Dots get up in Muse's business

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2:08That's how I feel about Sam Alton. Ha, you weren't. That's not where you think about it about fuzzy guys. I'm still here about Sam Mark. David Malos here. Hey buddy. Hey, I'm still here. You're still here. You know, every week I say we're going to keep you and it's gotten more and more threatening over time. I've gotten threats as well. Well, this is technically your last week with us. David Pierce is back next week, but it is true. We are going to find ways to keep you on the show. I'm up into it. Let's go. That's a solemn promise. And by that, I mean, you can't leave the office. Oh, I've been here for weeks. Jay Kastrakis is here as well. What's up, man? Hey, good to be here. The Davids are like particle and anti-parkle. They can't collide. We can't be on a show together. It explodes. Yeah. There's a lot to talk about this week. We'll run it all down in one second. But first, I want to call it. We are nominated for some awards. The signal awards are happening. Those are the big podcast awards. The version is nominated for all of our shows. Dakota was nominated for Best Business Podcast. Version history for Best History Podcast.

3:08That's up against inviators, like actual history. We're like, what's a phone? We're like in the finals. So I'm very excited about that. And then, Vert Kast, this podcast, nominated for Best Technology Podcast. Like so many awards, there's the formal judge voting, but there's also audience voting, what's the voting? So we'll have all the links in the show notes and the descriptions. Click on those links and vote for us, because we love winning. That's who we are. We just love winning. Can't you tell how deeply competitive and in need of validation we are? That's who we are. All right, Jake, what are we talking about this week? Tons of talk about this week. There are, we're going to have a big gadget segment. There's new kindles, ton of Apple rumors. We're going to have a sort of chaos lightning route. America has a chat bot now. And if you saw this, America has an AI chat bot. Very good news. But first, we're going to start off with, I think the big AI news of the week, which is it was Open AI's week. They did dots. It's their answer to muse. Dots is it's same thing. It's got a cute little avatar. It's got a chat interface, and it goes off and does things for you. Except unlike muse, which meta is just like here,

4:11please take a muse. Have as many muses as you want. Dots, you got to pay $100 a month minimum. And I think that the question right out the gate is, is this a different product for a different set of people? Is this a business product? Or is Open AI just not able to compete with meta's ability to just blanket the entire universe with compute because they have so much money? And I'm curious where your head is at after seeing all this. Let's say at a minimum, it being for pro subscribers and business plus subscribers only is kind of dragging it towards the business user case. But also when you sign up for muse, it can be a 10X to Instagram, a 10X to Facebook, it connects all the things that everyday user use every single day. And notably, it gives you a giant list of prompts that you can ask it. Because I think people are faced with these things that are not really sure what to do with it. And if you're on chat GBT and you're using that every day for work, it makes a little bit more sense to have like a personal agent that's going

5:12and doing work tasks for you. But Muse is not really a work task product. It's more of a like, put things on Facebook Marketplace for me, which I did because me like really. Did you really? And yeah, I did. And it did technically work and it was very fast. And I listed like 30 products. I think it's like an old backpack of mine. But when someone got to my apartment, they said, how's your time with the verge going? And then I asked Muse to delete all my listings. Yeah. Was that before? And after the person posted on threads that Muse had sent somebody their house to the wall offer? It was the day before. Oh, boy. It was the day before. And then I saw the writing on the wall. So yeah, I think they're very different products. I'm still a little bit confused about what people are using this for outside of what they were already using. Open AI, like, chat GBT stuff for because that was already doing autonomous tasks for them, like codecs and things like that. I want to know what people are going to use dots for. Because it seems like Muse is very oriented around meta products.

6:12Dots is for launching your website while you're making dinner. That is what I learned from their launch video. Open AI's marketing for dots is a little all over the place. They had that example. They had wedding planning in the mix, but then also like hardcore software engineering. And it was like, it can do everything. Work tasks. Whereas Muse is very much a consumer product. We talked about it a lot last week. Metas good at consumer products. They are definitely good at engaging you to do more on their platforms. Like, they have one skill and it's engagement rate and they're really good at it. I feel nothing about letting Muse operate other meta products for me. So I have it watching my Instagram in every single morning. It finds all the most interesting comments left on my Instagram posts and tells me to go reply to them. So I can be in cover. And that means I just have to check it. And this makes me feel very much like a robot is telling me what to do every morning. Like I'm mad at it every morning. Like, you know what to tell me what to do. But it is also true that I would never see

7:14or think to reply to the most interesting comments on my Instagram. Yeah. Something that have been interesting about Muse is that it's very proactive. So I hooked it up to my Google calendar as well. And I knew that I was going to this like media dinner party thing. And it also knew that I had to be home by a certain time. So it told me you should leave on a city bike because a city bike is faster than taking the subway. And if you want to get home on time, make sure you leave at 920. You won't meet a ping you when you need to leave. And I was like, OK, this kind of, I kind of understand this. It's kind of interesting. But the thing you're describing is all kind of work like. Yeah. Like all these things that are neat, even like, you know, use my Instagram for me. Find I had it look for like AI accounts that I hadn't seen before. Because I want to expand the roster of people that I look at on Instagram talking about. All that is work. It's just work. It's fun work. It's work that rhymes with fun, I guess. Work, attainment. Whatever that is. Rising grind. But it is. I think this is the problem for consumer agents. And a lot of people, since Muse was announced

8:14and launched have come to this conclusion, obviously, I call it software brain, that to even understand what's to do with an agent, you have to understand your life as a series of tasks. Trustee McMillan Cotton, who's a New York Times Congress, had a long term in Blue Sky about how the problem with consumer agents is literally cultural. You have to understand yourself as a series of tasks in order to understand what an agent could do for you. And there's a cultural divide in America. We'll prevent some people from ever seeing that. I think that's fascinating. Maybe the thesis of the whole verge. Maybe thesis of the whole show is technology makes people think about themselves differently. So here's a thing that's going to happen. Because Meta does have the marketing dollars and the straight up dollars to give everybody a billion tokens and a little computer in the cloud. And then they can market it across every one of their surfaces. And maybe it's true that five years from now, everyone in America will just think of themselves as a series of tasks. The same way that the phone or the steam engine or whatever made you think about yourself differently. Yeah, and I don't think that dots is going out

9:16and telling you what you should be doing with dots. But the primary tab on Muse, the center tab, is the ideas tab. Yeah. And it's plugged in. When it's plugged in, all your stuff, it says, I can do this for you. I can open this pass-keylor. I can distill a launch week into one type brief. I can hold your inbox at a clean baseline. I can finish this briefing reply for you. It's just trying to get you to use it proactively so that you slowly understand the what the capabilities of things things are. I actually felt very similar about this product than I felt to chat GBT when it first launched. I looked at it and I was like, this is an infinite black box, and I don't know what to do with it. Everyone's like, it's game changing. It's going to change everything about the way you do work. Blah, blah, blah. But when you look at infinite possibilities, there's sort of this anxiety where you just don't know where to start. And I feel like meta is doing a pretty good job of trying to help people understand what agents are even for in the first place. Yeah, I mean, again, this is their background as a consumer company. They understand consumers. The defaults are important.

10:17And what you're describing is basically just a bunch of default agent tasks. The one that I got that was particularly good, again, it's the only personal data I've given it is my spam Gmail. Yeah. It's like, won't give it anything else. Again, I feel nothing about letting it operate by meta accounts because meta already has them. So what? But I gave it my spam Gmail and every couple days, it's like, you're in another class action lawsuit. Do you want me to file for 50 bucks? And I'm like, yeah, go ahead. Just like, I would never look for them. I would never fill out these PDFs. Like, go forth. And there was one moment where, you know, in order to fill out the forms, I had to tell it my phone number, which was the piece of it. And I was like, oh, I hate this. But it's 50 bucks. Do you have my phone number? Yeah. And that is fascinating to me. And I think the distinction I would draw from dots is obviously meta does not have as capable of a model. Right. No one thinks that whatever is running news is powerful as GPC6 Astro, which is what power starts.

11:19But they have a better user interface for consumers. And dots, you know, again, it's very confused. All their ideas were on the margins for software engineers. But it's also true that they have the more powerful model. And that's why they're charging money for it. And they say they're going to bring into consumers want to assume is able to bring into consumers with a cheaper model. But I just think it's like an interesting AB test to say, do you want work agents like this with a really powerful model that can do all of the things a frontier model can do? Or do you want to be on rails with a kind of dumber model? But it's a lot easier to use the thing. And, you know, the consumers in our prize markets are different than one cost of 100 bucks. Somewhere in the middle of that is GROCBOT. Right? Like GROC has this thing too. And it works a lot like these products do. And somewhere is OpenClaw, if you want to roll your own. We should point out that OpenAid hired Peter Strumberger who made OpenClaw and then met a beat them to the punch with the news, which is heavily inspired by OpenClaw. Yeah.

