Kylie Robison joins the show to talk about the recent dueling AI blog posts from OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei. What do these CEOs think the future of AI looks like? Then, Will Poor tells us the story of ShakeAlert, an earthquake alert system that has huge potential and some surprising challenges. On The Vergecast Hotline, Allison Johnson joins Will to figure out whether the iPhone's new Camera Control is really as fast as advertised.
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TechTranscript
00:00:00Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of decreasing the cost of AI infrastructure.
00:00:04I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here updating all of my AI gadgets. So like six
00:00:10months ago, give or take a couple of weeks, I reviewed both the Humane AI pin and the Rabbit R1
00:00:16kind of back to back. Didn't like either one. Neither one was any good. And to be totally honest,
00:00:21I basically turned them off, stashed them in a drawer and forgot about them. But six months later,
00:00:25these companies are still here. They're still making stuff. Humane has slashed its price in a
00:00:30way that suggests not a lot of people are buying that stuff. Rabbit, I think has confused people
00:00:36more than enticed them over six months. But they've made a lot of changes. Rabbit is saying
00:00:41it's getting close to shipping the large action model that it's been promising for forever.
00:00:44Humane does timers now. So I figured after six months, maybe time to pull these things out and
00:00:49see if we're any closer to AI gadgets getting anywhere. That's for a future Vergecast. I
00:00:54literally I have spent like hours just sitting here charging and updating software on these
00:00:58things. And I had to find a SIM card for the Rabbit and I had to redo service for the AI pin.
00:01:04It's been chaos. That's for a future Vergecast. Today, we are going to do two things. First,
00:01:09we're going to talk about the sort of dueling blog posts from Dario Amadei at Anthropic and
00:01:15Sam Altman at OpenAI about the future of AI. I think normally I find these blog posts sort
00:01:20of ridiculous, but the fact that there were two of them and they're from these two people at this
00:01:25moment in time, I think matters. So we're going to talk about what's in those letters, what they
00:01:29agree on, what they disagree on, and what we might be able to learn about the future of AI.
00:01:33We're also going to talk about earthquake detection and this huge sprawling project
00:01:38underway, especially on the West Coast to alert people more quickly to earthquakes.
00:01:44Super important problem turns out to be more complicated and challenging than you might think
00:01:48for lots of super interesting reasons. Will Poore has been reporting this story out for a while and
00:01:53he has come to talk about it and I'm very excited. We also have a hotline, lots of fun stuff to do
00:01:57this week. Very excited about this episode. All that is coming up in just a second, but literally
00:02:01as we've been sitting here, both of these things just finished an update and now both have another
00:02:06update. So I'm going to go do more software updates and we will be right back. This is the
00:02:10Vergecast. See you in a sec. Welcome back. So about a month ago, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI
00:02:18and probably the single most prominent person in the AI world right now, wrote this blog post
00:02:24called The Intelligence Age, all about basically his vision for the future of AI, why it's going
00:02:31to be huge, why it's so exciting, why we should all be so excited, when it's going to happen,
00:02:36sort of big flowery stuff about the future of AI. Ordinarily those blog posts are like, whatever,
00:02:42I think people paid more attention to this one because it's Sam and Sam is like right at the
00:02:46center of the tech industry right now. But still, we wouldn't have spent a ton of time on it
00:02:50otherwise. But then a couple of weeks later, Dario Amadei, who is the CEO of Anthropic,
00:02:55which might be OpenAI's most interesting competitor, wrote his own blog post called
00:03:02Machines of Loving Grace that is sort of spiritually the same, but structurally very
00:03:08different. He wrote this 10,000 word plus opus full of details and full of thoughts about specific
00:03:15ways that AI might be implemented to make the world a better place. And he lands in sort of the
00:03:20same place, which is everything's going to be amazing. But I think the structure of the way
00:03:25he talks about it is really different and really interesting. We talked about both of these,
00:03:28I think briefly on the show before, but what they say together is really interesting. These are two
00:03:35of probably the three most important people in AI. I think the third would be Demis Hassabis,
00:03:40who runs DeepMind at Google and is increasingly more powerful in all of the stuff that Google
00:03:45is doing in AI. He, as far as I know, has not written a many thousand word blog post about how
00:03:50terrific AI is, but these two have. And so I think what I wanted to do was really dig into these and
00:03:57see what we can learn about where AI is going from these two blog posts, where they're the same,
00:04:02where they're different, where there might be conflict between these two companies and these
00:04:06two ideas. But also if you believe the vision of Silicon Valley, and I think somewhere in these
00:04:11two blog posts is the vision in Silicon Valley for AI. What does it look like? The Verge's Kylie
00:04:17Robinson has been covering all of this. She has read these blog posts. She's talked to people
00:04:20about the blog posts. She, I think, could probably recite some of these blog posts from memory at
00:04:24this point. And I figured, who better to come on and see if we can make sense of all of this
00:04:29than Kylie. Kylie, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me.
00:04:33Just unrelenting AI chaos in your life. Yeah, it never stops.
00:04:39We do have a little bit of tiny news that we're going to get to at the very end.
00:04:43Some next model stuff, which we should just talk to really fast.
00:04:48But the thing I have brought you here to do is talk about these two blog posts.
00:04:51Yes. And first I want to know
00:04:53if you agree with my assessment that most corporate CEO blogs are nonsense.
00:05:00Well, that's the first one. That's, do you agree that most?
00:05:02Yes. Okay, good.
00:05:03Yes. But also, I don't know,
00:05:05something about the fact that both of these happened from these two people in particular,
00:05:11like within a couple of weeks, just felt like more of a moment to me than your average,
00:05:15like CEO pontificates about the future thing. Has that been your read too?
00:05:20Yes. And at the time when I wrote about it, I had real like AI, AGI believers yelling at me
00:05:27because like, how could I ever consider, I keep saying this, your messiahs are businessmen.
00:05:33I'm sorry. It's calculated. So yeah, I drew the same conclusions.
00:05:37Okay. So the homework I gave you ahead of this was to come up with three ways in which
00:05:44these two men agree and three ways in which they disagree. Let's start with what they agree on.
00:05:50What's the first thing you feel like these two agree on?
00:05:52So I think that they do agree on that the world is going to be such a beautiful place
00:05:58with AGI, of course. I would say to flip on disagree, I think that Dario was a lot more
00:06:05measured where Altman was a lot more grateful dead about it.
00:06:12Wait, I would actually put that slightly differently. My read on this has been,
00:06:16I think Sam Altman feels like it's inevitable. That like his whole blog post is basically like,
00:06:24we've done it. It is done. And there's even a line in it that I pulled out that was something
00:06:28like deep learning works and the rest will solve itself. Like that's not what it says,
00:06:33but that's essentially what it says. That compared to Dario, who goes over and over and over,
00:06:40like to the point where it makes the blog posts too long of being like, none of this is inevitable.
00:06:45It doesn't have to be like this. We all have to do it on purpose. A lot of things have to go right.
00:06:48Like you just get the sense from Sam's that he is like problem solved. We just have to sit back
00:06:54and wait for this. Like you're talking about beautiful, incredible future where everything
00:06:57is wonderful. And Dario is like, maybe that future exists, but it is not certain that we're going to
00:07:05get there. And that to me was like, tonally the most striking difference between the two. And it
00:07:09sounds like you, you caught that too. That is a hundred percent. A great take.
00:07:12That is exactly right. No, because it's been a long week and I haven't thought about these blogs,
00:07:17but yeah, that is exactly correct. Who do you believe? Do you think Sam's right? I really want
00:07:23you to just be like, I think Sam's right. We did it. It's all done. Future's going to be beautiful.
00:07:27I just keep thinking one of these two men has been fired from the job for lying.
00:07:35Yeah. Well said. All right. What's the second thing? What else did they agree on? Wait,
00:07:39actually, let me drill down into the first one before we get to the second one. Do you think
00:07:44like biggest picture, most beautiful future, they roughly agree on where that might go?
00:07:50Like in the, in the absolute best case scenario, do you think these two CEOs and by extension,
00:07:56Anthropic and OpenAI, think it might be as good in the same way as each other?
00:08:02I think you can see this in the actions of both companies. One is absolutely gutting safety
00:08:11and the other is doubling down on, on safety. So I would say that they disagree or like what
00:08:20the future looks like. I think Altman is a lot more optimistic than Dario and Dario says at the
00:08:25top, like, you know, there's a, there's potentially a lot of bad things. I don't want to talk about
00:08:30that here because we talk about it a lot. So I think that's, that's the difference between the
00:08:34two of them. I think Dario sees a lot of the, what could go horribly wrong and Altman's like,
00:08:39dude, it's going to be beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. And I think
00:08:43that was the thing I kept having to remind myself reading Dario's blog post and like,
00:08:47to his credit, he says right up front, I think there are a lot of problems. I'm not going to
00:08:51talk about them here. And like every paragraph of his thing, I kept wanting to like raise my
00:08:56hand and be like, well, I have 1000 questions about all the things that might go wrong in
00:09:00service of doing this cool thing that you're imagining. And I'm like, okay, that's not,
00:09:04that's not what we're doing here. I have to, I have to take him at his word that he thinks there
00:09:08are problems. We're just not talking about them right now. So fine. We're talking about the big,
00:09:12beautiful future. Uh, what else do they agree on? What else did you write down?
00:09:15How this is going to transform labor, the economy work. They both seem to agree that
00:09:22a lot of rote tasks and monotonous jobs are going to get replaced by AI and that perhaps we should
00:09:29have some plan for that. I think, I think that's something they both agree on for Altman. He has
00:09:34explored UBI, universal basic income. He ran a test, uh, giving people certain amounts of money
00:09:41for an extended period of time to see how it changed their life. Um, Anthropic has not done
00:09:45that same, same kind of research, but I sense that they both agree that this is going to
00:09:50change the way humans work and that's important to explore.
00:09:54Were you satisfied by either of their answers as to what we do about it? And, and again, to,
00:10:00to Dario's credit in particular, he's pretty upfront about, I don't have all the answers.
00:10:05This is going to be complicated, but they do both treat it as inevitable that at some point,
00:10:10this thing will essentially blow up our day-to-day lives and the overall economy as we know it.
00:10:17And they kind of are just like, yeah, we'll figure it out.
00:10:20No, I'm not sad. No, of course I'm not satisfied. And I was just on
00:10:23decoder talking about this with Nilay about, you know, uh, there's so many unanswered questions.
00:10:28This is so nascent. It's not a fun answer to hear. You know, you expect the AI reporter to
00:10:33be like, we have all the answers. And I think that's what people expect from these executives
00:10:36too. Like, but we don't, we just don't have all the answers and it is unsatisfying. Like, okay,
00:10:41if AGI was real, which like, I don't even see that as a possibility necessarily, but if that
00:10:46were to happen, then we could all be out of jobs, but we'll figure it out. Like,
00:10:52it'll be fine. Somewhere between three years and a million years from now,
00:10:56everybody's screwed, but we'll figure it out.
