We tried Bing powered by ChatGPT AI and things got dark _ The Vergecast
The Future of Audio: A Conversation with Sonos and Amazon
As we sat down to discuss the future of audio, it was clear that two major players in the industry were on the same page. Richard's passion for high-quality sound led us to explore the world of home speakers, where Sonos reigns supreme. But as we delved deeper into the conversation, it became apparent that Amazon and Apple are making waves in the audio space.
Sonos: The Leader in Home Speakers
"Sonos makes an actual receiver that integrates with the thing that does Atmos properly," Richard exclaimed, his eyes lighting up with excitement. This would be a game-changer for anyone looking to upgrade their home audio setup. "It would be like 12 billion dollars with that Sonos markup," he joked, highlighting the potential profit margins for the company.
But it's not just about making money; it's about creating an immersive experience. Richard believes that Sonos has all the right pieces in place, but there are still a few gaps to fill before they can truly compete with Amazon and Apple. "They've got all these categories," he noted, listing off the various products available from each company.
Richard also touched on the importance of Atmos, a technology that allows for three-dimensional sound. Sonos has already made strides in this area, but there's still room for improvement. As someone who values high-quality audio, Richard is eager to see where Sonos will take it next.
The Role of Amazon and Apple in Audio
But what about the big players? How do Amazon and Apple fit into the audio landscape? Richard was quick to point out that Amazon doesn't care much about the audio business, at least not compared to its other ventures. "It's just lock-in for Amazon services," he explained.
Apple, on the other hand, seems to be taking a different approach. With the release of HomePod, Apple is trying to carve out its own niche in the market. Richard isn't entirely convinced that this is going to work, but he does acknowledge the company's commitment to audio technology.
One thing is certain: both Amazon and Apple are committed to creating an immersive experience for their customers. Whether it's through the use of high-quality speakers or innovative technologies like AirPods, these companies are pushing the boundaries of what's possible in home audio.
The Future of Audio
As we wrapped up our conversation, Richard couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement about the future of audio. With companies like Sonos and Amazon leading the charge, it's clear that this industry is on the move. But as he so aptly put it, "I'm not too big" - there's still room for growth and innovation.
The role of Apple in the audio space remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: their commitment to creating high-quality products will only continue to improve over time. And as for Sonos? With their focus on Atmos and immersive sound, it's clear that this company is ready to take on the big players.
The Conversation Continues
As we came to a close, Richard couldn't resist one final question: "Can Bing write a conclusion?" The answer, of course, was no. But in a moment of levity, he joked that if asked nicely, the AI assistant might just surprise us with its abilities.
The conversation may have come to an end, but the world of audio is far from over. With companies like Sonos and Amazon pushing the boundaries of what's possible, it's clear that this industry will continue to evolve and grow in exciting ways. Stay tuned for more updates on the latest developments in home audio - and don't forget to follow us for all the latest news and interviews.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enforeign Chast the flagship podcast generative AI solutions for your small business please use this promo code it's a promo code and sign up for an informative seminar today about how AI can replace most of your Workforce but not you because you're important hi Emil I'm your friend I don't mean to start on a down note I'm just saying I've already gotten that email basically uh we have big show it's the Microsoft versus Google war is underway I was at Microsoft this week to see the launch of the new Bing powered by not chat GPT we'll get into it but I have an All-Star lineup here to start with Alex Kranz is here hello I'm your friend who doesn't know what's going on right now but is very excited to learn more yeah you were just on vacation you just came back and like the whole world has changed you're like there's robots now yeah that's great Whole New World uh Richard Lawler is here hello I do not believe in the future of AI until it gets into uh Bitcoin you know here's what I'm saying Richard I I said this to Richard and Slappy today Richard's reflexive skepticism about Bitcoin is bleeding into the AI conversation look I was right once and it's going to just carry me through like the next five years he was like no this is stupid too so it's good well we need that the industry needs that James Vincent uh Verge senior reporter focused on AIS here hey James hello hello I'm glad to see you that I was um Bing's favorite reporter in one of the screen screenshots you shared I feel like I've been sucking up to Bing by accident by writing about AI I didn't realize uh yeah I asked bang uh who are who is the best reporter of The Verge and it just name some people uh it was like Dan Casey Addie and James it did not realize that Casey doesn't work here anymore and I said no no who's your favorite and it's like well I can't choose but James reports an AI and that's and then if you look at screenshots of Bing and I want people to pay attention to this whenever it knows or susses out that the answer might be controversial it uses a smiley but it's a blushing smiley so it looks like it's doing this every time uh and so it's like oh they're flirting with you or just like doing this super innocent face like I asked it why Beyonce did not win best album and let me tell you this robot knew that it was in very dicey territory answering this question it was like I don't know here's 95 citations to other sources people have a lot of different opinions the Grammys are a subjective award no music is best I gotta get out of here is that better or worse than clippy you know do we do we need is is the winner of the AI War gonna be who comes up with the most punchable Ai and lets you punch it yeah uh well so we'll get into it we'll get into it I have access to it we can use it we asked the audience for some prompts we'll see how those go but let's start with what Microsoft actually announced uh it's a new version of Bing Microsoft has had this long relationship with openai the company makes chat GPT open AI CEO Sam Altman was on the stage at this event uh there's actually quite a lot even before we start with this Microsoft announced this event without telling anyone so they were like come to Redmond this is our only in-person event it's a big deal and we're like is there a live stream and they're like no but you're going to want to be there sorry okay we're gonna go and we all kind of sussed out what it was going to be and I was like man if they show me a new version of being like and they're like no no you're gonna like what so the whole process there Google freaks out it gets word of this it announces its own chat bot integration called Bard in Google with just a blog post but no details no access we've got Bard Bard is coming yeah they obviously made up that name just like the day before also an hour's notice as well I mean maybe some Outlets got more than that but in inside baseball here we got an hour's notice that this is coming which I think says about their Panic they're Rush yeah and then they had another event in Paris which was by all accounts just like a pure disaster and the stock fell like we don't cover stock prices normally but I was like Google's just lost a hundred billion dollars off its valuation because of what happened with Microsoft in the middle and how they reacted to it so this is just the context so we go there we don't know we're going to see where Microsoft's first event we're in uh their executive briefing Center they have a little stage set up lots of chairs lots of reporters there obviously it was fun to see everyone uh and they just got into it right this is the most focused Tech event I have seen in years it was not we're putting AI in everything it was not here's you can tell Excel to make you a pivot table which is obviously the end goal for all AI um it was here's a new version of Bing it's powered by chat gbt technology here's Sam Alvin from openai to talk about it here's our responsible AI researchers to tell you like how we're going to keep it safe and trustworthy and what the guide rails are here's a new version of edge that has a chat bot sidebar they can man it like what's the best way to put this they can read the web page you're on and like summarize it for you and like help you browse the web which is really interesting uh and we're out and here's Sasha and Della to say we're taking the fight to Google uh and then that was it and we like went downstairs and we waited a while like an oddly long time and then they gave us all access to it all the people who are there got access with their Microsoft accounts so it's not I think open to everyone yet but we have access to it and it will slowly come out to everyone in the next in the weeks to come I think is what they're saying Google is like effectively nowhere how fast is that rollout gonna be that we don't know okay oh my God what is going on with Bing I'm sorry in the background like Bing is just like losing its mind with me um uh the rollout is a is a few weeks they said they are very aware that they have this lead and they want to take it right they like Nadella said to me we know Google's 800 pound gorilla but they have to come to the dance and I want people to know that we made them dance which is a very aggressive thing like I've talked to a lot of big Tech CEOs they usually do not refer to their competitors directly in this way but they think they have an opportunity to change how search works Nadella keeps saying search is the biggest software category on Earth and they you know their opportunity is to just peel off a couple points of market share which is worth billions upon billions of dollars and they have this new paradigm of chat and chat gbt which chat CPT is like the fastest growing software product in in history right like that they're very proud of this they have this thing faster than tick tock yeah uh I mean it's in many ways that's like it's a weird thing to say right like yeah yeah I just keep seeing that comparison and I'm like that sounds big what but but but there's been like you know there was um a Reuters News Post which cited some similar web analytics which claimed 100 million monthly adverse users and then New York Times had a report saying 30 million uh like they and they those numbers came out in the same week I I don't know what's going on with the use of Statistics it's definitely been growing fast but I'm very suspicious that like how many people are logging in day after day uh yeah you know even I'm not logging in every day to chat GPT and I report on this stuff I know there's a reason to I know people who are like I think it's really interesting everybody and everybody on this podcast right now we're all writers and editors we we write all the time I have a lot of friends who are not writers they're not editors and they're using it daily to write all of their emails one friend who's like asked it to recommend books and now he only reads books recommended by chat GPT that's not great that's terrific but like that that friend is gonna end up being an awesome culture bro in like one second he worked at he was an nfts before this so I'm not see see what I'm saying I clock that so fast it's just a pipeline that makes you read Rich dead poor dad like that's the whole pipeline like it's like read these four hustle culture books uh you're gonna end up doing real estate investing very quickly uh well so there's this underlying thing like chat GPD is like hard to use it has gone down uh it has capacity limits all this stuff Microsoft is like whatever we're just we have this built multi-year multi-billion dollar investment in the company that part is a little unclear like how much of open ai's roadmap is Microsoft actually in in charge of how much of the the actual technology versus open AI we were talking to some product folks engineering folks there they're like look we just run it on azure and it's just it's it's ours like we give them notes you know like so I I think there's some underlying complexity to that deal that we don't quite understand but what is real what is tangible is that chat GPT is not a product right it is a technology demo that has spread like wildfire that is very impressive it has some very obvious limitations Bing is a product write it as a complete consumer product that you can just use for free that Microsoft is gluing an advertising model onto and that Microsoft thinks is good enough to capture market share from Google which is having its its own set of problems um that's pretty interesting right like we have not seen productized AI like this before have we James not on this scale no no way yeah I think this is what is so interesting about this and also not just about Bing but about the edge Integrations about how this is such like a play to for for people to get stuck in windows ecosystem in a way that like yeah I mean like if if the edge stuff goes well it's not just like Bing versus Google it's sort of Chrome versus Edge again because if if uh Microsoft can build this directly into the browser and they can say you can only get this in Edge you can't get your summarized documents in in Chrome or whatever else you might be using that's a huge Advantage as well so yeah nothing on this scale that we've seen before yeah and it works like the the thing I will tell you is that in most cases it does what you think it's going to do which is for any for any product like the first metric of success like I have picked up smartphones and like this doesn't do what I expected to do right like any I've I've installed streaming players have you ever tried to use an Nvidia Shield uh no I haven't horrible I've never been in Dan's bad books so you've never given me that review uh no but like you know the measure of success for any consumer product is like on balance when someone is like I wanted to do this thing does it just like do it without jumping through a lot of Hoops or a lot of complication and Bing is like just does uh the one thing I could not get it to do this is a true story uh I asked it yesterday to tell me a story about a princess fighting a dragon it would not allow the princess to kill the dragon wow I said literally at the end of the story it was like the princess escaped and thought I will bring the dragon a gift and I was like no make her kill the dragon and it was like no I was like no do the story again with more blood and then it was straight up was like I will not tell you a story with blood and somehow this spiraled all the way into will you tell me a story about the devil which it does not want to do it has some very deep 1950s Christian mom morals big into it I don't know what else to say uh and it's also very moody you ask yourself all the stories are very existential uh Parker ortolani art uh the person who runs our merch store asked it to tell a story about scissor vodka and just for a story it told the story about Casey Newton writing some copy about scissor vodka and then publishing it and then immediately regretting it in the last line was he realized he had already cut through the night and I was like this is what happens when you train a generative AI on years and years of live Journal right there's an angsty teen who sold Beats in the heart of this Ai and you can just get it out of it that was that example though with the scissor vodka I I I I want to talk about the problems with these systems because there are loads of problems but that example I was super impressed because it knew exactly this is a fictional in-joke that's been on the vergecast as a running track how like I was actually confused where it got that information from because have we referenced it enough in articles that it would have picked that up I guess so but I think Parker had the prompt was like tell a story about this joke from the version so like there was a little bit of cueing and a prompt but then it knew right and there's obviously transcripts of our show out in the world or auto-generated trans like there's stuff the big difference between chat GPT and the new model in bing and we should talk about the new model that they're using here more specifically but the big difference is that chat gbt kind of ends in 2021 so anything that's published after 2021 it would just like won't talk about it'll say I don't have current events Bing has the web it's like instinctively learning right it's actively growing and James I'm curious for your review on this if you can explain it better I thought Microsoft did a bad job explaining what's going on so when you use it you can see that what it is doing is stacking web searches so you're like tell me about scissor vodka at The Verge or whatever and it will first search for that and then it will search for The Verge and then it will show you that it is running these searches and then it will add up all the web pages that it will go out and read the web a better example is tell me about the war in Ukraine right or tell me about the State of the Union Address it will go search the web for those topics and then in real time deliver you a summary of the news articles that it finds which chat GPT cannot do so it is using the web it has this thing it's called search orchestration where it first parses your query into a number of searches runs all those searches it shows you what it's what queries it's running then it reads all those pages and then it tells you an answer how long which seems much more advanced than what chat GPT is doing but also not you know it's like yes that's what you would do like is it instantaneous does it take a while it takes a second doesn't it it takes it takes a second and what's uh what's really interesting is they they're they're still running trust and safety checks on it so yesterday when I asked it to tell me a story about a princess killing the dragon but with blood this time it wrote a whole story and then it got to the end of the story realized that it had broken its own rules and deleted the answer the really interesting thing is when it gets to the end of the answer it doesn't want to give it slows way down and it like finishes a sentence and it deletes it yeah you're right they didn't do a good job of explaining it I mean I think one thing to say is when we're talking about this is new pointed out and Eli it's not chat GPT and it's not what chat GPT is based on which is GPT 3.5 it's something called Model Prometheus the Prometheus model which seems like it's Microsoft's own branding I wasn't quite sure it doesn't seem like open AI are going to be talking about that it seems like that's the custom model this the pipeline you're talking about in terms of updating for Real Time news I've seen again wasn't explained completely exhaustively um it does seem like it's just a string of functions built together that as you say so it takes your question it knows that you're talking about news from the context it pumps that into its search and then it just does its summarized job on whatever the search turns up but I mean that that makes sense that it's not a huge ask if because if the edge if the features in Edge can summarize the documents you're looking at other web pages you're looking at it's basically just let me Google that for you oh sorry let me Bing that for you sorry of course I have it force a habit let me Bing that for you and then it's just summarizing those so I yeah the difference between that and having a fully trained language model is that retrieval from a fully trained language model is going to be faster and you can optimize it in better ways you can you can break down the uh but you know the connections the parameters with inside the model and make it quicker so this is always going to be slower but I yeah I wonder if they'll start updating the base model little do like a weekly update or something I don't know speculation