Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of internet-connected baby monitors. I'm your friend David Pierce, and he's back, my friends. The one, the only, the man, the myth, the legend. Nilay Patel is here. Hey buddy, welcome back.
Which is very different from other episodes, everyone should know. You normally come just prepared to the teeth. This time...
Just full of riffs. No, I'm back. I'm back. It's week one, you know.
How is it being back? It's been a very weird transition for me.
Yeah. I'm curious how was... I mean, you're like the skeleton key, right? I was like, 'How's baby 2?' And then you gave me all the tips, which were 'It's fine,' basically.
More or less. Yeah. It's been like pure unadulterated chaos, but I'm like used to it now, if that makes sense. Like, I know how to do the chaos now. And so, it's been okay. But then they'll be teenagers and they'll change. I was going to take way more time off and then our baby Jack just started sleeping through the night. So my job was to do all the nights because what I learned from our first baby Max, 7 years ago, was that if Becky doesn't get enough sleep, we are all in danger.
Physical, emotional danger.
Yeah. It's not good. And then like a seven-year-old versus sleepless wife is like the town is in danger. Like that has a blast radius. So I was like, 'Look, I'll just do... I like being up at night. I can scroll TikTok. It's fine. I'll just be up all night with this baby and then we'll do it.' And then literally he was like, 'Well, I sleep now.' So then I was just buying stuff on Instagram by myself in the middle of the night. And I was like, 'I should go back to work. I got nothing to do.'
What's the dumbest thing you bought on the internet during this?
We own a steam mop, David.
Why do we own a steam mop?
Does it mop with steam or does it mop and also steam?
It's unclear if it accomplishes either of those goals particularly well. Just why, you know, it's like you see a cleaning video and you're like, 'I'm going to get that bathroom real clean,' and then you are in your bathroom holding a steam mop and it turns out they produce steam. So you're like, 'I'm hot and damp alone and I've made a mistake.' I should go back to work. Like I had that full...
they don't tell you that it's damp in the Instagram video. Like, you will be more damp than you were before if you use this product.
Yeah. Steam. Who would have thought? You know what I mean? Who could have possibly seen that coming?
Also, just, you know, I don't know if you [know] this, but like I'm a sucker for a cute baby onesie.
Lots of those.
A truly alarming number of like brand-name onesies have come across. I own a Nike swoosh Just Do It newborn hoodie now that I'm very excited about.
Has he grown into or out of it yet?
I mean, one and then almost immediately the other.
We just booked it through it.
So, Vergecast question for you because this is... I've actually been asked this a bunch. Did you do any tech stuff differently this time than last time?
Actually, you and I were texting about this with our friend Joanna. So, I thought we would upgrade the baby monitors. And I'm totally opposed to having internet-connected cameras in our house. Just not a thing that I want to screw with. So I was like, I'll get ones that do like the picture-in-picture, the split screen, and we screwed with it. And that was too much user interface. You know, like our daughter, she said she doesn't want that baby on her. She wants to yell. She uses it like a walkie-talkie.
Right. Like that's what it's there for. She's in a room and she's like, 'Dad,' and like it comes through on the thing. So, instead we just have two and one's labeled Max and one is labeled Jack and the hardware walks around and literally my wife and I refer to them as the children and we're like, 'Do you have Max?' And she like waves a baby wand at me. So, that was like the big... I thought we would solve the problem with like innovative technology and we just solved it with adding more devices. We just threw hardware at the problem until it was solved. But no weird sensors or anything like that. Like I feel like the new thing that happened since Max was... there's now just a billion sensors you can put everywhere.
Yes. So Jack was in the NICU for the first nine days and so I bought an outlet and then I immediately returned the outlet, like instantly, for a whole number of reasons. First, I think I was just annoyed that it only runs on 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi.
Just in principle. Yeah. You have that has to get out.
Right? Like being like, to set up this sock that will do nothing but false alarm, I have to put my Eero... like the whole network has to be downgraded to 2.4 GHz for 90 minutes so that it can figure itself out. And I was like, I hate you. And then, you know, it's like they're not even meant for very small babies, which is not a thing anyone says out loud.
Yeah, I did not know that.
Here's my outlet review. They're not meant for very small babies and they will constantly false alarm, which is like when you want it the most, really. So whatever. So we just immediately got that back. The sensors that we did add is... the smart home is out of control in this house all of a sudden.
So he's got automatic shades in his room and I have a lot to say about shades. So when you close the shades in his room, the lights go off and the fan turns on. And then when you open the shades, the noise machine turns off.
So there's just like a lot of if-then statements in his room.
It's like the good night and good morning routine basically.
