Here's what an AI-first phone might look like

0:02Hello and welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of 5G Connections. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're going to talk about phones. Kind of. We're going to talk about this new set of AI devices that appear to be coming for us that are not phones. At least the companies who are making them claim that they're not phones. But they seem to be a lot like phones. They're AI-centric. They are, in some cases, made by companies who want you to use their AI products. and they're trying desperately to unseat the smartphone while seemingly discovering that the only way to do that is to make a smartphone.

0:35David Amell, who's with The Verge this summer, is gonna come on and we're gonna talk through what OpenAI, SpaceX, and Amazon, and potentially many others are up to and whether any of them can build anything that isn't a smartphone that actually makes you replace your smartphone. All that's coming in just a second, but first, here's what else is happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Monday, July 27th, 2026. A bunch of big AI companies, including NVIDIA, Microsoft, SpaceX, IBM, and a whole host of others, are creating a new group called the Open Secure AI Alliance. It comes after NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong shared an open letter last week, arguing in favor of open models in general.

1:11It became a whole thing over the weekend who signed that letter and who didn't. That particular drama isn't all that interesting. But the US AI industry is clearly concerned with how fast China's AI is improving, and in part it's improving that fast because its models are so much more open. That means some big questions are left to answer about how we build and share AI going forward. Meanwhile, it appears Amazon is gearing up to start competing for real with Starlink for satellite internet supremacy. It filed an FCC application over the weekend to deploy 5 ,105 new satellites starting in 2028, and said it plans to partner with mobile carriers to offer direct-to-satellite service, kind of like Starlink does with T-Mobile right now.

1:49Right now, Amazon's Leo service is way behind Starlink. Way behind. But the company bought GlobalStars Network earlier this year and has said it intends to offer its own service going forward. There's even been a rumor recently that Amazon might be building a phone again. I wonder if those things are connected. And finally, The Verge's Antonio DiBenedetto just dropped his review of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro, which is frankly one of the most exciting things to happen to Windows PCs this year. It's modular, it's repairable, it has good battery life and performance and almost everything else you would want.

2:18It is also, thanks to the ongoing RAM shortage,$3 ,100. $100. That's up$800 since it was announced just in April. Raymageddon comes for us all. You can read more about all this at TheVerge.com. That is 90 Seconds of the Verge for Monday, July 27th. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. AI-assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. But if your data layer is still a bottleneck, what's the point? Instead of wrestling with rigid schemas or translating data formats, MongoDB's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak. It ships at the speed of AI, is ACID compliant, and scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads.

3:02Developers have a word for that kind of reliability. Actually, five words. It's a great frickin' database. Start building at mongodb.com slash AI.

3:16This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. All right, let's talk phones that aren't phones. David Amell is here. Hey, buddy. Hello. The Verge is David Amell.

3:52Waveform's David Amell. DavidAmmell.com's David Amell. That's right. Just the David Amell. He's here. Right. Good to have you back. So I've brought you here to talk about phones, but not actually to talk about phones. I've just become obsessed with this thing that seems to be happening where a bunch of companies are looking for a way to put AI into a device that makes it the most important thing in your life. And basically, if you're not Apple or Google, you can't. You just don't have an option for a bunch of reasons we should probably get into here. But what you now have a bunch of other companies doing, I think most reported, OpenAI, SpaceX, and Amazon are all believed to be, reported to be in the process of making something that they would love you to believe is not a phone, but might have an awful lot in common with a phone.

4:39And what I want to try to figure out here is whether, A, that's possible, B, what it would be, and at what point is your not phone just a phone, and what's the line you need to avoid crossing, and C, whether this could even possibly work. Does this all make sense to you? Yeah. This seems like a crazy moment that we're in, in not phone, phone world. You asked me if it makes sense to me. The idea makes sense to me. The what would this even be does not really make a lot of sense to me. Yeah. Okay, good. So let's talk this out a little bit, because I think if I'm open AI, I assume the thing I want is a chat GPT forward device available to you at all times.

5:24Is it is there anything more to it than that? Do you think I'm missing anything here? It seems like that. I mean, they're going through all the, you know, they make all of these things where they just build the UI on the fly and they just move through intent-based operating. Like the main paradigm shift that I think a lot of these companies are trying to do is that they're trying to move from a tool-based model where you use your phone as a tool. Each individual app is a tool. You jump to the tools to an intent-based model where you can use natural language and your intent becomes the thing and then the apps become the piping for the thing.

