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Live from the Brooklyn Bowl at the Consumer Electronics Show in Sin City, Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Vergecast, presented by L'Oreal Group. Please welcome to the stage your Verge editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, and editor-at-large, David Pierce.
Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of things about the height of your ankle that run around on every surface at your house. I'm your friend, David Pierce. Nilay Patel is here.
Have you seen the AI video of the cat doing the cripwalk dance?
It's all over my feeds. It might be the most important story at CES.
Do you realize that almost every episode of this show, at some point, you ask me if I've seen an AI video of something? Now, this is what we do here.
Anyway, we're here at CES at the Brooklyn Bowl doing this live. Thank you to everybody who's here.
Very good. This is the greatest day of my life. That's it. That's the first cast for being done. I have nothing left. Um, so we did a show, you and I, on Monday afternoon. Yeah. It came out on Tuesday, going through a bunch of the sort of early announcements of the show. And since then, we've both come to Vegas. We've both gotten to be out on the show floor. We've taken some meetings. We've done some stuff. Um, I first want to know, this is your what, 15 plus CES?
16 or 17? I want to say it's a long time.
I feel like you're good at it now.
I have a lot of feelings about Las Vegas.
Um, see, this is a weird one. This is a weird show. I don't know if you had caught the same vibe. Like, Samsung doesn't have a booth. They have a private booth in the Venetian.
All of the stuff on the show floor is sadder than it was before, in like very meaningful ways. And then we're going to talk about just the enormous amount of components you can buy on the show floor. Like just acres of lenses and actuators as far as the eye can see. And it's very much the consumer electronics of this show are not happening at this show. They're happening in meeting booths and hotel rooms and all that sort of stuff. It's just a very different vibe than it's ever been. Um, I remain convinced that Las Vegas is the only city in the world where you can just walk out of a building and say, 'I would like to be in the largest limo you can find me.' And someone will be like, 'Yeah, I can do that for you.' Um, and that is truly, I think, America's major contribution to the world. Like, it is the most transactional place you can be to the point where you can just demand the largest vehicle that exists at any given time in a radius and it will be provided to you.
So, people ask me all the time, you know, you get the question, people are like, 'Oh, you've been to CES a bunch of times. What are your tips?' And I used to give the normal tips like, you know, bring chapstick, drink a lot of water, give yourself a lot of time. But now I've started giving people a tip that I just completely stole from you, which is take all the money that you would spend gambling and spend it on limos. And it is the best possible.
Everyone will remember that you bought the limo for the rest of your life. You will not remember that you lost $500 playing roulette. Um, and I think this puts me out of time because the entire economy is gambling now and I'm not good at gambling. Like you can't be like, the economy is Hummer Limos. Like that doesn't work. Um, but yeah, I highly recommend taking your gambling budget for the night and be like, I'm going to buy the stupidest car I can get. Uh, still my number one Vegas tip. And having now done this so many times, I'm at the point where I'm like old and it's dangerously pathetic that I just do limos now. And like I'm trying to find my inner child to become excited about again.
We'll do that with all of you later tonight. We're gonna take limos tonight. It's gonna be great.
You heard it here first. Yeah. So, okay. So, what we did was we put together a bunch of kind of bigger picture trends from CES, like the sort of meaningful things that we're thinking about that are going to matter for the rest of the year. Um, I think the way I've come to see CES is less as like a bunch of individual gadgets and more sort of a statement of intent from the tech industry that's like, here's what we care about and what we think is going on. So, we're going to pull a bunch of trends out and just kind of talk through what we've been seeing.
