Two possible futures for AI

24:45And he talked about how he's been writing this since August. He's gone through a bunch of different versions. And yeah, it definitely seems like Sam just fired this off. And here we are. Yeah. And that's fine. Who among us hasn't just fired off a blog post that too many people read, right? Like it's an occupational hazard. I will say one thought that I had in this was that it makes a lot of sense to me why Anthropic is building better products than OpenAI right now. Damn girl. Like consumer products. I mean, you go through and like Dario's is just full of ideas about things a person might do with AI and ways that they might be used.

25:17The only one Sam mentions is like, it's going to be a personal assistant that will help you accomplish tasks. And like, fine, everybody has that idea. We've had that idea for decades. But like, it's a bit of a galaxy brain take to just read that out of two blog posts. But like, I think Anthropic is just destroying open AI when it comes to actually building good products for people to use. and you can sort of see that from these two. I don't even think that's that hot a take. Claude is better than ChatGPT right now. It just is. I agree. I agree. I keep name dropping podcasts I've been on recently, but I said this on Pivot.

25:51They were asking me, what's my favorite? What's my favorite? And I was, Claude, obviously. Claude is so much better than the competition. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah, and I think the question of what is the underlying technology is going to be like a forever game of leapfrog between a bunch of companies, principally these two. But right now, like, Anthropic is just a mile ahead in terms of actually building good consumer products. And you can see it in Dario's stuff. Like, he has ideas about how people might use it in a way that I'm not sure. There's not a lot of evidence that OpenAI does. Right. So you're counting Gemini out?

26:23Gemini is just so its own thing that it's, they're just like, Google is just like over here. Kind of like winning Nobel Prizes. Right. And I still like my true galaxy brain take is I think Google is just going to win all of this and it's not going to matter and we're going to have to reckon with that sometime very soon. But that's for another day. I have a lot of... I'm also like, I've been fighting that fight for too long now, so I have to die on the Google is further ahead than anybody realizes hill. Yeah. And I think I'm okay dying on that hill, but we'll see. All right, real quick. Some news, and then I'm going to let you go here.

26:57Yes. We had two scoops last week about upcoming new big stuff from both OpenAI and Google. Tell me what's going on. Yeah, so my scoop with Tom Warren, our Microsoft reporter, was about how by the end of the year, OpenAI is planning to release Orion, which you can think of as GPT-5. It would be the successor to GPT-4. So just in September, we wrote in the article that the researchers threw a party for finishing training the model. At Microsoft, they are preparing the compute to host Orion. Microsoft gets it first, and then they're going to release it to limited partners so they can find their own use cases, find the features that they want to build with Orion, which is the codename of the project, Orion.

27:46So that's supposed to happen by the end of the year. Altman, I had my first real run-in with tech executive hits joint and takes to Twitter. He called it fake news, which it's not. And I said this at the top of the episode, and I'll say it again. One of these people was fired for lying. So, yeah, that's what's coming out by the end of the year. It's, of course, subject to change. And then, more interestingly, in December, Google, Alex Heath, my colleague Alex Heath, wrote this in Command Line. He wrote that Google is planning to release its next big Gemini model in December. So, OpenAI loves to front-run Google.

28:30So that's something to watch every time. If Google's going to have a big announcement, you can almost certainly expect OpenAI is going to fire somebody or release a big new feature or something. Yeah, I do think, I mean, to your point about, like, who's really going to win here, OpenAI certainly thinks Google is its main competition. Yes. And Anthropic is just kind of over on the side doing a different thing. And that might turn out to be true. It's certainly true right now in terms of, like, shine and resources. But I think Anthropic is closer behind than it gets credit for in a lot of ways. I agree.

29:06And OK, have you ever watched Mad Men? Yeah. Do you know the elevator scene where he's like, I feel bad for you? And he's like, I don't think about you at all. That's very much Google and OpenAI's relationship, I think. Oh, 100%. Yeah. 100%. Google is, yeah. Google is not super worried about it. Like, they're just actually winning Nobel Prizes. Like, Google's going to be fine. Right. Demis Azadis will eventually write an even longer blog post and we'll be back doing this again, I'm sure. Oh my gosh, I can't wait. And part of that, I forgot to mention that Alex wrote that Demis is not super thrilled about the capabilities of its Gemini model right now, the next one that it's supposed to be releasing.

29:41So that'll be interesting. I think I would love a way that's more clear than benchmarks of how to weigh these against each other. I don't think we're there yet. And I just don't trust self-evaluated benchmarks in a lot of cases. But yeah, I'm excited to see how these all stack up in December. It'll be fascinating because we've been at this now for, I don't know, a year and change where Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have all just continued to release better and better models. And we're at the point where like every two weeks, somebody is releasing a slightly better model. And I've been asking people forever when it's going to stop being so easy to improve the state of the art.

30:21and everybody I've talked to at least is kind of like, I don't know, it would be fascinating if it started to be these. If somebody comes out already behind, that might change things. You know, that's funny because the AI people I've talked to just last week were like, I think that we're hitting that point. We are finally hitting that point where it is getting harder to scale these or to make them better than before. Because for a minute, it was really easy to just like leapfrog, leapfrog, leapfrog. But we're starting to slow down in that sense. But I guess we'll see in December. Yeah, it might be a messy holiday season in the AIO world.

30:53There might be a lot of Googlers working over Christmas. Typical. All right, Kylie, thank you as always. Thank you for having me. All right, we got to take a break and then we are going to come back and we're going to talk about earthquakes. We'll be right back.

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33:46welcome back will pour is here will hello hello what are we doing here will you've i know earthquakes that's all i've got what are we doing here yes um so to to start us off um i have a terrible terrible sound that i want to play our favorite the best way to start a podcast i i'm told is to make people take off their headphones as quickly as possible so with that in mind

34:22okay that's enough okay can i tell you where my brain immediately just went yes please a mix of jackhammer on the streets of new york city yeah and like the the sarlacc pit in star wars opening up like the really creaky metal door opening up plus jackhammer. That's not fun. I didn't like that. I mean, it's spooky season as we record this. So that all kind of works. Yeah. So what what is this? What am I listening to? That is the sound of my house getting seismically retrofit, which is basically like earthquake proofing. I wanted to get my house earthquake proof because I live in Seattle, which is earthquake country.

