The New Siri is here! (Kinda)

30:38And I just looked it up real quick. This launched everywhere. Like there's friend.com, there's Instagram, there's Twitter, there's whatever. So they put the YouTube video out. This same exact YouTube video got 131 ,000 views, 800 likes, 700 comments. They launched it on Instagram, brand new, has 693 likes and has 800 followers on their account. And they launched it on Twitter. And on Twitter, it has 18.2 million views 9200 retweets and 3600 comments dang so there's a there's a type you're at this right and i just wonder like how how local is this type is this very very ai positive type of person who's willing to give it a shot versus the general public because i first watched this and it felt kind of like a sketch like a parody and i think a lot of people watching it may feel the same way But in a certain group of people, this is much more hard hitting.

31:35I was just going to say, I think part of those numbers are inflated by Twitter also being the easiest place to dunk on things. Facts. So I think there's definitely some of that of people on Twitter enjoy retweeting and commenting to dunk and make fun of things. I have a question. Well, it's not really a question. It's more, well, it's kind of a question. Anyway, my kind of a question is that if you're selling something for$99 and it costs money per query, to me, that says we don't expect people to use this long term because there's no subscription. And if they did use it long term, it would cost us money.

32:16It says something totally different to me. That says we are definitely selling the data we're collecting from this. Wow. Because that's the only way it will make money. To me, it tells me that they're trying to get bought. Like immediately? It doesn't need to be long term. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Three totally different takes. Yeah. Because I agree with you. Like the way queries work,$99 would run up if that's all the money. If you actually use this for like a couple of years, I'm pretty sure your query costs would be above. And that's not including hardware and any of that. Which probably costs three bucks.

32:52but it's a microphone with a... I do also agree. Necklace is kind of... Necklace option. Could it not be a keychain or a belt buckle? Probably just wears most of the sound. The belt buckle is wild. Keychain, I guess you could have put on. Necklace, you can always do it on. Yeah. Yeah. You got to be able to tap it at any time. You definitely need a certain fashion style to be able to wear a necklace every day with a little AI assistant on it. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I mean it's a battery life yeah that's a great question how do you charge it I think it has a usbc port on it yeah I'm pretty sure I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out but a lot of just I know that I sound negative a lot around a lot of the ai stuff it's just that it feels like there's this gold rush and everyone knows that they can make a lot of money but no one is thinking about like does anyone actually want this or does this may actually make anyone's life better or a society better because parasocial relationships already exist on youtube and all of these things and having a parasocial relationship with a robot which is literally a prediction machine it feels very very dystopian and bleak i sent this to my sister who is way younger and cooler than me and more of a normal person.

34:18And she replied and said that she felt like she was watching a horror movie and was waiting to get jump scared with that video. Yeah. Yep. There's a really funny parody video of it already, by the way, called Enemy Instead of Friend. It's great. And each thing that texts back is just like Voldemort saying like, after the guy gets beat in the video games, it's Voldemort saying like, wait till they fall asleep and light their house on fire. I also think that there's a little bit of a hyper positivity on Twitter specifically around like AI and tech. What? No way. Because, yeah, because look, it's cool if you're like going to create a product and like make something and that you're putting a lot into it and actually like trying to make something.

35:04That's very cool. Not a lot of people do that. But the Silicon Valley way is just like make it even if nobody wants it. Just has to be unique. Just make money. And it sort of feels like a let's just make money kind of thing. So I don't know. Well said. That's my take. but I'm willing to give it a shot once they actually come out. I'm not. Yeah, I don't want it. In the perfect world. I mean, this doesn't look like for me. Maybe it's for someone else. I can't see myself ever using it. For the amount of time that I feel comfortable using it, which I don't even know if I do because no one else is consenting to their voice being stored.

35:42That's another great point. Is that even legal in a lot of states? Can you just be recording all the time and not tell people? There's a difference between phone calls and recordings. I don't know the rules, but that is another good question. He's just recording everything all the time. Yeah. Also, he said that he eventually wants to add a camera to it, in which case I'm like, no, don't do that. Do not do that. This is already far enough. This is already too far, in my opinion. Yeah. People would see a camera and just that would be it. Assuming this works perfectly as advertised, I still don't think it's useful.

36:16Like, why do I want someone else to text me random things throughout the day? It does. The commercial is always random things. I was trying to think of useful things it could do. If you were like, where did I put my keys down? And then because it could hear the last time your keys jingled, they could tell you what room you were in or had a camera. But maybe it could help you answer questions or maybe you tell it to remember stuff. When I was testing the Meta Ray-Bans, you could have it remember stuff for you. Things like that could be a utility if it's always listening, maybe. That doesn't sound like what they're going for.

36:47It's not in the commercial. No. I think it's just super dystopian that that guy was playing video games with his friends. With real friends. And instead of interacting with his friends he was in the same room with, he decided to text, not even his new love interest, but a robot. It's already rude to get on your phone when you're with your friends and text someone else, but to text a robot when you're with your friends? Bro! It's a choice. What is this? Anyway. I don't really get this. It was very well shot, though. It was pretty well done. The video was pretty well done. Yeah, even if it was dystopian.

37:20Maybe the product is well done. Who knows? I... You know. We'll see. We'll see. We shall see. We shall see. We gotta take a break. We got much more to talk about with AI and a couple other products as well. But before we take a break, we gotta take a trivia break.

37:40Trivia, dude. Nice. Thanks. So, we spoke about Google X earlier, which was famous for its crazy projects such as Project Loon and Waymo, even Glass. So because Ellis is away on vacation, I have a multiple choice in his honor. Which of the following was not a Google X project? Project Glare, a project that used exclusively solar energy to charge hot-swappable e-bike batteries. Project Dandelion, a project that sold geothermal energy systems to consumers. Project Flux, a project that made a tool for designing eco-friendly buildings. Project Mineral, a project that used machine learning to scale sustainable agriculture.