Okay. Um, you have seen some of these but not all of them. So, you can veto me on any of them that you want, even though you'll be wrong, and that's fine. Um, and the first trend that I've noticed, which is kind of what you just pointed at, is it seems like anybody can make anything now. And so, there is this really weird push at CES for everybody to make everything. Like the thing I keep noticing is these companies, particularly that started in Shenzhen or are in China or both. Uh, companies like SwitchBot, which is like a thing people know as a vacuum company, showed up and they have a humanoid home robot, which is like the thing to have at CES this year. If you didn't come with a robot that doesn't do anything but sort of walks around and looks funny, like what are you even doing? Um, they have a bunch of other home products. They have a desk lamp that's like pixel art. And to me, it's just like there is this very real ability to get almost anything. And that to me is all over CES now. That is like everything is being manufactured at scale in China and it is easier than ever to get access to all of those things. And so what we're seeing more than ever is just a thousand different versions of the same thing immediately as soon as it is invented.
And it's like all the same thing.
In unique and interesting ways, like the Boston Dynamics robot dog, everyone has one now. Yeah. And like it took Boston Dynamics a long time to build that dog and now everyone's like, I can also do that.
Um, and that is spread throughout the Chinese manufacturing economy. That to me, there's a lot of ways to feel about that. The number one thing that occurred to me as I walked the show floor yesterday was all of this hardware is ready and none of this software is ready.
Right? If you can build a robot that can fall over, you're just waiting for someone to be like, I figured it out. I figured out how to make the AI make the robot useful. And then when that happens, by some miracle, you'll have the useless robot in your house. You'll flip the switch, you'll start paying the subscription fee, right? And the robot will do your laundry. I don't know if you guys went to the LG booth where they were demoing Cloyd.
I watched the poor presenter at the LG booth, just the light go out of his eyes. Just the 50th time he was like, 'And now it's going to fold this towel.' And this was the big demo, right? And it wasn't clothes, it was towels. It was, I'm going to make this rectangle a smaller rectangle with the power of AI. And it just sat there just baffled, you know, just like, should I? And the guy's like, 'Moving on now that that towel's folded.' I was like, 'The towel's not folded, man. It's less of a rectangle than it was before.' Uh, and you can just see the software isn't ready, but the hardware is so ready. So beyond ready. And the software to make the humanoid robots balance and walk and do kung fu. Allison Johnson shared a video where one walked outside and did kung fu and it knocked itself out,
Perfect metaphor for the whole thing.
Incredible. Uh, like that is the best thing I've ever seen. You can just see the software to do the basics, stand up, walk around, move, do a dance, all that's ready. It's been ready for years because of Boston Dynamics and other companies. The software to turn the corner and make them useful at human tasks is absolutely not ready. So that's like the first thing that just became really obvious. The hardware ecosystem is ready then.
Which is actually very cool, right? Like this thing where you can essentially make anything you want out of these incredibly immature supply chains for everything is very cool. It does make really obvious that most of it doesn't work yet the way that it's supposed to. But like, you know, we've said for years, hardware is hard is like a truism of the tech industry. And getting from, you know, I made one thing in my garage to tens of them and then hundreds of them and then thousands of them, I think, is easier than ever. Like, it's still work and it's still a process, but there's just so much out there to do now and so much to work with that is really exciting.
This is very exciting. And this is the other thing that just occurred to me, particularly as I'm wandering like West Hall, which is where a lot of the mobility stuff is. All the car tech is there. Obviously I was drawn to it like a moth through a flame. And then in the back corner there's dozens of booths that are mostly like electric dirt bikes and the humanoid robots that aren't getting any coverage because those companies, it's like the same company. They're like, we do batteries and motors. This one can do jumps and that one can do falling over and like one of these is going to work out. Um, and you're like, 'Oh, the manufacturing capacity of China is out of control.' Like, we don't have this. We can't just... You can't be three guys to start a company literally called agibbots.com and then set up a booth at CES and be like, 'Giots.com.'
And it's like only one half of that name is correct,
you know? But like they just started it and they're here and they're not, you know, funded by some huge mega corporation. Everything in tech in America is like only Apple and Google have the scale to do this.
