that day? Oh, for sure. I did not. And it was very upsetting. And I assumed. So I was first alerted to this because Travis posted something on Blue Sky, like being mad at connections. It turns out it was about this and that the New York Times is finally tacitly acknowledging that it ripped off this superior British game. I then went and just failed connections because all of the connections were weak and stupid and didn't make any sense. And raged to Travis, assuming that he had also failed connections.

1:21:15But I guess he didn't. I've failed connections one time and my stats are still 99 % success, right? I just love that I mean that she's like it's like our show but it's stupider and I had to make myself dumber to be good at it it's such a thunderous dunk that came off so politely it's very good it's very good and so the times only connect Olive Branch but that wasn't the connection it was not it should have been but it was not alright that's all I have thank you for thank you for hearing me that was delightful thank you thank you very much alright Eli what's your second one I'm cursed to update the audience on the fact that AOL, my former employer, has been once again purchased.

1:21:55Yeah, does it even count as your former? Like how many owners has AOL had since you worked there? I believe it's at least five. And that's counting all the random private equity groups. Verizon was one of them for a hot minute in an organization called Oath, you might recall. Very confusing. Memory, that was the like AOL, Yahoo combination. AOL, Yahoo were combined by Verizon into a unit called Oath. Their strategy was that they were going to bundle AOL, Yahoo, Oath content onto mid-range Android phones. The plan that everyone has. Everyone goes through a year, what if we just shove this shit onto mid-range Android phones?

1:22:37And we're just doomed. Another generation of wireless executives is going to grow up one day and they're going to have the same plan. And we're just doomed to see it. But AOL spun off from Oath with Yahoo. They went to another private equity company. Who knows what's going on? They were owned by Apollo Global Management as of 2021. And then Apollo has now sold it. AOL, not Yahoo. They've held on to Yahoo. Can't let go of Yahoo. They've sold AOL to Bending Spoons, the company which buys everything and ruins it. I don't know how else to describe Bending Spoons. Bending Spoons is the most confusing and fascinating.

1:23:16So, Bending Spoons recently bought Evernote. It recently bought Vimeo. It bought WeTransfer. It now owns AOL. It apparently raised a bunch of debt to buy AOL, which seems like a real bold choice. It owns a bunch of other brands that I would say out loud, and you would go, oh, I haven't thought about that in a while. That's who Bending Spoons buys. Right. It buys these things. It weighs off most of the employees, and it raises prices, and that's the strategy. It's a move. Great. And they claim, so Richard Lawler and I worked at Engadget together. There's a deep, meaningful bond between the two of us because we went through that experience together.

1:23:53And so we were reading the press release and we got to this line. Bending Spoons has never sold an acquired business and will continue to serve AOL's large, loyal customer base for many years to come. And it's like, you guys, you're going to sell AOL in like three years. Like, you don't, you don't like buy the cursed amulet and then like break the curse. Like the amulet wins every time. I mean, somebody has to be the one to fully run it into the ground, right? Like I actually, I read that as bending spoons being like, no, we're going to kill it for good this time. It's going to be full dead by the time we're finished with it.

1:24:31God bless AOL, man. You know, we talked about Warner last week and, you know, buying Warner Brothers is also a cursed amulet that every media company apparently has to go through. AOL was the other side of that. They're the original zombie owner of Time Warner. Yeah, that's right. And it just hasn't been great since that happened. Good luck. By the way, the CEO of Bending Spoons is named Luca Ferrari, which is objectively the best name in history. Good luck, Luca. That's a real person's name? See how many since Luca Ferrari. Never mind, I'm in. AOL is going to be a huge success. This is going to go super great.

1:25:07I love this for everybody. It's just a lot, man. Can I interest you in a Trump phone update? Yes. I don't have one for you. Can you interest me? No, I don't. I've been in the market for several years. So it is now, as you're listening to this or watching it, it is the last day of October. The Trump phone does not exist. Trump Mobile first launched in June. with big promises about service launching and then a phone, the T1 phone, which we had a lot of questions about at the time because all it appeared to be was a bad, ugly render of a gold phone with camera lenses that were weirdly spaced. And it was supposed to be coming in September.

