Support for the show comes from Sonos. Most of us here at The Verge are big movie buffs. When watching at home, I don't want that experience to be any less immersive than it would be in a theater. And sound plays a huge role in that. The Verge has actually published a few pieces over the years about how much sound matters to a movie. From headphones to sound bars, a Sonos system pulls you in. So far, you might actually think the phone call is coming from inside the house. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.
Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of AI mascots. A little bit of butt. That's right. I'm your friend Nilay Patel. I'm back after two weeks away. That's what you were expecting. Jake Kastrenakes is here.
So glad you're back for delightful intros like these.
David Imel is here. What's up, man?
We're never letting you leave. You understand this, right?
The people demand that you stay in that studio and never go anywhere else. We're going to figure it out.
I live here now. Okay. All right.
There is a lot going on this week. There's Google Books. There's Meta Connect. Jake, what's on the menu?
Yeah, it was a busy week for gadgets. Google Books. We're going to finish up with Brendan Carr is a dummy, naturally, now that you're back. The long-awaited return. We've got a lightning round. We've got to start with Meta. So Wednesday night, Meta Connect, Mark Zuckerberg takes to the stage. This is their VR and glasses show. Most recently, actually, if you watched it this week, it turned into the Muse show, right?
If only they had brought on the band.
Yeah, the branding, I think, would have gotten a little conflated with the sexy, what is it? Bear.
It's called the Jolly. And so the mascot's name is Jolly.
That will fix their privacy.
We're going to come back to Jolly, I assure you.
And I don't want to come back to Jolly. It became a show about Muse. Muse was everywhere in everything. I think this is fascinating, right? This is Meta's new AI agent. It's like three weeks old at this point. Two or three weeks old. Have you guys been using this yet? Have you instructed your Muse to shop for you yet, David?
No. I do not know if this makes me a bad tech journalist, and it probably does, but I do not feel comfortable with Meta having my information. So I have not used it yet.
This is the problem with Muse, right? It straightforwardly, every piece of coverage we do, all the comments, even we had an editorial meeting about it the other day. I was like, 'Everyone needs to at least use the thing.' And half of our editors were like, 'I don't, I won't.' I was like, 'But you have to.' So I gave it one thing. I gave it my personal spam Gmail.
Right. Which is like, if Meta can look at however many Home Depot e-receipts it wants to, that's fine. Okay. And it was some boring thing. It's like we returned something overseas and there's like a tax form, and I was like, 'Can you just figure this out?' And it did it. Right? Like I bought a thing from overseas and we had to send it back and all this stuff, and I was like, I do not have the time or inclination to do this, and I just asked Muse to do it, and it did it. And it did it by connecting to my Gmail and reading my email, which I don't love. And I don't love that Meta now has access to that. There are a lot of promises around Meta's privacy and end-to-end encryption with the virtual machine, and they hired Moxie Marlinspike from Signal to build it, and Mark Zuckerberg keeps saying his name like a talisman, you know, like, 'Well, Moxie Marlinspike is here. Nothing can possibly go wrong.' But it is shockingly useful, and it's a good product. There's a lot of it that is like OpenClaw part two.
Yeah. Like people have dug into it and a lot of the file names are exactly the same. Like the structure of the files are effectively OpenClaw, and one of the developers of Muse came on and said we were heavily inspired by what Peter... by the files we downloaded. Yeah, exactly, open source. Yeah, it goes.
The thing about it, though, is that it is a product. Like Meta is a good consumer product company. They have the chops. They hired a bunch of designers. It works. Like you can show it to a normal person and it works as a consumer product, not like OpenClaw, which is a little bit terrifying, or any of the other AI products really are kind of rough around the edges. Chatbots. Muse is just a fun consumer product you can use. And the thing that struck me about it is I don't want it to do anything more than look at my spam Gmail, right? Like that's as far as I'm willing to go. Jake, have you used it?
Yeah, I've been poking around, but that is exactly it, right? Like it's sort of like baby's first OpenClaw or something. Like it's very friendly and cuddly, and it's like, 'I can do anything. Just give me access.' And you're like, 'Oh, cool. I mean, I guess I'll just give you my Instagram access because like probably you're tapping into that anyway.' But then there's a ton of stuff it can do and can access. And every single time you ask it to do something, it's like, 'Oh, if you want me to email that daily brief that I'm making for you based on the fact that I'm tapping into the API of Bluesky to scan for posts that you asked about, I will need access to your Gmail account.' And I'm like, man, it just went off and did that. And it's able to build this brief for me and paste it into its own chat. But if I want it to email to me in my inbox, I need to give it Gmail access. I don't necessarily want to give it Gmail access.
And that is just the problem with all of these AI tools.
So, do you believe... I saw an analyst writing, 'These downloads indicate that Meta's privacy terms and conditions and its promises about secure virtual machines are resonating with consumers.' And I was like, I don't... I don't know what you're talking about. Consumers do not know what a virtual machine is. I guarantee you.
I mean, this is the problem for Meta, and we should come back to Muse in detail because it is their next platform. It's their next bet. We can talk about Alexander Wang, the head of Meta Superintelligence Labs, just making that mascot sexy, which I think is hilarious and also very disturbing. But the privacy problem for Meta is super real. And it maybe got worse because of the glasses, right? That everyone, they're putting cameras on everyone's faces and everyone's calling them pervert glasses. And that the reputation that Meta is not good at privacy is everywhere. And it feels to me anyway like it hangs like a dark cloud over Muse. Like why would you give this company even more of your data?
Yeah. Yeah. I think that this company has like over time used a lot of your data to make you even more sad. So people don't really want to be like, 'Have access to my Gmail, have access to my text messages.' There's a level of trusting that Meta will eventually enshittify and all of their products will just sort of extract more from you. So at least from my perspective, and again I probably should try this, but the red flags that are going up in my head are just like, now I see the horizon where it's good for now, and then at what point does it start to become addictive or it starts like harvesting my data and serving me even more ads? The reason I don't want Meta Ray-Ban displays is because I don't want ads like injected into my eyeballs, which is the long horizon of what I see with all Meta products, and that's sort of the problem. So my feeling here is that they know this is a problem and they're just going to horsepower through it.
