It's time to panic about AI safety

15:16David Pierce:So you don't see this as some potentially fundamental shift in how we think about technology ownership?

15:23Nilay Patel:I think we discover that everyone is buying their Apple Watches and MacBooks this way. I will feel very differently about it. But the reality is most people are already buying their phones this way. Sure. So in that case, in the phone case, it's like, sure, everyone's renting their phones anyway. If we come into a future where everyone is renting their laptop and this rumored kill switch where if you get behind your payments, Apple can shut you down, ever comes into play. Like, yeah, then I will hair on fire. I will be very upset. It just remains to be seen if anybody wants that for real with non-phone devices.

15:56Yeah.

15:57David Pierce:That Apple kill switch thing is so weird, by the way, because the people found the code for a feature like this. Apple then did what it almost never does and give a full throated on the record denial that this is not a thing they're going to do. And, and, but it's like, and so I saw a bunch of posts online that were like, so did you just, you just wrote this code for funsies? Like what, why, why is it here? Why did someone write this code? If this is not a thing you're at least exploring or interested in doing, it's very much like all the weird stuff meta is pushing to smart glasses, but not turning on.

16:30David Pierce:And then like this feature doesn't exist. You're like, well, you, you did write all the code for this feature. What are we doing here?

16:36Nilay Patel:Yeah. And then you gave interviews to, to other journalists being like, yeah, we're going to make facial recognition. Yeah, exactly. This is the new thing. Maybe this is just vibe coding. The power of vibe coding is people are just shipping, shipping features they never intend to use. Like who knows?

16:49David Pierce:You know, they don't even know the agent built this feature.

16:53Nilay Patel:We should do social credit in the United States. Go forth, you know, like, I don't know. Um, but yeah, I'll feel different if it comes to everything else. But I think the status quo in phones is already, and I think it's because your phone already has a pretty big monthly service plan associated with it. Right. That everyone's just really comfortable being like, all right, sure, I'll get a new phone every year. If it's laptops, if it's like Apple TVs, I don't think Apple TVs are in here, but if it's like Apple watches and laptops and everything else, whew, that's gonna feel likey.

17:20David Pierce:Yeah, it is strange. And I think in particular, I was actually thinking about this the other day, that like my laptop of every device that I own, my laptop is the one that feels the most like my computer, right? Like my, the existence of my iPhone is in some combination of like my relationship with Apple and my relationship with Google and my relationship with my carrier. Like it is so dependent on so many other things for basic functionality in a way that like my laptop, and this isn't even actually all that true anymore because the internet exists, right? But like my laptop feels like my computer in a way that any intrusion in that relationship feels weird and different in a way that I think you're right.

18:02David Pierce:Going all the way back to, you know, 20 years ago when we were getting our phones for quote unquote$200. And that was just a lie. And you paid the difference in your bill every month to your wireless carrier. These fees have always been hidden. And there was a minute where it started to get a little more transparent and Apple is just like, no, no, no, no, let's go back to pretending everything is cheap. This is great. It's terrific when we can just hide the price of these things and make it easier for you to walk out of the Apple store.

18:29Nilay Patel:Yeah, I mean, and you might hate this. Like I know a lot of people, they're like, you should buy the phone full price every time and then you just sell it on back market or whatever you trade it in great you can do that in that thankfully that is more possible now than ever before but in the early part of the smartphone market when the iphone first came out apple was just selling it for full price that is that steve ballmer video where it's like 599 with fully with a plan right he's like my phone's 99 and it's like no it's not your phone is the same price but you've hidden it in some fees and it didn't work like apple had to go back to at &t and come up with it's baked into the price of the service right and you know if you just think about like would you prefer to buy a phone up front for 600 and i at t's first plan for the iphone was like 20 bucks a month like it was like a great deal but nobody wanted it and they went back and they lowered the price of the phone and made the price of the plans more expensive and then everyone bought that so there's just something about the the market here that maybe wants some fees hidden.

19:28Nilay Patel:I can't, I don't know. I can't tell you that that's, I love it, but like the people have spoken and they would like their fees to be hidden. Thank you.

19:36David Pierce:Yeah. The one last piece of this I've been thinking a lot about is a thing Emma Roth on our team included in her story about this, which is something like more than half of people who buy something through Klarna miss a payment. It's just like, is this predatory? Not exactly, but it often plays out that way. And so like, be careful out there is all I will say. All right. We have a couple more to get to before we get out of the what is a computer questions here. And we should probably talk about Mark Zuckerberg, who is just loves, loves a weird idea about computers. Nobody does weird computers more than Mark Zuckerberg.

20:09David Pierce:And there are kind of two different moments this week where Mark sort of laid out the way that he thinks about computers going forward. And we're going to split these because one of these is just perfectly aimed at me and one of them is perfectly aimed at you. Does this sound okay?

20:23Nilay Patel:Yeah, that's right. And by perfectly aimed, it means I was alone in the woods screaming at the sky.

20:29David Pierce:Yeah, I punched a hole in my basement ceiling after reading the other one. So we're doing great. Okay, so this is a quote from Mark Zuckerberg on Meta's earnings call this week. He said, soon we will have agents that can work 24-7 on your behalf to help you achieve your goals and improve your life, your health, your relationships, your finances, whatever you want. The first domain that agents have really taken off in is coding. But engineers are more technical and willing to spend time making those agents work. So to build great personal agents, this needs to be a great consumer product that just works out of the box and is easy enough for billions of people to adopt and use.

21:00David Pierce:All like this, this is such a like, Mark, you're almost getting it. It's like you almost understand that actually everything we've built only works for coders. And this, this is the most like Neelai sitting in his basement screaming that people do not yearn for automation.

21:16Nilay Patel:This man has software brain.

21:17David Pierce:Yes.

21:18Nilay Patel:Yes. It's pure software brain. Yes.

21:21David Pierce:And there is this idea that because this works for people who like to write and work with and operate code, we are one small step away from everyone else being able to manage their finances and relationships through agents. is just this idea that has taken hold in Silicon Valley that drives me absolutely insane. Because those two things could not be further apart from each other in what it takes to make them work, in what people want from them. They have no relation to one another. And Mark is out here being like, well, we figured out how to code, so we're this close to fixing your relationships with AI.

21:58David Pierce:And it's like, brother, no, you aren't. You just aren't. They're so far away. But their big idea, Yeah, and this is all around a clear product roadmap from meta that is about agents, right? This company is deep into the idea that this should come to your profiles on various meta platforms. It should be part of how you interact with their computers. It should be part of how you interact with technology. They're going to brute force weird AI agent dating ideas onto the billions of people who use their products every month. And it's just going to be such a disaster.

22:29Nilay Patel:i just want to point out this is a company that cannot meaningfully solve the problem of listing something on facebook marketplace and having 10 billion bots say is this still available have you ever tried to give something away in a pay nothing group like a true disaster is it still available and it's just like robots all day long so you'd solve that problem mark and i'll let you do health next you know like seriously but yes you're right like i read this and i think i the same reaction as you, which is the whole world is not databases, no matter how much it looks like that from your position running a giant platform.

23:05David Pierce:Yeah. You know what's super not a database, by the way, your life, your health, your relationships, your finances. He picked four incredibly not databasey things and is like, oh, it's fine. We'll just we'll just AI agent it.

