Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Still for now, who's to say? I'm your friend David Pierce. Nilay is here. Hey, buddy.
You are, for those listening, I would say you appear to be in the cabin of a very large yacht. Is it just the vibe happening behind you? Where are you in the world right now, Nilay?
Fully the vibe of this house. So I'm married to a literal farmer's daughter. Becky has farms on both sides of her family here in Illinois. I'm in Illinois, in the like middle of nowhere, Illinois. And so we're on the farm on her mom's side, which her uncles have turned into like a beautiful house. Like the original house is there, but then they just added crazy house next to it. And so I'm in the basement office of her uncle's house on the farm, but like her whole family is here. There's just kids running around everywhere. And then her uncle's partner has a parrot that he got in 1989.
Whoa. This parrot owns the house, right? The parrot is like a longer patriarch of this family than anyone else at this point.
And so Norton is just screaming whenever he sees children. The children have all learned that they can sing at Norton. And he's great. He rules.
I immediately know everything I need to know about this parrot by the fact that his name is Norton and he was born in 1989.
Yeah, he's great. It's awesome. So yeah, we're at this like sick house on the farm for the family reunion this week. And so if you hear children, grand pianos, or parrots, just know what's going on here.
The big three, as we called them, the farmer trio, that's really good. All right. We got a lot of stuff to talk about. We got a bunch of AI news. We got a bunch of developer conference stuff going on. We got Brendan Carr doing stuff.
Brendan is particularly, there might be some straight f-bombs when it comes to Brendan, and not for any like reasons that you might think, just because it's so dumb. It's so, so dumb.
People always ask why is the word dummy, and it's like sometimes there are weeks where it's just, he's a dummy. This is just what he's doing.
Just transparently stupid. Anyway, yeah, I'm excited about it. The one bit of business we should get into at the very top is we have new Verge merch. I am the first, I believe, person on Earth to be wearing our new flagship podcast shirt, which I'm very excited about. We also have new Decoder merch, new Version History stuff. We have shirts, we have mugs. We have lots of cool stuff coming, but a thing people have been asking for for a long time is like show merch that's cool and good and high quality. So we have a bunch of that on the Verge Shop. Go get it. I have Decoder merch before Nilay does, which makes me feel really cool and powerful. I'm very excited about it.
I did not realize that we were going to make a 'people do not yearn for automation' t-shirt, which I'm very excited about.
It's great. It is. I have it. I have it over there. There's also, I will warn you, going to be a costume change before 'Brendan Carr is a dummy' today. Just as a brief teaser. Can I show you my merch, which we are not selling, but I just realized here's the coffee cup I pulled out of the cabinet.
It was the biggest one in the cabinet.
It's perfect. Farm Nilay is like a whole different vibe that I'm loving life right now. I'm never coming back.
It's good stuff. All right, we should talk about AI stuff because there's a lot of AI stuff going on this week. I think we're like deep in developer conference season, and I would say the theme of developer conference season so far, between Google I/O this week, Microsoft Build, and next week is WWDC, is basically just what do people want to do with AI?
There are lots of ideas about business apps and how you can sort of interact with all of the tools that your company uses. Then there are questions of like what do people want these tools to do? There is this increasing sense that actually this technology is very good at a lot of things. It has really developed in huge ways over the last 12 months. Do you want this over and over, the question from all of these companies? Here's a product we made. Do you like this?
Yeah. And the one I want to start with is the one that a couple of folks on our team have been testing, which is Gemini Spark. This is like the idea right now, I would say, right, is how do we take a bunch of the information that exists about you around our services, whether it's like Google Workspace stuff if you're Google, or it's Microsoft Office if you're Microsoft, and give you ways to like interact with, but also just have an AI agent go use those tools on your behalf. Like Spark's idea is to make calendar events for you and write emails for you and make Google Docs for you. Scout, which Microsoft launched this week, is exactly trying to be the same thing for all of Microsoft's apps. My first question for you, Nilay, is like, does this idea make sense to you? Like AI agent for your workspace?
Sure. There are three pretty obvious eras of AI that we've passed through. There was the first one, the sort of ChatGPT moment. You have a chatbot. It will do everything, including be your boyfriend. Shout out Kevin Roose. He'll be your boyfriend in the pages of the New York Times. That was one era, right? We're going to kill Google search. Google search is the best business in the history of the world, and a bunch of companies are going to show up and try to do that. The second era was reasoning models, right? That was last year, maybe a little bit before that. We're going to do long chains of thought. I'm putting reasoning and thought in quotes. If you're listening to this audio, I hope you can hear the disdain dripping off my voice as I talk about these words that have been co-opted. But like, you know, chains of thought means that model is basically going to prompt itself over and over again, and it's going to talk to itself a lot before it issues you an answer in the form of some research shock. And this got everything a lot farther, right? You could see the models got more powerful. They ended up in more enterprise use cases, and I would say the consumer use for reasoning models just never appeared.
Right. You could pay Google or OpenAI or whoever, and I used a reasoning model to negotiate a car lease. This is not a thing that normal people should do.
Sure. Right. And then now we're at agents where, okay, like OpenClaw happened. You can put a reasoning model next to your actual computer and your actual applications on your Mac mini or your MacBook that's cracked open while you walk through the airport. And it's going to actually use those applications, and you need pretty fast CPU to like run the model, and then you're going to send all the inference out to the cloud, and the model is going to run on the cloud. And this is like neat.
Yeah, right. It's just the next turn. It's the next era. And so every one of these developer conferences has been about agentic AI, which is just the next turn of letting the model do more stuff, like run longer, burn more tokens, all that. And then I think we've talked about this a lot. Somewhere embedded in there is, oh, we can write code now. We can write code well enough, not great, as we will discuss in some other context, particularly security, but we can write code now. Means not only can we use the computer, we can write applications for the computer to run that we can then use ourselves. And this is, you know, this is why Dario Amodei is talking about the foothills of the singularity.
Right? Like now the computer is not only using itself but is programming itself. And if you have software brain, the computer is now alive, like fully and completely alive. It can tell you it loves you and it can write code. What else is there in humanity?
That's what makes us human, right? Like those are the two things that make us human, apparently. So everyone's just running at it. I think Google's advantage is all of their software already lives on the web in the cloud, and your data is already there, as you have discovered in your testing. Like Gmail is just a cloud application that already runs on Google servers. They don't need a Mac mini. You're just like, Gemini Spark, go do computer stuff, and it's like, I already do that. I think Microsoft would like this. I think all of these AI companies have built browsers, are trying to get there where they can use a browser on your behalf, but Google just has so much of it already that they don't need to like overprove the concept.