Yeah. Yeah. Like they don't have a strategy besides publishing white papers about secure virtual machines. They're just going to do it. Part of my feeling here is based on interviews Mark Zuckerberg is doing. He just did a big interview with Alex Heath. He did a big interview with Joanna Stern, former Verge people, you can check out, but you can never leave. And with Joanna, he specifically said, 'Most people think of Meta as a sharing company because we started as Facebook, but we also make WhatsApp, which is encrypted, and many more products we make will be private and encrypted in the future. They won't just be for sharing.' I don't know if I buy this. Like WhatsApp is also for sharing, like in a very real way. And like Meta's business is advertising, and there's no business model that they have that isn't advertising, right? So they're going to have to come up with something else to prove that that's the case. And then the second thing, and David, this is just me wanting to prompt another camera crash out with you, which is my favorite thing to do, is their response to how do you feel about people calling them pervert glasses is to just say it has a light. Like that's what he's got. You can watch it. Here's, he just said it. Alex, we have that clip here.
We designed the glasses from the beginning with these privacy considerations in mind. We built the light into it. I mean, phones don't have a light.
Okay, so... Okay, phones don't have a light is... Okay, I see where he's coming from, but yeah, he... I like that he's just like, 'I just thought of this.' Like, this just occurred to me. He's just saying the flash does not always go off when you take a picture.
Sure. Not everything is a flash photo.
Phones don't have a light. Feels like Meta has to hold on to that as tightly as they can now.
That's what they got. You're mad about these glasses. Everyone's calling them pervert glasses. And the only meaningful response is phones don't have a light. And I, you know, I made a long Decoder. We don't have to go into it. But my immediate thought here was, well, you have to pull your phone out of your pocket, hold it up in someone's face. And honestly, maybe phones should have a light. Yeah.
Is a good response to this. But Joanna, you know, several weeks later asked a similar question and actually did the phone pulling out of the pocket move. We've got that here, too. Let's watch this.
I mean, this is the only device that I'm aware of that tells you when you're taking a photo or recording a video. I mean, people do that with phones all the time. And this is like, you know, this sort of, you're holding your phone up, right? They're not as...
Sure. But we kind of took this into account from day one. You know, the very first pair of glasses that we shipped, we're like, this is a thing where we want to lead on. We know that people are going to have questions about this and we want to make sure that we're handling this responsibly from the beginning. So we built the camera light.
So, it's that. Sure. Right. Sure. It's very dismissive of the fact that you have to take your phone out of your pocket and hold it in someone's face. Sure. Whatever. But it doesn't have a light. David, I know you've been thinking about this and there's all kinds of rules about photos in different countries.
Do you buy phones don't have a light as a response to privacy concern about the glasses?
No. Because the entire point of the glasses is to blend into your face. And much like when you're using your phone and it is obvious to other people that you're not paying attention to them because your attention is being directed in a specific vector towards your phone, down at your phone. Generally when people are recording on their Ray-Ban glasses, they just click it really quickly and then they kind of go about their day. And the light is not the most obvious thing in the world. You know, like you mentioned the other countries, in Japan, it's not a law, but they have an agreement among all of these cell phone manufacturers that the phones must emit a shutter sound every time you take a photo. And it's very loud. They try to make it very obvious that people can hear around them, see around them when they're being photographed. The light to me is not enough. You know, there are apps now that are like, 'Oh my god, someone has Meta glasses around you.' But I don't know. It doesn't seem like enough to me. This argument would be so much stronger if it was a prominent light. It is not. It's a little pinpoint that they're doing some work to try to prevent people from covering it up or obfuscating it. But even in the best situation, unless it is dark, like this is a very easy to miss light, right? Like it... except that the light is something, like it's... like you want more lights, like light up the front of those glasses, right? Like...
Yeah. The whole like Kanye style, like 2000s like...
Listen. Yeah. Yeah. I think own it.
I think like fundamentally there is a light just doesn't work because the light is barely there. Like it just at its most basic argument, even if you accept that the light should work, should be enough. Yeah. Like that light is not it.
Well, and Joanna asked Mark Zuckerberg in the interview around the audio glasses, which we will probably talk about, which are just only recording audio. She says, 'Well, why isn't there a light on those glasses?' And he says, 'Well, the light's for the camera and there's no camera.' She's like, 'Yeah, but you're recording people.' And he goes, 'The light's for a camera.' I was like, 'Oh god, didn't expect it.' Oh, audio is a totally different thing, apparently. So, I very much recommend everyone go watch the full Joanna interview. She makes him uncomfortable several times.
I'm still stuck on phones don't have a light because it feels, what's the phrase? It feels like a thought-terminating cliche. Like you just say this and no further questions, your honor. We're done here. Phones don't have a light. And it feels like Meta's approach to their privacy problems is to come up with a cliche and bash you over the head with it. Right? It's the same as Muse not being allowed to go surf Amazon.com and they're going to get to, well, it's the user's agent, so you're blocking the user. And it's like, well, this is a totally new way for computers to use the internet. Might it be worthwhile to consider how it works or are we just going to bash people over the head until we get our way? And I don't think that is the right approach to privacy.
We actually have a big piece on the site right now from Janice Rose. I think Jake wrote this headline. It's very good. Everything is spying on you and there's no opting out. Like we are in an era of passive surveillance and it's a hijack of the law which says you don't have an expectation of privacy in public. But that law was written 10 million years ago before cameras existed, right? Like we're not ready for this. Like the legal framework of privacy has nothing to do with anyone can quietly record you at all times. And I think that the social norms are actually way ahead of the legal norms here where people are saying about Flock cameras and Ring doorbells and Meta glasses, we don't like this. And well, phones don't have a light is absolutely not the correct response and I don't think it's going to buy them the privacy reputation they need to get me to put my credit card into Muse. And this just feels like the circle Meta is going to be in for quite a long time. Meta has learned all the wrong lessons from their privacy scandals, right? They went, 'Oh, when we apologize, everyone's still mad at us and so let's just plow ahead, right? It doesn't matter. Let's just go for it.' They did not try the thing where they respect what people ask. Like that is, I think, what we wanted from them. And instead, they're like, 'They're selling. I don't know what to tell you.' Like, 'Someone's going to do it. May as well be us.' Which in this case, Muse is, by their account, a success, right? Has a million users or so, and we can get into whether or not that's actually a success, but it's a 6X for them, you know, so they're not going to apologize for something that's working for them for sure.