23:16Nilay Patel:No, that's that's software brain. Your life is contained in a series of databases, right? You're you're just on instagram all day which is basically just a database of photos and videos and you're doing whatever you're communicating that and you're planning trips because no one can resist planning a trip that's all anyone does in their life uh your health is just a series of medical records in a database yep right you could just go down the list and you can see how all of these dudes think the world is a series of databases to be manipulated and for ai to go traverse them and manipulate them and whatever you're going to do.

23:50Nilay Patel:And that will somehow be useful or valuable to people. And it all falls apart when you point out that anyone who's ever run a database knows the database and reality do not actually line up. And it is way easier to change the database than it is to change reality. But if your agents are stuck in the database and they can't make that jump and they can't actually see what's happening in the world, then you're left with nothing. And I think that is generally the experience a lot of people are having with AI as it exists today. It's in a hermetically sealed container of only the context you have given it.

24:24Nilay Patel:And if you don't give it everything, it's going to get real confused about everything all the time. And most people are never going to give it anything, everything. And then if you're Mark Zuckerberg, you have to overcome the fact that people don't trust you or your company with any of their information. And you're never going to get enough personal context to make this thing useful. And so you're right back at software engineers who work at your company doing agentic loops, which, by the way, are verifiable because you can compile the code and test it, which is not something consumers can do in their lives.

24:54Yep.

24:54David Pierce:Which is why they are just going to brute force all of this into Instagram and hope that you funnel the data they need into it more or less by accident. But, Neil, I can offer you a counter theory which runs into the one of these that I want you to really get in your feelings about, which is just what if everybody had great databases? Maybe the problem is we don't all have good enough databases. And if I can get you a better database, I can solve all of your problems forever and ever. You're going to make me read the lawyer part. I'm going to make you read the lawyer clip.

25:21Nilay Patel:So Zuck claiming that soon we'll have agents that work 24-7 on our behalf. That's on the earnings call, right? He's trying to tell investors that all the money he's spending on AI is going to be worth it. Right next to that, he published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling us all to be more optimistic about AI, which is really a push for more open-weight AI and less regulation of AI in the United States because we're scared of China. But to sell that idea, you got to sell a grand vision of the future. Right. And everyone has realized we're going to fire all the white collar workers in America is not a good enough grand vision of the future.

25:54Nilay Patel:And it is in fact, causing data centers to be protested. So everyone is now promising superintelligence will save us all. So here's Mark's thought experiment. And he literally calls it a thought experiment. I'm just going to read you a quote. This is from the Wall Street Journal. is a thought experiment. Imagine only one person had a super intelligent lawyer. He would have an unfair advantage in court, even if his position was wrong in the merits. That would lead to a worse society. But now imagine everyone has a super intelligent lawyer. Justice would be carried out much more fairly and efficiently than it is today.

26:29Nilay Patel:When people are empowered, they naturally check and balance each other and the power of large institutions. Let's run this thought experiment to ground. So let's just take this thought experiment and put it into practice. Mark Zuckerberg is a very wealthy man who operates a very wealthy company. When Meta goes to court, it has the fanciest lawyers you can buy with infinite resources and infinite time because they can employ infinite first year associates to do whatever it is that they want their first year associates to do. I would that's a version of having a super intelligent lawyer I think meta loses the cases right a bunch of like impoverished state attorneys general show up without meta's resources or money or polish or free use of AI tools to write the briefs and they have been consistently winning child safety cases against meta right like in reality the price or intelligence of your lawyer meets the actual justice system meets the actual jury and you cannot predict what will happen and zuck should know this not only because he goes to court with his armies of expensive lawyers but dude runs a court the facebook oversight board exists to adjudicate decisions about content moderation that he thinks are too hard and that thing is slow it is confusing it is made up of like former prime ministers who don't agree zuck doesn't want to pay for it like they get things wrong or in confused ways you have all the you literally run a justice system for content moderation and you're like i'll just throw AI in this and that'll make it more fairer efficient.

28:20Nilay Patel:I don't know, man. Like this, when I see software brain, it always comes out. It's always pointed at the legal system first because the formalism of the legal system, like we're going to use these words to say to this judge at this time, makes people think it's code. Like literally Larry Lessig wrote a very famous book that was like, law is code, code is law. Like the idea that the structures of the software create rules and regulations that map to the law. Like, it's so tempting. And you're like, if I could just make a robot lawyer, everything would be better. And it's like, dude, you take your super intelligent lawyer to your next child safety case and be like, your honor, instead of my fancy law firms, Muse Spark will be defending me today.

29:07Nilay Patel:Let's just see how that goes.

29:10David Pierce:ironically the the thing they keep losing a lot of these cases on is a the merits which mark zuckerberg says have no bearing on anything uh and b what a lot of the opposing lawyers do in these cases is do things like read mark zuckerberg's words back to him in court uh things that he says in emails that are extremely incriminating which is a thing that if you gave muse spark perfect access to all of your things it would also be very well equipped to do I actually think you could make a really great case that having an AI lawyer is like a really easy way to just like nuke your own chances in discovery.

29:45Nilay Patel:I mean, this is the game. There's a lot of companies chasing this dream. But the idea that like two super intelligent robot lawyers would lead to justice being carried out much more fairly and efficiently really implies one that the two robot lawyers do not just enter a version of procedural warfare to delay any outcome forever, which is basically what rich lawyers can do for rich clients.

30:11David Pierce:yeah they discover they can bill more if they don't end the case this is the paperclip problem

30:16Nilay Patel:but it's the infinite yeah you're like i you you want to sue elon musk i'll tie you up in court forever is a real thing rich people say all the time right so like great so you have to somehow make everybody's ai be like what we want is efficient justice good luck yeah that doesn't seem like a thing and then it also implies that the judges will agree that the robot lawyer lawyering should be handled more effectively and efficiently. And judges, by and large, are like, get your AI out of my face. Get out of this courtroom right now. It's like, as a thought experiment, it's like, Mark, have you thought about it?

30:51Nilay Patel:Ridiculous.

30:52David Pierce:Yeah. Can I interest you in robot judges? Which famously would go super well.

30:58Nilay Patel:People love a robot judge. There's academic data suggesting that people believe the regular court system is biased and they don't and they think the robots won't be people love a hidden feat man that's all you can't you can't account for taste yeah all right this is this is a good

31:17David Pierce:segue into some of the what do we do about all of this ai stuff that we should talk about so let's take a break and then we're gonna dig into some ai safety stuff we'll be right back

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34:53David Pierce:All right, we're back. Nilay, I struggle to figure out how to summarize this week in AI safety. But let me just very briefly try. So last week, there was a lot of news about OpenAI hacking Hugging Face because one of its AI agents essentially went rogue, found a way out of a sandbox onto the internet, did a bunch of wild stuff in order to game a benchmark. The details of that are sort of fascinating, but kind of immaterial to where we've actually gone. This has become over the last, I don't know, 10 days or so, sort of an increasingly large conversation. Right next to this has also been a bunch of new AI models coming out of China that appear to be very competitive with the big models coming out of Anthropic and OpenAI and Google.

35:39David Pierce:And a big thing that the Chinese models by and large have going for them is that they are open weight. which is not the same as open source, which Robert Hart has to keep writing on our website like every eight hours, a reminder that open weight and open source are not the same thing. But what this does is give you a lot more access to understanding how the model works, which means you can tune it and tweak it and just understand it better. They also run much cheaper and more efficiently. So these two things are happening, right? Where all of a sudden there is this new, cheaper, more open competition.

36:05David Pierce:And also these closed proprietary models are running rampant. This has caused a panic. Panic might be a little strong. It has caused a lot of people in AI to feel a lot of feelings about AI, all the way up to and including Sam Altman, who has just been out there giving interviews, sort of wringing his hands about what's going on with AI.