00:10:58Exactly. Right. Exactly. Hopefully the sun explodes before then. I don't know.
00:11:02We'll all live on Mars and then it won't even be a problem.
00:11:04Perfect.
00:11:04Uh, what's the third thing?
00:11:06They both in, in practice, in not even in practice, in writing agree on the alignment
00:11:12of these systems. And I'm going to talk to researchers, I think tomorrow about what
00:11:17alignment really is and how it's such a fuzzy term, but I think that they both agree that
00:11:23broadly these should be safe systems that are aligned with what we value as humans. They
00:11:28shouldn't be running amok in writing. However, as I said earlier, one has gutted safety and the
00:11:34other has not, but I think they brought, they broadly agreed that it would not be good to
00:11:39create world destroying AI.
00:11:41Yeah. I mean, it's a hot take, but you know, it's, it's, it's a, it's a theory. I like that.
00:11:46Right.
00:11:46Uh, I, yeah, I, I caught that too. And I think the idea that that is a thing we have to do on
00:11:52purpose is sort of encouraging, right? Like, again, you can read what you want into the
00:11:57actions of these two companies. And I have a lot of thoughts that are a lot less optimistic than
00:12:00these two blog posts based on what they do, but the sense that like the way we build these tools
00:12:08and the way that they get used and the way that we manage them together, like one of
00:12:13Dario's big ideas was that we should have, I don't think he called it this, but essentially
00:12:17like a United Nations of AI where like a bunch of countries bands together to build and manage AI
00:12:23in a way that promotes liberal democracy around the world. Like, I don't know if that makes any
00:12:27feasible sense technologically, but that's the kind of thing we should be thinking about, right?
00:12:31That it's like, okay, we are, if this thing is going to be anywhere near as powerful as we think,
00:12:36that's the kind of stuff you have to start doing. And you have to start building the tools at the
00:12:40beginning to be like that. And I think, I think they both agree on that, whether, uh, both
00:12:47companies are interested in taking the time to do that in a crazy gold rush of AI. Uh, the answer
00:12:54seems to be no, mostly so far, but I like in the, in the long run, that at least strikes me as
00:13:00slightly encouraging. Totally. This is something I've been digging into recently. Um, just about
00:13:06for the listener, researchers who want to do safety research at these big companies require
00:13:13a certain amount of compute to do these studies, to figure it out and kind of a block of important
00:13:20safety researchers at open AI left because Altman promised them about 20% of the company's compute
00:13:26to do safety research. And they did not get that. And it really pissed them off. So I think, um,
00:13:31as Dario said, it is, you have to continue making this choice to align, to, to do that work. And
00:13:38I think that's important, important to watch, to see how, how seriously they're taking it because
00:13:41the researchers will tell you, they will yell about it. Yeah. They're not shy. No. Uh, all right.
00:13:48So any, any other agreements before we move to the stuff they don't agree on? No, I think that's it.
00:13:52All right. So that's all the stuff they agree on. What do they disagree on? What's first on your
00:13:55list? I would say that Dario is a little bit more scared of hyping up AI than Altman is. And I think
00:14:01that's kind of what we discussed already is that he's like, I, you know, I don't know if I should
00:14:05be doing this. Like, I don't know. This is not inevitable in Altman's like in a thousand days,
00:14:10hits the joint in a thousand days. This is all going to be so different, you know?
00:14:15So this is actually a good thing I was going to ask you about, which is why these two people wrote
00:14:21these two blog posts at this particular time. And you have a strong theory about why, and I want to
00:14:25know what that theory is. I have a strong theory and people like to talk about this topic and
00:14:29they're like, you know, motivations aside, I'm like, well, aren't motivations like the biggest
00:14:34piece here of why they're writing this at the time that they're writing this? Um, so Altman wrote his
00:14:39just around the time he was closing $6.6 billion in funding for open AI, the largest round for a
00:14:46private company in history that we know of. And then when I read this blog, the first thing I was
00:14:52thinking was like, Anthropic is also trying to raise money. We don't know how much yet,
00:14:55but Anthropic is also trying to raise buttloads of money. And that's, I think that's the timing
00:15:01of this is, you know, investors are kind of trepidatious because there's this problem of
00:15:08you need to sink so much money into these models and there's a lot of promise and hype involved
00:15:16that this will change the future. But at the moment it cannot even count the number of hours
00:15:22in strawberry. So, so I think 14,000 words is a good way to say, look, I promise. I mean, like,
00:15:30I guess he doesn't promise. He says it could or could not happen. We have to make those choices.
00:15:34We have to do the work. However, it is such a beautiful future if you give us billions of
00:15:38dollars. Yeah. Do you feel like spiritually this is not that different from like Travis Kalanick
00:15:44back in the day who was just like, once I'm, I have, you know, cars on the road with an app,
00:15:49but eventually robot cars are going to transform the way that every, and it's like, I feel like
00:15:55that is to some extent just the classic Silicon Valley story. Like you have to tell a story that
00:16:00is 10 times bigger than your actual story in order to get people to give you all this money
00:16:05because of like the structure of venture capital demands that you maybe be worth that much money.
00:16:10It's like, it's just all this weird stuff that eventually you sort of have to lie about the
00:16:15possibility for the thing that you're building in order to get the money to even try and maybe
00:16:20get to half of that over time. Yes, I a hundred percent agree. So you can imagine both of these
00:16:26blog posts as like hostage negotiations, right? Where they're like, it's like, they're like,
00:16:31I know I hear you. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Let me just, I'll put this out and then you can
00:16:34give me money and everything will be fine. Exactly. No, I think that it is, it is exactly
00:16:38the same. And luckily I work at the verge with a bunch of great people who have lived through a
00:16:43lot of bubbles and they're like, Hey, I remember the CEO saying almost exactly the same thing.
00:16:48Like Sergey Brin once said that their new health division at Google was going to cure death.
00:16:56That's in the article. Oh, and I put this, this is even a bit in Silicon Valley,
00:17:01the TV show where one of their, their caricature for a tech executive, he says, I don't know about
00:17:07you guys, but I don't want to live in a world where someone makes it a better place than we do.
00:17:11And that is that, I mean, it is just a tale as old as time. And unfortunately,
00:17:17the people who really believe in AI are like, this is different. And I'm like, I, I get it. I don't
00:17:23want to slam AI. I do think that it could prove to be really useful and it is useful in limited use
00:17:29cases today. However, it is not, we were talking about the spreading democracy thing. That's
00:17:34something I read in Dario's blog. I was like, okay, come on, man. You know, they do have to
00:17:39make these grand proclamations. It's the same as decades before them. Well, there's a certain
00:17:43amount of, uh, like, you know how in TV shows, when they get to like season five or six, they've
00:17:49made the stakes so high because you have to keep inventing new things to do to keep people interested.
00:17:54And you're like, well, we've already exhausted all of the interesting stuff. So like Fast and
00:17:58Furious nine is literally like in space. Like it's just the, the stakes creep is so real. And
00:18:03I feel like AI in general is such an incredible case of stakes creep where we have hit this point
00:18:09now where like everything has to be the biggest thing. It's sooner, but I said, it's fire. Like
00:18:13you can't, you can't come back from fire. And so like, this is all I read now is I just see these
00:18:19things and I'm like, this is Fast and Furious in space. Like this is, this is like die hard where
00:18:24he jumps a car into a helicopter. Like we've just, we've just lost our minds on how big all
00:18:28this stuff has to be because we're so desensitized to the rest of it. That is so good. I'm mad.
00:18:35Yes, this is Fast and Furious in space. Yeah, this is, I've spent a lot of time the last couple
00:18:39of days lying on the couch watching TV. So this is, this is, it's for work now. I get to spend
00:18:43all that time that I spent on the couch watching TV. Uh, what else, what else did they disagree on?
00:18:47What's next? Um, weren't you supposed to tell me one? All right, fine. I'll give you mine. Uh,
00:18:51the timing they disagree on in a way that I found actually very surprising. And I think
00:18:55this is one way in which, and again, this is just, it's two blog posts. What, what these men
00:19:01actually like are saying in meetings and what they believe in, even what they've said publicly
00:19:04sometimes differs from this. Uh, Sam Altman is less convinced that this is all going to happen
00:19:10tomorrow than Dario was, which I was very surprised by. Like his, his thing is basically
00:19:16we're a few years, this is Dario, a few years away from what he calls powerful AI because he
00:19:21doesn't like AGI, which fine. Uh, and then after that, all this stuff he's describing, all this
00:19:26stuff we've been talking about, all these changes to democracy, and we're going to cure all diseases.
00:19:29He puts that on a five to 10 year timeframe. Like that, this, like we're, we're looking at like,
00:19:34I don't know, 2040 at, at a, at a conservative guess for Dario as like everything about the
00:19:41world has completely changed forever because of AI. Sam is comparatively more restrained. Like
00:19:47he says, he says the next couple of decades, which again is like, it's soon, but it's not the same.
00:19:54He sort of immediate, like we're a couple of years away from the thing and then five more years away
00:19:57from it changing everything. Uh, and then, yeah, what does it, he says a few thousand days,
00:20:02which is such a like delightfully meaningless thing to say.
00:20:05I should check, but I feel like, yeah, maybe he does say a few thousand days because I thought
00:20:08he said a thousand days, but yes, I told an opening source of mine recently because they
00:20:13hadn't read that blog post. And I was like, well, Sam says in about a thousand days that we'll get
00:20:18this AGI. And he was like, really? Uh, I think it's going to be, well, he thought, he was like,
00:20:23it's going to be a lot sooner than that. He's like, Oh, I know, which is, which is just really
00:20:28interesting. Um, and I really want to know what the listener thinks, but like, I think most people
00:20:35think that this is bullshit. And then there's these people I live in San Francisco. I'm talking
00:20:39to these people all the time. I'm, you know, having drinks with them, going to dinners and
00:20:43they're like, yeah, it's inevitable, you know, next year. I'm like, where am I? Uh, so I don't
00:20:48know who to believe because I think that these people are really smart and they are building
00:20:51really smart systems. Like I believe that, but also, um, we're going to cure death, you know?
00:20:56Yeah. And we're all going to be in robo taxis, but like, again, this is, this is the game that
00:21:00we play. And I think like the, what's the Bill Gates thing. Everybody underestimates what they
00:21:04can do in a year or no overestimates what they can do in a year and underestimates what they can
00:21:07do in 10 years. I think there's probably a lot of that coming in AI. Like I, I would put a lot of
00:21:13money on, Oh, the over of one year from now. Certainly. Yeah. So what, what is the next one
00:21:21on your list of, of how they differ? So I think that just generally, these are completely different
00:21:27people. For instance, if you guys don't know, Dario left open AI because he was like, this is
00:21:33not safe and calculated and we need to make a more safe public benefit corporation that became
00:21:38anthropic. So I think the difference is just these two people. Dario is safety slowness, which is why
00:21:47I thought this blog was so out of place. And that's what made me think about funding. And Sam
00:21:52is more like hitting a joint in space fast and furious. This is going to happen. It's happening
00:21:58soon. I think that these are categorically different people attacking the same problem.
