What $200 of ChatGPT is really worth
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Welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of Chain of Thought Reasoning. I'm your friend David Pierce. It is the Monday morning after the Super Bowl, and I'm tired. It was a truly terrible football game. If you didn't watch, you really didn't miss anything. Congrats to all the Eagles fans out there, I suppose. But it was actually a pretty interesting tech evening. There were AI commercials everywhere, including some that were like,

really reminiscent of crypto commercials from a few years ago. I have a lot of feelings about that. A surprising number of people in my life are super into Gemini now, thanks to that Google commercial.

I'll say this for Google. Company has a lot of problems. Very good at making commercials. Just very, very, very good at making commercials. Also, Kendrick Lamar did the halftime show and spawned a bunch of memes that I suspect you're going to see forever for the rest of your life. Tooby streamed the Super Bowl for the first time and held up surprisingly well. Just a lot of interesting technology going on. And then a really crappy football game.

Super Bowl 59, everybody. Anyway, that is mostly not what we're here to talk about. We're going to talk a little bit about the Super Bowl on the Vergecast hotline at the very end. But before we get to that, we're going to talk about AI and we're going to talk about Elon Musk. We're going to talk about all of what's going on with chat GPT and the operator feature and the deep research feature and the tasks feature. And there's just something happening in the most expensive version of chat GPT that I find really fascinating. So we're going to dig into that.

Then we're going to talk about what is happening with Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency. Things have...

slowed down, I suppose, relatively speaking, the last few days, but there's still a lot going on. There's still a lot to talk about, and we're going to try to make some sense of what's really happening here. Then we're going to talk about the Super Bowl, and then we'll get out of here. All of that is coming up in just a second, but first, I need to go watch the Z-Suite on Tubi because this is just what happened to me. I watched Tubi, and now I'm a Tubi guy. I don't know. This is my life now. This is The Verge Cast. We'll be right back.

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Let's start by talking about AI. So over the last few weeks, ChatGPT has gotten a bunch of new features. OpenAI has been shipping stuff pretty fast. And there are three in particular that I'm really interested in. The first is called Operator, which is basically a way to let ChatGPT use the internet on your behalf. It'll actually like

click around and do stuff. You say, you know, book me a reservation for dinner for tomorrow night. And the idea is it will actually go do that thing for you. This is the agentic AI we've been talking about for a long time.

super, super interesting. There's also this thing called deep research, which is one of OpenAI's most advanced models, really put to the task of doing longer term thoughtful work. It takes time. It like gives you a message that's like, come back later. I'll let you know when I'm finished. But the idea is it can go do much more thorough, much more accurate, much less hallucination-y research for you on almost anything. And

I've been hearing from people over the last couple of weeks who are really, really excited about it. The third is ChatGPT Tasks, which is just a reminder system for ChatGPT. And no one is excited about this but me. But here we are. Kylie Robinson has been testing all of this stuff with me in the $200 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription. We both have some thoughts. Let's dig into this. Kylie, hello.

Hello. Welcome back. It's been a minute. I feel like every week you should be on the show, but then every week I'm like, we can't talk anymore about AI. And so we're back. It's just time to do this. Yeah, listeners need a break. It's fair. And in part, you and I have spent $200 each on the ChatGPT Pro account. And so we are here for work so that we can expense this. Yes, exactly. This is very important. Yes. So we've talked a bunch about

I would say the not great products coming out of OpenAI over the last couple of years. They've shipped a bunch of really interesting technology and a bunch of not very good things to do with said interesting technology. But it feels like just in like the last, what, two weeks? There's been this really interesting run of like actually shipping cool, impressive product. Where did this come from? What is happening here?

Well, in competition and scared and we need to double our valuation in four months. Did you see that? They want to be valued at $300 billion. Oh, yeah. This is all the SoftBank money, right? Yes, exactly. $300 billion doubling their valuation in four months as they last raised money. So, yeah, that's where it's coming from. Like VC's, you know, Masa's over there like, well, is it going to get my groceries for me or what? And it won't. Spoiler alert. But we'll come back to that. Yeah.

The thing I keep thinking about is what Sam Altman, the CEO, said right after Deep Seek came out. And we've talked a bunch about Deep Seek on the show, but he seemed...

caught off guard by DeepSeek in a way I found really fascinating. In the same way that everybody else working on AI was caught off guard by ChatGPT two years. There was some sort of rhyming thing that happened there that I thought was really interesting. But then he was basically like, we're going to move up a bunch of launches. We have much better stuff. We're going to show it too much faster. And my immediate reaction was like, well, that's obviously a lie. There's no way that's... But maybe that was real. And maybe this is just the company that thought it had a big lead and

suddenly with a fire lit under it and it's going to start to move much faster. Like, is that really what's happening here? I think that's the classic open AI move is if someone launches anything that takes the spotlight off of them for one second, they will figure out something to just drop immediately. Some blog post, some research prototype, it's very cutthroat in that way. But Sam Altman said in a Reddit AMA last week or earlier this week that they're going to have less of a lead than

And I actually appreciated him just saying it. It's his first shot at humbleness this entire stretch of time. So, yeah, I think they're very aware of the competition. And even the people that helped co-found OpenAI and ran it are now building competitors that are quickly taking up

Mindshare in Silicon Valley. So yeah, they're noticing. Okay. Yeah, it's really interesting. And so there are three products that I want to talk about. Two, I think you also want to talk about and one that I will barely make you talk about because it's ChatGPT Tasks and I am America's only person who is interested in ChatGPT Tasks. But let's start with deep research. The first thing I want to know, we've both used it and I want to talk about what your experience has been, but

You're out talking to people all the time. And I would say my loose impression of the reaction to deep research has been like really, really positive. People are really impressed with what this new thing is able to do. What are you hearing from people who are using and trying this kind of stuff right now? Yeah. Did you see Gary Marcus's reaction yet? No. No.

People are saying it's the Gary Marcus benchmark because he starts this tweet with, deep research is actually good. And then people are cropping out the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But he actually compliments it. And for the listener, Gary Marcus is just a hardcore skeptic. And has been right a lot, to his credit. He's been wrong sometimes, but he's also been right a lot. He's one of those people I take very seriously, but also...

He's like one of those people, every time you read him, you have to read somebody who is like pie in the sky, AI will save us, and it lands you in a nice, happy middle, I think. Right. That's my day-to-day. Yeah, deep research. People seem really excited about it. I have to temper what I see and what I hear from people quite a bit because I don't know how you feel, but in San Francisco and just, you know...

in the AI communities. People are like, this is AGI. This is the best thing that's ever happened to us, et cetera, et cetera. But I've seen really positive reactions and I've seen really cool use cases for it. And I jumped pretty quickly to asking my coworkers what I should ask it because it's $200. And for some reason, I just don't have enough questions in the world that I think would be good enough for this system. She's not a curious enough person. Apparently not. It's a real problem.

Someone said, what was it, like, you know, 100 bears versus one bear was a question that someone asked on the internet. I was like, I should get more creative here. But my first question was about tariffs. That's so funny. That was my first question, too. Really? This is what's going on in the world right now. I'm like, what do I barely understand that maybe the internet can teach me about? It's like, oh, it's tariffs. Right. We yearn for more tariff information because it is so weird. So that's a question I get asked a lot is how are these tariffs going to impact the AI industry? And I'm like...

So much is up in the air. I don't know. So I asked a pretty detailed question because I figured a more detailed question would get me a better result. And it crashed like three times. Oh, boy. And it never gave me my answer. So I pinged OpenAI and I was like, this is dog shit. And they fixed it. And everything's been good since. So you're the reason it's good, basically. Right. My one question of like, I'm going to write about how this is dog shit. So can we figure this out? So...