6:00But if you make a wholly new device that just tries to ignore all of these apps, what are people actually going to be doing? Right? Because we use ChatGPT and we use Anthropic to like create things to then put on the tools that we use every day. And this is where I get confused about what exactly are they trying to make. Yeah. So I think even as a user, I struggle with the question of what this would look like in a way that I find compelling. And I think you're right that the thing they're trying to do is upend the idea that the first thing I do is open an app to do something, right? Every time I want to do anything, the first thing I have to do is open an app and log into that app.

6:39And I think there's actually a pretty strong argument to be made that that sucks, that actually it's really inefficient. And remembering where everything is, is really complicated and doing things that might exist between multiple platforms is vastly too complicated. I am I am a long term believer that Apple shortcuts is a terrible solution to a very real problem. So the idea of saying, OK, we want to we want to flip that on its head and actually just let you worry less about where things are and sort of the individual silos on your phone and more about the thing you want to accomplish. 100 percent.

7:10Makes some sense to me. But I don't think. I just don't think what I want is for my phone to unlock into a chat window. Right. Is that is there is there something else you can imagine that might look like? Oh, that's hard. Um, this probably is like the many billion dollar question that a lot of people are R &Ding their way through. Yeah, it probably is. I assume that they probably have a bunch of ideas in a lab somewhere where you open your phone and they try to just guess your intent based on the things that you've done before. And the secondary model is to open a chat window. You know what I mean?

7:44They probably just want to try to predict what you want to do before you want to do it. But my question, again, becomes like, well, if apps don't exist, then what do you actually do with a device like this? You know, and then maybe apps do exist. You know, OpenAI, their device is apparently going to be an Android phone. Is that sort of the idea? It's like an Android-based device? That seems to be the running theory. But Android-based device can mean a lot of things, right? You can run a version of Android that has absolutely nothing in common with what most people perceive to be an Android phone.

8:16Like your dishwasher is an Android device at this point. So I think that could mean a lot of things. But I do think there is a case to be made that it might be a regular, normal Android phone with a very chat GPT-ish launcher. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I could kind of see that. the hard part about that is like it feels like the idea of an app and the buttons inside of an app are buttons for a reason right like if you're typing a prompt that takes like so much longer than just like tapping a bunch of buttons to get to the point where you want to be if you're on like a multi-chain like do this with this this app and then send it to this person and then edit it this way i could see it being you know based around typing or your voice or something like that.

9:00But right now, the like input mechanism of buttons is actually quite efficient compared to anything else that they might want to use it for. So it's very true. Yeah. One, one very simple way I've been trying to think about this is, okay, what if you unlock your phone and the first thing it drops you to is not your home screen of app icons, but the Gemini app. And you can still, you know, you can swipe again and get to your apps. And actually in theory, they're all there, but we've just sort of flipped the layers, right? That the thing on top is the AI system and underneath it is all of the apps that you maybe want to tap on.

9:34Does that do anything for you? You know, okay, I'd say that the new Siri is probably a good way to look at this. Now, anytime I want to do basically anything, unless it's literally like texting the first person in my contact list, I just pull down from the top and I ask Siri to do it. Interesting. So in a way, that is kind of what you're describing. And that means you actually changed that behavior fairly quickly. This is the thing I was going to ask you about is how much inertia there is in smartphones. But if you were able to do that just in the course of a couple of developer betas, that strikes me as kind of a meaningful change to make.

10:07Yeah. I mean, I will say that I was at first, I was only doing it because I wanted to pressure test Siri as much as I possibly could and see like, can it do this? Can it not do this? I don't think you can do this. Could it do it? But it has actually changed my behavior. And a lot of the time now I am just asking Siri questions. I mean, the biggest question is like Google search revenue is going to disappear because, you know, I'm just asking Siri all these questions. But Google already knows that. Wait, give me an example. What kinds of things have you discovered you can offload to Siri AI? OK, so one big thing.

10:39I'm like I was on Instagram yesterday morning. So I guess that's not like the first thing I do when I open my phone. But I'm on Instagram and I see that my favorite band is going to announce tickets for the show that they're going to have in December. and it doesn't say anywhere on the screen when they're going to release the tickets. They just announced the show. So I scrolled down on the Siri thing and I said, can you remind me to buy tickets to this when they go on sale? So it like searched the web, found when they're going to go on sale and then it created a reminder to buy the tickets at the exact time that they went on sale, which was this morning.