00:22:03They both want to build AGI. They're both building it in basically the same way. They both have big
00:22:08cloud partners. Um, but they're just completely different people approaching it much differently.
00:22:14Totally. I mean, I think the funniest thing about looking at these two blog posts side by side is
00:22:19how sort of embarrassingly underthought Sam's seems in comparison. Like it really is like,
00:22:26this is like a long tweet from somebody who got like a little high and had some thoughts about AI
00:22:30and Dario is like, my man just like wrote an academic thesis about AI and they might both
00:22:35be totally wrong. They might be wrong about different things, but like the, just the sheer
00:22:41like difference in level of thought here is just crazy. Like I just went back and found this.
00:22:47There's such a funny moment in Sam's blog post where he says, there are a lot of details we
00:22:52still have to figure out, but it's a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge.
00:22:55Deep learning works and we will solve the remaining problems. That's like Dario says
00:23:00like 11,000 words about those two sentences. It's just, it's just, it's just crazy to me.
00:23:05And I do think again, to some extent they're like trying to do different things. That's fine.
00:23:09But reading Sam's after reading Dario's was like, this is like a kindergarten level of thinking
00:23:16compared to that, which was striking to me. That's funny. The, the order that you read them
00:23:21because yeah, of course. And I think that's why it's hard for me to compare because this isn't
00:23:26like the only piece that Altman has wrote about AGI, but it is like timing wise, easy to compare
00:23:31them. And I agree. It is a thesis about, you know, I think he wants to genuinely inform Dario,
00:23:39wants to genuinely inform the public of his thinking. And he talked about how he's been
00:23:43writing this since August. He's gone through a bunch of different versions and yeah, it definitely
00:23:46seems like Sam just fired this off and here we are. Yeah. And that's fine. Who among us hasn't
00:23:51just fired off a blog post that too many people read, right? Like it's, it's a, it's an occupational
00:23:55hazard. I will say one thought that I had in this was that it makes a lot of sense to me why
00:24:02Anthropic is building better products than open AI right now. Like, like consumer products. I mean,
00:24:07you go through and like Dario's is just full of ideas about things a person might do with AI and
00:24:12ways that they might be used. The only one Sam mentions is like it's going to be a personal
00:24:17assistant that will help you accomplish tasks. And like, fine, everybody has that idea. We've
00:24:21had that idea for decades. Uh, but like, it's, it's a bit of a galaxy brain take to just read
00:24:28that out of two blog posts. But like, I think Anthropic is just destroying open AI when it
00:24:32comes to actually building good products for people to use. And, uh, you can sort of see that
00:24:37from these two. I don't even think that's that hot a take. Claude is better than Chad GPT right now.
00:24:41It just is. I agree. I agree. Um, keep, I keep name dropping podcasts I've been on recently,
00:24:47but I said this on pivot, they were asking me what's my favorite, what's my favorite. And I was
00:24:50Claude, obviously Claude is so much better than the competition. It's crazy.
00:24:54Yeah. Yeah. And I think the question of what is the underlying technology is,
00:24:58is going to be like a forever game of leapfrog between a bunch of companies,
00:25:01principally these two. Uh, but right now, like Anthropic is just a mile ahead in terms of
00:25:08actually building good consumer products. And you can see it in Dario's stuff. Like
00:25:11he has ideas about how people might use it in a way that I'm not sure. There's not a lot of
00:25:15evidence that open AI does. Right. So you're counting Gemini out.
00:25:19Gemini is just so its own thing that it's, they're just like, Google is just like over here
00:25:24kind of like winning Nobel prizes. And I still like my true galaxy brain take is,
00:25:30I think Google is just going to win all of this and it's not going to matter. And we're
00:25:33going to have to reckon with that sometime very soon, but, uh, that's for another day.
00:25:38I have a lot of, I'm also like, I've been fighting that fight for too long now. So I have to die on
00:25:44the Google is further ahead than anybody realizes Hill. And I think I'm okay dying on that Hill,
00:25:48but we'll, we'll see. Um, all right, real quick, some, some news and then I'm gonna let you go
00:25:53here. Uh, we, we had two scoops last week about upcoming new big stuff from both open AI and
00:26:01Google. Tell me what's going on. Yeah. So my scoop with Tom Warren,
00:26:05our Microsoft reporter was about how by the end of the year, open AI is planning to release Orion,
00:26:11which you can think of as GPT five, it would be the successor to GPT four. Uh, so they're just in
00:26:19September, we wrote an article that they threw the researchers through a party for finishing
00:26:23training the model, uh, at Microsoft, they are preparing the compute to, to host Orion.
00:26:28Microsoft gets it first. Um, and then they're going to release it to limited partners so they
00:26:33can, you know, find their own use to use cases, find the features that they want to build with
00:26:38Orion, uh, which is the codename of the project Orion. So that's supposed to happen by the end
00:26:44of the year. Um, Altman, I had my first real run in with tech executive hits joint and takes to
00:26:51Twitter. Uh, um, he called it fake news, which, um, it's not. And I, I said this at the top of
00:26:59the episode and I'll say it again. One of these people was fired for lying. Um, so yeah, that's,
00:27:07that's what's coming out by the end of the year. Uh, it's of course subject to change. Uh, and then
00:27:13more interestingly in December, Google, Alex Heath, my colleague, Alex Heath wrote this in
00:27:17command line. He wrote that Google is planning to release its next big Gemini model in December. So
00:27:24open AI loves to front run Google. So that's something that's something to watch every time.
00:27:29If Google's going to have a big announcement, you can almost certainly expect open AI is going to
00:27:34fire somebody or release a big new feature or something. Yeah. I do think, I mean, to your
00:27:41point about like, who's really going to win here, uh, open AI certainly thinks Google is its main
00:27:45competition and Anthropic is just kind of over on the side doing a different thing. And that
00:27:51might turn out to be true. It's certainly true right now in terms of like shine and resources,
00:27:55but, uh, I think Anthropic is closer behind than it gets credit for in a lot of ways.
00:28:01Totally. I agree. And okay. Have you ever watched Mad Men?
00:28:05Yeah. Do you know the elevator scene where he's like, I feel bad for you. And he's like,
00:28:08I don't think about you at all. That's very much Google and open AI's relationship.
00:28:12I think. Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. Google is yeah. Google is not super
00:28:17worried about it. Like they're just after winning Nobel prizes. Like it's Google is going to be
00:28:20fine. Right. Demis Hassabis will eventually write an even longer blog post and we'll be back doing
00:28:26this again. I'm sure. Oh my gosh. I can't wait. And part of that, I forgot to mention that Alex
00:28:31wrote that Demis is not super thrilled about the capabilities of its Gemini model right now,
00:28:36the next one that's supposed to be releasing. So that'll be interesting. I think I would love a way
00:28:40that's more clear than benchmarks of how to weigh these against each other. I don't think we're
00:28:45there yet. And I just don't trust self-evaluated benchmarks in a lot of cases. Uh, but yeah,
00:28:51I'm excited to see how these all stack up in December. It'll be fascinating because we've
00:28:55been at this now for, I don't know, a year and change where Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta
00:29:03have all just continued to release better and better models. And we're at the point where like
00:29:07every two weeks somebody is releasing a slightly better model. And I've been asking people forever
00:29:13when it's going to stop being so easy to improve the state of the art. Uh, and everybody I've
00:29:18talked to at least it's kind of like, I don't know, it would be fascinating if it started to
00:29:22be these. If somebody comes out already behind, that might change things. You know, that's funny
00:29:28because the AI people I've talked to just last week were like, I think that we're hitting that
00:29:32point. We are finally hitting that point where it is getting harder to scale these or to make them
00:29:38better than before. Because for a minute it was really easy to just like leapfrog, leapfrog,
00:29:41leapfrog, but we're starting to slow down in that sense. But I guess we'll see in December. Yeah,
00:29:46it might be a messy holiday season in the, in the AI world. There might be a lot of Googlers
00:29:50working over Christmas. Typical. All right, Kylie, thank you as always. Thank you for having me.
00:29:57All right, we got to take a break and then we are going to come back
00:30:00and we're going to talk about earthquakes. We'll be right back.
00:30:08Welcome back. Will Poore is here. Will. Hello. Hello. What are we doing here? Well,
00:30:13you've I know earthquakes. That's all I've got. What are we doing here? Yes. Um, so to start us
00:30:18off, um, I have a terrible, terrible sound that I want to play. Our favorite. Which is the best
00:30:24way to start a podcast. I I'm told is to make people take off their headphones as quickly as
00:30:29possible. So with that in mind. Okay, that's enough. Okay. Can I tell you where my brain
00:30:47immediately just went? Yes, please. A mix of jackhammer on the streets of New York city. Yeah.
00:30:53And like the, the Sarlacc pit in star Wars opening up like the really creaky metal door opening up
00:31:01plus jackhammer. That's not fun. I didn't like that. I mean, it's spooky season as we record
00:31:07this. So that all kind of works. Uh, so what, what is this? What am I listening to? That is
00:31:13the sound of my house getting seismically retrofit, which is basically like earthquake
00:31:18proofing. Uh, I wanted to get my house earthquake proof. I, because I live in Seattle, which is
00:31:24earthquake country. I am also very terrified of earthquakes. And so I was told by a lot of
00:31:30experts that this is a thing that I should do. And so a few weeks ago, uh, a bunch of people
00:31:36came to my house and crawled under my crawl space and drilled a whole bunch of bolts into
00:31:43concrete right beneath my feet. And I thought it was a good idea to try to work from home
00:31:48while this was happening. Sure. So, which lasted about five minutes, but, uh, this, this is me
00:31:54trying to work from home. They are crawling around in the crawl space and drilling very large bolts
00:32:02into the concrete foundation of the house, which I get the whole house is vibrating.
00:32:09Like I can feel this work in my teeth and I need to get out of here. It was a bad day. I had a bad
00:32:17day. First of all, incredible podcaster instincts to say this horrible noise is happening. I must
00:32:24record it. The people must know. I applaud you for this. Also, why, why are you doing this? Why
00:32:30did you do this to your house? So this is sort of the culmination of just like a long journey
00:32:36between me and earthquakes. I lived in San Francisco, the Bay area for like 10 years.
