How DeepSeek crashed the AI party
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Hello and welcome to the Redcast, the flagship podcast stealing stuff Sam Altman has already stolen. You're on notice, Sam. You steal a car. I'm coming to steal that car. Look, I haven't been a lawyer in a long time. Isn't that double jeopardy? Like if somebody else has done a crime and then you do the crime to them, you're good. Yeah, if it's additive crime, I think it is fine. Yeah. I don't... Look, I passed the bar exam a long time ago.

I've drank a lot since then. Just in the past five days of the Trump administration, I drank away one full bar exam. But I do believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, that if someone does a crime and then you do that same crime to them,

The courts like you're good. Listen if we've learned anything in the last two weeks, it's that you can in fact just say things Yeah, and sometimes those things turn out to have huge weight over how America works So yeah here we are. We're fully in the I declare bankruptcy stage experiment as I believe George Washington Prophesied in his first inaugural. He's like one day people are just gonna start saying stuff and

And you should row a boat away from here as fast as you can. Those are all the things I know about George Washington. All right. There's a lot going on this week. I'm actually very excited about our second segment this week. Last week, we asked a bunch of you to tell us what you were using AI for because there's a big gap, right, in how people feel about it, what the companies say about it, the amount of money we're spending on it, and then how people are actually using it.

And it turns out a lot of you are using AI. We got so much feedback, including from a bunch of people who were outraged at the idea that not everyone uses AI for everything all the time. And I really actually appreciate that. It was very cool to go through and be like, oh, these are real people who use it in their real lives and not just somebody trying to convince me to give them billions of dollars. Yeah.

Are you sure that Sam Altman wasn't outraged that not everybody's using it? Do I think Sam Altman has a lot of burners and is in our inbox on occasion? I do think that, yes. He does have access to ChatGPT. I will say that. So we're going to go through all those. I think that's going to be really fun. We've got a lightning round. But we've got to start, I think, with the tech news. It's the tech news. And it's obviously that Microsoft is continuing to launch Intel-powered Surface devices.

No? David? For $500 more, you can have a Surface that has more words in the name and a chip you don't really want. And worse battery life. Congratulations. You did it. There's something there. They did announce they're going to do this. They also announced that Microsoft is running DeepSeek now on co-pilot PCs that run Qualcomm chips. We're going to talk about DeepSeek in a second. But it's just interesting that Microsoft has to still carry Intel in this specific way.

because that partnership is so long and so important to everyone but it's like everything about microsoft releasing new service devices has changed in the past 18 months yeah to where two years ago they're like here's some service devices with arm chips i think the reaction would be and now it's here's some service devices with intel chips and it's like oh man you're still doing this and that's a big change yeah and it really did happen a really fast and b

almost without anybody noticing. Like, I feel like every step along the way was also kind of meh, right? Like when that first round of co-pilot, co-pilot plus PCs, still the worst name in laptops, uh, came out, they did, they were fine, right? Like the overwhelming response was like, Qualcomm did pretty good work here, but the emulation stuff is still pretty bad. The performances and what we, it's like, it's just not, it's, it's fine. And then,

Somehow between there and here, we've flipped all the way to, like you said, I see Intel Surface Pros and go, "That's not what anybody wants." Like, it's crazy. - To be clear, I don't think the ARM-powered chips are doing everything yet. There's a reason to sell Intel-powered laptops. Lots of people are still buying Intel-powered Windows PCs, obviously, but it's just interesting to see where the bleeding edge has gone to. Like, it's obvious that that thing has Runway and Intel, and you know, along the way they did fire their CEO.

They did do that. So maybe it's just vibes all the way down. That's not actually the biggest news. That was a joke and we ended up talking about it because it's for a cast. The big news is DeepSeek. Yeah. It has turned the tech world upside down in just a very – the only way to describe it is a very bubbly way. Like everyone was overinvested in overhyping AI and then everyone overreacted to another AI tool that's –

What do you think, David? So I actually think that's the right frame for it, because the more I've learned about this and the more I've talked to people about it, the more I've come to believe there are sort of three simultaneous things going on. On the one hand, there's the stock market freakout, which is just a stock market freakout. A bunch of people, I would say, like half correctly understood what deep seek is and made a bunch of weird assumptions.

semi-thoughtful bets against NVIDIA as a result. And there's been some really interesting reporting over the last few days that a big part of the sell-off was triggered by this one super deep, super thoughtful blog post about somebody who was shorting NVIDIA. He writes this big thing and lands on short NVIDIA. It has no moat. This thing is not. This thing is massively overvalued. Got shared by a bunch of people in tech and you can kind of argue that

That's what caused a lot of that. So on the one hand, there is just a lot of money was lost very quickly. So a lot of people got in a CNBC tizzy about that. So that's one thing happening over here. The other thing is very much a story about technology and the actual questions of like, okay, how do we think about what...

deep seek did here that is interesting and unique? And how do we think about open source AI being really at the bleeding edge of a lot of this stuff? And what did deep seek do that is interesting that's going to roll back to some of these companies? And what does it mean for open AI? That's all interesting. And I think we should spend most of our time talking about that. And then there's a third thing, which is just China. It's just the China of it all. And I think everybody sort of twists themselves in knots about everything to do with China, in part for good reasons and in part for bad reasons. But like,

Coming off of all this stuff with TikTok and Red Note and the ideas about what these companies are collecting about us and what it means that there is like technical leadership happening in those countries. And like everybody is just really spun up to have feelings about China. And so there was a lot of feelings about China in there altogether. So it just became this like perfect storm of, I think,

Under a couple of really small changes, this would have been like an interesting story and not like the only thing anyone in my group chats cared about all week. But because it was those three things together, it became everything. Like my high school friends are talking about deep seek. This has just been happening this week. Well, once you turn the entire economy into gambling, which is what we're doing, everyone cares a lot about the gambling. And to whatever you mentioned, the CNBC of it all.

like most people's retirement savings are like in big index funds which are all just big tech stocks right and so it's like eight companies now right so when nvidia goes down or apple goes down or meta goes down like actually the whole economy kind of goes with them which is not great

There's a lot of reading and reporting you can do about that. That's not what we care about here at The Verge, but it's just notable that that's why it breaks through so often now. Yeah, oh, I agree. And I think in NVIDIA's case, I mean, like what people have been saying about NVIDIA for...

months is that it has essentially propped up the stock market on its own for a very long time now. And it has gone through the roof like it's grown like crazy. And so, yeah, everybody has been saying there is a bubble and just pointing at NVIDIA. By the way, total side note, one of the funniest things about every time NVIDIA is in the news is the number of different ways people pronounce the name of that company. There's a lot of NVIDIA happening, like N-U-H-VIDIA, which I like. There's a lot of... If you're paying attention to Verge, there's some of that floating around the

We're going to fix it. The thing is, I'm not sure anybody's wrong. You know, who knows? It's nuclear and nuclear. Like, you know, it all gets the job done. Wait, hold on. We can't slide this far, David. There's an answer. We're going to clean it up. That's all I'm saying. Okay. So we agree that you would pronounce it like NVIDIA. Like there's a sort of sign. There's an I at the beginning, right? Yeah.

Like a gentle eye. NVIDIA has, their name is so stupid that they have pronunciation guidelines online. Do they really? Yeah, they have for years and years and years and years. It doesn't matter because like the CNBC people will just say NVIDIA. But also NVIDIA might be the company that most violates my theory that you can't overcome a stupid company name. And it's a stupid company name. It's hard to pronounce. It doesn't mean anything.

It's just like an Amazon brand of letters that they happen to turn into one of the biggest companies on Earth. Oh, that's rough, but it's good. That's a rough chuckle. That's really good. I bought this NVIDIA battery bank. That's what I'm saying. $39 with a 10% coupon code. Yeah, like in a parallel universe, Ugreen makes all of the GPUs that people buy in the world. And this is where we are. But yeah, so the money of it is real. And I think to the extent that it's also tied up in all of this other stuff,

That's important. But to me, that is actually like, that is the thing people got most sort of bent out of shape about and took it to mean that there is all this other equally important stuff happening in these other ways, like with the tech itself. And the more I learn about it, the less I feel like that's actually the case. So I keep making the comparison to Bluetooth with AI. It's just my go-to. Have you noticed you've been doing that a lot recently? You compare a lot of things to Bluetooth recently. Everything is Bluetooth. Yeah.

Right? Like we had to, you don't remember this. When we do it. First cast coffee table book, by the way, that's the title. Just throw it out there. Everything is Bluetooth. Everything is Bluetooth. When, when Bluetooth first hit the scene.

They were so proud of themselves. And they're like, everything is going to be Bluetooth. Bluetooth is going to change the economy. They were out here talking about personal area networks or PANs. Oh, yeah. I wrote a lot of blog posts in Gadget about personal area networks. How's your PAN doing? It's awesome, dude. It's my Apple Watch and my AirPods.

This is a real thing that was going to happen, right? Like the, we were going to blow up the world with Bluetooth and then the actual products didn't match the investment for years. And so like, it's a, just a good comparison. 5g actually is another great comparison. We were in a race for that. You will recall just to what, to what finish line? No one knew the answer. Robot surgery, right?

Seems unlikely. Autonomous cars, there's some of them driving around. Sure. Sure. But that was the big impetus. And also with 5G, you will recall, we had to beat China. Because if China got 5G networks first, America was done. Right. You can't have it. Which is very much what people are saying about AI right now. It all just tracks. These things rhyme, right? The difference is...

When AT&T and Verizon spent billions of dollars to build 5G networks against whatever hype and whatever graft, they at least knew they were going to sell people cell phones and cell service. True. At numbers that people were willing to pay. Right? And the people who put Bluetooth everywhere, they didn't know that there would be AirPods, but they could imagine AirPods being.

