Phones are the ultimate AI gadget | The Vergecast - video Dailymotion

The Verge

Today on the flagship podcast of dedicated AI hardware:   The Verge’s David Pierce and Allison Johnson debate whether the emergence of standalone AI gadgets like the Humane Pin and the Rabbit R1 are better off as apps or should exist as its own hardware.   The Verge’s Alex Heath joins the show to discuss Meta’s big move into AI with its multimodal AI smart glasses and a new AI model called Llama 3.   Nilay Patel answers a question from The Vergecast Hotline about Microsoft and antitrust.

Transcript

00:00:00Welcome to the Verge cast the flagship podcast of dedicated AI hardware. I'm your friend David Pierce and I

00:00:06Have a label maker. One of the things I've learned about myself. Is that I

00:00:11procrastinate by organizing which mostly means I just like take a thing that's over here and

00:00:17Put it sort of arbitrarily over here, although it improves nothing, but it like

00:00:21Scratches my brain in a very helpful way that makes me feel like I'm accomplishing things even when I'm mostly not

00:00:27But now that I have a label maker, I'm actually gonna get stuff done. There's the spice rack over there

00:00:32I'm gonna label all the spices. So I stopped using paprika instead of cinnamon

00:00:37Accidentally, I have a bunch of tea up here. I'm gonna label all of that

00:00:40So I stopped drinking caffeinated tea at night and staying up all night

00:00:44I'm gonna label the baby bottles over here

00:00:46So I know what he's supposed to be drinking out of and what we're not supposed to be drinking out of anymore

00:00:50I'm gonna label the milk with the word milk

00:00:53Which will accomplish nothing but will make me laugh every time I pull the milk out of the fridge

00:00:57I'm just gonna label everything and then my wife is gonna come home from work and have a lot of feelings about what happens

00:01:03So we'll see. Anyway, we are not here to talk about label makers

00:01:06We are here to talk tech and we have a lot to do on the show today

00:01:10We're gonna talk to Alison Johnson about AI gadgets. She's been testing some I've been testing some and she has a theory

00:01:17That maybe none of them need to exist and that maybe a phone is the answer. I have some thoughts

00:01:21we're gonna talk about that and then we're gonna talk about meta and AI because meta has been on a

00:01:26Huge run of new AI products and there's a big story in there somewhere

00:01:31So Alex Heath is gonna come on and help us figure it out

00:01:33Then we're gonna do the hotline lots to talk about this week. All that is coming up in just a second

00:01:38But first I'm not kidding. I have a fresh roll of label tape. The battery is charged. I have work to do

00:01:45This is the Verge cast. We'll be right back

00:01:47Welcome back. All right, I believe I have labeled everything in my house that there is to be labeled and then some

00:01:53We'll see how my wife responds when she gets home. Let's get into it for the last few weeks

00:01:58I've been immersing myself in AI gadgets the humane AI pin the rabbit r1 the meta smart glasses this voice recorder

00:02:05I have called plod a bunch of apps

00:02:08Everything I can get my hands on that is like a way to use AI and

00:02:12The number one question in front of all of these devices in particular, I think is the same thing

00:02:17Why isn't this just an app on your phone?

00:02:19Actually, that might be the number two question

00:02:22Number one is just is this thing any good and a lot of them aren't but let's focus on the phone thing for right now

00:02:27The Verge's Alison Johnson wrote a piece last week arguing essentially that a smartphone is the perfect AI gadget that we don't need

00:02:34Dedicated devices. We have the dedicated devices and she ran an experiment to prove it

00:02:39So, of course, I had to ask her to come on and tell us how it went

00:02:42Alison welcome back. Thank you. We usually talk about phones when you come on the show and this time

00:02:48We're gonna talk about phones, but maybe in the weirdest way that we've ever talked about phones, which I'm very excited. I'm here for it

00:02:55So let's just start at the beginning here. Tell me about this wearable phone experiment that you devised for yourself

00:03:01Oh my gosh, I have never been so glad that I just work in my own house

00:03:05I was just sort of ranting about how you know, the humane pin reviews came out and I was like this thing is just an Android phone

00:03:13Like a mid-range Android phone. I was like, I have so many mid-range Android phones

00:03:17so I just kind of set out to like recreate the

00:03:21Capabilities with what I had and it was surprisingly hard. I tried a flip phone

00:03:26I had the Motorola Razr Plus and I had it like kind of clamped in my hand

00:03:31I had the Motorola Razr Plus and I had it like

00:03:34Kind of clamped over the collar of my shirt, you know

00:03:37Like you do and I got like so far with that like I could kind of talk to google assistant

00:03:43So wait, so you you dangle it over with like what the front screen facing out?

00:03:47Yeah, and you just and then you just sort of like hey g it from yeah there and I figured because then you have cameras

00:03:55Facing forward you could do google lens

00:03:57That was the the thought it's not very easy to do any of that

00:04:02Kind of out of the box like the flip phones won't let you download the Gemini assistant, which is strange

00:04:08So you kind of that's weird like sideload it if you try and and trigger the google assistant

00:04:14With the phone closed and the cover just using a cover screen. It tells you to open up the phone

00:04:19So it kind of like it was already not off to a great start

00:04:23So did you ever find an actual?

00:04:26Solution with the phone itself. We're gonna get to headphones in a minute

00:04:30Yeah foreshadowing, but did you ever find a version of like a wearable phone that actually kind of worked?

00:04:36I did not really I had I just ran chat gpt in the kind of like

00:04:42Talking mode with the conversation mode

00:04:45And I had that on my shirt and just but it's just always listening and like waiting for you to say something

00:04:50so you can't just like go about your day and

00:04:52We had a very pleasant conversation about like the weather or whatever but yeah

00:04:57Nothing really worked the way I thought it would

00:05:00Well, this is why I wanted to talk about this because I think you and I have been talking about this for months now

00:05:05and the question everybody brings up about every single ai gadget is like why isn't this just an app on my phone and

00:05:13My thoughts on the subject and why it shouldn't just be an app on your phone are actually becoming increasingly

00:05:18Strong and intense and I feel like i'm more right than I was before but I am curious like at a at a broad level

00:05:25Do you buy that argument?

00:05:26Like are you also one of the people who is just like this is all ridiculous

00:05:30This should just be an app on my phone

00:05:31I think i'm i'm like 20 percent rooting for like a gadget that does these things in 80 percent

00:05:38Just it just feels like realism

00:05:41like

00:05:42Phones have already solved so many of these problems like these little gadgets get hot

00:05:48they have to connect to

00:05:50the internet they

00:05:52need cameras like

00:05:54Check mark on all of those for phones like they did it

00:05:58Battery life, you know regular software updates. I got it and i'm just like i'm having flashbacks of covering

00:06:06compact digital cameras for years where

00:06:09It was like, you know

00:06:11Oh, these are so much better than your phone and which is like not even true anymore

00:06:16But it was like no the phone is good enough for most people and people do not want to carry around two things

00:06:23That is that is what we learned from that experiment is if you can carry one thing instead of two things

00:06:29You will carry one thing. I do agree with that and that that is a I think maybe the most

00:06:34Convincing argument against the ai gadget is just it's it's the good enough hypothesis, right?

00:06:40That it's like I don't need it to be as good

00:06:42I just don't want to carry and charge and worry about two things

00:06:45But I think my most strident opinion on this subject is that I think we all

00:06:51Have forgotten how annoying it is to use your phone

00:06:54like we've just been doing it for so long that I think

00:06:58It's why I believe in flip phones for the same reason. It's like our phones are these big

00:07:02Chunky things that you balance on top of your pinky to the point where most of us have like divots in our fingers

00:07:08Now from trying to hold these things you have to sort of like worm your thumb around this gigantic screen in order to touch anything

00:07:15Like from a pure in a vacuum user experience. It's not good

00:07:20And if your hands are full you can't do anything and I spend like an alarming amount of my time

00:07:26With like dog and stroller in one arm and phone in the other like it's just bad

00:07:31And I this idea that okay every time I want to do anything

00:07:34The right user experience is for me to dig into my purse pull out my phone unlock it swipe swipe

00:07:41Open an app tap on the app log in do a thing like that's bad

00:07:45And the idea that you can shortcut all of this by just yelling a thing

00:07:49Is good I believe in that and this is why I like to experiment so much because it's like, okay

00:07:53Can I make my phone that thing?