38:30Man, they got a lot of projects going on over there, man. Yeah. Just project after project. Well, they did. They killed a lot of them. Yeah, they had projects. Or they spun them out as their own companies. That's a great way to not kill a product is just call it a project so you can just stop doing it at any time. It was just a project. We count them. well the subheader for google x was google x the moonshot factory yeah they were basically saying like most of the stuff we're gonna shoot for the moon and if we miss then we land amongst the stars or gravity brings us back down to earth crashing and burning either way we'll have the answers at the end like we usually do and we'll be right back

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39:55And if you get stuck, Shopify is always around to share advice with their award-winning 24-7 customer support. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. You can turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. You can sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash wayform. So just go to Shopify.com slash waveform, Shopify.com slash waveform. All right, we are back. So just recently, we got an iOS 18.1 beta update. It's a developer beta. And what's weird about that is we were just on iOS 18.0 beta. And so this is already a.1. Again, before any of it is pushing to regular people's phones.

40:42So we're 18.1. and it's the first beta with Apple intelligence features turned on. A couple of them anyway. There's some writing tools. There's the new Siri and some of the improvements coming with that. There is a new notification mode that's just like priority notifications only. A couple of the small things. Lots of things are also still very much missing, including the image playgrounds and a bunch of other stuff. But it's there. and one of the questions that came with this update is okay wait a minute only some of the apple intelligence features are here it's 18.1 already the phones that launch in september iphone 16 what is going to launch on those phones will that be ios 18.0 18.1 some of the ai features all of the ai features like we got a lot of announcements at wwdc and it seems with the current trajectory of timing.

41:41Many of those things will not be in the brand new iPhone that launches in September. Seems kind of odd to me. Maybe a little bit confusing. It'll probably eventually get to the iPhone but I just thought that was interesting. I guess the first thing is do you think these new AI features are going to be one of the larger selling points of 16? What I heard was that they are because there's not going to be that many changes to the hardware. They are going to be the bigger feature. Well, considering Apple Intelligence requires the A17 Bionic Pro, whatever it's called, or above, you'd need either a 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max, or 16 series at all.

42:21The reason I ask is like, I think we've all made it clear that we, at this point, expect every phone launch to have something in the event that we don't see till later, which is really annoying. Does this seem like one of the bigger features of that? Because like, what was it? the like, what was the Apple like diffusion one? Oh yeah, it was the camera one. Apple does a lot of camera ones that are like not the big thing you need, but something that makes good marketing material. And it ended up making zero difference. Yeah, yeah. I think it also like wasn't cinematic mode like two months late. Yeah, almost every big camera feature.

43:00Those are really good marketing things for the event, but ones that maybe you don't buy the phone for. Because like you've said for a very long time, don't purchase something based on future promises. 100%. This feels like one of the biggest selling points for this and to be a future promise, if so, that's why I think this one feels weirder than other ones. Also, so in the 18.1 beta that they gave to us this week, it doesn't offer any of the Siri features that I actually think are going to like foundationally change how you could possibly use your phone. Yeah. And that is what makes it hard to sort of like test this out and have any idea whether or not Apple Intelligence is actually going to move units.

43:39Because we don't even, it doesn't include any of the deep app integration for Siri. Yeah, so for those who are seeing this turned on for the first time, we've posted some videos of it and there's some screenshots of it, but you upgrade to the new iOS 18.1 developer beta and then you go into the settings and there's an Apple Intelligence tab and that is in beta. And that you have to join a wait list to get into because they're managing server capacity because obviously some bigger queries go to servers. So it's like a beta of a beta inside a beta. And it's very, very tightly managed. And yeah, it seems like a small fraction.

44:17And like you said, parts of Siri are there. Parts of Siri, like in-app actions, I feel like that's the part that I'm waiting for that I really want to test that could be really interesting that could set it apart. That's the rabbit replacement. Yeah. And so as of right now, if you just go and ask Siri a bunch of things, new Siri versus old Siri, it's pretty similar honestly there's not a huge ton of differences it's just a functionality difference yeah I can type to Siri more easily now things like that but yeah it's interesting have you gotten the prompt to send it to ChatGPT yet? no that's not built into this one that's one of the things that's not here yet as well so we're able to evaluate what we've seen a little bit this is a developer beta they're very early it's not coming to the public just yet maybe that'll be soon slows down my phone by a lot every time it engages.

45:06But, you know, I played with it a bit and it's, yeah, it's very few things. Yeah, very few things. Yeah, I mean, we were a little behind the scenes here, had videos ready for this week, saw the 18.1 developer came out, we were like, let's make a video on it. And then you guys looked at it and we're like, yeah, it almost like halted everything. I was like, wow, Apple intelligence is here. Time to review it. And then, oh, it's just a third of this stuff. And then made it short instead. Yeah, so we'll wait. Honestly, two things. One, the most impressive parts of it are the animations. I gotta be honest.

45:36I've seen a lot of things. Which is so depressing. The new Siri animation is so slick. The new writing tools animate in a super cool way. When you're typing in the keyboard, there's the suggestions for auto-reply. They pop in nicely. They're so bad. But they look so cool. They're so bad. I know. Oh, you're saying the actual suggestions are bad. The suggestions are bad. I've yet to see a good auto-suggest. And I hate when you accidentally press them. So honestly, that's number one to me is like the animations are very pretty. But number two, what you said earlier, I think is a really great point.

46:06The difference between the iPhone 15 and the iPhone 16, we don't think it's gonna be that much. Like we might have slightly better cameras and slightly better performance and slightly better battery life, but we're not expecting this dramatic, massive change like the way we might in some other form factors or some other phones. And so I think the AI has to be one of the biggest differences between everyone who just bought an iPhone 15 and will not get these features and what we're about to see in these new phones. So yeah, if this is the Pixel we're talking about, maybe there are some other things like a way bigger, brighter screen or some other stuff that would make you upgrade that isn't just the AI.