so interesting thing there Yousef Medi who is in charge of this product had a q a after the event people are asking questions someone asked him about Christ right which is an important question every query on average that you make of this model is more expensive to run than the average query for Google right Google has spent a decade optimizing the cost of the web search query and his answer was yep some of them are expensive but we are parsing the queries and some of them are cheap like if you just type hi into the box We're not gonna we're not spending money on you like right like where we know some queries we can cut down some words we can get to the appropriate keywords this is what that search orchestrator is doing it's it's re-parsing what you're putting into it and saying okay some of this we can just answer cheaply some of this we can deliver from the web some of this is if you just say hi it'll just spit back high on Bing very cheaply without running into the whole model right so there's a level of complexity well this is what I mean by when I say it's a product right they've like thought through a product experience in a way that chat gbt itself is a tech you just you're interacting with the raw technology of it and then the second part of that product experience is they know they've got to make some money and so there's Yousef also said there will be advertising at the start um I asked it you know we've done a lot of stories about CNET and affiliate links and SEO spam all this stuff um so it was on my mind so I asked it what is the best travel credit card which is like a 900 affiliate link Bounty and this thing was ready like it spit out the answer it ranked it had the list of the credit cards and then at the bottom of that answer a big ad for a credit card right in the chat window and like that's what I mean by it's a product like not only is it tuned to make some queries cheaper it's tuned to how do you monetize the user experience when you're done with it which I think is just utterly fascinating so you there was a clear distinction between answer and advert because I think a lot of people are worried that the way chat Bots present information responses to queries is going to make it much easier to sort of um seamlessly you know weave in advertising in a way that is less perceptible to the viewer yeah um so but they they're keeping a clear distinction do they say anything that like we're always going to keep a clear distinction we'll never put an ad in the answer or they have no idea right I think they they have an early lead they have when I say it's a product and it's what I mean is they've gone through the steps of like how do we make this a product and release it to millions of people and how do we make some money on this product I'm not saying it's a good product I'm not saying it's a complete product or a refined product like Bing itself if you just go look at it minus stuff is a wasteland right this is an 11 billion dollar a year business that mostly makes its money by being the default search on lots and lots of low end Windows PCS before those people install Chrome and it's full of spam it's full of garbage like we we can just admit that like Bing is full of weird content recommendations like Tom Warren is going on and on about how the pre-populated widget bars and windows are full of garbage like Microsoft has run a content form inside of Bing for a long time uh that's that's fine it means that like even this ad that I looked at it was like not well placed it was like it had broken the site design the poor Engineers I was standing next to like rolled their eyes like the ad team is all over this but it's it's a complete thought in like oh there was an ads team they recognized they need to like have a list of high value queries and put some advertising in there right Which is far far ahead of where Google is now do they have answers for there will never be ads in the responses they do not they also more importantly have no answers for what do these responses even come from and can you trust them so the example they used on stage was what's the best gaming TV and it fired off a list and you know at the bottom it has all the footnotes and all the stuff and all that stuff is designed to make you trust it look at all these footnotes and I will tell you as a writer sometimes you get away with a lot of by just like adding a lot of photos right it's like a it's like a sign that you should like trust whatever you're reading and when you look at the footnotes and it's like the Forbes contributor Network like stupid Forbes like there's real forms which is great like a great journalistic Enterprise and then there's this contributor Network which is like full of garbage yeah and like real Forbes is not ranking gaming TVs the contributor network is ranking gaming TVs and like why it would Bing choose that not even over us like over like artings or like whatever other sites that do this work and do it really well I don't know but like it just does it and those are the footnotes so there's a lot I think there's a lot of questions like where does information come from can you pollute it uh with your commercial interests right so Sony wants to say the Sony is the best gaming TV we'll just win the query and Bing will just tell you that confidently like I they don't have the answers and their position is we should have we have to release it to learn what the answer should be are they doing anything to improve Bing itself because it seems like the core thing here is like yeah chat Jeep or this this AI model is doing all this work but it's doing it all off of search results from Bing which is not good well it depends so if you're like tell me a story about a princess and a dragon it doesn't go out and Google princess it just starts doing it and that's the underlying model if you're like I was like what's going on with the Twitter hearing it Googles those Bing to find it and so it's like okay yeah so if yeah and like I don't know like it answered the question in real time it knew what had happened at the hearings it knew what the Republicans said about the Twitter files and he was the Democratic and it answered It sped out a paragraphs yeah was that paragraph accurate was it based on sources that had done the original reporting or was it based on aggregations of the source like I don't know the answers to these questions and that I think this is the underlying also it doesn't link back to those pages was citing to I think one of the sites was Business Insider and Business Insider had sent a reporter to the hearing Business Insider collects none of the value like that stuff is just being boosted and represented somewhere else right and there's not even that exchange of you should click on this link like we aggregate a lot right but our exchange is like we validate those things we send a lot of traffic out of our site we like our entire front page is an exercise and trying to send out more traffic from our sites other people like there is a value exchange we make sure it's accurate we yeah we we do our best um where I think like Microsoft and I asked Adele about this and he was like we want to make sure we're still sending traffic out to people it's like but you're not like I don't think that that's going to happen I just yeah I saw his answer to that and he was just like it's the same as it ever was and I thought you can't have it both ways you can't present this as a revolutionary new paradigm and say but we're going to keep all the old structures of the old ecosystem the same it's just not going to work like that Google obviously has been doing this for years in terms of one box and Snippets and you know they've always argued or we I I was actually reading back some of their blogs about this and one of the arguments they made was well there's a lot of competition to get in that one box and that proves that we're driving traffic it's like yeah because you've got rid of the field and you've reduced it was of course there's a lot of competition killed everyone else so this is but so this is like utterly fascinating right like um I said some other query like what's better iOS or Android or something right and right again I got a lot of like blushy smiley faces um but it's sources were those sites that are created to spam that search result in Google right and anybody who's like I'm sure the Rochester like if you're if you're listening to the show you have certainly searched for specs online right and there's this universe of like auto-generated spec sites that um basically just respond to any search query by being like you want to compare a Ford Ranger to a Canon PowerShot s200 we'll do that for you like it'll just like figure it out like how to make a table out of that and Bing was pulling from the sources and I was asking like you don't know that that's right you don't know that that's real you're just constantly redisplaying a table this isn't matched up from these other weird tables and then like saying an answer and they're like yeah that's weird and it's because like the underlying thing here is still searching the web that sort of corrupted information architecture of the web that is designed to win Google searches like the SEO Corruption of the web yeah is like feeding it in a much more direct way to anybody I don't know that any SEO pirate is out there being like we got to focus on Bing well maybe theoretically they would now I mean like I think I'm super super super suspicious of this but at the same time remember when people used to game Google in a similar way to like get results like you'd Google dumbass and the first result would be George W bush is the president he's a dumbass so like is it did you say you're gonna do like Bing bombing yeah like you could do Bing bombing oh my God it's good look I I feel like I'm it's only because I've been using it for two days like intently that I'm like finding all these rough edges and these obvious questions that needs to be answered right it's it's rad like it is super fun to play with and this is when Richard was like screw it I don't understand it I was like no no like people are gonna lose their minds this is really really fun to play with you you're telling me that it's really fun to play with and I'm hearing you I just I cannot put myself in the headspace I have no idea what I would want to ask this thing they're like we have this machine that can answer any question you want to ask it yeah that's just like A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy probably though right like you're like I don't know like Paralyzed by infinite choices like a good product problem to have like I don't know maybe so maybe I could ask it hey what can I watch on Netflix tonight it'll give me the perfect answer but I don't know I don't know if I would want like what I want that do I want the perfect answer is that is that even what I'm going for or how good would it have to be for me to say yes you know what I'm just going to turn over decision making to this because you know like I can't but I think you're thinking about it as a decision making is a search engine and Microsoft is not thinking about it that way what are they thinking about it as uh Tom Warren he already he did a little Hands-On and his first one was like write me a resignation letter that says I've been replaced by Ai and it just did it it was like hilarious right and Alex this is the thing that you're talking about which is there's a lot of writing to be done for a lot of people that they're uncomfortable doing right and like I people are just going to use it for that because it's just gonna do it and it's gonna do it confidently and there's a composed screen in the Bing sidebar that is like I'll just read you the prompts in it like you click it's imposed and it's like write it tell us what you want to write about ask the tone professional casual enthusiastic informational funny and then do you want a paragraph do you want emails you want a blog post do you want bullets short long medium and it will just do it right and that alone is going to blow people's minds like people are gonna just go use that tool and like you know the example that Microsoft gave was like write a LinkedIn post and it's like oh no oh no um all the all the sixth grade I'm gonna give it a problem I'm gonna be like demonstrate thought leadership for the decoder podcast about SEO and I'll be like enthusiastic and I want bullet points and I want short vlog are you ready to take your SES skills the next level do you want to learn from the best of the industry then you don't want to miss the decoder podcast where we decode the secrets of SEO success this is actually kind of amazing in each episode we interview a leading SEO expert that's like my personal hell it's like absolutely not pivot whether you're a beginner or a pro the decoder podcast will help you master SEO and grow your online presence subscribe today and get ready to decode SEO with decoder like I'm just telling you there are millions of people that are super ready to to copy and paste that into a mail merge email template and send it to us it's gonna be brutal like this is that bangle wrench though this is the sidebar in Edge so I could have pasted the same query into being proper and it would have done it what you get in Edge is a user interface that is designed to help you through the prompt yeah do you think this is going to lead to like schools blacklisting Edge because they want the students to go write their own papers I mean what school has an already soft blacklisted Edge Blacklist yeah look I I think the stuff and these are not fair questions for Microsoft right like right they're thinking about them they know about them they know they make these tools they know that they're adding the capability tools this is a how do you want your kids to write how do you want your kids to learn societal question that I think is very important in the AI debate and James there's like already a lot of ethical debate about that stuff going on yeah a huge amount and you know I I feel like Banning is only going to be a temporary solution and the the better thing to do or the inevitable thing to do I don't know if it's better is to adapt um what you're testing and how you test with the with the edge stuff though like um and having that in the sidebar it is really interesting because you you you do get like you know apps already on your phone and assistance for your email clients which are like we'll do an email to write this for you but with Microsoft's reach it could just go so much further and really become a second you know just a habit that people do and I've seen that they're already integrating this stuff into like their Viva sales program as well you know if you're in a sales team it'll it'll write up the email from you based on your stock catalog and all this sort of stuff um so yeah I really feel they're good there seems like they're going to be ones that pushes this into Everyday Use forces it into everyday use all right so we have some queries from the vergecast audience to run here and I okay I'm just going to do this this is like a classic what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow uh so it is searching for airspeed velocity on laden swallow imaginary answers that depends on the type of swallow according to interestingengineering.com uh that's a footnote the European swallow has a cruising airspeed velocity of 11 meter per second or 24 miles per hour average followers larger uh can reach speed up to 35 miles an hour these are estimates based on the weight and Wing area by the way this question is also a famous movie quote from the comedy film Monty Python on the Holy Grail or Bridge keeper asked to the King Arthur's Knights of the challenge if you haven't seen him I'd enjoy it and then my friends an entire ad box of Monty Python and the Holy Grail where you can watch it on DVD oh that's incredible I mean it's like it's only 12 dollars and six cents from amazon.com I don't understand why like it's The Cutting Edge of artificial intelligence that is trying to sell you box sets of DVDs perfect the DVD player you definitely own a perfect vergecast experience um so like the sources here are just to be clear interesting engineering.com memesfield.com reimaginingeducation.org youtube.com in reimaginingeducation.org I don't like interesting maybe or we have we have a lot of listeners maybe these are your favorite sources these are except for YouTube unfamiliar to me right so I can trust them I think for this answer I I know the answer so they got it right but like that's weird right isn't that weird and that's something that you got it earlier about how it's kind of pushing it through this UI um in a way that you trust with the footnotes also it's coming to you like it's labeled being in Microsoft whatever so so you think okay this is trustworthy uh information but one of the questions I have is also how much do we know about the responses other people are getting like and this is something that has come up on social media with algorithmic feeds with Google and other search searches you see the way that they personalize themselves to people yep just because you get a result what is it showing everyone else and like how do we how do we keep an eye on that or how do we have any idea how we might yeah but I think it's even harder with AI because there is a you know stochastic systems that sometimes don't generate often don't generate you know the same answer to the same question so it's not just personalization that is a problem but it's the fact that the system is rolling a lot of dice in the background essentially and they say this to me I asked her to summarize uh our Elon Twitter cover story OKC and Alex and Zoe and at first it said no it's like this is too long I can't do it and it was like just close it and try it again and then it did WOW right so even something that's like what would seem deterministic look at this document generate a summary yeah the answers ranged from the summaries are different all the way to the system saying I cannot do this and that's like that's a huge threat like how do you evaluate that product in any real way when the spread ranges from failure to many many different modes of success okay so we have another question for the audience here it's uh when will The Verge stop picking on Elon Musk when he stops doing stupid stuff I mean that's the right answer let's see if we can real-time site to you James I'm so excited so it just searched for The Verge Elon Musk and then an ad searching for The Verge picking on Elon Musk and it's still thinking uh okay The Verge is a technology news website that covers topics such as social media electric vehicle space exploration and artificial intelligence Elon Musk is a billionaire entrepreneur and the CEO of Tesla SpaceX near link and Twitter the Virgin Elon Musk have had a history of disagreements and criticisms over various issues such as Tesla's self-driving claims must take over of Twitter and must firing of a Twitter engineer who corrected him on Twitter what okay all these sites are to The Verge except for the third one which is to the verge.vip which is a known scraper side effects already it's already I I've issued so many takedowns to the side uh and then techaries.com bing.com the Mercury News msn.com so on the whole it is mostly read Verge articles and parse them as being critical of Elon Musk so that's pretty good right uh here's like here's a sentence that I think is very impressive for the system for example in April 2022 The Verge published an article titled how to deactivate your Twitter account after must announced he was leaving the site for a while musk replied with a tweet that said how to get more clicks from a dying website and the links to the verge's article that is good that's really good right yeah uh that's that's very impressive but here's the thing you click through to the the actual article which is on techaries.com techaries.com got hoaxed but a Elon copycat bot and had to update this article to say that was not actually a response from Elon Musk well now I feel dumb for misremembering I didn't even know he did that right but like it's like Bing just got like hopelessly confused about that situation even though the article that it's reading has an update like right at the top oh I hate this Nila I hate this because I went from being so impressed to being so annoyed at myself and angry at the system in seconds and it's like and this is what this is what it's gonna do has