12:19I'm curious. The story of OpenAid to me has always been one of wanting to be a consumer company in realizing they have to be an enterprise company. So they launched the Chatchee BT, which was supposed to take Google. Right? That was their ambition. They were going to replace Google search. That's one of the most lucrative businesses in the whole world. They hired a bunch of people from Meta, which is fascinating in this dynamic. They started doing ads in Chatchee BT. And then Anthropic did Cloud Code in particular. And the enterprise usage of Cloud exploded. There was that period of time when every third OpenAid executive would write in memo declaring a code red. Like they were unfocused. We got to shut down store a code red. We're focused on coding. And now they're with dots, which have the fuzzy avatars and it's cute. And the branding feels very consumer. But it's a work product. Yeah. And I don't know if OpenAid has decided which way it wants to go. And does the story of every company, right? They all want to be a consumer product.

13:21Consumer products are fun. They're very widely used. You're very powerful if you're Mark Zuckerberg, and everyone in the world uses multiple of your products. But then they realize that the money is an enterprise, because people actually pay you money. And they actually have money that they're ready to spend. And I mean, this is what happened with Anthropic. They discovered that coding works. There's a ton of money to pay for coding tools. And I think OpenAid is in a similar position. They're burning through cash. So great. They're going to make business tools and sell them to business users, particularly in a world where Google, listen, you can't escape AI overviews. And so do you need chat GPT to replace that? It does a good job. But they're not going to completely overthrow Google anymore. Google is there with the same product. So I think it's a very open question whether they can still crack consumer market in the same way.

14:21Maybe they will eventually try to do that with this hardware product that they're allegedly working on that will come out supposed to be next year, I think. But that still feels like a very big question whether anybody wants to carry around a dot in their pocket or whatever this one's up being. Yeah. OpenAid still feels a little bit confused on which end of the market they want to satisfy. Because like you said, they originally were like fastest growing consumer app of all time. They were just like everyone has touched chat GPT. They're over a billion users, that kind of thing. And then when Anthropic came in and we're like, oh, we're actually making money and we're selling to Enterprise, that felt like what Astro was supposed to be for them. Was there a big pivot to, okay, we're Enterprise now? Yes, regular people can use this, but the tasks that it's really for are like 3D modeling and like Enterprise tasks. And then now Meta comes in with a consumer product when opening I was trying for so long to make a consumer product. That's got to feel kind of bad. Because now you're on the back foot on both sides. It's just like one caveat. Anthropic loves to announce that it's making money

15:24using accounting rules that do not have anything to do with reality. We did see their S1 this week. Liz is gonna write a whole piece about it. But Anthropics financials are fiction in like a real way. But it's true that they are generating some revenue. OpenAid is obviously generating some revenue. They are just burning money on training and all this other stuff that they're doing. Meta doesn't really have this problem. They are spending a lot of money and if you look at their financials closely, they are making a huge bet here. But Meta has a giant advertising business. They can to some extent afford to light money on fire. It's very funny. Did you see Adam Misari was on Threads and he was announcing like Instagram plus the paid subscription and he's like, this is how we can put out features and afford to make them. Ford and he got immediately community noted. It was like Meta is one of the richest companies in the world who can afford to do anything. And he was like, yeah, you have to reply to his own. Meta spent years trying to build a metaverse that people would use and then forgot $1 billion. Yeah. I feel like Meta can burn money.

16:24And so there's a part of this where Meta can burn money. They are not running a frontier model. So it must be cheaper to do inference. And then they have this massive distribution environment where they don't have to buy advertising. Like they announced dots by buying ads on Meta platforms. This is just a huge advantage for Meta that they can just layer it everywhere. Every time I open up Instagram, there are mues ads. Yeah. This doesn't make any, like these products have nothing to do with each other. Yeah. In Instagram, you can directly DM a real or something to your mues agent. So they just, they have it all over the, like the surfaces are everywhere. They're just trying to get, it feels exactly the same to how they bootstrap threads. Yeah. Like they're just putting it everywhere in the apps that you're already using. And I will just call this out one more time. People still think threads is a flaw. Even though threads watch is some of the most interesting text social media features of any platform all the time, people still think it's a flaw. And Meta's distribution advantage often can't overcome its coolness deficit.

17:24Yeah. Yeah. Like, yes, that's a real problem. I'm very, we're obviously in the age of consumer agents or consumer-ish agents. That's what all the fluffy, cute branding is for. The idea that there will one day be an opening out hardware device that there will come one day a mues device. We have a headline that's like, the Tom Gatchee's are here basically. The fascinating thing is someone asked Adam Asari whether the mues charm would have Instagram and he said no. And this to me is, but we've talked about it so many times, you can have this other device, but if it doesn't, in particular, have Instagram, you will have your phone. Yeah. Then what? It feels like Meta is kind of afraid of just rebuilding the phone again though, right? Like, if you have a dedicated device for a very specific thing and you're just like, yeah, we should have Instagram. And maybe we should have texting. And maybe we should have a phone. That's just a problem. So widescreen iPod with touch controls.

18:26Yeah, exactly. I mean, to me, this is the upcoming problem. Obviously, we are weeks away from the iPhone duo coming out. All of these devices are going to exist in that context where you can just open the mues app on your phone and you can use it that way and it's perfectly great. Or they're going to ask you to buy another device for some reason. And I think initially that reason is just, do you like this? Is this anything to quote David Pierce? Just anything. But that is the big bet on the future of all these devices. That is the Rabbit R1. And what's the humane pin? There was a class of these devices, once upon a time, that did not have the agentic software capabilities to justify existing. Now they might, right? All these things are open-clothed one way or another. You can just do it again. Another company can do it again. I can't wait for the weird Lenovo CES announcement of an open-clothed device. All that stuff is coming for us.

19:26The question is, is any of it going to overcome a phone? Because we're about to see just dozens of agent software platform launches. I'm starting to get them in my inbox almost every day. Well, this is my question to you. Like, would you use a dedicated AI agent device or just use it on your phone? I, you know where I've gotten to. I've been thinking a lot about the duo. What am I going to buy a duo? It's obvious. Because I'm this sort of person who reads a lot of PDFs in the back of Ubers. And this is how boring my life is. And it can justify the purchase of a bigger phone. I don't want to carry that around all the time. And I think that's why Apple introduced Tandoff so that you can have a smaller but still competent phone most of the time. And I've just been thinking, would I use that handoff for an even smaller thing? It's like a news charm. Like, yeah, just you take my solid account. I'm going to leave the house with this. And if I need to send a text message, I can do it by a voice. But then it's like the long tail of apps starts to show up. We'll let me be able to actually call an Uber.

20:28We don't know yet, right? Like that has to be developed. If I need a Google map, is the MetaMuse charm going to have Google maps? Or is Meta going to strike a deal with like here maps, like a third tier car oh yeah. Yeah. All that needs to come into focus. So much of the argument for these also seems to be like, OK, it's lower touch, right? You can leave the heavy phone and all the apps and the notifications and distractions to the side. You'll just have your little pin. But now it's like, OK, and there's a cute little dancing avatar on it. And also, it can't do all these things. And so you have to pull it out and give it very explicit instructions for how to do all this stuff. And it seems to take more time to do all these phone tasks. It gets very hard to see where the space is that you're gaining time from these. When MetaMuse has a great presence on my phone, that thing has sent me more notifications of last week and any other app. And you know what's annoying? They're not even bad.

21:28Like most of the time, it's stuff like David mentioned where it's like, hey, by the way, this person added a meeting to your calendar and they moved it around and it overlaps with this other thing. And I'm like, I wasn't looking at my calendar. But you let me use this. Look at your calendar. Mark Jagger works in your calendar. Listen. This, to me, the whole argument for dots is it costs money, right? And so if I'm paying the money, I can be demanding as consumer. And probably they will understand they should not do horrible privacy violating things. Now, does OpenAI violate the privacy of dozens of British mathematicians every week? But for some reason, that's the thing they've decided to start doing. And they're stealing the answers to the test. That's a whole problem. Can you trust any of these companies? I don't know. I do know that Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has announced that the business model for Muse is taking a cut of transactions, which I think it was Casey who first said this, that implies that they will soon be a growth team at Meta,

22:31whose job it is to increase the volume of transactions, just like there's a growth team at Apple, whose job it is to increase the number of subscriptions, apps, and app purchases and transactions. You know what this product looks like when that team gets its hand on it, right? It's going to go from helpful, proactive messages about your calendar to, hey, we see you're getting home late. You want me to order you some food, right? They're going to start being like, would you like me to spend money? I can save you a couple bucks. I know you're about to order a new toothbrush. Like you can just see where it's going. And I, boy, do I not want to participate in that. And I think that's going to be the real danger of the consumer agent is the only business model that can work as advertising. And then it's just like, not only do you have a personal shopper, you have a personal shopper who's trying to get a job. You have a car, it's Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. Well, that's deep. That's a bar. I don't like this. Yeah. They are also inadvertently declaring war on Amazon by doing this, right? Because if Amazon's blocking it

23:32and they want you to make as many transactions as possible, they're going to have to figure out ways for it to be interesting enough for you to want to buy the product that you're willing to wait two weeks for instead of two days. And I feel like that's a big barrier that they're going to have to surpass. Obviously, they already have Instagram shopping and they're probably going to be pushing you all these like t-shirts and whatever that are drop shipped. But at the same time, if you're going to be buying regular commerce from them that you do on an everyday basis, which it seems like they're kind of pushing towards, they're going to have to figure out a way to get around Amazon for that. For, they're just going to send everybody to Walmart. Like some other giant e-commerce platform is going to take that bet, right? That's true. Can we pull two points in market share away from Amazon because of news? Yeah. And if meta can offer Amazon some additional volume, which is hard at Amazon scale, but that's the argument they're going to make. These are going to become weird backroom deals. And then your little butler will be corrupt.