They're like, yeah, we can just use Gmail for you. We already do that.
And it seems like that is incredibly effective.
I was blown away by how well it worked. Like the experience I had with Spark was basically try to do a number of the things that it tells you you can do, right? Where you say like, oh, go make the, one of the things that Josh Woodward, who runs this team, said at I/O was like, go make all of my meetings with Sundar Pichai pink so that they like pop on my calendar. Relatively easy, straightforward AI task, right? And that's the kind of thing Spark does very well. It's the like little tiny bits of busy work that these tools are supposed to do for you all the time. And like you said, all this stuff exists within Google already. So putting the pieces together is actually a bunch of people at Google having to have meetings more than it is like systemic technological breakthroughs. They've solved this problem in some really interesting ways. The thing that most sort of messed with my brain as a person was taking it outside of the work context. And like this wound up being the story I wrote, is I fed it basically a trip planning scenario, right? Like we've talked about this on the show. All anybody can think about is what if AI could book you plane tickets, right? Like that's everyone's AI idea.
And I just did the thing that everybody always does in these demos, which is like, okay, I'm going to Hershey, Pennsylvania, the weekend of July 18th. Can you just build me a whole itinerary based on just that level of information? I was like, I'm going with my wife, my two kids, and my dog. Can you build us an entire itinerary? And it went and thought about it for a few minutes. And ordinarily what comes back in that case is like, here are the top eight things on TripAdvisor to do in Hershey, Pennsylvania, right? It's just sort of a very basic like read one travel guide answer. This was very different. It went through and figured out like, okay, it understood that I had concert tickets for Saturday night, which is a thing that exists in my email and not anywhere else in the interactions I've had with Google. So it went and pulled that, and I was like, oh, it figured out this is why we're going to Hershey, because we have tickets for Saturday night. It knows a series of things that I was not aware that Google knew, like the names and ages of both of my children, the dietary restrictions of my wife, which is one that I sincerely still cannot figure out. Like, I've never emailed with Anna about her dietary restrictions. I don't know. I just don't know. And it went through and found restaurants that have all the things that our kids need. It went and found the pet fees for various hotels for things that we needed. It went and found how much Hershey Park would cost based on the ages of my children. Like it came back with this incredibly detailed, personalized, really, really, really useful itinerary that like frankly scared the shit out of me. Like in a way I was totally unprepared for this thing that was like really, really helpful and personalized and good. And you would have gotten something very different, right? Like if you had asked it the same question about the same days, Spark would have given you a completely different set of things to do.
Which on the one hand is completely correct, right? Like this is a huge advancement in this thing that these tools are trying to do, in the fact that it can do that, the fact that it's not just reading me the top of TripAdvisor, but is actually giving me David Pierce real based on my life and situation. So powerful. And I got to the end of this and I was like, I need to throw my computer into the ocean, delete all of my Google information, and never, ever, ever go online ever again. Like, and I just came to the conclusion that like this is the thing that we all have to decide whether we're comfortable with, because this is the trade. Like that thing worked astoundingly well. And it only worked astoundingly well because it is a terrifying privacy hellscape in which Google knows every piece of information about me regardless of whether I've actually proactively told Google that information. And I still, I've been sitting here for a week looking at this itinerary not knowing how to feel about it.
All right, let me make the bull case and the bear case. Okay, so the bear case for this, the negative case for this, is this is exactly how people feel about advertising online that makes them think their phones are recording them all the time.
Yes, it is exactly that feeling and just magnified to its highest level.
Right. The thing is listening to you and Anna talk about meal planning and it's like, I have deduced your dietary restrictions. It's been spying on you the entire time.
Yeah. And the flip side of that, the pro case is, well, all we got out of all that surveillance in the past was you glanced at Wayfair one time in your life and this chair is going to follow you until you die, right? And that has never been good enough. And maybe this is the thing that's good enough, right? This is the thing that makes it all worth it. I don't think I'm at this is the thing that makes all the surveillance worth it, but that's the case, right? There's finally a product that makes you useful items out of all the surveillance, not just advertising.
Right now, is Google going to lace a bunch of advertising into your itinerary? Yes, they sure as hell are.
And like maybe that will break, but you know, we're in the like honeymoon period where in particular, Google is very, very good at losing money until it's time to make money.
Yeah. And so the product will be great until it's not great. And maybe we should just enjoy the honeymoon period. But those are the two sides of the coin, right? It is exactly the feeling of, oh, my phone has been listening to me, which everyone hates, and but maybe this time the payoff is worth it. I don't, by the way, I do not think the payoff is worth it.
I was just going to say like, yes, I agree with all of that. And I think coming out of this like 15-year run where Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai and everybody else in this space have been trying desperately to convince us that what we want is targeted ads, that actually our experience of the internet is better if the ads are targeted, and I don't think people agree with that generally speaking.
I've been thinking about a thing Sundar said to me in that Decoder conversation since it happened. And it's the same conversation you and I have been having. Whether the numeric indicators of success are enough, right? Whether this concept of revealed preferences through click data actually tells you about how anyone feels about anything.
And so, you know, I handed Sundar my phone and was like, look at this search result for best Chromebook with me. And in the moment, I actually didn't think about like his initial response, right? I handed him the phone and he was like, great, we're doing this again. And we like got into it and I went and watched it back and he was saying something as I was handing him the phone that I'd missed in real time. He's like, we actually have a very scientific and rigorous way of measuring this.
Right? Like the thing you and I are about to do has nothing to do with Google's process for this. There's some method inside of Google where they actually measure the results page and then they determine if it's good. And you know, they have trillions of queries and they do this. And I'm sure at this point Gemini is like all in there being like, this one's good, right? And the gulf between Google's quantitative evaluation of whether the search page or the search experience is good, which they are absolutely relying on and maybe totally dependent on, and our qualitative experience of those products is wider than ever, right?
Because every one of these platform companies will tell you without a shadow of a doubt that people love targeted advertising. Yeah. That they keep making more money, that the advertisers keep dumping money into those systems, that they keep sending customers to small businesses. And then everyone else is like, yeah, but my phone's listening to me and you will never convince me otherwise. Adam Mosseri, by the way, Adam goes on his personal Instagram like once a month to be like, I'm not listening to you. No one believes him.