35:04I am also very terrified of earthquakes. And so I was told by a lot of experts that this is a thing that I should do. And so a few weeks ago, a bunch of people came to my house and crawled under my crawl space and drilled a whole bunch of bolts into concrete right beneath my feet. And I thought it was a good idea to try to work from home while this was happening. Sure. So which lasted about five minutes. But this this is me trying to work from home. They are crawling around in the crawl space and drilling very large bolts into the concrete foundation of the house, which I get the whole house is vibrating like I can feel this work in my teeth and I need to get out of here.

35:54It was a bad day. I had a bad day. First of all, incredible podcaster instincts to say, this horrible noise is happening. I must record it. The people must know. I applaud you for this. Also, why are you doing this? Why did you do this to your house? So this is sort of the culmination of just like a long journey between me and earthquakes. I lived in San Francisco, the Bay Area for like 10 years. And that's where I developed my fear of earthquakes. I had reason to. I felt them a bunch, and I was told constantly to prepare for the Bay Area big one, which in the case of San Francisco would be a repeat of that famous 1906 quake along the San Andreas Fault that burned down a lot of the city, among other things.

36:41So I spent a lot of time thinking about that in San Francisco and then moved to Seattle, which seismically is more quiet day to day. Like I've lived here for four and a half years. I I haven't felt anything, but it's also very much earthquake country and not feeling anything is a real false sense of security. Did you ever read there was a New Yorker article that came out about 10 years ago and the title was really big ones are really big ones. Yes. Yes. This piece scared me more than maybe any magazine story. It was very good and terrifying. What do you remember from that story? Wait, okay, can I go find a line for you in this story that I read that I still occasionally think about?

37:22To see the full scale of the devastation when that tsunami recedes, you would need to be in the International Space Station. That's just a sentence I think about a lot. And this isn't a New Yorker. This is not a thing that is prone to hyperbole and intensity. Can I read you another sentence? Now I'm looking at this piece and it's scaring me all over again. This is fun for me. I'm having a great time here in Virginia. Yeah, you're in geologically ancient Virginia. Says,

37:51What?

38:02Yeah, there's a quote somewhere in there that someone said, effectively, everything west of I-5 is going to be toast. I think those were the words. I live west of I-5. uh yeah and again this is a like sober magazine article that is essentially like we're on borrowed time so i can understand how you would become somewhere between rationally and irrationally terrified of what's happening here yes so let me give you all the other like the the full rational cause to be concerned okay so at some point probably roughly maybe in the next 500 years but also maybe tomorrow because that's how earthquakes work there's there will be this mega thrust quake in the Pacific Northwest.

38:43It's going to be felt from Northern California all the way up to British Columbia. It's on a fault that's called the Cascadia subduction zone that runs north-south all up the west coast, just off the coast. It could hit category nine on the Richter scale. It'll produce maybe five minutes of shaking in Seattle, which is bananas. It's going to do a ton of damage all on its own. And like you remember, it's going to produce this even more devastating tsunami all across the Pacific Northwest. Right. The earthquake is the first thing, but then it's what it does to the water that causes the worst of it all.

39:18Absolutely. Okay. So really, really very bad news. And you live there on purpose. And I moved there intentionally after I read this article. And so that I don't know what that says. So that's the very, very bad news. The good news is I not long after I moved here, I heard about this earthquake early warning system called ShakeAlert that had just gone fully live all up and down the West Coast. So there's no way to predict earthquakes. That's not a thing. That's not a science right now. But scientists can detect them right as they're beginning. And the internet moves a whole lot faster than shaking from an earthquake.

39:56So if there is a big quake today, and I happen to be far enough away from the epicenter, like if it's off the coast, I'll get an alert on my phone that says there's an earthquake coming. And it might be a few seconds or it might be a minute or two before the shaking reaches me, which is awesome for me and my fear of earthquakes. But the more I've looked into this, the more I realized that making a detection and warning system that's both reliable and fast enough to be effective turns into this massive, massive challenge. And in a lot of ways, detecting the earthquake is the easy part. The hard part is using existing technology to notify a ton of people all at once about this disaster that might only be seconds away.

40:46So I figured the best way to understand all this earthquake early warning stuff is just to follow the chain of technology from point to point. basically how an earthquake is detected, how an alert message gets generated from that, and how it gets all the way to my phone, which turned into this fun goose chase all around Seattle. And it started with this small kind of creepy shed next to a wastewater treatment plant right here in town. So let's pop out. I'll show you everything. Yeah, let's do it.

41:22Okay. Okay. Find a light switch. Is this going to want to stay open? Oh, that's right. Oh, that flickering is not fun. Good thing it's not a video. Yeah, right? You're hearing Doug Gibbons. He's a field technician at the University of Washington, or the UW as we locals like to call it. He offered to meet me here at this shed and show me some earthquake surveillance hardware. Yeah. So what we have here, this is a Titan strong motion accelerometer that is bolted to the foundation of the building here. The device is this plain green box like the size of a loaf of bread. So if the ground starts to shake, electronics inside this thing will capture a three-dimensional snapshot of the movement.

42:06It's oriented north to south and inside of there, there are actually three different seismometers. There's one placed in the north and south direction, measuring shaking on that axis, one placed on the east and west direction, and one placed in the vertical direction. Doug plugged a laptop in and he showed me the raw output of the seismometers. It's basically three different graphs that show the amplitude of motion at this one spot. It's basically like a digital version of those old earthquake readouts you see in movies, the needle that scribbles back and forth on that rolling piece of paper. Oh, yeah, the one that kind of looks like a lie detector test.