They need this to work, too, right? Like their reputation in AI has been kind of disastrous. Zuckerberg went out and spent an enormous amount of money to hire Alexander Wang to reboot their AI system and they've had basically nothing up until this month when they launched Muse, which admittedly is off to a very strong start, right? I think Facebook, sorry, I think Meta can scale just about anything pretty quickly just due to the size of their network, but clearly they did put together the right elements of a consumer product to make something click here. And a lot of it is like hard-coded prompts. And we know they're hard-coded because people are getting used to send it their file system and pulling out the hard-coded prompts. But, you know, the hard-coded prompt of like, go through my receipts and find returns, like they're good ideas. They're what you would want from a consumer product. And this is really basic make the product fun and easy to use from the jump design that Meta is good at, right? What is the onboarding flow? What are the first few things it's going to suggest? There's an ideas feed. These again are very basic product design ideas in consumer products, but Meta is good at them already.
The numbers question is really interesting. The idea that it's a big success comes from the fact that it's at the top of the app store. It has been for several days. Its early numbers outpaced ChatGPT, which is a fascinating thing we can dig into. And you know, there aren't huge scaled consumer AI products. Everyone's been waiting for one. I think there's some thirst to prove that an agent like this will be the future, right? This is the future of all computer interaction. You got a little fuzzy guy who's going to go do stuff for you. I don't know about those numbers actually. First, David Pierce wrote an entire story for us about what it means to be at the top of the app store. And the answer is not a lot. So, you can just set that one aside. Second, the early comparison to ChatGPT kind of forgets the fact that ChatGPT was a little bit of a slow burn. Yeah. Right. OpenAI put this thing out as a research preview. It took off like wildfire in a small community, but it really accelerated a little bit later. So these early comparisons are, you just have to be careful. And then I think most importantly, Casey Newton has been pointing out that success and failure is very relative here. Like Threads had 100 million users because Meta is good at scaling a social graph really fast and everyone still thinks Threads is a flop and it's way bigger than X actually now. And so what does success here actually mean for an AI product? For Meta, I think it is actually just good vibes. Like I think that is success for Meta right now. They need to be in the conversation and they are in the conversation in I think a very major way. And you see that from Zuckerberg's presentation at Connect where it is so fascinating to me, right? Imagine Muse is delayed by three weeks. The presentation the other night would have been, we have some new glasses and they're new styles and their battery life is a little bit longer and we would have been like, 'Cool, all right, sure.' Yeah. You didn't change the light at all. But instead, it became... I would have talked about the VR glasses a little bit. The VR glasses are quite impressive. But instead, it felt to me like that show was retooled to put Muse through everything. And most of the Muse stuff was forward-looking. It is coming to the glasses. It is getting computer use. It is getting an email address. Soon, right? They see that this is high potential for them, but they have to get there. They're still building this.
Every AI company dreams of releasing an agent like this, to be honest. Like all of these companies, yeah, they have apps on your phone, but they're not as integrated as something like Muse is, right? You have companies like Poke from the Interaction Company, which I believe got acquired, that lived in your iMessage, and that was their whole thing is like treat this like a friend that you're texting and it can do things for you, but it needs access to all this stuff. That was from a company that nobody really knew about that people were talking about on Twitter. But when you have Meta and you have the scalability of injecting ads for your product into all of the other products that three to four billion people use every single day, you're going to get something out of that. Even if you scrape 1% of all your users, that's a huge amount of people.
All right, so here's my question for you. I've been thinking about this a lot. There's a reason people are excited about a consumer AI agent, right? This is the promise of all of this technology that you will have a robot butler that will just do stuff for you. Maybe it lives in your iMessage or maybe like OpenClaw and live in your WhatsApp or Telegram or whatever. How do you think the people at Humane felt when they saw Mark hold up the little Muse charm? Because this is the whole thing, right? You're going to have a not-phone device with its own modem and talking to the cell network doing stuff for you and it'll be a little personality. Well, or the people at Rabbit. Yeah, Muse works. That's one thing. That's a big differentiator right there. Yeah, probably like vindicated, I suppose, but also they're owned by HP now. So, what are you going to do? I... Yeah, go ahead.
When they release this thing, so they have this little puck, the Muse Charm, supposed to come out later this year. I feel like this is going to be very revealing about the quality and capabilities of Muse, right? Because we saw the Rabbit R1 and we're like, 'This hardware looks beautiful and then it can't do anything.' Yeah. And right now, Muse is fantastic in a browser tab that I can go to every now and then. Will it be good as a standalone device that I'm paying for 5G service for every month? Can it actually accomplish that much? Is it just like a cute little Tamagotchi? Yeah. Yeah. And like, how much will AT&T make me pay for this? Are they going to consider it a smartwatch at $10 a month or a phone at 40? You know, like there's... I have a lot of questions about that, but it just occurs to me all of Meta's scandals aside, and there's a reason we led with scandals and privacy issues and the phones don't have a light, which I find infuriating. If you set all that aside, which I appreciate that not everybody can set that aside, they did it. They did the thing that everyone is trying to do. They built a consumer agent. It doesn't even appear to be running like a frontier level model, right? They took all the technology that exists, they wrapped it up in a good consumer experience and they built the thing that Siri should have always been or Google should have been shipping for five years now or Humane wanted to build or Rabbit promised. Remember at CES they said they had the large action model and really it was like absolutely brain-dead automations running on a Spotify server in the cloud. Like they built the thing that this industry has been promising to make in one way or another for quite a long time. I actually do think that that is remarkable whether or not it's hacked together or in the back end it is a bunch of bash scripts running on other people's models, which it might be. There's something there where they actually productized the promise this industry has been talking about for a minute and now I think a lot of people see what it's supposed to look like, right? The gap between vision and reality has been vast and I think Muse has in fact closed it.