11:13That might be the single most impressive Siri demo anyone has ever just, seriously, that is like, that's the dream. That's like the stuff they put in, advertising videos that never actually work the way they're supposed to. That's awesome. It's pretty awesome. It's pretty awesome. But the other question though becomes like, if it's using an Android phone or if it's using Gemini, like Google's kind of like paradigm for these AI based, you know, for Gemini controlling your phone is that it's sort of agentically clicking around. So obviously like how the phone is controlled is, is very important.

11:45You know, Apple's version of this is we're going to ask developers to put in all of these schemas and pipes to make sure that this actually works, whereas Google's just tapping around. And so if you land on a Gemini, you just land in Gemini, is it going to then swipe out of Gemini, enter another app, click on that app? Because the current version of that, as Allison has shown in her article, it works, but it's very slow. Yes. And I think it's also going to require a lot of trust. You know, if you just ask the ChatGPT app on your phone to order you Starbucks, there's a lot of trust built in there.

12:21Is it my red address? Did it get my order correct? Did it remember to do one pump of vanilla instead of two? I don't know. I think it might take a little while longer. And I'm very curious what these companies are thinking deep down in their labs on how these interaction paradigms would actually work. Yeah, I tend to agree. And I think what's so funny about the Siri example is I think you both just described exactly why every company is running at this idea, because if you can do enough things like that for people, it starts to feel like an actually genuine paradigm shift in how we use our phones.

12:52And also, Apple is never, ever, ever, ever going to let anyone other than Siri do that thing, right? And so if you want to do that thing, you have to build something else. And this is, to be perfectly honest, like I don't spend a lot of my time feeling sympathy for OpenAI, SpaceX, and Amazon, but I do sort of feel for them in this case, because you talk yourself into this long enough and you get to the point where to say, oh, to do that for David Amell, we have to have an Instagram app. And then you've built a smartphone. Like you just did it. You do that three times and you have made a smartphone.

13:27And you can see why everyone talks their way into phones. Like I remember talking to Carl Paye, the CEO of Nothing years ago when they were starting. And he was like, I have, you know, giant ideas about the future and we want to build lots of new things. I'm still waiting for any of those to come to fruition. but my question to him was well then why make a phone like you think you know what's next why make a phone now just start going and doing the next thing and his answer was just essentially we have to make a phone if we don't do the phone we can't do any of the rest of this we have to make the thing that's in your pocket we have to figure out how to make all this work and their answer has been build the ecosystem with you know earbuds and all this other stuff then try to sort of back that into some stuff that only works on the nothing phone and then presumably start to try and flip the form factor.

14:12So you like have to do it in a bunch of steps, but you do kind of have to make a phone first. So do you think it's possible that at the end of this, OpenAI and Amazon and SpaceX, if they all ship something, it might just be an Android phone or something essentially identical to an Android phone? I think it's essentially going to be an Android phone. I mean, we saw the rabbit r1 like try to do something now given that was super early and it didn't work and what they said it did it couldn't really do but that was also just an android phone you know what i mean it was like we made it a different shape and you know it's like is are there models embedded enough into your life for your daily interaction paradigms that you are going to want to use that model to interact with those things that you do every single day.

15:05I don't know. I mean, Google has the best shot with Gemini. Apple has a very good shot. You talked about the earbuds with the cameras. I don't know what their interaction paradigm with those cameras is going to be, but they already like if Carl Pace said we have to make the phone first and then we can make the smart things that attach to the nothing phone later. That's exactly what Apple is doing. Yeah. A third party coming in and doing that. It's just like, is anybody that invested in Grok that they want a Grok device? Like, I don't, I just, I, you know, I don't like being pessimistic and being like, there is a duopoly, but there is a duopoly.

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18:22At this point, particularly in the US, there are only two phones that matter. There's the iPhone and there's whatever Samsung shipped. That's it. I love the Pixel. I think more people should buy the Pixel. People don't buy the Pixel. People buy Samsung phones and they buy iPhones. Is it even conceivable to you that OpenAI could show up with a pretty good Android phone and make a meaningful number of people switch. What was the positivity rate around AI in the United States again? Like lower than the Democratic Party? Real, real, real bad. I don't think they can do that. They might get like a quarter of San Francisco, maybe.

18:59Yeah. But they're not going to get anybody else. And also, you know, the problem that that puts you into as well is that if you buy a device made by a model maker, it's inherently, if not only going to work with that model maker or works best with that model maker. And it doesn't really feel like a lot of people have allegiance to any particular model. I guess there's a little bit of allegiance to like Claude, but that's because they're supposedly the company that's trying to do the right thing. Well, ironically, I think the allegiance to Claude is as much a referendum on people don't like open AI as it is anything else.