36:28Nilay Patel:Even though OpenAI is the center of one very important controversy at the heart of all this.

36:33David Pierce:Yes, very much so. A couple of things that happened this week. last week, Jensen Wong, the CEO of NVIDIA, put out an open letter basically calling for more openness and more sharing among open-weight models in particular in support of them because the U.S. government is trying to crack down on how AI gets released. It became a whole kerfuffle about who did or didn't sign that letter. NVIDIA, Microsoft, and a bunch of other companies then announced an OpenAI Security Alliance, as far as I can tell, sort of meaningless conglomerate of companies designed to say nice things about AI. AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are not part of that.

37:11David Pierce:It's become this whole thing. So I'm not even exactly sure where I want to start, except to say that I had a mild panic attack on this show last week about how big a deal this was. And I feel more justified all the time in thinking that this is a big deal and we need to do something about it. What's your read on kind of how the industry has responded to this over the last week or so?

37:36Nilay Patel:I think there's a lot of competitive posturing going on here. It seems obvious that you need some sort of regulatory framework to at least make the people who make the mistakes pay money. Sure. Right? Like, at the very least, you need to be able to say, well, you're going to be liable for your agents going rogue and hacking to other companies. we can invent that in the courts through some lengthy robot lawyer process like we need some statutes and some frameworks and some like ways to account for this is bad and you should be punished for it and that should provide you some incentive to not do it again which open ai i think the robot judge says yes yeah presumably that's where we need to go now are the people in charge of ai regulation in this country capable of coming up with that plan and then passing it like no No, absolutely not.

38:27Nilay Patel:Like without question, that is not the case. And, you know, if you go back to like the Biden executive order, which was pretty toothless, they railed against things like you have to tell us how capable your models are before they go out. And that was like way too much. Like we're going to lose the space race, guys. And now we're kind of like, what if we shut it all down? And you have like half of the companies on the, we should shut it all down, but we can't do it on our own because no one else will be motivated or incentivized to shut it down if we shut down. So we'll just lose. And then you have, I think this other set of companies are like the open weight Chinese models are here.

39:01Nilay Patel:You can't do anything about it. The only thing we can do is build more data centers and make sure our models are the best so they can protect everything from this universe of road models. And the answer has to be somewhere in the middle, right? This is what a government is for. I find it particularly galling when we hear big tech leaders say things like, you have to trust the democratic process. Right. But like in this case, this is what it's for. It's just our government as presently constituted can't do anything. Right. Like physically locating senators is not a capability of our government right now.

39:39Nilay Patel:Sure isn't. So like, how are you going to get a framework that makes everybody comply and like play along and keep everyone safe, which is fundamentally a collective action problem that laws are meant to solve? You've got to have a person in the government who's like, here's the framework. It's happening. We're going to pass it through Congress. Can you identify that person? Can you identify Congress's ability to pass laws? Can you identify who in this motley cast of characters is going to complain? Who's going to see that as a lock and advantage for them, which I think a bunch of big companies would like.

40:12Nilay Patel:I think Anthropic would love tightly regulated AI in this country because they think they're going to win in that game. So there's just a mess that is meant for politics to solve. And our politics are so broken that I think we're just going to keep having hacking incidents until something goes so wrong that everyone is forced to stop and contend with it.

40:28David Pierce:I think all of that is true, but I also keep thinking about when we did this with social media last decade that you had the same sort of setup, right? You had a run of incredibly powerful companies having an incredibly consistent set of bad things happen on their platform. and one by one they all came out and were basically like, please, dear God, regulate us. We don't want to set the rules because if we set the rules for ourselves and they turn out to be less profitable than the rules somebody else sets, then we'll lose and we can't risk that. So we need some external party to set the rules for everybody so that we all have to play by them because competitively, none of us are incentivized to make good, rational decisions about the world.

41:16David Pierce:That is exactly where we are with AI right now. All these companies are like, we desperately want you to slow us all down because we can't slow ourselves down because it's bad for business. And so you get people out here being like, this regulation is good. Maybe there should be a pause on some of this stuff. Even Sam Altman is like, maybe we should slow some of this stuff down to speed up the process of working on safety and that we should do that more. And there are a lot of external people who are like, we should actually pause all model development until we have built some of these rails. Do you know who's not going to do any of that?

41:50David Pierce:Is any of the companies making models? Because they're all losing money at record pace. There is still a belief that this is going to be some kind of winner-takes-all industry. And they are like, we can't possibly slow down. The only way we can slow down is if someone bigger than us demands that we all do it. And I think to some extent, that is just offloading responsibility onto some other body that you also know is not going to get it done for all the reasons you just said. But it's also like in the world in which we live right now, where the entire economy is tied up in AI, it's all these like circular deals with NVIDIA where when somebody gets worried about the weird deals that NVIDIA is making to invest in everybody else, like the whole economy panics.

42:33David Pierce:And so we're just at this point now where I kind of don't know what the middle ground you just described even looks like. Because the government is like, we need more control, but we also have to beat China. And the AI companies are like, we are moving the fastest, but we also desperately need to be regulated. But if you regulate us, we'll lose to China. It's great. It's just like everyone has tied themselves up in knots that I'm not entirely sure how to unravel here.

43:02Nilay Patel:So let me distinguish this from social media. I agree with you that it looks the same. And in fact, several years ago, when Biden put out the executive order, President Obama was on Decoder and he made the exact same comparison. Oh, really? See, and me and Obama, I always say we have a lot in common. Yeah. You and Barry. And his point was like, we screwed this up. We can't screw it again. And then, you know, we we talked for a while about how it got screwed up. And the difference with social media is that social media is people's speech and writing speech regulations generally not allowed. Now, we'll come to Brendan Carr in a minute.

43:40Nilay Patel:He's trying his hardest. But government speech regulations in this country are generally forbidden. So if you want to write a bunch of content moderation rules for Meta and TikTok and Snap, they're just going to say, well, the First Amendment prohibits you from doing this. You've got to find some other way into it, which is essentially how we've backed into a bunch of kids safety regulations. Right. There's you can make the argument in some way that in order to protect the kids, we must restrict everyone's speech. And maybe that's going to work right now. There's a bunch of data saying that would actually help children or children are being harmed.

44:15Nilay Patel:And we're going to see how this all plays out. These lawsuits are ongoing. But that was the solution. And it took over a decade to land on this being the solution. It also took a whole bunch of kids who got harmed by the ills of social media. So this is not great. AI does not have this problem. There's no First Amendment protection for code hacking other systems autonomously. It just doesn't exist. So in the social media era, Facebook would put billboards all over DC. They would put up ads at the top of Politico being like, we welcome regulation. And I would just always look at that and be like, but you know they can't write any.

44:52right?

44:53Nilay Patel:Like asterisk, but the first amendment will keep you from ever doing it. Like we're just going to pay your bills and you're going to say Facebook is working with us, but we know the truth. In this case, there's no first amendment protecting the output of an AI system or protecting the things an AI system does. And we are now very much in a place where the computers are doing things and who should have liability for the things that computers do and whether all of that stuff should be subject to export controls or whether you can classify some of it as weapons and put it under that. There's a whole universe of stuff you can do that is no longer blocked by the First Amendment because we're not really talking about people's speech.