And everything you go through CES, you're like, these are very small companies that have access to massive manufacturing ability, just letting them try stuff at a rate that we cannot conceive of. And companies that size not a long time ago were relegated to like making apps, right? Right. And the idea was like the phone is the hardware and now we have to figure out how to exist inside of it or you make an accessory or something. And that has totally pulled out into the rest of the world. You can make anything now.
But you know, obviously we live in America that is beset by tariffs and trade wars and it's like, will any of this stuff actually come here? Like what is the point of this? What is the point of a robot that falls over?
Uh, and I think we will come to that throughout this conversation, but thank you for giving me the title of the episode, by the way. Like I don't know what we're actually demonstrating to people except that we have this incredible hardware capability that is waiting for the software to make it good. And it is unclear if the software is on the path to be good enough to run these robots the way that the video suggests they are. And the towel folding demos absolutely demonstrate they're not ready to do.
Yeah. No, I agree. And that actually is a good segue to my second trend, which is that there are no good AI gadgets, but that has not stopped everyone from trying. Like everywhere you look here, there's one category of things that is like, we took a thing and we did AI to it. And I mostly just throw that away, right? They're like, here's a hairbrush with AI and it's like, well that's nothing so we're going to leave that alone. But this category of sort of dedicated AI gadgets is everywhere and you get the sense even talking to the people who are making these things that they're not at all sure what this is for and what it's supposed to do. So like let me just give you a bunch of examples. Um, lots of companies including Lenovo are doing smart glasses, right? And like you always say about the Meta Ray-Ban glasses, the fundamental disconnect is everybody wants them because they're a camera and their headphones and Meta makes them because they're an AI product, right? Like that disconnect is real. Um, Lenovo is doing the same thing. Lots of other companies are here with AI glasses. Again, no one is sure what you're supposed to use them for, but everybody is convinced that that is a form factor. Um, we also got a thing that is like a little desk bot that you mount your phone to and it just launches an AI app that has eyes that's adorable and it's a little companion. There's tons of AI companions here.
Everyone really learned that lesson from OpenAI.
Yeah. Right. They're like, 'This technology is making people crazy murderers. What if it was adorable?' Yeah. But yeah, so there's like little pets and lots of like fuzzy things and all of these things meant to sort of bring AI into the world. Um, Razer, you were just up here talking to the Razer CEO, but they made this little thing that sits on your desk that's an AI woo. It's weird. Makes me feel that.
A very weird conversation.
Um, Razer also has an AI wearable that's a big pair of headphones with cameras and microphones. There's just lots of this stuff around and I have not run into anyone who is like, 'Here's why this thing needs to exist and isn't your phone.' Like, everybody is so sure.
There's a lot of... No, there's a lot of people who will make the claims, but they're like infomercial style claims. They're like, 'Have you ever woken up and been like so lonely that you haven't had anyone to talk to, so you're like, I'm going to talk to this robot that might bang you?'
And you're like, 'Yeah, it's happened a handful of times.' Edge doesn't...
So that is the use case. Like, we can just say it, like that is the use case. But I think, I mean, you're right. And there is something, again, it's with all of this stuff. Like this is why there's so many robots here, right? Because you look at this robot that doesn't work and it's really easy to imagine how cool it might be when it does.
And this is, I think, the sort of dangerous spot we're in with AI in general is like so many of the futures are so genuinely exciting that it's like if and when all of this works the way that you're saying, it's going to kick ass. It's just that none of it does and there's not a lot of evidence that it's about to anytime soon.