00:07:56Which I think is where we get to earbuds

00:07:58Yeah, the longer we do this the more i'm coming to the answer of like maybe headphones are the problem solver in all of this

00:08:04yeah, and this is something that our colleague v song has written about is like

00:08:10with wearable tech

00:08:11it's so important that it's just like

00:08:15something you want to put on your body and it's comfortable and it's kind of like socially accepted and

00:08:21I just come back to earbuds like we're just people just walk around with them

00:08:25I feel like such an old person being like these kids they just walk around with their earbuds all the time

00:08:31But like you have a good transparency mode

00:08:34You know and those things could get smarter about the sounds they let in

00:08:38and the sounds they keep out and then you have this connection to your phone that you can just like

00:08:43summon it when you want it and keep it in your pocket and not have to do the whole dance of like

00:08:49Tapping on things because I think we've come

00:08:51We're sort of blind to that like we are just so conditioned to like

00:08:55This is how you get things done on a phone. You take it out. You do all this you get distracted

00:08:59And yeah, once you start kind of like conceptualizing

00:09:03Not having to do that

00:09:04It's like oh, yeah, I I buy into that vision and I but I think

00:09:09We're just gonna be able to do it without touching our phone, but it's still gonna be phone

00:09:14Yes, well and that turned out to be sort of the second half of your experience

00:09:18With with this phone ai gadget thing, right? You you basically went like full pixel

00:09:24Yeah, I did like I downloaded the gemini assistant and switched into it and there's still like weird workarounds

00:09:30You have to do because you can have gemini assistant running on the phone

00:09:34The earbuds are not going to trigger gemini because they're they don't talk yet

00:09:40This is the most google thing you've ever said. Yeah, seriously

00:09:44Well, like the pixel watch you you can't have gemini on it yet

00:09:47So you're like talking to one assistant here

00:09:49You're talking to a different sister on the phone the google home in my kitchen is constantly being like what?

00:09:55so I had to like

00:09:56Unplug that and I kept gemini like open and running on the phone, which is not an ideal user experience

00:10:03but had the earbuds in and my like light bulb moment was I took a picture of this recipe I was making and I was

00:10:10Like look at this and remember it

00:10:13And I just walked around my kitchen doing things and I would ask it questions like how long do I put the fish in?

00:10:18how do I chop the vegetables just kind of

00:10:21Out of order and like as I was doing things and it it got it right all the time and it was like

00:10:27Oh, this is super helpful. I would be running back to this recipe with like

00:10:32Stuff on my fingers trying to figure it out. It's like man those earbuds

00:10:37That is maybe the single coolest use of ai i've ever heard by the way to take a picture of a recipe and then

00:10:44Just pepper the assistant with questions about that recipe as you go. That's very cool

00:10:49I was super into it and it's that kind of thing of like I run out of things to talk about with chat jbt

00:10:54i'm, like there's only so many like

00:10:56business proposals you can brainstorm but i'm like

00:11:00If you give it a little data set of like i'm doing this thing help me out

00:11:05Like it makes so much more sense to me that way

00:11:08Yeah, are you a voice assistant person in your day-to-day not at all?

00:11:12I set timers and I asked the weather and like trying to get myself i'm starting to like

00:11:18Realize I can use it a little more especially if I am using a phone with gemini on it

00:11:24like I asked but you just man you got to keep an eye on it because it'll make up a word or like

00:11:30I was asking if the bridge they were working on in my neighborhood had reopened

00:11:35And and it like got the days backwards. It was like yes, it's open, but it's opening tomorrow. So

00:11:43You just have to keep an eye on it, but it's it's like converting me a little bit to more of a voice assistant person

00:11:49I think okay. Yeah, I think

00:11:51One of the big questions I have about this space right now is did voice assistants work because they were a bad idea

00:11:58Or rather did voice assistants not work because they were a bad idea or did they not work because they weren't very good

00:12:04And I think they definitely aren't very good, right?

00:12:06And I think the siri experience

00:12:09Sort of proves that for a lot of people and I think a lot of people's first experience with these things was siri

00:12:13And you ask it to do something and it just fails or it's like here's what I found on the web and you're like

00:12:16Well, this is useless and then you never really try again. And so

00:12:20the first

00:12:21Attempt we all had to build that habit

00:12:23It failed spectacularly and there are a lot of like kids

00:12:28Who grew up asking alexa silly questions and getting silly responses and that was the thing that worked

00:12:32So I think the attach rate there has actually been better as a result, but then I come around to

00:12:37Okay, we all bet on this a decade ago. Like the tech industry was like this is the thing

00:12:43Conversational interfaces they're going to change everything and they super didn't uh, and now to some extent we're back in that exact same thing

00:12:51And the promise is no it was the right idea with the wrong underlying technology and

00:12:57At least my experience so far has been I still see the theory of it

00:13:02But even as I use all these things i'm not i'm using it more

00:13:06I agree with you. I've definitely found more reasons

00:13:09to do this stuff particularly with like I really like to

00:13:12Use an ai voice notes app to like say my to-do list out loud and they're actually getting pretty good at

00:13:17Turning that into just a structured list of stuff I have to do today

00:13:20I feel like a doctor who's like saying all of my charts into my voice recorder and then like something magical happens. It's great

00:13:27But I still don't feel like I have hit the thing

00:13:29Where it just sort of that becomes the main way I use my phone and what people say when I say that to them is

00:13:36Oh, it's just an interface question

00:13:37It's because once you have your phone out

00:13:38Why not just use your phone the way that you're used to which is why they're all excited about these new gadgets

00:13:42And so I just I don't know I spin in circles about like what is the actual

00:13:46Sort of roadblock here to this actually becoming real because it seems like there are a lot of them. Yeah

00:13:52there's just sort of like a pain versus reward, you know ratio of like

00:13:58I feel like it's starting to even out a little bit with the voice assistants

00:14:02but you still get burned where you're like

00:14:04and there's nothing worse than like being at the grocery store and being like i'm gonna use the voice assistant and then

00:14:09It's it just fails and you have to like either keep talking to it or like take your phone out

00:14:15I think once you had that experience, you're like i'll just use my phone for this. Yeah, but yeah, I think I think it's something we can

00:14:22Adjust to and it really has to like that threshold of public embarrassment

00:14:28Or just like frustration has to change

00:14:32And there's like signals that that will happen. I think but yeah, it's it's not proven. I wouldn't say. Yeah, one of my

00:14:40Developing theories is that headphones are going to be where a lot of this goes for that reason

00:14:46It's like it's a thing you can wear one of in the grocery store and no one will look twice at you

00:14:51Like we have solved the public weirdness problem of headphones. Sony did that for us 45 years ago. Yeah. Uh, thank you sony

00:15:00but what I wonder now is like should you have

00:15:04The ai system that is just purely baked into your headphones

00:15:06Like one of one of the conspiracy theories that I have no evidence for but believe to my soul

00:15:11Is that the next airpods maxes are going to be local ai devices because they're big

00:15:16And they're heavy and they have a big battery and they can do stuff

00:15:19but like if you try to run some of that stuff on airpods or

00:15:23The pixel buds or it's just the battery's going to die in one minute and there's just there's literally no place to put

00:15:29The ai stuff. Yeah, but maybe it's maybe that's okay

00:15:33Maybe bluetooth headphones and your phone in your pocket or purse is enough interface and it does seem like in your experiment

00:15:38That's kind of where you landed

00:15:40Yeah, that that kind of proved out and that didn't solve the camera thing, which is also like an intriguing

00:15:47related, you know like feature which the humane pin has the camera and you were both like

00:15:54Want to look at something and ask a question about it?

00:15:57Or if you want a hands-free way to take pictures, which both are kind of intriguing to me

00:16:01So, I mean everybody keeps bringing up the meta ray bands and yeah

00:16:06That kind of solves a couple of those problems and doesn't look stupid true. Do you wear glasses normally?

00:16:12I wear contacts. So i'm i'm so close to buying these things. I don't know really. Yeah

00:16:18I would be so good for just like taking pictures kid running around and I don't know but another gadget

00:16:25Do I want another gadget?

