How DeepSeek crashed the AI party

31:49The thing everybody was worried about about Uber 12 years ago was robo-taxis are going to come and just throw all this into chaos. That's happening in the AI world. All this stuff, whatever you build as an AI model company is going to be copied and bested immediately by six other companies. And this is just what we're seeing. So let me ask you this. Microsoft had earnings this week. They're doing fine. But, you know, it seems like the Microsoft OpenAI relationship has been rocky for a minute. Yep. You know, they were like part of the Stargate announcement, not really part of the Stargate announcement.

32:24That was mostly funded by Oracle and SoftBank. Nadella was asked about$500 billion. And he's like, we've already committed$80 billion to Azure build-outs. And I'm good for my$80 billion. And just like wouldn't talk about Stargate. And then this week, Altman and Nadella, Altman posted a selfie of the two of them. So the next chapter of this relationship is going to be great. But then the companies had also announced that Microsoft's deal basically goes until 2030. I can't tell what's going on with these two companies right now. And especially, he posted that after DeepSeek and after Nadella is trying to calm down the market by talking about Jevons Paradox, which is what you're describing where you make the thing cheaper so people use it more.

33:03What is going on with these two companies? I think it's as simple as they are. They're sort of in a mutually assured destruction thing where like Microsoft benefits so much from open AI being a huge success because it has these agreements for the all the cloud stuff that's happening because it's such a huge investor in the company. Like as open AI gets bigger, it uses more Azure, which is more money for Microsoft. Like Microsoft literally wins coming and going when it comes to open AI. So if I'm Satya Nadella, it makes sense to be doing both of these things. You both want to shore this stuff up in-house in case this company implodes in some meaningful way, which A, it has already done once, and B, could just happen again.

33:50Like I, the, the people a lot this week have been talking about the fact that most of open AI's co-founders aren't there anymore. There are many litigious people circling around this company. There are lawsuits circling. Like open AI is both absolutely chock full of money and like pretty fragile in a lot of ways. So I think if you're Satya Nadella, you're like, okay, I need to not be fully reliant on it, but I also am going to make so much money from opening AI. if it hits that it's it's worth a selfie and like a nice tweet a couple of times a year like that's a pretty low risk way to at least keep the piece enough that open nobody gets super nervous about it like one selfie like he's got a chart in his office it's like options one selfie invest 200 billion dollars leak phone call to sam like yeah be caught having lunch with sam at sweet green is like 200 billion dollars like it's i i really i think i think these companies hate each other and i think they know it's better to be stuck together for a while yeah and to root for each other because it will be successful for everybody but i think they will be uh in in they i think sam and satya both go home at the end of day and like throw darts at a at a the other person's face the really interesting thing is you know microsoft's core business is Azure, like in the realest way, Azure's doing great.

35:18You know, their earnings are out. There are parts of the Azure business that are like different than the others. Like their new customers are not signing up for AI. They're just signing up to be cloud customers. And they kind of announced during the earning call, like, yeah, we stopped trying to do that. Like we're back to just trying to get cloud customers. Yeah. I mean, that's what that has happened in a real way. Like that's actually been a big moment that both Microsoft and Google were like, okay, we're going to charge$20 a month extra on top of the normal, like workspace or office subscription.

35:49And you're going to get all the AI stuff. Uh, and people didn't like$20 per month, per person for nebulous AI features turned out to be an awful lot to ask. And, uh, these companies, like you said, they need more cloud customers and they need people to use the AI in order for the AI to get any good. And so they have just walked it all the way back. And what they want is they They want you to use their tools that make them money, and then they want to shove AI at you so that you use it, and maybe someday we'll pay for it. Yeah. We'll see how that goes. But that's like a really interesting piece, that Microsoft is at least reselling whatever capability it has.

36:27Google's reselling it. Amazon's reselling it. NVIDIA sells the chips, and then they, you know, like Jensen, flash on the world when it's jet made of money. Meta is really interesting in here because they're the only ones who don't resell the capacity. They are buying all the GPUs. They're building a huge data center the size of Manhattan, like crazy. But they sell none of it. It's all for meta. And either that's a lot of risk, right? They have to get the value out of it. Or they figured it out. And in their earnings, this isn't great. I don't love it. But they're like, we've increased ad targeting yield by sorting through all of the ads we can show people faster.

37:09and that's what the GPUs are for. And it's like, oh, they actually figured it out. They know why they're spending the money. They're not just trying to resell capacity to somebody who's going to make a killer app or assuming that they can make digital cod. They're like, oh, there's a thing we do with this that actually goes faster because we're doing it. Yeah, I mean, the killer app for AI might be ad targeting. Yeah, which is terrifying. I want to be clear, that sucks. Yeah, and Meta would love for you to not think about that and instead think about smart glasses. But like Meta is building those data centers to serve you better ads, not to like let you wear glasses on your face.

37:49If they can do all that stuff, terrific. But the business case for that Manhattan-sized data center is advertising. And I think that's what is happening across the world. It's true for Google. It's true for a lot of these companies. Like ads are going to be how a lot of these things support themselves in a way that I think people are not yet ready for. And in the case of Meta and Google specifically, they have already started down this road where the end result is you're some advertiser and you just type in who you want to reach and you put in the first version of your ad and then it makes infinite variations of that ad targeted at specific people.

38:29So everyone is seeing their own ad. Right. And that's what the generative AI is for. And this is either good or bad. You know, like, it's bad.

38:40But like, you know, from those companies' perspective, they might spend less money in advertising, but Meta might make more because they're showing more ads that convert more clicks and purchases. And you can just see how you get to this is all good. And then you can also see how the user experience of the platforms will go to hell because they're going to be just choked to death with AI slop and extremely weird AI ads. And it's already happening. Like, I don't want to pretend, I don't want to be like, this is some like vaporware idea. Like TikTok has some of this capability in their ad sack today.

39:16Meta and Google are already saying to creators, let people chat with AI avatars of yourself. Like they are training the user base to see AI content and think of it as the regular part of the user experience. And then it's just one turn to, hey Ford give us a bunch of money and we'll have infinite ad for explorers that like we know everything about this person and we'll be like hey we saw that you bought a lot of stuff at the store today that would fit better in a Ford Explorer like down to that level of targeting or it'll show me the color of Ford Explorer that I'm most likely to like in the setting that is most likely to make me want to buy it because that is data that these companies have like yeah It's going to get really weird.

40:02And I think the uncanny valley of targeted advertising is about to be explored in a really fascinating way. I will say, one of the funniest things about this is that it is going to make Amazon look even stupider. Because Amazon still does the ad where you're like, I buy a hat on Amazon. And then for six months, Amazon's ads are just like, do you want to buy that exact hat that you already bought? Yeah. How about a hat? Do you like hats? Here's a hat. And I'm like, and it's just like Amazon. If AI can fix that, I'm in. Give me AI. Just stop it with the S. Take this hat away from me. That's weird.