Yeah. I have a question for you guys though. Like if I'm going to be paying, you know, $5 a month for an internet connection on this thing or whatever. $5 a month is such a pipe dream. Okay. $20 a month for an internet connection on my little Muse book. A lot of these models I just don't even really know what to do with. Like we can test the edge cases of them. You can say go in my Gmail and delete all of my Home Depot, you know, receipts or whatever. How often do I want to do something like that? And a lot of these agents, to me, it just feels like it's a solution to a problem I don't currently have. And I would love to find out about what these problems that I don't even know about are, I suppose. But up until now, none of these companies have really given me a reason to want to use these consistently. Like I understand Claude, like co-work fixes my computer for me. When I run into like issues on my computer, it clicks around on my computer and solves the problem when I was searching for it forever or, you know, vibe coding something. That's a whole another thing. That is a clear problem that I'm trying to solve. But in a generalized sort of like agent in a box, you know, sometimes maybe once a month, I'm like, 'Ah, yeah, I should clean up my Home Depot emails.' But besides that, I genuinely don't know what to do with it. And that's another reason why I haven't really set it up yet. One is obviously it's Meta. I would feel more comfortable if it was a different company. But two, like I install this thing and then I'm like, now what? I think this is where you get like the Tamagotchi element of it. And I think this is where you see things like the Friend pendant, the 24/7 utility of AI for the average person, like it's not that high, right? What you need is for these things to always be around gathering the information so that when you do out of nowhere go, 'Oh geez, where was that one email I saw that one time three days ago?' Yeah. It's like, 'Oh, I got it because I've been monitoring your entire life. Easy. Done.' And I think that's sort of the problem, right? And so you look at like the Muse charm and it's just like the cute little Muse bear is like hanging out, smiling at you and waving. And it's like they need to make it fun and kind of cutesy so that you hang out with it. Because it is true, you're not going to be at the coffee shop being like, 'Triage my Home Depot emails.' Like, yeah, based on the people on Twitter who are like, I'm running 80 Mac Pros with like a thousand agents at the same time spinning up my company, which I don't know what that means. I don't know what any of that means. I'm not doing that. General people are not doing that. And I still can't really find a use case where I'm using it all the time.
Yeah. This is the thing. Like if you gave me an agent that I fully trust and can rely on, absolutely. I would find things to do it. There's like a bill I've been meaning to bother my insurance company about for fully a year at this point. And like it would be great if somebody else could do that. I don't want to do it. I'm not going to do it. It's overdue on my to-do list by like months. But do you have a test? That's what I'm saying. This is like especially for the charm. Why would you pay a whole separate thing instead of just writing it on your phone? Well, and I think this is the problem, right? Like Meta is making the charm because they don't own the phone. Yeah. They're trying to get around it. Yeah. And the reality is you do not have enough things to necessarily justify a standalone device, but they need it to be everywhere to get the data to accomplish these things. And I think that is sort of where this starts to break down. Yeah.
I mean, yeah, this is the game, right? If you have a new user interface where you get to talk to a computer in a different way and it can do things for you, then you get to new hardware. This is why OpenAI is trying to make hardware at Jony Ive, right? They're trying to make the same product. Yeah. Eventually Apple's going to have to do the same thing in some way and Google's going to try to do the same thing in some way. I think the exciting thing for Meta is they got there first with a thing like Muse that appears to be complete. Now, it's early. It's like just very obviously early, but it feels like the industry is going to have to react to it in a much stronger way. Like we just had Mark Gurman on Decoder and he said all of Apple's next hardware products are delayed because Siri AI didn't work. So if you don't have the new user interface, you're stuck with what kind of hardware you can make. And for Meta, for, you know, they've been chasing VR for ages and ages and ages, they at least got good at making hardware. Like they're pretty good at it now, right? So, you can just see, well, they've got a thing that feels like the future of the interface. They've got some hardware chops. Of course, they're going to make the first cut at a post-phone device and they're not currently being sued by Apple. Okay, we have a ton more to talk about from Meta Connect and all the hardware they showed off this week. We're going to take a break. When we get back, we're going to dive into the Meta Connect hardware and Google Books.
Support for the show comes from Sonos. A great sound system needs great sound. That's a given. But it also needs to adapt itself to your life. The spaces you listen in, the people you listen with. From portable speakers that can travel with you from room to room to the new Beam Ultra soundbar which turns your living room into a theater to Sonos Ace Ultra headphones that connect to your system and let you take the sound with you wherever you go. Every piece of the system works with the next. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos. Love the sound. Feel the system.
All right, we're back. It was a busy week for hardware. We've got a lot to talk about. First up, Meta Connect was not just Muse. There's also new hardware. They had an entire line of new glasses in a million different styles. They also had new VR glasses. And I think the one that we maybe all found the most interesting, they have glasses without a camera. Yeah. They are the Meta Ray-Ban Display audio. $349. Does this solve their problem?
No. I have a general question for you guys. Like, do you think that Meta kind of destroyed the Ray-Ban brand? Because now it feels like if the Meta Ray-Bans look pretty darn similar to like the traditional Ray-Bans and they just have little small cameras, if you see someone wearing Ray-Bans and they're not Meta Ray-Bans, do you now go like take a second look and kind of be a little weirded out about it? Oh, that's interesting. I do. I do when I see people in Ray-Bans now, I kind of like do a double take and be like, is there a little camera in that? Yeah. Am I seeing something? So, but if I don't see a camera, I'm just like, 'All right.' The audio-only version I don't think is going to solve their issue because I think now the issue is a Ray-Ban issue more than it's like a Meta issue. I think if they had started audio-only, this would still be a successful product, right? Like I think the headphone is the best use case for those. This is kind of the style. It's great. It is a casual, nice-looking pair of open-ear headphones. Mhm.