45:31Nilay Patel:Maybe in some cases we are, but the AI system is doing things, like taking actions. That's not speech that you have to worry about the First Amendment. So I think there's a critical difference here. I just don't think that the Trump administration, it is presently composed, or our Congress, it is presently composed, can come up with a bunch of ideas that they then have to muscle through. because they will have to muscle through whatever framework they put into place. And there's enough division and enough money and enough competitive fury and enough China phobia all in the mix here that the political will to muscle through a framework almost certainly dies immediately.

46:11Nilay Patel:And I think that's really bad. You talk about trusting the democratic process. That's the pure failure of an actual democratic process because you look around and AI is still polling bad. We have a bunch of great coverage on the site this week of protests at data centers and how bipartisan those protests are. Gabby Del Valle was in Florida at a very MAGA-tinged data center protest. Not even tinged, just like full MAGA data center protest. Yeah, I was going to say. Yeah. There's a lot going on here that democracy should actually take a hold of and our representative government should do something about it.

46:44Nilay Patel:And I think what's going to happen is it's just going to accelerate and get crazier and crazier until the midterms. And then a bunch of people would be elected or not. And those people, I think they will come into office on the back of a political groundswell around AI, and they will almost certainly have to do something.

47:04David Pierce:Maybe. But then you run the very real risk of that something being essentially tanking the economy. There's just walls everywhere you look, right? And I think, to your point about the kids thing, I'm increasingly convinced this is why everybody uses China. Like we talk all the time about the only way to get things done in the United States is either to save kids or fight China. It's like those are the only two bipartisan beliefs in the government right now. Yeah. And because they can't really talk about kids with AI, although there's some of that happening, they just yell about China. And one of my favorite things is every time we cover this, we talked about it on the Vergecast last week.

47:37David Pierce:We talked about it all week. Robert Hart's been writing some really great stuff for us. I think he's going to be on the show next week talking about some of this stuff, too. over and over the response from our commenters in our audience is what does it really mean if China wins in AI? And there's like there are people who would love to tell you all of the things that happen if China beats us to drug discovery and all these things and like giant disasters but I think fundamentally this is a weird race that people don't totally understand or believe in at all levels and so you get the government yelling about China and you get the AI companies yelling about China for a completely different reason.

48:16David Pierce:They're not worried about national defense. They're worried about the fact that Chinese companies are going to undercut their costs and destroy their IPOs. Like, everybody's mad at China, not for the same reason, but just because it's a really useful boogeyman whenever you want to get your way with AI. And it's working, and it will continue to work, I think.

48:33Nilay Patel:Yeah, I mean, I think a really good exercise here is just going on the list and being like, what do all these companies and people think winning in AI looks like? Demis Asabas believes we're in the foothills of the singularity. Is that winning an AI? Is it the singularity? And then we'll never know what happened before, you know?

48:50David Pierce:Sam Altman said this week that he, I think he said something along the lines of, we're on the verge of having a genie that can grant any wish, which is like the most you can just say things of anything that has happened to me this year.

49:03Nilay Patel:That is the purest software brain I've ever heard in my entire life. Unbelievable stuff. You can just talk to the computer and things will start happening. It's like, well, is everything else connected to the computer? Insane. I would love a robot genie that could grant everybody. This will do it. Okay, is that winning an AI? I guess. You know, and Microsoft will call it super intelligence, but they won't say AGI. Like, literally winning an AI is what? And it is a useful exercise to just go through and be like, all of these companies at the top are not really talking about economic winning. They're talking about getting to AGI or whatever first.

49:39Nilay Patel:And then something is going to happen that's going to rule. What is it? Is it Mark Zuckerberg does her dating for you? You tell me what that is. And usually the fallbacks are, yeah, we're going to do drug discovery. Yep. Science will accelerate in whatever way it's accelerating. But it never comes back to if China starts doing those things first, there's some reason why we will never do them. I mean, it's a different, it's a different comparison, but I mean, China was also the reason that we had to overbuild 5g, right? We had to win the race to 5g. And it was always like, and what will happen if we don't, will all the people in Kansas move to Shenzhen?

50:20Nilay Patel:Cause they've got great 5g there. Like what, what do we think is happening that is not already happening because the 5g networks don't exist. And I never got a good answer to that question. I asked everybody, we should start maybe in our reporting, spending more time being like, tell me what winning an AI is and what happens if we lose.

50:36David Pierce:It's a good one. I like it. All right. Before we get to the lightning round, I am curious how you feel about the OpenAI hugging face thing in particular. They've done a bunch of new excavation of what happened. There's some really interesting technical deep dives on how all of this happened, including the discovery that one of the things OpenAI's agent did was go and find login credentials to other services. They haven't named which ones, but for other services where just usernames and passwords were apparently available on the web, which is cool and fun, and went and hacked into services that way.

51:07David Pierce:This brings a whole new weird angle to all of the data breaches everywhere that all of a sudden you're going to allow AI agents into every service because they can just get in the front door now. That's wild. But I think what I've been trying to figure out is whether the OpenAI Hugging Face thing starts a really interesting, broader conversation about AI safety, or if there's something about that particular thing that is going to end up being really important here. Do you think this comes back on OpenAI in any kind of important way that it is the sort of instigating factor for this scary thing that everybody's talking about?

51:40Nilay Patel:I think the idea that these companies need really intense, both safety guardrails and research guardrails, and there needs to be a punishment if you screw up, will come back on OpenAI. This will be the poster child for that thing. There was reporting last week that OpenAI hadn't even noticed this for several weeks. Yeah. And then there's further reporting this week that there's safeguards in the testing environment. We're insufficient to begin with, which is how the model got out. Like it wasn't supposed to get out.

52:03David Pierce:If you built a sandbox that something can use to access the internet, you built a bad sandbox. Like it's very simple. Build better sandboxes.

52:10Nilay Patel:I mean, that's straightforward. Like you can just be like you were negligent. Now you have to pay money. And I think you can apply a bunch of existing laws and frameworks to this situation in that way. But this will be the poster child of some subcommittee hearing where we draft new regulation to punish out of control AIs and pin the fault on the company that makes the AI. And there's going to be a lot of arguments on that because the AI is not deterministic and the gargoyles can fail and they can do all kinds of stuff that you wouldn't predict. But someone has to be at fault and it is almost certainly an after the companies that make and deploy the AI systems.

52:46Nilay Patel:And we can't agree on that. We can't get there. And this incident can't be the catalyst to do it. I'm not sure what worse thing has to actually happen.

52:56David Pierce:Yeah, I mean, this is a ultimately sort of low stakes thing, which all of these, everyone involved has liked to remind everybody that this is fundamentally about a benchmark test and it had very little low stakes for what actually happened. But you change a couple of the nouns around in this story and you have actually an incredibly high stakes problem. And there is nothing preventing it from being an equally high stakes, disastrous problem. So I think you're right. And I think one of the reasons we've seen OpenAI and Hugging Face go out of their way to be like, we're taking this seriously, but it really wasn't that big a deal, is to avoid exactly the thing that you're describing.

53:33David Pierce:And I think it'll be interesting to see if that gambit works or if this conversation comes for them in that way.

53:39Nilay Patel:Yeah, I just, I think if you sketch this out all the way, right, if when I was a precocious eighth grader, if I had access to these tools, like my school would not be safe. Sure. Right, like it wasn't safe when we were running on Emacs, those little like molar-shaped Macs that were running. what OS 8 like good old days sure like I I caused a lot of problems in that school the big trick was to install the key logger but change the extension icon so it looks like a normal extension

54:15David Pierce:that's pretty good actually I like that

54:17Nilay Patel:don't I should be in jail don't feel like me kids what are we gonna do are we gonna have a bunch of kids trying to change their grades burning tokens in their in their like bedrooms at home while the School IT administrators burning tokens on the other side, all to accomplish nothing. Like, this can't be the outcome. I mean, it's a great outcome if you're an AI company because everyone's just burning tokens to accomplish nothing. But that can't be the endpoint of computer security is everyone is constantly using compute to create and defend attacks. And it's just like where we're headed, inextricably.