40:37Look, okay, we've done enough negativity around AI. I do think that this thing is a bubble and it has popped to some extent and it might bubble again. But there's just, I don't, it's not just DeepSeek. It's the products. It's I'm going to compare it to to cell networks again, because this is just this is just the world I was raised in. The money we spent on LTE was good. Like if you if we have a lot of newer listeners, but if you are with us from the beginning, you will remember that the iPhone getting LTE was a big deal. Yeah. Right. And the iPhone launching without 3G was like a legitimate criticism of the product at that time.

41:19it had edge it had 2g networking was too slow and putting wi-fi in it was the big like the big innovation this is all impossible to think about right now but the when the iphone got 3g that was a big big deal because it meant that it could access the internet faster and was usable on the go as an internet device when it got lte that meant it could do video and that's when a a bunch of mobile video like took off and like became a thing. When I got 5G, everyone was like, that's gonna happen again. And it just didn't. It didn't. It super didn't. What is this for is a question people should ask much more often about technology.

42:00I will say, I just wanna say one nice thing about DeepSeq and then we should take a break and talk about cool things people do with AI. Learning about DeepSeq sent me down a deep rabbit hole on chain of thought reasoning. Yeah. Which is one of the technologies that DeepSeek did a really good job with. Basically, like, these reasoning models all these companies are coming out with that kind of show you the way that they think. Truthfully, I thought of that as kind of a gimmick that was, like, less doing something different and more just, like, pretending to be human so that you trust it more. But what it actually is is DeepSeek and other companies have found ways to, basically, instead of generating one token that is like the answer to your question, it's able to generate a bunch at a time and actually go step by step and try to think through a problem.

42:48And what DeepSeek figured out how to do is how to use a technique called reinforcement learning, which basically rewards and punishes a model when it does things right and wrong, and teach it how to do that kind of step by step reasoning inside of the model. And so there's a there's a great moment in one of the technical papers where the model starts to answer a question, goes step by step, gets it wrong, realizes that it is going down the wrong road and is going to make a mistake, backtracks and starts over. And that is like a powerful moment in the history of AI. Because all this stuff is like, if you just think about it as like, it's generating the next word every time, it doesn't actually have the capability to go back and be like, wait, where did I go off track?

43:29It just keeps going off track. And with something like this, like this is the kind of thing you will start to see in every other model very quickly, I think, because the reasoning model is, A, there are pretty strong studies to suggest that it's vastly more accurate when you ask these things to go step by step, because instead of trying to answer the question all at once, it answers it step by step, which is like the correct way to do things. But that also, the more you let the model do that, like the longer you let it take and the more steps you let it take and the more you let it think and try and poke around and do stuff, the more accurate it actually is.

44:06So there is a path toward we can do this better. And it looks like these reasoning models. And there are huge compute challenges there. There are huge latency problems there. Like that stuff is going to be hard to do in a way that is like good user experience. But the idea of you can teach a model to be wrong less seems to actually be plausible. And I think that's very cool. And DeepSeek is way out in front of that idea. Fine, you've convinced me. Let's give Sam$500 billion. Fine. I believe. Did you download the deep seek app? No, I didn't either. I got so freaked out by like just their terms of service or just like, we'll give the data to anyone in the government who they've already leaked some.

44:44Yeah. Yeah. There was a whole database that got leaked. Like don't download the app people and definitely don't log in with like your Google account and your email address. Like be, be careful. Please. Uh, also when I tried to download it because none of that was my actual concern. They had shut down registrations because they were overloaded. I see. So you've tried and were foiled. Yeah, I tried to get in that club. You said, listen, China, and said, no, no, no. I should have that club drunk and they would not let me in. They were like, no shoes, no shirt, no service, sir. All right, let's take a break.

45:19That's been enough. We've been enough negative Nancy. Let's see what the people are doing and whether that justifies$500 billion. Sam Altman. We'll be right back. Let's be honest. Are you happy with your job? Like, really happy? The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown, or one we never wanted in the first place. But still, we stick it out. And we give reasons like, what if the next move is even worse? I've already put years into this place. And maybe the most common one, isn't everyone kind of miserable at work?

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48:22All right. So last week, we pointed out a gap that I think we see in all of our AI coverage. You might have even felt in the last segment that there's how people feel about AI, which in our comments is bad. Straightforwardly. There is a real like principled stance against it as a whole that a lot of people are coming to shame. And maybe it is. Like I said, the other leg of the stool that he kicked out is the New York Times winning its copyright case against Open Act or Sarah Silverman or any of these wasn't it Mark Andreessen who was like, if you don't let us steal from the whole internet, this all falls apart.

49:00Yeah, he wrote it in a letter to the copyright office. Perfect. Where he was like, I need you to do me a favor. Then he bought the government, so we'll see what happens. Yeah, there's that. But the Copyright Office this week announced a clarification of its rules saying if you make art with AI, that gets copyrightable, but art made entirely by AI is not. No gray area there. That won't be confusing to anyone. Super straightforward. Anyhow, there's a gap. The gap that I'm saying is people are mad about it, especially in our comments across the internet and various social media platforms. Its movie studio puts up a poster with AI.

49:32They get bullied right off the internet. Then there's what the companies tell us, which is people are using this stuff like crazy. DeepSeek is at the top of the app store. ChatGPT, most popular app by growth in the history of all applications. I think it's a little bit less than that, but you get what I'm saying. And then there's just the stats that we hear from the companies themselves that are sort of like less invested in the hype. Like the one I always call out, I called out last week, Adobe CEO Shantanir Ryan told me on Decoder that people use generative fill at the same rate as layers in Photoshop, which means they just have opened Photoshop.

50:02Right. Like, that's just an identity. There's this big gap in how people are saying they feel about AI, the hype, we're going to make digital God, and then the sort of like mundane reality of a lot of people are just using stuff and a lot of people like it, but they don't perceive themselves as like using AI. So we asked listeners, send us what you're doing. And David, it sounds like everybody responded. Yeah, we got a lot. we heard from a bunch of folks on social. We got like dozens of calls to the Vergecast hotline. We got a whole bunch of emails. Everybody, it turns out, uses AI. And there are at least a lot of people out there who had a use case that they wanted to share.