Yeah, because otherwise the noise machine is on 24/7 because no one can be bothered to turn it off while you're holding the baby and it was driving me nuts. So that's on a smart plug. All the other stuff is on Lutron switches and it's all just like I'm sitting here just like writing if-then statements in the rocker while the baby's sleeping, like, okay, if this happens, what four other things should happen, but conditionally this other stuff should happen. A bunch of Matter stuff made its way... like Matter and Thread devices made its way into our house.
Huge win for Gen 2. Somewhere Jen is just fist-pumping listening to this.
Huge win for Gen 2, not a win for those companies because now I know how well those devices work and it all feels like a hack. So, the way it works, more smart shades. The shades in his room are Matter-over-Thread smart shades. They're Qmotion ones that I bought on Amazon on the recommendation of Steven Robles, who runs a great YouTube channel.
And will be on this podcast very soon. He and I are scheduled to fight about Shortcuts.
Yeah, it was great. I was like, 'I'm buying these.' And he's like... he's made videos about every single one you can buy. They are all rebranded SmartWings. Like, at the end of the day, they're all the same. But these are great. They're inexpensive. I hung them up. So to do it, you got to pair them to HomeKit and then HomeKit will generate a code that you can have Google Home pair to. So it's like this weird round trip where Apple becomes the hub for Google and everything and it is like, oh, this is not great actually. Like the thing that you think is going to happen, which is you have multiple smart home platforms all working together in harmony, is much more like I'm typing strings of alphanumeric characters into Google and praying that this works until I realize that I have multiple competing Thread networks in my home and I once again have to shut my Eero down until I get to base configuration to bring it back up again. But it all works now.
It does all work now until like the light changes and it's all over. Like a gentle breeze will screw up your smart home at this point.
It's all rock solid in Apple Home and it is all... Google Home is like, 'What? Who am I?' We'll come to this. This is my theory about Google and AI, that the Google Home stuff is like the canary in the coal mine for the entire bubble to pop because it just every day it wakes up and it's like, 'I don't know who you are and I don't know where I am, but I will tell you facts about the moon,' you know? It's like, what's going on?
What about you? Did you do any stuff?
Not really. We did sort of the same baby monitor thing you did. So, we got a video monitor. But I think it's VTech, I think, is the company that makes it, that's not connected to the internet. It's all like on our local network. That's been great. We just got another one of those and now it split screens and that works great.
We were going to do a bunch more stuff, but then immediately started house hunting. So, then it was like, okay, well, we're going to wait and do all our smart home stuff. You and Jen and I are going to have to have like a long smart home therapy session as I move into this house because I have lots of questions and also a spouse who is not interested in any of this stuff. So, I have to do it all in like a sneaky way that she doesn't even notice.
We'll see how that goes. But we ended up doing less than I expected. Like with our first kid, Arthur, there was a period of time when he was like 2 weeks old where I basically went on Amazon and bought every sleep device that existed. And I was just like, whatever amount of money it costs me to have this child sleep and whatever weird Bluetooth technology it requires, I will do it. And our Lewis, our youngest, like he just sort of did okay from the beginning. And so the panic 'I have to buy technology to solve this problem' just didn't really appear, which was nice. We got lucky on that front. The flip side has been I am much more susceptible to being conned by Instagram and TikTok ads late at night than I used to be. I have a steam mop.
I don't have a steam mop. I got really into Swedish candy over the summer because somehow that ended up on my timeline a lot.
It's just like, sure, that sounds delicious. You can ship that to me in 3 days. Bonbon, like let's do this. Yeah, it was just a lot of scrolling in one hand. I have become even more of a PopSocket zealot because you can hold it in one hand while you hold a baby.
Oh, this is a game changer. I have dropped my iPhone 17 Pro Max every single day.
This is what I'm saying. So, there's the new PopSocket with the kickstand now that you can actually... not only is there a PopSocket, it folds out so you can prop up your phone on things. Do you know how many things I prop up my phone on, Eli? All of them.
All I got for you is that it's very good that you're married because if you were not, the chances of procreation would drop to zero.
No one ever suggested that I was cool, but my phone never falls down anymore.
I don't know what that thing is, man.
My job in my marriage is to be the one who brings all the chargers, and I do that very well.
Yeah, that's correct. That's about where we are. Anna just does not know cables exist and whenever her phone dies, she just reaches out her hand and it's my job to have the correct cable.
That's great. That's what I'm here for.
And sometimes it's a USB-C cable.
That's... I mean, I just have a bag full of them.
Yeah, same. That's great.