00:32:41And that's where I developed my, uh, my fear of earthquakes. I had reason to, I felt them
00:32:47a bunch and I was told constantly to prepare for the Bay area, big one, which in the case
00:32:53of San Francisco would be a repeat of that famous 1906 quake along the San Andreas fault that
00:33:00burned down a lot of the city among other things. Um, so I spent a lot of time thinking
00:33:04about that in San Francisco and then moved to Seattle, which seismically is more quiet day to
00:33:09day. Like I've lived here for four and a half years. I haven't felt anything, but it's also
00:33:16very much earthquake country and not feeling anything is a real false sense of security.
00:33:21Did you ever read, there was a New Yorker article that came out about 10 years ago and the title
00:33:27is a really big one. Yes. Yes. This piece scared me more than maybe any magazine story. It was
00:33:35very good and terrifying. What do you remember from that story? Wait, okay. Can I go find a
00:33:39line for you in this story that I read that I still occasionally think about to see the full
00:33:44scale of the devastation when that tsunami recedes, you would need to be in the international
00:33:48space station. That's just a sentence I think about a lot. And this isn't the New Yorker.
00:33:52This is not a thing that is like prone to hyperbole and intensity. Can I read you another
00:33:57sentence now? I'm looking at this piece and it's scaring me all over again. This, uh,
00:34:02this is fun for me. I'm, I'm having a great time. Uh, here in Virginia,
00:34:06geologically ancient Virginia says Ospac estimates that in the I five corridor, it will take between
00:34:12one and three months after the earthquake to restore electricity a month to a year to restore
00:34:15drinking water and sewer service six months to a year to restore major highways and 18 months to
00:34:19restore healthcare facilities on the coast. Those numbers go up. What? Yeah. There's a quote,
00:34:25there's a quote somewhere in there that someone said effectively everything of everything West
00:34:30of I five is going to be toast that I think those were the words I live West of I five. Uh, yeah.
00:34:37And again, this is like sober magazine article that is essentially like we're on borrowed time
00:34:42so I can understand how you would become somewhere between rationally and irrationally terrified of
00:34:47what's happening here. Yes. So let me give you all the other like the, the full rational
00:34:51cause to be concerned. Okay. So at some point, probably roughly maybe in the next 500 years,
00:34:58but also maybe tomorrow cause that's how earthquakes work. There's, there will be this
00:35:02mega thrust quake in the Pacific Northwest. It's going to be felt from Northern California all the
00:35:07way up to British Columbia. It's on a fault that's called the Cascadia subduction zone that runs
00:35:13North South all up the West coast just off the coast. Uh, it could hit category nine on the
00:35:19Richter scale. It'll produce maybe five minutes of shaking in Seattle, which is bananas. It's going
00:35:26to do a ton of damage all on its own. And like you remember, it's going to produce this even more
00:35:31devastating tsunami all across the Pacific Northwest, right? The earthquake is the first
00:35:35thing, but then it's what it does to the water that causes the worst of it all. Absolutely.
00:35:40Okay. So really, really very bad news. And you live there on purpose. And I moved there
00:35:46intentionally after I read this article. And so that I don't know what that says.
00:35:51So that's the very, very bad news. The good news is I not long after I moved here, I heard about
00:35:58this earthquake early warning system called shake alert that had just gone fully live all up and
00:36:03down the West coast. So there's no way to predict earthquakes. That's not a thing. That's not a
00:36:08science right now, but scientists can detect them right as they're beginning. And the internet moves
00:36:14a whole lot faster than shaking from an earthquake. So if there is a big quake today, and I happen to
00:36:21be far enough away from the epicenter, like if it's off the coast, I'll get an alert on my phone
00:36:27that says there's an earthquake coming and it might be a few seconds, or it might be a minute
00:36:31or two before the shaking reaches me, which is awesome for me and my fear of earthquakes.
00:36:37But the more I've looked into this, the more I realized that making a detection and warning
00:36:41system that's both reliable and fast enough to be effective turns into this massive, massive
00:36:48challenge. And in a lot of ways, detecting the earthquake is the easy part. The hard part is
00:36:54using existing technology to notify a ton of people all at once about this disaster that
00:37:01might only be seconds away. So I figured the best way to understand all this earthquake early
00:37:12warning stuff is just to follow the chain of technology from point to point, basically how
00:37:17an earthquake is detected, how an alert message gets generated from that, and how it gets all
00:37:23the way to my phone, which turned into this fun goose chase all around Seattle. And it started
00:37:28with this small kind of creepy shed next to a wastewater treatment plant right here in town.
00:37:34So let's pop out, I'll show you everything, and then we can chat.
00:37:44Okay, let's try and find a light switch. Is this going to want to stay open? Oh, that's right.
00:37:50Oh, that flickering is not fun. The wax, good thing it's not a video. Yeah, right.
00:37:56You're hearing Doug Gibbons. He's a field technician at the University of Washington,
00:38:00or the UW as we locals like to call it. He offered to meet me here at this shed and show me some
00:38:06earthquake surveillance hardware. Yeah, so what we have here, this is a Titan strong motion
00:38:11accelerometer that is bolted to the foundation of the building here. The device is this plain green
00:38:18box like the size of a loaf of bread. So if the ground starts to shake, electronics inside this
00:38:24thing will capture a three dimensional snapshot of the movement. It's oriented north to south.
00:38:30And inside of there, there are actually three different seismometers. There's one placed
00:38:34in the north and south direction, measuring shaking on that axis, one placed on the east
00:38:38and west direction, and one placed in the vertical direction. Doug plugged a laptop in
00:38:44and he showed me the raw output of the seismometers. It's basically three different
00:38:48graphs that show the amplitude of motion at this one spot. It's basically like a digital version of
00:38:54those old earthquake readouts you see in movies, the needle that scribbles back and forth on that
00:38:59rolling piece of paper. Oh yeah, the one that kind of looks like a lie detector test. Yeah,
00:39:03yeah. It's small and then it's huge and then it's small again. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Bigger scribbles,
00:39:08bigger earthquake, three of them for three axes of motion. Got it. Then it's so sensitive,
00:39:12it can even just detect me just bending my knees up and down. Literally one little shift in weight
00:39:17and two of the graphs went. So that is, wow, that is incredibly sensitive. That's wild. Yeah, it's
00:39:23fun. So it must just be doing things all the time. It is, and it's constantly feeding that to places
00:39:29that we'll get to soon, but it's taking samples many times a second constantly. So over the past
00:39:3610 years or so, field techs like Doug have installed maybe 1,500 sensors like this all up
00:39:42and down the West Coast. It's part of this huge effort led by the U.S. Geological Survey to keep
00:39:48tabs on all the seismic activity in this part of the country. And it's sensors like this one that
00:39:54power ShakeAlert, the early warning system for people like me. And we now are confident that
00:39:59we've got enough instruments to issue good warnings to people. So here I feel like we
00:40:05should stop and just do a little earthquakes 101 because it'll help a lot with everything
00:40:10we're about to talk about. So when an earthquake happens, when two parts of the Earth's crust
00:40:16suddenly slip past each other, there are two kinds of waves that ripple out from the epicenter.
00:40:22They're called the primary and secondary waves, or P waves and S waves. The primary waves move
00:40:28really fast, like a little more than three and a half miles per second, but they're too weak to do
00:40:34any damage. You probably wouldn't even notice them. The secondary waves are the ones that can
00:40:40really cause harm, but those move about half as fast as the P waves. And that's the big opportunity
00:40:48for early warning. All those really sensitive seismometers like the one I just saw, they can
00:40:53pick up those P waves when the real shaking is still miles away. Let me put this all in real
00:41:02world terms because I think that'll help it make more sense. So let's take this really big one,
00:41:07that 9.0 earthquake that I am completely petrified of. That could start anywhere up and down the west
00:41:13coast. Say it starts due west of Seattle. This is like worst case scenario for me. Better to just
00:41:18face your fears head on. That's about 135 miles west of Seattle off the coast. The Cascadia Fault
00:41:25is about 40 miles offshore, so that means that those first P waves have a good 40 miles to get
00:41:31ahead of the actual shaking. So when the P waves ping those coastal sensors, the real earthquake
00:41:38is still about 10 seconds away from the shore, which means it's 40 or 50 seconds away from
00:41:44downtown Seattle. So that chunk of time, let's call it 45 seconds or so, that's the window of
00:41:51time that ShakeAlert has to warn this major metropolitan city that this huge natural disaster
00:41:58just appeared out of nowhere. So step by step, here's how they actually do that. When the P waves
00:42:06hit those first sensors, those little seismometer graphs spike, and that data gets forwarded
00:42:12straight on to U-Dub over radio or hardwire internet or satellite, really whatever is
00:42:18available right where the sensors are located. And that part happens really fast. Within a fraction
00:42:25of a second, within a second or less, we want this data to head back to U-Dub. And that's from
00:42:31shaking in the ground to the sensor recording it, creating a packet, sending it to a communications
00:42:37device, that communications device either sending it through a radio wave or through the internet
00:42:42back to U-Dub. It lands at a server on site at the university. This one. So we just walked into
00:42:49kind of a small-ish room that has a bunch of computer racks in it, including a whole bunch
00:42:55of computers that just have green blinky lights. All the data from the field comes in here
00:43:01continuously and then gets processed. We're now in the basement of an Earth and Space Sciences
00:43:08building at U-Dub in Seattle. My tour guide is Renata Hartog. She helped build ShakeAlert's
00:43:13algorithms. The servers in here, along with others in northern and southern California,
00:43:19run a pair of algorithms that analyze any incoming quake. So one algorithm, it just looks
00:43:26for, it just looks at the very beginning of the signal. And then it tries to based on the
00:43:34amplitudes. So it associates it into, oh, this is an earthquake, just has a point on the map
00:43:40and an estimate of what the magnitude of the earthquake was. Basically, it's like a snap
00:43:45judgment of the epicenter and the magnitude of the quake. They have the second algorithm that's
00:43:50slower, but it can model the whole quake beyond just that first point on the map, which is a
00:43:56thing I never knew about earthquakes. Incidentally, the epicenter is really just the starting point.
00:44:01As an earthquake grows, it can get bigger and bigger as more miles of the fault lines slip.
00:44:07And that means longer shaking and more people affected.
00:44:11So for example, a large earthquake off the Pacific coast here on the Cascadia subduction zone,
00:44:18if it starts somewhere on the southern end, it will take minutes probably before that whole
00:44:24fault plane has ruptured all the way from the southern end to the northern end.