46:46But I think because it's Apple and they are so safe about their hardware changes, I think the AI has to be the thing that people are looking forward to with the new phones. And so that's why it's kind of confusing. Yeah, was it Apple's tagline that was AI for the rest of us? Or was that? I have a few primary thoughts on this. So, okay, we obviously have the new animations, which, as you said, are pretty. Well done. But then I was surprised to see all of these new writing tools built in in ways that I didn't really anticipate. One of them is when you're in messages, it will constantly just give you message reply suggestions, very similar to Gmail.

47:25Gmail has been doing this auto-reply thing for a long time. Oh, like as you type, it'll like fill out? No, that's Google Docs. No, Gmail too. Well, Gmail too, yes. No, more like just auto-replies. Like if you get someone saying blah, blah, blah, you could say, great, thanks. You can just press that and it'll send. So it's similar to that and then it shows you like two options and then you can keep going. But they're glowy because they're Apple intelligence. But so far, they have been so bad for me. So bad for me. I had a friend that was like, David, you need to drink water. You're not super young anymore.

48:00And then the two options were yes, no. I was like, okay. Okay. And then. Was that a real friend or. Yeah, it was a real friend. Yeah, a real friend. And then I've had, I've been having some old person stomach pain for the last few days that I was also telling a different friend about. And I said, I hope it clears up over the next couple of days. And they said, I pray. and then it just suggested, thanks for praying, exclamation point. And I'm just like, can you, this is the thing. You should have sent this. All the AI, all these large language models are just super basic, positive, but not complex in any way.

48:39And in an email context, generally you're being a little more formal so it makes more sense. But when you're texting people, it just doesn't work. It's funny because in a text, it's overly positive, but at the same time so minuscule that it feels like blunt. So like if you respond just like, yeah, like thanks, it just feels like, oh, I just typed like a pretty well thought out thing and you just said like, thanks, it feels like. You kind of need to be more. Or like that they're just blowing you off. Like it does exactly what it kind of is doing, which is I don't care enough about this message that I'd rather just click one of these.

49:15Very passive. In an email format, nobody really cares that you're being super blunt that way. but in a text message the context is different the one thing that has been useful though is when you get multiple messages either in a group chat or from a single person the notification has this new like summary summary thing i've seen this go well and poorly in my own case yeah yeah and it can also recognize images though which is cool because previously if you would get a text with an image it would just say like one image and now i got a text i got four I had a couple texts from her friend, one of them was a photo, and it said, photo of a fire escape, and she's also interested in this.

49:54Does that work with just iMessage? Or was it working with like Telegram? I have not tried it on other apps because I've only been using this for a single day. Oh, okay. But I thought that was interesting, and for group chats especially, because I'm in a couple photography group chats where people are just talking about cameras all the time, I generally don't need to be like, to the minute caught up. You know, seems interesting. I wonder if I'm in a group chat and I message with like 10 people and 40 new messages what it would say I'm curious if it would work but yeah I have gotten that working I would love it if it was just like you probably don't need to read these you weren't part of the context of this you're good skipping this one I would really like that that would be fire I sent a friend that article about the friend because I wanted to talk about it last night and she sent me back this really long message but just summarized it to questions wearable devices value in AI context, which was effectively the summary.

50:53And it's ironic that it was summarized by an AI, but you know, here we are. That's deep. Anyway, that's my thoughts. In my group chat, we have a lot of voice notes that we send each other. Yeah. I wonder if this will summarize the voice notes because like you get the transcript. I have to listen to them then. Well, there's the transcript. Can it just like get the transcript, give me the summary so I don't have to listen to a 10-minute voice memo. Because we all have one friend that lives 10-minute voice memos. Yeah, I don't. I have two. Really? I've made the right decisions in my life that I do not have that person.

51:27Well played. One of my best friends sends 10-minute voice notes all the time, and I'm like, can you stop? I'm sure they're all great people. I could forget what you were talking about in the first half. Yeah, if I had that person, I'd be like, play, and then I would just be like, huh, huh. I have to take notes anything else would distract me in that process I love that we started with phones as phone calls developed texting to be easier created phone longer phone calls and text messages and now we're summarizing back into smaller text messages it's the circle of lines back and forth that are not connected we're just going to land on phone calls again it's going to be a feature someone's going to launch a device and the primary feature is going to be a live audio connection to another person you mean like clubhouse and it's going to be revolutionary yeah walkie talkie like we've never seen before okay question so you're saying on the next iphone like what is it going to launch with could they have they already for sure announced everything that's going to be with ai could they do like camera upgrades or like video stabilization using new ai and make that like the selling point of the next iPhone.

52:38Yeah, but if it's with the new AI, I'm assuming it's going to come out at the same time as this AI, and it seems like that's not making it. I don't know. Well, this is more like language stuff, isn't it? Yeah, I feel like when I see Apple Intelligence, the way they seem to be branding it, they're like packaging together all of their models, whether it's their diffusion models or their language models. And I guess camera stuff is kind of in its own bucket until you're editing the image and using the diffusion models. So I don't know, it feels like that could be a separate, there could be an iPhone 16 specific camera AI feature in theory that takes advantage of some new powerful neural cores on a chip or whatever.

53:19I think Apple intelligence is generally language and image generation. Yeah. This will be the year where all the camera stuff comes out on launch day and all of the other stuff is a three month later. It's backwards, it's upside down. I'll just be super interested if the main part of the keynote is Apple intelligence and we don't get it as it comes out. It's a wait till the fall kind of thing. That would be kind of crazy. It would be really strange and very unlike, well, very like Apple, but unlike Apple at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just curious, like what is going to be the big selling point of this phone?