All right, there's a bunch of news we should get into. There's some Apple stuff to talk about, there's a bunch of AI news as always. We got a lightning round to do. We should probably do just like a little bit of housekeeping up the top here. Most people listening to this or watching this probably already know, but we just launched ad-free Verge podcasts. If you're a Verge subscriber, you can now get all of our podcasts, this one, Decoder, and Vergecast, all ad-free. There's a post on the site we'll put in the show notes with the instructions on how to do that. But Nilay, I want you to talk about this because we talked about this when subscriptions were coming out. And basically since day one of The Verge as a subscription, the number one thing people have asked us for is ad-free podcasts. And I got a post, I think, on Threads from somebody this week who was like, 'Well, what changed? You guys made a very compelling case for why this is difficult to do from a business perspective and doesn't really make sense. What's changed?' So why did we do this? What's your take?
A few things. One, we're coming up on a year of the subscription. So subscription businesses, I think this is obvious to anybody who's paying attention to it, certainly broadcast listeners, subscription businesses are all about renewals, right? You're obviously trying to get new people to subscribe, but if you turn off a bunch of people that you already got, then you're in trouble. So, we're coming up on a year. We wanted to... we have a lot of ideas for how to make it even better for all the people who subscribed. And this was, like you said, by far the number one request: 'I'm happy to pay you. I don't want ads in this podcast.' So you just look at the list and, you know, if you were making a bar graph, it would be like the one bar is the tallest and then that ruins the scale and like everything else is nothing.
Yeah. Like that's basically how the request broke down. So we figured we had to do it. There are new tools to do it that sort of don't ruin our analytics, which was a big thing.
So that's interesting. We'll see how those play out. And then we were able to figure out basically how to make the money work inside of the subscription. This is like Helen, our publisher zone. But I think our overall plan is to grow, right? We want to make the podcast more popular. And so if you have subscribers and they're helping you grow and that evens out the ad market, which is the first thing to go if you are worried about the economy.
Yeah. Than saying, 'Okay, we're going to bet on subscribers and try to grow the overall pie to be more lucrative to the advertisers who do show up.' Like, you're at least stable, right? You diversified the revenue. And my perspective is like, we need to do that. We should do that a lot. I'm looking broadly at the ad ecosystem, the internet ecosystem, and everyone is turning into a little ad agency. I think you guys were talking about Unwell Marketing and Pixel phones.
Alex Cooper's thing. Yeah.
Alex Cooper's thing on the last one.
Alex Cooper showed up at Cannes, which is like the big ad festival,
and she said out loud, 'I'm not an influencer. I'm a marketer.'
Great. Again, everyone should go get their money. I have no complaint. Like, I'm not going to fault anybody for making their bag by playing the game. It's kind of designed to be played.
Yeah.
But she's a marketer. That is what all of those platforms want you to be. Like, to be super clear, that is not Alex Cooper making outrageous claims about how things work. That is Alex Cooper saying everything about this system demands that I be a marketer. I am a marketer.
Right. Instagram wants you to shop.
Yeah. What we started the show by being like, we shop on Instagram. Like, we have a bunch of little QVCs. We don't want to do that. Like, I don't know how else to say it. Like, I want to make journalism. I don't want people to be able to pay us to say things or make ads. I don't want to make ads.
You don't want me making ads?
We did that one little run where they had me read the ads and the advertisers were like, 'Make him sound happy,' and I was like, I refuse.
So Richard Lawler on our team the other day just randomly, there was some like LeBron James Hennessy thing that happened and Richard reminded me of the time that I read a Hennessy ad on the Vergecast and told me that that brought him great joy for a very long time.
There was a period where I told our ad sales team that the only exception was liquor ads. I would read as many ads as anybody wanted and that is the one that they delivered.
I don't know if that was a good idea or not, but we had the experience basically. And the idea that we would do branded segments or we would even just read the ads, like I think when you are buying our subscription, what you are buying is our ethics policy. I mean that very sincerely. That is the thing you are buying from us. Yes, we make fun podcasts. Yes, the site is full of interesting stories. Yes, Liz is occasionally prone to just tearing someone limb from limb into tiny little shreds. And that is a worthwhile thing to pay for. But the fundamental thing that I think we are selling is editorial independence.
Yep. Which is what enables us to do all of that stuff, right? Like it's not like some high-and-mighty thing. Like it is the thing that enables all of that other stuff.
Yeah. And that to me, you know, on my break, staring at my phone, consuming a lot of platform content because scrolling with phone in your hand. No PopSocket, I will say, but scrolling while holding a baby with phone in hand. Yeah. I consumed a lot of platform algorithmic media. And I was like, all of this is ads. At the end of the day, everyone who is great at this is doing brand deals. And if you're prone to perceiving it, you're like, I can see all the pressure that is being placed upon all of these folks. And the way that I see it particularly in tech is the dam doesn't break until it breaks on conventional wisdom because everyone is like, no one wants to be the person who does the criticism and doesn't get the brand deal down the line. And then the dam breaks and everyone's like, 'This is bad,' and then everyone is like, 'This is bad,' because that's all the views, right? And I have millions of examples of this. But like there's just a piece of that puzzle that I think is... I don't want to play the game.