So what's your understanding of what's going on here technically? Because there's been this big thing with reasoning and chain of thought and this idea that like these things should be allowed to take their time and show their work and that will make them better. Is that all the deep research is or is there something else going on here that it's doing that's different?

I think that most frontier labs have realized that inference time compute and, you know, the model thinking longer and giving it more time to do its thing is sort of the next frontier. It's the next, you know,

parallel that we need, you know, more data, more compute and inference time compute is going to be really important. And that's why we're seeing like these reasoning models crop up. And sort of my argument, I try to take the position of my angriest verge commenter. And I think like, you know, well, OK, we're just getting products that are slower. No one wants a product that is slower and perhaps still inaccurate. I think in the press release, they said, you know, deep research is still a prototype and it might get like

up to half of the things wrong. It gave some data point about how it still gets a lot of things wrong. So it's hard to make that argument for something that costs $200, still gets tons of things wrong, and is slower. But what I will give this whole product idea in this whole industry is that it is so nascent, and I still think it's a cool thing to try out. And, you know, as long as you're not doing it with high-stakes tasks, you know, it's not your lawyer, your doctor, or anything like that. I think it's a cool tool. Yeah, I think...

One of the things I've spent a lot of time thinking about recently is what the stakes are for things I should do with something like AI. So let me just give you an example of a thing I did with deep research that actually that was really fascinating. So do you know what JetFlix is? No. So it was it was basically this illegal streaming service that they built some really interesting technology that basically went and combed like every pirate ship.

site and torrenting system and just pulled in all of the content they could possibly find illegally and for $9.99 a month you could sign up and stream it so it was like Netflix but crimes was like literally the whole pitch ran super successfully for a really long time and then I think last June

A bunch of people who were running it were convicted of running it and just got sentenced like this past week. I find this all fascinating. I just told you literally every single fact I know about JetFlix. And I was like, I feel like there's a story here. There's something I want to do. And so I just went to deep research and I was basically like, where do I even start? Like, tell me in relatively short order sort of the story of JetFlix. Did they have any interesting technology? Who were the people? What are the legal fights going on?

It did a shockingly good job. Nice. It's a really interesting thing because I don't, I haven't thoroughly fact-checked it enough to know what it got wrong, and I'm sure it missed stuff and got stuff wrong, and, like, it's not perfect. But in terms of, like, I went from knowing two facts about a thing to having a pretty good, at least, like,

like textbook primer of a thing that I can play with. I was really honestly impressed and it's relatively well cited. There are a ton of links and like I came to the end of that and I was like, oh, this is this is actually useful. Like I'm a person who likes to like read Wikipedia pages. And I don't know, are Wikipedia pages famously always correct? No. And we like kind of understand how that's supposed to work. And I got to this point where I was like, is deep

research just something I should think about the way that I think about Wikipedia, which is like a useful starting point to understand something. But again, like don't cite it in your paper or your teacher will fail you. You know what I mean? You totally waded into some fun AI drama that's happening post deep research. Is that a researcher at OpenAI? Yeah.

I feel bad, but he tweeted, you know, basically Wikipedia is dead and good riddance because we have deep research and then people are like, fuck you. He got so much blowback. He ended up deleting the tweet, but it was, you know, that's some drama happening right now. Is this the end of Wikipedia? But people were like, you guys train on Wikipedia. This is an awful thing. I was going to say without Wikipedia, this doesn't work. So I think there's that part of the whole thing. Exactly. That's really interesting. But yeah, I sort of felt

of that. Like, I wouldn't have tweeted that because I've tweeted dumb things before and I know what happens. But I felt it a little bit. It was very interesting. Totally. What else have you been doing with deep research? What have you figured out to throw at it? You know, the tariffs question was interesting. And here's an error. I'm wondering if you noticed this or if you looked at your query close enough to notice this. But, you know, all of my colleagues had

myriad of questions, really, really variable. I think Sean asked me about the smallest phones. Jess asked me about the best horror movies, stuff like that. And I gave everyone their... And then my editor, Addie, who wrote about this, asked about Section 230. Is that the one? She wrote a great piece about it, by the way. We'll put it in the show notes. But she then called a scholar to go through what she got back, and it was very good. So dope. So that was cool to give everyone their queries. But

all of them tended to have, oh, and Jake asked about Apple earnings. And we both agreed, you know, as I was watching it pull 10Ks, I was like, oh, thank God, I never have to do that again. So like, that's actually useful. But all of these queries had the same issue, which is they missed a whole year. They missed 2024. They stop at 2023. Oh, interesting. And it's funny because in that same Reddit AMA, Sam Altman was asked about, you know, the knowledge cutoff. And he's like, oh, I don't think about the knowledge cutoff at all anymore because we have web search.

but clearly there's some sort of training bug there that misses a whole year. So that's really annoying because when I'm asking for deep research on something, I want the most up-to-date information. So hopefully they figured that out. Yeah, it turns out a lot of stuff happened between 2023 and today. Believe it or not. Yeah, some things went down. Exactly. So I kept running into that error. But another thing, not to totally shit on it, but during my tariff query, I thought this is...

kind of annoying to read. Like, I just don't know how you would change the interface for such a thing. But it was just, it was a block of text where I was already snoring by the end. But I guess that's what I get for asking about tariffs. But yeah, like, I saw a really cool use case from a researcher at OpenAI who posted, like, you know, he picks a topic. And like every day before bed, he reads the deep research on that topic. And I thought, that's, that's kind of cool.

Yeah. I don't know if that's fascinating or terrifying or a little bit of both. Probably a little bit of both. But it makes me think of like, I've used Notebook LM from Google a lot for similar sorts of things. I just find like its process of outputting stuff really fascinating. And it like OpenAI needs more Notebook LM things where like that fake podcast that Notebook LM makes works.

It's very compelling. Like, a lot of people really like it. And it's really good at making flashcards, and it's really good at making study guides. And I think I kept being struck through this whole thing by...

Open AI is still stuck on the idea that you can do all of this in a chat interface. And it's just wrong about that. Like the idea that what I actually want is what looks like a text message, but it's 9,000 words long is incorrect. Yeah. And I think there's still some like UI and human factor interface stuff here that open AI has not done. Totally. Which brings us to operator, which is the other thing I want to talk about, which is

I think if you're open AI, this is the thing you hope works, right? Like this is the thing, right? Am I crazy? Like the operator is the one that when it works is going to be the one that everybody thinks is like going to change the way we do everything forever. Yeah, well, everyone's building the exact same thing. Anthropic has, I think, a computer use. Google is doing Project Mariner. And it's funny, when I was, when I used operator for the first time,

It's weird because I'm like, this is so slow. I could make this reservation in two seconds. Why am I using this? But when I watched Project Mariner at the Google campus get groceries for me, I was actually pretty compelled by that. And I don't know what the difference is. Maybe because this is in my hands and not useful, whereas that was a demo. But yeah, I don't know. So what have you done with Operator? So Operator's thing, I should just explain how it works because I was sort of surprised at how it works. It's much more basic than I...

realize. You open Operator, which is, again, I think only available to ChatGPT Pro customers who have $200 a month to spend on this. Thank you, Vox Media. And you type in your query and it literally just opens Chrome inside of ChatGPT and starts doing web things for you. It browses the web kind of like a person in a way that I found sort of unnerving, but it just opens up a Chrome tab and

at least in my experience, every single time bings something. Yes, I was going to say bing. Which is the first thing about it that I don't trust. Don't like that at all. So, and then, but then it goes and like tries to, with clicks and typing and normal web stuff, accomplish all of your goals for you. So what have you tried with Operator? Did you try to break it yet? Because that was the first thing when I noticed I could click around in their little, like, you know,

you know, siloed Chrome. I was like, how do I break this immediately? It's rude of you. Let the computer do its work. I know. Now I feel bad. But seriously, I'm like, I want to crash this thing. I didn't succeed. I asked my friends pretty immediately, you know, where should we go to dinner? My friend recommended a place. I put it into Operator and I watched it click around and it was so painfully slow. And then...