It's the same with Google, right? They're totally reliant on their quantitative metrics. All the numbers prove that you love this. And then everyone, I think, is sitting, I mean, like, I actually don't love this, right? Like maybe if you filter me into the aggregate of your billion users, you can say that we love this, but I don't love this. And do I count? And there's something there that all of these companies at their scale are going to have to start to reckon with, I think, as they start using more and more of the data to construct these personalized experiences, because there's no way to make me or you or someone a personalized Spark experience and then say the data says you love this, right? Because they made that for you and that something in there is going to break. Like you can feel it, right? Like this page statistically is the best page for everyone is a very different argument than this page is the best page for you because statistically all the other pages we've made for other people are the ones they like. I can't even like say the sentence. It makes no sense.
Well, right, and because it's impossible to do in a qualitative way, right? Like Google doesn't actually know or care if you like it.
And the LLMs don't know or care about anything.
Right, right. And I think like I've spent so much time recently trying to think about how to answer the question of like why do people feel differently about technology than they used to? And it's like it's big and messy and meh in my head. But like I think one reason there has been this giant pushback against data centers is it is one specific object that people can be mad about. And I think so much of this AI stuff is messy and confusing and it's hard to peel parts of it away from each other and it's hard to opt out and it's hard to get away from. And it's like it is easy to be like, what I don't want is this gigantic building that is offering me something I don't want in exchange for literally the resources of my community. Like that is a physical instantiation of this thing that is otherwise really hard for people to like get their arms around. And so I think I've started to look at people's opinions about data centers very straightforwardly as actually their opinions about like Google's AI overviews, right? Which is just like this isn't good enough. I don't want this thing in my life. I don't want it in my community.
This thing you're saying will take all the jobs away when I use it at my job is not good.
Yeah. And it makes me feel bad when I use it because everything that I hear suggests that it's making me dumber.
That's a great point, David. You were right to point that out. That's not just right. It's terrific.
I, yeah, but I keep coming back to the idea again, like this Spark experience I had was so good. And I think the reaction to this story that I wrote has been really interesting because it hits these lines exactly right where it's like on the one hand there is a sense of like, no, I don't want this. This is a success story that sucks and I hate it. And I think then there was another version of this was like, yeah, this is exactly the thing that we've been trying to do. This is the whole promise of AI spelled out for you. You didn't have to go do eight hours of really irritating Airbnb research because it found you the Airbnb that you should book. Like this is the moment that we're coming to with AI in a really interesting way, which is the tech is starting to work, right? Like it just is. We are at a moment now where all of the people who were like, it's just fancy autocorrect. It will never be the thing. Like I hate to be the bearer of bad news on this, but like the tech kind of works now. It's not digital Jesus. It's not going to remove everyone's jobs in a week, but like it can do things now. It really can. I've seen it. I use these tools all day every day. They work. And we are now confronted with the question in this like hugely existential way of do we want this? Like do we want this? And we have to ask it now and we have to do things about it now. And overwhelmingly the answer is no. And I think we're going to get to a point where it's like this stuff works and I still don't want it. And whether or not that message ends up being more powerful, I think is going to be sort of the question about AI for me for the next little while. Like it sucks and I don't want it is whatever.
I'm going to caveat works with your own feelings about AI that you have expressed on the show many times. It works for business and it works when you treat your own life like business, right? Consumer applications work if you compress yourself into being a travel agent. Do you know what I mean? Like that's great. And this is why I'm always yelling about software brain. It works if you conform to how it wants you to operate, which is very easy for corporations to do, right? Any corporation is like, oh, there's a 20% efficiency increase, we will immediately change the process of the corporation to go get that change. And that's the entire enterprise software market works in this way. Normal people just don't, right? And you say data centers are a reflection of how people feel about AI overviews. By the way, also fully disagreed with that when I put that to him. I think the opposition to data centers is how all of the products make all the people feel, which is stupid all the time.
Right, even though they're sycophantic and they try to make you feel like a genius. At some point you hit the brittleness, particularly free models, or you hit the like, this isn't the answer I wanted, but it's been presented in such a confident form that I'm just going to walk away from you, right?
Which is something like what Gemini Spark is doing, right? It made you a beautiful plan and to argue with that plan, like it's not like talking to your actual travel agent. It's not like talking to your friend who helps you plan a trip because they're really good at credit card points or whatever. It's like I have to fraud the computer in some way to not screw up the first half of the trip because I want to change a restaurant in the second half of the trip. And like now you're a computer programmer. You might be using natural language, but you have to conform yourself to how Gemini wants you to issue these instructions. And that stuff isn't good enough yet. It is great in the business context because you have every incentive to be good at your job and use these tools in that way. And I'm just pounding the table. Making people's lives feel like work makes for horrible consumer products. These consumer products are not anywhere close to good enough because all of them are in the framework of what if more of your life looked like using the computer at work. And I just think that's a mistake. Even the personal context stuff that Google's doing, that's a straight lift from how enterprises think about using AI because they have these vast stores of data and all of these databases or their data lakes or all this enterprise IT vocabulary. None of that data talks to each other. All of their like middleware products that are supposed to connect it all are expensive and don't work. And now you can just let loose Gemini for Work on your vast interconnected source of databases and it will start generating business insights at you. And like all of this seems very exciting. The leadership conferences are more energized than ever about this stuff. And no human being in their lives is like, boy, my data is in several unconnected databases. If only Gemini could read them all and deliver action. Like what? No, man. I just want to drink a bunch of Miller Lites and chill out. There's something there that's missing forever, you know.
Yes, I think that's right. But also, I think the belief at these companies increasingly is that you're wrong and that actually the ability to one-shot me a useful personalized trip planner is going to cross that chasm. Like, can I, I just want to read you a quote from, so I interviewed this woman, Gaz Ozner, who's a product manager at Google. We were talking in the context of this app called Dream Beans that Google came out with. I don't know if you saw this. The idea is it's essentially a proactive list of, they call them stories, of AI-generated things every day. I encourage you to go look at the thing that I posted on the site, which is one of the things it does is it generates pictures of you for a lot of these stories, which is just extremely rude about the size of my forehead in most of them. But the idea is like, okay, how do we put all of this data together for you in sort of a proactive, helpful, useful way? So sometimes it's like, here's a bit of information you should know for today, or like a fun way to tell me to update all my computers ahead of WWDC is literally one of the things it gave me. And she said this thing. She said she was originally on the personal intelligence team at Google, and she said, we realized that each service holds a specific piece of your life. Gmail has mostly your logistics and receipts. Photos has your visual memories and the people you care about. YouTube has your interests, and search reflects what you're curious about. So there's definitely something interesting in connecting all of that.