Anyway, to bring it back to ad-free podcasts, I think we're able to launch it because the subscription is working and we want to make it really valuable for people to renew, really valuable for people to sign up. The overwhelming feedback from all of you was give us free podcasts.
Yep. And then I think it's very important to not only just diversify the revenue because you think the economy is going to do whatever the economy is going to do, but to make sure that we preserve our editorial independence, to say the subscription is so valuable that the pressures of the ever-changing ad market on platforms will forever be distant to us. So we'll do some other stuff. I have lots of other ideas for how to make that case on these platforms. I think it'll probably get us into some trouble, but the thing that you're buying is our editorial independence.
Well, we should, you know, so many people have a relationship with you and me and the rest of our team through these podcasts. The podcast should reflect that, too, I think.
Yeah, I agree. And I think a thank you to everybody who's reached out being excited about this. Like, it's very rare that you just announce a thing and everybody is just like, 'Oh, thank god you finally did this thing.' It was nice to be able to do that. I don't know what your replies and DMs have been like, but just like universal joy that this is a thing that exists has made me really happy.
I do feel like we pulled the Apple move where we left off one feature.
We made the keyboard work again.
Yeah. And then like a year later we're like, 'We had this great idea, you know, like what if the camera zoomed?' You know? Like...
Remember USB ports? Do you want one of those?
There's part of me that's like, oh, this is why they do this.
Everyone's going to congratulate them because the phone is finally waterproof. Like, okay, fine.
Okay, so speaking of Apple, let's get into some of the news of the week. The big product news of the week was on Wednesday, Apple announced a bunch of new stuff, all unified essentially by the new M5 chip, which the fact of that is fascinating and we should talk about it. Basically, new iPad Pro with an M5, new 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5, new Vision Pro with an M5, just like pretty simple sort of internal revs of all of these devices with a new chip inside. Any of these get you excited?
Not really. I even saw one of the Apple sites, I can't remember which one off the top of my head, their take was the M5 MacBook Pro is such a small incremental update. It is the best case for waiting for the next generation.
So, if you're Apple, then why ship these things at all? Like, this is kind of what I was running. The iPad Pro with the M4 is still the best tablet anyone will sell you anywhere. The MacBook Pro doesn't have any particular competition. The Vision Pro, you know, lol. Like, I did sort of wonder why these things came out in this form at all. My read, at a very big remove, right? I've been out of it for several months. I didn't go to the briefings. I think we have reviews coming. I don't know if Apple addressed any of this directly. But my read is that they are managing their supply chain very tightly and they are moving manufacturing around. And in particular, if you have this big bet on TSMC and all of your chips are made in Taiwan, like there's all kinds of tariff stuff happening and you just get the feeling that they needed to move some chip capacity from one place to another and you can't go backwards.
So, you might as well start the M5 stuff and get that going and maybe you can reallocate some of your M4 to your more popular products because I don't think this base MacBook Pro is one of their most popular products.
The Vision Pro is not one of their most popular products.
The iPad Pro is maybe a different case, but I think it's so expensive. I don't think it is among the most popular iPads.
But you know, in its zone, I think it is more popular than the other two. But you just get the sense that they're kind of like, okay, we can make these updates. We need to start this production, but there's so much other stuff we have to worry about that we should make sure we have supply for that.
Yeah, that is my sense, like a total outside... this is a shot-in-the-dark guess, but like why update these three products with this chip? Well, I just kind of look at the world and I'm like, they are managing that supply chain against tariffs and trade and China trade. Like this is the kind of thing you start doing where you just start updating products off cadence to create capacity elsewhere.
Yeah. Well, I think that is certainly true and it makes very clear that Apple is now this company that we've thought of for so many years as run by this team of brilliant designers standing around those blonde wood desks and it's like this very iconic image that lots of people have about how Apple works. This company is run by the supply chain people and Johny Srouji and his team in that weird lab making Apple silicon. Like the cadence of this company are based on those two teams at this moment. And so it's like what seems to have happened, and this is what we see from lots of other companies that make sort of constant iterative technology, is they base their product revs on new chips, right? And so like when you get a new Dell, it's not because Dell had some wild new idea about what a laptop should be. It's because there's a new chip to put in it. And so they upgrade when there's a new chip to put inside. And increasingly with a lot of these products, it seems like Apple is willing to upgrade when there is a new chip to put inside and then to make big bets on what that chip can do. And like with a lot of this, I mean, you even read Apple's press releases and they're basically like, well, if you had an M4, it's fine. You're good. Don't worry about it. But then they talk a lot about the M1, right? And it's like, if you bought one of these devices four or five years ago, this is going to be a huge upgrade. But the huge upgrade is like it'll do local AI inference tasks two and a half times faster.