42:42Yeah, yeah. It's small and then it's huge and then it's small again. Yes. Yeah, okay. Bigger scribbles, bigger earthquake. like three of them for three axes of motion. Got it. Then it's so sensitive, it can even just detect me just bending my knees up and down. Literally one little shift in weight and two of the graphs went, so that is, wow, that is incredibly sensitive. That's wild. Yeah, it's fun. So it must just be doing things all the time. It is, and it's constantly feeding that to places that we'll get to soon, but it's taking samples many times a second constantly. So over the past 10 years or so, field techs like Doug have installed maybe 1 ,500 sensors like this all up and down the West Coast.

43:22It's part of this huge effort led by the U.S. Geological Survey to keep tabs on all the seismic activity in this part of the country. And it's sensors like this one that power ShakeAlert, the early warning system for people like me. And we now are confident that we've got enough instruments to issue good warnings to people. So here I feel like we should stop and just do a little Earthquakes 101, because it'll help a lot with everything we're about to talk about. So when an earthquake happens, when two parts of the Earth's crust suddenly slip past each other, there are two kinds of waves that ripple out from the epicenter.

44:00They're called the primary and secondary waves, or P waves and S waves. The primary waves move really fast, like a little more than three and a half miles per second, but they're too weak to do any damage you probably wouldn't even notice them. The secondary waves are the ones that can really cause harm, but those move about half as fast as the P waves. And that's the big opportunity for early warning. All those really sensitive seismometers like the one I just saw, they can pick up those P waves when the real shaking is still miles away.

44:39Let me put this all in real-world terms, because I think that'll help it make more sense. So let's take this really big one, that 9.0 earthquake that I am completely petrified of. That could start anywhere up and down the West Coast. Say it starts due west of Seattle. This is like worst case scenario for me. Better to just face your fears head on. That's about 135 miles west of Seattle off the coast. The Cascadia Fault is about 40 miles offshore. So that means that those first P waves have a good 40 miles to get ahead of the actual shaking. So when the P waves ping those coastal sensors, the real earthquake is still about 10 seconds away from the shore, which means it's 40 or 50 seconds away from downtown Seattle.

45:24So that chunk of time, let's call it 45 seconds or so, that's the window of time that ShakeAlert has to warn this major metropolitan city that this huge natural disaster just appeared out of nowhere. So step by step, here's how they actually do that. When the P-waves hit those first sensors, those little seismometer graphs spike, and that data gets forwarded straight on to UW over radio or hardwire internet or satellite, really whatever is available right where the sensors are located. And that part happens really fast. Within a fraction of a second, within a second or less, we want this data to head back to UW.

46:08And that's from shaking in the ground to the sensor recording it, creating a packet, sending it to a communications device. That communications device either sending it through a radio wave or through the internet back to UW. It lands at a server on-site at the university. This one. So we just walked into kind of a small-ish room that has a bunch of computer racks in it, including a whole bunch of computers that just have green blinky lights. All the data from the field comes in here continuously and then gets processed. We're now in the basement of an Earth and Space Sciences building at UW in Seattle.

46:48My tour guide is Renata Hartog. She helped build ShakeAlert's algorithms. The servers in here, along with others in northern and southern California, they run a pair of algorithms that analyze any incoming quake. So one algorithm just looks at the very beginning of the signal, and then it tries to, based on the amplitudes, so it associates it into, oh, this is an earthquake, just has a point on the map and an estimate of what the magnitude of the earthquake was. Basically, it's like a snap judgment of the epicenter and the magnitude of the quake. They have the second algorithm that's slower, but it can model the whole quake beyond just that first point on the map, which is a thing I never knew about earthquakes.

47:36Incidentally, the epicenter is really just the starting point. As an earthquake grows, it can get bigger and bigger as more miles of the fault lines slip. And that means longer shaking and more people affected. So for example, a large earthquake off the Pacific coast here on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, if it starts somewhere on the southern end, it will take minutes probably before that whole fault plane has ruptured all the way from the southern end to the northern end. And finally, based on all of that, ShakeAlert estimates the geographic area that will get hit the hardest, and it creates an alert to be delivered to phones.

48:16And that part happens super fast, too, by the way. The first alert leaves the server after just a second or two of processing. And if the quake keeps growing like they do, it can send out additional waves of alerts a couple times a second. Okay, wait, so hold on. Do the math for me right now. Where are we in terms of, like, lag? And I'm imagining the P waves are going, the S waves are going. Where are the waves and where are the alerts at this moment in time? So this is what I kept trying to do as I was having these conversations. I was trying to add up all of the lag from the beginning to now.

48:52And so I kept asking all of these people about all these steps. How long does this take? How long does this take? And everyone was like, I don't know, a second, less than a second. Everything that we've talked about so far is just super fast. the sensors picking up the P waves, sending that information over the internet to UW, the algorithm running and making decisions. All of that added up is like two-ish seconds. So in our scenario, the earthquake is still like 40 or 45 seconds away from me in Seattle. Okay, that's pretty good. So it's like I'm imagining sort of Jaws music as it's like slowly creeping towards us as we get here.

49:30But we're still ahead of the game here. We still have a solid chunk of time to, I mean, 45 seconds isn't forever, but it's something. It is something if it actually gives me 45 seconds, because there's this there's one other link in this chain that we have not talked about yet. And that's the alerts getting from this server to my cell phone. And that's where things kind of get messy. so the deal is we already do have this really good system in a lot of ways for getting alerts out to a gazillion cell phones all at once it's called the wireless emergency alert system or wia so if you've ever gotten an amber alert on your phone or a tornado warning or some other kind of emergency ping that's probably wia i'm sure you've seen these things before the presidential alerts or versions of this.

50:23Is this the one that also failed spectacularly in Hawaii and scared a bunch of people that something like a bomb was incoming? Oh, the ballistic missile. Yeah, the incoming ballistic missile, the alert that was just like, hug your loved ones. Yeah, basically. And then they were like, sorry, never mind. That was WIA? Yeah, yeah, that was WIA. Okay, so we do know how to do this. Exactly. That was developed back in 2012 by the federal government. So this has been around for a while. And it uses this kind of funny technology called cell broadcast. And basically, it uses cell towers like giant bullhorns.