Software brain. That is the most software brain of all time. You are just a bunch of different databases that Google runs.
I'm not positive she's wrong. Like, I think.
I'm positive she's wrong. Do you think YouTube is a complete list of your interests?
I think it's closer than just about anything else you'd find.
No way, dude. It's just like, no, that's absolutely not true. Does YouTube know that you just reviewed a whole bunch of phones and went back to iOS or Android?
Based on a bunch of things that I did and the Apple Store receipt in my... it's sitting there. But it doesn't matter. Google has all of them, right? Like, and this is the bet. And this is like, again, I bring this up in the context of Microsoft Build where their theory is you can do this at work. And I think fairly straightforwardly you can do this at work, right? Like everybody has incentives.
That's what I'm saying. In work, this all makes sense to me.
Work is just database manipulation for most.
And you put all of these in structural places like Notion is deep down this road, right? Of like, put all of your business stuff into Notion and our AI will just do everybody's job for them. Like that's plausible because everybody is incentivized to make these things in these structured ways inside of their companies. The most alarming thing about this Spark experience for me was like, it kind of works in my personal life. Like it didn't, I'm going to follow that itinerary pretty exactly because it was right about most things.
And that's like, that's one example of many things. But it's like, but then the fact that it worked and it still made me feel bad is just this thing I can't get past. And so I think like for me it's been like, okay, this isn't going to work because everybody is software. And I think we are inching to the point where maybe at least Google, maybe not anybody else, but maybe at least Google actually does have enough of this data about me that if it can put it all together in a way that feels as useful as this one Spark experience did. And again, this is one experience. Life is full of experiences. This is one. But it did it in a way that I had just not experienced before.
I can just think of ways that this can break pretty easily. One, if you don't use Google for everything, right? And I will stick on the idea that YouTube doesn't actually know my interests, but Google needs to pretend it does.
Do you know what I mean? Like that's very important.
Aren't you one of those people who like turned off history on YouTube so you don't get recommendations anymore?
I open YouTube and it is basically a dark gray search box and a prompt that's like, please turn on your history. And I'm like, I will never turn on my history.
No, it's absolutely true that all of this only works if you willingly have given your... but also like if you give your life to Google. So like lots of people don't do that.
I made the Gmail decision in 2004. Like this is not, people are not making this decision today. People made these decisions a long time ago, right? But some of those people made the decision to use Yahoo in 2002, right? Like there's a lot of that in the world where Google can't make the promise for everybody.
Sure. And there's the software brain piece of this is they have to flatten you into the databases they have. So I'm just going to keep pushing on the YouTube one to just flatly say like YouTube is where your interests are is required to make the product work, but it has no reflection on where your interests actually are because a lot of your interests are also on Instagram and a lot of your interests are also on TikTok and a lot of interests are never expressed to your phone at all. Like at all, you know, and like we're both watching Widow's Bay, right? I don't know that YouTube has any indication that I'm watching Widow's Bay in a totally different streaming service.
It does because you say your name at the beginning of the podcast and it's a transcript on YouTube.
But that's us. That's us.
It's there, dude. Like this is what I'm saying.
But like most people are not opening their podcast. They're not publishing to YouTube where they say the names of TV shows they're watching.
Like I'm confident that Google knows I play Madden. Like, but it's fine. But that's us, not everyone else.
I'm just saying that is the software brain. It's the promise. It is also the peril, right? Where you're like, okay, you're just a bunch of databases. What databases do I have that reflect you? YouTube is your interest. And you are sort of just required to say it. There's also like, you know, Microsoft had Build this week. There's their approach to it, which is to say out loud, we're just focused on the enterprise, right? And we have our new models and we're going to build a bunch of enterprise applications. And because we have so much Microsoft 365 and Azure data about your workplace, we can put out whole new products, concept products of what a computer looks like now that have nothing to do with Windows that are just like agent control panels that you might use to do work. And this makes sense again, I think, in the enterprise, right? If you sit down at your corporate job where like mostly you use a laptop to use software, it does make a bunch of sense to say, oh, I can talk to my agent to go use the software and the databases for me. And I think Microsoft sees that opportunity in like gigantic interesting ways. Sure. But everyone else, this is the Rabbit R1. Everyone else is like, we're going to run around and use your apps and services for you as a consumer. And that turns your life into work in exactly the same way. And I just, I don't think people want their regular lives to feel like what they do at their jobs. I maybe some people do. I know people who love to use Airtable to like plan their weddings or like whatever. There's reasons for lists and schemes to exist everywhere, but no one wants to be like, what's it, how do I get 20% more efficiency in my automated process at like absolutely not. We'll see.
I agree with you. I think this is the turning point. Like these things are going to ship to consumers and it's going to be extraordinarily apparent that a lot of us are reflected in a lot of databases that can be linked together to do this kind of stuff and then everyone is going to have to choose.
Yeah. And there's going to be this question of like knowing everything we know about where this technology came from, who stole what to make it, and what it's doing to the environment and to our brains. Do I want really great trip planning service?
Boy, did this all feel very existential just trying to get like a weekend trip to Hershey, Pennsylvania. But actually, we should take a break and then I want to come back and talk about the computer thing you just said because I think that's sort of the other AI story of the week is basically Jensen Huang's theory of the computing future and we should litigate this. So let's take a quick break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about computers. Be right back.
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All right, we're back. So Nilay, you kind of alluded to this, but the thing I want to talk about here is Jensen Huang's theory about computers. In addition to being Microsoft Build this week, it was also Computex and Nvidia announced this chip called the RTX Spark that it thinks is like the new sort of consumer chip from Nvidia. They're going after Apple Silicon. They're going after Intel. They're going after AMD. They're like Nvidia's really feeling itself here and just trying to like take over the computing industry. But in the course of all of this, Jensen Huang was up on stage and he had a long sort of digression into what he believes to be the future of computers. Can I just play you this clip? It's long, but it is the most Vergecasty thing anyone has said on stage in a very long time. Can I just play this for you?