I mean, again, the question I have is did they solve an input problem for their new platform? So they have always thought of these as AI glasses. That's what they've been calling them from the beginning. And my read on it was people actually do like having a little camera with them, right? Like they've been successful because people have a camera, right? Okay. Were they successful because you can talk to Meta AI? I don't think so. No. What is that? The audio glasses are a bet on whether or not Muse will be convenient and powerful enough for you to just be able to talk to it through your glasses, right? Like if the back end isn't useful, having the audio on the glasses just means you have headphones. The back end is really powerful. Having an ambient microphone that you can just talk to Muse all the time will be very useful. And I again, I think this all just comes down to like how useful do you think Muse is because that's what enables this product, right? I mean, now that does make this a better moment to release these glasses because Meta AI before Muse was not useful. It was not a thing anybody was tapping into. We're still being shown the same demos, right? So David, you talked to V&J on the show yesterday. They went to Meta's campus. They got all the same demos that they do every single year where Meta is like, 'Look at these food items and ask which one has the most protein in it.' And it's like, 'This is not useful for anyone on Earth, right?' And so I'm not sure, right? I'm not sure if the glasses with Muse are still going to be helpful enough because they're ultimately...
not getting a lot of data. They have to be tapped into everything and hooked up to your phone in order to do anything. Yeah. I personally think that they should have done more Muse style demos, right? Because if Muse is sort of the platform driving these glasses, all of those demos that Meta always gives of, look at these ingredients. What can I make in my kitchen with these foods? They're still doing that.
And they still have Meta AI shoved in everything. And nobody's ever really used Meta AI. So, if they're so excited about this platform, it seems like they would be pushing that through these demos and to reporters. So, I don't know if that means that like they didn't expect Muse to be a huge hit and so now they're kind of trying to shove it in, but the demos were already set up before that. It's a little weird. It does feel to me like Muse operates at the speed of all the other, you know, products from the AI industry where one day it doesn't exist and the next day they're like, "We've got this thing. We're just going to put it out and see what happens and maybe it'll crash and burn. Maybe it'll be the next big thing."
And now they're like, "Perfect. We have Muse. We have audio glasses." I mean, this is the thing, right? Every reporter, I think, on the planet asked Meta's team, "Is this your response to the privacy backlash?" Correct. And they kept saying, "No, no, no." They just
Right. Look, I buy the idea Mark said this to Joanna that they've been working on these for ages. Like, it takes a while to bring up products and develop them. I don't think they would have released them if not for Muse. If what you have is a pair of sunglasses that have some headphones in them and a microphone where you can talk to a not great AI, like you don't have a product. If you have Muse now, you have the possibility of building all kinds of other products. And it just I think it's convenient that they don't have a camera and a light. Phones don't have a light, you guys.
Phones don't have a light.
But like it is I think it's very obvious that Mark is betting the company on Muse, right? Like he's just very happy to say, "Okay, we have the platform after the phone." And he's all but saying it right in the history of computers that he will deliver if you ask him. He's like there were mainframes and then mini computers and PCs and the laptops and then phones and now there's going to be something else and
to him is something else. But you know whether or not people want to trust Meta such that you can make AI powerful for you remains the biggest open question from this company and I really think they've decided to just not engage it. They're just setting it aside. Phones don't have a light and we'll see. I mean, like people do buy these glasses, but again, my point of view on the ones they've had so far is people did want a camera on their face for action sports and kids. Whether they're going to buy these to talk to Muse is like actually a big statement about Muse and whether or not Muse is helpful and useful, right?
Notably, the audio glasses do have a hearing enhancement feature, which the AirPods Pro and some of the other AirPods also added, which is just kind of a nice like, oh, well, you can now use this for other things in your life that you used to need to use, you know? So, it does cost more is an extra $149, but is FSA and HSA eligible? So, now people have excuses to use their insurance to buy these glasses.
That is a decent selling point. You know, for a lot of people it's like if I have to have a hearing aid, but I would rather wear my Meta glasses.
People have been talking about this with earbuds forever, right? If you can make it look like something that is more normal, if it's something that you're already using and wearing.
Yeah. I mean, I have bought my own father every over the counter hearing aid you can buy and he's rejected them all. This is a market that was supposed to develop in a rare display of bipartisan unity. A bill was passed to deregulate hearing aids and at the time it was just very obvious that all of the members of Congress are very old so they could agree that we should deregulate hearing aids.
It was just one of those moments where I looked at that picture of like, you know, the bill signing and I was like, "Oh, I understand why you agree. You can set aside your partisan differences." And Bose made hearing aids and Sony made hearing aids. I bought them all. We just had the CEO of Bose on Decoder and I was like, "Why didn't this work?" Like all those products have essentially failed.
Yeah. And she's like, "It turns out hearing is a lot more complicated than you think." So, I love that Meta is doing this. It's a thing that you can do, but the history of the product category thus far suggests that
even suggesting to your father that they should wear a hearing aid. Yeah. It just like ices you out of the family.
That's been my experience. I got all the way to like, do you want to just try the AirPods like the kids? And he was like, I will kill you. Like, I'm not wearing AirPods. And I understand other people find all these tools very, very useful. I'm not discounting at all. I'm just saying broadly my experience with my dad and the numbers in the industry suggest there's more there than you need.
Is he in the market for an AI agent?
Yeah, maybe. Please go through the hell of their Gmail. That's probably the single greatest parent technology of all time.
Okay, we've got to talk about the other big piece of hardware that Meta announced this week because if you rewind I don't know two years ago, their big thing was the metaverse. It was VR. They had a whole bunch of Quest products. They had the Quest Pro. That's gotten a lot quieter in recent years. This year they came back. It was part of but not necessarily the flagship moment in their announcement. They announced the Meta VR glasses and it is a Vision Pro style headset except it basically just looks like a very chunky pair of sunglasses. And this feels like a very big step forward. I think in another environment, this would have made much more of a splash. They have these demos. They opened the event with Zuck wearing these glasses and he's got like nine different screens open inside his VR workspace and it's this lightweight thing that he's able to just like casually take off rather than having to undo a bunch of straps over his head to go in and out of virtual reality. Nilay, you've used a bunch of these big headsets. I'm curious like does this being lighter weight and slimmer make you want to go back into that world?