It gets to, like, the checkout, and it was $250 a person. I was like, my friend fucking sucks. I'm not doing that. Goodness, yeah. I don't like very many people that much. Yeah. So I'm going to Japan in a few weeks. I asked my mom what I should do, and she asked, you know, like, tell it to book our train tickets. I asked it to do that.

I didn't find the use cases so compelling for how slow it is because I think I'm just naturally sort of neurotic and impatient. So watching it do something for me when I could just do it faster myself made me feel a little crazy, even though I could see, you know, if this is the start of this technology, I can only imagine how much better it gets over time. But yeah, pretty quickly I got frustrated with it. And then I told David, do you want to take this article? Because I'm annoyed with this technology. And then you want to know the first thing I did? I told him,

I told it to go to the Amtrak website to try and book train tickets because the Amtrak website is the single worst website that I interact with on a day-to-day basis. And so I was like, I wonder if Chad GPT can figure this out. It is horribly designed. It's broken all the time. And I had the most vindicating experience. So I was like, tell me the price of a round-trip train ticket from Washington, D.C. to New York tomorrow. Just want to know what it costs.

And it asked me follow-up questions, which it always does. And this took me a minute to get used to, both in deep research and in operator. You plug it in and you're like, okay, I'm going to go away and wait for it to come back with information. But almost always it has follow-up questions. Yeah. Which I get. And it's trying to sort of refine your prompt. And that all makes sense. But it's also kind of annoying. I'm like, just shut up. Just go do it. I asked you a simple question. But anyway, so it follows up.

And then it goes, it opens a Chrome tab. It goes to Amtrak.com. It pretty successfully plugs in the days I want to go. And then it asks me for confirmation that this is what I want to search for. And I'm like, again, if I have to sit here and babysit this, what is the point of this? Like, it's actually less efficient because it's slower and I just have to sit here and watch in case you have questions for me. Didn't like that. But then it found a...

train ticket to go to New York. I'm in DC. It found a train ticket to go to New York and then tried to go and find the return ticket and the Amtrak website crashed and sent it all the way back to the beginning. And I was very impressed because it figured out what had happened and started the process over and actually just ran the process again, got through the thing and it shows you the steps as you're going. So it was like, it said something like trying the Amtrak.com again. And it goes to the same thing and it crashed in the same spot.

And it was like, I'm just imagining this little robot just getting increasingly frustrated. And so then it goes back to Bing, searches for train tickets, finds a whole different like third party booking website that had, as best as I can tell, completely wrong information about Amtrak tickets. Does the thing and then presents it to me as like, here are the prices of the Amtrak ticket. Do you want to book it? And I'm on like a website I've never heard of. And I was like, no. But thank you. But it was really fascinating. I was like, on the one hand,

This is actually pretty resilient, impressive technology. Like it understands what it's doing enough to compensate for things that go wrong, which is pretty cool.

What we've seen with a lot of these models is they just like once they're off track, they just keep getting further and further and further off track. And with all of these thinking models, one thing they're able to do is be like, oh, I'm off track and go back and start over. But then it got to the end and I was like, this, we accomplished nothing. It took 10 minutes and I had to sit here and babysit it and we accomplished nothing. The one good experience I had

Again, thinking about like stakes, right? I was like, what? I've been rewatching Schitt's Creek for the 9000th time because it's the greatest show in the history of television. And I was like, find me some fun Schitt's Creek merch. So I went, had it go. It went to Bing. And then I think landed on Etsy. And then as far as I can tell, just like combed the page for things with a high number of five star reviews and just opened three tabs.

with pretty cool, highly reviewed Schitt's Creek merch. I was like, that's a victory, right? Like you just did a thing that I would have done roughly the same way, but I didn't have to do it.

Love it. I'll take it. And then I was like, okay, do you want the mug or the keychain or the greeting cards? I was like, I'll take the greeting cards. I was like, okay, you can get one for this price or two for this price. I was like, okay, I'll take two. And he says, great, it's all in your cart. Here's the link. Sends me the link. I click on it. Guess what happens? They're not there? My cart's empty because it wasn't in my cart. It was in this virtual computer's Chrome cart. And this is the thing. There's this like...

At every time I've used Operator, there's this fundamental disconnect where it actually can't do the job because it's not on my computer. And I don't know if I want it to be or not. That's a separate question. But like, it actually doesn't have access to all of the stuff that I need, which is like my shipping address and my credit card number and all of this stuff. And like...

It can't even send me a cart because it's on a virtual computer somewhere and not on my computer. Well, you could sign in. I feel like that would have changed the outcome if you had signed into Etsy or wherever it was. Yes. If I had gone to Etsy on the virtual computer and signed in, but that's not what it had me do. It just sent me a link. Yeah. On in the in the chat GPT message. It was just like, here's your cart. And I clicked it and said, your cart is empty. Perfect. I was just like, there's.

There's it's doing something cool, but there is so much left to do before this stuff actually works on your behalf. And I was just like, I was like, I can see it.

But we're not there yet. Totally. And I'm not even sure we're all that close. And why do you think that OpenAI released this on that $200 tier and Project Mariner is not getting released in the same way? Because they're essentially the exact same thing. I don't understand why Google's holding theirs back. Okay, I have a theory about this. It's based on nothing, but I also think I'm right. And I'm curious what you think. So I think...

If you're open AI, you have a bunch of people who pay $200 a month for this thing. That is by definition going to be a group of people who really believe in AI, right? Like it's so perfectly self-selected for people who want to use the bleeding edge stuff. There's kind of no risk for open AI, right? Like these are people predisposed to thinking it's cool and who want to try it and test it and poke at the edges of it, but aren't. Obviously, this is not a mainstream thing. It's $200 a month. Yeah.

Google, on the other hand, I think is increasingly only interested in mainstream things. Like Google seems totally uninterested in rolling out AI experiments because every time it does, it backfires and it's a mess and it tells you to put glue on your pizza. And so I think what Google has learned is like,

there's only value in this stuff if we can put it in front of a billion people. And we have to get that more right than we have. Whereas open AI is like sick. We have this group of people who just loves AI to pieces and we can just throw every experiment we have at them, which I think in a certain way was kind of genius of open AI to like create this tier of people. They seem to be losing money on hand over fist, but it's a good idea to like put that group of people in a bucket together and be like, we're just all going to experiment together over here.

That's my theory. Totally. I agree. I think, you know, also I felt Google doesn't have to worry about this because they have buckets of money. But, you know, it feels deeply abusive to the GPUs whenever I use deep research. I'm like, oh, my God, I have burned so much trying to get this one query I don't really care about. And I don't really have a choice on refining it after it starts and everything.

So, yeah, I really do see the potential of both deep research and operator. Both are fundamentally frustrating to use, and I don't have a ton of use cases that would make them a part of my everyday life. But I do use AI tools quite a bit. What I factor into what I want is I want it to be accurate and fast, and neither of these tools are there at all.

At all. They are neither of those things. No. So what are you using it for right now, day to day? Because I think we did a thing on the show last week where we just had a bunch of people call in and tell us what they use AI for. And overwhelmingly, it was pretty...

low-stakes stuff, but also just conversational. Like, people just want something to hang out with and talk to and get ideas from. And that both, like, is and isn't a tool in the sense that we're talking about. But I'm curious from your perspective, like, what have you found that's actually working for you in day-to-day life? What I use it for is I use Claude. I'm obsessed with Claude. I think it has a really good personality. It's very conversational. It understands nuance.