And they were like, one day there will be AirPods. And then eventually Apple invented AirPods. Yeah, you could get all the things with wires and be like, what if no wires? And like that, that worked. You could see how you'd get there. But with AI, we just keep, we're like, what if it bangs you? Is that worth $500 billion? For some people, the answer is decidedly yes. Yeah.

We're like, what if it's agents and it does some clicking around the web for you? What if the Rabbit R1 is great? What if the Humane pin is great? To quote David Pierce, is this a thing? And there's not the finish line. Right. Where everyone's going to pay all of the money for the products that justifies all of the investment. And I think my version of the deep seek story is like, it just showed that all of this big upfront investment maybe isn't necessary. And so,

meta doing dick measuring by how many Nvidia GPUs it was buying kind of is like, are you just wasting money? Like, is there an end result to this or can you just do it much more cheaply now? And I don't know the answer to these questions because I don't think anybody has really delivered a product that is

gonna pay it all back. In the context of deep seek, that conversation has been super interesting this week. Because like the case for all of this being good news for the Mark Zuckerberg, you know, talking about the size of his data center of the world is, okay, let me see if I can explain how the theory goes. The theory goes like this. If you make AI cheaper to make,

two things will happen. One, you'll be able to make better AI for the same price. So you get the performance scale goes up, right? I can now make

something 50% better for the same price as I was planning to do it before. So thus good AI. Then all the stuff that I've already been doing gets cheaper. So it becomes more accessible to more people who use it for more things, thus also better. So it's like this flywheel of scaling is what everybody is very excited. Dario Amadei, the CEO of Anthropic,

made essentially that argument, right? That now, because all this stuff is getting cheaper, and this has been happening for a while, like DeepSeek didn't invent making AI cheaper to run. Like this has been happening for a while. One of the very first Google IOs in this whole AI tumult, like two years ago, literally Sindhar Pichai was saying, the thing that we're best at is making things cheaper. Right. And so now what you're thinking is like, okay, if you're Sam Altman, instead of spending...

$10 billion to do this thing, I can spend $10 billion to do the next thing, right? I can make the thing that I'm working on with all this money

50% better. But what is he making? This is what I'm saying. So all I actually buy that theory, right? Like it all makes sense. But the question continues to be, what are we laddering all of this up to? What is the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow? And my favorite thing that happened this week was, did you read Reid Hoffman's New York Times opinion essay that everybody was dunking on all week? Yes. Can I just read out loud two paragraphs from it? Please.

He says,

Decades from now, as you try to remember exactly what sequence of events and life circumstances made you finally decide to go all in on Bitcoin, your AI could develop an informed hypothesis based on a detailed record of your status updates, invites, DMs, and other potentially enduring ephemera that we're often barely aware of. As we create them, much less days, months, or years after the fact. This is Reid Hoffman writing about how AI is going to make humanity better. And the best use case he can dream about is it's going to tell you...

which DM made you want to buy into Bitcoin? Like what, what's the plan here? And, and now, and I, I've been thinking about this a lot with the questions of like, okay, well then if all these companies don't need this much money, why are they raising all this much money? And it's like, well, cause money's good to have. And you should, if you can raise it, you might as well. And so Sam Altman is out there raising unheard of amounts of money. And there are reports that they're about to raise anywhere from 15 to 25 billion more dollars now. Like,

Sam Altman is as good a fundraiser as we have ever had in this industry. And so he's going to go out and raise money, but it turns out, uh, I'm not sure anyone knows what we're building towards anymore. And I am less and less sure every day that people know what the answer is to what problem they are solving with AI. So we're in this place where like deep seek is very interesting in that it is going to make, it is going to help make a lot of this stuff easier and cheaper to make the fact that it's open source. I actually think is on balance, very cool. Uh,

There are scary things about open source AI, but whatever. I think by and large, this stuff should be in the open and not in the hands of three companies. It's going to change the way that this stuff gets developed. People are going to like take the things that deep seek did bring it in, make it better. The whole industry will get better. And to what end has not become any clearer at all. Yeah. It's funny. The read Hoffman thing. I read that too. And yeah,

you know like you do in trump administrations i i spend i've been spending a lot of time thinking about the inner lives of rich rich men sure like very rich men what do they what do they want for me because they seem to be in charge of everything um and it's just like dude wants a friend

Like, I think a lot of these guys don't have... All their relationships are just people who want things from them. And so when they're like, what could this robot be for me? They just imagine just a friend who's known them since kindergarten. But then do you think there's also a little part of them that's like...

wants their AI friend to know how rich they are. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. They're like, why don't you think my ideas are good? I don't want your ideas AI. I want you to like my ideas. I just think if I have a piece of life advice for everybody listening, it's like you should have some non-transactional relationships in your life with people who just like you and you like them and that's it. You're not trying to buy and sell.

That's everything. Yeah. All the time. That might be good for humanity. I always think about Steve Jobs. You know, he would end all the keynotes with like apples at the intersection of liberal arts and technology.

And like, these dudes are like, fuck the liberal arts. It's like, no, that's the important thing. Like, that's why that, that's why that company is important. Cause they, they like care about culture. They're like the, the computers are to make art with. That's why they can't make AI for shit though. But that's, that's so funny. I don't know what Steve Jobs would have thought about AI, but it's like, you look at the output and,

And it's like, it's pretty bad. And it's like, is this good? Like, this is, do you want to make more stuff with this? I will say deep seek is,

There was some copy going around that it had written about the nature of tools, which is a very Virgie thing to write about. Dieter made an entire video about whether or not computers are tools or instruments once upon a time. It was pretty good. It's not great, but it had some bangers in there. It didn't sound like chat GPT, which I mean is a compliment. I think we're all kind of learning how to sense when something is written by AI, and it didn't sound like that. It was...

and kind of overdone and overwrought. And it was very much like a overly pretentious college sophomore writing a paper for their English class. But like,

That's a lot better than ChatGP, so I'll take it. Yeah, it's not like a receptionist who's kind of annoyed that you're there, which is ChatGP's default tone. Like, I'll be so corporate that you will go away is kind of how ChatGP writes. But I just think that's very fascinating. What is this tool for? And the first answer with the image generators was art.

Right. And then the second answer was the chat bots will write me 10 more episodes of Seinfeld. And then it was like, they'll kill Hollywood. And then we just kind of like brought it all the way down to like, it'll be a friend that'll, that'll book an Uber for you and maybe buy a sandwich. And it's like, this is a really small vision at the end of the day, just as we're talking, I think you just kind of mentioned it, David, open as I can talks to raise more money at a $340 billion valuation and,

This is right on top of them announcing $500 billion to do Stargate, which is not real.

Right. That's the most like talk about Trump administration, standing in the White House announcing a project that you're not going to build is like the heart of the Trump administration experience. It's a giant novelty check. Like it really is. That whole thing was a giant novelty check for 500 billion dollars. Sure. But the reality check on this whole industry right now is you're spending all this money because no one was stopping you. Everyone wanted crypto to be it and crypto wasn't it. So then maybe I'll be it. And because it can do something as opposed to crypto. Yeah.

Like all the big companies are like, look at this new thing our phones can do. That's Apple intelligence. Like, great. But it hasn't done enough yet. And then deep seat comes along and they're doing it for way cheaper. And I still don't think it's good enough, but it's so much cheaper that it's like wiping out this like

investment thesis that you need all of the money to make a friend. Right. And again, it goes back to the thing of, uh, you have to start to explain to people what you're making. And I think like the, this, this, this, we are making God thing isn't going to work forever. It's already starting to come unwound. Like a thing I've really noticed is, uh,

As Sam Altman and others have started to pull back on what they claim AGI is, this idea that we are like marching towards a singularity where these things are going to be as good as humans at everything is.

is like getting more nebulous and weird and so like if anything the goal posts are getting fuzzier for these companies not more clear and so it's it's wild that it continues to be this frothy when it feels less and less like anybody has any idea what they're going towards here except

it will reinvent the economy. And that's what you have to say, because that's the only way to raise $25 billion more is to claim you are going to change the way that people live their lives.

And like, that's how Adam Newman convinced Masa Stone to give him a lot of money. And that went super great for rework. And we're just, we're just doing it again at even more scale. It is notable that SoftBank is investing into, you know, at large valuations. It is also notable that, you know, Sam Altman is, you know, making videos where he's saying AI will require us to renegotiate a social contract. And Mark Andreessen is like, absolutely not. And then in the next breath, Mark Andreessen is tweeting, like, imagine a world in which wages go to zero and everything is free. Yeah.

And it's like, well, that's renegotiating the social contract. I don't, what are you talking like that? None of that is going to, I cannot say clearly enough. None of that is going to happen. It's just not like some, if, if that does happen, play this clip for me and I will be suitably embarrassed as I sit on the yacht that I got for free because this is not going to happen. And so, and until then it's like, okay,

let's work backwards from reshape the way humans live our lives. What's the, what's the first killer app that you're going to like, what are you going to make for me? That is great that I like and use all the time. It's Apple intelligence. You can, you can summarize any email you want at the click of a button. Yeah. Uh, I saw, uh, an unnamed big tech executive and I just said the words, Apple intelligence. And we just started laughing. Yeah.

I think that's right. That was basically where they were at with it. There are two other funny parts of the deep seek story. Interesting, but funny. One is that deep seek is the result of, you know, by demonstration policies, restrict chips in China. And so it really feels like a bunch of us AI researchers got lazy and

And they were not optimizing their code enough. And the Chinese researchers with H800 chips, which are nerfed H100s,

over-optimized those chips to get better results than the H100s, which is just like a classic of computers story, right? Yes. Like you started out with 64 kilobytes of RAM and you just like worked your way up from there. And then the old head programmers are like, these kids today are wasting cycles on animations. Like it's all, it's just there. It's the same story. Yeah. I don't know if it's laziness. I think, I mean, there's certainly some laziness. They were counting on an infinite supply of processing power. Right. Right.