50:45So I figured we should just go through a bunch of them. And I think I tried to pull ones that are reflective of trends that we saw in the responses. so if you're down I'm going to read you some emails and I'm going to play you some hotlines and we're just going to talk about it because they all made me feel a lot of feelings and we need to sort through them together what is the show but sorting through feelings so I'm going to not say the emailers names because some of this stuff is very personal and also most people in their emails don't explicitly give us instructions whether to say their names I think a few of the folks on the hotline say their names but I feel like if you say it into the voicemail knowing we're going to play it on the show that's fair game so i'm so sorry if i'm outing you here on the first cast this first email is from sam a um all right let's start with ilia s has a note for us about how good ai is uh so here's one email we got uh it says i was recently diagnosed with a stomach issue so it's been difficult for me to find and know things that trigger and don't trigger a flare-up so when it's really acting up it's super easy for me to just take a picture of a menu at a restaurant or bar and just ask what what can i have and from what i've told chat gpt from the doctors it can just tell me what's safest to eat and drink even telling me the exact ingredients that are safe in those dishes that's awesome like unambiguously cool use case in my that's a great use case it's just like i again i'm just being negative i don't know how the restaurant actually made the food i don't know if the things hallucinate like Like that, it's just, this is what I mean.

52:18Like I'm just prone to see the risk. And I think that's an email where people see the benefit. So this is, you just brought up the exact thing that is going to come up an awful lot in these, which is you are going to see a trend in which there is a question of how much should I trust this? And one of the things that consistently surprised me is a lot of people saying it doesn't really matter. That like, I understand it has flaws. It might not be perfect. It's something. Like here, let me read you one. I've often felt intimidated by the professional and technical demands of public service. However, ChatGPT has given me the ability to communicate more effectively, present my ideas professionally, and quickly understand complex topics.

53:00From rebuilding water treatment facilities and developing billing systems to ensuring compliance with the Environmental Protection Agency regulations, I've been able to handle responsibilities I never imagined I could take on. Again, very cool. to me, I immediately read that and go, how many of the EPA regulations do you think chat GPC just flatly gets wrong? Like, yeah, just just fully hallucinates some made up thing. And I feel with a lot of these things, I keep coming back to like, it's gonna work for you until it blows up spectacularly in your face. Right. And it's like, it's the same with the eating in the restaurant, like, as long as it's right, and let's say it's right 80 % of the time, which is probably kind to most of these systems.

53:43But let's say it is. You take a picture of your food or you upload a PDF of a regulatory document, ask it questions. It's often going to be right. But when it's wrong, if you trust it, really bad things can happen. And so I feel like where I fall on the like, but what if it doesn't work scale might just be different than some other people. But that just is the thing I keep thinking about with all of these. Yeah, I don't trust computers. I have a weird job in that regard. But as David knows, when I record this podcast at home, I insist on recording locally to another recorder and not letting my Mac do the recording because I just don't trust the Mac, which is weird because I should.

54:29But I will say on the flip side. But I just like that's the frame that I'm in. Right. Whereas it's like what I hear in that email is not about trust. It's about I worked out this idea so that I would have the confidence to go have the idea. And that's really different and interesting. How so? Say more about that. I mean, that person sounds like they have a very complicated job. They have to know how to do everything. They're like designing a water plant, right? Yeah. I hear that and I think, well, you already did know how, right? Like you had the capability of doing it and what you needed was a conversation or a more easily digested reference material or whatever to get you over the hump.

55:17Like you just solved your imposter syndrome. The AI didn't do it for you. Right. It just helped you get to where you were inevitably going to be. I think there's something to that. And I think there's also a recurring theme in a lot of these that is basically like, I just needed something. I didn't have a tool to do this thing. And now I have a tool to do this thing. And even if it doesn't necessarily do it well, the fact that it does it at all is something. Right. And it's like, I think that I started with the food one because that is one that there isn't a clean other answer to. Right. Like I see on Reddit all the time, the people who go to a restaurant with like those huge placards of like, here's all the food I can't eat.

56:01And they hand them to the chef. And then the chef posted on Reddit being like, this asshole came to my restaurant. And to have something that is like, I can take a picture of this and it is going to give me even, even reasonably reliable information about what this is and whether I can safely eat it. reasonably reliable and easy is probably a huge step up from the alternative in this case. And I think that's something really meaningful. And so there's this sense that something is better than nothing is so pervasive through a lot of this, and I think is really interesting in a way that I didn't give it credit for.

56:31All right, let me play you a couple of voicemails we got. Hi, this is Alex. And I wanted to call in to talk about how I use LLMs in my daily life. I use ChatGPT as an on-demand advisor of sorts. You know, how can I improve this recipe? How much cat litter should my cats be using per month? What are some good ways to save time at the gym if these are my priorities? A lot of these things are things I could use Google for, but it's just quicker to ask ChatGPT. Another thing I use it for is as a way to organize my thoughts. So if I'm ruminating about something, I'll just talk to ChatGPP. It's no replacement for my therapist, but it helps reorient my thinking when I need it to.

57:22I know I could also get this from my friends, and sometimes I do, but ChatGPP is nearly always available instantly. I find that very compelling, I have to say. Yeah. I mean, again, it's hard to tell anyone they're, like, doing it wrong. Yeah. Like that's, that's great. I'm like very happy that that's working in that way. The thing that grabs me at that one in particular is it is the thing that Google is afraid of. Right. But it's also the thing that these products have shown themselves to be the worst. Like how much cat litter should my cat use every month is, well, first of all, it depends on the cat.

58:03But second of all, it's like, that's the one where it's like, you should, you should feed your cat rocks. Like, it's like, that's what will happen. glue in the cat litter it's like it's just sitting there yeah um and i think this is just really eye-opening for me in that yeah you're to your point it's just good enough yeah it's just something yeah and as we have covered exhaustively typing that sort of thing into google right now is like getting mugged in an alley seriously yeah no i there there is a real thing that i i keep hearing in a bunch of these that is just how aggressively google fumbled the bag of search that like what people want is better google not chat gpt and google just threw all of that away but i think one of the things that you say all the time is that the internet is about to be flooded with c plus stuff and i think what we might be underrating is how valuable a c plus can be sometimes like maybe a c plus delivered to me easily and quickly at all times is actually something.

59:03Is that bleak as hell? Probably, but it's something. All right, let me keep going. That's like why they invented legacy admissions at Harvard. That's what you're describing. What if we can just accept a flood of C-plus applicants? Yeah, and that goes fine. What are you talking about? All right, here's the next one. Hey, this is Jake. I've been listening to your recent podcast where you've mentioned how you want people to call in and say what they use ChadGPT for in the real world. I use it weekly to make my shopping list, I ask it to make the recipes based off of what I have in my house and what I'm going to buy.