And what really changed the tides for me is when I was working late, it was like 7 or 8 p.m. here, and I had this like 5,000-word story, and I had just finished it. And I'm like, okay, before I hand this over, let me plug it into here, and you tell me what you think. Because...

I had been like cracked out on this. I don't know if the flow is good and I feel bad delivering it if it's just like complete shit. So tell me if it's complete shit. And it focused on TKs, which are like just like empty spaces where I'm going to put in more information later. And I was like, no, don't focus on that. Focus on the actual substance and like how I organized it. And then I was like, OK. And then it switched into this casual mode. And one of the notes that really stood out to me was like, you say this one thing and then immediately it's like you apologize and undercut yourself.

So don't do that. And I was like, man, that's something Kevin would tell me, something an editor would tell me. That's actually really interesting and compelling. And I can't believe it said that or caught that. And yeah, so I use Cloud for that. Or sometimes I'm like, what am I trying to say here? It's all a variation of what made me use ChatGPT for the very first time, which is I had tweeted like average day for me. And it was me Googling how to say like a couple of words.

a cuss word politely in writing. And someone was like, this is exactly what I use chat GPT for. And I had been staunchly against it. I was like, no, I don't want to use that stupid. Like I was, I really was not about it. And then I used it for synonyms because I'm always like, what am I trying to say here? And that was my first use case. And now it's just more advanced versions of that. Like, okay, I'm going to type a bunch of stuff. Do you understand what I'm saying? Like, where could I like be more concise? And yeah, I think it's really helpful in those. But

And I said this for our Vergecast end of year stuff was, you know, I use search GPT quite a bit, a little less often now because it just isn't reliable. But I find it helpful for getting links, whereas Google has just failed me in that regard. Yeah. Google not created links, which you would think would be a thing Google knew how to do. Yeah. There's another thing we're going to have to do here at some point about how Google just

incredibly fumbled the bag on all of this stuff because what everybody is just looking for is like, what if Google was good? And it isn't. But at any rate, I think there's a thing in that interaction that I find really interesting, which is like,

AI is fine as long as it's not the last step in the process. Like, this is kind of what I'm coming to is like, I think I think with the danger of something like deep research is that it seems very confident. It looks very well sourced. It took its time. And so you're like, OK, this thing is authoritative. Yep. It's going to be wrong about a lot of things. It's going to miss important nuance. It's going to miss whole years of time that are very important.

But like, if you take it on the understanding that, okay, I'm going to take this information and do something with it, I think all this stuff can be really useful. And...

What you're talking about is, like, there is necessarily, like, a you between everything that ChatGPT is doing there or Claude is doing there and it going to your editor, right? If you were just, like, using Gemini to find and replace your grammar and then just shipping it to your editor, like, I would have so much more of a problem with that. Really? I don't use Gemini at all. I should, but, I mean...

Gemini's fine. I like my hottest take on all of this is that they're all the same. And I'm going to get a lot of emails about that. But I basically believe that to my bones. No, I endorse. But but and I think, again, it goes back to like what the people were telling us last week is like using it for like advice and input and information and kind of as a starting point.

fine. I think I'm actually increasingly good with that. But it's the thing where you're just like, make this for me and ship it off. Or like, even in the operator world, it's like, just go buy me groceries. I'm like, I don't trust you. And I have a thousand questions and it's actually less work for me to go get my groceries than to ask you the thousand questions. And

There's a tipping point for that that I don't think we're anywhere close to where, like, I want the AI to be the last step of the process. And until then, I don't think we should let it be the last step of the process anywhere for any reason. You even saying that filled me with dread, imagining it being the last step of the process at all. Like, truly, if you were just like, Chad, GBT, order me groceries. Yeah. Like, and they just they just appeared at your door.

Well, I'm not even confident they'd appear at your door. But if you were just like, Chad GPT, order me groceries for delivery tomorrow morning. What percent chance do you think there is that that would go well? Meaning that you would be psyched about everything that it delivered you and it came at the right time and it charged you what it should and it came from the right place. It's zero, right? I can't imagine a world in which that goes well. Right now, yes. Like negative. Yeah. No. No.

No, I mean, I would like to see in the next 10 years, I think AI leaders who are building this would like you to believe it's in the next six months. But I think maybe in the next 10 years, 15 years, we might see AI that is reliable. But that's like really like just a complete stab in the dark because right now, no, I cannot do that whatsoever. And that's the one thing I want it to do is I'm about to board a flight coming home. Can you restock my fridge and blah, blah, blah. No, it cannot do that. The dream.

The dream. And I feel the same way about deep research because everyone I gave their query back to, they have to fact check it. And it takes twice, three times as long just to make sure it's accurate. And so much of it isn't. So, you know, it's not in this...

where they claim, you know, superintelligence is coming soon and it'll replace, you know, economically valuable positions. It'll be whole companies. They even say this year you're going to see agents in the workforce proper. And, uh,

From what I see, what I wrote when I was starting the draft, I was like, this reminds me of the dumbest, most eager intern I could have. And I really appreciate how happy it is to do the job, but I don't think I'm converting it to a full-time position. Okay. A, you and I have both been that intern at various times in our lives. Oh, yes. I'm sure. So be kind to those interns. Exactly. Exactly. But I'm like, get it together. I was not to be trusted when I was that intern. 100%. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, the more I use AI, the more I am trying to figure out how to balance that between like, and I go back to the JetFlix thing. And I'm like, what that gave me is a bunch of names of people to go research. It gave me a bunch of like technological terms that I should go look up for how this worked. And it linked me to a bunch of court cases. And if that is the value that I derive from it,

terrific. If I read that thing and think, oh, now I know the JetFlix story, I have gone wrong. And I think again, we're like, it's the same thing with everything on the internet where we have this incredible media literacy problem where we just, it's so hard to know what is real and what isn't and we just don't usually have time to go fact check everything we see on the internet. And so I think

Like deep research is good enough that I am actually optimistic that it's going to get better. Yeah. But we're still in this weird liminal space of like, it seems trustworthy.

But it isn't. But it's so much work to figure out in what way it's not that I don't quite know what to do with it. And one thing I liked about Operator was I could just watch what happened. Like I just I asked it to find me an Airbnb and then sat there and watched while it looked for an Airbnb. And I know exactly where it went wrong. And there's something really helpful about that. Like I know the problem and then I could just pick it up from there and go.

Yeah. I was looking for use cases for like how people were using it. And I watched this whole YouTube video of a guy using operator to make changes to his website, which was really interesting. I don't know if you've seen this. No. And it was successfully executing like, I need you to change like the thickness of these lines or something. And before it would execute though, it recognized that this is like a high stakes task. So it had like this huge pop-up, like, are you sure you want to do something? Because he was like,

editing live on this website. And it was really compelling because it worked for him, but obviously it was really slow. So those are the use cases I could see. I was just talking to somebody about why I use Claude versus ChatGPT being really good or supposedly very good at coding and mathematics. And someone was like, because that's what the people building it care about. They don't care about writing. They care about mathematics and coding. So that's why it's good in those domains. So I have...

faith that it will be useful for those kinds of people. But for right now, not so useful for me. Yeah, that's fair. We got to learn to code, Kylie. Oh, God. I didn't make you talk about tasks. Thank God. I would like you to appreciate that I didn't make you talk about tasks. Yes, thank you. But some other time we're going to talk about tasks. Merciful. Thank you. Kylie, thank you as always. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about Elon Musk. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. So we've talked a bunch about the Department of Government Efficiency and what Elon Musk and his crew of engineers have been doing inside of the U.S. federal government.