53:57Here's the thing. If that is what we would argue the number one thing about selling the phone and it doesn't come out till November, can you not recommend that phone right off the bat? Well, if it's just the same phone as last year, then it's the same phone as last year. Then that's all I can say about it if the stuff's all coming soon. Yeah. And if you already have a 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max, you really don't need it. Don't buy it. It's the same phone as last year. Yeah. Yeah. But most people, they're coming from three or four years ago anyway. Yeah. Sure. In which case, you can probably recommend a 15 Pro as a 16 comes out because the 15 Pro comes down in price and should have all the same capabilities.

54:35And I think it's easier to recommend, like you're still not recommending that for a four-year difference based on the thing that's coming soon. All the other things are still an upgrade from that four-year thing. So like it's less bad and then maybe a good bonus later. But then there's the awkward thing where next year there's supposed to be the slim and possibly the flip. So now you're like, there's nothing new. Can you wait another year? Yeah, this could be a skip year. Well, that's kind of what I was getting at. Is there any chance that there could be some big surprise this year? Are you saying specifically hardware-wise?

55:07Yeah, like a hardware change. I doubt it. Highly doubt it. I hope. I like events where we're actually surprised. I do too. So that would be cool, but I doubt it. I trust our boy Mark Gurman, you know? I trust him. What was the last skip year? iPhone 13? I mean, every S year. There was the one where basically the pro almost wasn't worth getting because...

56:04It had like one extra camera Tuesday. Friend did? That's true. Friend.com. They got the memo. They know, yeah. Thanks, Javi. Thanks. Alright. We missed this last week. It was OpenAI's launch of SearchGPT, which is sort of their competitor to perplexity, and also kind of a competitor to Google's response to ChatGPT, which is an interesting place to be in. But there was this rumor a long time ago before, well, not really a long time ago very recently because this stuff moves so fast when they were about to launch gpt4o which is our omni model which had the scarlett johansson drama that it was going to be a chat gpt search engine that ended up not being the case at the time but they were actually developing they're working on their search engine because if you can displace google then you make all the money in the world if you could displace one percent of google you would make a crazy amount of money exactly and And that's why Google is terrified of.

57:04So they took the veils off of search GPT, which is kind of a search engine, kind of chat GPT. They do interestingly say they're eventually just going to integrate them together and there won't really be a difference. Just kind of weird. But effectively what this looks like right now is you have a big text box that you type stuff into and you talk to it. And right now when we search things on Google, we search things in sort of like an SEO language. We've talked about this before. There's a way to Google that will get you your answer faster because you learned how to write in SEO. We're all little prompt engineers.

57:43Exactly. We all know what to type to get Google to give us the thing. 100%. Yeah. And so the idea here is we're trying to get people used to speaking in natural language to ChatGPT. Now you theoretically should be able to speak in natural language to a search engine. That's sort of the future that they're trying to move people towards, which makes sense because you know there's a reason that my parents are really bad at googling things and i'm always like can you just look it up because they just use natural language because for people that don't understand how to speak in seo yeah it's actually hard to look up information that's why i feel like this could either be amazing or horrible this could be amazing for mom dad grandma grandpa who just type where do i buy the like like just asking like like a person a question and it actually understands it and gives them a correct answer, that could be amazing for them to use instead of Google.

58:37It could be horrible if it hallucinates or gives them the wrong answer to an important question. Which happened in their demo. Evergreen. Every single time, it is impossible to have an AI demo without it hallucinating. AI demo with only real facts challenge. It's impossible. It's like hire a fact checker, a human fact checker. It won't be too hard. So one of the searches that they did was they wanted to find music festivals happening near them. And it suggested this Appalachian Summer Festival that said it's running from July 29th to August 19th. Because they just said music festivals happening near me.

59:18And basically the way this looks, and we can show it on screen, but I'll try to describe it for audio listeners, is it is sort of like a big Excel spreadsheet that looks a lot nicer. And on the left-hand cells, there are actually links if you open up the page. And on the right hand is kind of like this paginated list where it shows an image. It'll show the answer and the actual event that's happening if you search for events. And then it'll show a link. And they are very, very specific about trying to make the links very out there because there's been a ton of blowback on perplexity for just scraping people's information and technically linking, but really small and not being obvious about it.

1:00:04And I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago. There was an interview on Nealize Decoder podcast with Nick Thompson, who runs The Atlantic. And he's very deep in working with OpenAI on if this is the future and we cannot avoid it, how can we work together to make this like okay for both of us and that was the one thing that they were really pushing was like make our links more prominent um so yeah at the moment it kind of looks like this big thing anyway the the hallucination that happened was in the demo they asked for these music festivals that were happening nearby and the first one that was listed was an appalachian summer festival that's running from july 29th to august 19th but then if you actually go to the website uh it's actually running from june 29th to july 27th and it said the box office is closed from july 20 is closed from july 29th to august 19th whoops so here we go again uh whoops not yeah you just can't rely you can't rely on the answers that a large language model serves you underlying massive problem people still need to double check everything they do which is another skill which is another skill like the prompt engineering was one skill but then you also had to learn how to verify that the answer that you got was correct yeah checking your sources double checking just making sure you got the right thing yeah yeah the frustration is just that we keep being told that we're that the hallucinations are getting we're almost there we've almost solved the hallucination problem for the last number of months you know and it's like We keep being told that, and every single time there's a demo, they don't even catch hallucinations that shows up.

1:01:45Do you remember when ChatGPT came out, and then Google frantically panicked and released Gemini and made AI their whole thing? Do you think they're going to frantically panic with this as well? I mean, perplexity's been out for a while. They have been panicking. The strange thing is that I think they realized they released the AI reviews too quickly, because they've really reeled back how much they show you overuse. I never see them anymore. I get them on my phone all the time, but never on the computer or anything. Interesting. And I can never figure out exactly why. And every time it pops up, I just start scrolling because I'm like, I can find this link faster than you can populate this overview.