19:35Yeah, that is also very true. That is also very true. But either, I mean, as soon as I'm, I don't know, I'm a big believer in like these open source models are starting to get crazy. And as soon as RAM gets cheaper again, I think people are going to start running their own, especially at business scale. You know, if you can buy RAM cheaply again, a lot of these open source models are almost as good and you just really don't need to use any of these model providers. So I don't know. A device for me makes no sense. I think a smartphone running what these companies want you to use makes sense. And it is the most basic thing that we've always had.

20:12But disrupting that interaction paradigm is like, I don't see how you do it. Especially like you were saying, you either open up to a chat box, which is kind of annoying to open up to every single time you unlock your phone, or you have to talk to it. And the reason that things that you have to talk to in order to interact with them don't work is because we live in a society. So, you know, the Vision Pro, very isolating. Everything's isolating. Isolating things don't work. I will say I am extremely bullish on doing more things on your phone with voice and fewer with a keyboard. Good dictation on a smartphone is life-changing.

20:53Like I did this big experiment earlier this year where I tried desperately to get rid of my iPhone, tried all the other Android phones and then came back to the iPhone because I'm a deeply broken person. But the biggest thing I discovered, my absolute favorite thing about the day-to-day experience of Android is how much better dictation was. Oh my God. Gemini is better. Voice recognition in general is vastly better on Android. But my ability to successfully type text messages on an Android phone leaps and bounds beyond what I've ever experienced on an iPhone. And it was wonderful. Yeah. And I think in general, I've been testing all these dictation apps on the Mac too.

21:30And the idea that they're starting to understand which app you're in and actually communicate and transcribe differently based on the apps. I think that's A, that's pure AI. And that's very powerful and is going to be very exciting. That is open AI showing up and being like, we have a better dictation model on our phone. You should buy our phone instead is not going to work. No, but Amazon is the one of these that I'm the most stuck on because right. Amazon 2014 tried the Fire Phone obviously didn't work. And it was full of bad ideas. I think the most bad idea being that what people mostly want is a closer connection to Amazon.com all the time.

22:05that is just not correct. And then there's been this reporting that Amazon is building a phone again. It's internally known as Transformer, which is a rad name for a phone. They should just call it that. But let me just read you two quotes. This is from a Reuters story about this phone. Okay, I'm ready. It says, the phone is seen as a potential mobile personalization device that can sync with home voice assistant Alexa and serve as a conduit to Amazon customers throughout the day, the people said. Quote number two. As envisioned, the new phone's personalization features would make buying from Amazon.com, watching Prime Video, listening to Prime Music, or ordering food from partners like Grubhub easier than ever, people said.

22:41Oh my God. Amazon has learned nothing, David. They're just doing it again. Does anyone really want capitalism OS? That's basically what that is. Truly. It's just like, oh my God. I don't watch TV really at all, but I was over at a friend's place and they had a Prime TV show on. I think they were watching Fallout or something. I did not know that there are literal buttons on the ads that you can just buy an ad to your Amazon cart while you're watching the TV show. Oh, yeah. And I really feel like that's so black and I just don't. Does anybody actually wants that? Like nobody wants to have their escapism and just inject consumerism into their escapism.

23:25I don't see that working. You know who wants that? Every ad executive in the world. Jeff Bezos wants that. They want you to want that. so very badly. But yeah, this to me is Amazon. And there's even a line in that Reuters story that says Amazon understands that putting AI front and center in this way is actually not what people are looking for. So they decided to put Prime Video there. What? This to me is just like, this whole idea is just completely doomed on its face to me. I've only come up with one theory about what might work here and why all these companies might be doing this. And I just want to run this by you and I want to know what you think.

24:02Let's see. I think there's a world in which a few years from now, most of the job of our phones, or if not most of the job, a lot of the job of our phones is essentially to be a brick of compute and network connectivity. And that actually trying to put a lot of LLM stuff and a lot of battery and a lot of processing into your headphones or your watch or whatever else is a bad idea. but if you can just have a brick full of battery and lte on in your pocket at all times you don't need that you you can you can do all the stuff you want to do with your nifty headphones through the phone and that's actually no one will feel like that's weird because that's how we've been doing it for a very long time yeah so maybe if i'm open ai what i'm trying to do is not sell you a thing that makes phone calls and sends text messages and open instagram at all what i'm trying to sell you is literally just a box of chat GPT, but that's not even the point.