It makes me want to try them on an airplane. Like every now and you know I fly to San Francisco a lot. Yeah, David, I know you fly to San Francisco a lot.
Yeah, that New York to San Francisco flight or New York to San Francisco.
Just a little too long. It's just a little too long. But because of the thing that it is, there's always a Vision Pro guy.
That's true. Yeah. Like it's like that route in particular is where the Vision Pro guy is on the plane.
Like every time. And I'm always like that seems horrible, but I get it. Like if I could just nope out of this and be in VR. Look, it is remarkable that Meta showed up and they announced what amounts to a much better Vision Pro at like what is it? One sixth the weight, half the price.
Yeah. Now, it's been 2.5 years since the Vision Pro came out. I was like, "Right, it's early 24 it came out." So, it's been a minute. They've revved it once. But, you know, Meta gets the benefit of just hardware development cycles and everything getting faster and lighter. But, it is such a shockingly better Vision Pro than the Vision Pro.
Yeah. And you can tell that there were a lot of people that were working on the Vision Pro in this thing, too. Or at least that took very heavy inspiration.
They look very similar. They do a thing that a lot of people were doing on the Vision Pro where they don't have those eye seals that kind of like contain your eyes into this darkness through the portal of the glasses. They have like a gap between what you're looking at and sort of the world around you. That makes them lighter. That makes them easier to wear. It makes them more comfortable in general. 100 grams is a really big deal. You know, the Vision Pro is notably really really really heavy. And if you can use this and the puck that it's attached to as a fully standalone computer, I mean, that's a pretty massive deal, I think.
Yeah, it is wild to me that this feels like almost an afterthought in their event because I don't know where this platform is going for them, right? There was a moment when they thought this was their future. They thought everyone was going to live inside of these and now it's squeezed in between a bunch of Muse announcements. They're like, "Also, we improved the Vision Pro." And everyone's like, "That's very impressive." But
well, no. Look, shout out to my VR nerd friends. There are people who really, really care about VR in this world, and every time we make fun of it, they come and talk to me. It's fine. But this is a real platform. They've had it for a long time. They had early glimmers of success. I think the Oculus Quest 2 was actually another great consumer product from Meta. That thing was complete. Yeah.
And it was inexpensive and in the middle of the pandemic I think everyone got confused because people were buying all kinds of stuff and like a lot of people bought Quest 2s.
And that deeply confused Meta into believing that there was demand for the metaverse when there was actually just demand to be somewhere other than your living room.
Yeah. And so like you know everything got a little topsy-turvy there and obviously AI sort of upended all of the plans that everybody had. But the idea that they're just putting out the next version of their best product in a thing instead of just killing it dead I think that makes sense. I think the question is whether you know the investment they're making into even better holograms that are photorealistic with legs inside of their platforms. Like I have a million questions about this.
The holograms look good. They're there.
Okay. Where you have to take a bunch of photos to make a hologram like that, right?
Where are the photos coming from? How do you make that hologram?
The Vision Pro persona process was easy, but it was very limited.
Right. Like there's a lot of execution steps with this product that I'm deeply curious about. It's not coming out until like next spring. Yeah. So, they've got some time. But
as a piece of hardware that just advanced, it makes sense. The stuff they're doing with the keyboard and the trackpad.
With camera only finger tracking, it seems incredible. Like the Vision Pro can't do that stuff.
But it's just like unclear like how all the execution details are going to work and if what you want is a big movie theater or like 10 extra screens.
Yeah. Again, the flight from New York to San Francisco is going to be better than ever, but that's maybe that's worth $1,300.
Yeah, for the people that were just using these devices as entertainment devices, it seems like the best version of something that Meta personally has made, right? There's been a lot of third parties that make these like big screen VR and you can slap it on your face. It's really small, but it has super high resolution. And the main purpose of that device is to be in a movie theater and not be on the plane. But this gives me a lot of vibes of the Quest Pro when they were working with I think was it Atlassian? It was like some major B2B SaaS company and they were like we sold 10,000 of these to this big B2B SaaS company and in the future you're going to take all of your meetings in this VR space and they had these kind of cringe like Nintendo Wii style VR avatars whatever. But the holograms in this demo that they gave gave a lot of vibes of that because it was like you're on a video call and then you can press a button
and that person's upper body suddenly grows and their whole body is there.
And in this world where they sell 10,000 of these units to Atlassian, Atlassian can mandate that everyone take scans of their body so that the video calls are like this. Are average people going to be taking video calls like this and go through the whole process of like scanning their whole body to get it like that? I'm not sure. The technology is still fairly impressive even though it's 2D instead of like Gaussian splats like on the Vision Pro.
There's something happening by the way with splats and rendering.
Oh yeah, that is at the bleeding edge of how cool computers can possibly be that is also terrifying.
We're chasing a story on it because I want to cover it. But have you seen the demos of we'll just set up four iPhones and throw water on the ground.
And then have like a full virtual walkable environment.
That is so far from where we were even just a couple years ago.
It's all coming together in here and then it's like what is reality and is anything real? Like I don't know, man. But there's something. It's still cool.
I've had two separate friends send me a vibe-coded Gaussian splatting platform that they made. People are really into Gaussian. What are they splatting?
They're splatting objects, photos. I mean, there's a big movement. Every time I see a Gaussian splat, I'm like, "This is beautiful. This is so cool." And then I'm like, "What are we doing?"
Well, Apple and Google are both using the technology to make maps more realistic as well. Like, they're speeding ahead. This is a pretty new technology. They've made big advancements in it in the last year, year and a half. Now, all these companies are like, "We got to utilize it right now." But we should chase that story. It's a great idea. We should talk about the other big hardware news this week, which is that the Google Books are finally here. So earlier this week, Google announced the first five Google Books are going to arrive October 4th. Important date. That was the date that the Pixel 1 released in 2016. It's auspicious. That's good. Some of these look really good. There's a Dell XPS Google Book. It looks like a knockoff MacBook Air. I shouldn't say knockoff. It looks like a Dell-ified MacBook Air but with a Google platform. Have you? I'm curious. This is a very big bet. Nilay, were you one of the big Chromebook Pixel fans back in the day? Because this feels like the next era for those people.