00:16:28I I hear you i've been i've been debating this with some of the folks on our team for a while because I think

00:16:32they're definitely a huge leap better than like

00:16:36Having a headset on your face to have the the meta smart glasses and meta

00:16:41Is leaning into the fact that we've also solved having glasses on your face is not weird

00:16:45And I don't know what your experience has been but when I wear the meta glasses, no one ever looks at me sideways

00:16:49Yeah, like I got more public notice more sort of weird double takes wearing the humane pin

00:16:56Than I ever have wearing the meta glasses by a mile. Yeah, so that's that's a huge victory, but I also don't wear glasses

00:17:02Normally, and I don't want to start wearing glasses

00:17:05Like I wear sunglasses when i'm outside and I have mostly replaced my sunglasses with the meta glasses, which I like a lot

00:17:11But in terms of a sort of always on assistant, like i'm not going to get to work and keep wearing glasses

00:17:17I don't need just to use my assistant. It's a different vibe. Yeah, you have to be ready for that shift

00:17:23Yeah, like I are if we can normalize sunglasses indoors just in order to make ai happen i'm here for it this this works

00:17:30We'll work on that

00:17:31But yeah

00:17:31I do think I have definitely come around to the idea in testing

00:17:35the humane pin and now the rabbit and some of the other stuff that's out there now that

00:17:38Actually what we need to figure out is how to put ai into other socially acceptable things that already exist

00:17:44Before we try and invent some wholly new

00:17:47Thing yeah, like the humane pin kind of tries to hide it but it's sort of like look at this

00:17:53This is kind of a cool gadget. I appreciate that. The rabbit is just like this is a thing. It is bright orange

00:18:00It like practically glows in the dark

00:18:02I don't know if you have this experience where I walk into a dark room and i'm like there's the rabbit

00:18:09It really does it it sort of screams at you from wherever it is

00:18:13What do you think about the rabbit speaking of experiments you've been doing you've been you've been testing

00:18:17Rabbits ai stuff with some of the other stuff that's out there. How's that gone? It is boy

00:18:24That's a tough that sounds right it's a tough one

00:18:27The the battery life is just god awful

00:18:30Which you know as it turns out is important because I don't if I just have it in my bag and I go somewhere

00:18:36i'm, like i'm gonna leave it off because

00:18:39The minute I turn it on it's gonna be like draining the battery

00:18:43So like a if there's no battery it doesn't help you do anything. It's just a cool orange thing

00:18:48I've seen a couple of moments when i'm like, okay

00:18:51This is maybe doing a little more than a gemini

00:18:54I took a picture of my plant on my desk and it it did the typical thing of like this is a pothos plant blah blah

00:19:01and it it kind of like went into the care instructions and it was like

00:19:05Your plant looks happy in its current pot. I'm like, you know, great job. I I don't get that assessment from

00:19:11Gemini it just sort of spits out a bunch of stuff at you like don't over water it don't under water it

00:19:16So, I don't know there's there's like something that

00:19:20Is a little more like could tune itself to like what you're actually doing or looking at that feels like

00:19:26Not just googling something

00:19:28But I don't want to give this thing too much credit

00:19:32It is not done that very often and it it kind of feels that basic stuff. Yeah, it's bad like I think

00:19:39We're gonna have we're gonna have more to say about it both on the site and on this podcast

00:19:43But the the the rabbit r1 is not good is is a pretty easy takeaway

00:19:46But i'm curious you've been testing it against chat gpt in particular pretty strenuously, right?

00:19:52Are they my assumption would be that most of these things should come out relatively?

00:19:57The same because it's all kind of pulling from the same back-end infrastructure. Have you noticed anything?

00:20:02Interesting poking at all this stuff. Well, I think that

00:20:05Something you mentioned I think is that it's running perplexity

00:20:09um, so you get a little more like real-time info than

00:20:13A chat gpt there are the free chat gpt I use that was trained whenever I go

00:20:19So I can ask it like is that bridge open that was closed over the weekend and I get a real response

00:20:26so

00:20:27that's interesting, but it's

00:20:29It's such a strange little

00:20:32Strange little creature. It's like very adorable. I think there's an adorable factor

00:20:39It perks up its little ears when it's listening to you

00:20:42but tbd on that does that do anything for you actually because I think

00:20:46I have i've definitely had the same experience that I like that

00:20:48the little rabbit on the screen sort of bounces waiting for you to talk and then

00:20:52You ask it a question and it perks up its ears and stops bouncing and when you're playing music

00:20:56It wears headphones and there's a lot of sort of charming little things about it. I think

00:21:01and

00:21:02I can't decide if that's what I want or is totally

00:21:05the opposite of what I want from a device like this because you you use

00:21:08Gemini or chat gpt or siri or whatever and it's all very matter of fact, right?

00:21:14Like they are they are tools to do a job and actually

00:21:18Every time we've seen these things exhibit personality. It's been in really bad ugly problematic ways mostly

00:21:23And so they've all learned to just sort of shut all that down

00:21:26And just be there to execute whatever they are required to execute and then move on

00:21:30And part of me is sort of endeared to rabbit for trying something else and part of me is also like well

00:21:35Maybe if it worked, but was less cute. I would like it better and maybe that's what actually matters here

00:21:40Yeah, like there's a cute little animation of the rabbit in a hamster wheel or something when you when you need to charge it

00:21:48I'm, like this is adorable, but i'm annoyed that I need to charge this thing again

00:21:54Like cute only gets you so far, I think yeah

00:21:57Do you think there's gonna be ways to put?

00:22:00more of this stuff onto phones in interesting ways like is is the next

00:22:03round of flip phones and foldable phones and smartphones gonna have some of the stuff we're seeing in these gadgets or

00:22:08Are we just gonna keep getting phones because like I just keep thinking about the razor as you're talking about it

00:22:13It's like what if the external screen of the razor

00:22:15Could run an assistant and could have that outer facing camera like it kind of has all the hardware it needs to do that

00:22:23Are we gonna get that do you think I I would like it

00:22:26I mean it would be an ideal world where you could kind of choose from your

00:22:30Ai assistant and you don't just have to use the one that your operating system baked in fair

00:22:36but yeah, then you get into like the

00:22:38Tech company is gonna let the app makers in

00:22:42you know like get into the system the way it would have to where you don't run into a wall like chat gpt can't

00:22:50Change settings on my phone or like put something on my calendar, you know

00:22:54So I feel like there is a pretty like firm wall on that right now and and that would be interesting

00:23:00I think that's kind of like rabbits, you know ethos is like

00:23:04how do we get around that and it the answer is a weird system where you log into stuff and

00:23:11On I don't know a virtual computer. Yeah, the answer is largely you can't right now

00:23:15It turns out that that seems to be not working also, so

00:23:20But yeah, it's it's an interesting question and my sense would be that's only happening if regulators make it happen, right?

00:23:26it see it seems to some extent like

00:23:29More powerful than setting your default browser, which you can do even more powerful than setting your default search engine

00:23:36which has only

00:23:37Become a thing because of regulatory pressure

00:23:40And essentially you could kind of argue

00:23:42It's like allowing you to install another operating system on top of your operating system

00:23:46Like if you were allowed to let chat gpt run your phone

00:23:49That's a pretty big thing for any of these companies to be able to do

00:23:52I kind of agree that that's how it should shake out

00:23:54If this tech is going to get better in the way that everybody says it's going to get better

00:23:57It'll be cool to have options and not just be forced to

00:24:00use

00:24:01Better siri or better gemini or better chat gpt or whatever. I don't know that I would bet on that ever being a possibility

00:24:09Yeah, that does seem like a big question mark and then you get back to just like

00:24:14Well, what if you could just talk to your operating system while you're walking around the kitchen?

00:24:21It's like not the

00:24:22Ideal future that I want. I think I want a future where there's weird gadgets or you can

00:24:28download a

00:24:30A virtual assistant that can actually do things for you

00:24:34Yeah, I think that's why i'm i'm on like team phones because it's the realist in me is like oh

00:24:40They're not gonna let this stuff happen

00:24:42I think that's probably right

00:24:43But I do also remember somebody I forget who it was somebody at one of the phone makers years ago

00:24:47Was like we're gonna get to a point where the phone in your pocket is basically just a cellular modem

00:24:52and

00:24:53all the accessories around

00:24:55Are going to be connected to that in some way your wearable is going to use that to connect to the internet your headphones

00:25:00You can use that connect to the internet your laptop is going to use that to connect to the internet

00:25:04But it is it's going to be less the device you use for everything and more the device that just lets you use everything everywhere

00:25:11yeah, and I think that's a really interesting version of the future and it's kind of what you discovered with this is like

00:25:16I can just use my phone as a go-between to all these services that exist and with headphones that I already own

00:25:22I actually don't need to

00:25:24Invent a completely new pipeline for that stuff. I just need a new way to kind of get at that pipeline

00:25:29Yeah, and i've become just an addict for the smart watch like

00:25:34I over the past couple years like I never used one before and now I cannot live without one

00:25:39it's just like

00:25:41it's the right kind of light interface for when I need to do stuff like i'm out on a walk and I need to

00:25:46pause music or

00:25:48Just check a quick notification or a text and it's like you run into the wall very quickly of like you can't

00:25:55Really respond to a text very well or you can thumbs up emoji something, right?