1:25:50September comes and goes. And between June and September, the only thing that happens is all mentions of September were just removed from the website. It was like later this year. It still says later this year. What phone the Trump phone is has changed. Now you can get several other Trump phones, including a refurbished iPhone 14 or 15. Sure. Which the Trump mobile folks will happily tell you is brought to life right here in the USA. Oh, I see. So if you refurbish a two-year-old phone that was originally made in China, it's now made in the United States. I like to think of it as like they fished it out of a lake and just like dried it off with a hairdryer, put it in some rice and it came back to life.

1:26:30And they're like, we did it right here in the USA. Only$629. But yeah, so it is now the end of October, which means we are now a full month late on the Trump phone. And there has been just absolutely no sign of the thing. The second Trump administration is full of a lot of bombastic promises that don't come to anything. There is a ceasefire in the Middle East. Did you know that? It's a lot of that. No one learned from doing this the first time that this is how it goes. Like we covered Foxconn every day because he said there was going to be an LCD factory in my hometown. And it just never was going to happen.

1:27:09And we were like, it's not happening. And we did it every day. If Verge House listeners will remember, he announced randomly at the beginning of COVID that Google was going to build a website to let people find testing. I think he said thousands of engineers were working on it. Yeah. Google did not know that they were doing this until Donald Trump announced it. And then we tracked it every single week. Like, it just didn't occur. And we're doing it again at scale with him. And the Trump phone is like a little example of this or bigger ones. The Trump phone is particularly – like, I ended up on CNBC the day the Trump phone was announced.

1:27:42It was a big deal. Whether or not phone manufacturing could return to the United States. And I was just like, guys, what are you talking about? It can't and it won't. And there was like, you know, some conversation about whether I was to, but like, here we are and we're refurbishing the iPhone 14 here in the good old US of A. And it's like, yeah, you can just hold them to their promises. You can just say, did you make a phone? And so now every week, David, I believe we're going to just ask the question, does the Trump phone exist? Because it is as clear of an example of what the Trump administration, both the first one and this one are like.

1:28:18They just say stuff. Yep. Dominic Preston on our team and I have both willingly signed up to send the same email basically every seven days to an email address that I'm confident no one checks. That's basically just like, huh? Do we have a, is there a, is there a phone? I do know a lot of people pre-ordered the phone. Well, I know some people, at least one person pre-ordered the phone. Many of those people presumably as a bit. But Trump Mobile took their money. Like it's, it's not like this is a fake website. Like people have paid money for this thing. And so despite all of the deep insanity of it, like they owe people a product, they owe the world a product and a poorly refurbished old iPhone, A doesn't count.

1:29:08And B also doesn't exist right now. Like you can't buy anything from Trump mobile. And this thing, we're going to keep tracking it. And we continue to get a mix of silence and no comments. And I will be bringing those to you once a week, presumably until it kills me. It is very funny that you have your own Fox condom here in Trump too, David. I'm excited about it. It's very rare that I am perfectly willing to call my shot on something being bullshit four minutes after it's announced. But I did that on our website and I am very much enjoying how correct I have been in this whole thing. Nothing would make me happier than for me to be proven wrong on this.

1:29:52As a journalist, as a tech enthusiast, as somebody who has reviewed many smartphones in the past, I want nothing more than to hold the Trump T1 phone in my hand and try to figure out what the hell it is and if it's any good. It existing is so much more fun than it not existing, but it doesn't exist. And so here we are. Yeah. Okay, I've got one more. I was going to do the wonky metadata story that Jess wrote about C2PA and Sora. But the answer is that Meta doesn't care to tell you whether or not anything is AI. And I think we've run that to ground here on this episode of The Virtuos. There are lots of standards.

1:30:27No one is interested in any of them. Yeah, Meta doesn't want to tell you it's AI. They want to feed you slop until you die. Yep. Mark Zuckerberg experience. So I'm just going to read this headline from Andy Hawkins. Congratulations to the Tesla Cybertruck on its 10th recall in two years.