Wait, can I just say that's more specific than what Apple is saying.
Apple says the M5 in the new iPad Pro brings up to 3.5x the AI performance of last year's Pro.
I don't know if you recall AI performance of last year's Pro. But it was nothing. Yeah.
Like, it's like nothing happened there.
They summarized some notifications badly.
Yeah.
So I mean even that is like, are we running local models on this thing on your iPad? Well, you're certainly not doing it in the background. Like what are we talking about? Yeah. Like I think honestly my other read on this is the M5 must be cheaper to produce and the new networking chips, the C1X cellular modem if you get that in the iPad, the N1 chip, their in-house networking chip for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Thread for some reason, all that must be cheaper than the ones they were buying because they're no longer paying Broadcom or Intel's or Qualcomm's fees.
So like maybe they're just moving to the new architecture which is cheaper.
Yeah. And they're like, 'If we put this in new devices, we can get it at scale. We can make it even cheaper.' The race to make that across the line makes a lot of sense. But it is just like what an incredibly rational and boring set of reasons to roll out new devices.
Well, can we just talk about the Vision Pro? I feel like the MacBook and the iPad getting chip bumps is like whatever. Like you don't... You're right. Dell does it. HP does it. That's fine. A laptop got a chip bump. There's almost nothing to say.
The Vision Pro, it got a chip bump. Great. It went from the M2 to the M5. It got heavier.
It got 150 grams heavier. And they changed the strap and I think the strap... it's not... there's like a heavier strap, but it's the Dual Knit now. That's the one they're doing.
Which they should have shipped from the beginning. Yes.
Because it is much more balanced. But they made it heavier. And they're what? They're adding basketball to it.
Yeah, there's going to be some like immersive NBA games starting next year. Which a bunch of people I've seen are excited about. And why? Like this is a thing everybody who does this tries. Like Meta did this years ago with the Quest where they were like, 'You can sit at half court and watch an NBA game.' And it's like, well, first of all, on the floor at half court is actually like a pretty bad seat. So you're going to give me a bad view with none of the fun things about sitting courtside. It's going to be like blocky and blurry. I'm going to have to go like this back and forth the whole time while I'm watching. This is not actually a good viewing experience for what we're doing here. It just doesn't... it's not a thing that people want. Like we're pretty good at TV sports now. I don't know that the next gen of TV sports is you're in the sports. I don't know. And so all of these things, like Apple keeps rolling these things out sort of one by one where like, you know, they make an immersive documentary or they'll do a music video or whatever and every single one of them the overwhelming reaction is like, 'Oh, neat,' and then no one ever talks about it again.
Yeah. And none of them are sticky, right? I mean maybe you can watch a season of basketball in Immersive 3D or whatever will be very, very sticky. Every time they show the demo of whatever F1 app where like the track is on the table and the cars are going on the table, I'm like, that would be great if I had a huge house with empty tables all over the place, right? And eight friends who all had Vision Pros in the room with me. But the chip bump for the Vision Pro and he made it heavier. I feel like it's just the wrong direction. What I want is a cheaper, less powerful, lighter Vision Pro.
And this thing is just going the wrong direction. I just Googled how heavy is 150 grams just because, you know, it's helpful to have a vision. I found a website called measuringly.com.
Fabulous that this exists. Here are some things that weigh 150 grams. Would you like to hear them?
A cup of all-purpose flour.
A cup of almond nuts. One and a half cups of oatmeal. Four slices of bread.
Three strawberry Pop-Tarts.
All right. So here's the next time I see you wearing a Vision Pro, I'm just going to put four slices of bread on your head and be like, 'Is this better?'
Another good one is an iPhone SE.
That's right. It's one iPhone SE.
One, three Pop-Tarts, one iPhone SE, and four slices of bread.
Sure. I mean, like, it's fine. Like, none of that feels like a lot, but it's on your head, right? And I don't know if the new strap will like counteract it or make it better or weight it better or balance it out better. Doesn't seem like they've made big changes to how it balances, right? The strap might distribute the weight slightly differently, but they haven't actually counterbalanced it. So, it's still very front-heavy. I don't know, man. It's truly their most confusing product. They're updating it against... right, Meta Display is going to start shipping soon.
Samsung is teasing the Moohan headset next week.
Which is their partnership with Google.
It's just like this thing, you know, my review is basically like this is the end of this road.
Yeah. Pass-through, big VR pass-through headsets have come to the end of the line. This is the best one you can possibly make. It's $3,500.