59:35Try to make it where I can get it as macro-friendly as possible. One of the features that I've started using more recently is whenever I make a shopping list, I ask it to make an optimized shopping pattern for a standard location of where I'm going. So if you want to Costco or Aldi, I can make sure that I'm shopping in those sufficient. And then I ask it to find substitutes for recipes. use it for pretty much anything that it comes to for like vacations trips i use it for planning that's the those are some of the main use cases that i use it for outside of all my work all right so first of all i just i that's all great i man google blew it you just described everything google has ever demoed at google io i know but you're doing it in chat cheap i know yeah yeah like there there's a there are a hundred google keep features that you just described that no one uses uh yeah no i this to me was the one that i was like the most sort of down the middle simple use case is like i'm gonna write a list of stuff that i have in my fridge you're gonna spit back some recipes and then i'm gonna say can you optimize this list to go to costco like chat gpt is great at that do it love it yeah and then the next turn is go on instacart with operator and order it for me right like you can see how you connect all those thoughts next time i go to costco i'm gonna tell chat gpt to give me directions around costco and i'm only going to follow chat gpt we're gonna see how it goes this is actually the part where he said that i'm dying to know more here it really implies that chat gpt knows how costco's organized and just based on my costco in it's a war zone that's what i mean it's like i've asked costco employees where things are and they're like, no, no, no, no, no.

1:01:23Good luck to you, sir. Yeah, it's a secret. You're not allowed to know. But yeah, that kind of thing. Like I am always talking to people about like, what do I think are good use cases for ChatGPT? And the one I always come up with is movie recommendations because it's like super low stakes, but actually a thing AI is unusually able to be good at where I'm like, I like these three movies. What else should I watch? And it's like, that's a thing LLMs do very well. And this kind of like recipe remixing is another good example of that. So I just thought that was great. All right, let me read you another email.

1:01:55Real tone shift here. You ready for this? Yeah. We got an email from somebody who's going through a divorce and said, ChatGPT has been a surprising source of support. Let me be clear. I don't use it as a talk therapist, parentheses, gross, but rather as a tool to help me communicate effectively and with kindness. My wife is very sensitive to perceive criticism. So I draft emails to her and then use ChatGPT to help me soften the tone, make them warmer and remove anything that can be interpreted as critical while still ensuring my requests and boundaries are not diluted. Filtering emails this way has made a difficult process a little less hard.

1:02:24It's also helped me curb any instincts to be petty, sarcastic, or passive-aggressive. It helps me keep my side of the street clean. Wow. Right? So I'm married to a divorce lawyer. I have heard about an infinite variety of passive-aggressive emails between partners for the past several years. I feel like I should just go tell her about this. It's really interesting, right? Yeah. This one, I was like, I don't know how to feel. On the one hand, it there's like a piece of this that kind of makes me sad that it's like it's a bummer that there is a web app that has to be your tool for this but on the other hand like again what's your alternative where else would someone go to do something like this if you took this out of the bigger context of ai and all of the noise and all of the hype and you were like there's a new feature in grammarly right five years ago yeah or you're like google docs has a new feature that just helps to like de-passive aggressive in email.

1:03:21I don't know that anyone would have any reaction to this other than that's actually pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And it's only in the context of all the AI hype and, you know, that horrible Apple commercial where it's just like bad employee sends professional email and like this is what Apple intelligence is for. this is maybe the most human of the notes that we've gotten. Yeah. Right? And that, I mean, not to say everyone else isn't human, but like this is a very emotional task that is being performed. Totally. And I really do think if you took this one out of the AI bubble and all of the baggage that comes with it, you put this in any other product five years ago and everyone's like, oh, this rules.

1:04:00Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it goes to show that A, our vocabulary about AI is still so primitive. Like we call everything AI and actually AI is lots of wildly different things and we need to get to the point where we're better at talking about them as different things. But it also, to some extent, goes to show how versatile something like ChatGPT is. Like all this stuff is happening in the same text box, right? Like it's a pretty remarkable thing. Also very notable, everyone has said ChatGPT. Every single person. We haven't gotten one Dolly, we haven't gotten one Gemini. Nope. No Apple intelligence.

1:04:36A little bit of Claude love in a few of these. Oh, it's coming, okay. A little bit of Claude love. I don't think I pulled any of the ones that people use Claude, but... You're just calling it out. Sorry, Claude users. Claude was mentioned. I don't think Gemma and I came up one time in the emails that we got. Brutal. But Claude, people were like, oh, I mostly use ChatGPT and like some Claude. There was a lot of some Claude. All right, let me play you another voicemail. Here's a... Again, we're just going to tone shift all over the place here because that's what AI does. Here we go. Hey, this is Leo from Atlanta, Georgia.

1:05:07um neil i asked what everyone's using their ai systems for and i use mine almost exclusively to solve hard questions in the word puzzle game word salad also to note i recently discovered that something about david's voice makes me super tired and helps lull me to sleep so i want to give a quick shout out and thank you to mr david pierce for uh improving my sleep quality and helping fight my insomnia thanks guys love the show something on david's voice makes me super tired first question was that a compliment or an insult yeah that's really that's a tough one you make me sleepy it's like a really yeah he said thanks i don't think he meant it uh but that one like another in the line of like movie recommendations right like pretty low stakes pretty straightforward this thing has a lot of information and it can it can spit some information back at me.

1:05:59Yeah. It works. You're cheating, but it works. You are cheating. To be so clear, you are cheating. It's okay. I've Googled what's the word will answer before. Like it's fine. It's bedtime for you, sir. We all have bad days. Yeah. Okay. Let me find the next one. I've been fascinated by my mom's usage of AI. She's 49. And while she uses it a lot for her small business, writing, posts, et cetera, I've noticed that over the past year, she's also started to use it as a general Google replacement in her personal life as well. She wants to know a fact. She asked ChatGPT. She has to write a WhatsApp message that requires minimum thinking.

1:06:32She asked ChatGPT. Last week, she found out one of her close friends is struggling with her mental health and having suicidal ideations. And I shit you not, she asked ChatGPT, what are the best ways to support someone who's depressed?

1:06:44Again, just Google fumbled the bag. Like people want better Google. Yeah, but this is the one, again, these are real people. Everyone use their computer however you want. i'm happy it's working but this is the one that's the the blinking red danger sign right it's like oh everyone just needs a friend like sure right there's there's just an element here where this is to me like this is where the robots hallucinate all day long and what you're getting is better google with worse results presumably but in a better interface or more reactive or just someone to talk to you in a way that's natural and it's like this is the one where it's like if you tell me this is the use case i will confidently tell you this does not support 500 billion dollars data center build out oh 100 because it it it doesn't scale like the thing will happen that happened to alexa in siri which is you'll do this until it fails you and then you will stop thinking and do anything more than this right like you're like siri tell me a joke and And it's like, I don't, I give up.

1:07:51Right. Like fine timers of music. It is. And I'm not saying the ceiling is the ceiling for tragedy. Is so much higher, obviously, but there's still a ceiling. And the ceiling is when it lies to you. Right. When it makes something up, when you ask it for movies and it gives you three real movies and one fake one, and then people are literally showing up at public libraries, asking for books that don't exist. Yep. And that, that's what I mean. It's like when lawyers show up in court citing cases that aren't real and they get disciplined by the bar association. That's the like they can't overcome.