But that's like it's it's you know, what is it? Constraints breed creativity like. Yeah. There is something to that. But I also think I don't know that they were sitting around being like, well, we don't have to try hard because the chips will do it for us. Actually, now that I say that, I do. I know for sure they were kind of doing that. See what I'm saying? Yeah. No, you're right. Once you work all the way out, you're like, oh, they didn't. They were just like, we'll just buy more chips. Like Sam, get more money and buy more chips. Right. There was there was a brute forcing to this idea.

problem that everyone just assumed was going to be how we get better was that like and they've been making changes to the foundational technology and like transformers are better than they were in 2017 when people started talking about this stuff like they're doing that but nobody at these companies spent a lot of time thinking about how do i do this on worse chips because they just had the good chips

Right. And, you know, a month ago we were talking about scaling laws. I'm like, can you just throw more horsepower and more data at this problem to make the models more efficient? And the answer was like, kind of no. And that might have been when the bottom should have fallen out of all these stock prices because that answer was no, then this moment was coming inevitably. Well, but then what they all did in response was say, okay, well, we're running into walls with our, you know, frontier models at these unbelievably huge things.

GPT-5 is reportedly not what OpenAI wanted it to be. Nobody can find the next huge turn. And then they were like, but if we do even bigger data centers. And it's the same thing to your point. It wasn't like, let's go back down to the metal here and figure out from first principles how to do this. It was, what if we throw even more chips at it? Which is how you get NVIDIA. Yeah.

And very much, Liz and I have been talking about parts of the NVIDIA story for a while now. I think she's even written it up. There are startups that are financing their purchase of NVIDIA chips with the NVIDIA chips as a collateral on the loan. Yeah. Because their assumption is that there will be so much demand for usage, they will be able to just make it work. And it's like, that's a little, that's got some NFT vibes to it. You know what I'm saying? Seriously.

And you just see, okay, well, they didn't, the Biden administration put restrictions on the chips we could sell in China. And the Chinese researchers at deep seek were able to ultra optimize those chips in a way that us engineers and researchers had no incentive to do.

And then this is so that's funny, right? That's like a unintended consequence of a restriction. Yeah, that like fine like it's funny in the sense that like Trying to nerf the Chinese AI market ended up tanking the US stock market weird. It's pretty good That's not what you want there. And then the second extremely funny part is

this idea of distillation where part of deep seek was trained by just like ripping off open eyes models in various ways. It's pretty, um, and like, you know, Sam Hallman is like a little bit outraged by it. And it's like, Sam, you stole the entire internet. Everyone's so mad at you. Yeah. I mean, deep seek is, is apparently was built on top of llama meta's model and used vast quantities of output from chat GPT, uh,

to train itself, which is just, it's just perfect. Like it's just, if every single stereotype you want to believe about the AI industry, every single stereotype you want to believe about China, like it's all right there. It's great. Yeah. And at least Meta to its credit is like, yeah, we made the model open source. That's what it's here for. Like, you know,

Open AI making noises that they have evidence that this was. And it's like, yeah, who cares? Yeah. Like, oh, no, they broke your terms of service. A lot of people have a lot of evidence about you, my friends. You know what else should take the bottom out of the AI industry? Losing the number of copyright lawsuits that you are currently engaged in. I feel like I need to disclose at this time that Vox Media has signed some kind of licensing deal with Open AI to make our stuff show up and search GPT. And honestly, no one uses it. So it's fine. Seems right.

That's way above our heads, but there it is. There's a disclosure. They just turned Gemini on for our Google workspace. That's the thing that happened this week. Disclosure. We had to have a meeting about trying to turn it off and keeping our data inside our own house. Even that, right? We're going to take a big bite out of the search market and knock Google off it. Like it hasn't played out. And that's the biggest identifiable market so far, right? You will ask the robot questions and it'll deliver your answers, right? We're going to make Google dance. All of that.

It doesn't seem to have played out. No. And I think that's, it's why everybody's betting so big on agents, right? It's like, okay, somewhere between we're going to take a cut of your door dash order and we are going to be the payments processor is like,

That's the idea everybody has had. Like, I think it was you that said to me at one point on the show that everybody's business model ultimately is just payments processing. Like it's really, it's really extremely true. Everybody is just desperately trying to do payments processing, including now X this week, which we can talk about, but, uh,

These ideas just aren't working. It is true, and we're going to talk about a lot of the stuff that people are doing with these tools. It is true that people like using these tools, and that is a meaningful thing. But the question of what are they for, and maybe even more importantly, what is the business here? Super duper unknown. It's important to keep reminding you that

The bigger open AI gets, the more money it loses. And that continues to be true. And like there was like the Uber thing that was like, you know, when when we win, we'll we'll take over and we'll raise our prices. And like they they did win. They did raise their prices. They had to retrench in like a huge way. And now they're making this much money. Yeah, that's not coming for any of these AI companies anytime soon, no matter how many billions of dollars you raise.

It's just not coming. Right, because their product isn't as useful as when you push a button, a Toyota Highlander shows up. Right. And it's being commoditized even faster than that. Like the thing everybody was worried about about Uber 12 years ago was robo-taxis are going to come and just throw all this into chaos. That's happening in the AI world. Like all this stuff, whatever you build as an AI model company is going to be copied and bested

like immediately by six other companies. And this is just what we're seeing. So let me ask you this. Microsoft had earnings this week. They're doing fine. But, you know, it seems like the Microsoft-OpenAI relationship has been rocky for a minute. You know, they were like part of the Stargate announcement, not really part of the Stargate announcement. That was mostly funded by Oracle and SoftBank.

Nadella was asked about $500 billion and he's like, we've already committed $80 billion to Azure build outs and I'm good for my 80 billion and just like wouldn't talk about Stargate. And then this week Altman and Nadella, Altman posted a selfie of the two of them. So the next chapter of this relationship is going to be great. But then the companies had also announced that like Microsoft's deal basically goes until 2030.

I can't tell what's going on with these two companies right now. And especially, he posted that after DeepSeek and after Nadella's trying to calm down the market by talking about Jevons Paradox, which is what you're describing where you make the thing cheaper so people use it more. What is going on with these two companies? I think it's as simple as they are... They're sort of in a mutually assured destruction thing where Microsoft benefits so much from OpenAI being...

a huge success because it has these agreements for the, all the cloud stuff that's happening because it's such a huge investor in the company. Like as open AI gets bigger, it uses more Azure, which is more money for Microsoft. Like Microsoft literally wins coming and going when it comes to open AI. So if I'm Satya Nadella, it makes sense to be doing both of these things. You both want to shore this stuff up in house in case this company implodes in some meaningful way, which a, it has already done once and B, uh,

could just happen again. Like I, the, the people a lot this week have been talking about the fact that most of open AI is co-founders aren't there anymore. There are many litigious people circling around this company. There are lawsuits circling like open AI is both absolutely chock full of money and like pretty fragile in a lot of ways. So I think if you're Satya Nadella,

You're like, okay, I need to not be fully reliant on it, but I also am going to make so much money from opening eye if it hits that it's worth a selfie and like a nice tweet a couple of times a year. Like that's a pretty low risk way to at least keep the piece enough.

That open, nobody gets super nervous about it. Like one selfie. Like he's got a chart in his office. It's like options. One selfie. Invest $200 billion. Leak phone call to Sam. Like, yeah. Be caught having lunch with Sam at Sweetgreen is like $200 billion. Like it's, I really, I think, I think these companies hate each other and I think they know it's better to,

to be stuck together for a while and to root for each other because it will be successful for everybody. But I think they will be, uh, in, in they, I think Sam and Satya both go home at the end of day and like throw darts at a, at a, the other person's face. The really interesting thing is, you know, Microsoft's core business is Azure, like in the realist way, uh, Azure's doing great. You know, their earnings are out. Um,

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

like workspace or office subscription, and you're going to get all the AI stuff. And people didn't. Like $20 per month per person for nebulous AI features turned out to be an awful lot to ask. And these companies, like you said, they need more cloud customers and they need people to use the AI in order for the AI to get any good. And so they have just walked it all the way back.

And what they want is they want you to use their tools that make the money and then they want to shove AI at you so that you use it and maybe someday we'll pay for it. Yeah, we'll see how that goes. But that's like a really interesting piece that Microsoft is at least reselling whatever capability has. Google's reselling it. Amazon's reselling it. NVIDIA sells the chips and they, you know, like Jensen flashed on the world when his jet made of money. Yeah.

Meta is really interesting in here because they're the only ones who don't resell the capacity. They are buying all the GPUs. They're building a huge data center the size of Manhattan, like crazy, but they sell none of it. It's all for meta. And either that's a lot of risk, right? They have to get the value out of it or they figured it out. And in their earnings, this isn't great. I don't love it, but they're like, we are increased ad targeting yield and

By sorting through all of the ads, we can show people faster. And that's what the GPUs are for. And it's like, oh, they actually figured it out. They know why they're spending the money. They're not just trying to resell capacity to somebody who's going to make a killer app or...

assuming that they can make digital God. Yeah. They're like, oh, there's a thing we do with this that actually goes faster because we're doing it. Yeah. I mean, the killer app for AI might be ad targeting. Yeah. Which is terrifying. I want to be clear. That sucks. Yeah. And Meta would love for you to not think about that and instead think about smart glasses. But like Meta is building those data centers to serve you better ads, not to...