54:49Nilay Patel:And I'm saying this because I would have done it. Burn the power grid. Without question, I would have done it. Yeah.

54:54David Pierce:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, listen, the world is more filled with Nilay Patel than anyone's willing to admit. You know what I mean? It's a real problem we're all having. All right, we should get to the lightning round. But first, we're going to take a break and then it's time to talk about our man, Brendan Carr. He did it again. We'll be right back.

55:14Nilay Patel:Support for the show comes from MongoDB. AI-assisted and agentic coding can help you build faster than ever. But if your data layer is a bottleneck, what's the point? MongoDB actually gets out of your way. MongoDB is a unified AI-ready data platform that empowers you to build scalable, generative AI applications. It eliminates the need for separate, specialized vector databases by combining a flexible document model natively with semantic vector search, full-text search, and real-time operational data. Instead of wrestling with rigid schemas or translating data formats, MongoDB's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak.

55:56Nilay Patel:Plus, MongoDB gives you the flexibility to ship at the speed of AI. The ACID compliance lets you sleep soundly at night and scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. Developers have a word for that kind of reliability. Actually, five words. It's a great freaking database. Start building at mongodb.com slash AI. What's the best way to think about age in politics?

56:23David Pierce:You don't want to be ageist, right? I do think term limits are more important than age limits. Some old people are really sharp. Bernie Sanders is popping off and he's like, what, 2000? I'm so fed up with the fact that most of our lawmakers are so old.

56:40Nilay Patel:The gerontocracy feels like a huge problem in American politics. We're now in our third oldest Congress in history. So why won't the boomers retire? I gave serious consideration last year to not run again. I asked 17-term Congressman Jim Clyburn that exact question. And I kept being asked, how do you feel? Clyburn, who turned 86 just this week, is running for re-election in South Carolina again. And I kept answering, I feel fine. And they say, well, then why would you quit? This week on America Actually, Congressman Clyburn makes the case for experience and the establishment.

57:24David Pierce:If you'll allow it, I'm going to throw some numbers at you. According to some recent polling from the good people at Pew, about half of Americans now use AI chatbots for something in their lives, whether it's work or personal. That's a dramatic increase from just two years ago when it was more like 30 % of the country.

57:44Nilay Patel:But here's the funny thing. Only 16 % of the country thinks AI will have a positive impact on society.

57:51David Pierce:Two-thirds of Americans think AI technology is advancing too quickly. And most Americans, especially young Americans, don't trust AI nor the people in charge of it. And all of this polling was done before an open AI agent went rogue and hacked another company. On Today Explained from Vox, isn't that the thing science fiction warned us about for all those years?

58:16Nilay Patel:Yes. And what can we do about it?

58:26David Pierce:All right, we're back. It's time now for the lightning round, beginning with America's favorite podcast within a podcast. He did it again, folks. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

58:56Nilay Patel:That's good. That's good.

58:59David Pierce:He's just so dumb.

59:01Nilay Patel:Yeah. It's fabulous. That is right up my alley. Can I tell you what that makes me think of?

59:06David Pierce:What's that? This is very like early 2000s MTV. That starts playing and like Neelai, your game show host, comes bounding out onto the stage and like high-fiving everybody in the audience. And then he's like, what's up, everybody? It's Neelai. Welcome back. That's that theme song. I love it.

59:24Nilay Patel:That's good. I caught a little like, you know, there's some lounge punk in there. I'll take it. There's the cramps are in there somewhere. I'll take it.

59:32David Pierce:Yeah. That theme is by Ricky Hopper. Thank you, Ricky. It's good stuff. It is good stuff. All right, what do you do this week, Neeline?

59:39Nilay Patel:By the way, just to say it out loud, because it makes me laugh every time I say it, the best cramped song is called Bikini Girls with Machine Guns.

59:47Nilay Patel:That's very good. It's a classic of the genre. I don't know what else to say about it. All right, Brendan. Brendan is getting himself in real trouble across the board by actually following through with his threats to speech. So Brendan, you know, if you're keeping track of wins and losses, Brendan was winning because he would make these like proclamations that he was going to punish speech and then he would chill speech, which is the whole point of not allowing government speech regulations. It doesn't matter if you do them. If you have government officials fulminating that they will punish you for speech, you will chill the speech.

1:00:27Nilay Patel:People just won't say things because they're afraid of being punished.

1:00:30David Pierce:Yeah, he wasn't winning like in court, but he was winning in sort of a mafia intimidation.

1:00:35Nilay Patel:Yeah, he was doing the bad thing. Yeah, he was issuing the vague threats and the speech was going away. And there's evidence of this, right? ABC wasn't booking congressional candidates on their shows because of the equal time rule. He was threatening that. But he's actually doing it with Disney. Right. With with he's putting up ABC stations for license review early, breaking with years and years of tradition. and he's saying they're not acting in the public interest all the way to, uh, you didn't run the president's speech in prime time. Obviously every time the president's speech is public interest, our nation's private broadcasters must carry this.

1:01:10Nilay Patel:That's on public interest. This is a reason to pull your license. I, I feel like that is very dumb and no judge in America is going to fall for that, but ABC has to spend the money, lawyer up, go to court and do it. Now here's the problem with actually doing the speech regulation. No one likes them. No one likes them. Do you know who hates speech regulations the most? Conservatives. When you body up against the First Amendment in this specific way and you do government speech regulations, it's not just a bunch of unhinged liberals. It's everyone. And in particular, conservative groups are filing letters.

1:01:51David Pierce:Conservatives who, by the way, have spent, basically the entirety of the internet era, screaming about how they're being censored on the internet. Yeah. Like, a lot of feelings about free speech coming from just as far right as you could possibly go on the political spectrum.

1:02:04Nilay Patel:So a bunch of conservative groups, including the Center for Individual Freedom, Citizens Against Government Waste, and Americans for Tax Reform, wrote a letter to Carr last week, urging the chairman to avoid setting a precedent that could hurt conservatives in the future, because if you start allowing government speech regulations, the other side will use them, which is a thing that everybody has known since the beginning right right if you if you give the government new powers it won't just be your team that uses them inevitably the other team will come into power and then the other team will use them to punish you which is a great reason to not have government speech regulations and in fact the reason why it is the first amendment to the united states the literal first one congress shall make no law respecting premium speech it's also a

1:02:48David Pierce:good. It's a real like mutually assured destruction thing that it's like if you go too stupid, eventually you'll lose an election and they'll do the stupid right back at you.

1:02:56Nilay Patel:Yep. So here is the letter, which was published by Fox News Digital. Always a good time here on Brendan Carr's the Dummy when Neil Apatow and Rupert Murdoch are on the same team. But here's the letter. First, they start by sucking up to Brendan. For media and broadband to the space economy, your deregulatory record is helping unleash investment and growth. And we are grateful for your leadership. Getting government out of the way, it's in that same spirit we respectfully urge the FCC to preserve the well-established, routine, predictable, and presumptive nature of broadcast license renewal. We ask the FCC avoid steps that would transform renewal from the largely ministerial process Congress designed into a discretionary checkpoint that would invite the politicization that conservatives, free market advocates, and others have long condemned.