00:26:00but boy has that been uh, like that is the point where i'm like I am

00:26:05so willing to charge this extra thing and it has its own special charger that I have to

00:26:10Bring along when I travel and like it crosses that threshold of like yes

00:26:16I will do all of that because I find it so useful

00:26:19yeah, I I think smart watches probably land in the the earbuds category of

00:26:25That kind of light input system that really works

00:26:27Like when I wrote when I wrote the humane pin review the overwhelming response was what you're describing is just a better apple watch

00:26:34and I think other than the camera stuff, which is left to be solved, but right now is only kind of

00:26:40Somewhat useful anyway

00:26:43That is true. Like my big regret right now is that I didn't buy a cell connected apple watch, right?

00:26:49And I wish I wish that I had because then I could do all that sort of lightweight stuff. You're talking about

00:26:54Without needing my phone in my pocket. Yeah

00:26:56Just leave the house. Can you imagine?

00:26:59I mean first of all, no, no, but also it sounds wonderful

00:27:04the idea of

00:27:05Your phone as a thing that lives in your pocket that it lets everything else connect to the internet

00:27:09Strikes me as much more of the sort of ai gadget future than like these all encompassing new ideas about gadgets

00:27:16Yeah, I know

00:27:18it's kind of depressing but

00:27:20It's also it is a little bit

00:27:22Yeah, and it means like all these other companies humane rabbit

00:27:25everybody else is like desperately trying to get around your phone just like you said and it's like oh this maybe

00:27:30keeps the world the way that it is if that's how we do it more than I would like but

00:27:35It also just might be inevitable. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting moment at least

00:27:40Boy, is it not dull?

00:27:42right now

00:27:44I know and i'm still thinking about the the camera comparison and cameras never came back

00:27:48No, they just did like mid-range we found a lot of interesting stuff to do at like the high end and I think about like

00:27:54The fuji series that people really love like I feel like if you want like a good camera

00:28:00Your options have never been better. But if you want a pretty good camera, they don't exist because you have a smartphone

00:28:05Yeah, you already have it. Yeah, and I wonder maybe that's where we're going to go with ai stuff

00:28:09And we're a ways away from the ai ai gadgets being any good

00:28:13So maybe we're we're going to be in a real sort of valley with that stuff for a little while

00:28:17It feels like yeah, we're gonna find out but luckily phones are getting better. So i'll yeah. Yeah phones are sticking around I think

00:28:24And you've given me yet another reason to buy a flip phone

00:28:27Which is all I really needed from you with more reasons. I took that motorola out of the closet

00:28:32I was like, this is so nice

00:28:35Oh just shutting it just shutting it feels good

00:28:38i'm gonna start buying t-shirts with the pocket on the on the breast and i'm gonna

00:28:42Fold it out and just stick it right there and chat with it all day. It's gonna be amazing

00:28:46Yeah, it looks super cool. Yeah, I I believe that I bet you made a lot of friends and everybody

00:28:51Thought you were super normal and cool all the time

00:28:53Yeah, I was taking pictures of it for the article and my husband walked into the kitchen and just slowly backed away

00:29:00It's like I don't understand what's happening here and i'm not gonna question it

00:29:04That's that's the correct way to react to ai of all sorts. Yeah, probably just back away

00:29:10All right, allison. Thank you as always. Thank you

00:29:13We gotta take a break and then we're gonna talk meta we'll be right back

00:29:21We're back while we're on the subject of ai there's one company that we don't talk about much as an ai powerhouse

00:29:28And we probably should that company is meta and it's been on a tear with new ai products recently

00:29:34It added multimodal ai to the smart glasses that it makes with ray-ban

00:29:37It launched a new model called llama 3 that it says can keep up with gemini and chat gpt and the rest

00:29:42It added meta ai to like every one of its apps if you use any meta product and statistically if you are a person on earth

00:29:50You do you basically can't avoid meta's ai anymore

00:29:54There's a big company-wide move happening here and it feels like meta which was all in on the metaverse not that long ago

00:30:02Might be all in on something else now

00:30:04Alex heath on our team knows this situation better than anybody and so he's here to help make sense of all of it for us

00:30:11Alex heath welcome back. It's good to be back on the people's podcast david. Yes, we who cares what the judges think?

00:30:17Alex, I don't I don't care about them. That's a webby reference

00:30:20so there's a lot of stuff going on at meta and basically

00:30:23You've been reporting out a bunch of like puzzle pieces over the last few weeks of what's going on there

00:30:28And I want to see if we can like make sense of them all together

00:30:32But let's start with last week with the big horizon os announcement

00:30:36Explain to me what meta is up to with horizon os and trying to like open up the quest universe to other people

00:30:44Yeah, so meta's been doing headsets since before it was meta for a very long time 10 years

00:30:48actually when they bought the oculus startup that then became quest later and

00:30:55What they did recently which I think actually makes a lot of sense in the bigger picture of meta

00:30:59Which I know we'll get into is that they decided that the os that they built for the quest which they've now called horizon

00:31:06And we are approaching google level naming confusion here. It's truly

00:31:11So ask me this to explain if it's confusing at any point

00:31:16but they are taking the os that they've built over time for the quest and starting to license it out to

00:31:23oems so basically replicating the android playbook that google used to become the

00:31:29Number one player by user base and mobile and they think a similar thing could happen with headsets

00:31:34Um, it's very early. So all they've announced is that lenovo is going to work on a custom headset using their horizon os

00:31:42And asus is also doing something and then there's going to be less custom

00:31:46But I think more just special edition with some, you know, uh bundled controllers, uh xbox themed quest

00:31:53And I think what they've decided is that they want to be the general purpose

00:31:57Headset maker so making kind of the state-of-the-art thing that could be used for a lot of different tasks on your face

00:32:04And they want a wide network of oems to basically invent all of these more niche

00:32:09Narrow headset use cases whether that's something for work something for gaming something for who knows construction

00:32:16Whatever the idea is just let a million flowers bloom here. That's really interesting

00:32:21So yeah, my next question is going to be what do you think this means for meta's hardware plans?

00:32:26but that's a really interesting way to think about it that actually this is

00:32:28Meta saying we want to build this sort of all-purpose headset

00:32:33But then let lots of people build lots of other kinds of headsets

00:32:36Which I think actually makes sense like we we certainly have not arrived at the perfect hardware for a headset

00:32:42So you might as well let lots of people try lots of things. No, and the quest is still pretty small

00:32:47I mean, it's approaching console level yearly volume in terms of sales. I think they've sold a little over 20 million

00:32:54Quests to date now how many people actually use those quests on a regular basis is a whole nother story, right?

00:32:59They were giving them away basically for a little while

00:33:01But yeah

00:33:02I think even with this market being so young

00:33:05They see the potential for others to come in and help them grow it and I think crucially for meta here with the os

00:33:11Is that it comes with horizon the social network?

00:33:15So yes horizon os also has what has been called horizon the 3d

00:33:20Kind of sims meets roblox social network that we have relentlessly made fun of uh here on the verge

00:33:27I was gonna say which sucks to be fair. They have squashed a lot of the bugs

00:33:32And the avatars look better, but yeah, it's still pretty rough

00:33:36But that comes bundled with this os it kind of reminds me of when google was licensing android

00:33:42I mean, that's that's still how they do it that really to get the best experience

00:33:47You've got to have google services baked into android and this has actually gotten them into some

00:33:51Anti-competitive, you know regulation trouble over the years with how they bundled things but meta's kind of doing the same thing here

00:33:57They're bundling. What is their actual way that they see monetizing all this metaverse stuff over time?

00:34:02Which is their social network, which will be monetized with ads, of course in commerce assuming that enough people

00:34:09Eventually start using it interesting. So I had been trying to think

00:34:14What is in this for meta because on the one hand I think meta's assumption would be that the more people use

00:34:21Any kind of immersive headset stuff the better, right?

00:34:24Like we're still very much in a sort of rising tideless all boats world

00:34:28Then if you're meta you're like, okay

00:34:29Do we want to be the ones who run the store and we just take a commission on everything?

00:34:34Everybody buys on every headset and that's something do we want to be the ones who like charge?

00:34:38Do we want to charge a licensing fee and go like the windows way and make all of our money that way?