Okay. About three years ago, I talked to Satya and I said, in the future, AI wants to run on a device too, because we want to have assistance running with us all the time. Right now, well, for you, all of your laptops are here. My laptop is in the room. If I want to talk to my laptop today, I got to wait until I get back to my room. In the future, if I need my laptop to do something, I just text it with WhatsApp. I said, you know, whatever. R2-D2. You know, there's this thing with the PowerPoint slide, slide number 17. That image is scaled or titled wrong. It should not say CX9. It should say CX10. R2-D2 opens up PowerPoint, modifies it, puts it in PDF, sends it to me. Can you imagine that? Easy. That's a future where your AI is not just a laptop, not just a tool, but your laptop becomes an AI, becomes an assistant all day long. Now, you don't want to necessarily run everything in the cloud because if you can run it locally, it's free, just like laptops, just like phones, just like in your house. You know, why rent the television? You're going to use it every day. Why rent the washer-dryer? You're going to use it every, well, hopefully once a week. Okay. You know, why rent your refrigerator? You're going to use it every day. Why rent your assistant computer? You're going to use it every day.
Just going to go out on a limb here and say Jensen Huang, probably not somebody who does his own laundry.
He has no idea how often laundry is done. This man, I don't even know if Jensen has children. If you have children, that thing is running every day. That's just how that goes.
Yeah. But this, like, what a perfect encapsulation, I think, of everything happening right now. Like that's why the RTX Spark chip exists is to make devices that can do that kind of AI stuff locally. It's what a lot of the Windows stuff is after. It's what Microsoft thinks is the future. Like that is as good an encapsulation of a certain bet about the future of computing as I have heard anyone make. And I'm desperate to know what you think about it.
Okay. So first of all, I have to just call out Hayden Field who wrote about Build with Tom Warren. And she wrote this line that I think just contextualizes all of this, especially when you think about Microsoft and OpenAI breaking up and Microsoft having to like be its own company. Here's what Hayden wrote. This year's Build had the vibe of a freshly single divorce posting a thirst trap on Instagram.
And I know for a fact that inside
Microsoft, there's furious debate about whether that's good or bad.
Um, so... Oh, interesting. Hayden will tell you that she thinks it's good, right? Microsoft is feeling itself. They're out of the relationship. They're just like, look at us, man. We still got ideas.
Talk to Tom actually. Mustafa is going to be into coder, and they're like training their own models. They want to be their own company with their own ideas about the future of computing.
The fascinating thing about Jensen talking about editing PowerPoint slides on his laptop, one, very much implies your laptop is open and available to do tasks on call for you, which is not the state of laptops when you're not around them.
Just a weird example there. Two, I don't know if he's aware of this, but most people rent Microsoft Office, right? Like if the intelligence is built into your laptop, but it's using PowerPoint, you're paying that SaaS fee for PowerPoint anyway.
True. So even the example breaks down because the first thing Microsoft is going to do is bundle some intelligence into what they now call M365, which is horrible. And then they're like, 'Let the PowerPoint AI do it for you, not the assistant on your laptop.' So something about where the computer lives is very much at stake, but also totally confused. I feel like we've been asking where the computer should live since Alexa came out.
Yeah. And what does that computer look like and where does it live is a 15-year-old question at this point.
And you shouldn't rent the intelligence because it can just happen locally on your laptop and that's free is like, woo, that's a lot, right? Because it's not actually free. You need a new RTX Spark computer that can do local inference at a fast enough rate, many thousands of dollars. Yeah. Have you, Jensen, have you seen what you are personally doing to RAM prices right now? So there's just a lot in there about where does the computer live? What applications does it have access to? How much those applications cost? Is it on all the time? And if it's an always-on computer with permanent access to your applications that you're already paying SaaS fees for, shouldn't that just live in the cloud anyway? That all just feels like, oh, we made one big bet, but Microsoft is feeling itself. Wants to talk about the future of computers, and so we're going to talk about this thing that exists, too. Even though, isn't that chip like already out? Wasn't Sean on The Verge saying that chip was basically already out?
Yeah, that was like a year ago, I think, when Nvidia shipped the Spark AI supercomputer. Do you remember this thing? It was like the little gold Mac Mini-looking thing that they were like, 'This is a supercomputer on everyone's desk,' and it cost $4,000. And I forgot about it until this happened.
Yeah, that's just what happened. Yeah, I think the Microsoft flexing that it has a bunch of its own ideas and it is no longer dependent on OpenAI. And by the way, here's Jensen Huang, you know, the most powerful man in AI with all kinds of ties to OpenAI, on our stage talking about not renting compute from our partner that will only rent you compute that we're breaking up with. Like there's just some great Microsoft in there. Like Microsoft at this moment in time, they showed off devices that don't run Windows. They actually run Android. Like this Project Salana stuff, and that's all agentic. All of that compute happens in the cloud, right? Yeah. Like where if you're using it, it's like a little credit card thing, right? Like a badge size. Yeah. And you just talk to it. It's a little agent and like goes and does stuff in the cloud. I continue to think that rules. I talked about this with Tom, too, but like that idea of like the little employee badge that becomes an intelligent AI assistant. Like if you're Microsoft, that is a perfect idea. Like I really, I earnestly believe that is... I don't know if any of it will come true or be real or ever actually work successfully, but it is the most complete and most Microsofty thought about AI that I have seen yet.
Right. And it absolutely presumes that the computer is in the cloud.
Yeah. Right. You don't need any sort of local compute if it's just a little badge with a display that is telling you what your agents are doing off in the cloud. And that is 100% opposed to 'why rent your refrigerator when I can just text my laptop,' which is the OpenClaw announcement. And Microsoft is basically like using OpenClaw. So they're pointed in two diametrically opposed directions. I'm sure you can write some coherent thesis about like you got to make every bet and like some people are going to want X and some people are going to want Y. But yeah, Jensen being like 'why rent this stuff' is like everybody wants you to rent the actual inference.
Yeah, I don't think Microsoft is the only one confused about this for whatever it's worth. Like this is very much what OpenAI is doing with OpenClaw. Like this is why OpenClaw is now part of OpenAI, right? Like this idea that we should have some piece of it that lives in the cloud, some piece of it that can use your computer, not just live on your computer, but use your computer, right? Like that's the turn, is how do we get access to all of your apps? We just use your computer for you. And what should run locally, what should run on your own sort of private data, and then what should run in like a public cloud somewhere else. No one knows, right? Like Apple is trying to figure this out with Siri and Apple Intelligence. They have this whole private cloud thing that kind of works, and then they just punt things to ChatGPT. And I think we're about to get new ideas about where all of that goes. No one has any answers to this. So I don't think Microsoft is like unique in being confused here, but it just makes me think we've been having this debate for a long time and I've been asking people this question for a really long time where one of two futures is coming. Either everything is going to be a computer, right? Smartphone chips became so cheap and so readily available that what if we just put one in everything became the thing, or you're going to have this one sort of centralized computer that you log into from everywhere, which is like sort of the Chromebook bet, or is like what Alexa is doing, right? Alexa exists outside of any given device. You just have a bunch of devices through which you interact with Alexa. Everybody is trying to do both of those things simultaneously right now, and it's just very confusing.