00:44:29And finally, based on all of that, ShakeAlert estimates the geographic area that will get hit
00:44:34the hardest, and it creates an alert to be delivered to phones. And that part happens
00:44:39super fast, too, by the way. The first alert leaves the server after just a second or two
00:44:44of processing. And if the quake keeps growing like they do, it can send out additional waves
00:44:50of alerts a couple times a second. Okay, wait, so hold on. Do the math for me right now. Where are
00:44:56we in terms of lag? I'm imagining the P waves are going, the S waves are going. Where are the waves
00:45:04and where are the alerts at this moment in time? So this is what I kept trying to do as I was
00:45:08having these conversations. I was trying to add up all of the lag from the beginning to now. And
00:45:14so I kept asking all of these people about all these steps. How long does this take? How long
00:45:18does this take? And everyone was like, I don't know, a second less than a second. Everything
00:45:24that we've talked about so far is just super fast. The sensors picking up the P waves,
00:45:29sending that information over the internet to UW, the algorithm running and making decisions,
00:45:34all of that added up is like two-ish seconds. So in our scenario, the earthquake is still like
00:45:4240 or 45 seconds away from me in Seattle. Okay, that's pretty good. So it's like I'm
00:45:47imagining sort of Jaws music as it's like slowly creeping towards us as we get here. But we're
00:45:53still ahead of the game here. We still have a solid chunk of time to, I mean, 45 seconds isn't
00:45:58forever, but it's something. It is something if it actually gives me 45 seconds, because there's
00:46:04one other link in this chain that we have not talked about yet. And that's the alerts getting
00:46:10from this server to my cell phone. And that's where things kind of get messy.
00:46:19So the deal is, we already do have this really good system in a lot of ways for getting
00:46:25alerts out to a gazillion cell phones all at once. It's called the Wireless Emergency Alert
00:46:31System or WEA. So if you've ever gotten an amber alert on your phone or a tornado warning or some
00:46:37other kind of emergency ping, that's probably WEA. I'm sure you've seen these things before.
00:46:42The presidential alerts are versions of this. Is this the one that also failed spectacularly
00:46:47in Hawaii and scared a bunch of people that something like a bomb was incoming?
00:46:51Oh, the ballistic missile. Yeah, the incoming ballistic missile, the alert that was just like,
00:46:56hug your loved ones. And then they were like, sorry, never mind.
00:47:01That was WEA?
00:47:02Yeah. Yeah. That was WEA.
00:47:03Okay. So we do know how to do this.
00:47:05Exactly. That was developed back in 2012 by the federal government. So this has been around for a
00:47:10while. And it uses this kind of funny technology called cell broadcast. And basically, it uses
00:47:17cell towers like giant bullhorns. They just blare out the simple digital message to any device
00:47:24that's programmed to pick it up. So this is great for earthquake alerts because there's no need to
00:47:30opt in or download anything. If your cell phone is in the danger zone when an earthquake hits,
00:47:36you'll get an alert on your phone as long as your phone and your carrier support WEA,
00:47:41which somewhere between most and all of them do.
00:47:44Our WEA messages that get delivered to cell phones are built for 90 characters, because we know that
00:47:52the majority of phones, even non-smartphones, will be able to get those alerts. If you go above those
00:47:5890 characters, people might not be able to get them. So we're in the position of crafting messages
00:48:04so that we can make even people who still use flip phones to be able to access earthquake early
00:48:09warning.
00:48:10That's Bob DeGroot. He leads the ShakeAlert operations team out of Pasadena, California.
00:48:16He says that WEA is the single biggest best channel for reaching the 50 million or so people
00:48:22on the West Coast. But at the same time, he's also really aware of its Achilles heel.
00:48:28When the wireless emergency alert system was developed, it didn't have ShakeAlert speeds in
00:48:35mind. Operating at the horizon of minutes was sort of, wow, that's fast. But now we're asking a
00:48:43system to operate in matters of seconds and fractions of a second. WEA is just not as quick
00:48:50as the rest of the ShakeAlert system that we stepped through. In fact, when ShakeAlert was
00:48:55in development, no one even knew what WEA's lag was. Bob's team actually set up these two tests
00:49:02in California, where they pushed out an alert to a specific area and then measured how long
00:49:08it took to reach their phones. We took a bunch of cell phones, including mine and including my
00:49:12colleagues. We put numbers on them and then laid them on the table and then took a GoPro basically
00:49:19and filmed all those phones. He sent me the video of this test, and it's really funny. It's this
00:49:25long table with a whole row of different kinds of phones spread out. And a lot of people are all
00:49:31gathered around these phones waiting for the test to start. So we waited for the alerts to
00:49:36come through and the phones lit up when the alerts came through. The very fastest turnaround that
00:49:47they recorded was around four seconds. The median was in the six to 12 second range. A bunch of
00:49:54phones just never got the alert. And then there were residents within the test area who reported
00:49:59an even wider range of latencies. So the point is, even with that controlled test,
00:50:05WEA is still this really frustrating black box. How do we not know better? I mean, this seems like
00:50:12A, solve technology, B, very important, and C, a thing we've been doing and using for a long time.
00:50:20It seems like this should be a totally known quantity at this point. I had that same feeling,
00:50:27and it took me attempting to map out all of the people involved in WEA to understand that
00:50:33it's just not one thing. It's not this technology that is implemented by one organization that can
00:50:39be optimized throughout this whole chain. There's the federal government, there are telecom companies,
00:50:45there are handset manufacturers, and every carrier might handle implementation of this standard
00:50:51differently. They might prioritize it differently on their networks. All of this is voluntary for
00:50:57them, so it's kind of whatever systems they've set up. And so there seem to be all these differences
00:51:02in delivery. There's different kinds of lag across the 2G and 3G and 4G and 5G networks,
00:51:09across different styles of phones. Bob said that a burner phone that he got at the 7-Eleven turned
00:51:15out to be the fastest delivery mechanism. So if you really want to be on point with WEA,
00:51:21just go get yourself a burner phone. No, babe, it's not a burner. This is my earthquake phone.
00:51:29So it's just a little bit of a mess. There's no built-in way to measure end-to-end latency.
00:51:34And again, this wasn't built for earthquake early warning. So no one in any part of this process
00:51:41was ever told, you have to find ways to shave off every second possible from this system.
00:51:47And again, we've been tossing this 45-second number around in our scenario. And so given that,
00:51:54a second here or there might not seem like a big deal. But the thing you got to keep in mind is
00:52:00that that's the amount of time that ShakeAlert has to notify me in Seattle about a Cascadia
00:52:07earthquake. First of all, even in that scenario, there are a lot of people that live closer to the
00:52:11coast. So they're not going to have 45 seconds to play with. And even for me in Seattle,
00:52:17there are other faults to worry about. And good evening. A rather typical late morning
00:52:23in the state of Washington was turned suddenly into a rumbling and rolling panic. An earthquake
00:52:28measuring 6.8 has left millions shaken. The damage is widespread. The injured list continues to
00:52:35change and at least one person has lost their life. That was the 2001 Nisqually quake. It hit
00:52:43right underneath the Seattle area and it shook the whole region for about 45 seconds. It ultimately
00:52:49did maybe $2 billion worth of damage. It's one of the costliest quakes in U.S. history.
00:52:55And the fault that produced it is really busy. Before 2001, it produced similar quakes in 1965,
00:53:031949, and 1927. That's basically every 20 to 40 years. Those are our most typical significant
00:53:14earthquakes, I guess you would say. That's a once-in-a-generation event as opposed to
00:53:19the Cascadia earthquake, which is once in the life of a nation kind of event.
00:53:26Gabriel Lotto works on engagement with the ShakeAlert team here at UW.
00:53:31And he explained to me that the fault responsible for the Nisqually quake
00:53:34sits a good 40 miles below the Seattle area.
00:53:38So let's say you have a repeat of the Nisqually earthquake today.
00:53:42That earthquake starts deeper down, but it's right below our feet,
00:53:46specifically right below the city of Olympia.
00:53:50Since the waves are coming directly up from below us, it means more of the region gets hit all at
00:53:56once. And for this one, we just get a lot less warning time.
00:54:00As the area of shaking spreads out, you could get
00:54:045, 10, 15 seconds, depending on where you are exactly.
00:54:08Just to bring that all home, 5 or 10 or 15 seconds is roughly the amount of lag time
00:54:14that's in the WEA system. So for this quake, the one that I will very likely experience
00:54:20myself in the coming decades, that squishiness in WEA
00:54:24could determine whether or not a lot of people get warnings in time.
00:54:29There's definitely a deeply bleak world in which you can imagine getting this notification
00:54:35like two or three minutes after the earthquake has hit.
00:54:38Yeah.
00:54:39Which sounds both very plausible and really, truly awful.
00:54:42And just, yeah, just the biggest knife twist.
00:54:45So it sounds like if WEA is not the answer, or at least not the perfectly tunable answer,
00:54:53are we just on our own? Is there just not a better system here?
00:54:56WEA is not the whole answer, clearly. But the people building ShakeAlert are thinking way
00:55:03past WEA to all of the possible platforms for delivering a message like this.
00:55:08So for example, a team at UC Berkeley built a smartphone app called MyShake.
00:55:14I have it on my phone, and it works like a normal smartphone app.
00:55:17I share my location with it, and if I'm within the alert radius of an earthquake,
00:55:22it sends me a push notification.
00:55:24And push notifications generally arrive in one to two seconds, much better than five to 15.
00:55:31Okay, so this makes a lot of sense to me, and is one of the things I was going to ask,
00:55:35is I feel like for you as a Seattleite, if somebody was like, hey, download this app,
00:55:43and give it your location, and we will tell you if there's an earthquake coming,
00:55:48that is the single best case I've ever heard in history for why you should download an app.
00:55:54Absolutely.
00:55:55But I guess there are challenges there too, but it does make sense to me that you would say,
00:56:01just do this one thing, and then we can do something much better.
00:56:05Yes, absolutely. And the ShakeAlert people are shouting that from the rooftops.
00:56:10The fact that it's opt-in versus opt-out for something like this means that out of the gates,
00:56:15you're capturing such a smaller chunk of the population that you are otherwise.
00:56:21There's just no getting around that.
00:56:23The ShakeAlert team has been at this for a while,
00:56:25and there are now three and a half million or so registered users of this app,
00:56:31which is awesome and huge progress.
00:56:32But again, there are 50 million people on the West Coast.
00:56:36So it's getting people signed on to this before a big earthquake becomes this
00:56:43consumer tech problem. It becomes an app development problem.
00:56:46It becomes a social problem. It just gets messier.
00:56:49Now, Google has been thinking about this for a while, and they have done one better.
00:56:55They baked ShakeAlert into Android at the OS level,
00:56:59which gives them the power to issue a couple of different kinds of alerts
00:57:03that you can't do just with an app.
00:57:05If it's a smaller earthquake, it just looks like a push notification.
00:57:10If it's a larger earthquake, it's a full-screen takeover.
00:57:14It will break through silent mode or anything like that.
00:57:18You have no choice but to look at this thing.
00:57:20It makes a sound. It takes over your screen.
00:57:22It buzzes.
00:57:24And it's possible to turn off these alerts, but they are on by default,
00:57:28which I think is a really good thing.