1:03:38Nilay Patel:Our concern is that establishing precedent in non-routine renewal creates a powerful level that future FCCs, including ones hostile to conservatives, religious or otherwise, if they are broadcast, would be all too willing to pull. This is the argument. You start doing governance future regulations, someone else will start doing governance future regulations. This comes on the heels of a bunch of former FCC officials represented by two lawyers on wildly different sides of the spectrum calling the early broadcast license renewal process an assault on free speech. and they also say it's a broader pattern in a campaign to punish speech disfavored by the Trump administration.

1:04:13Nilay Patel:This is over a dozen bipartisan former FCC officials, again, represented on just the wild bipartisan nature of thinking Brendan Carr is a dummy cannot be overstated. We all agree on a few things here in America. One, the truck should ever get ever bigger and jump over more things. Two, nobody likes data center. And three, Brendan Carr is a dummy. Like it's just bipartisan that we should not have speech regulation in this country. And And Brendan, I think he has gone from fulminating and sort of winning by saying he'll punish you. But the rubber is going to hit the road here. And when it does, when this goes to court, I think you're going to see a lot of judges be like, no, this straight up looks like you're punishing speech because the president told you to.

1:04:59Nilay Patel:And something will fall apart. Now, I can be wrong. I have no idea what the courts are going to do. I have not deployed a super intelligent robot lawyer to fight these battles on our nation's behalf. Not yet. Who knows what's going to happen as I keep saying that the courts are not deterministic or predictable. But I do think I know that when this comes to a head, Disney is going to be a much more favorable position. Mickey Mouse is going to say the government is trampling my free speech. And that's going to come out faster and farther than Brendan saying, you must carry the president's speeches or I'll punish you.

1:05:39David Pierce:So, OK, my only pushback on this, it would be that Brendan seems in many cases to be very happy on an island by himself as long as President Trump is a fan. That's like, sure, through the whole Jimmy Kimmel thing, he's basically like, I don't care what you guys think. Trump doesn't think Kimmel's funny, so I'm going to keep picking this fight. But I guess what you're saying is maybe he is going to run this stupid fight one tick too far, and he's actually going to get punched in the teeth for it.

1:06:10Nilay Patel:It depends on what you think the goal is. And if your goal is to just make people stop saying things you don't like, he was winning. I really think that his war on free speech in America was notching wins. People were not, the speech was chilled. People were not saying things. They were afraid to talk. People criticizing Charlie Kirk were getting fired. This is all of peace, right? Yep. Okay. If that's the goal, then he should know he's winning and he should stop. If your goal is to test the ultimate power of the executive branch of this country and to push it to the max, you have to keep going.

1:06:48Nilay Patel:Because you need someone to say you actually have the power to punish speech. You actually have the power to yank broadcast licenses. And if you actually have the power to yank broadcast licenses, you can take that next step and say, well, cell phones run on the internet on public spectrum. We can regulate cell phones. You can get there. I know that that is Carr's goal because he wrote the chapter on telecom regulation and project 2025, and he just said it out loud. So if the goal was just to chill the speech, he should have stopped. If the goal was to maximize power in the executive branch and actually get authority to regulate content on the internet, well, you got to keep going.

1:07:28Nilay Patel:Yeah. And I do think that's the goal. And it's of a pattern with the entire Trump administration, right? They're all just like in the library at Hogwarts, like finding ancient spells and seeing if they work. And that is the approach to the latent power of the administration. Like, does this statue let me do tariffs? No. What about this one? And we're just going to see what happens. And that's very much Carr's approach to telecom regulation, and particularly speech. Anyway, Brandon, if you want to come on the show or Decoder or anywhere, I'll read you Project 2025. It's available. And you can tell me if you're doing what it says.

1:08:04Nilay Patel:You wrote it, so you should know. But I welcome the conversation as long as speech in this country is still legal. That's been Brandon Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

1:08:23David Pierce:it's beautiful see it was like it was it was a we an upper in and a downer out now we're level again it's like it's like it never happened this is great um okay i have three lightning round items for you today all of which relate to what i would call deep video silliness uh the first one is largely just a shout out to Jess Weatherbed on our team who wrote my favorite headline that I've seen on The Verge in quite some time, which is Facebook considers giving up and becoming TikTok. It's just, it's perfect. This comes from a blog post that Tom Allison, who is the head of Facebook, wrote that includes this sentence.

1:08:59David Pierce:So later this year, we'll begin testing a re-imagined experience that puts a subset of people who we think want more video on Facebook into full screen video the moment they open the app. uh facebook has realized facebook is awful and at the same time has realized people watch reels do people like reels debatable people watch them they sure they sure super do you can accident

1:09:25Nilay Patel:your way into scrolling through reels in a completely arbitrary and frankly insulting way

1:09:31David Pierce:like all the time yep also on meta's earnings they talked about how instagram uh engagement continues to climb really, really fast. That is all about Reels. Like, I cannot overstate the extent to which Reels is the primary product of meta at this point in terms of like actual user facing product. It is basically a Reels company at this point. So in that sense, it sort of leads Facebook to say, well, marketplaces over here, we're doing weird stuff with groups. Nobody's on the newsfeed anymore except for weird AI slop and insane political nonsense Anyway, what if we just do reels? It's just the reels company.

1:10:12David Pierce:We're just putting it forward, literally giving up and becoming TikTok. Like I wrote I wrote a thing for the site last week about how vertical video has has won in sort of unprecedented ways, which is going to be a theme of my next lightning round. spoiler alert but this would be i think the true final nail in that coffin right like we we've talked a lot about is is text-based sort of town square social media over this would be one big point in the column of yeah it's over it's just video now all right wait i i can i can argue

1:10:43Nilay Patel:against that in one way okay the best part of social video platforms is the comments which are often not videos. Agreed. All we're really talking about is the era of the prime unit of social being text might be at an end, but the part where there's massive amounts of comments and everyone is still participating in text, that is not dwindled. It's only gone up. Yeah.

1:11:09David Pierce:I mean, yeah, social networking, quote unquote, is now videos with comment sections. Yes. That is what it has been. Like in every real way, that is what it has already become. And I think to an extent, Facebook making this change would be late, almost like a recognition of what the world actually is rather than holding on to this idea of what Facebook was supposed to once be. But do you remember not that long ago when Mark Zuckerberg was like, we need to bring friends and family back to Facebook. We're going to do the OG Facebook again. Lies. We're doing video.

1:11:39Nilay Patel:I cannot wait for my local parents groups from the school to be video first. It's coming, dude. It's going to be great. Here's how I know this is a real problem for Meta. And forgive me because I'm always looking at ads because I'm always thinking about the money. But I'm always like the internet is just ads, right? The whole social internet is just a big advertising machine and Meta is at the heart of that machine. The video products and I think the ad products in the blue app, the Facebook app, they're under such pressure that they're putting crappy text ads over the videos in Facebook. you would never expect this or accept this on instagram or tiktok or youtube shorts but if you open one of those videos you just see the chum box ad sitting over the bottom of it that's just like here's an ad for some other crap like here's one vegetable you shouldn't eat and it's like something's wrong right when we're making this money we've either over monetized the experience or driving people away or the whole thing is not making enough money and we're desperate for cash so we've added chumbox ads to the social videos which are just going to make people flee and go to instagram yeah and then the pressure to turn facebook ever more and instagram will just increase and we're just going to keep doing this i don't know man like i in many ways zucks focus on the metaverse and then now his ai glasses and building super lawyers he's lost sight of his products yeah oh yeah like in huge and important ways and i you just look at that chumbox ad and you're like oh this is not good like something is in decline here these these ads are a symptom of decline yep agreed um all right what's your next one um sadly for you i have a ramageddon update it just keeps coming brother what can't i afford now uh i'm just going to read you the list okay uh qualcomm is going to raise its phone ship prices starting september one the rumor is that they will go up by double digit percentages these are significant that makes everything more like

1:13:40David Pierce:immediately everything more expensive everything's gonna get more expensive

1:13:43Nilay Patel:Samsung smartphone business post its first ever loss but its ram business saw profits were 1300 good lord uh and Samsung is finding ways to make more ram for apple so apple doesn't go elsewhere the framework laptop 13 pro that price went up by like 800 right we already talked about this and the configurations are all crazy.