1:02:26I'm just curious because I'm looking at this screenshot of what Search GBT looks like and it did get that thing wrong. But this doesn't look bad. No. And I'm like, could Google just redo their UI? Their UI? Yeah, change their UI. Because they can already search the websites themselves and get the information correct. They could do half and half, you know? It is funny because I think it's the way they show things is it's almost not even like the prompting we're doing is just to get the more precise answers in these set of links because it wants to sell you absolute garbage first. and like so we prompt things to try and get like typing reddit in at the end to try and get a reddit thread or like typing something a little more trustworthy that we know inside of the search term to get that faster because we know google is usually the best search engine for any website that we like even though it's not even that website and that website has a search function already right but so like right can is it does google need to change their ai or not their ai their UI and what it serves you.

1:03:29So when it's a more simple term, it doesn't just serve you like the trash SEO crap. I think it should. However, I think that directly conflicts with how much they've made. Over the years, they've just slowly degraded the experience at a speed that you don't notice by putting more ads, more sponsored links, more clips on the sides of the page. And now they're so deep that if they were to reel it back and try to be more like Search GPT, they would just stop making money. OpenAI doesn't need to worry right now about making money. That's always how this happens is some new company comes in, releases a product that doesn't make any money but has a great user experience.

1:04:09Disrupts. Yeah, disrupts the market so they can gain user traction. And then eventually they're like, time to turn on the money mill. And then they just - And they became what they sought to destroy. It's what threads will become. And we're hanging on now, but it'll get worse. Don't mention that. Don't remind them. Threads? A thread is going to turn into Twitter, and then a new Fediverse is going to come up. Yeah, so right now they are releasing it to 10 ,000 beta testers of people that pay for a GPT Plus, and they do want to eventually integrate it into ChatGPT. Is this my turn to beg for an invite?

1:04:45So Arcteryx get to them, and OpenAI hit me up. I'll take$5 ,000 pants over a search engine. I would also. Any day. I'm not going to be hiking anytime soon, so let's talk. Anyway, it's interesting because there's all these different ways that you can look at search. And I think that Perplexity has this one direction that they look at it in. And they've been under a ton of fire recently for just stealing information from people. And now they're going to have to try to thread that needle. But separately, they also now just announced that they're finally starting to roll out their GPT-40, her like voice model that is like back and forth really quickly and kind and whatever weird.

1:05:29I think they kind of swept that under the rug for a while while the Scarlett Johansson drama was happening and now they're just like okay it's out. They just wanted a couple months for people to stop talking about it. So yeah. We'll have to try this stuff. I don't have access to it but I see the screenshots and I would like to. yeah okay well we should take another quick break a little more to talk about but before we do that one more trivia question

1:06:02all right fun fact tamagotchi is a portmanteau of two japanese words the actual translation is egg watch which i found hilarious egg yeah when was it released when was it in japan or the US. Worldwide. I don't think they're the same. So then Japan. The first one? The first one. Can I ask? Oh, that's what you're saying. Yeah, the first time it was released. You may search GPT. I'll give you an extra point if you get the day, by the way. I mean, sure. Was it a special day? Yeah, it was the day the Tamagotchi was released. Tamagotchi day. No, but I will give you a hint because that year it got Toy of the Year for Christmas.

1:06:52That's what came out on Christmas? Well, how did it come out before Christmas? To be toyed like Friday? I don't know, but I'll guess for sure after the break. Stay tuned for our guesses.

1:07:21From Pushkin Industries, I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and Heavyweight is back. The new season is bigger than ever. Bigger hopes. I keep waiting for this moment. When he says, Mom, I get it. I'm sorry. Bigger dreams. Tom Hanks wants to meet with you. This is a real chance. And bigger heartbreaks. I thought it would be my movie moment. And maybe he would even whisper in my ear, I've always been in love with you check out new episodes of Heavyweight on Apple Podcasts

1:08:00you want to know something cool? wait I should intro it first I thought that was the intro it might as well be hey you want to know something cool? a new phone came out it's called the Nothing Phone nothing phone 2A plus I'm holding it in front of a gray part of the background and it's blending in I'm noticing it's just the two camera bumps so basically whether you're an audio listener or a viewer you have no idea no okay so it's a it's a slight bump from the nothing phone 2a the word plus would suggest it's bigger it's not I think that's I should make that clear the nothing phone 2a plus is the same size as a nothing phone 2a what it is is it's slightly faster it has a dimensity 7350 pro 5g processor it has a slightly bumped up camera yeah it's uh yeah and it's it's silver now and it also charges five watts faster for some reason 45 watts to 50 which I don't think anyone's going to notice it's been four months since the 2a came out yeah so this is like a weird four months later version of the same phone but a little bit more updated and it's 40 it's 50 bucks more it's$400 instead of$350 but it's now the newest A phone from nothing the design is the one thing that I have not gotten everyone to agree on with I think it's just an excuse to charge more and I think it's just slightly different from the previous phone but it's a little bit shiny and I don't think it's better than the previous design but it's different enough that you can say it's a different phone did you guys have thoughts on this design I don't actually think it's that cool I kind of dig the silver it's a brushed metal see that's the thing people say metal and it looks like metal and all the ads look like metal but when you have the phone in front of you it's very clearly still plastic I mean obviously you don't think it's metal underneath the plastic I can't it almost doesn't matter because I can't feel it like the back of the phone is still plastic the sides are still plastic I think metal has a look though and that's what I care about here they also released the special edition of the regular 2A just two months ago.

1:10:20Right. I like that better. I think that's the reason why it feels like even less than four months is because we just did this again recently. And then so how long ago was just the Nothing Phone 2? Oh. A long time ago. A very long time ago. And how far away are we from the Nothing Phone 3? July 2023. I don't think they're doing it this year. I doubt. July 2023? So we're over a year out? or expecting a nothing phone 3 sometime soon? I don't think they're doing that this year. I don't know. Interesting. I don't mind that. Me neither. At all. That's good. So a year plus since the nothing phone 2 and no nothing phone 3.