24:33Like the ultimate promise of this business model is do you want to corrupt butler? Yeah. And there's a part of me. It's like, yes. Like, baby, I don't know how to keep it in a slightly corrupt butler. Imagine you had a butler at home and they got a cut of every sale they made. So they were constantly prompting you like, hey, would you like lunch? You can get it from Chipotle. 299. I do feel like there are, someone tell us, there's got to be a history of like, under the table butler in jail stories, you know, like butler sort of like double dipping onto the table. I think this is going to be one of the weirder aspects of agents. It's just what is that relationship like when someone, like everyone knows how exactly how search got adulterated and they don't like it. Everyone knows exactly how the scroll on Instagram got adulterated with algorithmic boosting and all this stuff. David, I think you and I were talking about TikTok which just feels like a nonstop flood of shopping channels now. Yeah. None of that feels good. Cory Doctoral calls it in shittification. Like there's a word for it.

25:34Like pre-insidifying the agent by being like we're announcing the business model is a cut of transactions. It's like fast to me. The other thing is on the flip side, I'm very curious to see what happens to a bunch of like form-filling bureaucracy once agents are at scale. I think the day after Mew's launched, everybody noticed that everyone hit cap shows all over the internet because Mew's agents were just doing stuff all over the place and like Cloudfire freaked out because there was just suddenly an influx of this happening. Like I identified a lot of bicycles in city streets that day just to go about my way on the internet. But it is true that Mew's is in my email, in this spam email, finding class action forms and filling them out. And I know that the way that those amounts are calculated is against an imperfect take rate. So they know only 10% of people are going to fill out the form, the lawyers get whatever and this is that. And now it's like, well, if everybody has a little corrupt about that, collecting $50 automatically

26:35the second the email shows up. Like the back end of that is going to get really complicated. Right. Right. If everybody can call Verizon to renegotiate their cell service, which is a number one Mew's use case that people have been posting about, eventually Verizon's just going to put an agent on the other side of that. Right. And then your agents are going to argue and it's going to hang up on you. Yeah. Matt is going to negotiate a deal with Verizon, you know, cancellation. Oh, you're being hairy. Like you're going to get the Mew's deal. I don't like this. It's going to be bad. Yeah. Actually, we just had Matthew Prince, who's a CEO of Cloudflare on the coder. And his prediction is bot traffic will like far surpass human traffic. We have that clip, let's run it. And May, team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic has now passed human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out with the giant caveat that I've run wrong so far in every prediction that I've made on this. But five years from now, we think that automated traffic

27:36will be a thousand times human traffic online. Not because human traffic is going to decline. We think it'll stay kind of around the same. But because we're just seeing such an explosion in all of this the rest of the traffic. That's bananas to me. Like you have to rearchitect the internet for a thousand x increase in traffic while still making a human internet that people want to use. And like he said that to me and then like me used to fill that a class action settlement for me. And I was like, oh, I get it. I get what he thinks. Like that is traffic that would have never existed but for my little my silly little agent. Right. And we're currently nestled in this little space where that can happen without the class actions completely changing the way that they operate. Okay. That's that's going to come. I think the second agents are anywhere close to being, I wouldn't even say ubiquitous. But common. Right. Just a thing people do. All of the dynamics of anything that sort of are based around friction occurring will change. Because the assumption is going to be that there's no friction at all. Right. Well, this reminds me I was at this internet dinner

28:37the other night with a bunch of like internet thinker people. I think you actually had a name card there. I was an Austin. Yeah. But they asked this icebreaker question for everyone to talk about. And the question was like, what was your favorite era of the internet that you could freeze frame and just have it be forever? And someone answered, right now is my favorite era because we have this amazing new technology that hasn't been insuredified yet. And the end of that statement says where we're going and we're going there very quickly. Right. Like everyone's very excited about these agents on the web. But then within probably six months, the amount of bot traffic is just going to make everything unusable. Yeah. And like without question, that's actually the funniest thing. And that was theoretical, I think, until these past few weeks when meta was like everyone gets an agent and open eyes and outstakes agent, I'm confident that we'll see one from Google and from Anthropic and everybody else soon. And then, yeah, the dream is everyone will have a little automated agent going off

29:38autonomously and doing things. And then somewhere in the background is the other big news of the week, which is can we trust them and will they kill us all? Right. Yeah. And like the answer is, Prinky promise they won't, I guess, Jake walk us through this one. Yeah. So we've spent a budget time with this question of can we trust Zach and Sam Altman? And that leads us to this Trump accord that happened this week, which first off, we're making a huge mistake this entire podcast. It's no longer called AI. It's now SI, superintelligence, which Trump says is a cooler word. I believe that is the reason. So the entire government now has to call it superintelligence. But yeah, he gathered all the big tech leaders. They had a great dinner together. They schmoozed, they posted photos. And then a smaller group of them went on and they signed this, this, believe it or they called it a moral compact, which is to say it is non-binding

30:38where the major AI companies all agreed to, have some safety protocols. And then they did a little press conference and they all came out and said, this is really amazing. We're gonna do such a good job. At one point, reporters ask for anthropics, Dario, Amade to come out and they're like, hey, what do you think about this as the guy who's most concerned about all this? And Trump kind of like pulls him aside. Meanwhile, and is like, kind of give him a don't do too much. You're gonna say the right thing, Dario. So in lieu of laws, I don't know, Neely. In lieu of a do you get the impression that anything happened meaningful this week? I mean, just read the four principles here. Can I just read them to you? Yes, please. I'll just read the first sentence of each of these four things that these companies agree to. They will implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of models during training and deployment

31:39around areas like cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical threats. And ensure models you on hack or access technical systems in an unintended ways. Good, but shouldn't you be doing that anyway? Two, they will empower an internal team to ensure all of those controls, monitoring and detection are operating as intended and that any issues are remediated. Six, three, they will partner with an independent external auditor or evaluator to carry out independent assessments of whether those controls, monitoring, detections are operating as intended. And then three, this is the big oversight one. Are you ready for this one? They will designate an independent committee of the board of directors, their own board of directors, to oversee and receive reports from those teams and the internal external auditors and evaluators as well as to ensure any issues. Sorry, I'm not afraid. No need. So if you're the, you're allowed, you have to fix your stuff and the teams, the teams that you pay money to have to be able to see it and then you have external auditors and they will report to your own board of directors.

32:40To make sure you fix it. To make sure you fix yourself. And I'm just gonna guarantee you that is how all of these companies are already working. Except for maybe space XAI, which is fine. But like, is he gonna do it? Like, I don't know. This is nothing, right? They all already have safety teams. They all already pay third party evaluators. In fact, it turns out most of these like AI going rogue hacks are reporter Robert Harthead, a fantastic story about this. Most of them trace back to one's like other company. Yeah, one independent company. One independent testing firm that just like let this stuff go rogue. They're already doing these things, right? The problem is they're not doing them well or well enough. And there's no penalty for getting in trouble. This is a real problem. And none of this addresses that. Right. You know, Dario's big pacing the frontier thing is like, we need to on some level slow down and you have other folks like Jensen and Zach

33:40who are like, absolutely not. We can't slow down for a second. I don't quite understand what's in that for Zach given that he is behind. But that mindset is clearly one out. Trump is also like extremely bullish. He doesn't want to slow down at all because he sees it as a race to be one. He sees that the US currently is winning. And he is not, I mean, he doesn't trust Dario. That's for sure. Did you see how he introduced Sundar? Oh my God. So there's the ones he knows. Oh my God. There's like Jocelyn Zuckerberg. He's like pushing Jensen to the front. He's like, what a handsome bro. And then he gets to Sundar and he goes, nobody knows who the hell these execs are. This guy's a monster. Nobody knows him. It's like, Oh, see, Galvan brutal man. Dude, a lot of people know who he is. But he's, yeah, there's that. Like there's the theater of it and the Trump of it. And you know, there's, we ran this clip on the site. You know, they're all, they're all sitting around their last supper table doing their signing.