00:57:30When life safety is on the line, yeah,
00:57:34you don't want to mess around with whether or not a user will pay attention to an alert.
00:57:41Apple so far has not built anything like that into iOS.
00:57:46There is a way to speed up WIA alerts,
00:57:48but it's this toggle that's buried in the iOS system settings.
00:57:51I will put a link in the show notes about that.
00:57:54I did ask Apple about all of this, but they didn't get me any more information.
00:57:59Anyway, the point is there are these other ways that you can get an alert,
00:58:03but it depends on where you are and what phone you have and what you're proactively signed up for.
00:58:09So this is where everything outside of WIA just gets really piecemeal.
00:58:13Right.
00:58:14Yeah, it's an interesting adoption problem,
00:58:17because you get to a point where you're like, okay, even if we solve this problem,
00:58:21the only way to get people reliably to download an app is to promise them free,
00:58:27cheap clothing from China.
00:58:29I will pass that along to them.
00:58:31Yeah.
00:58:33But you mentioned three and a half million people have downloaded this thing.
00:58:36The system seems to be sort of fully realized.
00:58:39Has it been tested?
00:58:41Have we been through a ShakeAlert earthquake before?
00:58:43Yes.
00:58:44In California, there have actually been a lot of them
00:58:47that have put all of these different platforms to the test.
00:58:50Actually, just back in September, there was a pretty decent quake in Malibu,
00:58:55and it all worked.
00:58:56And some people got like 20 seconds of warning,
00:58:58which is enough time to take cover.
00:59:00It's enough time to get away from windows that like you can do a lot in 20 seconds.
00:59:05Overall, the rollout has not been perfect.
00:59:08Back in 2021, there was another quake in Southern California
00:59:12that ShakeAlert ended up misinterpreting as multiple smaller quakes.
00:59:16So a lot of people just never got that warning.
00:59:20In some ways, though, the mistake that experts worry about even more
00:59:24is a false positive, an erroneous alert.
00:59:27Here's Gabriel again.
00:59:28If we tell people there is an earthquake and there isn't,
00:59:32we lose credibility.
00:59:35And that reduces public safety,
00:59:38because then you have the boy who cried wolf syndrome.
00:59:40Right.
00:59:41That did happen once in California back in 2020.
00:59:45USGS had to send a follow-up message,
00:59:47which I kind of love because it read, and I quote,
00:59:50ShakeAlert message cancelled, investigating.
00:59:53If you protected yourself, well done.
00:59:56It's almost like passive-aggressive.
00:59:59Yeah, it's a little bit like this was kind of a test in a way.
01:00:03Gotcha.
01:00:05Which is great, but also really not great,
01:00:08because as we all well know, we have spent years and years and years
01:00:13getting really good at ignoring annoying app notifications.
01:00:18And if earthquake alerts get that reputation,
01:00:21then the whole system collapses.
01:00:24Then people will turn off their notifications.
01:00:26They will go into their phone settings,
01:00:28dig around and find out how to turn these off.
01:00:30Right, right.
01:00:31But even without any mistakes,
01:00:34alerting becomes this kind of funny mix of art and science.
01:00:39With any automated system like this,
01:00:40there is always going to be some alerting threshold,
01:00:44a preset that says above this amount of shaking,
01:00:47we'll warn people, and beneath it, we won't.
01:00:49But finding that threshold is a social problem more than anything else.
01:00:54I actually happened to be in Los Angeles
01:00:56for a couple of back-to-back earthquakes back in the summer of 2019.
01:01:01And back then, ShakeAlert was this experimental app.
01:01:03It was just for people in LA, so I didn't have it.
01:01:07But for those earthquakes, actually, no one got an alert
01:01:10because the shaking just wasn't heavy enough.
01:01:13But the response from the public was,
01:01:16we just made this earthquake alarm.
01:01:18Why didn't we use it?
01:01:19They felt shaking.
01:01:20They didn't get an alert.
01:01:21They've been told that there was this awesome earthquake
01:01:24early warning system that was going online.
01:01:27So that turned into a whole thing.
01:01:29And the feedback from the public ended up helping USGS
01:01:32decide to lower some of the alerting thresholds.
01:01:35So that's just one example of one quake.
01:01:38But the point is, there's always going to be these edge cases,
01:01:42and they're going to have to keep dialing in these thresholds.
01:01:46And poor Bob DeGroote from USGS hears about it
01:01:50every time there's an earthquake.
01:01:51I manage our ShakeAlertX social media account at USGS underscore ShakeAlert.
01:01:58And I always entertain these questions of people saying,
01:02:03I got the alert.
01:02:04I didn't get the alert.
01:02:05Why did I not get the alert?
01:02:06I didn't feel very much at all.
01:02:07Why the heck did I get an alert?
01:02:09And of course, insert your favorite word in response.
01:02:15Generally, most people are good-natured,
01:02:16and I love interacting with people on X
01:02:18because they have really good, genuine questions
01:02:20that are very, very thoughtful.
01:02:22But sometimes people get a little excited.
01:02:26As somebody who lived in San Francisco for a bunch of years
01:02:29and thus experienced San Francisco earthquake Twitter,
01:02:33I feel Bob's pain.
01:02:35It's both a good time on the internet,
01:02:36and as somebody whose job is the earthquakes,
01:02:38I feel for Bob.
01:02:40Right, yeah.
01:02:41If you're the one all those tweets are going to,
01:02:42that's a different story.
01:02:43Yeah, exactly.
01:02:44But I feel like if I'm thinking about this big picture,
01:02:48you've sort of described a bunch of pieces that we need
01:02:52that all exist, right?
01:02:53Everybody has a device in their pocket
01:02:56that can, in theory, be alerted.
01:02:58We have the apps.
01:02:59The systems are getting better.
01:03:00You were saying the sensors are all over the place.
01:03:03But there are a lot of different parties
01:03:06required to get this together, right?
01:03:08You mentioned the carriers and the operating system companies
01:03:12and the government and so on and so forth.
01:03:14Do we just have a stalemate here
01:03:18where we're going to have a bunch of possibilities,
01:03:20but it would require somebody to just put them all together,
01:03:23and that is harder than it seems like it ought to be?
01:03:26We have this weird bureaucracy,
01:03:28collective action problem with earthquake alerts.
01:03:31Well, so all of this energy has been put into cell phones
01:03:35because that is the obvious massive delivery mechanism.
01:03:39Right.
01:03:40And so getting into the weeds around cell phones
01:03:43has taken up a lot of time and energy.
01:03:46And there are places, especially around WEA,
01:03:49where it does feel like, okay, it is what it is.
01:03:51You know what this makes me think of, by the way?
01:03:53This is a total random aside,
01:03:54but do you remember early in the pandemic
01:03:57when Apple and Google started to work together
01:04:00on some of the notification systems
01:04:02for people who had been exposed?
01:04:04Yes.
01:04:04And just the sheer amount of work and wrangling it took
01:04:08to get that stuff to work and talk to each other
01:04:11and make sense.
01:04:11And obviously, earthquakes are a big deal.
01:04:14That took a literal global pandemic
01:04:17for these two companies to actually sit down in a room together
01:04:19and be like, okay, how do we make this stuff work?
01:04:21Yes.
01:04:21And I think clearing that bar
01:04:24with anything short of a global pandemic,
01:04:26even for something as important as a natural disaster,
01:04:29just strikes me as very complicated.
01:04:31Completely.
01:04:32And they were under the gun during the pandemic
01:04:35in a way that everyone involved in earthquakes
01:04:38talks about the fact that until there's a big earthquake,
01:04:41that resets the idea of earthquakes in everyone's mind
01:04:44and pushes earthquakes to the forefront of everyone's minds,
01:04:48it's just hard to get people to pay attention sometimes
01:04:50and to identify it as a potentially
01:04:53really important thing to do.
01:04:55Right.
01:04:55And like you said, with phones,
01:04:57it's without those two platforms playing along,
01:04:59you can only get so far.
01:05:00Right, exactly.
01:05:01So that's been all of the cell phone development.
01:05:05But there's a lot of other things that you can do
01:05:08with these alerts that go way beyond smartphones.
01:05:11And people are working on that too.
01:05:13So you think about smart speakers,
01:05:16you think about home assistance,
01:05:17you think about smart TVs.
01:05:19The people I interviewed for this story were basically like,
01:05:22anything with a speaker or a screen
01:05:24should be a delivery mechanism for earthquake early warnings.
01:05:28Like they're all of those companies,
01:05:30all of those platforms,
01:05:32those could all be distribution channels.
01:05:34Then you think about big public channels like highway signs
01:05:38or PA systems in schools and hospitals.
01:05:41Then you think about all the other automated things
01:05:43that don't have anything to do with
01:05:45just warning you as a person.
01:05:47You can open fire station doors
01:05:49so that they don't get stuck down
01:05:51if they're damaged by an earthquake.
01:05:53Water utilities can shut off valves or pumps.
01:05:56You can slow down trains or you can recall elevators.
01:05:59There's all this other stuff
01:06:02that you could do with this information.
01:06:05And in a lot of ways,
01:06:06it's just early days in figuring out
01:06:08how to plug this information
01:06:11into all of these different systems.
01:06:12It also seems like it makes that threshold
01:06:14of when you do and don't trigger an alert
01:06:18become very important.
01:06:20Very important and potentially different
01:06:22for all of those different systems.
01:06:24Totally fair.
01:06:24Yeah, it's just a mess.
01:06:26So some of that is already happening,
01:06:28but it means working with one organization
01:06:32or agency at a time.
01:06:33It's really slow going.
01:06:35But ShakeAlert has only fully been online
01:06:38for a little more than three years now.
01:06:41So this is still really early days
01:06:43of actually plugging it into stuff.
01:06:45Is the sense that ShakeAlert is kind of a thing,
01:06:49sort of a project out of a university
01:06:51that is like interesting research for how to do it?
01:06:53Or is it the thing?
01:06:55Oh, it's on the West Coast of the United States.
01:06:57It's the thing.
01:06:58Okay.
01:06:59There are other similar systems elsewhere,
01:07:01but there's, thank God,
01:07:02there isn't like a competing earthquake
01:07:04early warning, like, standard.
01:07:08We have to do a whole other story about...
01:07:10You have to have a folder full of apps.
01:07:11Yeah.
01:07:12All of the rival engineers and scientists
01:07:14trying to make a different one.
01:07:16No, the system is in place.
01:07:19All of the state and local governments are aware of it.
01:07:22All of the big technology providers are aware of it.
01:07:24It's just a matter of making it as useful
01:07:27as it can possibly be.
01:07:29Okay.
01:07:29So do you have the MyShake app?
01:07:31I do.
01:07:32I absolutely do.
01:07:33How many notifications have you gotten from it recently?
01:07:36What do they make you feel?