Like let you wear glasses on your face if they can do all that stuff. Terrific. But the business case for that Manhattan size data center is advertising. And I think that's that's what is happening across the world. It's true for Google. It's true for a lot of these companies like Google.

Ads are going to be how a lot of these things support themselves in a way that I think people are not yet ready for. And in the case of Meta and Google specifically, they have already started down this road where the end result is you're some advertiser.

And you just type in who you want to reach and you put in the first version of your ad and then it makes infinite variations of that ad targeted at specific people. So everyone is seeing their own ad. Right. And that's what the generative AI is for. And this is either good or bad, you know, but...

But like, you know, from those companies perspective, they might spend less money in advertising, but Meta might make more because they're showing more ads that convert more clicks and purchases. And you can just see how you get to this is all good. And then you can also see how the user experience of the platforms will go to hell because they're going to be just choked to death with AI slop and extremely weird AI ads.

And it's already happening. Like, I don't want to pretend, I don't want to be like, this is some like vaporware idea. Like TikTok has some of this capability in their ad sack today. Meta and Google are already saying to creators, let people chat with AI avatars of yourself. Like they are training the user base to see AI content and think of it as the regular part of the user experience. And then it's just, it's just one turn to, Hey Ford,

Give us a bunch of money and we'll have infinite ad for explorers that like we know everything about this person and we'll be like, hey, we saw that you bought a lot of stuff at the store today.

that would fit better in a Ford Explorer, like down to that level of targeting. Or it'll show me the color of Ford Explorer that I'm most likely to like in the setting that is most likely to make me want to buy it because that is data that these companies have. Like, yeah, it's going to get really weird. And I think the like uncanny valley of targeted advertising is about to be explored in a really fascinating way. I will say,

One of the funniest things about this is that it is going to make Amazon look even stupider because Amazon still does the ad where you're like, I buy a hat on Amazon. And then for six months, Amazon's ads are just like, do you want to buy that exact hat that you already bought? Yeah. How about a hat? Do you like hats? Here's a hat. And I'm like, and it's just like Amazon. If AI can fix that,

I'm in. Give me AI. Just stop it with the S. Boil the oceans. Take this hat away from me. That's weird. Look, okay, we've done enough negativity around AI. I do think that this thing is a bubble and it has popped to some extent and it might bubble again. But there's just, I don't, it's not just DeepSeek. It's the products. I'm going to compare it to cell networks again because this is just the world I was raised in.

The money we spent on LTE was good. Like if you, if we have a lot of newer listeners, but if you are with here with us from the beginning, you will remember that the iPhone getting LTE was a big deal. Yeah. Right. And the iPhone launching without 3g was like a legitimate criticism of the product at that time. It had edge. It had 2g networking was too slow and putting wifi in it was the big, like the big innovation. This is all impossible to think about right now. Yeah.

But when the iPhone got 3G, that was a big, big deal because it meant that it could access the internet faster and was usable on the go as an internet device. When it got LTE, that meant it could do video. And that's when a bunch of mobile video like took off and like became a thing.

When I got 5g, everyone was like, that's gonna happen again. Right. And it just didn't. It didn't. It super didn't. What is this for? Is a question people should ask much more often about technology. Yeah. Uh, I will say, I just wanna say one nice thing about deep seek, and then we should take a break and talk about cool things people do with AI. Uh, learning about deep seek sent me down a deep rabbit hole, uh, on chain of thought reasoning.

which is one of the technologies that DeepSeek did a really good job with. Basically, these reasoning models all these companies are coming out with that kind of show you the way that they think. Truthfully, I thought of that as kind of a gimmick that was less doing something different and more just like,

pretending to be human so that you trust it more. But what it actually is, is DeepSeek and other companies have found ways to basically instead of generating one token that is like the answer to your question, it's able to generate a bunch at a time and actually go step by step and try to think through a problem. And what DeepSeek figured out how to do is how to use a technique called reinforcement learning, which basically rewards and punishes a model when it does things right and wrong. And

teach it how to do that kind of step-by-step reasoning inside of the model. And so there's a, there's a great moment in one of the technical papers where the model starts to answer a question, go step-by-step, gets it wrong, realizes that it is going down the wrong road and is going to make a mistake, backtracks and starts over. And that is like a powerful moment.

Yeah.

when you ask these things to go step by step, because instead of trying to answer the question all at once, it answers it step by step, which is like the correct way to do things. But that also, the more you let the model do that, like the longer you let it take, and the more steps you let it take, and the more you let it think and try and poke around and do stuff, the more accurate it actually is. So there is a path toward, we can do this better,

And it looks like these reasoning models. And there are huge compute challenges there. There are huge latency problems there. Like that stuff is going to be hard to do in a way that is like good user experience. But the idea of you can teach a model to be wrong less seems to actually be plausible. And I think that's very cool. And DeepSeek is way out in front of that idea. Fine, you've convinced me. Let's give Sam $500 million now.

Fine. I believe you. Did you download the deep seek app? No, I didn't either. I got so freaked out by like just their terms of service or just like, we'll give the data to anyone in the government who asked. And they've already leaked some. Yeah. Yeah. There was a whole database that got leaked. Like don't download the app people and definitely don't log in with like your Google account and your email address. Like be, be careful. Please. Please. Uh,

Also, when I tried to download it, because none of that was my actual concern, they had shut down registrations because they were overloaded. I see. So you tried and were foiled. Yeah, I tried to get in that club. You said, listen, China, and said, no, no, no. I should have that club drunk and they would not let me in. They were like, no shoes, no shirt, no service, sir. All right, let's take a break. That's been enough. We've been enough negative Nancy. Let's see what the people are doing and whether that justifies $500 billion. Sam Altman. We'll be right back.

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All right. So,

Last week, we pointed out a gap that I think we see in all of our AI coverage. You might have even felt in the last segment that there's how people feel about AI, which in our comments is bad, straightforwardly. There is a real principled stance against it as a whole that a lot of people are kind of chaffed. It's a plagiarism machine, and maybe it is. Like I said, the other leg of the stool that could get kicked out is the New York Times winning its copyright case against AI.

Or Sarah Silverman or any of these. Wasn't it Mark Andreessen who was like, if you don't let us,

steal from the whole internet. This all falls apart. Yeah. He wrote it in a letter to the copyright office. Perfect. Where he was like, I need you to, I need you to do me a favor. Then he brought the government. So we'll see what happens. There's that. But a copyright office this week, uh, announced a clarification of its rules saying if you make art with AI, that is copyrightable, but art made entirely by AI is not. No gray area there. That won't be confusing to anyone. Super, super straightforward. Anyhow, there's a gap. The gap that I'm saying is people are mad about it, especially in our comments. Uh,

across the internet and various social media platforms. You, you, it's movie studio puts up a poster with AI. They get bullied right off the internet. Then there's what the companies tell us, which is people are using this stuff like crazy. Deep seek is at the top of the app store, chat GPT, most popular app by growth in the history of all applications. I think it's a little bit less than that, but you get what I'm saying. And then there's just the stats that we hear from the companies themselves that are sort of like less invested in the hype. Like,

The one I always call out, I called out last week, Adobe CEO Shantanu Ryan told me on Decoder that people use gender to fill at the same rate as layers in Photoshop, which means they just have opened Photoshop. Like, that's just an identity. There's this big gap in how people are saying they feel about AI, the hype, we're going to make digital God, and then the sort of like mundane reality of a lot of people are just using stuff and a lot of people like it, but they don't perceive themselves as like using AI. So we asked...

Listeners, send us what you're doing.

And David, it sounds like everybody responded. Yeah, we got a lot. We heard from a bunch of folks on social. We got like dozens of calls to the Vergecast hotline. We got a whole bunch of emails. Everybody, it turns out, uses AI. And there are at least a lot of people out there who had a use case that they wanted to share. So I figured we should just go through a bunch of them. And I think I tried to pull ones that are

reflective of trends that we saw in the responses. So if you're down, I'm going to read you some emails and I'm going to play you some hotlines and we're just going to talk about it because they all made me feel a lot of feelings and we need to sort through them together. What is the show but sorting through feelings? So I'm going to not say the emailers names because some of this stuff is very personal and also most people in their emails don't explicitly say

give us instructions whether to say their names uh i think a few of the folks on the hotline say their names but i feel like if you say it into the voicemail knowing we're gonna play it on the show that's fair game so i'm so sorry if i'm outing you here on the first cast this first email is from sam a um all right let's start with ilia s has a note for us about how good ai is

So here's one email we got. It says, That's awesome. Like...

Unambiguously cool use case. That's a great use case. It's just like, again, just being negative, I don't know how the restaurant actually made the food. I don't know if the thing's hallucinating. This is what I mean. I'm just prone to see the risk, and I think that's an email where people see the benefit. So this is, you just brought up the exact thing that is going to come up an awful lot in these, which is you are going to see a trend in which

There is a question of how much should I trust this? And one of the things that consistently surprised me is a lot of people saying it doesn't really matter that like, I understand it has flaws. It might not be perfect. It's something like here. Let me let me read you one.

I've often felt intimidated by the professional and technical demands of public service. However, ChatGPT has given me the ability to communicate more effectively, present my ideas professionally, and quickly understand complex topics. From rebuilding water treatment facilities and developing billing systems to ensuring compliance with the Environmental Protection Agency regulations, I've been able to handle responsibilities I never imagined I could take on.