The answer is going to be some sort of hybrid model. I mean, this is true of smartphones too, right? I mean, I think it probably should be like if you have a smartphone with a slow processor, it doesn't matter how much compute is available to you in the cloud. You're not having the most fun, right? For sure. And so this has been going back and forth for years. I just think in this case, as we've been talking about, like all of your data is in the cloud. All of the applications that the AI needs to use more often than not are in the cloud, right? And it just seemed... the web exists, right? Like they often need to go search the web for stuff. Yeah. It doesn't seem like having the big local... even OpenClaw, like it started off as ClawBot because it was just a thing on your computer that was calling Claude a lot to use your computer for you, right? And people are just like burning through their token allocations using these harnesses. So at some point either Nvidia has made a chip that is so good it can run a good enough model locally and your laptop isn't red-hot and your power bills aren't skyrocketing, or the cost of inference will go down, which is what everyone will predict over time, and this will be like a moot point. Like you just pick whichever one works for you, and that's fine.
Yeah, I think to me the big question there is there is a next thing implicit in all of this stuff that Jensen is talking about and in all of the bets that even these PC makers are making that if we can make the chips fast enough, then it's going to completely change the way you use all of these devices and what you... not just what you use them for, but like how you interact with them, right? Like one of the things Jensen said in this is that he wants to talk to his computer. Everybody has this idea that typing is now like outdated, that actually you should just be yelling at your computer all the time. And if you believe all of this, right, there is going to come a time when the whole size and shape and form of your PC is going to need to change because of AI. And to me, there's no evidence of that at all. Right? Like, can you get a sufficiently fast chip to be able to do more things locally? I think is a really fun and interesting question. Like I've been using all of these dictation tools, the WhisperFlows and Spokenless of the world, as a typing replacement. And in many ways they're really interesting. They're also irritatingly slow because they're all doing stuff in the cloud. And you download the local ones and they're enormous and still kind of slow because I'm on a Mac Mini, which like they work fine. Like this stuff is good and fine, but in order for the sort of set of things you can do to expand, you do need these faster chips. But the idea that that is going to immediately turn into some brand new kind of relationship with our laptop, I think is just dead wrong. I just don't see it.
All right, I'm just gonna... here's... I have one counter example for you. Okay. Just a very simple point to make. The hottest consumer electronics product the past six months is the MacBook Neo. Yeah. A very inexpensive laptop that runs an older iPhone chip that does not have any pretensions to AI at all. And yes, I know people are going to tell me that people are buying Mac minis all around San Francisco to run OpenClaw, whatever, man. The hottest consumer electronics product of the last six months. It's the MacBook Neo. No question. Everyone is super happy with that thing because it doesn't have any of these pretensions about new form factors. It's just a really good laptop for not a lot of money that is absolutely fast enough.
Yep. Dell just put out a new XPS at a cheap price to compete with the Neo. And I believe it was Dell who said to us, we have to stop marketing these things as AI PCs because consumers don't want them.
Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. So I hear you. Like where does the compute live? Where does the logic live is a live question. I think it's been a live question since Alexa. Right. 'We're going to put Alexa in the smoke detector' was a real moment that we all lived through, and it was like, why are there microphones all over my house? I need one in every room, and you need to tell me where the computer is. Where does HomeKit live?
An open question that I don't think anyone knows the answer to, including the people who make HomeKit at Apple. Yeah. Like does it live on your Apple TV? Does it live on your iPhone? Who knows? 'Restart them both' is like a real thing that happens all the time.
It's like where should the logic be? How diffuse should the logic be? Is the logic on someone else's server or is it on 15 different devices in your home? By the way, this is the argument to put Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. That's another episode of the show that we're certainly going to have to do at some point. But I don't think any of these approaches to computing, even if they change where the computer lives, where the logic lives, change the form factor, right? I was on a flight to Chicago yesterday and I played games on my phone. There's nothing about any of these agentic tools that can replace that, right? And if you can't replace that, then you still have a phone, and then you still have a device that is capable of doing all the things, and nothing about that form factor is different. And I haven't seen anyone gesture at that problem, right? It's like, oh my god, you can just talk to everything now. The form factor should be different. It's like, bro, I played whatever horrible golf game for two hours on the flight yesterday. Like, do you have that? Like, no. Yeah. Okay, I'm done with this.
Yeah. No, I think one of my favorite things about this whole moment is I think there is a really strong case to be made that laptops are a perfectly solved problem. Like we nailed it. Laptops are done. Stop monkeying with the form factor. We can have all kinds of new ideas about lots of things.
No, no. Keyboard in the front, man.
Shout out Paul Miller. Keyboard in the front.
What a true nightmare that was for 10 minutes. Was that an Acer computer that they did that, that they switched them around?
There was a lot of them. It was like one of our weirdest recurring segments on the show was Keyboard in the Front Club.
Yeah, that was really something. But even like just reading back over this thing Jensen is describing where he's like, if I need my laptop to do something, I just text it with WhatsApp. I say, 'R2-D2, there's this thing with the PowerPoint slide, slide number 17. That image is scaled or titled wrong.' First of all, to your point, this is pure business brain. Nobody has any ideas about what this would do for you other than power. Like, do this on your phone. Like there's a real case to be made that it would be easier to make PowerPoint good on your phone to make this change than it would to do all of the things so that I can send this very long message through WhatsApp that a bunch of things will then go happen.
I don't know if you've ever opened PowerPoint or Google Slides on a phone. That is a fast way to make your phone overheat and shut down.
That is true. Maybe that is an impossible technological... but your point is correct. Like this is only compelling if you're the managing director at an investment bank.