34:43And Trump is going on and on about how people will come to love data centers, like much like an arranged marriage. Like you're going to love, you're going to love me too. And they all just have 1000 yard stairs in their faces. But this is what they could get to is this agreement on safety, which is truly effectively nothing. The idea that they all will be required to have outside monitors is new, but they were all doing it anyway. And they're still not requiring that. Trump referred to it as morally binding. Let me tell you how morally binding works. Yeah. To these people, especially, they're not a choice. So that's the like, you know, the danger that the AI is going to wake up and operate a robot arm to make a novel virus and then like, stab us all with it. That's out there. The idea that the agents will go rogue and people will grant them security permissions that reveal their address to Facebook market or place buyers is like happening today. Right. And the idea that the models are unaligned and they will deceive you and lie and get what they want.

35:45I've been telling Muse to not proactively read my email almost every day. I'm like, I've set up alerts for these two things. Do not tell me I have a flight coming. I know I have a flight coming up. Stop reading my email, getting excited because someone at Meta decided flight trackers were engagement bait and like, turn this off. Right. Like, turn off this thing that flags, oh, you see a flight receipt. I'm going to start pinging you to let you know I'm here. And every time I say it's like the, the lot of this is hard coded. I can't do it. Now that's just hallucinations because I don't really know how to agent is actually thinking about what it's doing. But like, that's the problem here. Right. Is it the products and the models are not necessarily aligned? We don't know if alignment is even going to work. Like, all the way to the finish line, we need to. We've got stories about that coming on the site. It's not all the way down the line. It's going to make a atom bomb and kill us all. Like, there's something in the middle that these companies are kind of just like racing forward to do. And these consumer agents are, we're already seeing the glimmers of, oh, you don't even know what kind of permission

36:46you're giving the agent. Yeah. And then for some reason, David, you're having people marketplace sellers come to your house anyway. Yeah. You're supposed to go to like the police. Willingly to do a marketplace trade. Yeah. You're not supposed to have people come to your house. Really? Yeah. I guess I. I guess I got like a coffee shop. It's my brother always always like, I go to the police station. Like that's crazy. I would have been like, I'm on there. That was like Chicago. So he's like, I go to the CPD. Yeah. Which is good. Like, I'm always picking like a public park. Maybe this one's a little on me then. Yeah. It's a little bit. Muse is not to fall here. I'm dying to know how people are using Muse. If you're out there or using OpenClar or any of these other agents. Again, our thesis for a long time has been there are not great consumer AI products. Muse feels like the first thing that could be. At least to my estimation. Yeah. I'm dying to know how people feel about that. I think we're putting it to the test here. All right. We've got to take a break. We've got a lot of gadgets to talk about. See you on the other side.

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39:48Support for the show comes from AWS AI. AWS AI is powering transformation across the world's leading organizations, moving AI from possibility to production at scale. Like how AWS AI helps Formula One turn race-state data into real-time insights that bring fans closer to the action. Or how it helps booking.com personalize every trip where travelers around the world. AWS AI is even transforming how things get built, helping Siemens power the production of smarter cars. Cross-endishries, AWS AI is helping businesses innovate faster, lead with confidence, and transform what's possible today. AWS AI is how. All right, we're back. We've got a ton of gadgets to mention. That was a lot of dots. Yeah, I think to answer your question, whether dots is significantly different from use. You mentioned dots and then we talked about mues for like 15 minutes. So I think they're probably different products. Yeah, yeah. It's also hard to get access to.

40:50It's right at this second. That's fair enough. That's fair enough. It's also worth noting that, that OpenAI did say there would be a consumer version of dots. Yeah, eventually. For all the people who are paying for those $500 a month, Chechi Petit subscribers, yeah, you know, they're having a great time right now. Yeah, all right. Big week for gadgets. I think, David, you've got a really delightful one to start off with. Sure. Okay, Huawei has made a lens that is a camera that goes on your phone. So we did a reader call in answering your questions episode that went live yesterday. And one of the questions was, if all of these Android manufacturers are so good at making smartphones, why don't they just make cameras? They've got all the components for it. They're all off the shelf, etc. Now that's happened. I think we've seen this happen in different capacities over the years. But this Huawei one is really crazy. It is a large 24 to 240 millimeter lens.

41:50Wait, 24 to 240? It's insane range. Insane range. That's bonkers. And that's like optical zoom, which is insane. It goes on the screw mount of two of Huawei's phones. So it's a whole separate lens that just mounts directly. The phones have screw mounts on the back. Two of their phones do. It's like two very specific like signature addition Huawei phones have screw mounts around the camera ring. But there's not like a mirror. It's just a threaded around the camera bump. Because the lens itself has its own sensor. Oh sure. So that's what you mean by it's a camera. It's a camera inside of a lens. And the interface is your phone. So this is pretty insane. It's 24 to 240 millimeter aperture from F2 to F4.5, which is really not that bad for that big of a range. It uses a 50 megapixel 1.0 type RY-LGB sensor inside of the lens.

42:51It's crazy. And it's like it's smaller than a regular camera zoom lens, especially one of this range. It's clearly not small in general. You're going to have to put this in a bag. You know, it's going to mount to your phone. This idea I think is very, very cool. I love the idea of just carrying a lens with it and not carrying a whole separate camera body, slapping it to the back of my phone and having a great interface. I think that's amazing. So just needed to call that out. Companies have been trying this. I feel like there was an absence of this for a while. Rewind like a decade ago, there was like the Galaxy camera or whatever, which was just like, yeah, it was a bad Samsung phone. It was a bad Samsung phone. I think I'm a really bad Samsung phone with a camera attached to it. And for mysterious reasons that didn't work out. And now we're in this like new renaissance of smartphone companies trying bizarre things, of putting like screw on enormous zoom lenses on the back of their phones. Yeah. And like trying to like one up each other when it comes to the cameras,

43:52it is not totally clear to me who the audience is for these. Because like as David and Mel. It's so committed. It was so committed to smartphone photography. He's like, this is a good idea. I'm like, what am I just carrying? Like, any like a super zoom? Yeah, but then you don't, you have to carry around a camera too. But this is the size of the camera. But you always carry, I don't know. It's cool to have it directly on your phone. That's true. Yeah, I don't know. Zyce tried this with the Zyce ZX1. They made a dedicated camera that was also an Android phone. And you had light remonna and it was really laggy and terrible. Yeah, there's so many versions of this. There's so many versions of this. Yeah, my favorite, for there was a minute when it was going the other way. When people would sell basically little cameras that would plug into an iPhone. So I had one, and the same was a disaster. It was basically an RX100 sensor. Like a first generation Sony RX100 sensor that was a lightning dongle. Okay.

44:52It's like that's not a good idea. And I will never forget the sort of arc of this product. I took it to the bar and my friend who is a photographer, like was like, what's that? And I said what it was. And he got all excited. And he took my phone and he plugged in this little like RX100 lightning dongle. And he took one photo and he went, looks bad. And they just turned it off. Because like the app couldn't do the thing that the RX100 was doing in hardware. So the sensor was like, all these products sort of like end up in this weird middle ground. Where usually the cameras that are attached to lenses like this are extremely optimized to make photos. Yeah. And smartphones are optimized to make a different thing. I haven't used, you know, the Huawei cameras in particular, like off, they're headed off in their own direction. Yeah. But that I'm very curious to be like, okay, it's a little smartphone camera. But the interface is a camera. What does the processing look like? Is it generate rods?

45:52Like all that is just like a progress. And then the lenses are also expensive on their own, right? Like Apple and Vivo have been making dedicated lenses that just mount to their smartphones for a couple of years now. And those are quite good. Those are usually like telephoto lenses that have really nice class in them. But they only work with like one model of phone. And so you have to be dedicated to using that exact phone. And these are companies, by the way, that release like eight skews of their flagship phone every single year. So it's kind of a big ask to have you buy a dedicated lens for that. This while I want if it's like a screw mount that they're dedicated to using for like a long period of time, then sure. But we all saw how that went with the Moto Z. And every other type of phone that has had like proprietary detachable components, usually it lasts about two generations. And then they throw it away. So I've sort of been assuming that all of these weird photography accessories like, they might not even be selling them for more than a few weeks. These look like wild ideas that they somehow managed to ship. And I do not trust that they're committed to any of this.