01:07:36Zero.
01:07:37Okay.
01:07:37This is the thing.
01:07:38This is the thing about living in Washington.
01:07:40It's just, it's like, it's quiet.
01:07:42It's too quiet.
01:07:43It's too quiet.
01:07:45And I swear to God, a lot of these folks
01:07:47that I interviewed for this story
01:07:50all told me some version of,
01:07:52I just want there to be like a good medium earthquake
01:07:56in Washington or thereabouts
01:07:58that just reminds everyone about earthquakes.
01:08:00It doesn't do any damage per se.
01:08:02It doesn't kill anyone.
01:08:03It just puts it back in people's minds.
01:08:06They just want like a nice, fun reminder quake.
01:08:11The earthquake that just knocks like one plate out of a cabinet.
01:08:14Yeah.
01:08:15Everyone loses a plate and it's like
01:08:16maybe everyone's favorite plate.
01:08:17And so they're like, where's that plate?
01:08:19Oh, the earthquake got it.
01:08:21Yeah.
01:08:21100%.
01:08:22Yeah, that makes sense.
01:08:24Has all of this made you more or less terrified of earthquakes?
01:08:28I act like strong both.
01:08:31Okay.
01:08:32That talking to the science people about all of this taught me about all the other faults
01:08:38that are around me besides just the Cascadia subduction zone.
01:08:42There's a fault that runs basically under my house,
01:08:45like very shallow and it's much less well known and well understood than the others.
01:08:52So that's just like a new abstract fear for me.
01:08:55So that's cool.
01:08:56On the other hand, it's genuinely very heartening to see this really messy constellation of
01:09:05organizations try to figure out early warning government agencies, states, local governments,
01:09:10universities, telecom companies, cell phone makers, like they're all doing their best.
01:09:16And the result is something that I can almost certainly say I will benefit from
01:09:22at some point in the future.
01:09:23I just have to wait and see when.
01:09:26Also, I really want an Android phone now.
01:09:28We're all buying Android burners.
01:09:29That's my takeaway from this is everybody gets an Android burner and it's going to save the world.
01:09:34100%.
01:09:36So yeah, back to the house.
01:09:37We're done with the noises.
01:09:38How was how was the process?
01:09:40Was this are you glad you went through this crazy earthquake fitting process at your house?
01:09:45I am.
01:09:45It was only a couple of days and now it is like everything else about earthquakes.
01:09:50It's completely abstract until it's not.
01:09:53So I just like I'm just standing here in my house knowing that the house is now bolted to
01:09:58the foundation and I just have this like magical thing that I don't see protecting me in theory.
01:10:05And so now I just have to go about my business.
01:10:08But I will say just like it's like having an amulet.
01:10:11It's like much more real than that, obviously.
01:10:13But just knowing that that happened, I can kind of just like put that part of my mind to bed.
01:10:18Totally.
01:10:19All right.
01:10:19We got to take a break.
01:10:20But real quick, give people the call to action.
01:10:24What if you're on the West Coast and you're worried about this?
01:10:26What what should you do about it right now?
01:10:29Yes.
01:10:29So if you're on the West Coast, if you have an iPhone, we'll put in the show notes how to turn
01:10:34on a feature called local awareness.
01:10:36That's the thing that speeds up.
01:10:37We have messages, Android and iOS.
01:10:41You can download the my shake app and you can go to ready.gov for just general earthquake advice
01:10:48for before and during and after.
01:10:50Love it.
01:10:50All right.
01:10:50We'll put all that in the show notes.
01:10:52Will, thank you as always.
01:10:54Should I play just like a little bit more of that drill sound to play us out instead of the
01:10:58Vergecast music?
01:10:59Yeah, let's really ruin everyone's day on our way out.
01:11:02Let's do it.
01:11:03See everybody.
01:11:13All right.
01:11:13We got to take one more break, but we'll stick around.
01:11:15And you're going to help us do a question from the Vergecast hotline.
01:11:27All right, we're back.
01:11:28Will Poore is still here.
01:11:29Hi, Will.
01:11:30Hi.
01:11:30I haven't left.
01:11:32Will just lurks in the background of every Vergecast, whether you hear him or not.
01:11:36I could appear at any moment.
01:11:37Just know that that's always a possibility.
01:11:41So we've been thinking over the months about all the stuff we can do with the Vergecast
01:11:46hotline.
01:11:47We get tons of good questions.
01:11:48Lots of them are weird and are basically just like, is my iPhone bad?
01:11:53And we say like, no, it's fine.
01:11:56But occasionally we get questions that like make us really like go deep down rabbit holes
01:12:02to try and figure out what's going on.
01:12:03And so we've been trying to figure out ways to go down more of those rabbit holes.
01:12:06There are also like an alarming number of people in the Slack room now who see all the
01:12:11hotline questions because everybody loves getting these questions.
01:12:13It's really fun.
01:12:14It is.
01:12:14I it became part of my job somewhat recently, but I would have been doing it anyway because
01:12:19it's just a fun way to spend a minute at a time.
01:12:22It is super fun, except when people are mean to us.
01:12:24Please don't use the email to be mean to us.
01:12:26Yes.
01:12:27But when you call, be nice.
01:12:30That's really all we ask.
01:12:31Yeah.
01:12:32But you I have no idea what you're about to do.
01:12:35But you found a rabbit hole that you went down.
01:12:38Yes.
01:12:38On the hotline.
01:12:39So set this up for us.
01:12:40Well, I there's not much set up other than I found a question that I personally wanted
01:12:45the answer to.
01:12:46So I was like, OK, I will go try and find this answer.
01:12:50And that will be a hotline.
01:12:51So that's what we're doing here.
01:12:52All right.
01:12:52Set up the question.
01:12:53Who's the question from?
01:12:54This question comes from a listener who has a kid who is running around all the time,
01:12:58and he wants to take pictures of that kid.
01:13:00And he has a question about that.
01:13:03Hey, it's Peter from Brooklyn.
01:13:04I had an idea of how to show the new features on the iPhone 16.
01:13:08Be really cool to do a race to take different types of pictures in different situations
01:13:15with the new phones versus the old phone.
01:13:17I want to know, can you really take the camera out, open it up and get a shot of that moving
01:13:23kid faster?
01:13:24Can you really change the aperture faster?
01:13:27All those different settings.
01:13:28Is it really faster with the new controls versus the old ones?
01:13:32That's it.
01:13:33Thanks.
01:13:33Have a good one.
01:13:34Rock and roll.
01:13:35Okay, so I went straight to Alison Johnson for this because A, she did our iPhone 16
01:13:41review.
01:13:42And B, I know from listening to this show that she has lots of experience chasing small kids
01:13:47around with a camera.
01:13:48Hello, Alison.
01:13:50Hello.
01:13:50So I was curious about this question because I'm one of those people that watches every
01:13:57Apple keynote every year just to see what the camera does now.
01:14:02And I feel like even for me, this year was a very camera-y event.
01:14:09Do you feel that way also?
01:14:11Yeah, it wasn't so much that anything drastic had happened with the camera pipeline or whatever.
01:14:17But the camera control was the big thing on both of the iPhone 16, all the iPhone 16 models
01:14:24and kind of the new filter options you have.
01:14:30Yeah.
01:14:31So yeah, it's like a camera-forward update, I would say.
01:14:35Well, I watched, I saw all of that.
01:14:38And my question was kind of the same as Peter's, which is, you know, how much does that button
01:14:48make it feel like you have a point-and-shoot camera in your pocket?
01:14:52Which to me is just like a muscle memory question.
01:14:54It's not a question that you can answer from watching the keynote or watching demos or
01:14:59anything because it's all about the routines of how you just pull out and use your camera
01:15:04without thinking about it when there's a toddler running by doing something cute, for example.
01:15:09So I'm curious to get your take on what routines you have around your phone and what routines
01:15:17you've had over the years and then whether the 16 and that button meaningfully changes any of that.
01:15:24So, you know, historically before the 16,
01:15:27walk me through your reflexes for taking a photo really quickly.
01:15:30You've got your phone in your pocket.
01:15:32Your kid is doing something cute.
01:15:34Like, what are the steps?
01:15:35Yeah, so I switch between Android and iPhone like quite a bit throughout the year.
01:15:41So that changes things up.
01:15:43But on Android, it's actually super easy because I can double-click the power button.
01:15:49And like, I think on basically every Android phone,
01:15:54we'll just open the camera app from wherever you are.
01:15:58So I can do that without looking on an iPhone.
01:16:01Typically, I will take the thing out of my pocket and I could be clever and map the camera to a
01:16:10triple press of the home button or something.
01:16:12I just am not that smart, I guess.
01:16:16And I always just end up like swiping from the home screen.
01:16:21Like you can tap the camera icon and like hold it and that.
01:16:26Right, that's what I do.
01:16:27Yeah, that's I think what a sensible person does.
01:16:30I don't know why I have trouble with that.
01:16:34I swipe, I slide my finger across and that's how I open it up.
01:16:38So it's like one extra beat where I have to kind of like
01:16:43have the phone in front of me and the screen, you know, wakes up and I
01:16:48swipe and then I'm ready to go.
01:16:50Gotcha.
01:16:51So there is some like home screen friction.
01:16:54Yeah, yeah, a little bit.
01:16:56Maybe it's of my own making.
01:16:58I don't know.
01:16:59Yeah, I know the feeling of just like reaching my phone to quickly take a picture of something.
01:17:07And then I like the screen doesn't quite want to wake up
01:17:10or the like it doesn't register the little camera icon tap.
01:17:15There is a little I've like I've lost pictures because something in there
01:17:20just doesn't like quite happen the first try or the first two tries.
01:17:24And that's super frustrating.
01:17:26And then I'm distracted, like trying to swipe on the screen.
01:17:29And then my kid has run off and he's doing something else.
01:17:32Yeah.
01:17:33So disaster.
01:17:34Yeah.
01:17:35So the there's an in between that experience potentially and this new fancy camera button
01:17:42and it's the the action button on the iPhone 15s.
01:17:47Did you have you played around with that over the course of the past year?
01:17:50And is that meaningfully different?
01:17:52Because I know a lot of people just mapped their camera to that button.
01:17:56Yeah, yeah.
01:17:57OK.
01:17:58Yeah, it's totally reasonable to use the action button as that like camera shortcut button.
01:18:03I find the placement of it a little funny for that.
01:18:06It's kind of like on the other side of the phone that I feel like I'm reaching for.
01:18:11And it's kind of up high above the volume buttons.
01:18:15So for me, I feel like I have to kind of do a do a little maneuver to get there.
01:18:21But it seems to work for a lot of people, I guess.
01:18:25Yeah, but it's not it's not the like it doesn't
01:18:28form the muscle memory for you the way that you want it to.
01:18:32Yeah.
01:18:33Gotcha.