Again, very cool. To me, I immediately read that and go, how many of the EPA regulations do you think chat GPT just flatly gets wrong? Like, yeah, just just fully hallucinates some made up thing. And I feel with a lot of these things, I keep coming back to like, it's gonna work for you until it blows up spectacularly in your face. Right. And it's like, it's the same with the eating in the restaurant, like, as long as it's right. And let's say it's right 80% of the time, which is

probably kind to most of these systems. But let's say it is. You take a picture of your food or you upload a PDF of a regulatory document, ask it questions. It's often going to be right. But when it's wrong, if you trust it, really bad things can happen. And so I feel like

Where I fall on the like, but what if it doesn't work scale might just be different than some other people. But that just is the thing I keep thinking about with all of these. Yeah, I don't trust computers. I have a weird job in that regard. But as David knows, when I record this podcast at home, I insist on recording locally to another recorder and not letting my Mac do the recording because I just don't trust the Mac.

Which is weird because I should. But I will say on the flip side. But I just like that's the frame that I'm in. Right. Whereas it's like what I hear in that email is not about trust. It's about I worked out this idea so that I would have the confidence to go have like have the idea. And that's really different and interesting. How so? Say more about that.

I mean, that person sounds like they have a very complicated job. They have to know how to do everything. They're like designing a water plant, right? I hear that and I think, well, you already did know how, right? Like you had the capability of doing it and what you needed was a conversation or more easily digested reference material or whatever to get you over the hump. Like you just solved your imposter syndrome. The AI didn't do it for you.

Right. You just it just helped you get to where you were inevitably going to be. I think there's something to that. And I think there's also a recurring theme in a lot of these that is basically like I just needed something. I didn't have a tool to do this thing. And now I have a tool to do this thing. And even if it doesn't necessarily do it well, the fact that it does it at all is something right. And it's like I think that I started with the food one because that is one that there isn't.

a clean other answer to, right? Like I see on Reddit all the time, the people who go to a restaurant with like those huge placards of like, here's all the food I can't eat. And they hand them to the chef. And then the chef posted on Reddit being like, this asshole came to my restaurant. And to have something that is like, I can take a picture of this and it is going to give me even reasonably reliable information about what this is and whether I can safely eat it

reasonably reliable and easy is probably a huge step up from the alternative in this case. And I think that's, that's something really meaningful. And so there's this sense that like,

something is better than nothing is so pervasive through a lot of this. And I think it's really interesting in a way that I didn't give it credit for. All right, let me play you a couple of voicemails we got. Hi, this is Alex. And I wanted to call in to talk about how I use LLMs in my daily life. I use ChatGPT as an on-demand advisor of

of sorts. You know, how can I improve this recipe? How much cat litter should my cats be using per month? What are some good ways to save time at the gym if these are my priorities? A lot of these things are things I could use Google for, but it's just quicker to ask JackGBT. Another thing I use it for is

as a way to organize my thoughts. So if I'm ruminating about something, I'll just talk to ChatGPP. It's no replacement for my therapist, but it helps reorient my thinking when I need it to. I know I could also get this from my friends, and sometimes I do, but ChatGPP is nearly always available instantly. I find that very compelling, I have to say. Yeah. I mean, I

Again, it's hard to tell anyone they're like doing it wrong. Yeah. That's great. I'm like very happy that that's working in that way. The thing that grabs me out that one in particular is it is the thing that Google is afraid of. Right. But it's also the thing that these products have shown themselves to be the worst. Like how much cat litter should my cat use every month is, well, first of all, it depends on the cat.

But second of all, it's like that's the one where it's like you should feed your cat rocks. Like it's like that's what will happen. Put glue in the cat litter. It's like it's just sitting there. Yeah. I think this is just really eye-opening for me in that, to your point, it's just good enough. Yeah. It's just something. And as we have covered exhaustively, typing that sort of thing into Google right now is like getting mugged in an alley. Seriously. Yeah. No, there is a real –

thing that I keep hearing in a bunch of these that is just how aggressively Google fumbled the bag of search. That like, what people want is better Google, not chat GPT. And Google just threw all of that away. But I think one of the things that you say all the time is that the internet is about to be flooded with C plus stuff. And I think

what we might be underrating is how valuable a C plus can be sometimes. Like maybe a C plus delivered to me easily and quickly at all times is actually something. Is that bleak as hell? Probably, but it's something. All right, let me keep, let me keep going.

That's like the, that's like how they, why they invented legacy admissions at Harvard. Like that's what you're describing. Like what if we can just accept a flood of C plus applicants? And that goes fine. What are you saying about? All right, let me, here's the next one. Hey, this is Jake. I was listening to your recent podcast where you've mentioned how you want people to call in and say what they use chat GPT for in the real world. I use it weekly to make my shopping list. I ask you to make the recipes based off of what I have in my house that

and what I'm going to buy. Try to make it where I can get as macro friendly as possible. One of the features that I've started using more recently is whenever I make a shopping list, I ask it to make an optimized shopping pattern for a standard location of where I'm going. So if I'm going to Costo or Aldi, I can make sure that I'm shopping in the most efficient. And then I ask it to find substitutes for recipes.

he talks about using it for pretty much anything that it comes to for like vacations trips either for planning that's the this is some of the main use cases where i use it for outside of my work all right so first of all i just i

that's all great man google blew it you just described everything google has ever demoed at google io i know but you're doing it in chat i know yeah yeah like there there's a there are a hundred google keep features that you just described no one uses uh yeah no i this to me was the one that i was like the most sort of down the middle simple use case is like

I'm going to write a list of stuff that I have in my fridge. You're going to spit back some recipes. And then I'm going to say, can you optimize this list to go to Costco? Like chat GPT is great at that. Do it. Love it. Yeah. And then the next turn is,

go on Instacart with operator and order it for me, right? Like you can see how you connect all those thoughts. Next time I go to Costco, I'm going to tell chat GPT to give me directions around Costco. And I'm only going to follow chat GPT. We're going to see how it goes. This is actually the part where he said that I'm dying to know more here. It really implies that chat GPT knows how Costco is organized. And just based on my Costco experience,

in it's a war zone. I'm not sure Costco knows how Costco is organized. That's what I mean. It's like, I've asked Costco employees where things are and they're like, no, no, no, no, no. Good luck to you, sir. Yeah. It's a secret. You're not allowed to know. But yeah, that kind of thing. Like I, I am always talking to people about like, what I, what do I think are good use cases for chat GPT? And the one I always come up with is movie recommendations. Cause it's like super low stakes movies.

but actually a thing AI is unusually able to be good at where I'm like, I like these three movies. What else should I watch? And it's like, that's a thing LLMs do very well. And this kind of like recipe remixing is another good example of that. So I just thought that was great. Um, all right, let me read you another email. Real tone shift here. You ready for this? Yeah. Uh, we got an email from somebody who's going through a divorce. Um,

and said,

Filtering emails this way has made a difficult process a little less hard. It's also helped me curb any instincts to be petty, sarcastic, or passive-aggressive. It helps me keep my side of the street clean. Wow. Right? So I'm married to a divorce lawyer. I have heard about an infinite variety of passive-aggressive emails between partners over the past several years. I feel like I should just go tell her about this. It's really interesting, right? Yeah. Yeah.

This one, I was like, I don't know how to feel. On the one hand, there's like a piece of this that kind of makes me sad that it's like it's a bummer that there is a web app that has to be your tool for this. But on the other hand, like, again, what's your alternative? Where else would someone go to do something like this? If you took this out of the bigger context of AI and all of the noise and all of the hype and you were like, there's a new feature in Grammarly.

Right? Five years ago. Yeah. Or you're like Google Docs has a new feature that just helps you like de-passive aggressive in email. I don't know that anyone would have any reaction to this other than that's actually pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. And it's only in the context of all the AI hype and you know that horrible Apple commercial where it's just like bad employee sends professional email and like this is what Apple intelligence is for.

This is maybe the most human of the notes that we've gotten. Yeah. Right? And that, I mean, not to say everyone else isn't human, but like this is a very emotional task that is being performed. Totally. And I really do think if you took this one out of the AI bubble and all of the baggage that comes with it,

You put this in any other product five years ago and everyone's like, oh, this rules. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it goes to show that a, our, our vocabulary about AI is still so primitive. Like we call everything AI and actually AI is lots of wildly different things. And we need to get to the point where we're better at talking about them as different things. Uh,

But it also, to some extent, goes to show how versatile something like ChatGPT is. Like, all this stuff is happening in the same text box, right? Like, it's a pretty remarkable thing. Also, very notable, everyone has said ChatGPT. Every single person. We haven't gotten one Dolly. We haven't gotten one Gemini. Nope. Uh,

no, no Apple intelligence. A little bit of Claude love in a, in a few. Oh, it's coming. Okay. A little bit of Claude love. Um, I don't think I pulled any of the ones that people use Claude, but, um, sorry, Claude user. Claude was mentioned. I don't think Gemini came up one time in the emails that we got, uh, but Claude there, it's people were like, Oh, I mostly use chat GPT and like some Claude. There was a lot of some Claude. Uh,

All right, let me play you another voicemail. Here's a, again, we're just going to tone shift all over the place here because that's what AI does. Here we go. Hey, this is Leo from Atlanta, Georgia. Neil, I asked what everyone's using their AI systems for, and I use mine almost exclusively to solve hard questions in the word puzzle game, Word Salad. Okay.

Also to note, I recently discovered that something about David's voice makes me super tired and helps lull me to sleep. So I want to give a quick shout out and thank you to Mr. David Pierce for improving my sleep quality and helping fight my insomnia. Thanks, guys. Love the show. Something about David's voice makes me super tired.

First question, was that a compliment or an insult? Yeah, that's really, that's a tough one. You make me sleepy. It's like a really. Yeah. He said, thanks. I don't think he meant it. But that one, like another in the line of like movie recommendations, right? Like pretty low stakes, pretty straightforward. This thing has a lot of information and it can, it can spit some information back at me. Yeah.