1:10:58But we got three nothing phone 2As in the last four months. Got it. Correct. They all just seem like variations of each other though. They had all these working internally and they were like we'll just release them two months apart. Yeah. $400. I like the silver. Have you been using it, Marcos? Is your main SIM in there? No. My main SIM, I recently moved back to the Pixel 8 Pro in anticipation of comparing it to the 9s when they come out. So my SIM has skipped the nothing phone entirely. I don't suspect. I mean, I reviewed the 2A. I think it's a good phone, by the way. It's a good, inexpensive, big screen, great software, nice phone so I'm sure this will be very similar but I don't feel the need to like go through that week and a half long review process for myself to verify it because it's we're around the corner for some much more interesting phones.

1:11:54Can we talk about the news reporter widget? I was just going to ask that. I do have that. Okay. Can we talk about that? Is that an embargo? No it's not embargoed. Okay. Yeah. So there is one interesting new piece of software called the news reporter widget. You might see it on my home screen here. It is a circle with eight bars. And that is intentional because the news reporter widget is, I want to get this exactly right. It is summarizing a bunch of new news articles from various sources from subjects that you have checked. So I checked, what did I check here? Science, sports, and technology, but you could also check health or entertainment or business.

1:12:36And then it translates them to audio and reads them to you in an AI voice. Well, it is Tim Holbro's voice, which is the CFO of nothing. So it's trained on this man's voice. It sounds very human-like to me. It sounded very good. And I'm going to play my latest news story from today, Wednesday, July 31st. Okay. Welcome to Nothing News, where the only thing we're not short on is bad news. I'm Tim, the CFO, and I'm stuck reading this stuff out every day. Guess that's what I get for investing in nothing? it's a real nothing venture it's funny because that's AI kicking off today's episode the Pentagon has finally achieved a significant milestone by breaking free from its reliance on Russian rocket engines so it sounds like a human I can pause because a widget on Android you can interact with but I can't seem to skip or anything and then when I hit it again it picks up where it left off so it's like a bad media player Can I describe what this feels like to me?

1:13:39NPR. I think this is Spotify DJ, but for the news. For NPR. It's like, yeah. I found the media player controls. They just show up like you're playing a Spotify song in the media player. And you can play, pause, and scrub up here. Can you jump to different topics at all? You can fast forward. But are there markers for different topics? Yeah, each track is one topic. Oh, really? Or one, yeah, story. Interesting. So there's eight stories from those topics you selected. I have some, I have questions. Yeah. Okay. So theoretically, it is synthesizing the biggest news stories in different categories across the web.

1:14:20I don't know how it's deciding which stories to pick. I also. Me neither. What, like, is it just going to like read off of, is it just going to like summarize a bunch of stories that were written by actual journalists and then not quote or reference? anything correct sick so this is would you expect anything like if you went to a if you went to a web page that had a 10 paragraph news story and just asked copilot gemini gbt whatever to summarize it and you got those bullet points i think that's what you're getting here it's just a super short summary a one minute long summary of that news story and no source, nothing else, and then just moves on.

1:15:07And it's read in an interesting AI voice, and that might be the most impressive part is how human-like that voice sounds. Well, I have a question. Have you gotten to the end of a story recently? Yes. And it definitely does not source it. It doesn't say, like, this story comes to you from blah, blah, blah. Let's get to the end of this Boeing story and hear what happens. The program remains uncertain, with scheduled flights potentially being further delayed. That was it. Okay. Coming up next, the New York Mets have bolstered their pitches. Sounds so bored. I would never agree for them to use my voice for this because now I am the one potentially screwing up news stories and tossing out misinformation.

1:15:48But what if you had investments in the company? What if you were the CSO? Don't use me. This is basically like the Daily from the New York Times but generated by an AI that could be just hallucinating information. Or just, yeah. It could even be reading correct information from unreputable news sources. Or that, yeah. I would, do you know what's funny? I would like something like this. An onion article gets in there. Yeah. But like, I would like something like this that wasn't summarizing and I picked the news stories I wanted of the day. So then I could be like in the morning like, oh, here's a couple of things I would find interesting but now you can read them to me while I'm in the car with a nice sounding voice.

1:16:31I believe, so the New York Times uses some service that does this for their articles. And I think you can just use that service and use it to read a bunch of articles. Even non-New York Times articles? Yeah, yeah. Oh. There are services out there that you can tell to read certain webpages to you and it will read them. That would be cool. But if it was just like a widget on my phone and if it even said like, here's a couple of news articles you might find interesting today. And I'm like, oh. Yeah. pick those four read those to me today i guess this is like the this is like the lowest effort possible version for on the user part like i just wake up and just tap the widget and off i go yeah there's a there's a npr podcast called up first that's basically 15 minutes of the biggest news stories and that's actually fact-checked by journalists so is it an entirely human process or Or is it like AI curated and then human fact check?

1:17:25No, it's entirely human. Yeah. What if it wasn't? Well, then they've been doing AI for a long time. Up First has been around for a very long time. Yeah, a really long time. They're great, yeah. All the tech companies, I think, just are fine with stealing. And I just... There is a small disclaimer at the bottom. Oh, great. There we go. That'll fix everything. When you go into the widget settings and then you go to adjust them at the bottom, It says, the news content is curated from third-party sources, period. Nothing is not responsible for the accuracy or opinions expressed in these articles. Nice.

1:18:03Lawyers killed that statement. We should throw that at the end of all our podcasts.

1:18:10Adam Molina has curated. Yeah. There isn't much else to say there. It just kind of reads you AI news. well if you're willing to have a second up first that might be lying to you try this out yeah super easy that might be look I'm always happy to have more podcasts but this guy also sounds really bored he does and I wonder like if they have other voices that they tried or if they wanted to add other options for voices if they'd be like more excited or other personalities do you think he requested to be that voice oh to be the voice I don't know do you think he requested or Carl was like you're doing this I think behind the scenes, nothing is probably pretty pumped that they're able to try this level of weird stuff and kind of just get away with it.