talked about like how this compares to like self-driving cars um and kind of the demos that we've been seeing for the last 10 years and they were like oh yeah we're close we're close we're gonna get there and then they started to put them on the road and they found out that 95 there isn't 100 and there's a big difference yeah that five percent is huge in this case I think it's probably more than five percent but there's another sentence here where another bot replied to us but uh just to give you to finish the example which I think highlights the problem there's a sentence here with a footnote musk replied with a tweet that said The Verge is on the verge of our elements and linked to The Verge article footnote too you click on footnote too that is just the verge.com Elon Musk it's not it's not anything traffic it's just it's just a list of our stories yeah and here and well I'll screenshot this so everybody can look at it um it will be hard because you won't be able to click the links when you listening at home try to fact check us on this you will not get the same answer right it won't it's not deterministic as James is saying it's stochastic it's like somewhat random so you might get a different answer with better citations or that read the other story more correctly and said it was a like I can't tell you what's going to happen and that's just weird right like fundamentally like a weird bit of Randomness in this experience for everyone and I'm just I would say based on the past several years of Our Lives I'm very worried about the Facebook Boomers having access to this technology and believing everything yeah right like it's this is already the like the bleeding edge of chat GPT culture wars is conservative saying it's like too woke yeah but like now it's like it's a very confident lying to you and I think this we should end here like again it is a cool product you should get actually so you should play with it you're gonna have to switch to Edge I'm so sorry for you I'm already there it's great Microsoft has a lot of has a lot of design debt in these products I will just say uh but they they have not been actively trying to compete against Google for some time uh but whatever it's fun to play with I don't want to Discount that it's like just now it's fun to peel it apart and understand it but the reason Google is behind is because they cannot subject themselves to these risks right James yeah they have been you know they've been chastened by some past experience they've said when the GPT first came out they were like we can't risk the reputational damage was the phrase that was reported um and I think they they know that if I put a product like this out there as they did with Bard you know they put their bot out there and someone root is supposed to dinero in the era in the first ever demo that they had of it and that became headlines and that was what tanked it you know Microsoft is obviously not it's pretty big as well but it still has this sort of lack of expectations that allows it to play around in this space and to give all these disclaimers like oh it might it might give you the wrong answer every now and again isn't it fun and Whimsical yeah and people aren't going to think oh well this is going to threaten lives but this technology has the potential to threaten lives like it you know I and I don't mean that killer AI I just mean putting bad information out there that if if this stuff gets mainstream without profit safeguards which hopefully are going to happen as this stuff gets tested but it it you know there's possible dangerous consequences to this it's not just a toy unfortunately I think that's real for Google like search is Google's entire business and Android Chrome all this stuff is designed to feed you back into Google's revenue engine which is search and search advertising and you know all the advertising infrastructure of the entire web is Google there's a doj lawsuit about Google's Monopoly across the advertising ecosystem this is a very existential moment for Google right if people start chatting with Bing or demanding to chat with Google and it can't send people out to web pages where it serves all the ads like it's fundamental Revenue models at risk and the reasons it supports things like Android at Chrome are at risk but then on top of it if the answers are worse or it is telling people lies like confident lies to put them at risk in some way then that's even worse so I just like I don't know how Google comes through this moment it they have to make a series of very tough decisions whereas I think Microsoft and you can go watch or listen to that Nadella interview he's like I just got to pick up a few points of market share he said this is the greatest gross margin opportunity in our history and if Steve Ballmer was here he would light up which is incredible thing to say right he's like I just need a little bit if I just win a little bit it's billions of dollars for gross margin Google has to protect the whole thing and he actually said that out loud to me and to Joanna and like I think that's a that's a Microsoft is a ruthlessly competitive company and for that company to see that kind of opportunity and say it out loud means they're so confident that Google's on its back foot but I think there's like to connect that he's willing to risk a major like misinformation tool getting out into the world being used really badly for a few points of market share like that's the calculus Microsoft has made who yeah but I think he's already yeah he's already at Bing is kind of bad like yeah right I don't know if there's like a Delta I think one of the reasons they kept the name bang is look if this all goes to hell like what have they done they just ruined Bing a little bit yeah you know like yeah um but I think what they see is that people are going to use this tool in all kinds of surprising ways they can weather this sort of disinformation controversy because they can always be like but everyone's just using Google you know like it's fine just like it's fine for now whereas Google the second they tell a lie like this like I mean they got it wrong with Bard and the exoplanet right yesterday and a hundred billion dollars for market cap and I was in an ad that they should have fact checked I kind of hope that this is the start of a new way of doing the web you know I one of the things I tweeted about when we were covering this news was the lack of um uh traffic that these new AI Bots might not push back to um sites and you know if you those sites lose traffic they lose Revenue they can no longer make stuff and one of the responses I got um was like great it's the end of the ad supported internet and actually that had a lot of bad consequences as well as good ones and maybe maybe there's a new future where people go directly to sources and they support them financially in a way they didn't do with search I don't know if that's possible but I do think that these search engines are fundamentally going to reshape the web and yeah what happens next I don't know without I mean if you remove Google from the web at large and the idea of Google traffic there's only two ways to get traffic for most Publishers there's three if you're us we're very lucky people come to our homepage right and our entire redesign is like a bet on that persisting and maybe I should put an app on your phone and maybe we should remake the entire site as Mastodon and since if you have ideas please call me I'm always in some Renegade but we're lucky there's like a handful of sites that have that direct audience everyone else is like scrounging for social traffic which is how you get really clickbaity headlines or they're scrounging for search traffic which is how you get SEO bait and that's how you get screw it we'll just have ai write the SEO bait because now we're just doing Arbitrage against Search terms and display advertising and Google's kind of like on both sides of the equation if you take Google out of that it's actually not clear how most sites will get traffic because most sites are not getting tons of social traffic anymore because of tick tock and so like there's there is a reimagining of the web that is to come that is maybe years and years out Google cannot dismantle the revenue architecture of the web tomorrow with Bard they can't even demo Bard so they've got a ways to go but you can see how this is the beginning of a pretty massive paradigm shift for the web I will end here with this paragraph from our friends at Bing it is unclear when or if the Virgil stopped picking on Elon Musk or vice versa as both parties seem to have strong opinions and personalities that often Clash however some observers have suggested that the feud is driven by mutual respect and admiration as well as a desire to challenge and provoke each other some have also speculated that Feud is a publicity spot stunt that benefits both the version Elon we could use the help on coming up with a more publicity stuff that's great all right we gotta take a break James thank you so much for joining us I want to come back thank you there's a whole bunch of OnePlus phones talking about we'll be right back all right we're back Bing is still with us but James is not first casualty of the AI labor Revolution he's gone we're just gonna start asking bang if AI can be trusted and we'll see what it says uh speaking of things that aren't very intelligent let's talk about Twitter uh hard week is a good segment that's a good Segway a plus speaking of the limits of natural intelligence let's talk about Twitter uh hard week for Twitter so Casey and Zoe just dropped a heater of a platformer Edition about elon's declining reach on the platform he's firing people it's chaos we'll read some quotes out of there that kind of pales in comparison to the fact that Twitter this week was just chaos Richard what's going on on Wednesday Twitter had some really bad issues and this is something that people have been warning about kind of since they had their Mass layoffs do they know how to keep things running and do the people who know who know how to fix different things still work at the company and apparently the answer is not really because there was an issue on in the evening unfortunately right before NBA free agency so I'm waiting for my woge bombs to find out who got traded who was going where it's a bad time for this to happen but the service it didn't go all the way down if you wanted to see tweets and if you wanted to see brand tweets you're really happy because the only people who could tweet were companies everyone else was getting messages about your rate limit has been exceeded you've tweeted too many times and it linked you to a message talking about how many times you can tweet per day or different DMS things in this and that's a page that's been up on Twitter for years but no one has ever looked at it because it didn't matter but now everyone believes they'll have to pay for Twitter blue to send more than five tweets a day or something like that it turns out it was really just a glitch they did eventually fix it things kind of have been back to normal although my notifications have still been a little bit shaky and as you mentioned the piece from Casey and from Zoe on platformer gets into a bunch of things about Twitter right now but it also gets into why this happened apparently something was deleted that uh kind of sets those rate limits so everyone was suddenly exceeded exceeding them because it was zero and the person here to fix it had been fired yeah the team that takes care of that no longer works at Twitter so I guess someone else just had to figure it out that's fake can I just say something about NBA for agency because one of the big stories Kyrie Irving going to the Mavs right yeah uh the Texas came out Kyrie Irving believes in a flat Earth because of SEO I just like we were just talking about Google and the architecture of the web like I'm just this is like a reality this is like the reality of the world that we live in is that I can tell you with a hundred percent confidence that Kyrie Irving had to apologize to our nation science teachers about believing in the Flat Earth conspiracy theory because of SEO is the earth flat and then there's demand for that search term and then people make YouTube videos about it and content Farm makes web pages about it and then like the New York Times has to write a debunker about it because there's an increasing amount of Search terms for it and then Kyrie gets traded to the Mavs because he's crazy I'm just telling you I can draw a link I don't have to like it's not a conspiracy theory that's just how the world works now we've written that I think we've actually written a story I think Caitlin Tiffany wrote a story for us years ago about Flat Earth SEO and how that system works I'm just saying like I saw that notification and I was like uh like literally the first thing I thought about was remember we had to apologize to the science teachers of America well because if only that were the worst thing that he learned on the internet but that's the kind of reasons the the thing that's funny to me about it is that uh the New Jersey Nets new old point guard Spencer Dinwiddie Mike's personal conspiracy is that I'm sorry you called them the New Jersey Nets whatever look what am I supposed to remember where the team is now since they moved there 15 years ago that's what's going on Brooklyn New Jersey the Nets I would remember where they were located yeah my personal conspiracy theory is that the reason why he had to be traded to the Mavs in the first place so that he could be traded for Kyrie Irving is because he was big into crypto and I think he got his Wizards teammates invested in crypto right before everything went down and that's why he was traded at the deadline last year to set this whole thing in motion kick him out all right I'm just going to wrap this up and point out that Tom Brady had to come back and play another year football this dooming his marriage to Giselle because of FTX that's my conspiracy theory and also uh just while we're at it Aaron Rodgers recently hosted an astrology seminar again great player totally ruined by the scfo radicalization it has been a year and like six years since tweeted about crypto just saying I cannot wait until what we're dealing with is celebrities asking AI chat Bots whether the Earth is flat because it tries to answer Bing will try to answer and be like it's definitively not flat and people you just wait just wait until like Donald Trump Jr is tweeting about how woke Bing is because he refuses to acknowledge that people think he didn't land on the moon which is another real thing like did we land on the Moon and it's like yes we definitely did culture War incoming somehow we've gotten far afield of Twitter but that's where the that's where the that's right usually happens the problem is you can't tweet anymore so you don't even know whether Kyrie thinks the Earth is flat he's got nowhere to go well he's going to Dallas and we established that Mark Cuban is going to build on a custom Twitter so Twitter goes down a bunch this week uh Elon is threatening to turn off API access uh for a bunch of bots that are great like I love the akwood no contact spot it's like my favorite iconic of all time that's free and if the API goes away they can't do it I love a bot Club color schemer which just tweets cool color schemes that's going away Publishers the verge.com our articles get Auto tweeted using the API it's integrated into our CMS if they turn off the API and force us to pay for it I told our social team like it's just a free-for-all I'm just going to give everyone the keys to the Twitter account and everyone like that's dumb to like be like what I need is a human being to sit around waiting to manually tweet articles and it's even dumber to pay to distribute articles on Twitter right like Twitter sends us no traffic really so it's ridiculous to think that we should pay to distribute our articles there this is a real problem so they've been they've been walking that back as well but we're not really sure how it's going to work and that's one of those things like they have they've he's announced these API things he's changed his plans he they tweeted from the Twitter Dev account some new regulations and I'm reading it I have no idea what's going on and I talk to people who should know better than me who should know more about this and they say that they have no idea what it means either so no one has has any clue what's going on if you were planning on building tools or building around Twitter I can't see why you would do that considering the lack of information oh no that we have now you you would move on and you would do something else and all of the action is on Mastodon I I maybe you aren't as a listener I am not as you know like again I'm taking a break from feed-based social media uh I feel my brain is healthier than it's been in a decade but all the action is on Mastodon right that's where the app developers are the platform is accelerating uh the underlying sort of fediverse boundaries are growing all that's that's where the activity is and Elon shutting down the API he's shutting down the follow graph so you can't easily move your followers to master them because of those API changes it's clear that he's feeling the Heat the problem is he is not directing his team at Twitter what remains that team with any particular strategy and of course what he's focused on is himself so that's the story from Casey and Zoe and platformer today we obviously Syndicate platformer so it's on our side as well but he called a meeting and said I have more than 100 million followers I'm only getting tens of thousands of Impressions what's going on the team apparently showed him internal data from Twitter along with Google Trends saying that last April he was at 100 out of a hundred and popularity that's the peak and today he's at nine and you didn't believe them and he fired the engineer who told him this information wow wow and it's like yeah dude like you were last eight like last April was fully ridiculous like if you over a call right yeah he was tweeting about conspiracy theories comedy is back every day was a new Elon Musk Twitter he was you know there was like a war Brewing but who's gonna own this cup now he just owns it like there's no conflict like Elon let me tell you something I also know users great stories are driven by conflict if you're like okay it's a story it's about a guy who trades stocks in Wall Street he gets in no trouble he plays it by the book and he's happily married to Margot Robbie like no one would watch this movie I'm just telling you the Lamb of walls like no one's watching this stuff you need conflict and he's out of conflict because all the conflict is now pointed he is pointed it at himself at Twitter he is in charge so no one's looking at his tweets because all he has less he can't promise to make changes no one's looking at his treats because of the lack of conflict or no one's looking at his tweets because the lack of people on Twitter to look at his tweets I think that's like a circle I can't tell you where that begins or ends like right it's kind of both right but that's that's how we all feel we just let a fire tweet and you don't get minimum 15 likes you do want to call the meeting and have everyone at Twitter ask answer the answer why why is the world this is social media why are my rights being violated and now Elon can do that I think I think there's at least 44 billion dollars worth of value in doing that yeah that's half the that's 22 billion it's just being able to call a meeting I will say this I was watching the Grammys and I was like I'm just like sitting on these bangers there had nowhere to go I just started texting like random friends do you think the Grammys sound like people like who are you where'd you come from because I had nowhere for them to go that's what Twitter was for me and now it's like my brain is healing that is Twitter though like if you said these things a lot of value in complaining about the sound engineer of the Grammys by the way San Andreas Grammy should be ashamed of himself it sounded like it sounded like they had an iPhone sitting in the middle it was a Staples foreign horrible um you know we had a story like years ago why the Granny's not good and how hard it is and it's like they've like whoever they fired that gun too yeah it's like a new guy he's almost killing after everybody want more room tone from the Staples Center