50:58They just blare out the simple digital message to any device that's programmed to pick it up. So this is great for earthquake alerts because there's no need to opt in or download anything. If your cell phone is in the danger zone when an earthquake hits, you'll get an alert on your phone as long as your phone and your carrier support WIA, which somewhere between most and all of them do. Our WIA messages that get delivered to cell phones are built for 90 characters because we know that the majority of phones, even non-smartphones, will be able to get those alerts. That if you go above those 90 characters, people might not be able to get them.

51:39So we're in the position of crafting messages so that we can make even people who still use flip phones to be able to access Earthquake Early Warning. That's Bob DeGroote. He leads the ShakeAlert operations team out of Pasadena, California. He says that WIA is the single biggest, best channel for reaching the 50 million or so people on the West Coast. But at the same time, he's also really aware of its Achilles heel. When the Wireless Emergency Alert System was developed, it didn't have ShakeAlert speeds in mind. And operating at the horizon of minutes was sort of, wow, that's fast. But now we're asking a system to operate in matters of seconds and fractions of a second.

52:27WIA is just not as quick as the rest of the ShakeAlert system that we stepped through. In fact, when ShakeAlert was in development, no one even knew what WIA's lag was. Bob's team actually set up these two tests in California, where they pushed out an alert to a specific area and then measured how long it took to reach their phones. We took a bunch of cell phones, including mine and including my colleagues. We put numbers on them and then laid them on the table and then took a GoPro, basically, and filmed all those phones. He sent me the video of this test, and it's really funny. It's this long table with a whole row of different kinds of phones spread out, and a lot of people are all gathered around these phones waiting for the test to start.

53:13So we waited for the alerts to come through, and the phones lit up when the alerts came through.

53:23The very fastest turnaround that they recorded was around four seconds. The median was in the 6 to 12 second range. A bunch of phones just never got the alert. And then there were residents within the test area who reported an even wider range of latencies. So the point is, even with that controlled test, WIA is still this really frustrating black box. How do we not know better? I mean, this seems like A, solve technology, B, very important, and C, a thing we've been doing and using for a long time. It seems like this should be a totally known quantity at this point. I had that same feeling, and it took me attempting to map out all of the people involved in WIA to understand that it's just not one thing.

54:13It's not this technology that is implemented by one organization that can be optimized throughout this whole chain. There are the federal government, there are telecom companies, there are handset manufacturers, and every carrier might handle implementation of this standard differently. They might prioritize it differently on their networks. All of this is voluntary for them, so it's kind of whatever systems they've set up. And so there seem to be all these differences in delivery. There's different kinds of lag across the 2G and 3G and 4G and 5G networks across different styles of phones. Bob said that like a burner phone that he got at the 7-Eleven turned out to be the fastest delivery mechanism.

54:56So if you like really want to be on point with WIA, just go get yourself a burner phone. No, babe, it's not a burner. This is my earthquake phone. This is my earthquake detector. so it's it's just a little bit of a mess there's no built-in way to measure end-to-end latency and again this wasn't built for earthquake early warning so no one in any part of this process was ever told you have to find ways to shave off every second possible from this system and again we've been tossing this 45 second number around in our scenario and so given that a second here or there might not seem like a big deal.

55:36But the thing you got to keep in mind is that that's the amount of time that ShakeAlert has to notify me in Seattle about a Cascadia earthquake. First of all, even in that scenario, there are a lot of people that live closer to the coast, so they're not going to have 45 seconds to play with. And even for me in Seattle, there are other faults to worry about. And good evening. A rather typical late morning in the state of Washington was turned suddenly into a rumbling and rolling panic. An earthquake measuring 6.8 has left millions shaken. The damage is widespread, the injured list continues to change, and at least one person has lost their life.

56:17That was the 2001 Nisqually quake. It hit right underneath the Seattle area, and it shook the whole region for about 45 seconds. It ultimately did maybe$2 billion worth of damage. It's one of the costliest quakes in U.S. history. And the fault that produced it is really busy. Before 2001, it produced similar quakes in 1965, 1949, and 1927. That's basically every 20 to 40 years. Those are our most typical significant earthquakes, I guess you would say. That's a once-in-a-generation event, as opposed to the Cascadia earthquake, which is once in the life of a nation kind of event. Gabriel Lotto works on engagement with the ShakeAlert team here at UW.

57:09And he explained to me that the fault responsible for the Nisqually quake sits a good 40 miles below the Seattle area. So let's say you have a repeat of the Nisqually earthquake today. That earthquake starts deeper down, but it's right below our feet, specifically right below the city of Olympia. Since the waves are coming directly up from below us, it means more of the region gets hit all at once. And for this one, we just get a lot less warning time. As the area of shaking spreads out, you could get 5, 10, 15 seconds depending on where you are exactly. Just to bring that all home, 5 or 10 or 15 seconds is roughly the amount of lag time that's in the WIA system.

57:54So for this quake, the one that I will very likely experience myself in the coming decades, that squishiness in WIA could determine whether or not a lot of people get warnings in time. There's definitely a deeply bleak world in which you can imagine getting this notification like two or three minutes after the earthquake has hit. Yeah. Which sounds both very plausible and really truly awful. And just, yeah, just the biggest knife twist. So it sounds like if WIA is not the answer, or at least not the perfectly tunable answer, are we just on our own? Is there just not a better system here? WIA is not the whole answer, clearly.

58:37But the people building ShakeAlert are thinking way past WIA to all of the possible platforms for delivering a message like this. So, for example, a team at UC Berkeley built a smartphone app called MyShake. I have it on my phone, and it works like a normal smartphone app. I share my location with it, and if I'm within the alert radius of an earthquake, it sends me a push notification. And push notifications generally arrive in one to two seconds, much better than five to 15. Okay, so this makes a lot of sense to me and is one of the things I was going to ask is I feel like for you as a Seattleite, if somebody was like, hey, download this app and give it your location and we will tell you if there's an earthquake coming, that is the single best case I've ever heard in history for why you should download an app.