1:18:56Yeah. Like if they had announced this separately, like obviously we already are familiar with the NPRs and like the early morning podcast news shows of the world. And if they wanted to just jump into that ecosystem and offer an AI curated one, the reaction would be very one sided. I think everyone would go, that's a little weird. We like the human touch. We need it to be fact-checked. Having an AI-generated version of this in this ecosystem, not ready for that yet. But instead, it's just a widget on a nothing phone where the users of this phone, they're already kind of curated. It's people who are buying these nothing phones.

1:19:36They'll try it. And if they like it, they like it. If they don't, they don't. But that allows them to play with a very forward, almost radical idea and see how it goes. And so now that's how we end up with this really crazy AI generated news radio show that the radio shows probably aren't even really paying attention to. What is the app called? This? Yeah. It's called the, let me double check. The Nothing News or something. news reporter widget. Okay. Because there's no app on the phone. Nothing had told us that there was going to be an iOS version of this widget. Yeah. But I don't know if it's out yet or if that's actually happening.

1:20:21Also, to be fair, I joke about it being the CFO, CTO? CFO. CFO. If there's a company pulling it off with one of their people, nothing makes the most sense because in general, nothing is pretty good at getting their executives and people at their company out there for their fan base and their fan base seems to like that. So this does make the most sense for them. Yeah. Also, interestingly, I believe Carl had said that he made this whole thing about how he's interested in how AI is going to change the way we interact with smartphones. And from what I understand, that's the main reason they're not planning on releasing a phone three this year is they want to like kind of re-engineer the UI for smartphones and release it on the Nothing Phone 3 like next year.

1:21:07Sure. Sure. Which to me feels like the Nothing Phone 3 might as well be basically the same as the Nothing Phone 2 just with a bunch of up-to-date specs and a ton of AI stuff. Well, that's what the Nothing Phone 2A Plus is. Exactly. Nice. It's the world we live in. It's the world we live in. The world we live in. I heard Adam has a rant to finish this off. My rant is something I have been asking for for at least a decade at this point. And it is basically 2K Quidditch. For those that don't know, this is something else. NBA 2K or like sports game. NBA 2K, but just Quidditch. There has been a new game that's coming out, Harry Potter Quidditch Champions, coming out September 2024 or whatever.

1:21:54I've been asking for this for so long. But I have so many questions about it because, first of all, it looks just like it did in the PS2 game or whatever that we used to play way back in the day. Wait, there was a Quidditch one? There was a Quidditch section of a Harry Potter game on the PS2 or PS1, I think, years ago. And it's like the same mechanics, which is a little weird. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone on PS2. It wasn't this Quidditch World Cup? There was also a Quidditch World Cup game. I never played that one, though. I wish I did. But that brings me to my next point. I'm just curious how they're going to do this because the game mechanics and everything.

1:22:32Like Quidditch inherently makes no sense. The author has said multiple times that she was like making it. She made this game for the stories intentionally to make fun of people that like sports. So at one point in a game, you can catch the snitch, get 150 points, and basically that guarantees victory. So it's like, what's the point of playing the game? It's like playing Zodiac. Yes, sure. Yeah. Exodia. Obliterate. Obliterate. It makes no sense how the game mechanics work in itself. So I'm just curious how this game is going to work because there's like an online multiplayer game. Like, am I just going to coast the whole game and then last minute just try to catch the snitch because it's worth the most points?

1:23:12I mean, in my PlayStation 1 version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, you could play Quidditch. And I didn't beat the game for so freaking long because I just played that game as if it was a Quidditch game. it was so good it was so fun and so if they had mechanics in that they'll probably build it out I'm just curious how they're going to make it fair I think they want this to be FIFA but for Harry Potter fans I hope maybe not hope but it would be funny if there were game packs like the right in like FIFA and NBA where you like open packs to get players and gamble all your money away with DLC so you can get the gold Messi card I want the gold Nimbus 2000 and I want to spend$800 trying to open it.

1:23:59Yeah, pay to play, baby. It's coming. But I will report back when this game comes out because I'm 100 % playing it. I'll play with you. They made something called Seeker VR but I feel like Quidditch VR would actually make sense because you can move in it because flying, you don't need to move your legs. Your body doesn't move. You don't feel your body moving though. You don't feel your body moving but it's way better than just walking in VR which makes no sense. so you could fly around catch the golden snitch have you guys ever lucid dreamed before? oh yeah hard left it's related for those that don't know lucid dreaming I'm not promoting this as a thing that you can train yourself to do because I don't know I tried and it never worked anyway I have been able to lucid dream three times and it's basically when you realize that you're dreaming but it doesn't wake you up and then you're able to take control of the dream and you're basically a superhero and it's sick.

1:24:59Do whatever you want. You've never lucid dreamed? I have. This description is hilarious. I'm not trying to make this a goop podcast but we're close. But basically the first time I ever lucid dreamed I was able to ride around on a broomstick because I was super into Harry Potter when I was a kid. That's awesome. And I was like flying around it was super sick and my dad walked in I was like look I could write a broomstick and he was like okay but anyway it was super fun and cool so I think that this game will be interesting. In VR. In VR. In VR. Right. VR would be sick. That was the point. That'd be cool.

1:25:37If we could get to my childhood lucid dreams in real life I would appreciate it. We're working on it David. Before that we also have trivia.

1:25:52trivia dude so quick update on the score google with negative three ellis carrying the one thank you marquez with 14 andrew tied with 14 and david with 15 let's go five percent battery nice you don't need it anymore yeah now we're done it's that's true first question which of the following was not a google x project a project glare a project that used exclusively solar energy to charge hot swappable e-bike batteries b project dandelion a project that sold geothermal energy systems to consumers c project flux a project that you know when you say a word too many times doesn't feel real anymore that's project right now for me.