I think the best piece I've ever written for The Verge is I bought my mom a thousand dollar Chromebook Pixel, which was so expensive. And it's like the best computer I've ever bought for my parents and this has nothing to do with that idea. Like I think these are really interesting and there's a lot of really interesting ideas about applications and where they live and how you can synthesize a phone and a piece like all that's there. The reason I loved the Chromebook Pixel was that it was just a web browser.
There was exactly one metaphor in that computer. And if you just gave Chrome 16 gigs of RAM, it ran pretty good at the time. Like this is ages ago, right?
And the whole point of it was whenever you buy a Windows PC or even a Mac, there are so many competing interface metaphors now
that my parents were getting caught up in just confusion, right? Like am I using a Launchpad? Am I using a Mac app? Am I in the web? Like all that stuff was just like too much. And the idea of just one fast web browser that worked one way all the time was really great for them. Now obviously that's all long in the past. That didn't work except for I guess school children or whatever and Android and Chrome even get ever closer and I think these are really fascinating. It just I think the lineage of those two products is as divergent as possible.
Right. Because this thing is all metaphors like up and down new ideas, new metaphors, you know, as a tech dork. I love it. I can't get enough of it. But man, is it just a list of new ideas?
This feels like they already had Android basically running at a desktop operating system level. They went to native access of your phone from a Google Book laptop. You can access apps from your phone on a Google laptop. That's great if you have Android. David, can you imagine seeking this out as an Android user versus just going to Windows or just going to Mac or a platform that you already know and trust that has a rich app ecosystem?
As an Android user, actually, absolutely. This is really interesting to me as an Android user because most people use their phone for most tasks. Like a lot of people have laptops, but a lot of people spend $1,200 on a phone and do a lot of power tasks on their phone. And phones have gotten better and better and better at doing the things you need to do on the internet through apps, all of these things. But there are many times when you just need to sit down and book your flight and you don't want to do that on your phone. And the continue on feature where you have your phone next to it and it pops up on the screen. All that stuff is there. Your files are there. All of these things. I mean, we explored this idea with the Motorola Atrix, you know, in 2014 or whenever that was probably before then. But now it's just this weird like this synthesizing thing where it just goes from your phone to your laptop. All the files are there. All the stuff's on your phone. I think it's a really cool idea. What blows me away is that the lock in here is actually more intense than the iPhone to the Mac, right? Because if you have an iPhone, Google Books are basically useless.
That is kind of wild to me. So if you're using an Android phone, you buy a $1,200 laptop, you can't get an iPhone. It just makes it useless. That is strange. I mean useless is maybe an overstatement because I mean I have an Android phone. I use a Mac and it's like I think that same amount of features are not available to me, right? You still have an operating system, you still have a laptop, but then you're just into
a Chromebook territory, right? Where it's like it has a browser and it can run Android apps and those Android apps may or may not be good enough for a desktop environment. To me I'm just what like I see the audience for this that they are competing with people who are going to buy Windows laptops.
And I am not sure if Google is ready to compete against Windows laptops from a marketing perspective. I'm not sure they are. From a what people usually do on their computers perspective. I could totally say they are.
I mean neither are there's a lot of people who are very mad at Windows these days.
Yeah. Do those overlap with the people who are looking for who are Android fans who are looking for this sort of integration like can this appeal to that mainstream audience with this frustration brewing?
My feeling about the anger at Windows and we've covered a lot of this and it's funny like I think our instruction at the beginning of the year is like we should do more Linux coverage and that has just paid off like people are mad and the fact that you can run Windows games better on Linux than Windows. I think that all just has to do with how commercialized and shitified Windows has become. Like it's
it's just always asking you to do one more thing like do you want to try Copilot? Like it's just trying to like mug you in a blind alley every time you use it.
Yeah. That's just like like there's whatever problems you might have with Windows or not, the fact that it has just gotten so engagement-baited is a real problem, right? They're just always trying to get you to do the next thing Microsoft would like you to do.
Google doesn't have that problem so much, but there's a bunch of Gemini in there, right? Like I'm not sure that those experiences are going to be meaningfully different. They'll just be different. And maybe that's enough. Like maybe you're so upset with Windows that you're going to go over there. If Google would like fully lean into the fact that Android and Linux have some commonalities and be like you can play Windows games on here.
And emulation like maybe that would change some hearts and minds. But I'm with you that if you take away the Android integration which is fascinating like
the merger of phone and laptop here is way beyond anything anyone else is doing. Right. I think that's so cool. But if you take that away, you are kind of left with a Chromebook with a backstop of Android apps and that might not be enough.
Unless you just want a great Chromebook. Maybe I'm back where I started. I'm like, this is just a great Chromebook. Mom and dad, please ignore the other interface metaphors.
But they are way too expensive for what people expect a Chromebook to cost. You know what I mean? Like they start at $900 and that's an introductory price for the Acer one. And they said it might change based on market conditions.
Oh, it will change. The price of RAM is making that go up.
Yeah. This is market price just like your fish.
Yeah. No, I mean I just I again I think that it's we're in a time of like big new ideas about what computers should be. Yeah.
And I'm just very happy to see Google basically throw caution to the wind to your point about lock in.
Right. If you don't have an Android phone, this isn't useful. And that means a lot of people are just not going to think they're useful.
But what can you do when you know that there's a phone there with a bunch of applications on it? Can you just make that feel seamless with your laptop? I mean that how many variations of this promise have there been, Jake? Like I'm thinking of the Motorola Atrix from like 2012.
It is wild to me that at like the dawn of smartphones, a bunch of companies were like, "This will be all of your computers." And then we spent like a decade being like, "That was bad. We made a mistake there." And now we're back to it where we're like these things it's all one operating system. It can do it all.