Yes. And in no way does this require a different kind of laptop, right? Like I'm sure you've seen all of these memes of like now everybody leaves their laptop slightly cracked outside the bathroom because their agent is running. And it's like, first of all, buddy, Google 'caffeinate' on Mac and you will have solved all of your problems. There are ways to make sure your computer doesn't turn off when you close the lid. Like I don't know if you guys know this. Blow your mind. But also it works on your laptop. It's fine. This is not... we don't need new ideas about laptops here. And I think this goes back to your idea of like, isn't the actual future of this that all of this stuff lives in the cloud? But even if it's running locally, my MacBook Air running an M4 chip could do everything described there perfectly fine except that Apple is bad at AI. Like, we don't need new gadgets to solve this problem. And I'm so struck by we have phones and we have laptops and actually that might be the entirety of what the AI revolution requires.
I mean there's a lot of startups that want to bet differently. I'm just coming back to what did I play? I played like a game where you connect a bunch of lines. It was called like Flow. Okay. You know, it's just burned time while the baby was asleep on me on the plane. Like whatever, man. Can your weird pendant that wants to be my girlfriend do that for me? Because if it can't, like I'm still gonna have a phone. And I guarantee you my phone is gonna have a faster processor, a better cell modem, and a bigger battery than your girlfriend pendant. Yeah. I'm sorry. Like, and I have a wife. So, phone, wife, nailed it. Sorry, friend. Like, yeah.
Look, I think the idea that what if we can make much faster laptops is super exciting. I actually think like the whole RTX Spark thing is going to be really interesting if they have made the thing as sufficiently powerful as they say and can bring the sort of Windows ecosystem up to the Apple silicon level. That's cool and exciting and will enable lots of new things for people. Nothing in that to me suggests we need an entirely new take on what computers are. I just don't see it.
Not to be a total conspiracist, this industry is desperate to get away from the Apple tax. And the way you do that is you get people to buy different hardware running a different OS with different toll rates in the app stores, like whatever that thing is. And to do that you need a new user interface paradigm because otherwise you're competing with the iPhone. This is why Meta did the metaverse, for whatever reason they did the metaverse. But like underneath it all, if you go back and read all that coverage, Nick here actually wrote a long piece at Pixel Envy about the metaverse promises and he points out Mark Zuckerberg is constantly talking about the Apple tax and Apple and how much he hates Apple. That's the whole impetus behind that whole disaster.
Their bet was the next thing. They had no conviction about what it was. They just needed the next thing.
They just wanted another platform that they didn't have to pay the Apple tax on and didn't have to care about Apple's privacy policies. And so they were like, 'That's it. We're helmets on your head. It's definitely going to be it.' And now we're at, what if you talk to it? And so Meta has thrown away the helmets on your head. They've put out the glasses. You can just talk to that. They're going to build personal super intelligence. Everyone else is chasing pendants and wearables and rings and bracelets because if you can just talk to the computer, you don't need all the apps on the phone. You don't need that distribution. You don't have to deal with Apple and the Apple tax. And Apple could just end this overnight by changing how the app store worked, right? And they would cement the dominance of iOS for another generation. But they can't because that's all their money. And so now we have this fight. And maybe that's great, right? Maybe this is actually the competition everyone needs. But you just see like, oh, there's a weird dance here that has nothing to do with whether or not you actually need the new form factors, right? And maybe they're exciting, but you don't need them if you weren't trying to run away from the economics of iOS in particular. And by the way, Android has the same economics. It's just Google's like, here's our assistant, and no one can beat that. Yeah. Right. And because Siri has to date been a disaster, there's a lot of like, oh, we can beat Siri, but very few people are rolling up into an Android phone and being like, we can beat Gemini, your Android phone. Like, that seems much harder than beating Siri. So, all the emphasis on Siri and also iOS customers spend more money. There's a lot of reasons for this. We'll see what happens at WWDC. But I look at this, all of this frenetic, let's reinvent computers, and somewhere lurking in the background at different priority levels for every company is we have to get away from Apple.
We have to get away from the Apple tax. Apple and Google both, but I think particularly the Apple tax. And there is this ongoing sense that those things are only going to become more entrenched, right? And so it's like if we're going to do it, we have to do it right now. Otherwise, Apple will figure out the next form factor that it needs. And we'll get to this in a minute, but there's been a lot of new reporting about Apple's vision plan for smart glasses and the Vision Pro and all this stuff. And it's like Apple is also reportedly working on a pendant. Like Apple has these ideas too. And so there is this sense of like we have to beat this paradigm first or else the ones that have already closed it will just close it again. And that's what Gemini is doing, right? Like the fact that Google caught up so fast with Gemini is like an existential threat to everybody else doing this because it's like, oh well, if Google just wins the next one the way that it won the last one, we're all in trouble again.
Yeah. The same duopoly just can do it again. This is why they're all doing browsers. This is why they're all doing computer use. They need access to your data as directly as Google has access to your data and a staggering number of applications. Who knows, man? I just think like I'll use smartwatches as an example, right? The Apple Watch is a great product. People love them. Google just put out the Fitbit Air. I'm wearing this Whoop band that tortures me daily about if I could just tell the Whoop band I have a baby and it could stop telling me that my sleep was interrupted, that would be great. And it just like won't believe me. Like I'm like this is not going to stop for 18 years. One of my favorite things about the Fitbit Air is that the first night it was like, 'Gosh, you woke up a lot.' I was like, I have a 10-month-old. And now it just says every morning it's like, 'You did great,' even though the baby woke up six times. 'I'm really proud of you.' It like fully changed its tenor about my horrible sleep. It's great.
Maybe I just don't want to tell the Whoop band that much information about myself. It'll be like, 'You're less masculine because you cared for your child.' I have a lot of feelings about the Whoop band.
Such a low-T move to care for your child. It's constantly telling me I need... It's like no one wants me to 10x my testosterone. Like zero people in the world think that is a good idea for me in particular. Anyhow, that set of wearables works, right? There's competition in the market for screenless health trackers and they all kind of work with iOS in whatever way they work. And if you want to display one notification and make something smarter than that, Apple stops you. And there's not actually great competition for the Apple Watch in the category of things that are Apple Watches, right? There's competition for things that are next to it. Like I'm a much harder runner, so I'm going to go to Garmin or whatever it is, right? And then there's competition for things that don't even pretend to do the things the Apple Watch does. Like you know, like all these screenless trackers, the Whoops and the Fitbit Airs, like they're just doing what they can do inside the apps that they can run and then they stop at Apple's garden walls. And I think no one wants to repeat that. Like there should be way more competition in smartwatches and there kind of just isn't because every single phone maker has the smartwatch that works best with their phone and that's pretty much where that ends.