1:14:07David Pierce:I was so annoyed, by the way. Antonio DiBenedetto put up his review this week. I really desperately hoped that thing was going to be pretty mediocre. And it's like, oh, okay, this is actually not the Windows laptop I've been waiting for forever. Turns out it is exactly the Windows laptop we've all been waiting for forever, except it costs$1 million.

1:14:25Nilay Patel:Yeah.

1:14:26David Pierce:It's awful.

1:14:27Nilay Patel:And the comments in that piece are so mad. I think Sean published it basically just like a cry for help is a headline. It's like, I love this laptop, but it's already too expensive because the stupid RAM situation.

1:14:38David Pierce:Yeah.

1:14:39Nilay Patel:And then Logitech basically is like, we're not going to make a handheld because of RAM again. Like, we're done. We're out. And so your prediction that we're going to stop seeing entire classes of gadgets every day is coming true.

1:14:52David Pierce:Man, that Qualcomm thing is worrying. Not surprising, but worrying. Yeah. Because it's like if we're bleeding out of we can't just make this particular kind of memory to actually most other kinds of component supply is going to be constrained as everyone shifts all of their everything to building that kind of stuff that these data centers are looking for. This could cascade in some pretty ugly ways.

1:15:19Nilay Patel:Yeah. And again, we've had a lot of politics on this episode of the Vergecast, but I'll just point out, I don't think the AI companies are making a good enough case for what they will give to people to account for the cost. And some of the cost is you can't build a gaming PC. Some of the cost is Logitech is canceling products. Some of the cost is I think everything with a smartphone ship from Qualcomm is about to get more expensive. And I think regular consumers can see all this stuff is getting more expensive. It's already a time of great anxiety. And it's getting expensive because of that data center over there in their community that they hate.

1:15:54Nilay Patel:No one has made this connection in a way that allows them to go contend with it. We're still talking about drug discovery. But you're not talking about, well, you can't play video games anymore. Right.

1:16:05David Pierce:And what's funny is I think people at a mass level have made that connection you're describing. Oh, without a doubt, yeah. between my, like, no one is mad at Framework for the fact that its computer got more expensive. Yeah. No one. Everyone is mad at the AI companies for the fact that Framework got more expensive. And I think that's not like a perfectly accurate corollary, but it's close enough that everyone is pointing their anger in the correct directions. And especially when the juice is not worth the squeeze on the other side. And so I think like this, the things that these AI companies are being held responsible for and the ways in which data centers in particular are becoming the totem of all of that anger is only going to increase as every single one of these things keeps happening.

1:16:54David Pierce:Yeah. And I don't think the I think you're right that the AI companies have not yet figured out how aggressively all of that is coming for them and how quickly it's growing.

1:17:03Nilay Patel:Yeah. I mean, these are just real consumer outcomes. You can't buy a computer. the iPhone will be$10 million. Okay. Why? Oh, because of the data center I hate? Yep. What's it going to do for me? And the answer is like, have you thought about super intelligent lawyers battling it out? That doesn't seem cool.

1:17:25David Pierce:Okay, my next one. You just immediately made me think, God, I would watch an HBO show of super intelligent lawyers battling it out. It's actually called Suits, by the way, and it's Neal's favorite show on television. No! Anyway, my next one is, it's about vertical video, which is now coming to HBO Max. Because what is a streaming service without a vertical video feed at this point? Netflix has one. Paramount Plus has one. Disney Plus has one. They all call it clips. Sure. Which I'm fine with. HBO Max decided to call it shorts, which is rude and unhelpful, and I do not appreciate it. but um in hbo max the idea is essentially that it's it's a it's a feed of clips and trailers and like behind the scenes content and stuff and if you watch something that you like you can press a button and immediately go actually watch that title on hbo max this to me is fascinating because just that description that i'm sorry i'm sorry it's actually called hbo max shorts it's hbo max shorts not just shorts max shorts it's called hbo max shorts do you know what max shorts are called neil they're called pants this is hbo pants is what this is called i didn't realize it was the formal name was hbo max shorts it's it's all very upsetting it's that's very good there was a time not that long ago one name change ago this product would have just been called max shorts yeah this is this is we almost got max shorts it's good it's good stuff almost but anyway so hbo pants uh this is this is a thing that in like an abstract way makes a lot of sense, right?

1:19:02David Pierce:You're like, okay, we're going to give you a feed of all the stuff you're watching on all these social platforms anyway. We're going to give you all the clips. We're going to give you all the trailers. And if you are intrigued, we have solved the discovery problem because you can press a button and go actually watch the thing that we're showing you the clip from. Neel, I can go find the episode of Suits that this clip comes from. Everybody wins. My question for you, Neel, is have you ever once one time in your whole life engaged with one of these vertical feeds in one of these streaming apps no me neither i like this is the thing but i might maybe there is some huge behavior that i'm not aware of but my my interest in watching clips from netflix shows is so much larger than the number of times i'm willing to go to netflix and then watch clips of netflix shows that is just when i go to netflix i would like to watch netflix do you know what i mean no wait i

1:19:50Nilay Patel:can no i disagree all of these platforms have massive discovery problems right totally And the fact that people are watching the clips on TikTok, like, I think you and I have both at this point watched all of A Few Good Men on TikTok in clips. Many times. I don't know why that keeps happening to me. At this point, I'm basically halfway through a full Game of Thrones rewatch on TikTok. Why is that happening to me? And I am of the opinion that HBO Max is pirating its own content onto TikTok to promote what amounts to a pretty lackluster season of House of the Dragons. They're like, would you just like to watch regular Game of Thrones?

1:20:23Nilay Patel:Like, here it is. Here's random scenes from that. Who knows how this promotional cycle works? This is just the official version of that. Yeah. And it does. It makes intellectual sense. Can I read you their description of how this works? Oh, God. Sure. It's so bananas. Okay. The clips for this feature are powered by an AI tool built in-house, which helps human editors select and verticalize content by using machine learning algorithms that utilize scene-level metadata to comb through thousands of hours of titles and suggest the most compelling high-impact scenes for discovery.

1:20:56David Pierce:You already lost me at vertical lies, but keep going.

1:20:59Nilay Patel:Scene-level metadata. What is scene-level metadata that tells you if something is the most compelling high-impact scene? Is it literally metadata? It's like, this scene rules. Yes. Is there fighting? Robots in this one.

1:21:13David Pierce:Yeah. What? This scene has two swords.

1:21:19Nilay Patel:This scene has five swords. But you can do that with an AI, right? Sure. Is it just the captions? Is it just like literally like it says Tom Cruise? Tom Cruise talking now.