1:08:23They don't know how to overcome that. And so like this one to me is like, yeah, every experience is valid. Like, great. And that's really interesting to see how different people are approaching it. But this is the one that hits the wall the fastest. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think I agree. but I also think there is a more charitable way to look at that that says, uh, the human is still kind of in charge here. Right. Like I think it's, it's one thing to, uh, have these things do things on your behalf. Right. And this is where I think things like operator get really messy. Like, would you let chat GPT text your wife for you?

1:09:01Like even something relatively innocuous. David, I don't, I don't think I've made this clear enough. I'm married to a divorce lawyer. No, but even something very simple where you're like. That woman can have chat GPT divorce me. It's just a macro on her computer. It's a work issued windowed laptop with a button that says D and then my life is over. Fair. Yeah. But like, okay, fine. Helen Havlack, our boss. Our boss. Would you like voice mode chat GPT and be like, hey, will you text Helen and tell her I'm running late, but I'll be like 10 minutes late to the meeting? Why wouldn't I just text her that?

1:09:32No, no, but just go with thought experiment with me here for a second. Okay. Would you let it take that act, like do that on your behalf? Not say, here's a message you might send, but be like, send this message for me, chat GPT. Would you have it do that? Yeah. Abstractly. Yes. Really? See, I wouldn't. I like just the, there, there is a certain thing where I'm like, okay, if you want to write the text and then I'll look at it and send it. Yeah. I guess that's what I'm imagining. Cause that's how I use Siri in the car. Nope. I even get freaked out in the car because you say it and it reads it back to you.

1:10:03And I'm like, what if it like put weird punctuation and a period at the end? And my wife is middle finger emojis between every word. I don't know. Yeah. Okay. And I still like, I truly get nervous about doing a text that I can't look at the words before I send them. And I think that's where all of this agentic stuff gets really messy for me because I'm expecting you to do things. But again, just to finish this out in this case, the idea that like, I'm asking chat GPT to give me ideas about how to support a friend, I think is less terrifying than the idea of like, send my friend a supportive text message, which would be horrifying.

1:10:37I scrolled down and I'm reading the rest of the same email to about the mom. And the second part of the email is the most important part of the email. Okay. Here's a quote. Most people I'm friends with or that listen to the show are probably concerned with accuracy, environmental impact, development of critical thinking, etc. She, the mom, could frankly not give less of a shit. and i suspect people are like her are likely to be the majority not because she's dumb she's brilliant other ways because she's just not wired that way and this is your point about good enough yeah right it's just the computer's talking to you and it sounds fine and that's good enough and i i'm just very convinced that we live in an age where just being confident is like all you need.

1:11:27Like just blustering through it is very effective in a variety of domains. And maybe that collapses on itself. We'll find out. But that's like the whole population is primed to just be like confident talking. That must be right. Totally. Wired ran a headline the other day, something to the effect of the less people know about AI, the more they like it. And I'm there based on a study that I think it was like a marketing firm did basically defined that if you don't understand what's happening, AI seems great. And that makes perfect sense to me. That feels exactly right. And I think most people don't understand what's happening.

1:12:03And maybe that's terrifying, but I think that's what's coming. Based on this and that second piece, which is super interesting to me, I understand why a bunch of companies are so excited about this because it's the first time using a computer has felt different for people, right? The, the jump from the command line to the graphical user interface felt different and you built an entire paradigm of computing around it. And then the jump from desktop computers to touch screen, mobile phones was an entire paradigm shift. And obviously phones could go with you and all the other stuff, but that created an entire economy and they've been searching for something else that makes computers feel different to people.

1:12:43Are they going to fold? You know, like what's something it's gotta be something. and this feels different to people because they're just talking to them but there's not an application layer behind that that builds the whole economy or supports all this like and also i just come back to the serious example like eventually mom's gonna hit a wall right it's gonna lie to her she's gonna make a mistake it will embarrass her in some way and then and then we'll stop because she can't trust it and that trust once it's gone is gone yeah i i definitely agree with that and i think the question of a when that happens and be what the stakes are is the stuff that makes me really nervous about all of this.

1:13:19Yeah. And either I'm just a chicken or everyone else should be more afraid or both. I don't know. All right, let's do one more and then we'll get out of here. Yeah. Here's one more. Hey, The Verge and or The Slack channel. My name's Florian. I'm calling from New Jersey. Taking up your request on what I use ChatGPT for. I would say primarily I use it as a more reliable resource than Google searches for informed decisions. So whether that's in-depth settings menus, I can find Bluetooth. But the other ones, I'm a recent college grad, so I've used a lot to help friends with their career growth or updating resumes, kind of like the bad code, good code arguments.

1:13:59um i come back for practical advice um namely curious topics or other things like that to gain some information on very quickly but i would say primarily it's for things like when i can't find the answer on av forums for how to set up the blu-ray player through arc with the soundbar and making sure that dolby true hd plays from my disc neil i don't know for you but i love you Make sure the great pod and hopefully someone in the Slack sees this. Have a great day. I love you. I love this man. First of all, just call me. You're going to talk to the robot? I'm around. Yeah, this is why the VertCast exists.

1:14:39We will solve these problems for you. That's great. The in-depth technical problem. The issue that I've always run into with that is the answer is buried in some forum posts from six years ago, and it's just been muddled. And I actually want to find the old forum post where the person actually has the answer, not the, do you know what I mean? Like not the, not the synthesis over time. This is where I think like Reddit answers the, the Reddit AI search is, is actually super exciting because it is geared toward that exact thing. Yeah. That is like, what if we just did a smarter job of searching this stuff, but we're still interested in finding actual people's actual answers.

1:15:16It's like, that's a, that's a cool mix. If we can figure out how to do it right. I lied. I have one more to play for you and then we should go to break. But let's just. I just want to say to, to my guy, you're my best friend. We don't know each other, but we're in it now. You are one of us. We're family. Welcome to The Verge. All right. I got one more. True HD for life. This is Matt from Springfield, Missouri. I was just answering your question about using AI daily. All these tools came out when I started dating and I used it to help write my profile and also compose my messages because I'm a machinist.

1:15:50I have good ideas, but I'm not good at words. And AI helped me fill that gap. It must have worked because now I'm in a relationship. I'm going to have a son this year, and I still use AI today to compose thoughtful messages to send to her throughout the week. Oh, this is great. AI is good, Neelai. I got to say, I mean, we just got it there. We should shut down The Verge. Negative Nancy is good out of here. That's fast. That one made me really happy. It's actually only hit two years ago. We went from zero to sun. Killing it. Pretty good. Yeah. Pretty good. Pretty good. you know most people move in together for i'm just saying anyway um not anymore this is an ai world we live in no time for that okay i'll give you i'll give mine and we and it's very different than that but it's in the same zone i recently sold something on ebay and i let ebay's ai just write the description for me really just gave it it was so dumb it was like uh we we bought a new stove uh and we bought different color handles for the stove so i sold the old ones and i just took a picture and figured out what it was and i'm like do you want to write a description it's like this is the lowest stakes shit in the world like anybody who's searching for replacement stove handles and sees a picture of this like they know like that you don't have to describe them very much i was like fine here's some copy and it did it uh poshmark today actually uh announced that they're letting people do AI descriptions i think there's this world in which like weird low stakes fields get filled in obviously dating is a higher stakes field but i can i can see why it's very tempting to people.