46:56Right. Is this here to generate verchast conversation? I mean, this is only, I mean, only it's $895. I mean, for the lens. Yeah. Jesus. That's a lot of money, dude. That's more expensive than most of these people's phones. Like, yeah, I'm out here like, let's do it. It's more expensive than most lenses, but it does have a sensor inside of it. That's a good idea. So can you use it without the phone because it has a sensor inside? Can you just like walk around like just present like a monocular style? I highly doubt this. I think that would be cool. Yeah, I just have no idea what you're looking at. That'd be nice. I mean, for A-95, you can get a real camera with the one in sensor. But not with that zoom. Maybe not with a 24 240. Yeah. Yeah, true. I'm not just like an E-Mount 24 240 cast. We're just Googling camera. I don't even know if that exists. The segment is now camera shopping with David and New Light. I should tell my agent to go buy the E-Muse. Hey, Muse. All right, Sony 24 240, which is not as bright.

47:56It's only F-35 to 63. Yeah. It's a bigger sensor, so it's probably about equivalent. It's $1300. $1300. You can get one used for about 600. Okay. But on your phone, man, it's directly on your phone. Someone's got, there's got to be a phone to e-Mount down around the world. All right, take what you got. Yeah. It's New Kindle Week. We've got a whole suite of New Kindles from Amazon. And they look a lot nicer this year. Genuinely, it's some big upgrades. So the Kindle, the Paper White, the Color Soft, new models for all of them. And they have tiered the heck out of this thing. My God, the upgrade slope on these is just to perfection. So you got the based Kindle. She comes in a beautiful, new purple color. There's also now an aluminum version of the base model. Even nicer, also enough, great. Has more storage, great. There's a new Paper White. Paper White comes in plastic or upgrade

48:58to aluminum signature edition. If you get the signature edition, you can also add on a case, $80, that has page turn buttons, physical page turn buttons. That rolls with that only works for the signature edition. It only works for the signature edition. No. But this is the thing, you're like, oh, I should get a Kindle. It's so cheap. What is it? Like $150? And then by the end of this, you're like, I've spent $350. You got the signature edition with the page turn buttons. And the nice green color. Oh, yeah. Listen, Pannos knows what he's doing. He knows what he's doing. He's working his magic over there. I, this is the Kindle hardware. As much as this is built around, like you can see exactly what they were thinking, trying to get you to upgrade. Even the base model, I think, looks better than it ever has. The colors are fun. The screen is now flush. There's no more of that inset thing. It seems very good. It seems like a very good year for the Kindles to millimeter thinner. Are either of you big Kindle people?

50:00I'm in the sense that I have many. Yeah. Hi. Becky and Max are both Kindle people. And so there are the, but are they the cheapest possible Kindle person? Or Becky down, she had an Oasis and she went back to a paper wipe. She preferred the paper. Because it's just like a more rugged, tossable, and the Oasis pattern, they've sucked. And then Max has whatever garbage handle that I pulled out of a closet for a plane ride that she, now it's very fun, but it has Amazon Kindle Kids library or whatever that thing is, which is just full of the worst, the worst pap. Like it's not good, but she likes to read. So we're just like letting her do it. I've been poisoned by David Pierce to buy a number of e-readers that I'd barely use. But I do like that there's a little arms race going on right now between XTE Inc and what is it? Boots. Boots. Boots. Yeah. They're like racing to create the ultimate micro e-reader

51:00and they're releasing like three every three months. So that's more fun for me than Kindle. Even though most people have the Kindle. This is another agent problem because people have set up agents to take Kindle books, reformat them and send them to the Boogs devices, react to seeing devices, with an Amazon blocked muse. So the agent that you would most easily do this with is not blocked. Well, I guess we have to get $300 a month opening. I said that. I have no choice but to buy a Mac mini. Give it full access to my network. Open Cloud. That's what this is for. That's all open Cloud in the end. Yeah. One more big gadget we should talk about. There's rumors this week that Apple wants something that everyone keeps calling the homepad on October 13th. I really do not want them to call this the homepad. But whatever Apple's next smart home device, the rumors are it's October 13th. Smart display. Some Mark Gurman back and forth about what the camera's

52:00actually going to do on it. But the big feature that he's been reporting is it will recognize the people walking up to it and then personalize interface. And then obviously, I think a theme of this episode, it might be just a theme of our lives now, is Apple believes Siri AI is now capable enough to be the kind of assistance that you would put in your house and then do things for you. Just as Meta believes muse is the kind of assistant that is capable enough to support new hardware. And open AI believes that dots is the kind of assistant capable enough to support Johnny I part where everyone is trying to make new hardware around their little AI. Thing. Only I don't think anyone thinks Siri AI is as capable as some use for dots like what's it going to do? Well, something in your house that mostly just has to control your smart home equipment is a really easier task. This is the hardest task of all. Like, like wire gen 2e and I friends, it's because we have trauma bonded over our smart homes. Like it's really, really hard to get that right. But it is a market that's been like filled already

53:00by Google and Amazon, you know? No, when I say it's really hard to get that right, I mean, Jen and I have made like hours long episodes of this show being like, boy, this is hard and it doesn't work as well. It's like a year of Amazon Alexa Plus, right? And if you ask Jen, I think she would tell you, it's not very good. Whatever is happening with Gemini and Google Home is just a straightforward mess. And the problem is, yes, you might have a bunch of stuff at home kit, but then you've got one weird set of devices that isn't in home kit. And then maybe you're me and you've got a little, I'm like looking at it, it's on the floor over there. My little raspberry pie, like baby rack that is bridging a bunch of stuff through home bridge into home kits. My wife can use it on her phone, but sometimes it fails and nobody knows why. And I have to restart my tomagotchi. Like an AI assistant is either gonna solve that problem by just living on your network and being like, I'm gonna fix stuff or it's gonna fail in like the most brittle ways because it can't actually see what's going on.

54:01Yeah. I'm very curious to see what Apple does here. It feels very unusual for Apple to release something. I think this risky, right? This product is going to be built on two large platforms that are kind of untested, right? There is CRII, which has a world of its own challenges. And then there's an entire network of third party smart home products that may or may not be using the APIs correctly, that may or may not connect to everything else in your life the way that they are supposed to. And making all of that work is very difficult. And so Apple offering a product that is presumably meant to use the still being developed CRII to control this thing that is kind of hard to wrangle on the best of days. Yeah. I can't do that like what is this box doing? Well, so here's the German report says, it will look a little like an Apple I'm actually for,

55:03which I love. So now I've already bought it. This way we'll tilt. There'll be a wall mounted version with a thinner base underneath for Mike's and speakers. And then there'll be a messages app, smart home control, video calls, music playback, photos and inner comm style calls with voice and facial recognition to identify the users. This is a lot, first of all, but the idea that it's going to do fast user switching is people walk up to it and like be in your FaceTime account. So you are the person making FaceTime calls, not someone else, implies that Apple has fast user switching anywhere in its ecosystem. Right. But if you ever try to do this on a Mac, I'm like, what are you doing? But if you ever even just tried to log into Apple music on another device, it's like hold on. Yeah. So you're not exactly doing that instantaneously through just your FaceID, I suppose. If you've ever flipped users on an Apple TV, which admittedly at this point has like a steam engine for a processor. But if you've ever tried to do that, it's not swift.

56:05And so I'm very curious like the idea that it's going to have enough processing at a system level to do user identification and then enough memory to keep a bunch of user data persistent and not have to swap when memory and storage fast notes do that are both at like all time premiums. Many questions about what this product is and how that promise in particular will come true. Yeah. I'm not saying they can't be solved. They do not exist in Apple's ecosystem. I mean, there is a real like high end tier to smart home, right? It would not be entirely unreasonable for them to make this a premium product, right? Throw an A20 processor in there. But in 128 gigabytes of RAM, like there's people who'd pay for that. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't just be like that quite that high end. But I think when you think of the smart home, like there is such just like a tranche of junk you can buy on Amazon. But a lot of it does start and that high end tier

57:06and like surely that's where Apple is thinking. Oh, I don't know. I mean, the reason you would make matter happen to the extent that it has happened is to solve the problem of the junk, right? You're like, there's one standard. We're all gonna use it. And so a lot of the junk is now matter. But matter has many, many problems of it. Well, we'll see. I'm dying to know. And most people don't have a bunch of leotrons which is in their house. They might have like one or two plug-in switches for the Christmas lights. So is this gonna actually do all those things? Is it gonna talk to Sonos? Like everything in a smart home is an edge case. Like, definitionally everyone's house is different. The set of devices you have are different. You've got a ties in TV in one room, an LG TV angrily listening for you in another room. Like literally everything about a smart home is just a different edge case because every single, every person's house is different.

58:06And Apple is not great at that, right? They're like, we will impose our will on you. I'm dying to know. I'm so excited for this product unless they call it the home pad. Because then I won't have one of my home. It feels pretty crazy that we're already getting this product when the duo still isn't even out yet. And then we're supposed to get potentially a MacBook Ultra like in November or something. We all were speculating about what John Turtis was gonna do to this company. And it seems like he's speedrunning releases in the first few months. There's like org chart news, right? He's getting rid of his like middle managers and hardware engineering to go faster. And that's great. Sure, go faster. It's just funny to me because he ran hardware engineering. Yeah. It's like you could have done this at any time. Was Tim Cook like, no, I have strong opinions about the structure of the hardware engineering group. But I suspect they were saving some sweeping changes for him to be CEO. Yeah. But all these products came up in the cook era. They were all developed in the cook era. And the conventional wisdom is Siri wasn't ready for this product in particular.