It works. You're cheating, but it works. You are cheating. To be so clear, you are cheating. It's okay. I've Googled what's the wordle answer before. It's bedtime for you, sir. We all have bad days. Yeah. Okay. Let me find...

The next one. I've been fascinated by my mom's usage of AI. She's 49, and while she uses it a lot for her small business, writing, posts, etc., I've noticed that over the past year, she's also started to use it as a general Google replacement in her personal life as well. She wants to know a fact? She asks ChatGPT. She has to write a WhatsApp message that requires minimum thinking? She asks ChatGPT. Last week, she found out one of her close friends is struggling with her mental health and having suicidal ideations, and I shit you not, she asked ChatGPT what are the best ways to support someone who's depressed. Again,

Just Google fumbled the bag. Like people want better Google. Yeah, but this is the one, again, these are real people. Everyone use a computer however you want. I'm happy it's working. But this is the one that's the blinking red danger sign, right? It's like, oh, everyone just needs a friend. Sure. Right. There's just an element here where this is, to me, like this is where the robots hallucinate all day long.

And what you're getting is better Google with worse results, presumably, but in a better interface or more reactive or just someone to talk to you in a way that's natural. And it's like,

This is the one where it's like, if you tell me this is the use case, I will confidently tell you this does not support $500 billion data center build out. Oh, 100%. Because it doesn't scale. Like, the thing will happen that happened to Alexa in Siri, which is you'll do this until it fails you, and then you will stop thinking you can do anything more than this.

Right? Like, you're like, Siri, tell me a joke. And it's like, I don't, I give up. Right? Like, fine, timers and music it is. And I'm not saying the ceiling is, the ceiling for Chachapie is so much higher, obviously, but there's still a ceiling. And the ceiling is when it lies to you. Right? When it makes something up. When you ask it for movies and it gives you three real movies and one fake one, and then people are literally showing up at public libraries asking for books that don't exist. Yep.

And that's what I mean. It's like when lawyers show up in court citing cases that aren't real and they get disciplined by the Bar Association, that's the – like they can't overcome – they don't know how to overcome that. And so like this one to me is like, yeah, every experience is valid. Like great. And it's really interesting to see how different people are approaching it.

But this is the one that hits the wall the fastest. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think I agree. But I also think there is a more charitable way to look at that that says the human is still kind of in charge here, right? Like, I think it's one thing to have these things do things on your behalf, right? And this is where I think things like operator get really messy. Like, would you let chat GPT text your wife for you?

Like even something relatively innocuous. David, I don't, I don't think I've made this clear enough. I am married to a divorce lawyer. No, but even something very simple where you're like, that woman can have chat. She, she divorced me. It's just a macro on our computer. It's a work issued windowed laptop with a button that says D and then my life is over. Fair. Yeah. But like,

okay fine uh helen havelack our boss would you would you like voice mode chat gpt and be like hey will you text helen and tell her i'm running late but i'll be like 10 minutes late to the meeting why would i just text her that no no but just go with thought experiment with me here for a second okay would you let it take that act like do that on your behalf not say here's a message you might send but be like send this message for me chat gpt would you have it do that

Yeah, abstractly, yes. Really? See, I wouldn't. There is a certain thing where I'm like, okay, if you want to write the text and then I'll look at it and send it.

Yeah, I guess that's what I'm imagining because that's how I use Siri in the car. No, but I even get freaked out in the car because you say it and it reads it back to you. And I'm like, what if it put weird punctuation and a period at the end and my wife is going to think I'm mad? There's just middle finger emojis between every word and you just don't know. Yeah, okay, I'm with you. And I still like, I truly get nervous about doing a text that I can't look at the words before I send them. And I think that's where all of this agentic stuff gets really messy for me because I'm expecting you to do things. But again, just to finish this up, in this case,

The idea that like I'm asking chat GPT to give me ideas about how to support a friend, I think is less terrifying than the idea of like send my friend a supportive text message, which is horrifying. I scrolled down and I'm reading the rest of the same email about the mom.

And the second part of the email is the most important part of the email. Okay. Here's a quote. Most people I'm friends with or that listen to this show are probably concerned with accuracy, environmental impact, development of critical thinking, et cetera. She, the mom, could frankly not give less of a shit.

And I suspect people like her are likely to be the majority, not because she's dumb. She's brilliant other ways because she's just not wired that way. And this is your point about good enough. Yeah. Right. It's just the computers talking to you and it sounds fine and that's good enough. And I, I'm just very convinced that we live in an age where just being confident is like all you need. Yeah.

Like just blustering through it is very effective in a variety of domains. And maybe that collapses on itself. We'll find out. But that's like the whole population is primed to just be like confident talking. That must be right. Totally. Wired ran a headline the other day, something to the effect of the less people know about AI, the more they like it. And I'm there based on a study that I think it was like a marketing firm did basically to find that

if you don't understand what's happening, AI seems great. And that makes perfect sense to me. That feels exactly right. And I think most people don't understand what's happening and maybe that's terrifying, but I think that's what's coming. Based on this and that second piece, which is super interesting to me, I understand why a bunch of companies are so excited about this because it's the first time using a computer has felt different for people.

Right? The jump from the command line to the graphical user interface felt different and you built an entire paradigm of computing around it. And then the jump from desktop computers to touchscreen mobile phones was an entire paradigm shift and obviously phones could go with you and all the other stuff. But that created an entire economy. And they've been searching for something else to make computers feel different to people. Are they going to fold? You know, like, well, it's something. It's got to be something.

And this feels different to people because they're just talking to them. But there's not an application layer behind that that builds the whole economy or supports all this. And also, I just come back to this theory example. Eventually, mom's going to hit a wall, right? It's going to lie to her. She's going to make a mistake. It will embarrass her in some way. And then we'll stop because she can't trust it. And that trust, once it's gone, is gone. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And I think the question of A, when that happens, and B, what the stakes are, is the stuff that makes me really nervous about all of this.

Yeah. And either I'm just a chicken or everyone else should be more afraid or both. I don't know. All right, let's do one more and then we'll get out of here. Yeah. Here's one more. Hey, The Verge and or the Slack channel. My name is Florian. I'm calling from New Jersey. Taking up your request on what I use ChatGPT for. I would say primarily I use it as a more reliable resource than Google searches for informed decisions. So whether that's in-depth settings menus, I can find Bluetooth.

But, you know, the other ones, I'm a recent college grad, so I've used it a lot to help friends with their career growth or updating resumes, kind of like the bad code, good code argument. I come back for practical advice, namely curious topics or other things like that to gain some information on very quickly. But I would say primarily it's for things like weathering.

when I can't find the answer on AV forums for how to set up the Blu-ray player through ARC with the soundbar and making sure that Dolby True HD plays from my disc. Neil, I don't know if it's for you, but thanks for the great pod. And hopefully someone in the Slack sees this. Have a great day.

I love you. I love this man. First of all, just call me. You're going to talk to the robot? I'm around. Yeah, this is why the Vertcast exists. We will solve these problems for you. That's great. The in-depth technical problem, the issue that I've always run into with that is the answer is buried in some forum post from six years ago, and it's just been muddled. And I actually want to find the old forum post where the person actually has the answer, not the...

Do you know what I mean? Like not the synthesis over time. This is where I think like Reddit answers, the Reddit AI search is actually super exciting because it is geared toward that exact thing. That is like, what if we just did a smarter job of searching this stuff, but we're still interested in finding actual people's actual answers. It's like, that's a cool mix if we can figure out how to do it right. I lied. I have one more to play for you and then we should go to break. But let's just... I just want to say...

to my guy you're my best friend we don't know each other but we're in it now you are one of us we're family welcome to the verge all right I got one more

true hd for life this is matt from springfield missouri i was just answering your question about using ai daily all these tools came out when i started dating and i used it to help write my profile and also compose my messages because i'm a machinist i'm have good ideas but i'm not good at words and ai helped me fill that gap it must have worked because now i'm in a relationship um

I'm going to have a son this year, and I still use AI today to compose thoughtful messages to send to her throughout the week. Oh, this is great. AI is good, Nilay. I got to say, I mean, we just got out of there. We should shut down The Verge. Negative Nancy is good out of here. That's fast. That one made me really happy. It actually only hit two years ago. We went from zero to son. Killing it. Pretty good. Yeah. Pretty good. Pretty good.

You know, most people move in together for, I'm just saying, anyway. Not anymore. This is an AI world we live in. No time for that. Okay, I'll give mine, and it's very different than that, but it's in the same zone. I recently sold something on eBay, and I let eBay's AI just write the description for me. Really? Just gave it. It was so dumb. It was like we bought a new stove.

Uh, and we bought different color handles for the stoves. I sold the old ones and I just took a picture and I figured out what it was. And I'm like, do you want to write a description? And it's like, this is the lowest stakes shit in the world. Like anybody who's searching for a placement stove handles and sees a picture of this, like they know that you don't have to describe them very much. I was like, fine, here's some copy. And it did it.

Poshmark today actually announced that they're letting people do AI descriptions. I think there's this world in which like weird low stakes fields get filled in. Obviously dating is a higher stakes field, but I can see why it's very tempting to people. Yeah. By the way, that's a great story. Yeah. Matt, congrats. We're very happy for you. I hope you name your son Al. Think about it. All right. We should take a break and we got a lightning round.

That was great. Send us more of those. Yeah, thank you to everybody who wrote in. It was super fun. I learned a ton. This has been really enlightening and interesting. And I do want to make sure our coverage is rounded out. All right, we're going to take a break. We'll be right back. Make your next move with American Express Business Platinum. You'll get five times membership rewards points on flights and prepaid hotels booked on amextravel.com.