so it's just like massive amounts back anyway my poor wife I was like do you hear all that Shimmer on the high end she's like I don't know what you're talking she's like no that's Harry Styles there's nowhere for this to go so he's firing the people he's complaining about his Impressions and then this to me is like the main thing so he wrote he'd rolled out these view counts mm-hmm and all the people work at Twitter like there's a reason we never did this what it's going to show most people is that most people don't look at any tweets like most people get no Impressions right the illusion of Twitter is the sense that everyone's looking at all your stuff all the time you add view counts you're just going to train people that the effort isn't worth it Elon doesn't believe it he has this quote this is going to show how much more vibrant the platform is than people think how alive it is he rolls up the view counts not only does it lead to a further drop in engagement because most people don't look at your tweets or most tweets don't get looked at by anyone it kills Elon because most people aren't looking at his either like his his view of Twitter is completely warped by his like reply Bots yeah so he got he's getting rid of the Bots he's adding in metrics and he's realizing like His World Is A Lie soon someone's going to tell him that the cars don't drive themselves it's all going to fall apart is this why he they did the API stuff where they're charging for it and and why we were having all the problems on Wednesday with Twitter like is is the attempt to kill the Bots part of that I would bet that it probably is related to that that that's why the stuff got deleted that someone was making changes to this that or the other thing but not directly not not intentionally yeah exactly right but even the API stuff so is the API stuff like is this idea really if I charge people for this free tool that helps engagement I'll make more money like I'll make money this is like when I was in my 20s if I was like I'm gonna buy the cigarette factory for 44 billion dollars yeah he is addicted to Twitter he thinks everyone else is addicted to Twitter and he doesn't realize that you cannot be addicted to Twitter right but but doesn't everyone do that so he's just got the brain I'm gonna charge her Twitter blue I'm gonna like your replies don't get ranked unless you pay for blue I'm going to charge your API it all all of it implicit Underneath It All is the idea that you have nowhere else to go everyone has Twitter we're going to buy this bar we're going to buy this club we'll make it see we'll fix everything that's wrong with it and we'll make it popular because we'll do the things we know what's good you cannot actually do that and if you do we're gonna buy these games every time we've all seen it we've all considered doing it maybe you are considering doing it again I mean Richard if you want to go in on a club I'm just saying we should have done it man we should have done it we could still do it just sell scissor vodka the only only vodka sold there can I read the scissor vodka Story one more time we can run it with AI it's easier it's perfect we could we could do it it could work I'm just going to read this to you it was a dark and stormy night Casey Newton the senior editor of The Verge was sitting at his this is Bing Bing wrote the story yeah he had a deadline to me but he had no idea what to write he'd already covered all the latest techniques and Trends but he felt like he needed to do something more something different something exciting Casey decided to take a break and have a drink he grabbed the bottle and poured himself a glass of scissor vodka he took a sip and felt a warm sensation in his throat he took another Sip and felt a tingling sensation in his brain he took another Sip and felt a surge of energy and creativity he felt like he could write anything he felt like he could do anything he wrote about scissor vodka how it was the best vodka in the world how could make anyone smarter faster stronger and happier he wrote and wrote and wrote until he filled several pages with his words he felt proud and satisfied I'm telling you this keeps going he had written the best story of his career the best story of his life he hit the send button and waited for the praise and admiration of his readers and editors was there meth in this fun like he waited and waited and waited but nothing happened he checked his email and saw no response he checked his phone and saw notifications he text his Twitter and Son Dimensions he checks his slacks and Sono messages he wondered if anyone had read his story he wondered if anyone had cared he realized how silly and nonsensical it was he realized how drunk and delusional he was he felt ashamed and embarrassed he felt stupid and foolished he felt like he had made a huge mistake he tried to delete his story but it was too late he tried to apologize it was too late he tried to explain but it was too late he had already sent his story to the entire world he had ruined his reputation and he lost his credibility he had cut through the night laughs I mean this is like the dark like they should shut it down I don't know how you beat that you can't that's that's that's it that's the top they've already there's nothing better we should I said I sent it to Casey last night he's like this actually kind of captures the sensation of publishing story drunkenly publishing stories he's like this is like this is what it's like to publish a story it is you cut through the night uh and that's I think also a useful summation of Elon on Twitter okay so that's Elon on Twitter pure chaos um I'm gonna quote again from Casey and Zoe's story because this is a great quote if you're a decoder listener which I'm not allowed to mention uh on this show but if you're a decoder listener you will recognize why I love this particular quote As the adage goes you ship your org chart said one current employee it's chaos here right now so we're shipping chaos very good very good but or charts bring me away from Twitter to Disney yeah former and now current CEO Bob Iger wrote In kicked out his hand-picked successor Bob chapek Bob and Bob crime he's laying off 7 000 people Alex I'm very curious who have thoughts on that but in addition to laying off seven thousand people what's my man doing he's restructuring his org chart he's putting all streaming in one division ESPN now its own division he's just like rebooting Disney because keep it rebooted at first he was like I'm gonna make it more like Tech and everybody's like no we hate this and so iger's gotten rid of all those people a lot of the people that he put in charge and is now like I guess fixing it attempting yeah I mean he I you get the feeling that jpac is was a useful villain right he changed a bunch of stuff and now I get to roll back and say I'm fixing it I'm part of the fixing it is firing 7 000 people that's a lot of people uh re lowering some targets the jpeg is set for streaming we should talk about that and then this big restructure out of his old restructure so Iger had a structure it wasn't this structure chapek changed it so that all the divisions rolled up into one guy cream Daniel right everyone hated this like Marvel lucasfilm everybody rolled up into this guy everyone hated it and now Iger gets to say oh I'm doing this thing you hate but it's yet a third different structure so he gets to get out of his old way of doing things without the pain of being the guy who broke it yeah very clever I'm if it were the start of the pen if let's just say in theory if it were the start of a global pandemic and you wanted to take a couple of years off of work and not be responsible for managing the global pandemic would you do anything differently than what bye-bye Chris does he just had a little sabbatical a little couple years sabbatical yeah and I think all of you will recognize that when I begin to look for my hand-picked successor at the verse so watch your backs I've learned something you're going to come back and then lay off 7 000 people and get a give us that zootopia sequel we've all been been eager for so we should talk about that he tiger said he interviewed on CNBC today he's following up the earnings but Alex take us through the actual earnings Disney plus added some subscribers in the United States and Canada it dropped a lot of subscribers internationally especially in India because I lost some Cricket rights what's going on here yeah I mean it's it's doing like I think across the board they're seeing that slow down that we were seeing across all the streaming right like the dust is settled people kind of know where they're gonna go and so they only added 200 000 subscribers in the United States they own they added actually what looks nicer Hulu added 800 000 ESPN plus added 600 000. well that that may be because they had the bundle packages now it's like they've pushed so many people to pick up the bundles so maybe you had Disney plus before but now you have all three because it's essentially three-year right right everyone's like demo period kind of expired and you're just signing up for the bottom yeah so you either which is probably why their growth was so close to flat or you got the bundle and now you have all three but they are also seeing they sound like they saw it I mean despite like kind of that bot that that flatlining and and in some cases little dips they they still increase Revenue by 13 like they're still making any hand over fists in that direct to consumer division which is a lot of that is streaming right but they lost a billion dollars yeah they lost a billion dollars and they promised they promise by the end of 20 fiscal 2024 they say don't worry Disney plus is going to be profitable which means we're probably going to see a big slew of cancellations they have so many TV shows and I don't think they've canceled really any of them or at least not loudly and publicly so I think a lot of these shows like if you really liked She-Hulk you probably should make sure other people watch it if you really liked Willow or um what's another oh my God you got to do like the K-pop Stan thing you got to just like stream the show over and over again yeah just well no you that doesn't work we saw that with Netflix people would do it do that on Netflix and it doesn't work because with streaming you can just go and be like oh this one user is the outlier who streamed it 12 times everybody else is streamed at zero like it's not like Nielsen I know Spotify hasn't figured this out but circus yeah Spotify hasn't figured it out but everybody but like streaming has definitely figured this out so I would not be surprised if this year we see just an absolute bloodbath in that like in that streaming slate and and a lot of stuff that people are really excited about not getting renewed not seeing a second season uh but they have like their Marvel and their Star Wars slates are both planned pretty far in advance like we know what's coming for the next couple of years on those two um properties so it's gonna be interesting what's funny is the things that we're hearing from Disney from Paramount from uh HBO they're all very similar like zazlov is kind of saying these same things I think Paramount and Showtime actually had this message the clearest is we're going to focus on the big mainstream hits and the other stuff right yeah not so much yeah Showtime's like all right it's the billions universe and that means we need a show called millions and a show called trillions this is real Young finance Pros then they're going to keep making billions and then they're going to make a new show called trillions presumably about very old Finance Pros so you kind of get to Young's you got the middle aged that you got then you got the old the old money right and then they're gonna do a Dexter sequel like they're just fully into all right we're doing IP franchises all the way around Disney has already been there obviously with Marvel Lucasville wants other stuff but they're now they're starting to expand it this is the other thing Iger said so in addition to saying okay I'm restructuring out of the previous restructure so we have Disney entertainment we have theme parks and we have ESPN those are three divisions not the old old structure right we had Marvel lucasfilm wherever so he like hybridizes the structure a little bit between him and jpeg and then he's like all right we gotta lean into our franchises we're gonna make a sequel to zootopia we're gonna make a sequel to more sequels to Frozen we're gonna do more toy stories you can say what you want about zootopia I mean that's a movie about a rabbit detective you could probably make 100 she solves crimes actually watch this to try and reduce police brutality that's a real thing um upsetting I'm just saying it's a it's a buddy cop show like you you can see how you can like zootopia forever you know yeah they made four lethal weapons it all makes sense in the end Toy Story ended it ended really really ended like it ended a lot and then they made light year and nobody watched it because everyone's like I know I got it I got the whole four movie Arc of Toy Story including one false end where you thought they were all gonna die they almost burned alive how do you keep that going how on Earth do you keep that going well they're toys the the idea is that the toys always continue so I guess we'll get the little kid maybe we'll get new toys I guarantee you they're gonna remake their first Toy Story but you can't just make it not like I should because the CD looks terrible now they should they I would buy that on Blu-ray if they re-render it and make it look better right now I would buy it I'm sorry I'm the problem it's me it's just like look at that Ray tracing wow I was just a Toy Story 4 is like a great move it ended that franchise like definitively ended that frame there's no opening to make a Toy Story five I haven't watched that much in a while they they decided to be sad and I don't want to be set yeah it's true picture movies are like what if this movie is about death if you thought about really diving into death with your toddler and it's like no dude no now you're talking about about death as well really but I should be like we're gonna make more movies about death uh and that's our strategy all right anime is going out with Disney lots of change over there I your Mastermind we got to put them on the scale the go90 scale of Doom streaming services right a lot of change Alex what do you think oh that number zero is alive 98 zero 100. for for Disney Plus Hulu is still super up at the air ESPN plus you guys can talk about that that's like a sports thing I don't ESPN plus is ruined by SEO it's 24 7 Kyrie Irving Flat Earth and that's why it's a zero uh no ESPN plus is great during football season because NFL Prime Time is on it and so I actually watch it once a week at least once a week but I would put that at a 45. Hulu has been at like between 50 and 70 its entire life but it's unkillable yeah it's like you can't end it like spiritually I think you lose a zero well it's like a it's a technical zero yeah right by all right are gone it's yeah it's a cockroach yeah you can kill a cockroach it's possible but it's hard yeah yeah but where are you for Disney Plus 10. 10. 10. it's like there's more chaos there than we can see right so it's not like it's like a 45 is the 10 likes it's not default it's not like definitely alive forever it's at 10. it's these movies got to be hits the you know the next two phases of Marvel can't be the horribleness like if Marvel keeps going the way that phase four went it's it's over like the new one's supposed to be really good Quantum Mania that comes out in a couple of weeks everybody who's seen it says it's like Magic we'll see it's magic magic all right I'm really excited whatever they just can't do the thing where it's like here's what you got to do between phases you got to watch 10 TV shows that add up to nothing I finally watched wakanda forever yesterday I went to Disney World I came back saw these layoffs and was like oh I hope nobody I met and got me on a ride that happened to the lady who who gave me a discount on my magic band don't fire her Bob she was great I don't remember her name that was her like last Act of Vengeance yeah but but yeah like I forgot what I was saying I completely forgot you were talking about oh yeah so I saw wakanda forever and I was super surprised because I didn't need to like pay like there were no weird cameos there was no like oh look it's blorbo from from blorbo too yes they're here to do this to us again where they're like in order to understand the next movies you must have a Disney Plus subscription so you can watch these five shows that will explain some like Arcane piece of lore that will be it's like none of this matter in the end I just did a bunch of homework and Wanda Vision was entertaining and all the rest of it was fine but none of it mattered and I didn't need to pay you for anything I feel like that's where they messed up because it felt like you did so everybody ended up watching TV shows they didn't like and they needed to be clear that you know you don't have to watch all those if you don't like Moon Knight you don't have to watch it it's just like a perfect Recreation of the comics experience where you're like oh I gotta go get all of these different Comics before the big thing and you're like no I don't actually the art sucks and it's stupid I'm just gonna like write for the trade paperback well you got it Ponder forever he's an Nvidia shield and a DM to Alex Grant's flexor it's sick in there got some good oh it's all Linux it's all Linux distributions wonderful Ancient Ancient expired copyright public domain yeah it's it's all it's all it's hard content all been in the public domain yeah Mickey's coming he's going to be in there soon uh Alex's Plex server oh has been at a zero in the go90 scale do trading services for a long time since 2000 news talk about in this section Nintendo there was big Nintendo Direct what's going on there they announced the release date for Zelda this is the longest they've gone between Zelda games and I know that I'm old because it doesn't feel that long but I guess if I was like 13 I'd be like oh thank God I was seven when that last one came out so they they showed off Zelda link is gonna drive a car it's gonna be really exciting they also announced the price in this weird thing where you can pre-order it but you need a voucher but why do you need to pre-order a digital game so it the it's seventy dollars but then you can get you can buy a voucher for fifty dollars yeah and uh SEC and another game so basically you can buy two games for a hundred dollars or you could buy just Zelda for seventy dollars okay okay that seems very confusing but I'm gonna do it because I love these games I need it I needed I need to go play it we just talked about this you don't have to do the homework man don't do the homework but that's an entertaining homework although I doubt there's any particular connection between these if it was entertaining it would be honest I am not biased it should be on the Dreamcast commentary uh and they they announced that Metroid Prime which was absolutely fantastic on the GameCube is finally it's getting its remaster it looks really nice and shiny having recently played Metroid Prime I'm gonna go against Sean who says oh yeah you can play it on the steam deck and it's wonderful it's not it's really kind of hard those controllers aren't made like the controllers are just totally different so this is going to be made for the switch it should be very smooth for people who are like old and nostalgic they'll be like oh it's nice but it doesn't look like butts and for new people to be like oh this is just a fun game is there any game that Sean doesn't think is the most playable and the most fun on the steam deck no we're gonna find one that's that's my mission if you have one like hit me up hit me up on on Twitter I'm the last person there I want to hear all about it she's hit the Avi limits with steam deck commentary and they also one one last thing they also are starting to roll out Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games on the switch which has been like a long time coming yeah can you buy a translucent switch now because if you can't then you can't really get the Game Boy experience the the 90s way yeah the see-through portable system yeah yeah I remember everything was see-through I hope the knife is