1:21:33David Pierce:It's measuring the decibels of Tom Cruise's voice. The louder it gets, the more they're like.

1:21:37Nilay Patel:I looked at scene level metadata and I was like, what is that? All right. So they're going to have machine learning algorithms utilize scene level metadata to suggest the most compelling high impact scenes for discovery. Once the tool suggested those clips, HBO Max editors will decide which best represent the stories viewer love and capture jaw-dropping moments, pivotal pot twists, and visually stunning sequences. So we can't just trust the AI. The AI is going to use scene-level metadata to make a list of the stories viewers love and jaw-dropping moments. And then humans will be like, the robot's got it right or wrong.

1:22:19Nilay Patel:and then those clips will then be rendered in a new vertical video experience to ensure seamless playback uh-huh okay this is the most over complicated thing i've ever heard i'm like are you guys watching what's working on tiktok they're just cutting the whole movie into two

1:22:39David Pierce:minute increments like and then showing you a random one and then you're fine it turns out it

1:22:44Nilay Patel:It's like, why are you doing this in the hardest way possible?

1:22:48David Pierce:Seriously.

1:22:49Nilay Patel:If you work at WD Disco and you can tell us what scene level metadata the machine learning algorithms are using, I would love to know.

1:23:00David Pierce:I also, I'm just now reading this as you're reading it. It says, yeah, these clips are then rendered in a new vertical video experience to ensure seamless playback. What? a new vertical video experience is just vertical and seem like we've been doing seamless playback for some time is this not a video streaming application it's very it's very good the whole

1:23:22Nilay Patel:thing is like it's it's ai slop in like a different way like they needed to dress up we're gonna cut the movies into thousands of little pieces and stream them like tiktok in our app like that's all it needed to say but we had to back our way into a human ai hybrid of scene level metadata. Again, if you can tell me what it is, I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation that isn't just we're reading the captions.

1:23:44David Pierce:No, I bet it's what you think. I bet it's like this is where everyone is yelling. Yeah. We'll do that. Also, these companies should have something like perfect data about what people watch and when they tune in and when they tune out. And they're all like obsessed with how data driven they are. This seems like information they should all already have about this.

1:24:02Nilay Patel:Maybe. Or you could just go on TikTok and be like, what parts of our movies are stolen the most and just do that.

1:24:08David Pierce:That's also very true. All right. What's your next one?

1:24:10Nilay Patel:I got a good one around the set. Some good news for once, David. Okay. The Ferrari Luce has reported already hit its sales target. People love it. Okay. I saw a video of one driving and I was like, God damn, that is the ugliest car in the world. I have a really important follow-up question. Yeah. What was the Ferrari Luce's sales target?

1:24:27David Pierce:Was it two?

1:24:29Nilay Patel:It was just under 500. Which for Ferrari, it's a number. I was just about to say, actually, is that a lot or a little Ferrari? It's not a lot, but it's also a little. Like, you know, the game with Ferrari, there's like a reason crypto bros all have Lambos and not Ferraris. Like, it's very hard to buy a Ferrari. And in order to get a good Ferrari, you often have to buy bad Ferraris.

1:24:53David Pierce:Right. You can't just go to the Ferrari dealership and buy a Ferrari.

1:24:56Nilay Patel:Yeah, they don't like that.

1:24:57David Pierce:You have to, like, know a guy who knows a guy.

1:24:59Nilay Patel:I mean, you can buy bad Ferraris, but nobody wants the bad Ferraris. Okay. So to get an allocation of like a 12 cylindry or whatever, you have to like buy some like five bad Ferraris. And I think the Luce, particularly in China, is like, yeah, there's like rich people in China are like, yeah, whatever. Like, give me give me one of those things. I'll keep it. But I want a good one, too. And Ferrari insists they're not playing this allocation game with the Luce. But like every car YouTuber is like, of course they are.

1:25:25David Pierce:We'll see. I love that. Isn't this the most expensive Ferrari, too? Yes. They're like, OK, so you're like, I'm a super rich guy. I'm like, I'm going to buy a Luce and then I'm just going to sort of push it off a boat. And then you're going to allow me to buy the much cheaper Ferrari I actually want. Yes. Love this. Yes. If I'm Ferrari, I'm like, hey, just write me a check for a million dollars and everything will be fine.

1:25:48Nilay Patel:No, again, they don't want your money. What they sell is exclusivity in a row. Whereas like Lamborghini is like, how many do you want? Do you want lime green? This one's lime green, like whatever it is. So, Financial Times says Ferrari is trying to reach a new generation of wealthy buyers, particularly in China and Silicon Valley. And apparently, U.S. tech entrepreneurs have had positive feedback on the luche. So, maybe it's working. Maybe we're all wrong.

1:26:15David Pierce:You can't buy taste is a phrase that keeps coming into my head as we have this conversation.

1:26:21Nilay Patel:If you see one on the road, like just a video of it rolling, you're like, what is going on with this car? It just does not look good. I truly am as befuddled by this car as any of the cars that we often talk about that we are befuddled by.

1:26:37David Pierce:yep and ferrari's also had a really weird rollout of this where they keep giving demos to car youtubers and influencers and stuff but they're all these weird on rails canned thing that sort of make it look like the the creators are just being put on a like roller coaster made by ferrari it's it's very weird yeah the whole this whole thing does not suggest that ferrari thinks its car is awesome and everyone should have one do you know what i mean but i guess congratulations to the 500 people who spent a bunch of money on them.

1:27:08Nilay Patel:Yeah, they're doing great. They hit the target.

1:27:09David Pierce:I hope you enjoy it. Was one of them you? Be honest. No, no, no, no. You didn't sell the Raptor and get this instead?

1:27:18Nilay Patel:I mean, I'm up here, which is where I had the Raptor, and I think about that truck every day, David. But that's the one that got away.

1:27:25David Pierce:Alright, we should get out of here. We, Neelai has more vacation to take, more books to write, more Luches to save up for. when it happens you need to pre-order the book so that nilai can get a luche that's our new our new goal as a group that's a negative negative reason to finish this book is like i have to buy luche at the end of it yeah it's good stuff uh who's on decoder next week nilai uh we have tony schneider the new ceo of blue sky uh oh we're like official he's the official he was the interim he's the new ceo we got into it that was a fun one that's good i think we might do something Verge Castee with that next week too, but you were excited about that one coming out of it, if I remember correctly.

1:28:04Nilay Patel:Yeah, they've got, again, I'm enthusiastic about open social media and they've got new stuff coming out in the protocol. He's aggressive. I liked it.

1:28:14David Pierce:Love it. We're between seasons on Virgin History, but all of the smart home stuff is up, and we're also in the middle of making very fun plans for next season, which I'm very excited to do after I get back from parental leave. I'm going to go have a baby, and then we're going to talk gadgets again. I'm very excited about it. That is it for the Vergecast. Remember, the best thing you can do to support all of this is to subscribe to The Verge, verge.com slash subscribe. It gets you all of our podcasts, including Decoder and Version History and The Vergecast with no ads. It gets you all of our newsletters, all of our coverage of everything.

1:28:44David Pierce:Go read all of the stuff Robert Hart has been writing about China and the US and AI. He's very clear-headed and it's making all of our comments just really angry and I love it very much. Also, if you have thoughts, feedback, questions about any of this, you can send us an email vergecastatheverge.com call the hotline 866-VERGE-11 as always we genuinely truly love hearing from you The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network this show is produced by Josh Cajas Eric Gomez Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk we will see you next week Eli rock and roll