1:26:40A project that made a tool for designing eco-friendly buildings. Or D, Project Mineral, a project that used machine learning to scale sustainable agriculture.

1:26:57Marquez, you're erasing and rewriting or are you drawing? I thought about drawing, but I knew I was sticking with the writing. David you don't have to write that much it's just one letter it's like in Spongebob yeah alright flip him and read what do you got David B dandelion B dandelion wrong Andrew I forget it was flare or glare correct I also put Oh, hey, Glenn. You telling me. Because anytime I see a project using solar energy to charge batteries, I know it's not going to work. Really? Yep. It would make more sense. Bikes need way less charge. And wait. That's specifically why I said it. And wait.

1:27:49You're saying, because look. You know the e-bikes that they have in the city? Yeah. They swap out those batteries every night, basically, to keep them at 34 miles or however far they can go. If they put solar panels along the docks - Not nearly enough. Probably not, but something, right? I mean, I don't know. I just - This was a moonshot project. Selling geothermal energy to consumers - That was the only description. Seems a lot less likely than charging bikes. You would think. So I'm surprised. I applaud you guys for being smarter than me today. You remember the Prius with the solar panel on top?

1:28:34The what? The Prius with the solar panel on top? It gets like seven miles a day. Exactly. Think about that. Yeah. I thought they always said that was it takes care of the infotainment system and air conditioning controls. That's mainly what it does. Think about that though. The entire surface area of the top of the Prius. Yeah. Not the entire, but the whole roof. Yeah. Can power that thing. Yeah. In ideal conditions, sitting in the sun on a sunny day outside. for an entire day for five miles. That's more than enough for a bike though. But the bike has a much smaller surface area. I was never saying it was on the bikes.

1:29:12It was for the bike. I assumed it was like a station that had the carport with a covered 100 bikes. Have you seen the city bikes in New York City? The docks are super long and you could put a strip of solar panel on it. yeah I still don't think it'll be enough yeah and I guess considering like they are already powered because they like light up green or red when you like put them in and stuff so they're plugged in if they could figure out how to charge the battery by just docking it they would have already done that but they're probably just afraid of electrocuting people same yeah safety first question number two I'm gonna get this one by the way fun fact everyone is tied up right now 15 lost my lead okay so since we're all gonna get this wrong you don't know that closest well assuming we do can we do closest gets the point yeah i'll do delta what was the question it's like the tamagotchi date oh the question is rap when was the tamagotchi release go this is according to history of tamagotchi no tamagotchi-official.com slash history okay david why don't we just add search gpt

1:30:29extra point if you get the day wait like day of the week no Thursday flip them and read I put Thanksgiving 1987 wrong I put May 26th 1995 wrong and I put July 31st that's today 1989 oh it probably is today wait that first of all that's Claire's birthday like to the day which is really funny which also relevant Harry Potter's birthday is July 31st correct which we were just talking about that's cool damn I did not know that either what is the snitches well we're all wrong so what is the actual date that the Tamagotchi the actual date was November 23rd 1996 96. Oh, wow. Andrew was closer, so Andrew gets the point.

1:31:26I remember it being really popular when I was a kid, so I was like, I feel like it had to have come out sometime. I thought it would have gotten more popular in Japan and then taken over for us, which it did, actually. I also thought it was in the 80s. It would still make sense because I had one, and I was born in 95. I recently, as in in the past month, got my first Tamagotchi. Why? Wait. I'm just going to leave it at that. Nice. Wait. Next story time. Did you say Clara's born in 96? 89. Hey, hey, hey, hey. What? It's fine. Anyway. It's still, by the way, the Tamagotchi's not open. It's still in the plastic.

1:32:11It's new. New inbox. Are you going to use it? Nib. Is it a Kith collab? I would like to pick a not busy time because you have to keep it alive and pay attention to it. I would like to pick a not busy time to turn it on. So when you retire. I have to know why you bought it. You have to tell us. I didn't buy it. I got it as a gift. Oh. So. Are you going to use it? You plan on seeing how long you can keep it going? I don't know how long. I don't really know how active I have to be with it. Like how attentive. If you ignore it. If it's the original one. It dies. If you ignore it for half the day. It will die.

1:32:41It has like dysentery. Like six hours or something like that. Does anyone remember? Poops. You have to clean that up. I feel like Neopets was the next step. Does anyone remember that? And then you'd log on to your Neopet like three months later and it had like flies and like garbage around it. Yeah. Okay, quick story about Neopets. Wait, that's just an AI friend. It was an AI. It was way cooler. Yeah, it was cooler. Quick story about Neopets. At the time, you had to be 13 year older technically, but there was a loophole. Well, it wasn't really a loophole. It was a legal thing where if you could give your child permission to sign up for an account being under 13 and when I was like nine, I didn't know you could lie on the internet.

1:33:22Oh, you did crimes. No, I didn't do crimes. This is the thing. I printed out a document that I had my parents sign that I mailed to the Neopets headquarters to enable them to let me have an account before 13. Wow. And it worked. My sweet summer child. I know. I hope that letter is framed somewhere. I'm probably the only child that did not just overtly lie on the internet. Wow, all the characters are exactly the same. There's some new ones. That is crazy. I'm trying to find like... While they nostalgia over here. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening to this episode of Wayform. It's been a lot of fun.

1:33:57Hopefully by next week, we'll know some more things about the things we talked about this week. Because, you know, a lot of mystery is still out there. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace. Wayform is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Roven, a part of his... Come on, man. Wayform is produced by Adam Molina. You're doing great, sweetie. Waveformer is produced by Adam Molina and Alex Rubin Partner with Box Media Podcast Network And our intro outro music was created by Vancell Bingo!

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