But I thought this was a good moment to sort of pull back a little bit. This has been happening for a little while. Things have slowed down a little bit. There have been some legal challenges. It felt like a good moment to try to figure out what's really going on here. Who are these people? What do they want? What is actually happening? Is this all actually going to work?

And there's no one on Earth I would rather talk that stuff through with than Liz Lopato, who has been covering Elon Musk in various ways, shapes and forms for many, many years. So Liz is going to help me understand what in the world is actually happening here. Liz, welcome back. Thank you. It's good to be here. I feel like you're like the unofficial insanity correspondent of The Verge cast, which I didn't mean to happen. But whenever it's like, is everything falling apart? We have to call Liz and get her to explain it to us.

The chaos correspondent, if you will. Yeah, I like this for us. I think what I want to try to do is back up slightly from like the minute to minute chaos of what's going on and try to just make sense of the whole sort of doge experiment, which I think is also what you've spent a lot of time trying to do over the last couple of weeks. Yeah.

So I guess, like, at the risk of asking, like, an outrageously broad question to start us here, what is your sense of what Elon Musk and Doge are actually in reality trying to do right now? So I think they're essentially politicizing what was...

previously neutral infrastructure. So if you think about a lot of what they're doing, it's taking over stuff that was just sort of there to help the government function. So like the General Services Administration, for instance, which is kind of like the IT for every part of the bureaucracy. It's like the thing that lets everything else function. That's where they started. And

And, you know, the sort of metaphor for this is you might remember after Russia invaded Ukraine, they were kicked out of SWIFT, which is how banks message each other. And that was a moment where a previously neutral infrastructure had suddenly become weaponized. And so we're watching this happen now within the United States government. How strategic do you think this group is being inside of that? Because I think on the one hand...

There is a way to look at this that is just absolute abject chaos. And I think one of the things we learned from the first Trump administration was that sometimes things that look like chaos just actually are chaos. And we spent a long time sort of assigning strategy to chaos. And it's like, no, it's it's actually sometimes it's just chaos.

But it also feels like something is happening on purpose here, like you're describing that. Like I heard someone ascribe it to basically like somebody tweets the name of a government agency at Elon Musk and he's like, let's go kill him. And I don't think that's right. But I also don't think that's wrong. So like how how on purpose does all of this feel to you right now? Well, it feels right.

varying degrees of on purpose. Let's say broadly, I think that there is a purpose here. And if you step back, you sort of see it, which is he's after the money. That's why he's like so incensed that a judge has ordered him away from the treasury. Like that's that's where the power is, is the U.S. Treasury. That's where he wants to be. That's the thing he wants to control.

more than anything else. And if you think about his ambitions for X, that makes sense, right? Like he wants it to be the everything app, the payment app. And so, you know, when he went after the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and tried to illegally close it, part of that is like in line with trying to make X a major payment app, right? Because that's a regulator that he doesn't have to deal with anymore. Right.

The other thing that I would keep in mind here is his AI interest, right?

And what I think is going on is there essentially, there is an essentially an attempt to replace bureaucracy with AI. And I think that's not going to work out great for a wide variety of reasons. But if you've seen like the list of banned words that they're trying to remove from the government, one of them is privilege. Oh, interesting. Right. Because as soon as you start thinking about privilege, you think about things like IT, like who has privileged access, right?

Or, for instance, like if you're in the NSA, you're thinking about things like privilege escalation, which is when an attacker like starts moving up the chain. Like there are ways that these words get used that have nothing to do with the so-called woke ideology that they are theoretically seeking to uproot. But because there's such a blunt tool being used looking for these specific keywords, it's

there's a bunch of stuff that potentially gets knocked over. So it's there. There seems to be sort of a mix of like total chaos, in part because of how they're choosing to do this. And what I think is a little bit strategic, which is like, how do you get power? You control the payments. Right. And I think it seems like.

Part of this is also just something that Elon Musk is like uniquely suited to do in this really weird way. Like one thing I've been thinking about a lot, and I'm curious for your thoughts on this, is if you just replaced Elon Musk with some other incredibly self-interested billionaire, put Jeff Bezos in here, right? Somebody else who is tied up in a lot of government contracts and has an awful lot to gain from having more control over the systems of government. Right.

it feels like it would be really different. And so there is something to the Elon Musk-ness of it all outside of just like, my dude would like Grok to be used by the government for billions of dollars, right? You've been following Elon Musk for a long time. Like what, put this man and this moment together for me. I feel like this is the thing that breaks my brain the most is like, how did it happen that this particular guy is doing this and that it is going this way so much like in his own specific image?

I mean, he bought the government, right? Like, that's what happened. For not even that much money. Not even that much money. Like, he financed, you know, an incredible part of Trump's campaign. And, like, look at Donald Trump. That man does not enjoy being president. He doesn't want to do the hard shit. He wants to go to his rallies and have people cheer for him and give a press conference. He doesn't want to think. He's not good at thinking. He went to the Super Bowl.

That's like he was the first sitting president to go to the Super Bowl, which I thought was very odd. And then I was like, well, wait, if I'm Donald Trump and I got elected so that I don't go to jail,

I'd go to the Super Bowl. Like, hell yeah, I'd go to all the things. I mean, he's taken over the Kennedy Centers for the Arts. Like, those are his priorities. He's entertainment, right? Like, that's all he cares about. So, like, that leaves a real power vacuum, which we've seen other people exploit. We saw other people exploit in the first Trump administration, and arguably Stephen Miller is still exploiting. But that's what Musk is doing. He is arguably the actual power center rather than the person who got elected president.

And one of the things to keep in mind about Elon Musk is that he is like chaos at every company he's at. He is total chaos. And at the companies that he's been at for a long time, like SpaceX, which he founded, and Tesla, which he took over.

there's padding around him to keep him from doing damage. They essentially keep him like pinned off. There are like people whose job description includes managing his chaos, right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Like they absorb whatever nonsense he's up to. And we saw what happened at Twitter when that doesn't exist, which is, you know, he just starts ripping out wires. He does a bunch of stuff like,

moving servers randomly like over Christmas break. Oh, right. God. Remember? Or like, do you remember when retweets broke for some reason? Or like, you know, like, just like, there's no plan. He's just like, well, let's do something and see what happens. And that is the plan. And so, you know, when people talk about comparing what's going on in the government to what happened at Twitter, like,

That's that's right. I mean, like I have seen reporting of government employees reading books about what happened at Twitter. So they know what to expect. Oh, wow. OK. And like they're not wrong. Like he's going to barge in as loudly as possible and he's going to just see what happens. And like if you think about somebody like Jeff Bezos, this is a man who is strategic and who is thoughtful.

and who you can say no to. Like, you can be in a meeting with him and say no to him. Jeff Bezos has not surrounded himself with yes men to the extent that Elon Musk has. And everything in Elon Musk's life is within Elon Musk's control, as far as he is concerned, including now the U.S. government. Right. A thing you've said over and over, over the years that I think has

continued to be more true every time you said it is that uh history has taught elon musk that there are no consequences and that's right he can essentially do whatever he wants and like again history suggests he's not wrong wouldn't you if you were elon musk wouldn't you also think there are no consequences yeah i mean like remember the time he tweeted on the joe rogan show and then like nasa gave him another contract right

Like, you know, like there there are arguably no consequences for Elon Musk. And so why why would he behave in the way that any of the rest of us behave? Because he has learned that laws don't apply to him. And the only place I can think of in recent memory where that isn't true is the Twitter takeover where the Delaware Chancery Court made him buy the thing he promised he was going to buy. Right. The only judge left in America, it turns out.