1:17:19Yeah. By the way, that's a great story. Yeah. Matt, congrats. We're very happy for it. I hope you name your son Al. Think about it.

1:17:29All right. We should take a break and we get a lightning round. That was great. Send us more of those. Yeah. Thank you to everybody who wrote in. It was super fun. I learned a ton. This has been really enlightening and interesting. And I do want to make sure our coverage is rounded out. Yeah. All right. We're going to take a break. We'll be right back. Every story you love, every invention that moves you, every idea you wished was yours, all began as nothing. Just a blank page with a blinking cursor, asking a simple question. What do you see? Great ideas start on Mac. Find out more on apple.com slash mac.

1:18:42Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage? I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you. Teach me, Sildana. I couldn't possibly. At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch. all right we're back unsponsored lightning round that's how you know it's wild it's crazy times out there unfiltered uncensored the first amendment's back people and by back we mean trump will arrest you if you criticize all right there's actually a lot this lightning round let's start with some very exciting very niche verge cast news google is open sourcing the pebble source code this original smartwatch and eric minchikovsky the founder of pebble is gonna make another watch david you like talk to him what's going on here yeah so i saw eric at ces we had lunch and he had a pebble on his wrist and i said uh we were just talking about you know life and the future and gadgets and i was like i was like so you you've left automatic he sold his company beeper the messaging app that we talked about a bunch to automatic last year he left the company looking for something to do i was like so are you gonna are you gonna just like do pebble again are you going to re-pebble uh and little did i know he asked me again we talked this past week and he was like did did you know and i was like what are you talking about and he was like we're calling it re-pebble how like why did you say so i i'm feeling very proud of myself uh except that i completely let him off the hook and just moved on to something else but anyway so eric uh i guess over the last year has been working with google to open source all of pebble OS.

1:20:34So Pebble sold to Fitbit, which sold to Google. And a lot of the like Pebble ideas sort of percolated around those two companies. And you can see some DNA in like the Pixel Watch, but the Pebble software itself was just not being used. And so Google to its credit, I cannot report that Dieter Bone was involved, but I also believe in my heart that Dieter Bone was involved. Dieter, famous Pebble fan, works for Google now. You know, there's just sometimes there are pieces there but anyway look we don't do conspiracy theories here except for that except for that one uh and google agreed to do it so google open sourced all of pebble os which is not everything there are like third-party drivers and stuff that are occasionally complicated to open source the name pebble still belongs to google but functionally all of the software is now available uh and so eric is starting a company that will not be called pebble but the goal is just to make pebbles again he's like we got it right uh his pebbles now still work he said he had to replace the battery on all of them but they still work and they still do the things he wanted and so he's like i'm going to keep making these like long lasting e-ink gadgety gadgets to put on people's wrists and the plan is hopefully to start making stuff quickly like even this year uh and there are a lot of pebble nerds out there who are very excited about this so the pebble story as I recall it is that they just ran into API problems with the iPhone because the original Pebble could get notifications.

1:22:05Right. Apple supported sending notifications out that way but you couldn't reply to a message. They were just limited in very real ways. You could just look at a text message and get your phone. Apple's never going to open that up. Probably Android phones. The Pebble app on Android phones, they could do some of that stuff. It was always much better, yeah. There's more to do on Android but also I think for Eric in particular, I think the idea of it being like a messaging machine seems to be less compelling. He's very into it as like, it's an easy way to get kind of glanceable information, but it's also like simple and the battery lasts a long time and it has buttons for music controls.

1:22:42Like buttons for music controls is one of the specific things he named as like a core competency of Pebble. And it's like, it does not have to be a messaging system, which I actually kind of agree with. Like I would like, lots of features to exist, but I find that I only use a very small number of them on my wrist and I would trade a lot of them for like five day battery life. And I think it's going to be interesting to see what they do this time. I'm excited. I love a good open source hardware hacky project. It's going to be cool because there's like, there's been a pretty big community of people keeping this stuff alive for a long time.

1:23:17And the fact that now they have honest to God software to play with instead of like hacking around the edges of existing pebbles. I think we're going to see some pretty interesting stuff here like that. That community is really engaged and I think is going to get up to some stuff. OK, so that's Pebble. Next one. Oracle and Microsoft reportedly in talks to take over TikTok. This story makes me so tired. Although Trump denied Oracle, right? In some press conference, but he doesn't know. I mean, like when I say he doesn't know, I don't just mean be dismissive. I mean, literally, he gave them a 75-day illegal extension, which Apple and Google do not trust enough to put TikTok back in the store.

1:23:56And then at a press conference, he said, Congress has given me 90 days, which is 15 more days than he gave himself. Yeah. Congress has not given him 90 days. Congress didn't give anybody anything. The time's up. Like, what he gave TikTok was a 75-day pause on enforcement of breaking the law, which, again, Apple and Google do not trust. because that's billions of dollars. Anyway, so I'm just saying like the facts are confusing on the ground. Like what does Trump even believe is going on here? Because he's just saying different numbers. And then, but he did say, I don't think Oracle's involved, which is weird.

1:24:28But Microsoft was a bidder the first time. Nadella famously said it was like the weirdest deal he's ever been a part of. Yeah, a bidder might give Microsoft too much agency in that. It seems a lot like Microsoft was like dragged into a room and yelled at about buying TikTok for a while. No one knows what's going to happen. Like, truly, no one knows what's going to happen. And then this other plan that Trump keeps floating, where someone does a joint venture and they give 50 % of it to the United States. Our own big tech companies are extremely nervous about that plan. Oh, interesting. uh because if you just think about it that means india could shut down youtube and demand it gets sold and 50 of youtube be given to india like that's a precedent you do not want to play with right yeah because all their governments are way less skittish about nationalizing companies or doing speech regulations everyone's like don't play this game right uh we'll see it is actually a particularly interesting one in that it is a government that i think would be excited to do that kind of thing and is such a crucial market as a growth engine for so many of these companies oh yeah i picked it india has banned tiktok yeah straight up and it is very reliant on youtube but it has very draconian speech policies the modi government does not enjoy dissent in very specific ways uh you could see brazil another country like that russia exists you know like there's a million countries that would play these games uh and so like our own big tech companies like do not you do not want to open this door like you're already in 50 different trade wars like don't do this um is it possible that the door is opened now that just someone has said it out loud like do you wonder if there are a bunch of people sitting around in like government boardrooms being like how did we never think of this they do but like if you want to roll up on the united States that way, the United States would be like, no.