59:33Absolutely. But I guess there are challenges there, too. But it does make sense to me that you would say, just do this one thing and then we can do something much better. Yes, absolutely. And the ShakeAlert people are shouting that from the rooftops. The fact that it's opt-in versus opt-out for something like this means that out of the gates, you are capturing such a smaller chunk of the population that you are otherwise. There's just no getting around that. The ShakeAlert team has been at this for a while, and there are now three and a half million or so registered users of this app, which is awesome and huge progress.

1:00:11But again, there are 50 million people on the West Coast. So it's getting people signed on to this before a big earthquake becomes this consumer tech problem. It becomes an app development problem. It becomes a social problem. It just gets messier. Now, Google has been thinking about this for a while, and they have done one better. They baked ShakeAlert into Android at the OS level, which gives them the power to issue a couple of different kinds of alerts that you can't do just with an app. If it's a smaller earthquake, it just looks like a push notification. If it's a larger earthquake, it's a full-screen takeover.

1:00:52It will break through silent mode or anything like that. you have no choice but to look at this thing. It makes a sound, it takes over your screen, it buzzes, and it's possible to turn off these alerts, but they are on by default, which I think is a really good thing. When life safety is on the line, yeah, you don't want to mess around with whether or not a user will pay attention to an alert. Apple so far has not built anything like that into iOS. There is a way to speed up WeA alerts, but it's this toggle that's buried in the iOS system settings. I will put a link in the show notes about that.

1:01:32I did ask Apple about all of this, but they didn't get me any more information. Anyway, the point is there are these other ways that you can get an alert, but it depends on where you are and what phone you have and what you're proactively signed up for. So this is where everything outside of WeA just gets really piecemeal. Right. Yeah, it's an interesting adoption problem because you get to a point where you're like, okay, even if we solve this problem, you know, the only way to get people reliably to download an app is to promise them like free, cheap clothing from China. I will pass that along to them.

1:02:09Yeah. But you mentioned three and a half million people have downloaded this thing. The system seems to be sort of fully realized. Has it been tested? Have we been through a shake alert earthquake before? Yes. In California, there have actually been a lot of them that have put all of these different platforms to the test. Actually, just back in September, there was a pretty decent quake in Malibu, and it all worked. And some people got like 20 seconds of warning, which is enough time to take cover. It's enough time to get away from windows that like you can do a lot in 20 seconds. Overall, the rollout has not been perfect.

1:02:46Back in 2021, there was another quake in Southern California that ShakeAlert ended up misinterpreting as multiple smaller quakes. So a lot of people just never got that warning. In some ways, though, the mistake that experts worry about even more is a false positive, an erroneous alert. Here's Gabriel again. If we tell people there is an earthquake and there isn't, we lose credibility. And that reduces public safety because then you have the boy who cried wolf syndrome. That did happen once in California back in 2020. USGS had to send a follow-up message, which I kind of love because it read, and I quote, Shake alert message canceled.

1:03:31Investigating. If you protected yourself, well done. it's almost like passive aggressive yeah it's it's a little bit like this was kind of a test in a way yeah which is great but also really not great because as we all well know we have spent years and years and years getting really good at ignoring annoying app notifications and if earthquake alerts get that reputation then the whole system collapses then people will turn off their notifications. They will go into their phone settings, dig around, and find out how to turn these off. Right, right. But even without any mistakes, alerting becomes this kind of funny mix of art and science.

1:04:16with any automated system like this, there is always going to be some alerting threshold. A preset that says above this amount of shaking will warn people, and beneath it, we won't. But finding that threshold is a social problem more than anything else. I actually happened to be in Los Angeles for a couple of back-to-back earthquakes back in the summer of 2019. And back then, ShakeAlert was this experimental app. It was just for people in LA, so I didn't have it. But for those earthquakes, actually no one got an alert because the shaking just wasn't heavy enough. But the response from the public was, we just made this earthquake alarm.

1:04:56Why didn't we use it? They felt shaking. They didn't get an alert. They've been told that there was this awesome earthquake early warning system that was going online. So that turned into a whole thing. And the feedback from the public ended up helping USGS decide to lower some of the alerting thresholds. So that's just one example of one quake. But the point is, there's always going to be these edge cases, and they're going to have to keep dialing in these thresholds. And poor Bob DeGroote from USGS hears about it every time there's an earthquake. I manage our ShakeAlertX social media account at USGS underscore ShakeAlert.

1:05:37And I always entertain these questions of people saying, I got the alert. I didn't get the alert. Why did I not get the alert? I didn't feel very much at all. Why the heck did I get an alert? And of course, insert your favorite word in response. Generally, most people are good natured. And I love interacting with people on X because they have really good, genuine questions or very, very thoughtful, but sometimes people get a little excited. As somebody who lived in San Francisco for a bunch of years and thus experienced San Francisco earthquake Twitter, I feel Bob's pain. It's both a good time on the internet and as somebody whose job is the earthquakes, I feel for Bob.

1:06:18Right. Yeah. If you're the one all those tweets are going to, that's a different story. Yeah, exactly. But I feel like if I'm thinking about this big picture, you've sort of described a bunch of pieces that we need that all exist, right? Everybody has a device in their pocket that can, in theory, be alerted. We have the apps, the systems are getting better. You were saying the sensors are all over the place, but there are a lot of different parties required to get this together, right? You mentioned the carriers and the operating system companies and the government and so on and so forth. Do we just have a stalemate here where we're going to have a bunch of possibilities, but it would require somebody to just put them all together.

1:07:01And that is harder than it seems like it ought to be. We have this like weird bureaucracy collective action problem with earthquake alerts. Well, so all of this energy has been put into cell phones because that is like the obvious massive delivery mechanism. Right. And so like getting into the weeds around cell phones has taken up a lot of time and energy. And there are places, especially around WIA where it does feel like, okay, it is what it is. You know what this makes me think of, by the way? This is a total random aside. But do you remember early in the pandemic when Apple and Google started to work together on some of the notification systems for people who had been exposed?