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All right, we're back. Unsponsored lightning round. That's how you know it's wild. It's crazy times out there. Unfiltered. Uncensored. The First Amendment's back, people. And by back, we mean Trump will arrest you if you criticize him. All right, there's actually a lot in this lightning round. Let's start with some very exciting, very niche VergeCast news. Google is open sourcing the Pebble source code, the original smartwatch version.

And Eric Minjakovsky, the founder of Pebble, is going to make another watch. David, you like talk to him. What's going on here? Yeah. So I saw Eric at CES. We had lunch and he had a Pebble on his wrist. And I said, we were just talking about, you know, life and the future and gadgets. And I was like, I was like, so you've left Automatic. He sold his company Beeper, the messaging app that we talked about a bunch, to Automatic last year. He left the company looking for something to do. I was like, so are you going to, are you going to just like do Pebble again? Are you going to re-Pebble? And

Little did I know he asked me again. We talked this past week and he was like, did you know?

And I was like, what are you talking about? And he was like, we're calling it re-Pebble. Like, why did you say that? So I'm feeling very proud of myself, except that I completely let him off the hook and just moved on to something else. But anyway, so Eric, I guess over the last year, has been working with Google to open source all of Pebble OS. So Pebble sold to Fitbit, which sold to Google. And a lot of the like Pebble ideas sort of percolated around those two companies. And you can see some DNA in like the Pixel Watch, but the Pebble software itself,

was just not being used. And so Google, to its credit, I cannot report that Dieter Bohn was involved, but I also believe in my heart that Dieter Bohn was involved. Dieter, famous Pebble fan, works for Google now. Sometimes there are pieces there. But anyway. Look, we don't do conspiracy theories here except for that one. Except for that one. And Google agreed to do it. So Google open sourced all of Pebble OS, which is not...

There are like third-party drivers and stuff that are occasionally complicated to open source. The name Pebble still belongs to Google, but functionally all of the software is now available. And so Eric is starting a company called

that will not be called pebble. But the goal is just to make pebbles again. He's like, we got it right. His pebbles now still work. He said he had to replace the battery on all of them, but they still work and they still do the things he wanted. And so he's like, I'm going to keep making these like long lasting ink gadgety gadgets to put on people's wrists. And the plan is hopefully to start making stuff quickly, like even this year. And there

There are a lot of Pebble nerds out there who are very excited about this. So the Pebble story, as I recall it, is that they just ran into API problems with the iPhone because the original Pebble could get notifications. Right. Like Apple supported sending notifications out that way, but you couldn't reply to a message. Like they were just limited in very real ways. You could just like look at a text message and begin to get your phone. Apple's never going to open that up. No.

So probably Android phones, the Pebble app on the Android phones, they could do some of that stuff. It was always much better, yeah. There's more to do on Android. But also, I think...

For Eric in particular, I think the idea of it being like a messaging machine seems to be less compelling. He's very into it as like it's an easy way to get kind of glanceable information, but it's also simple and the battery lasts a long time and it has buttons for music controls. Buttons for music controls is one of the specific things he named as a core competency of Pebble. Love it. It does not have to be a messaging system, which I actually kind of agree with. I would like...

lots of features to exist, but I find that I only use a very small number of them on my wrist and I would trade a lot of them for like five day battery life. And I think it's going to be interesting to see what they do this time. I'm excited. I love a good open source hardware hacky project. It's going to be cool because there's like, there's been a pretty big community of people keeping this stuff alive for a long time. And the fact that now they have

honest to God software to play with instead of like hacking around the edges of existing pebbles. Uh, I think we're going to see some pretty interesting stuff here. Like that, that community is, is really engaged and I think is going to get up to some stuff. Okay. So that's pebble. Uh, next one, Oracle and Microsoft reportedly in talks to take over TikTok. This story makes me so tired. Although Trump denied Oracle, right. In some press conference, but he doesn't know. I mean, like

When I say he doesn't know, I don't just mean be dismissive. I mean, literally, he gave them a 75 day illegal extension, which Apple and Google do not trust enough to put TikTok back in the store. And then at a press conference, he said Congress has given me 90 days, which is 15 more days than he gave himself. Yeah. Congress has not given him. Congress didn't give anybody anything. The time's up. Like what he gave TikTok was a 75 day pause on enforcement of breaking the law.

which again, Apple and Google did not trust because that's billions of dollars. Anyway, so I'm just saying like the facts are confusing on the ground. Like what does Trump even believe is going on here? Because he's just saying different numbers. And then he did say, I don't think Oracle's involved, which is weird. But Microsoft was a bidder the first time.

Nadella famously said it was like the weirdest deal he's ever been a part of. Yeah. A bidder might give, uh, Microsoft too much agency in that. It seems a lot like Microsoft was like dragged into a room and yelled at about buying TikTok for a while. Uh, no one knows what's going to happen. Like truly no one knows what's going to happen. And then this other plan, uh, that Trump keeps floating where someone does a joint venture and they get 50% of it to the United States, uh,

Our own big tech companies are extremely nervous about that plan. Oh, interesting. Because if you just think about it, that means India could shut down YouTube and demand it gets sold and 50% of YouTube be given to India. Like that's a precedent you do not want to play with.

Interesting. Yeah. Because other governments are way less skittish about nationalizing companies or doing speech regulations. Everyone's like, don't play this game. India is actually a particularly interesting one in that it is a government that I think would be excited to do that kind of thing and is such a crucial market.

Yeah. As a growth engine for so many of these companies. Oh, yeah. I picked it. India has banned TikTok. Yeah. Straight up. And it is very reliant on YouTube, but it has very draconian speech policies. The Modi government does not enjoy dissent in very specific ways. You could see Brazil and other countries like that. Russia exists. Like there's a million countries that would play these games.

And so like our own big tech companies like do not you do not want to open this door. You're already in 50 different trade wars. Like don't do this. Is it possible that the door is opened now that just someone has said it out loud? Like, do you wonder if there are a bunch of people sitting around in like government boardrooms being like, how did we never think of this? They do. But like if you want to roll up on the United States that way.

the United States would be like, no fair. Yeah. But then the United States starts doing it. Like, okay, tit for tat. Like, here we go. Like we're off to the races. Like we, the norm has been shattered. And like, because we're doing trade wars, you can already see it.

You can see people be like, we don't know what's going to happen, but don't, don't do that one. We'll see if any of that goes through. We'll see if there's a buyer. We'll see what happens at 75 days. Like 75 days is not a long time to close a deal of this magnitude. No. Even if you had agreed on it already, it would be a short amount of time. Right. And as far, so far as you know, there's no lead buyer. And then there's the big question of, are you selling TikTok US or are you selling ByteDance? And there's a lot of chatter that the answer is they're going to sell ByteDance. Yeah.

And so that's a much bigger deal. Right. With a much different set of investors, one of whom is Jeff. Yes. Trump donor, you know, like a lot of his money is set up in bite dance, not TikTok U.S.,

And then there's the question of like, what does control mean? Because the law specifies it can't be under the control of a foreign adversary power. And then Trump is supposed to run an interagency process to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Is he going to do that? So there's just, I don't know, man, I think we're, I think we're going to run to the end of that 75 days and then we're all just going to look at each other and it's who knows.

It really does seem like at the end of day 74, we're still going to look around and everybody's going to be like, what happens now? And no one is going to know. It feels like that's where we're headed. And that is going to, you know, not that Trump isn't running into the separation of powers problem every single day, but you get to day 74 and he's like, I'm extending it again.

A bunch of Republican senators are going to say, no, no, no, no, no. Tom Cotton is going to be like, no, here's what we're going to do. We're going to shoot TikTok in the street. That's where he's already at. Yeah. And so, yeah, we're just barreling towards.

A full sale of ByteDance, which is nuts to contemplate with the permission of the Chinese government. ByteDance probably either the first, second or third most valuable startup on earth right now. Yeah. By April. And by the time you're listening to this, it will be very close to February. Like this is just not going to happen. Yeah. Yeah.

It's crazy to me. Yeah, I really like we were we were on the show for a couple of weeks trying to like handicap possibilities. And I have given up even trying to guess like I couldn't possibly begin to make an educated guess about what's going to happen here, which is so interesting and also so insane. I do think there's some reasonable likelihood that Microsoft actually goes through with this and tries to do it. They have the money to do it.

They have the ability to run the infrastructure. They have Azure. They have a consumer market with Xbox users. Like they have a thesis for why they would run it. They have an advertising business. It's fine, not great. Like, sure. Meta can't do it for sure. Can't do it for other reasons we can talk about. But like, you know, the FCC is still pursuing a breakup. Like they're not going to do it. Would buying ByteDance be the biggest acquisition in history?

Companies worth upwards of $300 billion is the number that keeps being fluttered around. I don't know what the number is. But then I've heard numbers for TikTok that are higher than $300 billion. So ByteDance, by the way, also kind of in the deep-seek race of putting out much cheaper AI models that can be... There's a lot happening in that company. There's a lot happening in that company. Also, just the chatter that I've heard is the number changes based on who buys it. Interesting. So like...

If Meta or Google buys it, for example, they have gigantic monetization engines that are really, really good.

So they don't have to spend any money like getting their money back out. Sure. Right. They just have to deliver ads inside of TikTok and they already have the clients and they already have the tech and they already have the, yeah, like whatever it is that you think they need, they've already, they already have it. It's just really expensive scale essentially. Yeah. They just bought more scale. If you are Amazon, even you got to go build an entire monetization system. So you're going to pay a lower price because you got to allocate some money to that stuff. So like how much you're willing to pay, how much it's worth is all based on what you can do with it.