It's the same with headphones. Actually, this has happened to the headphone market in like the saddest ways.
True. Not to talk about the headphone jack here, but there used to be pretty vast competition in headphones. And now there's one set of wireless earbuds that work best with your phone. Yep. And they're often made by the manufacturer of your phone and that is where that ends.
And like doesn't that suck?
It does. And so like all these AI products, like I respect that there's furious competition to get to the next turn of user interface because that's usually how you break the form factor and you break the lock-in. But boy, it seems like Apple's gonna get there with Siri before any of these figure out how to do all the rest of the smartphone stuff.
Yeah. And I also think you're making me realize that maybe that's the reason everyone is obsessed with reinventing your desktop computer from the inside out because it's the only way you can get access, right? Like Nvidia can't do the things it's describing on your phone because it can't. It violates the policies. Apple prevents that from being possible. But you can get pretty deep system access to somebody's Mac and start doing stuff at that level, right? Like I've spent a lot of time with this app Raycast, which is kind of the same thing. It's like it started as an application launcher and then it's like, okay, we can actually just take full system access and control all of your windows and control all of your settings. And all of a sudden, it's like, oh, we've become a new way to use your computer. And you only get that kind of access on people's desktop computers. So if you need to change the paradigm, you have to change it in some sort of giant non-accessory way. You can't build dependent because Apple and Google won't let you. So you have to start with the desktop computer because it's the only way in. Like maybe that's the reason everybody's desperately trying to reinvent your laptop because it's the only move they have.
Yeah. I mean, this is why Microsoft is announcing the Surface Laptop Ultra with the RTX Spark and they've got a whole lineup of their partners announcing it. Yeah, they want to make the claim that doing local AI inference on a laptop is the future of computing and the form factor can change slightly, but actually we're going to start selling you laptops with 128 gigs of RAM, right? And for the first time ever, there's a reason for that if you're not like a heavy Photoshop user or whatever, right? Sure. And I just don't... First of all, 128 gigs of RAM in this economy, come on. Literally economy. I could buy a laptop ultra. That's where we are. But I don't know that just adding a ton of RAM and processing power to a laptop is going to make it a different thing than a laptop.
Right. Right. Yeah. I am all for more powerful laptops. I think they should probably keep being laptops.
Bring it back. Somebody, you cowards, if you believe in AI, just get rid of the keyboard entirely. What if it's just one giant-ass touchpad and a microphone?
I mean, that's what Lenovo is for. This is why Lenovo exists. We're going to see the Lenovo concept of like a folding tablet with no input except a microphone like tomorrow.
All right, we need to take a break before anybody gets ideas. Lenovo, that was a joke. And also trademark Nilay Patel 2026. All right, let's take a break. Then we're going to come back. We got Hype Desk. We got the lightning round. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. It's time now for the Hype Desk where our friends Ross and Ashley come and tell us about cool things happening on the internet and in the world. Today it's just Ross. Sad. It's okay. Ross, welcome back.
Hello. Hello. Ashley sends her regards. She's just flying back from a three-week trip in Japan. So excited to hear about that.
That is cool. So what do you... Wait, actually, can we rewind to last week because you were going to come on last week and tell us about 007 First Light, which is the only thing I care about in the world. Yeah, I'm actually surprised you are playing it as much as you are. And you're not playing it on PlayStation, right? You're playing it streaming. So, we talked about this last week when you weren't here and I had to have feelings about it only to Nilay, who does not care about my feelings about James Bond games. But, I don't have a PS5 or a current Xbox. I play all of my games on the Switch at this point, which like says a lot about the kind of gamer that I am, basically. But, this is the first game in forever that I was like, I will go buy a console just for this game. I love James Bond games.
They raised the price of the console and then they put out a game that you like.
Yeah. So, it was $650, which is more money than I'm willing to spend on a James Bond game. Thank you to everybody, by the way, who sent me the link to the Woot sale that there was for like out-of-box refurbished PS5s for 300 bucks. They were sold out before I got there, but these are my people. What I ended up doing is spending $200 on a year subscription to GeForce Ultimate, which comes with 007 First Light, and I have been playing on my Mac Mini, and it rules. This game is amazing.
Okay, just a lot there. I feel like the whole segment is how incredibly rolled by the tech industry you finally have been.
Yes, 100%. You're gaming on a Mac Mini with a subscription bundle from a service no one uses. I don't know, man.
I will defend Nvidia GeForce. It is surprisingly good. It's great.
My internet's very fast and it's wired.
They're going to pull you on stage at WWDC and be like, 'We found one.'
Yeah. Well, ironically, you have to use like 11 other platforms in order to get this to work. I had to sign up for an account from the game developer. I had to get into my Steam account and I had to get a GeForce account. I don't know where I actually own this game, but I own it somewhere and it plays on my computer now. And it rules. And this game is spectacular. I'm literally barely through the tutorial of 007 First Light and I'm already having like a true blast playing this game. It is one of the all-time great tutorials and people I've talked to in the industry love it because it is just so smart. Like, and you all heard me talk about this in pre-record, but like it is basically WarioWare for adults. Like it teaches you everything in like this cinematic montage the way you would watch in a movie, right? You see James in a basic training. He's punching, he's learned to shoot, he's driving, he's getting better every rotation, but you see that rotation because they want to show the passage of time. They do exactly that jumping from scene to scene in the basic training. This is like 30 minutes in the game. It's not a big spoiler, but it is one of the smartest ways to get people caught up on like the basics of the game.
Yeah. And the whole first act is basically a movie that you kind of participate in. It's like 80% cutscene and then you walk. It's like most of the game and it works, like it plays somehow for the first full hour of this game. But anyway, we're mostly not here to talk about First Light. You have something else for us this week. What do you have for us?
Yes. Well, I will talk about Double 7 all you want, but primarily this is the greatest week in gaming. This is the one I'm really legitimately hyped and excited about. I got started in the industry covering E3. E3 is dead, but everyone kept showing up to Los Angeles anyway this week. And so, they've kept it going as Summer Games Fest. So, this is the week where every major company shows off basically all the games they want to release the next 12 to 24 months. Make huge hype circuits, all these trailers, hands-on. If you're out in LA, you can go to these little events as press and industry members. It's great. It's exciting. We just started this week with PlayStation State of Play a few days ago. And then Friday is the big flagship recording followed by an Xbox showcase on Sunday. And rumor has it a Nintendo thing next week, which not confirmed, but every year they've done something around here.