1:26:28Fair, yeah. But then the United States starts doing it, and they're like, okay, tit for tit. Here we go. We're off to the races. The norm has been shattered because we're doing trade wars. You can already see it. You can see people being like, we don't know what's going to happen, but don't do that one. We'll see if any of that goes through. We'll see if there's a buyer. We'll see what happens at 75 days. Like, 75 days is not a long time to close a deal of this magnitude. Even if you had agreed on it already, it would be a short amount of time. Right. And so far as we know, there's no lead buyer.

1:26:57And then there's the big question of, are you selling TikTok US or are you selling ByteDance? And there's a lot of chatter that the answer is they're going to sell ByteDance. And so that's a much bigger deal with a much different set of investors, one of whom is Jeff Yass, a Trump donor. A lot of his money is set up in ByteDance, not TikTok US. And then there's the question of like, what does control mean? Because the law specifies it can't be under the control of a foreign adversary power. And then Trump is supposed to run an interagency process to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Is he going to do that?

1:27:37So there's just, I don't know, man. I think we're, I think we're going to run to the end of that 75 days and then we're all just going to look at each other and it's who knows it really does seem like at the end of day 74 we're still going to look around and everybody's gonna be like what happens now and yeah no one is going to know like that it feels like that's where we're headed and that is gonna you know not that trump isn't running into the separation of powers problem every single day but you get to day 74 and he's like i'm extending it again a bunch of republican senators are gonna say no no no no right tom cotton is gonna be like no here's what we're gonna do we're gonna shoot tiktok in the street right that's where he's already at yeah and so i yeah we're just barreling towards a full sale of bite dance which is nuts to contemplate with the permission of the chinese government bite dance probably either the first second or third most valuable startup on earth right now yeah way up there by april and by the time you're listening to this it will be very close to february like this is just not gonna happen yeah uh uh it's crazy to me yeah i i really like we were we were on the show for a couple of weeks trying to like handicap possibilities and i have given up even trying to guess like i i couldn't possibly begin to make an educated guess about what's going to happen here which is so interesting and also so insane i do think there's some reasonable likelihood that microsoft actually goes through with this and tries to do it they have the money to do it they have the ability to run the infrastructure they have azure they have a consumer market with xbox users like they have a thesis for why they would run it they have an advertising business it's fine not great like sure uh meta can't do it for sure can't do it uh for all the reasons we can talk about but like you know the fcc is still pursuing a breakup like they're not going to do it would buying by dance be the biggest acquisition in history companies worth like upwards of 300 billion dollars is the number that keeps being floated around i don't know if the number is but then i i've heard numbers for tiktok that are higher than 300 billion dollars so like bite dance by the way also kind of in the deep seek race of putting out much cheaper ai models that can be like there's a lot happening in that company there's not happening in that company also just the the chatter that i've heard is the number changes based on who buys it right so uh like if meta or google buys it for example um they have gigantic monetization engines that are really really good so they don't have to spend any money like getting their money back out sure right they just have to deliver ads inside of tiktok and they already have the clients and they already have the tech and they already have the yeah like whatever it is that you think they need they've already they already have it it's just really expensive scale essentially yeah they just bought more scale if you are amazon even you got to go build an entire monetization system so you're going to pay a lower price because you got to allocate some money to that stuff so like how much you're willing to pay how much it's worth is all based on what you can do with it and there's only so many companies like and the two companies that could do the most of it we pay the most are not going to do it because the government's trying to break them up yeah so like literally they're trying to break up google google has to sell chrome but can have tiktok it's like a very funny outcome it's nuts uh all right on the next one this is a new segment that you're gonna have to get used to in the virtual cast for the next four years i'm just calling it brendan carr is a dummy oh it's a podcast within a podcast uh he's a moron he is uh he is a total political hack job with no conviction and no morals that's my belief brendan if you're listening you can come on decoder and you can try to prove me wrong but good luck buddy he doesn't even have a cool mug like if you're gonna be terrible at this job at least like have a funny mug you know you know uh ajit pai he was a guy he was also a character in the first trump administration he had a governor like he there was a line of depravity that he would not cross fair like you could be like i disagree with this irritatingly verizon captured conservative republican commissioner uh brendan is just a political animal yeah here of two examples this week and they're just going to happen every because the man loves attention uh he is rolling back a rule that allowed people who live in apartment buildings to go get their own internet service so like a lot of apartment buildings uh your landlord would be like i'm just going to sign everybody up for whatever ISP, Verizon, AT &T, Comcast, whatever.

1:32:17And all of you have to use it and you can't go get your own. And because I have collected this all up together, I'm going to get a deal, right? We have some scaling issue. And the ISPs, if you've experienced this, you're like, I don't, what? It's just the same number as everything else, right? You're not getting a deal. You're just being lazy or you're getting a kickback from the ISP and you're not passing any of that on, like, this was my experience in an apartment in Chicago, it was my experience in an apartment in New York. Same. Yeah, several times. A lot of people have had this experience.

1:32:47Yep. Biden, FCC, passes a rule, says you cannot do bulk billing. You have to increase competition and let people sign up for their own ISPs and apartments. Brendan Carr has revoked this rule, and his argument is this will lower prices. Which just on its face doesn't make any sense. It's one of those things that I can't even make the bad faith argument that that makes sense. You know what I mean? Here's a quote. I have ended the FCC's consideration of a Bryden-era proposal that could have increased costs by 50 % the price that some Americans living in apartments pay for internet service. This is regulatory overreach and it would have artificially raised the cost of internet service.

1:33:24There is not a world in which letting people choose their service provider raises their prices. I mean, you could choose the more expensive one. in which you live in an apartment building that's so big, and you have a landlord that's so good that maybe they were negotiating a terrific rate. I don't know anybody who lives in an apartment building like that. Yeah, no. There's one of those in America, and that's the one that Nicar is talking about. Yeah. I'm like, what does this mean by a political animal? He's straight up saying reducing your experience of broadband competition will lower prices.

1:33:58Yeah. It's ridiculous. All right, what was the other one? You said there were two. Pure doublespeak. All right. Well, there's two, actually. There's two other ones. The second one is he's reopened investigations into NBC, ABC, and CBS's broadcast licenses. It was very complicated because the stations have them, not the networks, but SoCo's. And in particular, he opened up the NBC one because he says they violated the equal time rule by having Kamala Harris and Tim Kaine on Saturday Night Live. Oh, right. Do you remember this? This was like last fall that he got all fussy about it. Yep. And so on her way out the door, Biden's FCC chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, just like wipes out these investigations.