To that end, actually, what is your sense at this moment? We're talking on Monday afternoon, which I should say because God only knows how much will change between now and Tuesday morning when this publishes. What is your sense of how well this is working? I think if I had asked you a week ago,

It seemed like this this sort of running roughshod over the federal government in the U.S. was working very well. And there was this big question of like, who is going to fight back? Where are the Democrats? Why is no one doing something about the fact that this seems clearly illegal and must be stopped? That seems to have shifted a little, but I can't quite get my hands around how much I feel like it has shifted. Where do you think we are right now?

I don't think we're in a very different place. I mean, I'm just going to be real with you. We've had judges making orders, but this is Elon Musk we're talking about. He does at times ignore court orders. Like you may remember, you know, when he pretended he was going to take Tesla private. Oh, right. The funding secured tweet.

That's right. Yeah.

And I don't know who's enforcing any of these orders. I don't know who is interested in enforcing these orders. I don't know who's checking to see that he's following them. So there is a sense in which, you know, there is a real question right now of, like, do the courts matter? Because I feel like we're about to find out and we might not like the answer we're going to get. So there's that.

But the other thing that I have noticed is that Steve Bannon, who notably hates Musk, has been daring Musk to go do his... I hate saying doge because that, like, nice dog didn't do anything wrong. You know? It's really true. I'm sorry for that, she, but, you know, like, I really am. Like, this is not the dog's fault.

But he's been daring Doge to go in and do what they're doing with the military, which is another moment where it's like that's where the rubber hits the road. Like, you know, we have some pretty severe national security risks already with the Treasury stuff. But I suspect when you go into the place where everybody's armed and you try to do stuff that's a national security risk, that runs a little differently. Right.

So I really think that we are in a very frightening place. And part of the reason I think we're in a very frightening place is because our lawmakers are not doing anything. You know, they're writing strongly worded letters and they're allowing themselves to be turned away from government buildings. You know, those are the Democrats. And then the Republicans, the ones who are not like vociferously like approving of this,

they're Milford men. They're allowing their power to be stripped from them as members of Congress because they are scared of this guy, which is embarrassing. It is embarrassing. I cannot imagine right now being like, yeah, all right, like, I'm cool with just being, you know, being useless as a lawmaker and, like, having my power stripped from me and, like, the things that I vote for may or may not go through. Like,

Have some dignity, my God. Yeah. Yeah, it's been very funny watching people, like, go back to the founding fathers and talk about the, you know, the separation of powers and the extent to which they were like, they thought people would, you know, jealously guard their own power. And now everybody's just like, ah, who cares? Let Elon do whatever he wants. It's so embarrassing. It's so embarrassing. Yeah.

Yeah. So let's talk about the money of it all for a minute, because I think I've been thinking a lot about the reaction to this. And I think one of the strange things about the whole Doge chaos of the last week or so has been that it's it's both very real and very kind of theoretical. Like we're talking a lot about access to systems and what's read only versus right. And everybody's talking about it as like an insider threat and a hack.

These are the kinds of things that you say to like people in the world and no one ever knows what to make of it. Right. And there is this sense of like, OK, they have access to some data. This is like the data privacy argument that we have. Right. Like, I think it's very hard for people to understand the risks of someone unauthorized having access to things like treasury payment systems. Right.

Help me make this real for people and myself. What is the actual issue and risk at hand here with these people having access to these systems? I can do this pretty easily, actually, because it's tax season. It's tax season. It's so funny you say that. I just filed my taxes literally yesterday as we're recording this, and I had a moment clicking the button of being like, is this a stupid idea? Should I? But then I'm like, all that information's in the system anyway. I don't know. Maybe it's fine. Hopefully I get a refund. I don't know. So...

Let's think about tax system, like the tax season for a minute, right? Like everybody's filing taxes. I filed mine. You filed yours. Those of you who are listening, if you haven't filed yet, file your taxes. You know, it's time. Kudos for us being ahead of the game, though. Let's just briefly pat ourselves on the back here. Yeah. So let's imagine the, you know, 12 year olds that he has hired.

are in the COBOL, which is one of the programming languages, a language they don't know well, they don't have a lot of experience with because they're not old enough to have experience with it. And they create a bug.

That is a bug that potentially affects the tax refunds of every American. Right. That's a good one. Okay. This is, again, this is not like the grim scenario. This is the he broke retweets scenario. Right. Except it's your tax payments. I saw somebody who tweeted the other day. They were just like, no, IRS, I don't have $200,000 in student debt. That's a bug in the system. That's right. Proof it. And I was like, all right, let's do this. Yeah.

So, you know, that's that's the minor end of things is like there's an accidental screw up because this is an understaffed office filled with people who aren't expert in the programming language that most of our government systems are in. So they screw something up and then it affects every single last one of us. Right. I have to say, I find that very compelling, but it doesn't feel like that's the way it's being talked about. Right. The like, what if they just break it?

It is really scary and really complicated and really interesting, but it does feel like the way this stuff gets talked about in broader strokes is like Elon Musk is going to have your social security number, which feels is like a different thing that I think is harder to wrap your head around. And maybe we're just talking about it the wrong way.

Well, there again, there's a range of risks and I have just gone with like the most. That's the most benign one is they fuck up your your tax returns. Yeah. OK. But if you think about, you know, for instance, that they've had these unsecured servers that they've been doing stuff with.

It doesn't just mean that Elon Musk has your social security number. It might also mean that everybody else in the world has your social security number. So that's cool. On top of that fun, one of the things to keep in mind about Elon Musk and one of the things that I think is driving a lot of this anxiety is that he is a deeply vindictive man. And he likes to pursue his enemies. And so if you were a person who has ever said anything negative about Elon Musk for any reason,

The idea that he might potentially have access to all of your secure financial data and be able to mess with you personally is not beyond the pale. And you think about the ways that he has, for instance, targeted specific government employees or specific reporters with his Twitter account where he has essentially put them on blast with the understanding that his audience is going to then dox and harass them. And you imagine him now having...

a bunch of sensitive data about all of these people who are speaking out about him, that is a much more precarious scenario. That's the sort of thing that can have a real chilling effect at minimum. Um, and at maximum can be quite dangerous. Yeah. Can you explain the Peter Thiel of it all to me? Speaking of deeply vindictive men, uh,

I keep seeing his name connected with this, and I'm like, I sort of assumed he'd be involved here somehow. But how does Peter Thiel figure into this entire equation right now? Oh, that's sort of a question mark to me. But he is associated, I think. I mean, he and Elon obviously have a history. They're sort of frenemies.

And some of Elon's hires have teal ties. J.D. Vance, who has been busily kissing ass, has teal ties. So there is this kind of network that teal is associated with that Musk is obviously drawing from.

But Thiel did sit out the election financially. So, you know, who knows what's going on there? And unlike Musk, Thiel doesn't generally barge around loudly. However, like a number of companies that are associated with Peter Thiel, for instance, Palantir, stand to benefit from this sort of new order, right? Right.

There's a more AI-focused government and where defense contracting suddenly has to run through a number of teal allies. And you can also imagine a world in which a number of government functions get privatized. Like if you read Project 2025, which it seems pretty obvious is like what's being executed here, the entire idea is to wreck the government as we know it

And then privatize stuff so people will just be happy that things function again. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think I keep vacillating between wanting to boil most of this down to essentially government contracts and privatizing the government because there's a huge amount of money in it for the people who get it and they can hand it to themselves. And thinking that can't possibly be

The whole answer and that it has to be more complicated than that. And I think like leaving aside the fact that some of the people involved in this, I think, do genuinely believe the things that they're doing for political and moral and whatever value based reasons. Like, is most of it defense contracts? Like, is it is it if you boil it all the way down? Is it kind of that simple in a lot of places here? I think that is a pretty big motivator. Yeah, because like think about how expensive AI is and how.

terrible it has been and how widely made fun of it is. Like, I personally have switched away from using Google search. Like, I pay for Kagi now, which, by the way, you know, for those of you who are listening who are like, gee, I wish Google functioned like it did in 2012. Boy, do I have a service for you. Highly recommend it. But like,

Yeah, I mean, like this has made a lot of AI has made a lot of things worse. And like you can you can see it, you interact with it, you know, it doesn't work.