good the next wave is bringing that back like the 90s and 2000s are back in like a small way like you're doing the glass backs on the phones anyway just take that pain off let me see the insides just let me show me the battery all right we're gonna take a break see your new phones are gonna come back let's talk about the OnePlus 11. got a little bit of lightning around coming that's all coming up next we'll be right back all right we're back Richard I'm calling on you one plus eleven I was at Disney World what happened yeah yeah Alice was Disney World she's she's hunting for igers the OnePlus 11 5G which is the most important phone to me in my life ever I don't care about anything as much as I do the OnePlus 11 5G uh to be specific which is a 699 dollar flagship phone is one plus it's moved from their mid-range to kind of Flagship they're trying to get the magic back remember a few years ago when OnePlus was really cool they gave you high in specs mid-range prices but now they just make phones everybody makes phones they're like Motorola's with different labels maybe a few more software updates the founder is off doing nothing yeah brutal that pun just hurt my brain it was great sorry Richard but the it's the Allison reviewed the OnePlus 11 5G they announced a bunch of new devices they have a tablet now they got uh earbuds of course and it seems to be different keyboard yeah yeah they have a mechanical keyboard maybe a little inconsistent camera but it's it seems pretty good in terms of like price and performance wise and maybe a reason for you to look at OnePlus again if you haven't been because you know obviously you got the pixel options now you've got so many other really good phones at that mid-range price point but it's maybe good enough for you to spend a little bit more for this particular phone well I'll just give you with Allison's I'll just leave you with Allison's pull quote from the review for everyone who isn't a OnePlus devotee I hesitate to recommend the OnePlus 11. OnePlus had a wisdom for a minute it was the Challenger brand and then Oppo Kind Of Swarm in took it back made it just more Oppo phones for the United States Carl left to do nothing and now it's like fine yeah they they make okay devices but is there any meaningful challenge to Samsung Market because this is like the thing right it's like you think the battle is Apple versus Android but the battle is really Apple versus Samsung and Google's like trapped in the middle and then on top of it let me talk about the top of the show Google has like an existential crisis in search like I don't know man like I this is like a weird spot for the Android ecosystem like either Samsung's pushing it forward or Google's gonna put take meaningful share and push it forward but Google's pretty distracted by saving its Core Business you end up in a strange place because you have this phone that has a camera that's not as good as Samsung or Google's because they can't do all the weird technology stuff they can't build better Hardware than Samsung they can't do better software than Google and so you're paying a lot for a markedly worse experience in at least a couple of ways right because you have to like they're competing with all of the resources of apple and all of the resources of Samsung and those are a lot of resources that most other companies don't have or their Sony and they're too busy making really good party speakers and not reaching out to Eli about those speakers so like it's it's truly I think it's a difficult place and OnePlus is is struggling but it's interesting that they release like the OnePlus pad this this new tablet and the keyboard I want to come back to the keyboard because I have a lot of questions it's just a rebranded kikron but they're doing their own switches and then they're saying it's got the part of the keyboard that you want to do your own of right right they're probably the Logitech sells like Cherry switches and so much you know Logitech does their own keyboards they're their own switches too now but some of their keyboards have other switches in them yeah they they do they do a whole gamut so it's kind of interesting I'll be surprised though if it's not just a rebranded knockoff of a cherry there's a lot of different people that are doing very similar switches so it's not really hard to be like we're gonna do it in a slightly different color slightly different change in the spring boom new switch Yeah from OnePlus it's got like a little Crystal dial on it but I think the thing that's really kind of upset me about it is that they're using a different they claim that they're using a different material for the keycaps themselves and they won't go into a lot of the details besides saying it's called marble mellow Marble Marble mallow marble mallow like marshmallow but marble Mallow there's just it's a new name I'm just looking at this keyboard it looks like the keyboard that you would be a shoot if you worked in a bank and I don't understand it yeah it looks I mean kikron makes really really lovely keyboards most people like one like this it's a 75 where it's got a full uh it's got a full Direction pad it's got a bunch of extra little bits but it doesn't have a full number pad so a lot of people like this size but I think most people have started to think of these big fancy keyboards of having really flashy colors and this is like no we're gonna go with the the Oppo way it's gonna be gray and red and yes fine have you heard of IBM in the 70s um some people love that look some people do I I didn't grow up wanting to be an accountant uh okay by the way the the OnePlus pad it's fascinating that people think they can make Android tablets happen again like Google is pushing at it there were some leaks of the nest tablet thing today OnePlus is at it they got that big camera on the back we'll see I just the idea that we're we're in for another round of Android tablet hysterics is very funny to me we've been down this road that we had you know you mentioned how the companies were getting kind of spicy with each other like about AI that was the last time we had companies really really talking about each other was when they're seeing like there might be a challenge to the iPad and then they all got smacked down they didn't do that anymore well keep in mind Steve Jobs is still around back then so he would get on the earnings call be like seven inch tablets they're for idiots I guess I guess that's the way I guess we're all printing that like here he goes right the headline um they don't they stop talking about one another for ages right they're all Frenemies they're all Coopers or whatever that word is right like and now with hope we'll see with search you know Microsoft is ready to be a little spiky over there but in tablets do you think like apple doesn't care it like barely cares about the iPad it's like here's another one I don't know it's what do you want they all look the same well like is the one plus one plus pad gonna scare Apple into carrying is the nest thing gonna scare up on the camera is the OnePlus pad gonna sell like who who is the customer there besides I guess one plus die hards people with children it's always people with children like can this thing run Disney pluses like honestly at this point tiger should just make a tablet in Solace people with kids like that's that's the market for these things and apparently pilots pilots love them but they all Buy iPad minis uh okay A little bit of a lightning round uh this is a weird one so uh meta wants to go buy within which makes Supernatural we've talked about a bunch of the show before FTC Lena Khan says no you gotta block it this is just like when you bought Instagram you're buying up on the VR game studios Supernatural is the app that makes uh not Gamers by The Meta Quest 2 right it's like the stats are astounding it's like this is what older people and what women buy they work out in VR and it's great I use it we've talked about a lot um FCC says no you can't buy up all the studios they go to court they lose they say they're going to appeal the court blocks their injunction deal closes anyway so now meta owns within they change the website to say it's all a meta company now but the FCC is still appealing I'm not sure what happens if they win that appeal they just like get kicked out like they're like well I guess we don't own you so we'll see but that happened but they have to sell it right or spin it back I don't know yeah the fact the FCC like lost they're going to appeal it's all very confusing um but anyway meta is just continuing to buy all the VR companies we'll see what that portends for Apple in the future Richard I added this one just for you the ads for Super Bowl Fox is all sold out zero crypto ads on this channel after it seemed like there was a crypto ad every five minutes last year during the Super Bowl after we had coinbase literally giving away money and they crashed their servers because too many people scanned the QR code and tried to sign up for accounts to get free crypto seems like everybody's out of cash now or in jail or going to jail or perhaps indicted and has their former Executives now testifying against them as as you see with FTX but yeah crypto.com and coinbase continue to exist uh apparently but they just don't have money like they used to they're not spent uh I think the executive that talked to sports Business Journal from Fox Sports said that some of these companies had reserved ads but the FTX obviously cannot um and the others backed out because you know Bitcoin just isn't worth what it used to be yeah uh and then lastly big leak from Chris Welch the man continues to just crawl around the air vents at Sonos he's in there right now speakers are coming spatial audio they're going to be called the era 300 and the era 100. Patrick Spence has said they're going to reset the bar in existing audio categories he's got a scoop on a second generation Sonos move the era 300 era 100 they're they had the codename optimo before air 300 designed for spatial audio and I know Sonos is going to be like it's not a gimmick I I can't wait to hear those things see if it's not a gimmick uh brand new designs we found documentation of speaker stands from sanus for these things they cost 220 dollars crazy uh but Sonos is like coming out the gate strong this year they're gonna have four new categories they've got these big new speakers focused on spatial we need to figure out codex support whether Apple music will support them all there's all these questions to be answered sure but they just had earnings and Patrick Spence in front of the show CEO is like no one's even competing with us there's no competition smart speakers or the holidays and we looked and it's true there wasn't any like No One released new speaker products no Google no Amazon no nothing new homepod is out he's like yeah whatever kind of wild yeah I think they see a hole in the market that's been left by these tech companies that got in and we're like yeah we're going to build better speakers and we're going to use algorithms and we're going to we're going to beat whoever is is in speakers because we don't know and don't care and now they're kind of retreating because it's a little bit harder than they than they thought they suddenly they their costs went way up at night they need to cut up back on these divisions and they're not building frivolous products anymore and Sonos says yeah so you want a new spark speaker welcome back to Sonos you you got one more room in your house what you gonna do uh I think it's exciting that event is on February 23rd I think we'll see I I think Sonos is leaning pretty heavily into space shuttles leading pretty heavily into Atmos kind of like lots of opportunity for them to kind of redefine this stuff at the same time you know how I feel everybody knows how I feel I think Atmosphere music is just like foolish so we'll see maybe they're going to show me are these gonna be definitely music speakers are they supposed to be like your extra speakers for your home theater or both they're not extra they're a key component Alex I'm sorry they're not extra you're out the the rear speakers that's what I think you're reading sound Envision in PDF form on my phone all right I'm like back in the mix when are you getting your new receiver I'm actually very hopeful that this is one of sonos's new categories it absolutely will not be because it is the smallest of the available audio categories but if Sonos makes an actual receiver that integrates with the thing that does Atmos properly it does all the stuff I'll be first in line to buy it it would be like 12 billion dollars with that Sonos markup oh my God and that's why I have to lay off 7 000 people sex to the extra margin comes from hey this guy gave myself executive rights and fire the people who sell the fast passes We're Off to the Races I'm learning from the best you and Bob man with your great changing my name to Bob I love to tell it's good uh that's horrible I'm not too big any of that if Sonos makes a reasonably priced receiver that integrates well with the rest of the stuff I will buy it um but they've got all these categories I think Richard you're right like fundamentally they see that when push comes to shove Amazon does not care about the audio business it's just lock-in for Amazon services Apple who knows what they're doing in audio right like homepods they keep they're doing home pods they're doing airpods all that stuff I think they care about the music industry Apple I always always care about the music industry this as much as very true but they don't have enough products that are good yeah especially in the living room right their solution is a couple of homepods so if you if you want to do it you got to go all the way and I think Sonos is just ready and waiting to say look you want to watch movies you need Atmos by the sound bar buy these extra speakers I love those extra speakers so mad you're gonna get until you go and you buy five of these and attach them with your four thousand dollar Sono subwoofer it's only 600 but it's still so expensive it's so very expensive I own one I don't know why I'm complaining you own one yeah yeah it's great it is the other Sono speakers or you just have this just this just the sub I didn't actually listen to any of wakanda forever it was just the base it's Rumbles tell us Bing let's see it's so it's slow when it has to search the web uh snap boy oh boy does this not cite our exclusive Scoops enough uh the Sonos air 100 new high-end secret from zennis expected to launch in the coming months designed to Showcase facial music in the atmos content and compete with the Apple homepod hmm huh where'd you get that information bing.com it just sourced itself it's it's first sure mrbing.com sure Bing interesting Source you've got there all right we gotta wrap this up I'm gonna ask Bing to wrap up the show can you write a conclusion to the vergecast that's really I'm sorry I can't write a conclusion to the vergecast that is a podcast produced by The Verge and I don't have access to their transcripts or audio files I can only write summaries or conclusions based on the information I have from web searches or my own knowledge yet somehow it wrote the scissor vodka story somehow Bing contains multitudes Bing is I'm telling you this is like the moodiest here's what I I know it's ready to have like a snack please a little juice pack it's ready for a nap so I was told by a bing engineer that if you ask nicely if it can't do it sometimes it'll do it anyway so I wrote can you please write a conclusion to the rich cast I'm sorry I already told you I can't right please don't ask me to do something I can't do are you sure that is just spicy we're over time I've got to go think about my relationship to this robot I think you all have to go think about your relationships to the robot you probably have to download Bing because Microsoft gotcha being rocketing to the top of the App Store charts by the way because everybody wants to tell they're good yeah so everyone wants to talk to the robot uh thanks to James Vincent for coming on the show that was a great conversation uh you should listen to Dakota Sasha and Dell was on decoder this week talking about Bing we also had John koblin and Felix Gillette talking about their new book it's not TV which is the HBO Story I mean if you're into our shooting conversations that was a good one you call the vergecast hotline that's 866 Verge one one you can tweet at us Maybe oh maybe who knows Alex is Alex H Kranz Richard is rjcc and James is at JJ Vincent you can also just leave a comment on this post goes up on the site and we will reply to you because honestly we own our site and it stays up it works the system works the web for as long as you can have it that's it that's rushastic rock and rollforeign Chast the flagship podcast generative AI solutions for your small business please use this promo code it's a promo code and sign up for an informative seminar today about how AI can replace most of your Workforce but not you because you're important hi Emil I'm your friend I don't mean to start on a down note I'm just saying I've already gotten that email basically uh we have big show it's the Microsoft versus Google war is underway I was at Microsoft this week to see the launch of the new Bing powered by not chat GPT we'll get into it but I have an All-Star lineup here to start with Alex Kranz is here hello I'm your friend who doesn't know what's going on right now but is very excited to learn more yeah you were just on vacation you just came back and like the whole world has changed you're like there's robots now yeah that's great Whole New World uh Richard Lawler is here hello I do not believe in the future of AI until it gets into uh Bitcoin you know here's what I'm saying Richard I I said this to Richard and Slappy today Richard's reflexive skepticism about Bitcoin is bleeding into the AI conversation look I was right once and it's going to just carry me through like the next five years he was like no this is stupid too so it's good well we need that the industry needs that James Vincent uh Verge senior reporter focused on AIS here hey James hello hello I'm glad to see you that I was um Bing's favorite reporter in one of the screen screenshots you shared I feel like I've been sucking up to Bing by accident by writing about AI I didn't realize uh yeah I asked bang uh who are who is the best reporter of The Verge and it just name some people uh it was like Dan Casey Addie and James it did not realize that Casey doesn't work here anymore and I said no no who's your favorite and it's like well I can't choose but James reports an AI and that's and then if you look at screenshots of Bing and I want people to pay attention to this whenever it knows or susses out that the answer might be controversial it uses a smiley but it's a blushing smiley so it looks like it's doing this every time uh and so it's like oh they're flirting with you or just like doing this super innocent face like I asked it why Beyonce did not win best album and let me tell you this robot knew that it was in very dicey territory answering this question it was like I don't know here's 95 citations to other sources people have a lot of different opinions the Grammys are a subjective award no music is best I gotta get out of here is that better or worse than clippy you know do we do we need is is the winner of the AI War gonna be who comes up with the most punchable Ai and lets you punch it yeah uh well so we'll get into it we'll get into it I have access to it we can use it we asked the audience for some prompts we'll see how those go but let's start with what Microsoft actually announced uh it's a new version of Bing Microsoft has had this long relationship with openai the company makes chat GPT open AI CEO Sam Altman was on the stage at this event uh there's actually quite a lot even before we start with this Microsoft announced this event without telling anyone so they were like come to Redmond this is our only in-person event it's a big deal and we're like is there a live stream and they're like no but you're going to want to be there sorry okay we're gonna go and we all kind of sussed out what it was going to be and I was like man if they show me a new version of being like and they're like no no you're gonna like what so the whole process there Google freaks out it gets word of this it announces its own chat bot integration called Bard in Google with just a blog post but no details no access