And there's only so many companies. And the two companies that could do the most of it, that would pay the most, are not going to do it because the government's trying to break them up. Yeah. So, like, literally, they're trying to break up Google. Google has to sell Chrome but can have TikTok. It's like a very funny outcome. That's nuts. All right. On to the next one. This is a new segment that you're going to have to get used to in the Verge cast for the next four years. I'm just calling it Brendan Carr is a dummy. Ooh. A podcast within a podcast. Yeah.

He's a moron. He is a total political hack job with no conviction and no morals. That's my belief. Brandon, if you're listening, you can come on to Coder and you can try to prove me wrong, but good luck, buddy. He doesn't even have a cool mug. If you're going to be terrible at this job, at least have a funny mug. You know what I mean? You know, Ajit Pai, he was a guy. He was also a character in the first Trump administration. Yeah.

He had a governor like he there was a line of depravity that he would not cross fair like you could be like I disagree with this Irritatingly Verizon captured conservative Republican Commissioner Brendan is just a political animal. Yeah here are two examples This week and they're just gonna happen every because the man loves attention He is rolling back a rule

That allowed people who live in apartment buildings to go get their own internet service. So like a lot of apartment buildings, uh, your landlord would be like, I'm just going to sign everybody up for whatever ISP. Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, whatever. And all of you have to use it and you can't go get your own. And because I have collected this all up together, I'm going to get a deal. Mm-hmm.

Right. We have we have some scaling and the ISPs. If you've experienced this, you're like, I don't what? Like, it's just the same number as everything else. Right. You're not getting a deal. You're just being lazy or you're getting a kickback from the ISP and you're not passing that on. Like, this was my experience in an apartment in Chicago is my experience apartment in New York. Like, same. Yeah. A lot of people have had this experience. Yep.

Biden FCC passes a rule says you cannot do bulk billing. You have to increase competition and let people sign up for their own ISPs and apartments. Brendan Carr has revoked this rule and his argument is this will lower prices. Which just on its face doesn't make any sense. It's one of those things that like I can't even make the bad faith argument that that makes sense.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Here's a quote. I have ended the FCC's consideration of a Biden-era proposal that could have increased costs by 50% the price that some Americans living in apartments pay for internet service. This is regulatory overreach, and it would have artificially raised the cost of internet service. There is not a world in which letting people choose their service provider raises their price.

There might be a world in which you live in an apartment building that's so big that you have a landlord that's so good that maybe they were negotiating a terrific rate. I don't know anybody who lives in an apartment building like that. There's one of those in America, and that's the one that Nagar is talking about. Yeah. I'm like, what does this mean by a political animal? He's straight up saying reducing your experience of broadband competition will lower prices. Yeah. It's ridiculous.

All right, what was the other one? You said there were two. Pure doublespeak. All right. Well, there's two, actually. There's two other ones. The second one is he's reopened investigations into NBC, ABC, and CBS's broadcast licenses. It was very complicated because the stations have them, not the networks, but so it goes. And in particular, he opened up the NBC one because he says they violated the equal time rule by having Kamala Harris and Tim Kaine on Saturday Night Live. Oh, right. Right.

Do you remember this? This was like last fall that he got all fussy about it. Yep. Yeah. So on her way out the door, Biden's FCC chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, just like wipes out these investigations. She's like, these are stupid. I know they're politically motivated. We're not doing this. He's reopened them. Whatever. You can say whatever about two of them. They're dumb. But in particular, the NBC one, he knows that NBC complied with the rule because he has emailed people and said that they have. Yeah.

This is such a brazen lie, right? He's like, they had her on. They complied with the rule. Here's their notice. And then immediately had Trump on a NASCAR race the next day because they gave the proper notice and the campaign took advantage of it. He knows. I know he knows it because I've seen the email and he's reopened it to be like, I'm investigate. Like, this is just total political theater. It's just yelling. Yeah. Yeah.

And this is dangerous First Amendment territory. I don't like this speech, so I will cost you money is not what you want. Any government, it doesn't matter if you like Kamala Harris, you love Donald Trump, you hate one, it doesn't matter. Unelected bureaucrats saying I will cost this money, I will make this painful because I don't like your political speech is red flashing warning light.

of free speech problems. And then on top of that, just as we sat down to record, Carr announced investigations into NPR and PBS. Because he says they are illegally advertising, and what he specifically means is that they do fundraisers.

And so his line is, "Taxpayers should not pay for commercial activity," and then, you know, the usual garbage about woke Sesame Street or woke NPR. He's attacking NPR in particular because the CEO of NPR is Catherine Maher, who used to run Wikipedia, and the conservatives hate Wikipedia right now. And so this is just Brendan Carr trying to chill speech.

He's like, I will defund PBS and NPR because I've constructed a legal reality in which them doing fundraising drives or saying we're supported by viewers like you who call us to give us money is advertising for an agenda.

Right. And all of that is transparently nonsense. But it maybe doesn't matter because he's in charge of the F. It doesn't matter in in like the alternate reality of X where this man is trying to build a profile. And I'm like, if he, Brendan, I know you pay attention to us. You have for years. You want to come on Decoder and explain this like craven political bullshit when you are playing with the absolute fire of the First Amendment and claiming you're doing it. Come on. I'll talk to you.

But it's not going to be easy because I think this stuff is incredibly transparent. Yeah. I also this is not important in the scheme of things. But like if you find yourself against Sesame Street, like in any way, business politics, like if you're canceling Sesame Street or you're mad at it, like you've done something wrong. Like just it's not good. You shouldn't be against Sesame Street.

That's it. That's all I have to say. Sesame Street is great. It's pretty straightforward. Leave Sesame Street alone. I will stop. It's lightning round. We got to move on. Yeah. Oh, but I have another super fun, deeply craven political speech thing. Do you want to talk about it real fast? Love it. My favorite. Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle the Trump suit over suspending his account after January 6th, which is just like...

in a sea of Mark Zuckerberg nakedly sucking up to Trump for business reasons, this is the simplest one yet. Like, here's a bunch of money. Please be nice. And then there was some reporting that Trump was basically like,

I think what he said is like, we have to settle this lawsuit before I can like bring you into the, into the fold. I think he called it the nest into the nest. And it's just like this, this was the price of admission, right? Like this is what happened at the inauguration. They all spent a bunch of money to hang out with him and go to parties and he would say nice things. And now Meta is just spending another $25 million to make Donald Trump like them because that is worth it. Can I just say why this one is like particularly galling to me?

Meta would have definitely won. Right. The theory of this case is that Meta, when it banned Donald Trump, was somehow the government and that violated Trump's First Amendment rights. Right. Which is nonsense. Which is nonsense for the very simple reason that the president at the time Meta banned Trump from its platform was Trump.

He was the government. It turns out. Yeah, he was super the gut. Like, you don't even have to get to the like pedantic forum stuff of like the First Amendment is about the government, not slash. Like, I can do that all day. I was raised in that fire. I'm just saying this one is particularly stupid because you're like meta acting on orders from the government who was me illegally banned. Yeah, it's so stupid. He's lost other versions of this case.

But this is, everyone is doing, there's other cases that he would have, ABC settled one, Disney ABC settled one. They're just trying to get out of the line of fire because he controls the regulatory agencies. All these companies have decided it's worth the money. And the thing is, they're right, right? Like I would say pretty transparently, yeah.

You can make the case that this is just a good use of $25 million for meta, which is a sneeze, has a lot of complicated cases going on. There are antitrust questions about meta. Trump has threatened to throw Mark Zuckerberg in jail a bunch of times like Trump.

I can see why you write this check. It just sucks. Like, it just sucks so much that this is the state of things right now. I mean, yeah, the FTC is going to try, their antitrust case to break up Meta is coming. The various teen health cases about Instagram causing mental health crises across the country, they're all coming up. You can, if you have an angry Trump who's like, break him up and you can get out of that for $25 million. Yes, there's a ruthless cynicism here. Yeah.

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

Threads is much bigger. Threads continues to add a million people a day. It has 320 million is the number Mark Zuckerberg gave on the earnings call this week. That's a gigantic number. But Blue Sky is the fun one now. I think we can say pretty...

Yeah. Certainly that like blue sky has replaced Twitter as the place that is fun to hang out. And it is true. It's a bunch of like liberals being annoying to each other. Super annoying. But in addition to that, this is a group of people. It's also a lot of does not love jokes. No. Yes. At least that's my experience. Yes. But like a I'm psyched that there are multiple versions of this thing that are succeeding. I think it would have been a bummer if we had just replaced Twitter with one thing. The fact that there are a few different cuts at this that are going to work.

is really exciting. Mark Zuckerberg also made noise about wanting to make the OG Facebook experience come back, which that's not going to happen. Like, sorry, Mark, you ruined that 15 years ago. But like blue sky, man, blue sky, I think has hit like escape velocity in that this thing is going to work and it's here. People are building stuff on the protocol. People are using the app. It's coming. Yeah.

I don't remember what, but they're doing it. I would say I'm a blue sky person. My harshest criticism of blue sky is for all the promises of that protocol and how open it is. There's not one other server. No, there's not.

But there are people building, somebody built a cool blue sky-y app that just looks like Instagram and it just takes photo posts. Like, that's cool. That's the Fediverse, baby. Give me weird ideas about how to look at blue sky. I'm in. Yeah. But that's all just like API front-end views. Listen, one other place to log in. One thing at a time, man. I want to post, maybe that's going to be the Verge.com. You said good news. Let's end on good news. Okay, good news. We're happy. The Fediverse is around. Yeah.

I like it. I do like it. I do love an open source weird pebble hack. And I do love a weird band of misfit decentralized social media hackers. That's the good stuff. Hell yeah. That's the rebel stuff. Well, you know, the bad thing happens. That's what we want. Send us more. This is your... Send us more weird rebel technology. Right? That stuff. That's your homework for this week and we'll play the voicemails next week. Love it. All right. That's it. We're way over time.

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