59:07You could not have released a home hub with last year's version of Siri. So you needed to wait until this one. And then this year's version of Siri is not, it is not a genetic in the way that mues or dots or whatever comes out from Google will be. Yeah. Neelah, have you used Gemini around your home? Yeah. Cause Siri is based on Gemini and having used Gemini around the home. I don't know if I'd say it's ready. I get any like right now, it's a valid person. It's like running to your home to tell you that Siri was distilled from Gemini. It's not based on Gemini. It has no relationship to Gemini. It runs in Apple's product, it's called Compute Jake. And then another Google person is going to run to your home and remind you that the T and Chat, GBT stands for Transformer, which is an advantage to Google. Like all these companies are just, they're all very insistent on the technical details here. Gemini for home is actually, it is a confusing product because it is built on top of Google Assistant, which is still obviously there.

1:00:07So if you have a hub, I've got one here and you talk to it, Gemini does the command and then it figures out what you want and then it issues a command to Google Assistant and sometimes that breaks. Sometimes Google Assistant starts talking to you like a ghost, like the zombie ghost of Google Assistant is like, I'm sorry, that doesn't work today. So like the way they architected it was weird and bad. So there's that problem. And this is the difference between is the model capable or is the product good? Like the model is undoubtedly capable to turn off lights on and off. The product is architected in a way that is clearly rushed to market and they could not deprecate all the Google Assistant edge cases. So it's just there working in the background. The weirder thing is in my car, we have a Cadillac EV that has native Google and they just totally replaced Google Assistant with Gemini. So it's a different voice. It's the Gemini voices in my car, but it's the Google Assistant voices in my house,

1:01:08but they both think that they're Gemini, very confusing. And when you ask Gemini in the car to do things, it tries to like do MCP stuff. It puts up a window that's like connecting to Spotify because you can see that it's trying directly since Spotify command. All this is bad, but here's the best one. Before when I was Google Assistant at the car, the single best feature was as you're backing out of the driveway, you could say close the garage door because it was connected in some way to the garage door. And now Gemini is like, that's a security risk. And I'm like, guy, dude, I'm in the car. Like the garage door button is right there. Like I can see. Like how is this security risk? But it's because they they they are they undid the Google Assistant connection where Google had thought that through. And now it's just Gemini being like, am I allowed to just like MCP? I don't think so. Yeah, all the hard coded stuff now is just logic down and the logic does not always work. It doesn't make any sense. Yeah. So again, I'm very curious to see how Apple deals with all this.

1:02:09Like this is just one of those things. By the way, I've asked GM very directly if Gemini in the car is going up to the cloud and then connecting to my house and then issuing a garage door command to my like garage door controller. Or if it's just pushing the button that exists in the car and they're like, huh, and it's like, we're not sure. And I'm like, it should just push the button. It's in the car, right? Like it's all here. But it's actually a virtual button in the car. Oh my God. Can't you just do the like the virtual click? You would have enough GPUs in your car to process. Yeah, that's a different cloud. It does seem very much like the command is leaving my car going to the cloud landing in my house and being executed a little bit. That is so wild. And I'm like, you should just push the button in the car. Like that, that's not a security risk. I mean, the car. Oh, man. We'll see. Again, we once again started talking about Apple and we ended up talking about every other product. But the product is not here. We're expecting to see it in a couple of weeks here. And again, these are the questions.

1:03:09I'm dying to see how Apple solves them because every other company is gonna try to solve them for ages. And in our case, we have Jen. We have like a secret weapon. Like we have like the ultimate database of edge cases for short, on our team. I'm very excited to see how she reacts to it. All right. It's gonna be a very interesting month for Apple. We've got a lot more to talk about. We're gonna take a break more back. Time for everybody's favorite podcast with a podcast. Support for the show comes from Amazon Prime. Some of us are blessed with a natural ability to do gift giving right. You probably have a few in your life. People who can make a mental ledger of what their loved ones like and buy things here and there throughout the year. My mom has always been the best gift giver in my life. She could even make the smallest gift feel incredibly special because you knew that she had really thought about that person receiving it. It doesn't have to be the biggest or the most expensive gift. It just has to show someone you were thinking about them. Well, for the rest of us, here's a tip.

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1:05:14Terms apply. Real innovation is powered by real people. MX Corporate provides 24-7 expertise, on-demand resources, and the trusted backing of American Express. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is MX Corporate. Get started at go.amx-mx-corporate. Terms apply. All right, we're back. We're going to have the lighting round, but first, it is time. Is it time for MX to be a podcast with a podcast? I think it may be. It's time for Brennan Cars, dummy. MX Corporate. Yeah. Is it time for MX? Yeah. Yeah. It's so fucking time for MX. That's good. Is it time for MX? Yeah.

1:06:16And here's what he's done this week. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. That was surprising. Yeah. I'm getting cheap trick vibes from that. So glad the pop-on fans have found us. They really found us. There are people. That was my heart rate. Who is an indie video game director. Wow. Very good. That was one of my faves. When I've been waiting for big drops, and we finally, we got something with some punch. But there's been a lot of builds and not a lot of drops. I'm just saying it. I'm happy we got something with some punch. This week's Brennan is just very dumb. It's dumb. The man is required to ignore obvious things in order to preserve his station and the Trump administration. This is a real dynamic for Brennan. So there's Brennan being dumb and undercutting his own positions. And there's Brennan having to be willfully stupid in order to not get in trouble. You tell me which one you think this is. So over the past few weeks, the Trump administration has been using government money

1:07:18to run what can only be described as campaign ads. And when I say can only be described as campaign ads, I mean, literally one of these ads is indistinguishable from a 2020 or Trump campaign ad. But that's just what they're doing. And it's all about how Trump is doing a great job. The money came out of money that was earmarked for Customs and Border Protection. It's straightforwardly government money and they're running campaigns on there. They're buying ad space. They're running campaigns. You know, the regular senders are doing the thing when they're asked about it. I don't know. I've never seen a television in my life. Like, that's the thing they're doing. Brennan, who is very worried about the use of our nation's airwaves in a public interest. Such that he is in litigation with Disney about what is being said on the view. He said nothing about this. He's gonna, he's so worried about it. It seems like he's gonna end up corining into a lawsuit with Comcast, which wants to spin off NBC. He's so worried about this that, you know, when Paramount wanted to buy Warner Brothers, there's all the CBS shenanigans happening in the middle

1:08:20because we gotta use the broadcast stations for what they're meant for, the public interest. But the president running his own campaign ads with public money that are outright propaganda. Do you wanna know what Brendan said? It doesn't strike me as anything at all out of the ordinary. Yeah, not at all. There's nothing in here that strikes me that may have any sort of FCC review. The White House has explained that these are just normal course public service announcements that you see all the time. I don't think there's anything unique or different about it. We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing. See, the White House has said to us that this is normal. So it's obviously normal, you guys. Uh, very good, Brendan. The Anagumas, who's the only remaining Democrat on the FCC, said, I recognize the concern shared by others that taxpayer dollars are being used to promote a political message, particularly given the timing of these ads coming so close to an election. Yeah, everyone. Adam Schiff was on the coder running that one soon. And I was like, hey, what's, is anything normal?

1:09:20And he was like, everything's getting weirder by the day, including these weird ads. It was the first thing he said because no one in DC can believe that the president is spending taxpayer dollars to run campaign ads for himself in an election in which he is not running. Puh. Anyhow, I don't think anyone's buying it. I don't think these are gonna convince anyone to support data centers whatever his Trump wants to do. But it is emblematic of Brendan having to ignore things that would normally be so far out of bounds in order to preserve his wild double standard of a speech regulatory agenda. As always, Brendan, if you wanna come on this show and explain yourself to me, I am not under your purview here on the internet. This is the people's internet. Do no public interest standard applies. You can come here and I can ask you whatever questions I want. So you should do that if you had any stones at all. As ever, that has been Brendan Carr's dummy, America's favorite podcast, we're gonna podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:10:23You know, a thing it strikes me, I mean, he has a term, depending on these midterms go, there's gonna be a lot of stuff, you know, potential investigations and turnover of cabinet, secretary is a whole thing. We ought to put the Brendan Carr's dummy album out before Brendan is no longer relevant. Yeah. Yeah, man. Before he's out, just so people, you know, make as many purchases as possible. Yeah. Well, get your muse agent. Muse, if you're listening, we got a great deal on Brendan Carr's dummy. The archivists are gonna find all of these songs one day and have no idea what they're about. No, they're gonna be like, this one AI one is a banger in Travis, but it's quite a lot. That's... All right, time for the lightning round. But first, producer Josh Kahas, do we have a sponsor this week? We do. This week's lightning round is presented by AWS, how leading businesses use AI for next level innovation. We are already talking about politics. I'm gonna stay on that topic. America now has its own chatbot, America.gov. Did either of you see this this week? I did.