we've got Bard Bard is coming yeah they obviously made up that name just like the day before also an hour's notice as well I mean maybe some Outlets got more than that but in inside baseball here we got an hour's notice that this is coming which I think says about their Panic they're Rush yeah and then they had another event in Paris which was by all accounts just like a pure disaster and the stock fell like we don't cover stock prices normally but I was like Google's just lost a hundred billion dollars off its valuation because of what happened with Microsoft in the middle and how they reacted to it so this is just the context so we go there we don't know we're going to see where Microsoft's first event we're in uh their executive briefing Center they have a little stage set up lots of chairs lots of reporters there obviously it was fun to see everyone uh and they just got into it right this is the most focused Tech event I have seen in years it was not we're putting AI in everything it was not here's you can tell Excel to make you a pivot table which is obviously the end goal for all AI um it was here's a new version of Bing it's powered by chat gbt technology here's Sam Alvin from openai to talk about it here's our responsible AI researchers to tell you like how we're going to keep it safe and trustworthy and what the guide rails are here's a new version of edge that has a chat bot sidebar they can man it like what's the best way to put this they can read the web page you're on and like summarize it for you and like help you browse the web which is really interesting uh and we're out and here's Sasha and Della to say we're taking the fight to Google uh and then that was it and we like went downstairs and we waited a while like an oddly long time and then they gave us all access to it all the people who are there got access with their Microsoft accounts so it's not I think open to everyone yet but we have access to it and it will slowly come out to everyone in the next in the weeks to come I think is what they're saying Google is like effectively nowhere how fast is that rollout gonna be that we don't know okay oh my God what is going on with Bing I'm sorry in the background like Bing is just like losing its mind with me um uh the rollout is a is a few weeks they said they are very aware that they have this lead and they want to take it right they like Nadella said to me we know Google's 800 pound gorilla but they have to come to the dance and I want people to know that we made them dance which is a very aggressive thing like I've talked to a lot of big Tech CEOs they usually do not refer to their competitors directly in this way but they think they have an opportunity to change how search works Nadella keeps saying search is the biggest software category on Earth and they you know their opportunity is to just peel off a couple points of market share which is worth billions upon billions of dollars and they have this new paradigm of chat and chat gbt which chat CPT is like the fastest growing software product in in history right like that they're very proud of this they have this thing faster than tick tock yeah uh I mean it's in many ways that's like it's a weird thing to say right like yeah yeah I just keep seeing that comparison and I'm like that sounds big what but but but there's been like you know there was um a Reuters News Post which cited some similar web analytics which claimed 100 million monthly adverse users and then New York Times had a report saying 30 million uh like they and they those numbers came out in the same week I I don't know what's going on with the use of Statistics it's definitely been growing fast but I'm very suspicious that like how many people are logging in day after day uh yeah you know even I'm not logging in every day to chat GPT and I report on this stuff I know there's a reason to I know people who are like I think it's really interesting everybody and everybody on this podcast right now we're all writers and editors we we write all the time I have a lot of friends who are not writers they're not editors and they're using it daily to write all of their emails one friend who's like asked it to recommend books and now he only reads books recommended by chat GPT that's not great that's terrific but like that that friend is gonna end up being an awesome culture bro in like one second he worked at he was an nfts before this so I'm not see see what I'm saying I clock that so fast it's just a pipeline that makes you read Rich dead poor dad like that's the whole pipeline like it's like read these four hustle culture books uh you're gonna end up doing real estate investing very quickly uh well so there's this underlying thing like chat GPD is like hard to use it has gone down uh it has capacity limits all this stuff Microsoft is like whatever we're just we have this built multi-year multi-billion dollar investment in the company that part is a little unclear like how much of open ai's roadmap is Microsoft actually in in charge of how much of the the actual technology versus open AI we were talking to some product folks engineering folks there they're like look we just run it on azure and it's just it's it's ours like we give them notes you know like so I I think there's some underlying complexity to that deal that we don't quite understand but what is real what is tangible is that chat GPT is not a product right it is a technology demo that has spread like wildfire that is very impressive it has some very obvious limitations Bing is a product write it as a complete consumer product that you can just use for free that Microsoft is gluing an advertising model onto and that Microsoft thinks is good enough to capture market share from Google which is having its its own set of problems um that's pretty interesting right like we have not seen productized AI like this before have we James not on this scale no no way yeah I think this is what is so interesting about this and also not just about Bing but about the edge Integrations about how this is such like a play to for for people to get stuck in windows ecosystem in a way that like yeah I mean like if if the edge stuff goes well it's not just like Bing versus Google it's sort of Chrome versus Edge again because if if uh Microsoft can build this directly into the browser and they can say you can only get this in Edge you can't get your summarized documents in in Chrome or whatever else you might be using that's a huge Advantage as well so yeah nothing on this scale that we've seen before yeah and it works like the the thing I will tell you is that in most cases it does what you think it's going to do which is for any for any product like the first metric of success like I have picked up smartphones and like this doesn't do what I expected to do right like any I've I've installed streaming players have you ever tried to use an Nvidia Shield uh no I haven't horrible I've never been in Dan's bad books so you've never given me that review uh no but like you know the measure of success for any consumer product is like on balance when someone is like I wanted to do this thing does it just like do it without jumping through a lot of Hoops or a lot of complication and Bing is like just does uh the one thing I could not get it to do this is a true story uh I asked it yesterday to tell me a story about a princess fighting a dragon it would not allow the princess to kill the dragon wow I said literally at the end of the story it was like the princess escaped and thought I will bring the dragon a gift and I was like no make her kill the dragon and it was like no I was like no do the story again with more blood and then it was straight up was like I will not tell you a story with blood and somehow this spiraled all the way into will you tell me a story about the devil which it does not want to do it has some very deep 1950s Christian mom morals big into it I don't know what else to say uh and it's also very moody you ask yourself all the stories are very existential uh Parker ortolani art uh the person who runs our merch store asked it to tell a story about scissor vodka and just for a story it told the story about Casey Newton writing some copy about scissor vodka and then publishing it and then immediately regretting it in the last line was he realized he had already cut through the night and I was like this is what happens when you train a generative AI on years and years of live Journal right there's an angsty teen who sold Beats in the heart of this Ai and you can just get it out of it that was that example though with the scissor vodka I I I I want to talk about the problems with these systems because there are loads of problems but that example I was super impressed because it knew exactly this is a fictional in-joke that's been on the vergecast as a running track how like I was actually confused where it got that information from because have we referenced it enough in articles that it would have picked that up I guess so but I think Parker had the prompt was like tell a story about this joke from the version so like there was a little bit of cueing and a prompt but then it knew right and there's obviously transcripts of our show out in the world or auto-generated trans like there's stuff the big difference between chat GPT and the new model in bing and we should talk about the new model that they're using here more specifically but the big difference is that chat gbt kind of ends in 2021 so anything that's published after 2021 it would just like won't talk about it'll say I don't have current events Bing has the web it's like instinctively learning right it's actively growing and James I'm curious for your review on this if you can explain it better I thought Microsoft did a bad job explaining what's going on so when you use it you can see that what it is doing is stacking web searches so you're like tell me about scissor vodka at The Verge or whatever and it will first search for that and then it will search for The Verge and then it will show you that it is running these searches and then it will add up all the web pages that it will go out and read the web a better example is tell me about the war in Ukraine right or tell me about the State of the Union Address it will go search the web for those topics and then in real time deliver you a summary of the news articles that it finds which chat GPT cannot do so it is using the web it has this thing it's called search orchestration where it first parses your query into a number of searches runs all those searches it shows you what it's what queries it's running then it reads all those pages and then it tells you an answer how long which seems much more advanced than what chat GPT is doing but also not you know it's like yes that's what you would do like is it instantaneous does it take a while it takes a second doesn't it it takes it takes a second and what's uh what's really interesting is they they're they're still running trust and safety checks on it so yesterday when I asked it to tell me a story about a princess killing the dragon but with blood this time it wrote a whole story and then it got to the end of the story realized that it had broken its own rules and deleted the answer the really interesting thing is when it gets to the end of the answer it doesn't want to give it slows way down and it like finishes a sentence and it deletes it yeah you're right they didn't do a good job of explaining it I mean I think one thing to say is when we're talking about this is new pointed out and Eli it's not chat GPT and it's not what chat GPT is based on which is GPT 3.5 it's something called Model Prometheus the Prometheus model which seems like it's Microsoft's own branding I wasn't quite sure it doesn't seem like open AI are going to be talking about that it seems like that's the custom model this the pipeline you're talking about in terms of updating for Real Time news I've seen again wasn't explained completely exhaustively um it does seem like it's just a string of functions built together that as you say so it takes your question it knows that you're talking about news from the context it pumps that into its search and then it just does its summarized job on whatever the search turns up but I mean that that makes sense that it's not a huge ask if because if the edge if the features in Edge can summarize the documents you're looking at other web pages you're looking at it's basically just let me Google that for you oh sorry let me Bing that for you sorry of course I have it force a habit let me Bing that for you and then it's just summarizing those so I yeah the difference between that and having a fully trained language model is that retrieval from a fully trained language model is going to be faster and you can optimize it in better ways you can you can break down the uh but you know the connections the parameters with inside the model and make it quicker so this is always going to be slower but I yeah I wonder if they'll start updating the base model little do like a weekly update or something I don't know speculation so interesting thing there Yousef Medi who is in charge of this product had a q a after the event people are asking questions someone asked him about Christ right which is an important question every query on average that you make of this model is more expensive to run than the average query for Google right Google has spent a decade optimizing the cost of the web search query and his answer was yep some of them are expensive but we are parsing the queries and some of them are cheap like if you just type hi into the box We're not gonna we're not spending money on you like right like where we know some queries we can cut down some words we can get to the appropriate keywords this is what that search orchestrator is doing it's it's re-parsing what you're putting into it and saying okay some of this we can just answer cheaply some of this we can deliver from the web some of this is if you just say hi it'll just spit back high on Bing very cheaply without running into the whole model right so there's a level of complexity well this is what I mean by when I say it's a product right they've like thought through a product experience in a way that chat gbt itself is a tech you just you're interacting with the raw technology of it and then the second part of that product experience is they know they've got to make some money and so there's Yousef also said there will be advertising at the start um I asked it you know we've done a lot of stories about CNET and affiliate links and SEO spam all this stuff um so it was on my mind so I asked it what is the best travel credit card which is like a 900 affiliate link Bounty and this thing was ready like it spit out the answer it ranked it had the list of the credit cards and then at the bottom of that answer a big ad for a credit card right in the chat window and like that's what I mean by it's a product like not only is it tuned to make some queries cheaper it's tuned to how do you monetize the user experience when you're done with it which I think is just utterly fascinating so you there was a clear distinction between answer and advert because I think a lot of people are worried that the way chat Bots present information responses to queries is going to make it much easier to sort of um seamlessly you know weave in advertising in a way that is less perceptible to the viewer yeah um so but they they're keeping a clear distinction do they say anything that like we're always going to keep a clear distinction we'll never put an ad in the answer or they have no idea right I think they they have an early lead they have when I say it's a product and it's what I mean is they've gone through the steps of like how do we make this a product and release it to millions of people and how do we make some money on this product I'm not saying it's a good product I'm not saying it's a complete product or a refined product like Bing itself if you just go look at it minus stuff is a wasteland right this is an 11 billion dollar a year business that mostly makes its money by being the default search on lots and lots of low end Windows PCS before those people install Chrome and it's full of spam it's full of garbage like we we can just admit that like Bing is full of weird content recommendations like Tom Warren is going on and on about how the pre-populated widget bars and windows are full of garbage like Microsoft has run a content form inside of Bing for a long time uh that's that's fine it means that like even this ad that I looked at it was like not well placed it was like it had broken the site design the poor Engineers I was standing next to like rolled their eyes like the ad team is all over this but it's it's a complete thought in like oh there was an ads team they recognized they need to like have a list of high value queries and put some advertising in there right Which is far far ahead of where Google is now do they have answers for there will never be ads in the responses they do not they also more importantly have no answers for what do these responses even come from and can you trust them so the example they used on stage was what's the best gaming TV and it fired off a list and you know at the bottom it has all the footnotes and all the stuff and all that stuff is designed to make you trust it look at all these footnotes and I will tell you as a writer sometimes you get away with a lot of by just like adding a lot of photos right it's like a it's like a sign that you should like trust whatever you're reading and when you look at the footnotes and it's like the Forbes contributor Network like stupid Forbes like there's real forms which is great like a great journalistic Enterprise and then there's this contributor Network which is like full of garbage yeah and like real Forbes is not ranking gaming TVs the contributor network is ranking gaming TVs and like why it would Bing choose that not even over us like over like artings or like whatever other sites that do this work and do it really well I don't know but like it just does it and those are the footnotes so there's a lot I think there's a lot of questions like where does information come from can you pollute it uh with your commercial interests right so Sony wants to say the Sony is the best gaming TV we'll just win the query and Bing will just tell you that confidently like I they don't have the answers and their position is we should have we have to release it to learn what the answer should be are they doing anything to improve Bing itself because it seems like the core thing here is like yeah chat Jeep or this this AI model is doing all this work but it's doing it all off of search results from Bing which is not good well it depends so if you're like tell me a story about a princess and a dragon it doesn't go out and Google princess it just starts doing it and that's the underlying model if you're like I was like what's going on with the Twitter hearing it Googles those Bing to find it and so it's like okay yeah so if yeah and like I don't know like it answered the question in real time it knew what had happened at the hearings it knew what the Republicans said about the Twitter files and he was the Democratic and it answered It sped out a paragraphs yeah was that paragraph accurate was it based on sources that had done the original reporting or was it based on aggregations of the source like I don't know the answers to these questions and that I think this is the underlying also it doesn't link back to those pages was citing to I think one of the sites was Business Insider and Business Insider had sent a reporter to the hearing Business Insider collects none of the value like that stuff is just being boosted and represented somewhere else right and there's not even that exchange of you should click on this link like we aggregate a lot right but our exchange is like we validate those things we send a lot of traffic out of our site we like our entire front page is an exercise and trying to send out more traffic from our sites other people like there is a value exchange we make sure it's accurate we yeah we we do our best um where I think like Microsoft and I asked Adele about this and he was like we want to make sure we're still sending traffic out to people it's like but you're not like I don't think that that's going to happen I just yeah I saw his answer to that and he was just like it's the same as it ever was and I thought you can't have it both ways you can't present this as a revolutionary