01:18:34OK, so what about the literal camera button that is now on these phones?
01:18:39How is that?
01:18:40Has that changed this like quick draw routine to go back to the beginning?
01:18:44Like kid is doing something cute.
01:18:46Your phone is in your pocket.
01:18:47What do you do?
01:18:48Yeah, so I just had a roller coaster of emotions with the camera button
01:18:53because it's like coded like everything I would like.
01:18:57You know, it's like a real button.
01:19:00It's controls the camera.
01:19:02You can do a bunch of cool like change exposure and stuff with it.
01:19:06I don't actually like it as much as I thought I would.
01:19:10Oh, no.
01:19:11So my kid is doing something cute in front of me.
01:19:13I will definitely press it to launch the camera.
01:19:18The screen has to be awake already before it will do that,
01:19:22like pushing it just the one time will wake up the screen.
01:19:26So you have to kind of do it again.
01:19:29Oh, interesting.
01:19:30Yeah, which I would like start that process when the phone is in my pocket.
01:19:36So it's hitting the button once to turn the screen on
01:19:38and then again to launch the camera app and then again to take a picture.
01:19:42Yes.
01:19:43And for the third thing, for the taking a picture, I don't like it very much.
01:19:49Because I know it is.
01:19:52It's kind of stiff.
01:19:54Like it's a little bit recessed.
01:19:56Yeah, with it from the edge of the phone,
01:19:58which makes sense because you don't want to accidentally take a bunch of pictures.
01:20:03But it just feels like that little bit.
01:20:05It's too stiff.
01:20:07And like, I have to push a little bit too hard on it
01:20:10that I feel like I'm shaking the whole phone.
01:20:13And I'm still, you know, maybe the iPhone can cope with that.
01:20:16But I'm so like, no, I don't want any shake, you know, in this photo.
01:20:21It might be messing with your framing.
01:20:23Yeah, it's gonna be a little crooked or something.
01:20:27Um, I don't like that.
01:20:28So I'm just really stuck on this like once this like scenario
01:20:34and the like individual beats of this kid does a cute thing,
01:20:37one click to turn the thing on one click to get into the camera
01:20:41and then you're hitting the software button on the screen.
01:20:44Yeah, gotcha.
01:20:45That's been my process.
01:20:47And maybe the screen will wake up when I take it out of my pocket.
01:20:50You know, there's variations in there.
01:20:52But that's basically it.
01:20:53Yeah, but it's still a little fiddly.
01:20:56Is it faster? Meaningfully?
01:20:58Is there anything about this that does speed up the process, even if it's fiddly?
01:21:03I feel like I do like having just a button to press down
01:21:06and that like feels to me like I am starting the process.
01:21:11Even if it's not like, you know, bam, I'm going to get a shot just like that.
01:21:15Yeah.
01:21:16One thing it is really useful for, and this is something I've kind of like
01:21:21used more in long term testing and not exactly in those like quick draw moments,
01:21:27is changing the exposure compensation,
01:21:30because when you do that, like little half press or the light press on it,
01:21:35that's how you access.
01:21:37You can set it to a bunch of different things.
01:21:40But the one I like is the exposure compensation,
01:21:43because I don't know if you've ever tried changing the brightness on a photo
01:21:49that you're taking, but it's such a pain on an iPhone.
01:21:53That's where you have to like tap the screen until the little sun icon
01:21:57shows up and then you have to drag the sun up and down.
01:21:59And yeah, I can never do that right.
01:22:02It never feels like I'm dragging it enough.
01:22:04And then all of a sudden the image is like way too bright.
01:22:07And I'm like spending so much time fiddling with that,
01:22:10that like whatever I was taking a picture of is long gone.
01:22:14Yeah, this is just like a little bonus exposure compensation dial, which I love.
01:22:22So that's been my favorite part of the camera control, honestly.
01:22:26Okay.
01:22:29Can you get to other settings really quickly?
01:22:33The vision I have of what Apple wants out of that button is for people to
01:22:37very intuitively just like wiggle their finger back and forth by a few millimeters
01:22:42and like do 17 things and take a picture.
01:22:44Yeah.
01:22:45Do you feel like you are like psychically connected to this button the way that
01:22:49they want you to be?
01:22:51I do not.
01:22:52And it's a little funny.
01:22:54It's like something you have to kind of get used to because you're
01:22:57you're like half pressing this button.
01:22:59It's not there's not actually a half press.
01:23:02It's that's the like capacitive, you know, it gives you a little haptic buzz like you did it.
01:23:08And then you're supposed to keep your finger on there and slide it back and forth.
01:23:13And I end up like taking my finger off or like I slide it and I need to reposition my
01:23:20finger to like, you know, do the adjustment some more, which feels a little like choppy
01:23:26and not quite right.
01:23:27And then there's no good way to like exit the control, which is a weird thing that
01:23:33Nilay and I both noticed in the review is like you kind of want to just like tap to
01:23:38get out of there.
01:23:39And it's just weird how it works.
01:23:42How do you get out of there?
01:23:45Do you even know?
01:23:46Have you figured it out yet?
01:23:47Or is that setting been up since you got the phone?
01:23:49Let's see.
01:23:51No, no, no.
01:23:52You tap the live view.
01:23:55Oh, God, the little sun icon is back.
01:23:57I don't want that at all.
01:23:58Um, yeah, no, it feels like you should do a light tap again, and that would exit.
01:24:05And that's not what happens.
01:24:06That does not work.
01:24:07Yeah, that's the weird behavior.
01:24:10Huh?
01:24:10Okay.
01:24:12Well, I can't say it feels like you're selling this button.
01:24:16I know, I'm really not trying to, I guess.
01:24:20Yeah, I clearly I that's that is fair and understandable.
01:24:24I guess the like, I guess Peter's question was, is this any faster?
01:24:28And my sort of tack on question is, is this meaningfully better?
01:24:33And I guess all of that rolls up to is this a meaningful factor in deciding to buy a phone?
01:24:41If you really care about taking pictures quickly?
01:24:44Yeah, the thing I've kind of come around to is like, it doesn't hurt.
01:24:49Like literally nothing was taken away.
01:24:51You can use the camera in any other way that you prefer.
01:24:56And this is like an extra thing that, you know, for opening the camera itself kind of helps.
01:25:03I don't prefer it for taking a photo.
01:25:06But it's not like Apple took away all the other ways to take a photo.
01:25:10Right.
01:25:11And then you get that little extra control that like sometimes does come in handy.
01:25:16So it's, it's like, I don't know if it's a net positive, but it doesn't hurt.
01:25:23And that's what you want out of any flagship feature.
01:25:27It does.
01:25:28It's not damaging my experience in any big way.
01:25:32Do no harm.
01:25:34Something like that.
01:25:35And I think it's just like a lot of other things with phones is like, I don't see a lot of
01:25:42new, you know, on iOS or on Android, a feature that I'm like, wow,
01:25:47you should absolutely throw away your old phone and get a new phone this year for this thing.
01:25:52Right.
01:25:52It's sort of like, are you in the right time in that like cycle of, for some people,
01:25:59it's maybe like two to three years or for other people that they just want to not shop for a phone
01:26:05as long as they can.
01:26:06Yeah.
01:26:07It's sort of like, where are you in the discomfort with your current phone
01:26:10and how appealing are the things on the new phone?
01:26:15I think the 16, like the regular 16 in particular, this year is a pretty good
01:26:20value proposition of like, you get these new buttons and like maybe Apple intelligence
01:26:25will turn out to be something.
01:26:27And it's, but besides that, it's just like the new iPhone and it's pretty good.
01:26:32So.
01:26:33Yep.
01:26:34Yeah.
01:26:35That is fair.
01:26:36I guess my, my last question is that we talk a lot about whether in the future,
01:26:43we're all going to keep using our phone for everything or whether the phone is going to
01:26:48get splintered into a bunch of other gadgets.
01:26:50Point and shoot cameras are having a moment.
01:26:53If you care about, you know, whipping out a device and taking a picture really quickly,
01:26:57is there a world where you should just get a point and shoot camera and not worry about
01:27:01all of these fiddly buttons and software updates?
01:27:04What do you think?
01:27:05I, I was really hoping I could shortcut to this could be a cool point and shoot camera
01:27:11with the camera button and with the photographic styles.
01:27:14Yeah.
01:27:14Because you get some kind of neat kind of Fujifilm-esque, you know.
01:27:18Totally.
01:27:20Film stocks or whatever you want to call them.
01:27:22And it, it does not feel that way to me.
01:27:25Like, of course that doesn't, it's a phone, like it's still going to be a phone.
01:27:29It's still going to be like pinging you with Slack messages when you're
01:27:32out trying to take some pictures.
01:27:34So I think that is true.
01:27:36Like a button is not going to turn this into like, you know, a super great camera in a
01:27:43way that it wasn't before.
01:27:46It's still the camera I use most of the time.
01:27:51But yeah, it's, I don't think gonna, gonna sway anyone from, from a nice Fujifilm camera
01:27:58or I don't know, some Meta Ray Bans?
01:28:00Like that.
01:28:01Yeah.
01:28:02That will take a photo faster than taking a phone out of your pocket.
01:28:05So I don't know.
01:28:06Right.
01:28:07There are other ways.
01:28:09Yeah.
01:28:10Okay.
01:28:10Well, I, I don't know where Peter goes from here, but.
01:28:14I'm sorry, Peter.
01:28:15I want to, I just want to like hit this button a bunch of times now.
01:28:19Now I'm, now I'm curious to see.
01:28:22But thank you, Alison.
01:28:23Thanks.
01:28:25All right.
01:28:25That is it for The Verge guest today.
01:28:27Thank you to everybody who came on the show.
01:28:29And thank you as always for listening.
01:28:31There's lots more on everything we talked about at theverge.com.
01:28:34All of our coverage of what's going on with OpenAI, all of our coverage of the iPhone stuff.
01:28:38We'll link to both blog posts in the show notes.
01:28:41You should really read them.
01:28:42It's a lot of reading and it gets pretty flowery at some points, but both of these things are
01:28:47good reads and I recommend checking them out.
01:28:49As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or blog posts about AI that you
01:28:53would like to share, you can always email us at vergecasts at theverge.com or call the
01:28:57hotline 866-VERGE11.
01:28:59We love hearing from you.
01:29:00And like I mentioned, there is that Slack room and everyone's in it.
01:29:04And I can't even begin to guess all of the fun places that hotline questions are going.
01:29:09So thank you so, so much to everybody who reaches out.
01:29:12It's the best.
01:29:13This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez.
01:29:16The Verge cast is Verge Production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
01:29:19Mila and I will be back on Friday to talk about more OpenAI news, all of Apple's
01:29:24gadget announcements from this week, and lots more.
01:29:26We'll see you then.
01:29:27Rock and roll.