And I still feel, I think, exactly the same way. Yeah. My bet for what's about to happen is the Meta displays are going to be like a medium-sized hit. Meta is not making that many of them, but I think they'll do well. People will buy them. I think the new generation of regular Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses are going to do very well. I think Moohan is a stupid name, but that thing is going to be almost as good as the Vision Pro and like drastically cheaper. Like, half the price would be my guess. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if this thing is like 1,500 bucks and all of a sudden it's going to make the Vision Pro look just completely on an island by itself. And all the reporting, by the way, suggests that Apple is like keenly aware of this and is essentially running away from the Vision Pro as fast as it possibly can.
And yet they're doing a chip bump.
I know, that's the odd thing. Like, it would almost make more sense if Apple would do the thing that it occasionally does and just sort of studiously forget that a product exists, where they just refuse to acknowledge that it's still there and part of the company and then someday they'll kill it. But Apple is clearly on to smart glasses as a thing, has pivoted pretty hard internally towards making that stuff work. They've had some weird employee turnover that might make that harder. Meta just keeps throwing giant sums of money at everybody who works anywhere doing anything with AI. But I think we're headed towards a moment here where the Vision Pro just doesn't make any sense to anybody.
Yeah, we're already at that moment.
You know, my read on the Meta display glasses is that Meta is equally confused as Apple, but their product is closer to what people want. I think the only reason people are buying the Meta Ray-Bans is because they have a camera in them and headphones and...
Maybe sometimes the headphones.
It's mostly... it's like 60% camera, 30% headphones, 10% everything else.
If you bought these, let us know. Send us a note. Right? I'm very curious, but everyone I know who has them is like, 'I bought these for the camera.' No one is sitting around talking to Meta's AI assistant. Meta has confused itself into fully believing that they have found the form factor by which people will engage with their AI assistant. And it's like, no, they just have a camera that you just made a camera and literally a pair of Ray-Bans that look pretty good. And so people bought the camera and the pair of Ray-Bans look pretty good. And then you get all the way to, okay, if people have the AI assistant, now we have to put a screen on there because everyone wants to build AR. And you're like, 'Now the glasses look bad.'
Yeah, they do. V on our team has been using them and is, I think, getting a review ready and she like shows up to meetings wearing them every time and you like...
Look at them and you don't really clock them as anything and then like you sort of... you always kind of double-take at them because it's like, wait, why are your glasses enormous? Like, did you buy the wrong... like, are those costume Ray-Bans? Like, what are we doing here? And it's just... it's sort of like the Vision Pro in a very different way in that it is like... it is very technically impressive that this thing exists.
I don't find it compelling and from Meta's perspective, like I think the best argument for what you just said is that as far as I can tell there's not that much interesting stuff to do with the screen at all right now.
Yeah. Their big idea is like walking directions. Like it'll give you a heads-up display to tell you to turn right. And it's like, I know there are so many devices with so many ideas about how to tell me to turn right and my phone does it just fine. Like, I'm good. It'll be all right.
Yeah. But again, I think they've concluded for better or worse that they have found a piece of hardware that can replace your phone and the interface for that will not be the neural band, which is fine. Like, it's impressive because it is the thing that it is, but you're like, in order to use my computer, I have to put on glasses and a bracelet. Just like, my phone is much better at these things. And they've decided that this is how they will displace the phone, that the user interface of the future is somewhere embedded in this hardware. And I think they've missed the fact that everyone's just buying the cool ones for the camera. And I don't think anyone's going to make the leap to 'I'm going to start talking to my glasses.'
Well, and it makes you wonder if maybe Apple sees that, right? Like if Apple called it wrong and tried to do like the Tesla Roadster strategy where you ship the really expensive luxury thing first and then scale it down rather than shipping the minimum viable product version of it and building up. And if somebody other than Meta is looking at it and going like, 'Oh, this actually isn't an AI product. It's something else that we can eventually do AI to.' There are a lot of interesting ways you could take the thing over time.
Sure. But the dream is augmented...
Reality. None of them are actually augmenting anything. We bought a new car. We bought a Cadillac Vistic and has an augmented reality heads-up display.
And really, it has an arrow that gets bigger in your line of sight as you get closer to the turn. This is what I'm saying. Everybody has ideas about turning right. Like it starts out like really far away and then it's like the arrow zooms in on you and it's like an ever larger cartoon arrow is getting closer to you and you're like, you haven't augmented anything. Like this is it's very clever, right? You've tricked everyone into believing that you know, but like really the arrow is just getting bigger. Like very big at the end. It's a very funny. Um, but the goal is like augmented reality and I'm we've done the stack so many times. I'm going to do it again because I haven't done it in months on the show. You need to have a chip that can process what a camera is seeing in real time. You need to have connectivity to figure out what's happening like in the world. Uh, you need to have a battery that can power it all. You need to have a display that is bright enough outside to show you stuff overlaid on things that are themselves bright and has a large field of view. These are each of them massive technological hurdles. Oh, and then you need a battery that can make that all go right. The Vision Pro is like the battery is totally external.