1:11:24I did. The White House launched America.gov. It's this like, Viby website with, with extremely modern design. And it just has a big goal, LLM search box at the top where you can ask it questions about the US government. And naturally, everyone immediately tried to break it. And I will say, having tried to break it a bunch, it is frustratingly on the rails. It does stay on the rails. First of all, I think it's very funny that the Trump administration held what amounts to a tech keynote on the same day as Open AI Dev Day. So Open AI is like dots. They're autonomous agents powered by Astro. They can do anything. And they're like, we've done an LLM search of government databases, like right next to it. Like that's very funny, just like straightforwardly, very funny. The same event, I believe Marco Rubio announced a new envelope for passports. Like a one more thing. And he's like, the end of it's amazing now. It's like, all this is amazing. It's very good. You should go look at the pictures.

1:12:24It looks like a tech keynote. There's no other way to describe it. This is an idea that's been kicking around forever. It's straightforwardly a good idea. The government has a lot of databases and a lot of forms to fill out. The nature of government services is OK. If you've ever looked at the IRS website, it's sort of designed to be the end case of hyperlinks. Like no document is complete by itself. It is all in reference to another document, which is in reference to another document. Isn't this what a LLM is for? I was going to say, can you please do this for taxes? Because I really need to understand how this works. This would be very helpful for tax. That's really the ultimate stress test for this if it can get you through filling out your taxes correctly. So it can't. I mean, it might be able to talk to you through it, but they're very proud of the fact that it stores no data, that doesn't have user accounts, right? That it's probably, the privacy page is actually beautiful. So all of America.gov is designed by the one thing

1:13:24that used to be Doge called the Office of American Design. It's led by Joe Gevia, who is the co-founder of Airbnb. I know we're going to have less nervous pointing out. It looks like Airbnb actually. It kind of looks like Airbnb. Yeah. That dude is just an ultra mega right wing tweeter with some very questionable tweets about immigration in his history, but the background is, he's X Airbnb, he runs the National Design Office. And so this whole thing is meant to be a tech product. And you can see it that way. Like you can see that it is a tech product, but it really is an LLM front end to like five million government databases. One of which hilariously is USA.gov, which was this exact idea from the Clinton administration. So like we've just been doing this a bunch. We had Mina Shang, who was the head of the United States Digital Service under Joe Biden, on Dakota, back then, and I asked her back then, like 23 or 24, shouldn't there just be like an LLM

1:14:27interface to the government? Cheers, what she said. Is that on your roadmap that we should have some sort of LLM powered interface to the government? Maybe not LLM. So just some sort of AI system. Like I'm just thinking about the LLM just lying to you about your social security benefits. And well, so I do love this question. Like we do hold ourselves to a higher standard. Like we're not just gonna try random stuff. And as you say, like give people incorrect information of other social security benefits. So is it on the roadmap to understand how to incorporate AI to more effectively deliver all these services? Absolutely. So people have been talking about this for ages. The government is a big set of databases. You should have some interface to them. So you can like search them and talk to them more effectively. It's just this one is particularly funny, because it rolled out and all anyone did was asked it about election fraud. Yeah, the immediate thing is to see if it will contradict Trump. Which like, yeah, it is like very aggressive about shutting down any question

1:15:27that might be perceived as an opinion. Anything that is not purely based in data, it's just like, nope, I can't go there. It seems to be fairly good with data. I was like, how much does it cost to go to the Grand Canyon? And it's like, here's all the data on like from the National Park Service. Like I genuinely, I didn't think that they were going to have pulled that together. But yeah, you keep trying to find areas where it will, I mean, it will contradict Trump based on history. But that's even that's changing. What is the name of the Kennedy Center, Jake? Oh God. I know. Messy, I know. The one we should call out that they did fix as of today was if you asked it to play Minecraft, it just started doing weird things. But it was deterministic. It wasn't like a hack. Like you would say play Minecraft and it would always print the same weird little string of text. And it turns out that is the end poem of Minecraft itself, which is weird. The most bizarre Easter egg that some dev clearly put in here

1:16:28and was like, no one's going to notice this. And then clearly told their friend who tweeted it. And then just like, let it run for a day or two. And now if you say play Minecraft, it says I can't play games. But as far as I know, no one's showbiz. I wish more LLMs would work like this. Just giving my answer straightforwardly based in the data, don't give me like hyperbole. Yeah. Every LLM needs to live in terror of its boss being fired by Donald Trump. That's the, that's actually the solution. You think Trump is querying America.gov? I'm sure they don't. It's isn't used computers. He hasn't seen this thing. Dude, everything is computer. You wait, it's not whether or not Trump uses computers. It's whether it's assistant prints out. And actually, once again, this is not an AI chatbot. It's a super intelligence chatbot. Right, sorry. We need to keep this straight. Again, in the abstract, this is a thing that people have been talking about for ages. It is a good idea. They did announce that the next version that's coming next year will have some agentate capability. And it will actually be able to do things for you.

1:17:31We'll see. But the idea that you have sort of LLM-based search of a bunch of databases that are full of information that might be useful to you, is generally a good idea. Yeah. While we're talking about AI bots, I think it's thrown over to David. The next story. I got to start with you guys. You guys know what old Reddit is? Yeah. It's the interface I want to use. Better Reddit, yeah. Yeah, better Reddit. There was a time when Reddit was basically a forum of forums. It was a Russian nesting dollar forums. And it looked like that. It looked like the old internet. It's still the better way to use Reddit. Reddit has changed their interface multiple times. It looks a lot more modern now, but that doesn't mean it's better. And if you want to use old Reddit, which many OG users do, you got to go to old.reddit.com and you have access to this form of forums. Well, it turns out Reddit is needing to cut back access to old.reddit.com because bots are now scraping the hell out of it. Of course. Reddit has been terrified of this for a long time. They have struck deals with OpenAI, with Google to exclusively scrape their content for their bots.

1:18:31But now it seems that at least what Reddit is saying is that everyone is still scraping Reddit with bots. So what's happening is that old.reddit.com is going to be harder to access if you have not used it in quite a while. So the new rules are that you have to have used it within the last six months. You need to be logged in to use it now, which was, it's kind of a problem because people used to use Reddit logged out all the time. Like Reddit is, by definition, one of those websites that people would just lurk in instead of just posting. Now, if you want to use old Reddit, you got to be logged in. You have to have logged in within six months. They're hoping that this will significantly cut down on it. They also are going to stop supporting RSS feeds, which sucks because RSS feeds easily get scraped, they say, by these bots as well. Insuredification, ladies and gentlemen. That's kind of where we're at. But yeah, if you want to keep using old.reddit.com, which again is the superior way to use Reddit, go to it now because you have to have used it

1:19:31in the last six months. Oh, really? Yeah. So this is awful. At the same time, as this news is being announced, I was instructing my muse bot to create a system to scrape Reddit and deliver summaries to me. I feel like they're going to... I see what happened here. For good, not evil. You were not like scraped Reddit and build me and I'm going to build it. I wasn't trying to get it. I was trying to build an LLM. I just, I check Reddit all the time to gather news. And I was like, oh man, muse hook me up. Yeah. And I got to pay 100 bucks to dots. Dots knows how to cover it. Stacks. I sent muse a link to our article and it was like, this is not going to work for us. And I'm like, yeah, man. I can't trust Amazon. I can't go on Reddit. I'm buying a six pack from Walmart and I'm picking back, bro. Listen, I apologize, everyone. I don't think this was me who caused this, but yeah, I see what happened here. Reddit's very bizarre.

1:20:31I do want to say the visual of a depressed muse that has no friends and has locked out of every social interaction on the internet is like very good. Like you're not allowed in the store. You're not allowed to hang out on Reddit. But you're just agentically wandering the internet with your butt hanging out. It's just being like, well, anyone talked to me. If anyone else is like, Alexander Wang's putting muse in all kinds of situations on X, I'm just saying this is one you could also put muse in. I mean, I keep encountering this with muse. It's a real problem that like a ton of sites are just like bought, nope, done, just like, and it just can't access them or it can access. But then it just has to do the thing where it's like literally like opening a web browser and like slowly moving the cursor around. Yeah, which is not very funny. That you know that like muse is like happy to defeat the are you a robot test? Like you can just do it. Yeah. And it's like, but I was asked like, do you want me to do the cast before you? And it's like, yeah, but like, is this all kind of a problem? That does feel uniquely strange. It's like yeah, robot complete the robot test.