00:34:42But you think it's actually the big galaxy brain play here is actually a social networking play

00:34:48I just think that's how they're going to make money off of it

00:34:50they've decided that they won't be making money on a hardware margin like apple and

00:34:57You know, they're leaning into what they're inherently good at which is like scaled ad based attention services

00:35:03And I think they think that they can translate that to headsets over time

00:35:07And so that's why horizon the social network is in horizon the os

00:35:11I'm sure they're going to get paid also just for someone to license the os, but I don't think they see that as a key

00:35:17money maker

00:35:18and I know i've been mentioning android and google already a lot but I would say that if you were to talk to

00:35:23To mark zuckerberg like I have he would really rather be me making a comparison to microsoft because oh interesting microsoft when they

00:35:30You know began licensing windows oems really wanted it

00:35:33It was actually the leading desktop pc software platform because microsoft had invented

00:35:38The most useful productivity software at the time, right?

00:35:41Whereas android was very clearly a reaction to the iphone

00:35:44It wasn't so much something that oems were seeking out because of how good it was. It was more of a defensive play

00:35:51And to meta's credit they invested in this category before anyone else at the level that they have it hasn't gotten them a lot yet

00:35:58But I think with this opening up play that they're doing

00:36:01It positions them better long term, especially with apple getting into the picture with the vision pro

00:36:07I mean it is a funny time because there was just this report that

00:36:10Apple is scaling back its vision pro plans because it hasn't been selling the way that it hoped it kind of feels like

00:36:17Everything you just described makes quite a bit of sense to me, right?

00:36:20Actually for like both what meta is good at and also where this space is headed

00:36:25Building an operating system makes a lot of sense and meta has done this really well

00:36:28But I feel like there's it all still assumes that eventually there will be a real market for headsets

00:36:34And I don't know that i'm less confident in that thesis than I would have been a couple years ago

00:36:38But I certainly don't feel like i'm more confident in that thesis

00:36:40But you've been talking to mark

00:36:42Where do you feel like his head is with how this market is going in general right now?

00:36:47I think they still see these headsets that fully immerse yourself in virtual environments as akin to like the future pc market

00:36:56in terms of

00:36:57Volume and scale so you're not talking hundreds of millions of devices a year. You're probably just looking at you know

00:37:03Low to mid tens of millions and this is over a period of the next several years

00:37:08I think the industry is in single digit millions right now the ar side

00:37:12So where the meta ray-ban glasses are now but eventually where they want to get to with displays in them

00:37:18I think they see that by the end of this decade early 2030 as something that could be approaching mobile

00:37:24In terms of its just widespread usage and adoption

00:37:28So there's kind of two parts of the same play and a lot of the headset technology

00:37:33Eventually makes its way into the ar technology. It goes back and forth and you know, we saw that with the quest 3, right?

00:37:39It has the mixed reality component that you're also seeing in a lot of ar

00:37:44devices

00:37:44yeah, and I guess that also makes the social emphasis make sense because if you're

00:37:50Trying to build sort of from both directions

00:37:53One thing that will will flow kind of across that whole spectrum all the way up from smart glasses to like really high-end headsets

00:37:58Is just people want to talk to each other and hang out

00:38:01And so if meta can build that stuff for that whole spectrum

00:38:04It can sort of win no matter how long it takes us to get to the final thing

00:38:08Yeah, I mean they see this hardware naturally as like an inherently social medium

00:38:13Uh, I think that's a bit of a dichotomy when you think about strapping something to your face

00:38:17There's something inherently anti-social and putting something on your face between you and other people

00:38:22But it's a pretty different approach to what we've seen at least apple do to date with the vision pro, right?

00:38:28They're really treating it as more of a general purpose computing platform

00:38:32They're not leaning into social the only social thing they have the facetime personas are pretty creepy based on my experience

00:38:39so I think meta recognizes where it can play to its strengths and that's in building social experiences at scale and

00:38:47Being this kind of quasi open player. That is the microsoft to apple's apple

00:38:53Yeah, let's talk about the open player thing because there was also

00:38:57You know this this push to llama 3 the new large language model and their meta's trying to be open about how it approaches

00:39:03A lot of the big language model stuff. It's very strange to me that the company that built facebook

00:39:09which you had to be logged into in order to see anything and was so

00:39:13famously like its own walled garden and made a ton of money by being that walled garden that people came into and spent all

00:39:18their time into has now made this grand pivot into being like a

00:39:23Good citizen of the internet and an open player working with everybody and they're talking about this with

00:39:28Federating threads they're talking about this with the ai stuff. They're talking about it with the horizon stuff

00:39:32Like what happened here?

00:39:34Is it like mark zuckerberg got like really into fighting and was just like I love the world now

00:39:37Like what what happened here? I don't know if fighting would get you into being like embracing open source

00:39:42That's an interesting theory

00:39:44Um, he just has somewhere else to put all of his rage. So now he's happy at work

00:39:48I don't know. I would challenge a little bit of your your history retelling there. I mean you remember the farmville era

00:39:54Um, sure, they actually made a huge bet very early to become a developer platform

00:39:59So yeah, they've been a walled garden in the sense that they've pretty tightly controlled the the walls around their apps

00:40:05So it's not like you know

00:40:06The code to instagram is open source and it never will be

00:40:09But I would say they have historically actually even on the hardware side

00:40:13Uh thinking about very early, you know, oculus rifts were done with companies like xiaomi

00:40:19samsung

00:40:20um lenovo

00:40:22So they have a history of this. I really think that meta is becoming a kind of new microsoft

00:40:30and it makes sense because zuckerberg has seen bill gates as a

00:40:34As a kind of a business idol and mentor personally for a very long time and i've heard him talk about microsoft's influence on his thinking

00:40:42Uh over the years and he's talked about it with me recently in what sense like what what about microsoft?

00:40:47Do you feel like sticks out to him is appealing? I think the way they leveraged their

00:40:52expertise in

00:40:54software

00:40:55And then licensing that software across different players to really just build a true platform

00:41:02There's this old bill gates quote and i'm gonna butcher it, but essentially he said, you know

00:41:07You know

00:41:07You've built a true platform when the total value of what has been built on top of your platform

00:41:13Is greater than the platform itself, right?

00:41:15And I think that's what met us hoping for on the headset side and especially on the ai side, you know with llama

00:41:22For example, I just interviewed mark for the llama 3 release

00:41:26It's interesting what they're doing because they're spending billions of dollars on compute to build these

00:41:31Cutting edge models that compete with open ai anthropic and others and they're just giving them away

00:41:36And that seems counterintuitive for a company like meta to do

00:41:39Uh, but when you think about where they're kind of strategically positioned relative to the rest of the players here

00:41:45They don't have their own cloud business, right? So they're not selling access to their servers

00:41:50And their business is building consumer social products that

00:41:55monetize attention and

00:41:57Rather than boil the ocean. I think they're realizing that's where they're they can play to their strengths

00:42:02and

00:42:03The history with open source is if you get a bunch of people to build on your frameworks that you've open sourced

00:42:10Guess what? It makes the technology you build more pervasive

00:42:15And value flows back to you in the sense that the community helps improve it

00:42:20right and uh, zuckerberg said something on a podcast recently where

00:42:24If the developers using llama 3 can help them lower their costs

00:42:29On inference, which is the cost of like running these models over time even just slightly

00:42:35It will make up for the entirety that they've spent on training all future versions of llama

00:42:39Just in terms of the cost of what they need to to run this stuff in the cloud in their cloud

00:42:45So it's a pure infrastructure play

00:42:48That I think mark has correctly identified they're in a unique position to make and it creates more competition

00:42:55Because llama 3 can be used by other developers. It forces openai and others

00:42:59I think to do more in open source, which I think we'll see over the course of this year and

00:43:04You know meta has a long history of doing open source actually, uh on the kind of just regular coding side. That's true

00:43:10Yeah, it makes sense for them and it's again. I just think we're seeing kind of like the rise of

00:43:15Perhaps the next microsoft in terms of how they're attacking each of these new technologies

00:43:20Yeah, it seems smart too because right now most of those other companies

00:43:24You just named are all desperately trying to be the next apple

00:43:27Like openai is very much trying to sort of build a universe inside of openai

00:43:33they like license some of the stuff out but like it's clear that the thing that they want to do is like they want to

00:43:36build they want to make custom gpts and have you use their stuff inside of their stuff and

00:43:42So many and like google is desperately trying to like pull the whole ecosystem in around itself with ai and

00:43:48You get the sense everybody sees this as a chance to sort of own the whole experience

00:43:52And meta is going the other way being like this is a chance for us to like own

00:43:56The whole experience everywhere, which actually strikes me is very smart in this moment. Yeah, and you know, it's yeah

00:44:02I mean meta should maybe be called openai and openai should probably find a new name at this point

00:44:06I mean openai isn't open at all. Really? Yeah, it's it's interesting. I I agree with you

00:44:11I think for a while meta was trying to have its cake and eat it too on the reality labs quest side and I kept

00:44:17pushing them on this that like they were trying to be too much like apple in the sense that they were

00:44:21Doing all of the hardware fully vertically integrated and the software

00:44:27and I was like

00:44:27When are you gonna if you want to be the open player?