Uh, right. One solution to that problem. I think the Meta display doesn't solve most of those problems. They've literally just added a display.
Yeah, they don't have the compute to do anything other than turn you can turn right. They certainly don't have like real time camera recognition. Then they're Meta and I don't want them to have it.
I don't want them to have it. I don't want a bunch of people wearing Zuckerberg glasses walking around like live streaming back to Meta's data centers. It just seems like as a society, we've all made the decision that that would be a bad idea. We're careening towards that future cuz no one can stop it. But like I think anytime we discuss this product, we have to look at it. Then I am very concerned that in a world of like no content moderation, everyone will live in like differently augmented realities. Like right now, if you stare at the Capitol building, you're like, "What happened here on January 6th?" like different people have wildly different opinions about what would happen in epile on January 6th. Meta will have to make some decisions about what to say and then Donald Trump might throw Mark Zuckerberg in jail if he doesn't say the right things. Like that's just a weird place to be. It's a set of technology, a set of experiences and I they're like so excited about it. I'm like have you guys you know it doesn't a the tech to do it doesn't exist and then the that outcome is careening towards us as well.
I mean, I would say like to the implicit question there of have you thought this all the way through? The answer is like of course not, right? Like what what about the history of the tech industry suggests that anyone has thought this all the way through? We we can't convince Open AI to think gosh, how will copyright owners feel about like this is this is just not what we do here? They we ship the thing, see what horrible stuff happens, apologize. Like that's that's what we do. It's the tech industry. But I also think a bunch of that is really far away, right? And so the question is what's the next thing? Like the the the thing you just described doesn't work yet and it won't work anytime soon. The like can I stand in front of the capital building and be like what happened here and it will like usefully tell me like none of that is real. It might be eventually but even even the thing that is good and interesting and cool between here and there I think we have not yet figured out. But I do think the idea of what is this going to look like on my face, we all pretty much know it's going to look more like Meta than like the Vision Pro.
Yeah, I I'll give you that. I mean, you know, the killer app is a killer app. If they can just do names and faces, everyone will buy one.
Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg, all is forgiven if you can let me do names and faces. And I know they can because the prototypes have been developed and the like kids are building proofs of concept of this using the existing Meta display app. And then they got a lot of publicity and those kids I believe started a company to do it for real.
So like that's coming and I you know that set of questions is is going to come along with that very very fast.
Yeah. Yeah. Right. We actually have some more AI stuff to talk about. But we should we should take a break first. Uh and then we're going to come back and like you you have just been alone with AI tools for 3 months and we need to talk about it.
I have a new girlfriend David. This is the last time I'll ever see anyone. Uh, but we're we'll get into that. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. Uh, Neil, when I came back, I spent two weeks shouting my insane, sleep deprived takes at Jake and Hayden, and I offered you the chance to do the same here. And and you said basically you only had one, and it was about AI.
Do you have something you want to get off your chest here?
Well, so I I have the same basic AI take as I think a lot of people. I'm going to say that my path to getting there is the virious path. Okay. So I I think we're in a bubble. I think we're in a big AI bubble and it will eventually pop. And you know I agree that a OpenAI doing sex bots is like pretty bubbly. Just bubbly. There's you know in the circular deals. Liz sent me a chart of all the the circular deals of the companies investing in each other today. And let me let me quote specifically what she said. She wrote she drew it and sent me a picture for a story she's working on. And she wrote, "Hello, I made you something horrible. It's basically just a it's like a series of circles with labels. It's like a lot."
So that's like what And I think that's like the standard argument, right?
The money is going in circles. That's not good.
Yeah. The news this week was OpenAI is like we're going to spend a trillion dollars on on compute and like and Nvidia stock goes up and AMD stock goes up and everybody's stock goes up every time Sam Alman says like a bigger number about computing costs and then somebody raises their hand and goes where is that money going to come from and Sam Alman just sort of like throws a smoke bomb and disappears and just like keeps getting away with this and this it's it's it continues to work and everybody believes him about this money for now But uh the the we're in a bubble talk has gone from uh sort of a thing people were saying quietly to just like mainstream accepted really shortly. It's been really interesting.
And again I think that most of that is like financially oriented.
Right. This is a bubble because this finance stuff doesn't work. I heard Cara Swisser say the circular deal making reminded her of like telecom in the '9s.