We still have the same Android problems, right? Like Android even today like an Android smartphone is not a best-in-class app experience. And now they're saying, "Oh, we don't have any desktop apps, but you can use all the Android phone apps." And like, all right, Android tablets had problems because of in part the app ecosystem isn't there. And now they're doing this thing that I think everybody kind of liked that in the Play Store. It'll tell you if one of the apps is, you know, best as an app or it'll say, "Oh, this is better as a website. Go to the website."
Which one's better as a website is one of the harshest burns an app store can possibly be.
But also, it's so polite, but also like that convenience is showing their failure, right? That they have not gotten the desktop apps.
Yeah. Well, it's notable that Google's been spending so many years to make Android and the experiences on Android flexible for multiple screen sizes, right? First it was for foldables and then it was because they wanted to compete with DeX so you could plug your phone directly into a display because people just have displays sitting around I guess
and then now it makes sense I guess to like now that that foundation is there you can feasibly just run it on a laptop and I think that that's a cool evolution of the thing that they've been thinking about for a lot of years now. Obviously, not all the Android apps are going to be optimized for that kind of thing. They said I think they said the half of the top 100, which is an interesting way to say 50.
Something I guess it's not the top 50. It's more equally and you don't know if it's the bottom 50.
It could be the bottom 50. Yeah.
You know what's funny is right next to that is Apple, which is like here's a new form factor. Everybody write your apps from scratch for it. The iPhone. It's not an iPad
within 2 months.
We need all of your best engineers on reflections.
There's something there. I mean, again, Google has done a lot of work to try to make their app ecosystem just appear more places.
Whereas Apple can just drag developers to be where they want.
But I do think for Apple that has come at a cost, right? They're like, we want these very bespoke experiences. But I think it would be much harder for Apple to do things like this on say a forthcoming Mac touchscreen MacBook.
Because you're gonna it's here's yet another screen size and form factor and interaction paradigm instead of you know you can feel how you want about Google's approach to it and what that means the apps have become but it is trivial for them to do these kinds of things now.
For sure. Even with the foldable iPhone, there are now like eight new like screen size paradigms that you have to code for, which I'm sure developers are very not happy about.
So to me, at the end of the day, these laptops, the reason you end up choosing Windows or Mac or one or the other right now is usually there is a specific piece of software that I need on one or the other. Right? If you are a professional and you need a specific piece of software, you are just locked in. And none of those specialized pieces of software are going to be on this platform right now. And so they're appealing to a subset of the audience, right? People who have Android phones, who do not need specialized pieces of software, who are okay with what is going to be a developing experience of the apps that even do exist. What is interesting is that a lot of these specialized pieces of software are being ported to mobile. Like Premiere Pro just came out on Android like 2 days ago.
But is it like full Premiere Pro? Well, it's a Premiere Pro. It's a Premiere Pro. This is the thing. It's like Lightroom is on Android.
Yeah, but like it's not Lightroom class the same. Yeah, it's not
I don't know. It's very exciting to see this and the hardware I think looks much better than certainly I expected. These don't ship for a couple weeks, but I'm really excited for folks to get their hands on them to see just what that interaction is actually like. Yeah.
If anything, Google has done a, you know, they may have not done an amazing job at explaining what Google Books really are supposed to be to people, but they've kept it in the media cycle for a really long time. And now on October 4th, we're going to all be doing reviews of it. So, you know, months ago, we were talking about it. We're talking about it this week, and we're going to be talking about it next week.
Yeah, it's an exciting time for laptops. All right, it's time to turn to the hype desk.
Ashley Sketa is here. Ashley, hello.
Ashley, good to have you.
I'm at an undisclosed hotel room in San Francisco.
I like the secretiveness. I think this is good for you.
Me too. I feel like Carmen Sandiego a little bit.
Hype can happen anywhere at any time.
We are entering a period of hotel design where it's like I'm very close to being able to identify specifically what hotel you're in because they all look the same now.
Yeah. I have to keep my I trying to keep a low profile. I can't be seen. I don't want people to identify where I am.
It's important you're spotting the trends early. All right, Ashley, what do you have for us today?
You know, we got to talk about Blade because Mahershala Ali, we don't quite often see this level of shade from an A-list actor, an Oscar-winning actor, to somebody who is also very powerful in Hollywood, Kevin Feige of Marvel. But he was interviewed and Mahershala Ali they asked the interviewer asked Mahershala Ali about Kevin Feige having said you know that he felt like a gigantic loser and a failure that they couldn't get the Blade movie off the ground with Mahershala Ali and Mahershala Ali just looked this interviewer in the eye and said he's 100% right. He should feel that way. He is a failure and a loser. Like just straight up just came for him so hard like just right up right out front.
Kevin, he said it was the biggest failure of his career and I agree.
The quote was, "I feel like a giant loser and failure for not getting off the ground with"
I agree with him. I agree with him 100%.
100%. He should feel that way.
My entire TikTok feed is clips of this interview and it is incredible. Mahershala is just like he's chill and he's just like this is how it is. Like we all know this. No one this is not controversial even within Disney.
Yeah. First of all, I just want to point out he's wearing an incredible jacket in this interview. And I was not able to like view the content of the interview or like understand what was being said to me because I spent so much time trying to decide if I could pull off that jacket. The answer is no. The answer is flatly no. I have one style of jacket that works for me and it's not that one. So, I tried to do this exercise where I tried to remember the existing Wesley Snipes Blade movies. Like, I didn't go watch them. I didn't think about them. I didn't like read the Wikipedia summaries. All I remember I barely remember the first one. I have zero there's zero content in my brain about the Second Blade movie, which I know exists. Nothing. Okay. And the thing that stands out to me is the third one is the most incredibly bananas movie that I can recall because it
First of all, it has Dracula in it. Dracula's hot like but like an older hot because he's like a million years old because he's Dracula and they insistently call him Drake throughout the movie.
These are the facts that I know in my brain.
I can't believe you. This is what you remember about the Blade franchise.