1:30:43That's a really good headline. It's very good. I will say we have a lot of debates at The Verge about headlines, and I don't think we always write the best headline. That's a great headline. It's very good. Great job, Andy Hawkins. This one is just for the light bar that can detach while driving, which doesn't seem great. I will note that some of them have been for the wiper, the singular engineering achievement of the Cybertruck. But, oh, man, what a disaster that thing has been. I know some Cybertruck owners, they love it. Again, I will point you to Verge expat Zoe Schiffer's article in Wired recently, just interviewing Cybertruck owners.

1:31:20One of whom was a convicted Gen 6 guy. Oh, cool. Choice. All of its choice. And another one who's like, yeah, the car does not attract women. Like, just straightforwardly set it to a Wired reporter. It's very good. What was the recall this time? It's the light bar. The off-road light bar can detach while driving. Seems bad. So if you're behind a Cybertruck, just be careful. Because either the wiper or the light bar might be flying at you. Congratulations, Tesla. All right, I'm going to do two in very rapid succession. Yeah. One is I am going to say a nice thing about Mark Zuckerberg, which is that Threads rolled out ghost posts, which are great 24 hour expiring posts on threads i think it's fabulous like such a good idea i i have been a long-term believer that all social media posts should expire by default i think like the world would be a better place if we were not all held to everything we've ever posted on social media in all of our lives and this it looks a little weird because it has like a sort of dotted I know.

1:32:32I love the way it looks. It looks like you're whispering onto the platform. Oh, I like that. Okay. Thinking about it that way, I'm okay with it. It stands out in a way that threw me a little bit, but I'm okay with that way of thinking about it. But this idea of an expiring 24-hour post that if somebody replies to it or likes it, it goes to your DMs. It's such a small twist on the way that we communicate on social media that I love. Yeah. And I think like the this idea that actually if I'm going to post something and if you want to engage with it, we are going to engage with it. Just the two of us, not in public in front of everybody is actually such a healthier way to think about social media.

1:33:13And I think this is one of the reasons that stories has been so successful on other platforms is that it's not I'm doing a thing in public, but we're not doing the whole thing in public forever. and the fact that like the actual engagement interaction is just between us and not for everyone to see is better. And we've just never put that in text posts before. And I think it's a great idea. And I hope every other text platform gets something like this soon. Like, I love it. Yeah, it's very good. Threads secretly is Meta's best product. It's huge. No one gives it any credit for being huge because it's not where stuff goes down.

1:33:48Yeah. Like no drama goes down on threads. It all goes down on X or it all goes down on Blue Sky. Lots of drama goes down on Blue Sky. But Blue Sky's drama is so like specific and exhausting. I mean, so is X is. Like you sort of know exactly the fight you're getting into in both of those places. I find threads to be handily the most pleasant social. Yeah. Because it's a meta product and it's designed to keep you engaged forever. Yeah. It's very milquetoast in a way that I think is like fine. But it is huge. Like it is huge. Like. Yeah. I think like they're onboarding one blue sky like every hour or something.

1:34:22Like it's like, it's just this massive platform that's taking advantage of the Instagram graph. If you open Instagram, there are threads posts in Instagram now and it kicks you to threads to look at them. And then they have all these products to use, which are just great. Yeah. And so it has, in Instagram, like from Adam and Sari on down, they know that the action on Instagram happens in DMs. So you can see that they're like, how do we get people on threads to slide to DMs? And like ghost posts is just a great way to do it. Yeah, I think it's working. The clear goal of Threads was to copy that thing that was like the sort of default public chat space on the internet from what Twitter used to be.

1:35:00And I think it is rapidly heading in that direction. I should have ended on that note because that's a happy note. Now I'm going to end on a just sheer rage, which is we talked about Samsung fridges getting ads and now we know what they look like. Can I show them to you? Do you want to see what the ad's coming? Yes, and I will describe them to the radio audience. I assume you have many fridges with screens. I won't have screens in a fridge, man. We're not doing that. No? No, thank you. That's where you draw the line. No. I hate and fear computers. I don't know if you've met me. All right, so I just put a picture in our chat here.