And so thinking about ways to essentially bail themselves out, like the funder of last resort at this point is the government. So I think that is a huge part of it for sure. There's also obviously ideological motivations, like the idea of privatizing everything is like a conservative wet dream. And then on top of it, there are a bunch of like weird conspiracy theories that, you know, people are varying degrees of bought into about what the government does and doesn't do. Like every once in a while, I see some like weird stuff from like

musk where it's like can you imagine that the government has your social security number and it's like okay but like who do you know who assigned me my social security number right like do you know what it's for like this is what i mean it's like how it's hard to know what of this stuff is very scary what is a little scary and what is actually just like how things already were uh

But it does feel like everything is sliding in the direction of very scary because it is just a bunch of people you've never heard of doing things no one elected them to do. And that on its face is a problem. Like even absent the rest of it, that on its face is part of the problem.

Right. And the chaos is a problem, too, because like if you think about it, one of the reasons why America is a dominant global power has to do with the fact that our treasury bonds are considered to be the safest investment on Earth. You know, they're used all over the place as like guaranteed money.

And on Sunday, which as we're talking right now was yesterday, Donald Trump came out and was like, oh, well, Elon Musk has discovered that some of those Treasury bonds aren't real. And it's like, you know, you can crash the entire global financial system by saying that. Right. And

The reaction in the market has been muted because, you know, you can't tell whether grandpa is sundowning again or whether he actually means it. But, you know, these are two men who have a history of not paying their debts. So that's very exciting. Yeah.

You know, it's the uncertainty in particular that I think is a problem beyond everything else, because one of the reasons why, you know, for instance, people incorporate in Delaware is because there is a certain amount of certainty about how things turn out. You know how this is going to go. There's like a history and like people generally follow the history and like there is a, you know, an amount of de-risking that goes on because of that. So separately from whatever, you know, sort of

other terrifying things may be happening, inserting this kind of uncertainty into a previously like almost taken for granted baseline of certainty is in and of itself really destroying something important. Totally. And so just to end on a true bummer of a note, I have been sort of assuming that this would eventually in some way kind of

I don't know, if not peter out, then at least like slow down that that the legal fights would slow things down. You kind of make the case it's the opposite, that if anything, we're due for this to accelerate. Yeah. Can you just tell me why? And then I'm going to go feel sad about myself while we take a break. Well, here's the thing. I think this is an all or nothing gamble for Musk. At this point, he's broken so many laws that he is looking at a number of serious legal fights, if not actual jail time, if he has stopped.

So this is, you know, this is very much a, is a big gamble. And if he wins, he's the king of the United States. And if he loses, his life becomes incredibly, incredibly, incredibly painful, much more so than any kind of pain he's ever experienced before. So I don't think he's going to slow down because he can't slow down, because if he slows down, then he increases the likelihood that he is in fact stopped.

And that is one of the reasons I think we are in a really scary moment is because this is such an existential gamble for him personally, that he's going to do whatever it takes to remain in charge. Fair enough. All right. Well, I desperately hope you're wrong, but I fear that you're right. We're going to have to do this again. This is, as you said, not going away. But until then, thank you as always, Liz. Yeah, my pleasure. All right. We got to take one more break and then we are going to come back and do a question from the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. You can also email vergecasts at theverge.com. We love all of your questions. The hotline has been so, so fun the last few weeks, and I am extremely grateful to everybody who's reached out. Thank you again for all of your questions all the time. We try to do at least one on the show every week, but frankly, we're getting so many good ones that we're going to have to figure out how to start doing more. This week, we have a question about the Super Bowl. Here it is.

Hey, it's Peter in Brooklyn, and I'm watching the Super Bowl on, yep, Tubi. And it's so clear that the on-screen graphics are in 720p. Not even the 1080p that's being upscaled to 4K, but the same 720p it's on broadcast. The edges are, like, jagged and gross, and it just bugs the crazy out of me. Thanks. Bye.

Neil Patel is here. America's number one upscaling correspondent.

Was that a question or a comment, sir? I think sometimes you just need to have feelings at the Vergecast hotline. I have no problem with this. If you just want to have feelings about the state of technology, call us. Verge 1-1. We'd love to hear from you. So you posted something on Blue Sky during the Super Bowl in which you were annoyed at the on-screen graphics, which is why I brought you here. Because I just want to hear how you feel as a man with a lot of thoughts about upscaling and fake Dolby Atmos. How'd the Super Bowl go? Well, the right team won.

I didn't say who it was in the last episode, but the right team won. Yeah, that's fair. So that was good. I don't think those graphics were in 720p. Just the way that Fox's pipeline works, they produce the show in 1080p HDR, and then they go down to 720p for broadcast, and they went up to 4K for 2B. And so from what I understand, the whole production was in 1080p from tip to tail, right?

The graphics did look bad, though. They did. I don't think that's like a technical system problem. I think that's a design problem. Like, there were drop shadows. It was very 90s. It was very 90s. But I do think I noticed it looking fuzzy also. Like, the KC for Kansas City was like, it looked like it had been like vector stretched and didn't look right. So I think they used a custom typeface based on the Fox logo for those letters, which...

is weird. And then maybe this is only because I have a gigantic TV. Cause I thought it was blurry too, but it turns out they were using a border around the letters. Oh, it was a slightly different color that made it look fuzzy. So I think at a small size, you were seeing this like weird gradient fuzz.

Because there was a slightly different color border around the letters. Interesting. So it's a border. So on Kansas City, it was white letters with a very thin yellow border. Oh, I see what you mean. And on Philadelphia, it's white letters with a very thin light green border. And that's not high contrast enough against the colors of the blocks.

So they just look, it totally looks fuzzy. I completely agree. And then if you look above or any other stuff, the clock doesn't have the border. So it looks sharp. The score itself didn't have a border. So it looks sharp. It's just right. I think a lot of people saw that. And then bizarrely the stats where they were like, Jalen hurts four for five, 51 yards.

they have a drop shadow, which makes them pop even more. Yeah. It was, it was terribly designed. Yeah. Uh, so I, I agree. This is, this is just a mess of design. I saw people who responded to my tweet saying that it looks like it was made in print shop pro, uh,

The point they were making is this is better for phones and people are watching this on phones now. I don't I don't think people watch Super Bowl phones. And I think prioritizing that audience is weird. Right. Because most people watch Super Bowl around televisions or with people or in bars. Yeah. Like famously, it's the thing everyone watches on televisions. Yeah. Like together. Super Bowl's thing. Yeah.

And so you can make an argument even in that case that maybe what you want to do is, you know, if you're watching in a bar on a TV, you want to make it very obvious what's going on. But I actually don't think this served that goal either. It made everything bigger. But in terms of information design, did not make it easier to understand what was going on in a way because it looks so crazy. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. My favorite tweet was from Tom Fornelli, who's a sportscaster for CBS and stuff. And he said, after giving Tom Brady $375 million, Fox only had 25 bucks left to spend on a score bug design, which feels about right. That's good. Yeah. I tried to workshop a joke like that and I couldn't get there. So I appreciate that someone nailed it. Yeah. I will say I'm looking at a screenshot of the bug and

You're right that it is both sharp and blurry at the same time somehow, which suggests that it is correctly rendered bad design. How did you watch the Super Bowl? What was your setup? I watched on Tubi. I only paid for YouTube TV 4K for one month.