The robots are very interesting and for a lot of reasons, but the main one is that they're awaiting a technology that isn't even being invested in at the rate it needs to be to make the robots work. So, all of our AI right now is built on LLMs. We've talked about this on the show a lot. Like LLMs have all the investment, they have all the hype. OpenAI is existentially tied to LLMs in a lot of ways. Mark Zuckerberg built superintelligence labs at Meta to bet on LLMs. He hired a new person. He pushed out Yann LeCun. Yann LeCun, one of the fathers of AI, is like, LLMs can't do it. Like they're not going to get there. We need to build these world models and that's how you're going to get to robots and superintelligence and all this other stuff that needs to happen next to LLMs. Um, that video that we've all seen of Joanna Stern where the robot is following her but it's teleoperated by another guy. That's how you train the world models, right? And even that Razer, um, those headphones, uh, Min, the CEO of Razer, was telling me that they have interest from the robotics companies so that the teleoperators can wear the headsets while they run the robots because that will see everything that they're... and that's right. This is like a lot of work that needs to get done.
But no one's investing in the world. Like no one's out here talking about world models to enable these kinds of robots yet, right? We're all still doing LLMs, we're all still doing this like very basic training. We have to collect all this data. And I just see all that and then I see the promises people are making and there's a pretty big gap. And I think the gap is smaller for the, we'll give you a little companion that you can just chat with because everyone has seen how much people like chatting with the chatbots. Yeah. So, if you can make a hardware chatbot, like maybe a lot of people will buy it. I think people are still going to just talk to the one on their phone. And I think this is like a real...
It's... you say this all the time. It's really hard to beat your phone.
Like your phone is a pretty amazing device. It's with you all the time. Are you going to take one of these AI companions with you? I just don't know the answer. But I do know the big leap into robotics, into all these other kinds of devices that can do things in the real world require, and the AI industry is saying it itself, they require a different kind of technology that is not being invested in at the rate that the LLMs are being invested in.
Yeah. I think one of the fun stories of this year for us is going to be whether anyone finds that other sort of way to interact with the AI models, right? Like even if you assume the tech doesn't get any better at all, there's a lot of stuff left to do with it. And this idea of like, okay, everybody is out here exploring these different form factors, right? Everybody has landed on like the little sort of pill recorder thing that can take notes in all your meetings. Great. Fine. That's going to work. Meeting notes.
Have you seen the rumor that OpenAI's thing with Jony Ive was a pen?
This is like to me one of the funniest outcomes of all this. Like...
I just like very straightforwardly, they... first of all, Jony is going to end up on a stage insisting that he's figured it out. Then he's going to show you a pen, right? Like I'm dying. Do you think he's going to like dramatically pull it out of a pocket protector in his shirt,
right? Like when he's like, 'And how do you get rid of the point?' And he like clicks the pen. Like it's all going to happen.
And we're all going to experience that together as a family and I'm very happy that we will be connected in that way forever, right? Like that's going to be amazing. And then it's like, dude, you've taught everyone to just talk to these things for the long... Do you think they're going to write in longhand? Like, do you love me? Like what... there's just some disconnect in that thinking. And all of it comes down to what is the form factor for this thing. And I think they can't do a pen, they can't do the like little hockey puck that's going to sit on... like those things are now being tried at scale. Everyone can see that they're not as useful as just having a phone.
And you've got to beat the phone, you've got to go somewhere else. And like sure, maybe it's a pen.
Yeah, I mean maybe it's a pen. I've also seen people who are building stuff that's more of a like desk object that it's like kind of an Alexa-looking thing, but it's just for voice in and out with ChatGPT. Maybe it's a fuzzy dog that talks to you. Like, I don't know. I think this question of like this tech is now good enough that lots of people want to use it. Can we put it somewhere other than your phone is clearly the question. And it's like everybody sort of thinks it's glasses, I think, without very much confirmation that it's glasses, but everybody's just going to try other stuff. Uh, and I think that's going to be fascinating. But this was the same thing that happened to Alexa and Google Assistant here for years.
Right. Where we would show up and they'd be like, 'Here's what we did. We put Alexa in a smoke detector.' And you would have to like... I was like a baby journalist at this time and I would have to sit there and look impressed because I thought that was part of my job. And now I'm like really old that smart speakers was a real thing that happened. Lots of people have smart speakers.