1:07:42Yes. And just the sheer amount of work and wrangling it took to get that stuff to work and talk to each other and make sense. And that was, obviously, earthquakes are a big deal. That took a literal global pandemic for these two companies to actually sit down in a room together and be like, okay, how do we make this stuff work? And I think clearing that bar with anything short of a global pandemic, even for something as important as a natural disaster, just strikes me as very complicated. Completely. And they were under the gun during the pandemic in a way that everyone involved in earthquakes talks about the fact that until there's a big earthquake that resets the idea of earthquakes in everyone's mind and pushes earthquakes to the forefront of everyone's minds, it's just hard to get people to pay attention sometimes and to identify it as a potentially really important thing to do.

1:08:33Right. And like you said, with phones, without those two platforms playing along, you can only get so far. Right, exactly. So that's been all of the cell phone development. But there's a lot of other things that you can do with these alerts that go way beyond smartphones. And people are working on that, too. So you think about smart speakers. You think about home assistants. You think about smart TVs. The people I interviewed for this story were basically like anything with a speaker or a screen should be a delivery mechanism for earthquake early warnings. Like they're all of those companies, all of those platforms, those could all be distribution channels.

1:09:12Then you think about big public channels like highway signs or PA systems in schools and hospitals. Then you think about all the other automated things that don't have anything to do with just warning you as a person. You can open fire station doors so that they don't get stuck down if they're damaged by an earthquake. Water utilities can shut off valves or pumps. You can slow down trains or you can recall elevators. There's all this other stuff that you could do with this information. And in a lot of ways, it's just early days in figuring out how to plug this information into all of these different systems.

1:09:50Also seems like it makes that threshold of when you do and don't trigger an alert become very important. Very important and potentially different for all of those different systems. Totally. Fair. Yeah, it's just a mess. So some of that is already happening, but it means working with one organization or agency at a time. It's really slow going. But ShakeAlert has only fully been online for a little more than three years now. So this is still really early days of actually plugging it into stuff. Is the sense that ShakeAlert is kind of a thing, sort of a project out of a university that is like interesting research for how to do it?

1:10:32Or is it the thing? Oh, it's on the West Coast of the United States. It's the thing. Okay. There are other similar systems elsewhere, but thank God there isn't like a competing earthquake early warning standard. We have to do a whole other story about— You have to have a folder full of apps. Yeah, all of the rival engineers and scientists trying to make a different one. No, the system is in place. All of the state and local governments are aware of it. All of the big technology providers are aware of it. It's just a matter of making it as useful as it can possibly be. Okay. So do you have the MyShake app?

1:11:09I do. I absolutely do. How many notifications have you gotten from it recently? What do they make you feel? This is the thing about living in Washington. It's just, it's like, it's quiet. It's too quiet. It's too quiet. And I swear to God, a lot of these folks that I interviewed for this story all told me some version of, I just want there to be like a good medium earthquake in Washington or thereabouts that just reminds everyone about earthquakes. It doesn't do any damage per se. It doesn't kill anyone. It just puts it back in people's minds. They just want like a nice, fun reminder quake. The earthquake that just knocks like one plate out of a cabinet.

1:11:53Yeah, everyone loses a plate. And it's like maybe everyone's favorite plate. And so they're like, where's that plate oh the earthquake got it yeah 100 yeah that makes sense yes all of this made you more or less terrified of earthquakes i apt like strong both okay the talking to the science people about all of this taught me about all the other faults that are around me besides just the cascadia subduction zone there's a fault that runs basically under my house like very shallow and it's much less well-known and well-understood than the others. So that's just like a new abstract fear for me. So that's cool.

1:12:35On the other hand, it's genuinely very heartening to see this really messy constellation of organizations try to figure out early warning. Government agencies, states, local governments, universities, telecom companies, cell phone makers, like they're all doing their best. and the result is something that I can almost certainly say I will benefit from at some point in the future. I just have to wait and see when. Also, I really want an Android phone now. We're all buying Android burners. That's my takeaway from this is everybody gets an Android burner and it's going to save the world. 100%. So yeah, back to the house.

1:13:15We're done with the noises. How was the process? Are you glad you went through this crazy earthquake fitting process at your house? I am. It was only a couple of days. And now it is like everything else about earthquakes. It's completely abstract until it's not. So I just like I'm just standing here in my house knowing that the house is now bolted to the foundation. And I just have this like magical thing that I don't see protecting me in theory. And so now I just have to go about my business. But I will say just like it's like having an amulet. It's like much more real than that, obviously. But just knowing that that happened.

1:13:54I can kind of just like put that part of my mind to bed. Totally. All right. We got to take a break. But real quick, give people the call to action. What if you're on the West Coast and you're worried about this, what what should you do about it right now? Yes. So if you're on the West Coast, if you have an iPhone, we'll put in the show notes how to turn on a feature called local awareness. That's the thing that speeds up via messages. Android and iOS, you can download the My Shake app. and you can go to ready.gov for just general earthquake advice for before and during and after Love it. Alright, we'll put all that in the show notes Will, thank you as always Should I play just like a little bit more of that drill sound to play us out instead of the Vergecast music?

1:14:37Yeah, let's really ruin everyone's day on our way out. Let's do it See you everybody

1:14:51All right, we've got to take one more break, but Will, stick around, and you're going to help us do a question from the VertCast hotline. We'll be right back.

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1:17:28All right, we're back. Will Poore is still here. Hi, Will. Hi. I haven't left. Will just lurks in the background of every Vergecast, whether you hear him or not. He's always here. I could appear at any moment. Just know that that's always a possibility. So we've been thinking over the months about all the stuff we can do with the Vergecast hotline. We get tons of good questions. Lots of them are weird and are basically just like, is my iPhone bad? And we say like, no, it's fine. But occasionally we get questions that like make us really like go deep down rabbit holes to try and figure out what's going on.