00:44:29You've got to start licensing some of this stuff because apple you can't compete with apple at its own game

00:44:34Right like apple is the best at this

00:44:37And I think they finally realized that and are embracing it and it's what microsoft did and it's smart

00:44:43yeah, no, I I think I think that's right and it also seems like it's given

00:44:48Meta real momentum like my my sense is this the the llama 3 launch and just the sort of meta ai

00:44:55percolation around all of meta's different apps

00:44:57Really worked very quickly like it it kind of it became a big player pretty fast in in this space

00:45:04I think in part because it has been sort of out in the ecosystem much more rather than just saying, you know

00:45:10Here is an ai you can talk to inside of instagram

00:45:12Which I think everybody would have kind of just sniffed at and moved on

00:45:15It feels like meta is able to make these big plays by playing this game differently

00:45:20They are I have a framework for evaluating companies

00:45:23which is like are you in the show me or tell me phase and I think meta has been doing a lot of tell me

00:45:27Stuff with ai like the assistant is going to be everywhere, right? That was the recent news

00:45:32They're putting it in the search box of instagram, which I hate by the way. Yeah, so that's where i'm going like

00:45:37They're putting it everywhere. And now the real test is do people actually want this?

00:45:41Does it make sense to have a chat gpt-like experience in your instagram or your whatsapp where you're used to just talking with people?

00:45:49And zuckerberg really thinks we're all going to be interacting with synthetic ai type personas like people

00:45:54In conversations with people, you know, like you can add the meta ai to a whatsapp thread with other people to give recommendations or something

00:46:01So they've got to prove that people actually want that the running joke inside meta before they put the ai everywhere

00:46:07Was that like no one was using this it was something you had to kind of find it was pretty buried

00:46:12And not even like people at meta were using it

00:46:14So now that it's got llama3 under it, which is pretty competitive as a model

00:46:18And they've got google results in there and bing results in there

00:46:21Which are the only chatbot that does real-time search from both those

00:46:25It's got a good shot at capturing a lot of the attention, uh from people who have maybe never tried

00:46:30Chat gpt or anthropics clod because you know for people who listen to the show

00:46:35They know all these names, but you got to think the the boomers sharing, you know spaghetti jesus

00:46:41viral generative ai memes on facebook

00:46:44They've probably never used a chatbot before there's there's millions hundreds of millions of people who have never used one of these things

00:46:50And I think zuckerberg's bet is just like he did with stories and snapchat and reels with tiktok

00:46:55He's going to introduce this new format this new way of uh,

00:46:58Interacting with the internet to more people than anyone else possibly could because his true

00:47:04Inherent leverage and competitive edge is over 3 billion daily users

00:47:10Yeah, I think that all strategically makes a lot of sense to me

00:47:13And I think as a product it works in some places like I actually think putting the generative ai stuff inside of facebook has

00:47:20Terrifying implications, but as a product makes some sense. I hate that

00:47:24They have replaced the instagram search bar with meta ai. I just want to find a video

00:47:29I don't want to talk to the ai

00:47:30I want to search for a video like it's

00:47:32This idea that we have decided ai and search are the same thing just drives me insane

00:47:37And I wish meta would stop doing it. They might you know, if there's enough uproar they might they did this like overnight

00:47:43Meta is notorious. They invented the kind of ruthless ab testing in silicon valley

00:47:47So in a normal situation, they would have tested this with some

00:47:51You know in different markets for weeks and on end months on end figured out if people actually want it

00:47:56They just flipped it on for everyone overnight, which means it's a zuck level top down

00:48:00We are betting the farm on this as a modality

00:48:04and

00:48:05Now he's got to be proven right or wrong

00:48:07So that was actually one of the things I wanted to ask you about is like connect the ai push

00:48:11to that sort of big picture meta idea for me because I think

00:48:15I saw ai

00:48:17for a while at meta as kind of an end around metaverse play like

00:48:21Ai got really cool right as the metaverse stopped being cool

00:48:24And they could build ai stuff that was actually metaverse stuff, but they just had to call it ai stuff

00:48:29but now it seems like there is this idea that some part of that like

00:48:35engagement based community

00:48:37Stuff going on inside of meta's products. They also seem to think ai as part of that in a way that I can't quite

00:48:43Wrap my head around like as you talk to people like zuckerberg

00:48:48Like what is the sort of galaxy brain vision for ai right now?

00:48:52It's this kind of scary vision that I frankly I can't decide how dystopian it is

00:48:58but it's this idea that there are just going to be thousands if not millions of ai's that we chat and

00:49:05interact with in our feeds and our messaging threads that are indistinguishable from people and

00:49:11Uh that creators that kylie jenner on instagram will have an ai version of herself that she's trained with certain parameters

00:49:19That uh means that all her fans can interact with quote-unquote. Kylie jenner, right?

00:49:24And they're doing some I think kind of clever early engagement hacks with meta ai there was an example of I think 404 media

00:49:33Where it was really cringe, but it was an interesting way to kind of juice human engagement on facebook

00:49:39Uh, there was this group, uh full of parents with special needs kids

00:49:43and

00:49:44There's this new feature that meta is trying in a group where if someone doesn't comment under a group post

00:49:50For I think like more than an hour meta ai will comment with its own just prompt to try to spark

00:49:56conversation with the actual human beings and in this example that I made up that it had

00:50:01A kid or a couple of kids with special needs and it was pretty creepy and hallucinating and all that

00:50:07But you look at the thread it got a lot of humans commenting underneath it, right?

00:50:11So it's like you're using ai as the beginning flame to get a bunch of people to actually talk to each other

00:50:17I like the idea that the ai's job is to just say some wild insane stuff on every post on the internet just

00:50:25Just to get the fire and we can all just rage at it

00:50:27And yeah, I think that's part of it

00:50:30But yeah, it's it's all of these things and it's also the the the visual generation stuff. There's going to be multi-modality

00:50:36So generating video you can already generate images. They upgraded it where it like generates the image as you type. Have you played with this?

00:50:44It's really cool. Yeah, it's cool

00:50:46And you know, obviously they're they're still figuring out the like things that will and won't do that are cringe, you know

00:50:51The gemini type diversity scandal stuff, but I think we're still in the very early innings of this

00:50:57It's the and now it's to show me like I was saying they've got to show that people actually want all this stuff

00:51:02That's a very broad way of thinking about it because like the the way you're describing it earlier, right is that there is that sort of

00:51:08Unifying sense of what meta is very good at which is which is basically building products that people engage with at scale, right?

00:51:14like you you can boil a lot of the things that meta does down to that and

00:51:19The ai seems like it's partly that but it could also be lots of stuff and I get the sense that meta is

00:51:25Maybe just going to explore that stuff to see what happens

00:51:28But also I think like a lot of companies is

00:51:30Going to be prone to being distracted by whatever shiny thing you can do with a language model

00:51:35And just shove it inside of apps and think people will use it

00:51:39and I feel like

00:51:40Meta more than most might have a chance to like really ruin some of its products by over extending ai into it

00:51:46The thing is they're a large mature publicly traded company

00:51:49They won't torch everything for this like if they see that it's tanking key metrics that will impact, you know

00:51:55The next earnings they'll roll this stuff back

00:51:58I mean I would point out they torched a lot of things in the name of the metaverse for a while there like this wouldn't

00:52:02Be totally unheard of well kind of I mean it was all it's all still separate, right?

00:52:07Like yeah, so it's a lot of sunken money into it

00:52:11But nothing they've done on the quest has like impacted your experience as an average instagram user. That's fair

00:52:17They're not fighting facebook. Yeah, that's what's different about meta ai is that they're literally putting it everywhere

00:52:22So they're in the like like you said shove it everywhere and find out phase and we're all about to find out

00:52:29Yeah, so what's your sense from talking to mark about this google stuff, by the way?

00:52:35This is this is the like small detail of of your most recent story with him and this whole

00:52:39Meta ai rollout that I found the most fascinating. They're very excited about having google integrated into meta ai search results

00:52:46Yeah, which just seems bizarre to me that that is a thing that exists. What what do you know about what's going on there?