But smart speakers were the first one, right? People thought voice was going to be a thing. Now again, the thing I keep coming back to is the LLMs have conclusively reduced the like brittleness of voice input.
You can just talk to the computer. You can say whatever you want to it and it will agree that you're smart, which is incredible. Like it's amazing. Uh, can it turn around and do anything with that in one place? It definitely can, right? And software development has conclusively proven that this is very useful and it can do agentic stuff that has deeply confused people whether their laptops are alive.
Great. Like all that's cool and I don't think you should discount that at all. In every other domain, it's like I don't know.
Right. And so on the show floor yesterday and in meetings I asked a lot of smart home people like I don't think the LLMs can run smart homes. I think this idea that Google Assistant can just look at all the stuff on my network and just get it right is like really hard. And basically everyone agreed with me. And here's a really surprising thing. They told me that they thought the AI browsers would get there first before the smart home assistants.
Because if you're a browser company and you have the scale, you literally can sit there and look at every website.
You can just go look at every website in the world. Like there's a lot of them, but there's actually, you know, there's still a finite number. And then there's a much smaller number of ones that people actually care about. And so they're like, 'We'll figure out the agents and browsers before we figure out your crazy smart home because we can't just look at your house all day every day to figure it out, but we can look at the web all day every day to figure it out.'
And I think that's going to be a real weird break for people. The other thing I heard that I thought was really interesting is that the browsers, you get to watch them work. So users are starting to learn to trust them.
As you can see where they fail, they can ask you for help if they need it. They're just very transparently doing a thing. Whereas a voice-only assistant in your house, it just like you don't know. You have to really trust it and it might just fail and the first time it fails, you'll never talk to it again. And so like there's a real disconnect between you're going to put the AI in some other system, but it won't be obvious what it's doing the way that it's obvious right now in a chatbot showing its reasoning or in a browser clicking around and that trust turn. You can see it all over CES actually. You're like, 'So you want me to trust this like Furby?'
No, thank you. Yeah, not at this time.
I think this is one reason these things are actually surprisingly successful desktop computer things. Actually, I'm curious folks in the audience, show of hands, do any of you talk out loud to your computer? Like, whether you use a program or Siri or whatever, do you like spend time talking to your computer? Is it awesome?
Everyone I know who does this is like, all of you are living in the past. I'm living in the year 3000. Why are you typing? Don't ever type again. Just talk to your computer. And I think this is the sort of thing like you get it is maybe having a big ass screen and a microphone is actually the correct answer and like we're all just going to do laptops minus keyboards.
How romantic is the conversation you're having with this computer?
This is my fear is like we're all slowly driven into just bonkers territory.
If I'm being honest, I'm starting to worry that this is happening to you.
I'm just reading our own coverage.
It's like other people every day it's like another person is like my laptop is alive and it loves me. And maybe that's true. You know, who am I? Who's to say? This brings me actually delightfully to my next trend, which is that we're doing weird computers again.
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There was this time at the beginning of The Verge where everybody was like, 'What if your laptop was different?' And they were like this, 'What if the screen moved? What if there were five of them? What if instead of the keyboard being here and the trackpad being here, we just flipped them for no particular reason?' And everybody, they just had this idea that like this was not the only correct answer for a laptop. And then they all decided they were wrong. And we went back to this being the only correct answer for a laptop. And now kind of out of nowhere, we're doing weird stuff again. Lenovo has a laptop with a screen that starts 16 in like this and then just like pulls outward. It has another one that twists. We're doing the rollable screen again. Uh, there's an ASUS has one that's two screens and is like we're just out here doing stuff. Uh, ASUS also has one that they say is GoPro-inspired, which like what is that?
I don't know. Um, there's one HP made a keyboard that has a whole computer inside, which I think is like an amazingly good idea. We think about these things TI-99. That's a Commodore 64.