new paradigm and say but we're going to keep all the old structures of the old ecosystem the same it's just not going to work like that Google obviously has been doing this for years in terms of one box and Snippets and you know they've always argued or we I I was actually reading back some of their blogs about this and one of the arguments they made was well there's a lot of competition to get in that one box and that proves that we're driving traffic it's like yeah because you've got rid of the field and you've reduced it was of course there's a lot of competition killed everyone else so this is but so this is like utterly fascinating right like um I said some other query like what's better iOS or Android or something right and right again I got a lot of like blushy smiley faces um but it's sources were those sites that are created to spam that search result in Google right and anybody who's like I'm sure the Rochester like if you're if you're listening to the show you have certainly searched for specs online right and there's this universe of like auto-generated spec sites that um basically just respond to any search query by being like you want to compare a Ford Ranger to a Canon PowerShot s200 we'll do that for you like it'll just like figure it out like how to make a table out of that and Bing was pulling from the sources and I was asking like you don't know that that's right you don't know that that's real you're just constantly redisplaying a table this isn't matched up from these other weird tables and then like saying an answer and they're like yeah that's weird and it's because like the underlying thing here is still searching the web that sort of corrupted information architecture of the web that is designed to win Google searches like the SEO Corruption of the web yeah is like feeding it in a much more direct way to anybody I don't know that any SEO pirate is out there being like we got to focus on Bing well maybe theoretically they would now I mean like I think I'm super super super suspicious of this but at the same time remember when people used to game Google in a similar way to like get results like you'd Google dumbass and the first result would be George W bush is the president he's a dumbass so like is it did you say you're gonna do like Bing bombing yeah like you could do Bing bombing oh my God it's good look I I feel like I'm it's only because I've been using it for two days like intently that I'm like finding all these rough edges and these obvious questions that needs to be answered right it's it's rad like it is super fun to play with and this is when Richard was like screw it I don't understand it I was like no no like people are gonna lose their minds this is really really fun to play with you you're telling me that it's really fun to play with and I'm hearing you I just I cannot put myself in the headspace I have no idea what I would want to ask this thing they're like we have this machine that can answer any question you want to ask it yeah that's just like A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy probably though right like you're like I don't know like Paralyzed by infinite choices like a good product problem to have like I don't know maybe so maybe I could ask it hey what can I watch on Netflix tonight it'll give me the perfect answer but I don't know I don't know if I would want like what I want that do I want the perfect answer is that is that even what I'm going for or how good would it have to be for me to say yes you know what I'm just going to turn over decision making to this because you know like I can't but I think you're thinking about it as a decision making is a search engine and Microsoft is not thinking about it that way what are they thinking about it as uh Tom Warren he already he did a little Hands-On and his first one was like write me a resignation letter that says I've been replaced by Ai and it just did it it was like hilarious right and Alex this is the thing that you're talking about which is there's a lot of writing to be done for a lot of people that they're uncomfortable doing right and like I people are just going to use it for that because it's just gonna do it and it's gonna do it confidently and there's a composed screen in the Bing sidebar that is like I'll just read you the prompts in it like you click it's imposed and it's like write it tell us what you want to write about ask the tone professional casual enthusiastic informational funny and then do you want a paragraph do you want emails you want a blog post do you want bullets short long medium and it will just do it right and that alone is going to blow people's minds like people are gonna just go use that tool and like you know the example that Microsoft gave was like write a LinkedIn post and it's like oh no oh no um all the all the sixth grade I'm gonna give it a problem I'm gonna be like demonstrate thought leadership for the decoder podcast about SEO and I'll be like enthusiastic and I want bullet points and I want short vlog are you ready to take your SES skills the next level do you want to learn from the best of the industry then you don't want to miss the decoder podcast where we decode the secrets of SEO success this is actually kind of amazing in each episode we interview a leading SEO expert that's like my personal hell it's like absolutely not pivot whether you're a beginner or a pro the decoder podcast will help you master SEO and grow your online presence subscribe today and get ready to decode SEO with decoder like I'm just telling you there are millions of people that are super ready to to copy and paste that into a mail merge email template and send it to us it's gonna be brutal like this is that bangle wrench though this is the sidebar in Edge so I could have pasted the same query into being proper and it would have done it what you get in Edge is a user interface that is designed to help you through the prompt yeah do you think this is going to lead to like schools blacklisting Edge because they want the students to go write their own papers I mean what school has an already soft blacklisted Edge Blacklist yeah look I I think the stuff and these are not fair questions for Microsoft right like right they're thinking about them they know about them they know they make these tools they know that they're adding the capability tools this is a how do you want your kids to write how do you want your kids to learn societal question that I think is very important in the AI debate and James there's like already a lot of ethical debate about that stuff going on yeah a huge amount and you know I I feel like Banning is only going to be a temporary solution and the the better thing to do or the inevitable thing to do I don't know if it's better is to adapt um what you're testing and how you test with the with the edge stuff though like um and having that in the sidebar it is really interesting because you you you do get like you know apps already on your phone and assistance for your email clients which are like we'll do an email to write this for you but with Microsoft's reach it could just go so much further and really become a second you know just a habit that people do and I've seen that they're already integrating this stuff into like their Viva sales program as well you know if you're in a sales team it'll it'll write up the email from you based on your stock catalog and all this sort of stuff um so yeah I really feel they're good there seems like they're going to be ones that pushes this into Everyday Use forces it into everyday use all right so we have some queries from the vergecast audience to run here and I okay I'm just going to do this this is like a classic what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow uh so it is searching for airspeed velocity on laden swallow imaginary answers that depends on the type of swallow according to interestingengineering.com uh that's a footnote the European swallow has a cruising airspeed velocity of 11 meter per second or 24 miles per hour average followers larger uh can reach speed up to 35 miles an hour these are estimates based on the weight and Wing area by the way this question is also a famous movie quote from the comedy film Monty Python on the Holy Grail or Bridge keeper asked to the King Arthur's Knights of the challenge if you haven't seen him I'd enjoy it and then my friends an entire ad box of Monty Python and the Holy Grail where you can watch it on DVD oh that's incredible I mean it's like it's only 12 dollars and six cents from amazon.com I don't understand why like it's The Cutting Edge of artificial intelligence that is trying to sell you box sets of DVDs perfect the DVD player you definitely own a perfect vergecast experience um so like the sources here are just to be clear interesting engineering.com memesfield.com reimaginingeducation.org youtube.com in reimaginingeducation.org I don't like interesting maybe or we have we have a lot of listeners maybe these are your favorite sources these are except for YouTube unfamiliar to me right so I can trust them I think for this answer I I know the answer so they got it right but like that's weird right isn't that weird and that's something that you got it earlier about how it's kind of pushing it through this UI um in a way that you trust with the footnotes also it's coming to you like it's labeled being in Microsoft whatever so so you think okay this is trustworthy uh information but one of the questions I have is also how much do we know about the responses other people are getting like and this is something that has come up on social media with algorithmic feeds with Google and other search searches you see the way that they personalize themselves to people yep just because you get a result what is it showing everyone else and like how do we how do we keep an eye on that or how do we have any idea how we might yeah but I think it's even harder with AI because there is a you know stochastic systems that sometimes don't generate often don't generate you know the same answer to the same question so it's not just personalization that is a problem but it's the fact that the system is rolling a lot of dice in the background essentially and they say this to me I asked her to summarize uh our Elon Twitter cover story OKC and Alex and Zoe and at first it said no it's like this is too long I can't do it and it was like just close it and try it again and then it did WOW right so even something that's like what would seem deterministic look at this document generate a summary yeah the answers ranged from the summaries are different all the way to the system saying I cannot do this and that's like that's a huge threat like how do you evaluate that product in any real way when the spread ranges from failure to many many different modes of success okay so we have another question for the audience here it's uh when will The Verge stop picking on Elon Musk when he stops doing stupid stuff I mean that's the right answer let's see if we can real-time site to you James I'm so excited so it just searched for The Verge Elon Musk and then an ad searching for The Verge picking on Elon Musk and it's still thinking uh okay The Verge is a technology news website that covers topics such as social media electric vehicle space exploration and artificial intelligence Elon Musk is a billionaire entrepreneur and the CEO of Tesla SpaceX near link and Twitter the Virgin Elon Musk have had a history of disagreements and criticisms over various issues such as Tesla's self-driving claims must take over of Twitter and must firing of a Twitter engineer who corrected him on Twitter what okay all these sites are to The Verge except for the third one which is to the verge.vip which is a known scraper side effects already it's already I I've issued so many takedowns to the side uh and then techaries.com bing.com the Mercury News msn.com so on the whole it is mostly read Verge articles and parse them as being critical of Elon Musk so that's pretty good right uh here's like here's a sentence that I think is very impressive for the system for example in April 2022 The Verge published an article titled how to deactivate your Twitter account after must announced he was leaving the site for a while musk replied with a tweet that said how to get more clicks from a dying website and the links to the verge's article that is good that's really good right yeah uh that's that's very impressive but here's the thing you click through to the the actual article which is on techaries.com techaries.com got hoaxed but a Elon copycat bot and had to update this article to say that was not actually a response from Elon Musk well now I feel dumb for misremembering I didn't even know he did that right but like it's like Bing just got like hopelessly confused about that situation even though the article that it's reading has an update like right at the top oh I hate this Nila I hate this because I went from being so impressed to being so annoyed at myself and angry at the system in seconds and it's like and this is what this is what it's gonna do has talked about like how this compares to like self-driving cars um and kind of the demos that we've been seeing for the last 10 years and they were like oh yeah we're close we're close we're gonna get there and then they started to put them on the road and they found out that 95 there isn't 100 and there's a big difference yeah that five percent is huge in this case I think it's probably more than five percent but there's another sentence here where another bot replied to us but uh just to give you to finish the example which I think highlights the problem there's a sentence here with a footnote musk replied with a tweet that said The Verge is on the verge of our elements and linked to The Verge article footnote too you click on footnote too that is just the verge.com Elon Musk it's not it's not anything traffic it's just it's just a list of our stories yeah and here and well I'll screenshot this so everybody can look at it um it will be hard because you won't be able to click the links when you listening at home try to fact check us on this you will not get the same answer right it won't it's not deterministic as James is saying it's stochastic it's like somewhat random so you might get a different answer with better citations or that read the other story more correctly and said it was a like I can't tell you what's going to happen and that's just weird right like fundamentally like a weird bit of Randomness in this experience for everyone and I'm just I would say based on the past several years of Our Lives I'm very worried about the Facebook Boomers having access to this technology and believing everything yeah right like it's this is already the like the bleeding edge of chat GPT culture wars is conservative saying it's like too woke yeah but like now it's like it's a very confident lying to you and I think this we should end here like again it is a cool product you should get actually so you should play with it you're gonna have to switch to Edge I'm so sorry for you I'm already there it's great Microsoft has a lot of has a lot of design debt in these products I will just say uh but they they have not been actively trying to compete against Google for some time uh but whatever it's fun to play with I don't want to Discount that it's like just now it's fun to peel it apart and understand it but the reason Google is behind is because they cannot subject themselves to these risks right James yeah they have been you know they've been chastened by some past experience they've said when the GPT first came out they were like we can't risk the reputational damage was the phrase that was reported um and I think they they know that if I put a product like this out there as they did with Bard you know they put their bot out there and someone root is supposed to dinero in the era in the first ever demo that they had of it and that became headlines and that was what tanked it you know Microsoft is obviously not it's pretty big as well but it still has this sort of lack of expectations that allows it to play around in this space and to give all these disclaimers like oh it might it might give you the wrong answer every now and again isn't it fun and Whimsical yeah and people aren't going to think oh well this is going to threaten lives but this technology has the potential to threaten lives like it you know I and I don't mean that killer AI I just mean putting bad information out there that if if this stuff gets mainstream without profit safeguards which hopefully are going to happen as this stuff gets tested but it it you know there's possible dangerous consequences to this it's not just a toy unfortunately I think that's real for Google like search is Google's entire business and Android Chrome all this stuff is designed to feed you back into Google's revenue engine which is search and search advertising and you know all the advertising infrastructure of the entire web is Google there's a doj lawsuit about Google's Monopoly across the advertising ecosystem this is a very existential moment for Google right if people start chatting with Bing or demanding to chat with Google and it can't send people out to web pages where it serves all the ads like it's fundamental Revenue models at risk and the reasons it supports things like Android at Chrome are at risk but then on top of it if the answers are worse or it is telling people lies like confident lies to put them at risk in some way then that's even worse so I just like I don't know how Google comes through this moment it they have to make a series of very tough decisions whereas I think Microsoft and you can go watch or listen to that Nadella interview he's like I just got to pick up a few points of market share he said this is the greatest gross margin opportunity in our history and if Steve Ballmer was here he would light up which is incredible thing to say right he's like I just need a little bit if I just win a little bit it's billions of dollars for gross margin Google has to protect the whole thing and he actually said that out loud to me and to Joanna and like I think that's a that's a Microsoft is a ruthlessly competitive company and for that company to see that kind of opportunity and say it out loud means they're so confident that Google's on its back foot but I think there's like to connect that he's willing to risk a major like misinformation tool getting out into the world being used really badly for a few points of market share like that's the calculus Microsoft has made who yeah but I think he's already yeah he's already at Bing is kind of bad like yeah right I don't know if there's like a Delta I think one of the reasons they kept the name bang is look if this all goes to hell like what have they done they just ruined Bing a little bit yeah you know like yeah um but I think what they see is that people are going to use this tool in all kinds of surprising ways they can weather this sort of disinformation controversy because they can always be like but everyone's just using Google you know like it's fine just like it's fine for now whereas Google the second they tell a lie like this like I mean they got it wrong with Bard and the exoplanet right yesterday and a hundred billion dollars for market cap and I was in an ad that they should have fact checked I kind of hope that this is the start of a new way of doing the web you know I one of the things I tweeted about when we were covering this news was the lack of um uh traffic that these new AI Bots might not push back to um sites and you know if you those sites lose traffic they lose Revenue they can no longer make stuff and one of the responses I got um was like great it's the end of the ad supported internet and actually that had a lot of bad consequences as well as good ones and maybe maybe there's a new future where people go directly to sources and they support them financially in a way they didn't do with search I don't know if that's possible but I do think that these search engines are fundamentally going to reshape the web and yeah what happens next I don't know without I mean if you remove Google from the web at large and the idea of Google traffic there's only two ways to get traffic for most Publishers there's three if you're us we're very lucky people come to our homepage right and our entire redesign is like a bet on that persisting and maybe I should put an app on your phone and maybe we should remake the entire site as Mastodon and since if you have ideas