Great. There there's that whole argument and you can you can get that anywhere. You can go buy that on the street corner. It's fine. This is a Vergecast. Here's my argument. LLMs as a technology cannot do all the things you need them to do in order to make the products that would pay all this investment off. And I a lot of people can argue with me about this. There's a lot of ways to supplement LLMs as a technology. There's a lot of ways to enhance them. There's a lot of ways to connect them to traditional deterministic computers. But the way that I know it can't be done is I've watched the three biggest tech companies in the world, consumer tech companies in the world, Apple, Google, Amazon, all try to ship a smart home assistant based on an LLM, and they can't do it. They simply cannot turn the lights on and off reliably using the foundation of what modern AI is. I'm not saying there's not other AI techniques, right? LM aren't all of it. There's more. You can layer stuff around them, but everyone knows what it should be. Like, I know what would pay off all of this investment.
it's the super capable assistant that can just do stuff when I ask it to do stuff. And I know this because we keep getting shown the demos of it, right? Computer use from OpenAI, uh, whatever the Chrome thing we saw at IO was where Chrome went and browsed for you. We've talked about whether the web would exist at all
because the robots could just use the computers on your behalf.
You'll never book a flight or order a sandwich again,
right? Like we've been show Apple Microsoft announced that the next major version of Windows would just be a computer you could talk to. All built around AI. I've heard this from Microsoft before.
Many, many, many times. But this is the vision that will pay off the bat. You will you will have an ambient computer around you. You will speak into existence your desires and then it will happen. Yes. Three of the biggest companies in the world cannot reliably manage to turn the lights on and off straightforwardly. Like Gen 2 has reviewed Alexa plus and that first of all they're adding ads just like straight up ads to all those displays so that people get them out of here. They call it orchestration between when you talk to the AI and it, you know, figures out what system to use. None of that is reliable. Nope.
Sometimes it hallucinates and just lies to you. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. The real promise of like, hey, when I get home, like every time I get home, like detect that I'm home, turn on the lights, start the coffee maker, do this stuff where you're basically programming with prompts and you get automations. Real shaky. Google is starting to roll it out, but it's just adding Gemini as like a feature to the existing Google Assistant on these hubs, right? They haven't even like directly connected them. And you have to pay 20 bucks a month. Yeah. But I think that the Google answer is particularly telling because that is clearly the right answer, right? like the the the sort of less impressive version of these systems, which is what they've been building since like 2012 with Google Assistant and Siri and Alexa and all these things. They're not interesting in the same way that a lot of the agentic AI stuff is interesting right now to people, but it does work. like the when you ask your assistant to turn off the light, it will much more reliably turn off the light if it's running the old tech than if it's running the new tech. And that is kind in a way like it's a feature, not a bug. And it's actually because these LLMs are not trained in such a way to just go from A to B like that. They are not they are not command executors. That's not what they do. There's a bunch of steps in between, like you said, all of which can fall apart all the way along the chain. And the chain is big and interesting and open and allows you to do lots of things, but what people want to do is turn off the light.
No, it's it's fascinating to me. And, you know, I've just added more and more smart home stuff to this house. You know, the the my wife and daughter are like, "We're never leaving this house. That's just where they are." A seven-year-old girl, by the way, saying we're never leaving this house is like her foot is down. It's we're not going anywhere. It's like, "All right, I can do like the house is the house is a robot now. Like we're fine. We're all in. And so I'm like, you know, we have a home assistant set up over here for me to tinker with. Got home bridge over there to bridge everything together. And I'm like, oh, the way that this should work is I, you know, it's it's my network. I should put one of these assistants on my network. It should just see that there are some Hue lights over there and there's a TV over there and this thing and it should just go use it for me, right? I should be able to give it credentials and just use it. And I should actually have a smart home platform. That's how this should work. Like my house has a bunch of network devices on it and this thing should, you know, assuming that I trust all these companies, have permissions to traverse my local network and flip switches for me. And nope. Like just nope.
Well, and lest you think that is like an outrageous thing to ask, Ero, the company that makes your Wi-Fi router, owned by Amazon, the company that makes Alexa. Like it's the it's sitting there.
Right. and they just can't do it. I mean, Apple can't do it at all, right? They they delayed Siri, right?
And they control all the applications on your phone
and they couldn't do it. And I I don't know if you guys talked about this the past couple weeks. There are some big hints that Siri app intents which was the thing they were going to make developers do so you know AI Siri could control the applications that they were going to use MCP model context protocol which was the sort of nent protocol that anthropic developed to do all this stuff that Apple would like basically cave and give in and use that
which would be a huge cave.
Right. Because Apple not doing its own weird standard is usually a sign that something has gone massively arai.
And if you look at the Google subreddit, the Google Home subreddit, everyone is furious at Google all the time. They're just mad. Like they don't trust this company. They don't want the stuff. And it's like Google, you have this huge installed base of unhappy people. And for some reason, you're charging what is it 20 bucks a month to use Gemini on a Nest. This is insane. You could just give them a good product that they like and they would be happy and you have lots of cuts of this product. The Gemini is all over the place, right? You can't open Chrome without it insisting that it summarize whatever you're looking at.