1:35:39Tell me what you see. I see an ad on the bottom of a slow Tizen screen for water filters. I mean, the reason I won't have every computer gets slow, and as many Virgcast listeners know, one of my mottos, in addition to I don't give a fuck about your stock price, is that life's too short for slow computers. So if you're going to put something in my kitchen that's hard to get rid of, like a refrigerator, and then eventually I know that it will be a slow computer, that is just out of bounds. No, thank you. I'd rather just like command strip an iPad to that thing. Yeah. And the idea that they're going to junk it up with targeted advertising is horrible.

1:36:13And that is a big ad. That is not a small ad. It's like the bottom, it's not quite a third. It's like the bottom fifth of the screen is ad. But it's like a big beige screen. Like if you imagine a refrigerator with two doors, the whole right door is a screen. And the bottom strip of it is just an ad. And so that's one version of it. This is called the cover screen, which the fact that you have a cover screen on your fridge is just deeply hilarious. So they call this a widget and it's actually a rotating thing. and the ad is one of four things in the rotation. So there's one that's news, one that I think is your calendar, one that's the weather, and then one that is, they call it curated advertisements, which is just what advertisements are.

1:36:56And it rotates every 10 seconds. So every 40 seconds, this ad is just going to pop up on your screen and you can remove the widget. So you can PSA go into settings and then advertisements and then toggle the advertisements off, but it also kills the whole widget, which is very funny. so you either get the good stuff and the bad stuff or you get that count as a dark pattern or is that just like a hostage situation uh right like you can it's not like quite they're not tricking you they're just like do you want this to be useful or not because then you have to have the ads but then there's another way to get these uh that i think is even more offensive which is this one here it's called the daily board and it has six tiles and it's basically one of the things these fridges are supposed to do is be like a hub of your house right they show you what's going on where people are you can do timers so it's supposed to be the sort of family central and i think that's what this screen is supposed to do so it has uh six square widgets basically one is a timer one is the weather one is your calendar one is a memo that just says pizza day exclamation point in this ad uh one says my house which is presumably some like smart home controls and one is an ad of course and it just it's just a big ass ad for a water filter uh and these are these are your options and again if you if you want to not see ads you don't get any of the other stuff either so like it's it is a dark pattern in that sense it's like if you want the good stuff you have to get the ads for this incredibly expensive refrigerator that you've already bought in my mind this should inspire as much outcry as when bmw try to put heated seats behind a subscription I agree.

1:38:33I will say that my fridge has a screen is one of the most bougie problems in the world. So maybe it won't. But I do think this, the advertising bait and switch that is happening in a lot of people's houses is worth being mad at. And people are mad. Like the thing that has happened with Alexa devices in recent weeks where they've started just putting ads on the sort of standby screen of people's Echo shows all over their house after not having them. So it's like, I bought this thing. I installed it prominently somewhere in my house and then oops one day ads is so outrageous to me that it's like if they wanted to start saying everyone that is sold from today on will start to have ads and there's nothing you can do about it they just have ads fine like at least now you're letting people make a wise wide open decision or like what you see Amazon do a lot where they're like you can buy the cheaper one with ads or you can pay more money and have no ads.

1:39:26I'm actually fine with all of those trade-offs, but to install a refrigerator, which is like, I'm moving house and we are taking everything that we own, but we're leaving our refrigerator because that's not an easy thing to remove from your home. It is a crucial appliance to your life. And Samsung knows that and it knows it essentially has you and can do whatever it wants because what are you going to do about it? And that feels gross. If you are the sort of person who thought to yourself, I should put a giant Tizen screen on an appliance that is essentially immovable in my home. So let us know, because I've been dying to know why people have these things.