00:52:51I thought it was interesting too reading between the lines, you know, I asked him

00:52:56What is the deal here because google has not licensed its real-time search results any of these chatbots yet?

00:53:02And I was like, are you paying them? Are they paying you?

00:53:06He basically said that meta is paying google, but it's not quote a ton. I don't know if a ton is

00:53:12billionaire who owns half of kawaii a ton or normal a ton

00:53:17I'm sure that will come out but yeah

00:53:19It's smart because that's one of the main problems with these chatbots right? Is there a recency? Is it very good?

00:53:26They make up events. I was using meta ai

00:53:29Without the google integration and it like used last year's coachella lineup when I asked it who was just performing at coachella last weekend

00:53:37So you've got to fix that real-time search can do that

00:53:41Zuckerberg hinted to me that google's building a model

00:53:43And I don't mean ai model, but I think a business model around this

00:53:47Around licensing search to these chatbots. So it makes sense because that is google's bread and butter still

00:53:54I thought that google would keep that for gemini that that would make their chatbot experience

00:54:00You know more unique and their leverage there, but I think this means that we may start seeing them license it elsewhere as well

00:54:08That's fascinating a

00:54:10Sucks for perplexity. You had a good run perplexity. Great job, but b the the tension there just for google

00:54:16This is a total aside

00:54:17but the tension there for google between like

00:54:19Search has made it all of the money in the known universe and also they're betting a lot of that search money on ai working

00:54:25But then you look at this and there is just a giant money faucet licensing this data to

00:54:31Chatbots all of whom would want it and pay for it

00:54:33Fascinating the like the the business machinations between those two things

00:54:38Are going to be really interesting to watch in the next couple of years. I agree

00:54:41I i'm eager to hear google maybe talk about that more at io soon

00:54:45So big picture as as the person who broke the story of facebook renaming to meta

00:54:51I'm curious how you feel about meta as a metaverse company at this moment in time

00:54:55like there is part of me that is like rewind whatever five years and

00:54:59Knowing what he knows now mark would have renamed the company like artificial or something instead of meta

00:55:04Like is the metaverse still the thing when you talk to meta and mark?

00:55:08No, I mean, it's not the thing they want to talk about the most but I don't know man

00:55:13I I think you can walk and chew gum at the same time and

00:55:17I still think 10 years out they see

00:55:20More of their optionality on the future being on the metaverse stuff because they've hit a plateau with facebook

00:55:26It's not getting young people back

00:55:29Eventually, and they talk about this pretty frankly internally

00:55:32Literally, everyone's just going to die right because like if you're not getting new users on your platform your platform's in terminal decline

00:55:38Instagram is their next facebook, right?

00:55:41It will be we're all going to be on there in probably 10 years and it's going to feel just like facebook does now to

00:55:46the younger generation

00:55:48Whether they can buy the next thing to keep that whole cycle going 40 years from now tbd

00:55:53Unlikely, but this whole push to control the next computing platform and or at least have more say in it

00:56:00So that apple just doesn't invent the whole next, you know headset modality. I think it still makes sense

00:56:05I mean, I don't know i've been playing with the um, the ray-ban smart glasses with multimodal ai on them

00:56:11Uh, you have it too, right?

00:56:13And you know, it's not great. It's wrong half of the time

00:56:17I will say i'm impressed with the speed of it, but you know

00:56:20It's just makes stuff up still a lot

00:56:22but you can see when they iron out these kinks like oh the the basis of this makes sense like

00:56:27I actually do see over time as the tech gets figured out a lot of people wanting to use technology more

00:56:33Through their eyes and through their kind of egocentric view of the world

00:56:37And you're covering this a lot in the wearable ai side with you know, humane and rabbit and all that

00:56:41but this is all kind of converging over time this generative ai meets

00:56:45Wearables into what I think is a pretty compelling next computing platform

00:56:50And if anything, I think meta feels like ai

00:56:53has only kind of made that more apparent and

00:56:56Actually pushed off the need to have the whole display stuff

00:57:00That we always hear about that

00:57:02We're gonna have all these holograms around us and it just keeps getting pushed out and out and out

00:57:06And now maybe they think like oh, maybe all we really need for the next five-ish years or so is compelling ai in a wearable

00:57:11form factor

00:57:13So, yeah, I mean all these big tech companies they over rotate on the topic du jour and that's generative ai right now

00:57:19Um, I don't think they're changing the company name again

00:57:21I think they're still investing a lot of money in reality labs and we'll have

00:57:26a pretty wild product next year that i've scooped which is

00:57:29The ray bands with the display and a bracelet that does emg kind of neural interface control

00:57:36So imagine like typing and clicking and pointing with I guess just basically thinking

00:57:41So we're about to hit a lot of really interesting new stuff there

00:57:46It's definitely like they they over rotated on it like way too early, but that's like the story of meta

00:57:51They spent you know, whatever they spent on oculus 10 years ago

00:57:55And where has it really gotten them in terms of roi, uh, even now so

00:57:59Them like going too hard too early is nothing new

00:58:03That is fair. That is what they do and I will say to their credit

00:58:06They they both like built the way too early thing and the kind of right on time thing

00:58:12Like the I think the smart glasses were the correct move for now

00:58:16The big push after the headset in the metaverse is like way too early, which is a classic microsoft move

00:58:21So good job again, but they're doing a surprisingly good job of both sort of running those in parallel and pushing them towards each other

00:58:28and I think that is like

00:58:30If you can keep that up and you can afford to keep that up until they actually hit each other

00:58:34That's it that ends up being a pretty powerful place to be as opposed to somebody like apple who now has

00:58:39This massively overpowered thing that it's gonna have to figure out how to like pull back into

00:58:44Actual mainstream interest over time and I think that's harder than it gets credit for. Oh, yeah for sure

00:58:49It's hard, but it's coming from different ends. Totally. All right, we gotta take a break alex

00:58:54Thank you as always good to have you back. Yeah. Thanks for having me again

00:59:04You

00:59:06All right, we're back let's get to the hotline as always the number is 866 verge 11

00:59:10The email is verge cast at the verge.com. We love all your questions

00:59:13We try to answer at least one on the show every week this week. We have a question from josh in denver

00:59:19Hey virgin, this is josh from denver. I have a question that runs the risk of uh, sending me like on a legal rant

00:59:26But I have to ask it

00:59:27Anyway, it seems like microsoft is back on the path that it was in the 90s

00:59:32They got in a lot of trouble specifically that a lot of

00:59:35Anti-competitive stuff is making it into windows. They're making it very hard to switch browsers again

00:59:40They're making it so that the default edge browser is kind of like popping up constantly

00:59:45Even if you've selected it not as your default browser same thing with the cloud storage and I wanted to know

00:59:51Number one, why do they think they can get away with doing the exact same thing that got them in trouble in the 90s?

00:59:56I mean, I understand the market share for their browser has dropped but it's still the same

01:00:01Anti-competitive practice and two why aren't we putting a stop to it legally? Anyway, thanks. Hope you can answer the question

01:00:09All right, you ask for a neely rant you get a neely rant neely patel. Hello. Hi. How's it going?

01:00:14So we we've talked sort of obliquely about microsoft as part of all of these big antitrust things

01:00:20So I figured this is useful and to just hit head on. What are your thoughts? What do you make of this question?

01:00:25I don't know if you're gonna get so much a legal rant for me. It's just a rant about the fact that

01:00:30Nothing can displace chrome

01:00:33like governments around the world have been trying to displace chrome for

01:00:3610 years more and and nothing they try works and I think they're kind of at a point where they're like

01:00:41I don't know. Maybe microsoft can do some stuff and it doesn't work and I think that

01:00:46Specifically with the edge browser and the prompts to make edge the default and all that stuff

01:00:51I think the market is very clear that it hates it

01:00:55People don't like it whenever we write about it people are like I hate this. This is stupid

01:00:59And then it doesn't work

01:01:00anyway

01:01:01and I suspect that regulators in europe and the united states are kind of looking at that being like

01:01:05Fine, it's just not working right if you want to destroy your own reputation trying to make this work like have at it

01:01:10When I interviewed jonathan canter on decoder the head of antitrust at the department of justice

01:01:15He said his framework for decisions was hips

01:01:19Called it hands on hips high impact programmatically significant and I think you just look at that equation

01:01:25You're like this is low impact because it's not working

01:01:28Anyway, that said microsoft is not getting away with it. Totally. They rolled out teams

01:01:33They bundled teams into office that basically put a ton of pressure on slack

01:01:38It forced slack into selling itself into salesforce. The european regulators looked at that very sternly

01:01:44and microsoft

01:01:46Bundled teams from office

01:01:48And they have now done that globally because I think they saw the pressure was rising globally

01:01:53So there I think there is I think there are some places where microsoft is responding to the pressure

01:01:58But specifically when it comes to irritating everyone around edge

01:02:02And then regulators like yeah, that shit doesn't work, right?