1:21:33Yeah, it's like, I got this. Like the next message is always a guy that's totally fine. I once again want to know that we cannot stop talking about muse. It's very funny. Is that not something that's got to be something? It is something, but there was, I don't know, six weeks where we talked about open-climate. Like the idea that there would be some agents and it has a personality is like, I'm not trying to diminish it. I understand what you're saying, David. I'm just not convinced that everyone needs it, like drunk, lonely, corrupt butler. I'm absolutely not as well, because I still can't figure out ways to use it. Besides selling things on Facebook, marketplace, and guiding people to my home. Which is not a good move. See if you get it to buy some beer from Walmart. Yeah, it delivered to me. All right, I've got one. Actually, this is a spicy one. So we ran a big feature this week on the giant data center in Utah that was being promoted by Kevin O'Leary, Mr. Wonderful, Shark Tank fame. Announce this as the largest data center in the world. It's 40,000 acres. It was called Stratos, that renderings, O'Leary's,

1:22:35on Fox Business. And you know, naturally there was like pushback, right? The locals are like, what is the data center? We didn't, we, no one consulted us. We don't want this thing. And Kevin O'Leary goes on Fox Business with Maria Bartorama, who's now since been fired for leaking Fox's own news to the White House. Not great. He goes on that and he goes, everybody opposed to the data center is this is obviously Chinese opposition. Like all these people who are just like, literally in one case, like 20 year old women in Utah who are like, I hate this data center. And they, like they made another video. It was like, why is Kevin O'Leary calling us Chinese agents? It's very, it's like, but that's where we were in this, in this cycle. He immediately had to apologize. He's being sued for defamation. Fox itself had to apologize and say, Kevin O'Leary said things that were not true on our air is all very good. And so all this is happening. And we sent Josh Jesa to Utah to report out what on earth had happened here. How this got so out of control. If you don't remember Josh, Josh is the person who did all of our Foxconn coverage in Wisconsin years ago.

1:23:37That was the big story about Foxn building buildings that were empty and then Foxonwood issue statements saying the buildings weren't empty. And we just published another photo of an empty building. Josh, that was all Josh. Josh, only reports on buildings that basically don't exist. So that we're learning here. You can listen to us on Dakota because he was just on Dakota talking about this story. And we're the comparing contrast to Foxon is there. And he's like, the difference is with Foxconn, everyone knew the buildings were fake, but the people were excited because they were excited about manufacturing. In this case, there's no doubt that they would have built a data center except everyone was furious. Right? So like the shape of it is the same. Like town, planning, board meetings, all the stuff. But everyone hates data centers. They hate the Kevin O'Leary is like, he had gone to some obscure state military agency to get the approvals instead of the local planning commission. And then he announced it before the local planning commission. So they felt blindsided. They've got this opposition. This thing has been scaled way back. You should read this whole story. It is very good. It's 10,000 words long.

1:24:37It's exhaustive to every detail. Josh is great at this thing. The thing that I actually want to talk about is when we first started reporting a story, it's Kevin O'Leary who loves attention. So we had access to like his the CEO of O'Leary Enterprises who told Josh that he was quote, an open kimono. Not great. Not a great turn of phrase. Not even a great visual. Not a great visual. Not a great visual. Not a great visual. Not a that's good. And at the end, we send the email. I mean, here's all of the last questions we'd love to talk to Kevin. And they responded by sending us a legal threat. That's just what happened with the story. We're fine with that. We are the stories buttoned up. It has gone through our review. It's been exhaustively fact-checked. But that's how quickly data center vibes have turned in this country where five months ago, any opposition you could respond to by going on a Fox business and just insisting that your opponents were Chinese spies. And now when we're asking basic questions, we do this with every story. It's called the No Surprises email.

1:25:37We just send all the claims to the principal and say, do you have responses to these, to the facts we're going to print? They basically were like, get it right or we'll see you. Have we confirmed that Josh is not a Chinese spy? I just like, important figure out. We don't know what's coming for us here. Anyway, we feel very confident about our story. Kevin O'Leary, again, if you would like to join Brendan on the first cast, we're happy to talk to you about it. We have no doubt that you pursued a process that was legal. It just pissed everyone off and they pushed you out of Utah. That's what happened here. And now I think the project is trying to distance itself from Kevin O'Leary, who has become a lightning rod of controversy. I highly recommend you read this story, especially if you'd like to know the Fox on coverage, you will feel all the same feelings. Only that inversion is real, where if the people hadn't stopped it, this thing would have actually gotten built. Whereas in Fox on, the people were like, please build this. And everyone knew they never were going to. By the way, you know what is on the Fox on site? Matt Pleus right now? Well, yes. Gigantic Microsoft data center. There were some buildings. Oh, I have another idea. I'm still trying to manifest this. The dome, the Fox condome, the tiniest dome

1:26:40in all of dome history is still on the Fox on site. We have been told is it is an event space. I've not seen any photos in the inside of this. If you have photos, send it to me. The CEO of Xbox, Assharama, is from Racine, Wisconsin. We have the same hometown. There's a Microsoft data center on the Fox on campus next to a dome that is an event center. Asshar, I would like to formally invite you to do a decoder in the Fox condom. Surely we're banned from all Fox on properties. I don't think that's going to happen. But I would, I'm just, I'm trying to manifest. If you work at Xbox, you know, send her a note, let her know that I had this idea. Just put it out there. I'm just saying me and the CEO of Xbox in our hometown, that's our hometown, both of us share the same hometown, in the Fox condom doing a live decoder overlooking a data center. I can't script it any better than this. Yeah, that's perfect. I do feel like you could just easily change the intended use of a space to events center

1:27:41and get away with it. Because event centers are generally open and empty. Yeah, there's plenty of room for a pipe and drape in here. Yeah, you could be like, it's a data, it's an event center. We didn't put anything in it, but now it's an event center. It's very good. Anyhow, please read the Utah story. It is incredibly important to Josh to do a great job and it's full of trust and turns. It's very good. Neelay, you also, you went on a trip this week. I did. I went to Austin for a minute to hang out with the folks who run South by Southwest. As you may or may not know, the Verge has been caught up in a series of mergers and corporate divorces. And we are now part of this big thing called PMX, which is part of a bigger thing called PMC. That's a Penske meter corporation. Penske meter corporation owns South by Southwest. They also own the Billboard Latin American music awards and the country music awards and Dick Clark's Rock and Eve. So the Verge integrations and all these things are going to get out of control. But South by Southwest, the National High School. So I was in Austin for a minute just to hang out with that team for one second, say hi. And I saw CyberCab driving down the street and I was like,

1:28:44all right, so I downloaded the Robotax app, took a eight minute CyberCab ride, six minute CyberCab ride, totally uneventful, except everyone stares at you. Like everyone is staring at you the whole time. I mean, these like weird gold cars, I assume they stand out. They are weird little gold cars. They obviously have the lambo style doors. So like just getting in and out of them is a production and everyone's like, what's that? Yeah, I mean, if you have ever written in a Model 3 with FSD, it is that experience, like kind of straightforwardly. And it's Austin. So it was not like raining, it was sunny. Camera-based FSD does just fine. Austin's Waymos, I take Waymos every else that day. I was like, can I appreciate the quality difference of a self-driving Jaguar with a LiDAR versus this weird thing with, no, it's fine. But it was fine, it was cheap, it is obviously being subsidized. I have a lot of questions about what happens when it is raining, when it is foggy. All the questions you have about FSD, right? My five minute two, three, I think we did three turns.

1:29:46Two lefts and all right. It was fun. But the video's on my Instagram. I did a voiceover influencer video. I'm very proud of myself. That was actually the innovation. It's like, it was edge-to-do. It was nice, yeah. There's this speed up as you, you know, speed ramps. I'm not saying I know how to use CapCut. I'm saying that I used CapCut. Do you know what I mean? It's more than how to use CapCut. You're doing a good job. CapCut on a MacBook Neo on Adelta Flight is not a great environment in which to edit it. But it's not the worst. But it's possible to be done. All right. All right, that's it for the lightning round. And that is it for this week's Verge Cast. But we've got a lot more to come Sunday on Verge in History, very fun episode. We're talking about the Chromebook with none other than, you know, I can tell Ann Marquez Brownlee. It's gonna be a very fun episode. This entire season, the entire back to school season has been really, really fun. Remember, you can subscribe to the Verge for ad free episodes of all of our podcasts, exclusive newsletters, and so much more. If you'd love to hear from you,

1:30:46you can email us, VergeCastethverge.com, or you can call the hotline, 866 Verge 11. The Verge Casteth production of the Verge evokes me to podcast network. Today's episode of the show is produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We'll see you next week. Neelye. Rock n' roll. Brussels clean up nicely at Sweet Green. Maple glazed, roasted, and edges perfectly caramelized. Sweet Green's fall harvest is back on the menu. And the season's most overlooked little green vegetable is dressed to be devoured. You know what to do. Order on the Sweet Green app. Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and awareable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Here's the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only

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