1:40:03I'm a huge nerd who can't stop making the home smart, and it has never occurred to me to have one of these screens. Yeah, you can see inside your fridge without opening the fridge. I can do that with my LG fridge. It has a window. You just knock on it twice, and it lights up, and you can just see through the door. It's great. Yeah, but that's less exciting. What if I can do it from my phone my lg fridge does have wi-fi for no reason every now and again it tells me the ice is old and i'm like screw you ice doesn't get old the ice is old sounds like a like a code word that you would say to the president when something terrible has happened you haven't used all the ice in seven days i've used enough ice shut your mouth like that's yeah it's not a useful app in any sense of the word.

1:40:44Jen Tui reported on the ads on the Tizen screen. This is Samsung's official explanation. The pilot further explores how a connected appliance can deliver genuinely useful contextual information. The refrigerator is already a daily hub and we're testing a responsible user control way to make that space more helpful. Ads do not make things more helpful. Nope. Just straightforwardly, they don't make things more helpful. Especially when the ad is, the water filter in your refrigerator is going bad and we want you to buy a new one from us. it's just not helpful like i don't know what they're doing like that's a bad explanation the other thing that's very funny about this gen piece um is that samsung doesn't know what its products are called so in announcing this pilot uh they said it won't it'll come to these screens but not ai home screens and so technically the fridge is not an ai home screen because only the nine and seven inch screens are ai home screens and then gen has this line and gen's been on the show a lot.

1:41:41I'm sure you're familiar. She's very dry, very British. And she goes, I've asked numerous Samsung folks about the distinction here and no one has a straight answer. I would say she comes to the same conclusion I do, which is that it's safe to say there will eventually be ads everywhere and this distinction will be meaningless. Yeah. But it's just very funny. I can just imagine Jen being like, do you know what an AI home screen is? And like 10 different Samsung people are like, we don't. We just started calling some stuff that it's great somewhere someone at telly is like okay we're gonna do a free fridge with a screen full of advertisements and we're gonna we're gonna crush and they will and i will buy it i'm just saying as much outcry as bmw saying heated seats which to this day every car company executive i talk to whether they work at bmw or not like burned completely burned by what happened with bmw and heated seat subscriptions they are in the best way like that's a good thing Yeah, they're not going to do it.

1:42:36That is a cautionary tale inside of the car industry that is such a giant win for consumers as a result. Yeah. Like, keep being mad. That's the story of the first guest. I will not buy your water filters and this ice never gets old. It's just water that's cold. Exactly. All right. We should get out of here. We've gone way over, as we are once. It's nice to be back. We just, like, you and I have not gotten to do this this much in, like, several months. It's fun to do this again. It's great. Glad to be back with you. All right. We are out of here. this Sunday we have you and I on an episode of version history about the Microsoft Zune I'm very excited I think if memory serves this was the first episode of version history that we made so if you watch it or listen to it and you're like gosh why is this so bizarre and chaotic and everyone's all over the place it was completely deliberate don't worry about it everything's fine and then on Tuesday actually Jen is coming back on we're going to do a big mega hotline of smart home questions we're doing a two episode thing with Jen over the next two Tuesdays, all about smart home stuff.

1:43:35It's going to be very fun. In the meantime, remember to subscribe to The Verge. You can get this podcast and Decoder and Version History, all ad free. Go find Decoder on YouTube. All of our stuff is increasingly everywhere. Our goal is to make Neelai ubiquitous. Everywhere you go, you should see Neelai's face. This is what we're doing here. I'm very excited about it. It's fine. And if you have questions, email us, vergecastatheverge.com. call the hotline 866-VERGE11 tell us who should be on the panel this is if you take nothing away from this tell us who should be on the AGI expert panel Simon Cowell is my nominee and you have to beat that to get on this panel that's very good I was going to say Jennifer Lopez also pretty good honestly anybody who has been through the American Idol school that's what I'm saying is ready for this I think I believe in them the voice less so American Idol is the training I'm looking for alright the Verge cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

1:44:31The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back with so much stuff next week. We'll see you then. Eli, rock and roll.

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