1:34:38She's like, these are stupid. I know they're politically motivated. We're not doing this. He's reopened them. Whatever. You can say whatever about two of them. They're dumb. But in particular, the NBC one, he knows that NBC complied with the rule because he has emailed people and said that they have. this is such a brazen lie right he's like they had her on they complied with the rule here's their notice and then immediately had trump on a nascar race the next day because they gave the proper notice and the campaign took advantage of it he know i know he knows it because i've seen the email and he's reopened it to be like i'm investigate like this is just total political theater for an audience of one.

1:35:22It's just yelling. Yeah. And this is dangerous First Amendment territory. I don't like this speech, so I will cost you money is not what you want. Any government, it doesn't matter if you like Kamala Harris, you love Donald Trump, you hate one, you love, it doesn't matter. Unelected bureaucrat saying I will cost this money, I will make this painful because I don't like your political speech is red flashing warning light of free speech problems. And then on top of that, just as we sat down to record, Carr announced investigations into NPR and PBS because he says they are illegally advertising. And what he specifically means is that they do fundraisers.

1:36:01And so his line is taxpayers should not pay for commercial activity. And then, you know, the usual garbage about woke Sesame Street or woke NPR. he's attacking NPR in particular because the CEO of NPR is Catherine Marr who used to run Wikipedia and the conservatives hate Wikipedia right now and so this is just Brendan Carr trying to chill speech right he's like I will defund PBS and NPR because I've constructed a legal reality in which them doing fundraising drives or saying we're supported by viewers like you who call us to give us money is advertising for an agenda right and all of that is transparently nonsense but it maybe doesn't matter because he's in charge of the it doesn't matter in in like the alternate reality of x where this man is trying to build a profile and i'm like if he brendan i know you pay attention to us you have for years you want to come on decoder and explain this like craven political bullshit when you are playing with the absolute fire of the first amendment and claiming you're doing it come on i'll talk to you but it's not gonna it's not gonna be easy because i think this stuff is incredibly transparent yeah i also this is not important in the scheme of things but like if you find yourself against sesame street like in any way business politics like if you're canceling sesame street or you're mad at it like you've done something wrong like just it's not good you shouldn't be against sesame street that's that's it that's all i have to say sesame street is great it's pretty straightforward leave sesame me street alone i will stop it's lightning round we gotta move on yeah oh but i have another super fun uh deeply craven political speech thing do you want to talk about it real fast love it my favorite meta agreed to pay 25 million dollars to settle the the trump suit over suspending his account after january 6th uh which is just like in a sea of mark zuckerberg nakedly sucking up to trump for business reasons this is the simplest one yet like here's a bunch of money please be nice and then there was some reporting that uh trump was basically like i think what he said is like we have to settle this lawsuit before i can like bring you into the into the fold i think he called it the nest into the nest uh and it's just like this this was the price of admission right like this is what happened at the inauguration they all spent a bunch of money to hang out with him and go to parties and he would say nice things and and now meta is just spending another 25 $25 million to make Donald Trump like them because that is worth it.

1:38:35Can I just say why this one is like particularly galling to me? Metta would have definitely won. Right. The theory of this case is that Metta, when it banned Donald Trump, was somehow the government and that violated Trump's First Amendment rights. Right. Which is nonsense. Which is nonsense for the very simple reason that the president at the time met a band Trump from its platform was Trump. Yeah. He was the government. It turns out. Yeah, he was super. Like, you don't even have to get to the like pedantic forum stuff of like the First Amendment is about the government, not slashed. Like, I can do that all day.

1:39:17I was raised in that fire. I'm just saying this one is particularly stupid because you're like meta acting on orders from the government who was me illegally banned. Yeah. It's so stupid. He's lost other versions of this case. But this this is everyone is doing. There's other cases that he would have ABC settled one. Disney ABC settled one. They're just trying to get out of the line of fire because he controls the regulatory agencies. All these companies have decided it's worth the money. And the thing is, they're right, right? Like, I would say pretty transparently, you can make the case that this is just a good use of$25 million for Meta.

1:39:59Yeah, this is a sneeze. Which has a lot of complicated cases going on. There are antitrust questions about Meta. Trump has threatened to throw Mark Zuckerberg in jail a bunch of times. Like, I can see why you write this check. It just sucks. Like, it just sucks so much that this is the state of things right now. I mean, yeah, the FTC is going to try their antitrust case to break up metas coming. The various teen health cases about Instagram causing mental health crises across the country. They're all coming up. You can if you have an angry Trump who's like, break him up. And you can get out of that for twenty five million dollars.

1:40:35Yes. There's a ruthless cynicism here. Yeah. But man, we are I'm we are just playing with fire with the First Amendment right now, like left and right. We are doing weird speech regulations and claiming to do them in the name of free speech. Weird. Super weird. Yeah. All right. We got to end with a happy one. Blue Sky. Yeah. I'm happy Blue Sky's working. I have, I'm all in on Blue Sky. I was. Wait, just the concept of Blue Sky is your last happy? Blue Sky now has 30 million users. I was like, there's news, right? Not just knowledge like I logged into Blue Sky. It's growing. Threads is much bigger.

1:41:11Threads. Massively bigger. It continues to add a million people a day. It has 320 million is the number Mark Zuckerberg gave on the earnings call this week. That's a gigantic number. But Blue Sky is the fun one now. I think we can say pretty certainly that Blue Sky has replaced Twitter as the place that is fun to hang out. And it is true. It's a bunch of liberals being annoying to each other. Super annoying. But in addition to that. This is a group of people that does not love jokes. No. Yeah. At least that's my experience. Yeah. But like, A, I'm psyched that there are multiple versions of this thing that are succeeding.

1:41:47I think it would have been a bummer if we had just replaced Twitter with one thing. The fact that there are a few different cuts at this that are going to work is really exciting. Mark Zuckerberg also made noise about wanting to make the OG Facebook experience come back, which that's not going to happen. Like, sorry, Mark, you ruined that 15 years ago. But like, Blue Sky, man. blue sky i think has hit like escape velocity in that this thing is going to work and it's here people are building stuff on the protocol people are using the app it's coming yeah i don't remember what but they're doing it i would say i i'm a blue sky person my harshest criticism blue sky is for all the promises of that protocol and how open it is uh there's not one other server no there's but there are people building somebody built a cool blue sky app that just looks like instagram and it just takes photo posts like that's cool that's the fediverse baby give me weird ideas about how to look at blue sky i'm in yeah but that's all just like api front-end views listen i want one other place to log in at a time man i want to post maybe that's gonna be you said good news let's end on good news okay good news we're happy the fediverse is uh around

1:43:03I like it I do like it I do love an open source weird pebble hack and I do love a weird band of misfit decentralized social media hackers that's the good stuff hell yeah that's the rebel stuff well you know the bad thing happens that's what we want send us more this is your send us more weird rebel technology right that stuff that's your that's your homework for this week and we'll play the voicemails next week love it All right, that's it. We're way over time. That's the Verge Cast. Bye, Carol.

1:43:38And that's it for the Verge Cast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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