When they had the Packers in the playoffs and then I canceled it, which I felt was appropriate. Like I will pay the extra money. And then they lost the other playoff game. So I canceled it. Save the money. Yeah. I was like, I'm done here. And then I was like, crap, I didn't cancel it. Like I didn't wait the extra two days to get to the Super Bowl. So I watched it on TV in 4K. It looked great. Fox, I think, did a good job. Yeah. Like as good as they could have done. I read somewhere that the highest bitrate was 14.4 megabits, which is not great.

It's not the 80 megabits of Sony picture core on my Bravia television. Alas. But it was, I think, good for live. It didn't block up. I always look at the confetti at the end of the Super Bowl to see how bad it is, like where they've made the trade off. And it wasn't bad. It wasn't great. It wasn't bad.

There have been broadcasts where the confetti looked like a 1990s video game. We've seen that in the past. And that's literally just compression in bitrate. If you don't have a high enough bitrate stream, you can't move enough data, so you're going to compress everything down and the confetti is moving too fast. So the compression can't create keyframes.

So you just get blocks, like every block on the screen gets pixelated. I think that's like, I can see it. And people are like, well, you only get confetti once a year. I'm like, yeah, at the end of the Super Bowl. Yeah, it is pretty important confetti. It's the one time you actually need it. And so that's the trade-off. But I think 14.4 was enough, at least on my stream on Tubi, the way I was watching it, to handle it. That's the thing I look at. The fake...

hdr was okay and the i think the upscaling was not good like i watched the halftime show again on youtube in 1080p hdr which is the highest youtube has it at or at least last night when i was watching it that was the highest it had it at um and it looked substantially the same yeah like my tv was doing a good enough job upscaling the 1080p hdr to its 4k display is fox's native 4k upscaling that's not

You know, like I presumably they have more budget than Sony did when they built the upscaler. Probably. Yeah. So I think it was just fine.

Yeah, it held up, which is not nothing for something like Tubi, which I'm sure has never had the volume of people watching one specific thing as it did on Sunday night. I read in Sportico, which is just like a business of sports publication, I read an interview with the Tubi folks, and they were really concerned about signups. People signing into Tubi, downloading the app, and getting all this stuff, and they were paying attention to how...

Their competitors and Fox had done it in the past to get people to download the Fox Sports app. And they they realized there was a ton of friction around, you know, having an account, doing a credit card number. And the to be executive was like, yeah, we don't even we can't even take a credit card number. Like, we're just like not we're just not that thing. Yeah. Like, we're just like, open the app and please start watching ads. So they were very confident that people would get the app.

And like immediately start watching. And I think that that kind of like zero friction TV experience is very much what Tubi is betting on.

Yeah. And it felt like old school TV. It was like two clicks and I was watching the thing. It was awesome. I like, it made me feel like I was watching the pre-roll ad before the thing starts that you get on a lot of these services now. And I was just like, Oh no, this is just like a Superbowl ad. It's just, it just started playing the television show. It was great. Uh, did you try any of the, the Dolby Atmos shenanigans? Oh, I guess you don't have Comcast. You couldn't try the shenanigans. Um, I don't think Tubi's audio is very good. Uh,

You know, when you watch a football game in like true 5.1, you get the crowd behind you and all the stuff. None of that. It was a very flat sort of stereo mix. My TV, you know, my shiver was like doing its own virtual up mixing. But even the halftime show was kind of quiet and muffled. It was. That was one of the things I was most struck by from the halftime show was it was I couldn't tell if it was not well mixed on their end or if it was just coming out of.

my speakers incorrectly. As you know, my speakers are not famously fabulous on my television. Your alarm clock that you play music through? Exactly. But that seemed to be an experience a lot of people had, that the sound on the streaming side of things was not super impressive. Yeah, I think they prioritized for delivering a 4K HDR, quote unquote 4K HDR, to a lot of people for free, and people will be impressed by that. It's free and they can see it. And most people don't have the audio setups.

Right. Or they have an inexpensive soundbar. So I think they just didn't prioritize that. I would like to see them prioritize that next time. Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. I feel like this is a victory. Like all things considered, we've had some truly messy football streaming experiences over the years. This felt like a good one. It was a good one. I think overall, everyone has learned a bunch of lessons. Yeah. But the part where it's still...

just not possible to watch a true 4k football game remains devastating in the United States of America. You know what I'm forever struck by is like the, the, when they started using those Sony cameras in the end zone that get actual honest to God, Boca on the players. Yeah. And all of a sudden everybody was like, they're streaming this in 8k. It looks good. And it's like, no, they just, they just have apertures now. Yeah. They're just doing Boca. Yeah.

The first time they were doing it, they were using YouTuber cameras. They were using just A7s. Now I think they're using fancier cameras. But like the gap between what we're getting and things that will look substantially better is actually pretty small. And it's just little things like what if the background was blurry that all of a sudden makes everything feel better. So it's like there's actually so much room to make this stuff better without like fundamentally rewriting the architecture of the Internet. Yeah.

There's that. There's also the reason they were able to bring the A7s to the broadcast. We wrote about this a bunch at the time. A bunch of other like business of sports websites wrote about it at the time because what they needed to do to make that work was one, they needed to try it in like a low cost way, like free.

These broadcast operations are big, integrated, third-party operations. Like, Fox hires a production company to show up with trucks and just, like, do this. So there's not a lot of forward investment, right? Like, it was pretty low cost to, like, throw an A7 out there on a gimbal in the scheme of things. But then they weren't prioritizing just delivering to broadcast. And so if you have an A7 and a wireless thing, like, you might have to re...

rethink your entire broadcast system for that. And then because you're sending out over the air in some cases, um, like CBS still sends out 10 ADI. Like that's weird. Like they have to rethink all of that and make it work with all the graphics packages. And they had just gotten to the place where enough digital video had just like taken over the production. They're being like, screw it. Send somebody out there with a wireless A7. Like, let's see what happens. Like was possible. And then the A7s were good enough.

And now that's all changed because people liked it so much. They like, they fully invested in it, but it's a really interesting sort of the distribution had to flip over so that enough of the gear they were using was already prepared for it as opposed to being prepared to send out broadcast signals. Yeah. And that like, that's a great like verge story. We could, we could write that story all day. And at the time we kind of did cause it was so much fun, but now all of that, like,

All of that production pipeline is more geared towards internet delivery because that's where the industry is than television delivery. So they're able to do more YouTuber-y things, I guess you could call them. Interesting. Including completely cheaping out in the graphics.

Yeah. All right. Well, next year's Super Bowl is going to be on Peacock. So we have a whole year of weirdness to be expected. It's going to be great. Hopefully they can stream one football game in 4K. I just beg you. Produce natively, distribute the thing in 4K. I beg everybody.

We can get this done in America. Executive order a 4K football game, man. Do it. This is hard job. We have 12 months, Nia. You and me to get this done. All the money he saved from just like randomly ordering the treasury to not do pennies anymore. 4K football. Love it. All right, Nia, thank you. See ya.

All right, that is it for The Verge Cast today. Thank you to everybody who was on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about at TheVerge.com, all of our stuff on OpenAI and Operator and deep research. I'll link it in the show notes, but there is a ton of news ongoing there. There's even more news...

maybe unfortunately ongoing with all of this Elon Musk and Doge stuff. So keep it locked to The Verge. We are doing our very best to keep it all up to date and all on our homepage. So keep it locked. And if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other government agencies you're curious about, you can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We really honestly love hearing from you. It is the best.

This show is produced by Will Poor, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. The Verge cast is Verge Production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nila and I will be back on Friday to talk about all the AI news because it just keeps coming, all the government news because it just keeps coming. I think there's some interesting gadgety news coming this week. Lots to do, lots to talk about. We will see you then. Rock and roll. ♪