Well, we think about these things as like, you know, the laptop that you and I use and sit at all day. But if you're like a person out in the field who is like plugging into some terminal, you're hot-swapping computers all the time and all these things have just shoved into your keyboard. Kick-ass idea. I'm into this. And in general, like we're just... I don't know, will anyone buy any of these things? Yeah, I don't know. But I just love that we're back to having weird ideas about laptops.
I will say the thing that gets me out of all these weird laptops is like Windows is in a state of complete insanity right now.
Yes. To the point where like the Windows-focused publications are like, I hate this.
Yeah, because Satya Nadella is out here being like you're not even going to use your computer anymore. It's going to use itself.
That's barely a paraphrase. That's what he says. Um, and so like there was a moment I think where Windows had achieved a level of like aesthetic consistency, reliability that I think sort of reinvigorated the laptop market. And now we're seeing a bunch of these devices come out that have been in development and it's like, and then you got to run Windows 11 on it and the first thing it's going to do is be like, I'm Copilot. I will be in your way no matter what you do for the rest of your life. And I'm just basically saying these computers will all be great next year when they run Linux.
2027 is the year of Linux on the desktop.
Year of Linux on the desktop. Uh, I'm not going to lie to you. There is a real sort of uprising of Linux inside The Verge newsroom and this is going to become a thing. Um, can I read you a really fascinating quote? Um, so Kevin Towiliger, who's Dell's head of product. By the way, Dell did the like low-key best thing of CES, which is get rid of its stupid new brand and go back to its better old brand. They're just making XPSs again. Thank you, Dell. Great job. Um, but Kevin Towiliger said to PC Gamer, he said, 'We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device. In fact, everything that we're announcing here has an NPU in it. But what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI. In fact, I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome.' Like, a, I appreciate the honesty and forthcomingness, but b, like, yeah, dude, duh. Like, we've been doing this Copilot Plus PC thing for a minute. Everybody is trying to explain whether Apple Intelligence is going to be useful. There just has been this idea that we're going to AI your laptop and that will change everything. And now we're back to like, but what if it actually just had more screens instead? And I feel like that's a more fun run of hardware right now.
Yeah. And we already come to it. I think one of your other trends is like what if we made the battery life good and like it's as simple as it gets and it works every time. Yeah.
Um, I think that Dell learning this lesson is actually really fascinating for a number of reasons. Uh, one, like, you know, Dell's business is enterprise PCs like through and through and they're not even trying to pretend that they're doing AI in the enterprise, like that's for someone else to figure out. I think the idea that the consumer demand for chat, like the free version of ChatGPT has confused everyone has fully confused everyone because a free robot that will just tell you that all of your questions are good is like a very different value proposition than like I need to buy this PC because it has AI in it. And like I love the free version of ChatGPT, it thinks all of my questions and concerns are very smart and that's great, you know.
Did you accidentally put in like custom instructions into ChatGPT that were like, 'You're in love with me and you think I'm so smart.'
This would be a good prank to do on people, by the way.
Change it and then change it rapidly.
And um, no, I mean like it's, you know, they're just prone to being agreeable. And so like a free thing that will talk to you and be agreeable obviously is the most popular consumer app of the last decade. Like of course that thing is popular. I think Gemini is popular for the same reasons. None of that is a reason to go buy something else or this tech. This would be like if you're like people love AirPods so they must love Bluetooth. I have to put Bluetooth in everything,
right? It's like not that doesn't track at all. Like this is an enabling technology that made a product people like. And I think Dell just got there really fast because they did it last year with AI PCs on everything and they saw that there was no take-up for it. I think Microsoft is going to quickly learn that lesson with this version of Windows. It's not going to juice their sales in any way. And I think a bunch of the consumer brands we see here, Lenovo, LG, Samsung to some huge extent, uh, they're all going to find out that just bundling the existing products does not make their fundamental products any new. Like did you see the, um, uh, I believe it's Samsung has an AI soccer mode for their TVs.