01:02:05Yeah, my my read on this was that there are interesting microsoft antitrust questions probably around windows

01:02:12And probably around office and especially as it shoves co-pilot ai stuff into all of that

01:02:18There might be interesting questions to come up there, but you just cannot make the case that edge is powerful

01:02:25Like you just you just can't and I I think you're right that everyone has been desperate

01:02:30For there to be a meaningful competitor to chrome for a really long time

01:02:34Mozilla has been running around saying, you know, firefox is the thing we're going to do everything differently

01:02:39All these browsers now even run chromium like mozilla is one of the few companies that isn't using

01:02:44The blink engine with the chromium project underneath

01:02:47All of the browser stuff like edge is just another skin on the same stuff that chrome runs

01:02:53And so it's all really mealy and weird

01:02:56But for everything that microsoft is doing edge still has like teeny tiny market share

01:03:00And I feel like if i'm a regulator i'm like, oh you're trying so hard

01:03:04This would be sketchy if only it were working

01:03:06Yeah, I mean the regulators in europe basically imposed the same thing that microsoft is doing which is like would you like to try another browser

01:03:12And everyone's like no and so microsoft is welcome to try to decrease the market share of chrome

01:03:18Which is the problem that those regulators have been focused on they're just not doing a good job

01:03:23The other thing that I think is interesting and kind of virtuosity is the reason microsoft was terrified of netscape back

01:03:29Then was they were very worried that the application model for desktop computing would leave the wintel monopoly

01:03:37So they were doing anti-competitive stuff to protect that monopoly protect the dominance of windows

01:03:43Make sure windows was the place where all applications were deployed and they saw correctly

01:03:48That deploying applications to the web would break that model and that 100 percent happened

01:03:54Yeah, so the fact that edge runs chromium

01:03:57Is because if you want web apps to run well, it is better to standardize the browser engine

01:04:02So they all work in the same place in the same way

01:04:04And that's how all apps are deployed now. And so I it's just weird that like we've come full circle

01:04:10But actually the thing microsoft was the most worried about absolutely happened

01:04:15and what the browser chrome is like the the way the browser looks and works and

01:04:19What default search service it uses versus what is the browser engine like that war is lost

01:04:24Yeah, and I think I mean it's it's a weird place to be in because my next question for you is going to be

01:04:29Should we be talking more about microsoft in an antitrust way?

01:04:32Because again, it's either the first or second biggest company on earth. It is it is clearly as powerful as anybody

01:04:38It's just so much more

01:04:40Diversified in that way that it doesn't it doesn't have kind of the one thing that feels like its thing the same way

01:04:46But I guess it would be windows but windows has been completely

01:04:49Commoditized like I think desktop operating systems in general have been made totally irrelevant

01:04:55By web browsers essentially in the internet

01:04:57Like most people you buy a laptop you download a browser and that is that is your portal to everything else

01:05:03And so maybe if i'm an antitrust regulator, there's just no upside in caring about desktop operating systems anymore

01:05:08Even though microsoft is like by a mile the dominant player, but there's a handful of things that are worth considering

01:05:15But even there you can see there's enough competition

01:05:17So the one I would just throw right back at your example is games

01:05:20Sure, if you want to play video games on a pc, you're gonna buy a windows pc

01:05:24Yeah, you are really reliant on windows and all of its graphics support and the ecosystem of graphics cards available for windows

01:05:31There are like three people with steam running on their macs who are like really upset that you said that but yeah

01:05:36And they're running it at very low frame rates

01:05:39Compared to any windows pc, right? Like and so there's a little

01:05:43Market there that feels very tightly controlled, but then you look around and you're like

01:05:47Oh, there's all these like cool handhelds

01:05:50That run linux and steam and you can just see okay. There's like

01:05:54Meaningful like the game developers themselves. No, they don't want to be totally stuck here forever

01:06:00So they're creating new markets and there's new distribution and windows itself has not given microsoft

01:06:06Some particular advantage in gaming xbox its other big consumer gaming brand

01:06:10It's an is not the winner like phil spencer will happily tell you they're not the winner all day and all night

01:06:16So I I think it's hard for a regulator to point at some big consumer harm in gaming

01:06:21Like they couldn't even make the case to keep microsoft from buying activision

01:06:25So I think that's challenging and plus you you know

01:06:27That space does feel competitive and then everything else kind of doesn't touch consumers that microsoft does slack and teams

01:06:35And it got the scrutiny and they had to stop bundling teams

01:06:38What else is there everything else all of microsoft's other business is a bunch of enterprise business. It's azure

01:06:45It's cloud computing services. It's security to some shaky extent like that's competitive now

01:06:50Yeah, I think it's hard to put together the political case

01:06:54Like here's a real problem that people are complaining about

01:06:56Unless it's something a consumer can see or lots of people can see

01:07:00In the way that like blue and green bubbles is like it has that like visceral thing that you can point to

01:07:05Microsoft doesn't have any of those. Yeah, and then when it does it it's so blatantly annoying

01:07:09Like would you like to try edge that like the market just sort of corrects for it by being like no

01:07:14I will now I will never do this

01:07:17And that's fine. Yeah, so you don't you don't necessarily think any of this is even necessarily coming for microsoft

01:07:22like I think the the two i've been waiting for are

01:07:25YouTube scrutiny and microsoft scrutiny and I think youtube scrutiny is probably still coming i'll take the office

01:07:29I'll take the other end of that bet. Oh, okay. I youtube is just a blind spot for everyone. We treat it like the ocean

01:07:35Like there it is

01:07:37Forever changing and always the same

01:07:39Powerful it will be there long after we're all dead. Yeah

01:07:43There lies the ocean

01:07:45It's like who knows what what vast mysteries exist in the deep. It's just an absolute blind spot for everyone

01:07:52No one treats like a business microsoft

01:07:54I think their deal with open ai how they will integrate those products the

01:07:59Exclusivity around that deal whether it's a whether they sort of like acquired open ai without acquiring it

01:08:05I think there's a lot of scrutiny left to come there particularly as that market heats up

01:08:09But I don't know what shape it will take but I think people will understand that's weird and there's money and power and characters over

01:08:16there before anyone

01:08:18even

01:08:19Tries to understand youtube

01:08:22That's fair and that is to your point that like

01:08:24directly

01:08:26Regular human relevant thing like yeah

01:08:28If you want to if you want to start talking about what happens to chat gpt like now you're back squarely in

01:08:33Regular consumer territory, which is where that goes. Yes. Did microsoft illegally invest in whatever blah blah blah with open ai

01:08:41To make these guys rich

01:08:43Sure, you can tell that story. It's I think it's very hard to be like we're gonna mess with youtube

01:08:48It's just the ocean that might be the best metaphor for youtube i've ever heard I very much enjoy that

01:08:52That's not what we came here to do, but i'm glad

01:08:56One day someone's gonna be like, huh youtube's a company

01:08:59And we'll see what happens after that

01:09:02Yeah, fair enough. All right, josh. I hope that helps nilai. Thank you. Thanks

01:09:07All right, that's it for the verge cast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening

01:09:11There's lots more on everything we talked about from rabbit to allison's experiment to

01:09:16Alex's coverage of all things going on at meta at the verge.com

01:09:19We'll put lots of links in the show notes, but as always read the verge.com

01:09:23It's good website if you've thoughts questions feelings or other ai gadgets

01:09:27You want me to try you can always email us at verge cast at the verge.com call the hotline 866 verge 1-1

01:09:33Thanks again to everybody who voted for us for the webbies

01:09:35We're still riding high on the victory there thrilled that you all listen to and like this show

01:09:40It means the world to us send us all your thoughts and questions ideas everything

01:09:44We want to hear them all call the hotline send an email

01:09:46We love hearing from you

01:09:47This show is produced by andrew marino liam james and will pour the verge cast is verge production part of the vox media podcast network

01:09:52Nilai alex and I will be back on friday to talk about presumably more ai gadgets

01:09:57Some ipads coming up next week and everything else going on in tech. We'll see you then rock and roll

01:10:10You

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