1:18:05And so we've We're trying to figure out ways to go down more of those rabbit holes. There are also like an alarming number of people in the Slack room now who see all the hotline questions because everybody loves getting these questions. It's really fun. It is really fun. It became part of my job somewhat recently, but I would have been doing it anyway because it's just a fun way to spend a minute at a time. It is super fun, except when people are mean to us. Please don't use the email to be mean to us. Yes. But when you call, be nice. That's really all we ask. Yeah. But you, I have no idea what you're about to do, but you found a rabbit hole that you went down.

1:18:39Yes. On the hotline. So set this up for us. Well, there's not much set up other than I found a question that I personally wanted the answer to. So I was like, okay, I will go try and find this answer and that will be a hotline. So that's what we're doing here. All right. Set up the question. Who's the question from? This question comes from a listener who has a kid who is running around all the time and he wants to take pictures of that kid and he has a question about that. Hey, it's Peter from Brooklyn. I had an idea of how to show the new features on the iPhone 16. It'd be really cool to do a race to take different types of pictures in different situations with the new phones versus the old phones.

1:19:18I want to know, can you really take the camera out, open it up, and get a shot of that moving kid faster? Can you really change the aperture faster? There's all those different settings. Is it really faster with the new controls versus the old ones? That's it. Thanks. Have a good one. Rock and roll. Okay, so I went straight to Allison Johnson for this because A, she did our iPhone 16 review, and B, I know from listening to this show that she has lots of experience chasing small kids around with a camera. Hello, Allison. Hello. So I was curious about this question because I'm one of those people that watches every Apple keynote every year just to see what the camera does now.

1:20:03And I feel like even for me, this year was a very camera-y event. Do you feel that way also? Yeah. It wasn't so much that anything drastic had happened with the camera pipeline or whatever, but the camera control was the big thing on both of the iPhone 16, all the iPhone 16 models, and kind of the new filter options you have. So, yeah, it's like a camera forward update, I would say. Well, I watched, I saw all of that. And my question was kind of the same as Peter's, which is, you know, how much does that button make it feel like you have a point and shoot camera in your pocket? which to me is just like a muscle memory question.

1:20:56It's not a question that you can answer from watching the keynote or watching demos or anything because it's all about the routines of how you just pull out and use your camera without thinking about it when there's a toddler running by doing something cute, for example. So I'm curious to get your take on what routines you have around your phone and what routines you've had over the years and then whether the 16 and that button meaningfully changes any of that. So, you know, historically before the 16, walk me through your reflexes for taking a photo really quickly. You've got your phone in your pocket.

1:21:33Your kid is doing something cute. Like, what are the steps? Yeah, so I switch between Android and iPhone like quite a bit throughout the year. So that changes things up. But on Android, it's actually super easy because I can double click the power button. And like, I think on basically every Android phone, we'll just open the camera app from wherever you are. So I can do that without looking on an iPhone. Typically, I will take the thing out of my pocket and I could be clever and map the camera to a triple press of the home button or something. I just am not that smart, I guess. And I always just end up like swiping from the home screen.

1:22:22Like you can tap the camera icon and like hold it. Right. That's what I do. Yeah. That's I think what a sensible person does. I don't know why I have trouble with that. I swipe, I slide my finger across and that's how I open it up. So it's like one extra beat where I have to kind of like have the phone in front of me and the screen, you know, wakes up and I swipe and then I'm ready to go. Gotcha. So there is some like home screen friction. Yeah. Yeah. A little bit. Maybe it's of my own making. I don't know. Yeah, I know the feeling of just like reaching my phone to quickly take a picture of something and then I like the screen doesn't quite want to wake up or the like it doesn't register the little camera icon tap.

1:23:16There is a little I've like I've lost pictures because something in there just doesn't like quite happen the first try or the first two tries. And that's super frustrating. And then I'm distracted, like trying to swipe on the screen and my kid has run off and he's doing something else. Yeah. So disaster. Yeah. So there's an in between that experience potentially and this new fancy camera button and it's the the action button on the iPhone 15s. have you played around with that over the course of the past year? And is that meaningfully different? Because I know a lot of people just mapped their camera to that button.

1:23:57Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's totally reasonable to use the action button as that camera shortcut button. I find the placement of it a little funny for that. It's kind of like on the other side of the phone that I feel like I'm reaching for. And it's kind of up high above the volume buttons. so for me I feel like I have to kind of do a do a little maneuver to get there but it seems to work for a lot of people I guess yeah but it's not it's not the like it doesn't form the muscle memory for you the way that you want it to yeah gotcha okay so what about the literal camera button that is now on these phones how is that has that changed this like quick draw routine to go back to the beginning like kid is doing something cute your phone is in your pocket what do you do yeah so i just had a roller coaster of emotions with the camera button because it's like coded like everything i would like you know it's like a real button it's controls the camera you can do a bunch of cool like change of exposure and stuff with it um I don't actually like it as much as I thought I would.

1:25:11Oh, no. So my kid is doing something cute in front of me. I will definitely press it to launch the camera. The screen has to be awake already before it will do that. Like pushing it just the one time will wake up the screen. So you have to kind of do it again. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Which I would like start that process when the phone is in my pocket. So it's hitting the button once to turn the screen on and then again to launch the camera app and then again to take a picture? Yes. And for the third thing, for the taking a picture, I don't like it very much because it's kind of stiff. Like it's a little bit recessed from the edge of the phone, which makes sense because you don't want to accidentally take a bunch of pictures.

1:26:04but it just feels like that little bit it's too stiff and like I have to push a little bit too hard on it that I feel like I'm shaking the whole phone and I'm still you know maybe the iPhone can cope with that but I'm so like no I don't want any shake you know in this photo it might be messing with your framing yeah it's gonna be a little crooked or something um I don't like that So I'm really stuck on this like once this like scenario and the like individual beats of this kid does a cute thing. One click to turn the thing on one click to get into the camera and then you're hitting the software button on the screen.

1:26:45Yeah. Gotcha. That's been my process. And maybe the screen will wake up when I take it out of my pocket. You know, there's variations in there. But that's basically it. Yeah. But it's still a little fiddly. Is it faster meaningfully? Is there anything about this that does speed up the process, even if it's fiddly? I feel like I do like having just a button to press down and that like feels to me like I am starting the process, even if it's not like, you know, bam, I'm going to get a shot just like that. But one thing it is really useful for, and this is something I've kind of like used more in long-term testing and not exactly in those like quick draw moments, is changing the exposure compensation.

1:27:31Because when you do that like little half press or the light press on it, that's how you access. You can set it to a bunch of different things. But the one I like is the exposure compensation, because I don't know if you've ever tried changing the brightness on a photo that you're taking, but it's such a pain on an iPhone. Is that that's where you have to like tap the screen until the little sun icon shows up and then you have to drag the sun up and down. And yeah, I can never I can never do that right. It never feels like I'm dragging it enough. And then all of a sudden the image is like way too bright.

1:28:08And I'm like, yes, spending so much time fiddling with that, that like whatever I was taking a picture of is long gone. Yeah, this is just like a little, little bonus exposure compensation dial, which I love. So that's been my favorite part of the camera control, honestly. Okay. Do you feel like it do you can you get to other settings really quickly? I just the like, the vision I have of what Apple wants out of that button is for people to very intuitively just like, wiggle their finger back and forth by a few millimeters and like do 17 things and take a picture. Yeah. Do you feel like you are like psychically connected to this button the way that they want you to be?

1:28:51I do not. And it's a little funny. It's like something you have to kind of get used to because you're like half pressing this button. There's not actually a half press. That's the like capacitive, you know, it gives you a little haptic buzz like you did it. and then you're supposed to keep your finger on there and slide it back and forth. And I end up like taking my finger off or like I slide it and I need to reposition my finger to like, you know, do the adjustment some more, which feels a little like choppy and not quite right. And then there's no good way to like exit the control, which is a weird thing that Neelai and I both noticed in the review is like, you kind of want to just like tap to get out of there and it it's just weird how it works how do you get out of there do you even know have you figured it out yet or has that setting been up since you got the phone let's see no no no you you tap the live view oh god the little sun icon is back i don't want that at all um yeah no it feels like you should do a light tap again and that would exit.

1:30:06And that's not what happens. That does not work. Yeah. That's the weird behavior. Huh. Okay. Well, I can't say it feels like you're selling this button. I know. I'm really not trying to, I guess. Yeah, clearly. That is fair and understandable. I guess Peter's question was, is this any faster? And my sort of tack on question is, is this meaningfully better? And I guess all of that rolls up to, is this a meaningful factor in deciding to buy a phone if you really care about taking pictures quickly? Yeah. The thing I've kind of come around to is like, it doesn't hurt. Like literally nothing was taken away.

1:30:53You can use the camera in any other way that you prefer. And this is like an extra thing that you know for opening the camera itself kind of helps i don't prefer it for taking a photo but it's not like apple took away all the other ways to take a photo right um and then you get that little extra control that like sometimes does come in handy so it's it's like i don't know if it's a net positive but it doesn't hurt and that's what one out of any flagship feature of a new phone it does it's not damaging my experience in any way do no harm um something like that and i think it's just like a lot of other things with um phones it's like i don't see a lot of new you know on ios or on android a feature that i'm like wow you should absolutely throw away your old phone and get a new phone this year for this thing right It's sort of like, are you in the right time in that cycle of, for some people, it's maybe like two to three years.

1:32:02Or for other people, they just want to not shop for a phone as long as they can. It's sort of like, where are you in the discomfort with your current phone? And how appealing are the things on the new phone? I think the 16, like the regular 16 in particular, this year is a pretty good value proposition of like, you get these new buttons and like maybe Apple intelligence will turn out to be something. And it's but besides that, it's just like the new iPhone and it's pretty good. So, yeah, that is fair. I guess my my last question is that we talk a lot about whether in the future we're all going to keep using our phone for everything or whether the phone is going to get splintered into a bunch of other gadgets.

1:32:51point-and-shoot cameras are having a moment. If you care about, you know, whipping out a device and taking a picture really quickly, is there a world where you should just get a point-and-shoot camera and not worry about all of these fiddly buttons and software updates? What do you think? I was really hoping I could shortcut to this could be a cool point-and-shoot camera with the camera button and with the photographic styles. Because you get some kind of neat kind of Fujifilm-esque, you know. Totally. film stocks or whatever you want to call them. And it does not feel that way to me. Like, of course that doesn't.

1:33:28It's a phone. Like, it's still going to be a phone. It's still going to be like pinging you with Slack messages when you're out trying to take some pictures. So I think that is true. Like, a button is not going to turn this into like, you know, a super great camera in a way that it wasn't before. It's still the camera I use most of the time. But yeah, it's, I don't think, gonna sway anyone from a nice Fujifilm camera or, I don't know, some Meta Ray-Bans. Like, that will take a photo faster than taking a phone out of your pocket. So, I don't know. Right. There are other ways. Yeah. Okay. Well, I don't know where Peter goes from here.

1:34:15I'm sorry, Peter. I just want to hit this button a bunch of times now. Now I'm curious to see. But thank you, Allison. Yeah, thanks. All right. That is it for The Verge Cast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about at TheVerge.com. All of our coverage of what's going on with OpenAI. All of our coverage of the iPhone stuff. We'll link to both blog posts in the show notes. You should really read them. It's a lot of reading and it gets pretty flowery at some points, but both of these things are good reads and I recommend checking them out.

1:34:50As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or blog posts about AI that you would like to share, you can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you. And like I mentioned, there is that Slack room and everyone's in it. And I can't even begin to guess all of the fun places that Hotline Questions are going. So thank you so, so much to everybody who reaches out. It's the best. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nilay and I will be back on Friday to talk about more OpenAI news, all of Apple's gadget announcements from this week, and lots more.

1:35:28We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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