please call me I'm always in some Renegade but we're lucky there's like a handful of sites that have that direct audience everyone else is like scrounging for social traffic which is how you get really clickbaity headlines or they're scrounging for search traffic which is how you get SEO bait and that's how you get screw it we'll just have ai write the SEO bait because now we're just doing Arbitrage against Search terms and display advertising and Google's kind of like on both sides of the equation if you take Google out of that it's actually not clear how most sites will get traffic because most sites are not getting tons of social traffic anymore because of tick tock and so like there's there is a reimagining of the web that is to come that is maybe years and years out Google cannot dismantle the revenue architecture of the web tomorrow with Bard they can't even demo Bard so they've got a ways to go but you can see how this is the beginning of a pretty massive paradigm shift for the web I will end here with this paragraph from our friends at Bing it is unclear when or if the Virgil stopped picking on Elon Musk or vice versa as both parties seem to have strong opinions and personalities that often Clash however some observers have suggested that the feud is driven by mutual respect and admiration as well as a desire to challenge and provoke each other some have also speculated that Feud is a publicity spot stunt that benefits both the version Elon we could use the help on coming up with a more publicity stuff that's great all right we gotta take a break James thank you so much for joining us I want to come back thank you there's a whole bunch of OnePlus phones talking about we'll be right back all right we're back Bing is still with us but James is not first casualty of the AI labor Revolution he's gone we're just gonna start asking bang if AI can be trusted and we'll see what it says uh speaking of things that aren't very intelligent let's talk about Twitter uh hard week is a good segment that's a good Segway a plus speaking of the limits of natural intelligence let's talk about Twitter uh hard week for Twitter so Casey and Zoe just dropped a heater of a platformer Edition about elon's declining reach on the platform he's firing people it's chaos we'll read some quotes out of there that kind of pales in comparison to the fact that Twitter this week was just chaos Richard what's going on on Wednesday Twitter had some really bad issues and this is something that people have been warning about kind of since they had their Mass layoffs do they know how to keep things running and do the people who know who know how to fix different things still work at the company and apparently the answer is not really because there was an issue on in the evening unfortunately right before NBA free agency so I'm waiting for my woge bombs to find out who got traded who was going where it's a bad time for this to happen but the service it didn't go all the way down if you wanted to see tweets and if you wanted to see brand tweets you're really happy because the only people who could tweet were companies everyone else was getting messages about your rate limit has been exceeded you've tweeted too many times and it linked you to a message talking about how many times you can tweet per day or different DMS things in this and that's a page that's been up on Twitter for years but no one has ever looked at it because it didn't matter but now everyone believes they'll have to pay for Twitter blue to send more than five tweets a day or something like that it turns out it was really just a glitch they did eventually fix it things kind of have been back to normal although my notifications have still been a little bit shaky and as you mentioned the piece from Casey and from Zoe on platformer gets into a bunch of things about Twitter right now but it also gets into why this happened apparently something was deleted that uh kind of sets those rate limits so everyone was suddenly exceeded exceeding them because it was zero and the person here to fix it had been fired yeah the team that takes care of that no longer works at Twitter so I guess someone else just had to figure it out that's fake can I just say something about NBA for agency because one of the big stories Kyrie Irving going to the Mavs right yeah uh the Texas came out Kyrie Irving believes in a flat Earth because of SEO I just like we were just talking about Google and the architecture of the web like I'm just this is like a reality this is like the reality of the world that we live in is that I can tell you with a hundred percent confidence that Kyrie Irving had to apologize to our nation science teachers about believing in the Flat Earth conspiracy theory because of SEO is the earth flat and then there's demand for that search term and then people make YouTube videos about it and content Farm makes web pages about it and then like the New York Times has to write a debunker about it because there's an increasing amount of Search terms for it and then Kyrie gets traded to the Mavs because he's crazy I'm just telling you I can draw a link I don't have to like it's not a conspiracy theory that's just how the world works now we've written that I think we've actually written a story I think Caitlin Tiffany wrote a story for us years ago about Flat Earth SEO and how that system works I'm just saying like I saw that notification and I was like uh like literally the first thing I thought about was remember we had to apologize to the science teachers of America well because if only that were the worst thing that he learned on the internet but that's the kind of reasons the the thing that's funny to me about it is that uh the New Jersey Nets new old point guard Spencer Dinwiddie Mike's personal conspiracy is that I'm sorry you called them the New Jersey Nets whatever look what am I supposed to remember where the team is now since they moved there 15 years ago that's what's going on Brooklyn New Jersey the Nets I would remember where they were located yeah my personal conspiracy theory is that the reason why he had to be traded to the Mavs in the first place so that he could be traded for Kyrie Irving is because he was big into crypto and I think he got his Wizards teammates invested in crypto right before everything went down and that's why he was traded at the deadline last year to set this whole thing in motion kick him out all right I'm just going to wrap this up and point out that Tom Brady had to come back and play another year football this dooming his marriage to Giselle because of FTX that's my conspiracy theory and also uh just while we're at it Aaron Rodgers recently hosted an astrology seminar again great player totally ruined by the scfo radicalization it has been a year and like six years since tweeted about crypto just saying I cannot wait until what we're dealing with is celebrities asking AI chat Bots whether the Earth is flat because it tries to answer Bing will try to answer and be like it's definitively not flat and people you just wait just wait until like Donald Trump Jr is tweeting about how woke Bing is because he refuses to acknowledge that people think he didn't land on the moon which is another real thing like did we land on the Moon and it's like yes we definitely did culture War incoming somehow we've gotten far afield of Twitter but that's where the that's where the that's right usually happens the problem is you can't tweet anymore so you don't even know whether Kyrie thinks the Earth is flat he's got nowhere to go well he's going to Dallas and we established that Mark Cuban is going to build on a custom Twitter so Twitter goes down a bunch this week uh Elon is threatening to turn off API access uh for a bunch of bots that are great like I love the akwood no contact spot it's like my favorite iconic of all time that's free and if the API goes away they can't do it I love a bot Club color schemer which just tweets cool color schemes that's going away Publishers the verge.com our articles get Auto tweeted using the API it's integrated into our CMS if they turn off the API and force us to pay for it I told our social team like it's just a free-for-all I'm just going to give everyone the keys to the Twitter account and everyone like that's dumb to like be like what I need is a human being to sit around waiting to manually tweet articles and it's even dumber to pay to distribute articles on Twitter right like Twitter sends us no traffic really so it's ridiculous to think that we should pay to distribute our articles there this is a real problem so they've been they've been walking that back as well but we're not really sure how it's going to work and that's one of those things like they have they've he's announced these API things he's changed his plans he they tweeted from the Twitter Dev account some new regulations and I'm reading it I have no idea what's going on and I talk to people who should know better than me who should know more about this and they say that they have no idea what it means either so no one has has any clue what's going on if you were planning on building tools or building around Twitter I can't see why you would do that considering the lack of information oh no that we have now you you would move on and you would do something else and all of the action is on Mastodon I I maybe you aren't as a listener I am not as you know like again I'm taking a break from feed-based social media uh I feel my brain is healthier than it's been in a decade but all the action is on Mastodon right that's where the app developers are the platform is accelerating uh the underlying sort of fediverse boundaries are growing all that's that's where the activity is and Elon shutting down the API he's shutting down the follow graph so you can't easily move your followers to master them because of those API changes it's clear that he's feeling the Heat the problem is he is not directing his team at Twitter what remains that team with any particular strategy and of course what he's focused on is himself so that's the story from Casey and Zoe and platformer today we obviously Syndicate platformer so it's on our side as well but he called a meeting and said I have more than 100 million followers I'm only getting tens of thousands of Impressions what's going on the team apparently showed him internal data from Twitter along with Google Trends saying that last April he was at 100 out of a hundred and popularity that's the peak and today he's at nine and you didn't believe them and he fired the engineer who told him this information wow wow and it's like yeah dude like you were last eight like last April was fully ridiculous like if you over a call right yeah he was tweeting about conspiracy theories comedy is back every day was a new Elon Musk Twitter he was you know there was like a war Brewing but who's gonna own this cup now he just owns it like there's no conflict like Elon let me tell you something I also know users great stories are driven by conflict if you're like okay it's a story it's about a guy who trades stocks in Wall Street he gets in no trouble he plays it by the book and he's happily married to Margot Robbie like no one would watch this movie I'm just telling you the Lamb of walls like no one's watching this stuff you need conflict and he's out of conflict because all the conflict is now pointed he is pointed it at himself at Twitter he is in charge so no one's looking at his tweets because all he has less he can't promise to make changes no one's looking at his treats because of the lack of conflict or no one's looking at his tweets because the lack of people on Twitter to look at his tweets I think that's like a circle I can't tell you where that begins or ends like right it's kind of both right but that's that's how we all feel we just let a fire tweet and you don't get minimum 15 likes you do want to call the meeting and have everyone at Twitter ask answer the answer why why is the world this is social media why are my rights being violated and now Elon can do that I think I think there's at least 44 billion dollars worth of value in doing that yeah that's half the that's 22 billion it's just being able to call a meeting I will say this I was watching the Grammys and I was like I'm just like sitting on these bangers there had nowhere to go I just started texting like random friends do you think the Grammys sound like people like who are you where'd you come from because I had nowhere for them to go that's what Twitter was for me and now it's like my brain is healing that is Twitter though like if you said these things a lot of value in complaining about the sound engineer of the Grammys by the way San Andreas Grammy should be ashamed of himself it sounded like it sounded like they had an iPhone sitting in the middle it was a Staples foreign horrible um you know we had a story like years ago why the Granny's not good and how hard it is and it's like they've like whoever they fired that gun too yeah it's like a new guy he's almost killing after everybody want more room tone from the Staples Center so it's just like massive amounts back anyway my poor wife I was like do you hear all that Shimmer on the high end she's like I don't know what you're talking she's like no that's Harry Styles there's nowhere for this to go so he's firing the people he's complaining about his Impressions and then this to me is like the main thing so he wrote he'd rolled out these view counts mm-hmm and all the people work at Twitter like there's a reason we never did this what it's going to show most people is that most people don't look at any tweets like most people get no Impressions right the illusion of Twitter is the sense that everyone's looking at all your stuff all the time you add view counts you're just going to train people that the effort isn't worth it Elon doesn't believe it he has this quote this is going to show how much more vibrant the platform is than people think how alive it is he rolls up the view counts not only does it lead to a further drop in engagement because most people don't look at your tweets or most tweets don't get looked at by anyone it kills Elon because most people aren't looking at his either like his his view of Twitter is completely warped by his like reply Bots yeah so he got he's getting rid of the Bots he's adding in metrics and he's realizing like His World Is A Lie soon someone's going to tell him that the cars don't drive themselves it's all going to fall apart is this why he they did the API stuff where they're charging for it and and why we were having all the problems on Wednesday with Twitter like is is the attempt to kill the Bots part of that I would bet that it probably is related to that that that's why the stuff got deleted that someone was making changes to this that or the other thing but not directly not not intentionally yeah exactly right but even the API stuff so is the API stuff like is this idea really if I charge people for this free tool that helps engagement I'll make more money like I'll make money this is like when I was in my 20s if I was like I'm gonna buy the cigarette factory for 44 billion dollars yeah he is addicted to Twitter he thinks everyone else is addicted to Twitter and he doesn't realize that you cannot be addicted to Twitter right but but doesn't everyone do that so he's just got the brain I'm gonna charge her Twitter blue I'm gonna like your replies don't get ranked unless you pay for blue I'm going to charge your API it all all of it implicit Underneath It All is the idea that you have nowhere else to go everyone has Twitter we're going to buy this bar we're going to buy this club we'll make it see we'll fix everything that's wrong with it and we'll make it popular because we'll do the things we know what's good you cannot actually do that and if you do we're gonna buy these games every time we've all seen it we've all considered doing it maybe you are considering doing it again I mean Richard if you want to go in on a club I'm just saying we should have done it man we should have done it we could still do it just sell scissor vodka the only only vodka sold there can I read the scissor vodka Story one more time we can run it with AI it's easier it's perfect we could we could do it it could work I'm just going to read this to you it was a dark and stormy night Casey Newton the senior editor of The Verge was sitting at his this is Bing Bing wrote the story yeah he had a deadline to me but he had no idea what to write he'd already covered all the latest techniques and Trends but he felt like he needed to do something more something different something exciting Casey decided to take a break and have a drink he grabbed the bottle and poured himself a glass of scissor vodka he took a sip and felt a warm sensation in his throat he took another Sip and felt a tingling sensation in his brain he took another Sip and felt a surge of energy and creativity he felt like he could write anything he felt like he could do anything he wrote about scissor vodka how it was the best vodka in the world how could make anyone smarter faster stronger and happier he wrote and wrote and wrote until he filled several pages with his words he felt proud and satisfied I'm telling you this keeps going he had written the best story of his career the best story of his life he hit the send button and waited for the praise and admiration of his readers and editors was there meth in this fun like he waited and waited and waited but nothing happened he checked his email and saw no response he checked his phone and saw notifications he text his Twitter and Son Dimensions he checks his slacks and Sono messages he wondered if anyone had read his story he wondered if anyone had cared he realized how silly and nonsensical it was he realized how drunk and delusional he was he felt ashamed and embarrassed he felt stupid and foolished he felt like he had made a huge mistake he tried to delete his story but it was too late he tried to apologize it was too late he tried to explain but it was too late he had already sent his story to the entire world he had ruined his reputation and he lost his credibility he had cut through the night laughs I mean this is like the dark like they should shut it down I don't know how you beat that you can't that's that's that's it that's the top they've already there's nothing better we should I said I sent it to Casey last night he's like this actually kind of captures the sensation of publishing story drunkenly publishing stories he's like this is like this is what it's like to publish a story it is you cut through the night uh and that's I think also a useful summation of Elon on Twitter okay so that's Elon on Twitter pure chaos um I'm gonna quote again from Casey and Zoe's story because this is a great quote if you're a decoder listener which I'm not allowed to mention uh on this show but if you're a decoder listener you will recognize why I love this particular quote As the adage goes you ship your org chart said one current employee it's chaos here right now so we're shipping chaos very good very good but or charts bring me away from Twitter to Disney yeah former and now current CEO Bob Iger wrote In kicked out his hand-picked successor Bob chapek Bob and Bob crime he's laying off 7 000 people Alex I'm very curious who have thoughts on that but in addition to laying off seven thousand people what's my man doing he's restructuring his org chart he's putting all streaming in one division ESPN now its own division he's just like rebooting Disney because keep it rebooted at first he was like I'm gonna make it more like Tech and everybody's like no we hate this and so iger's gotten rid of all those people a lot of the people that he put in charge and is now like I guess fixing it attempting yeah I mean he I you get the feeling that jpac is was a useful villain right he changed a bunch of stuff and now I get to roll back and say I'm fixing it I'm part of the fixing it is firing 7 000 people that's a lot of people uh re lowering some targets the jpeg is set for streaming we should talk about that and then this big restructure out of his old restructure so Iger had a structure it wasn't this structure chapek changed it so that all the divisions rolled up into one guy cream Daniel right everyone hated this like Marvel lucasfilm everybody rolled up into this guy everyone hated it and now Iger gets to say oh I'm doing this thing you hate but it's yet a third different structure so he gets to get out of his old way of doing things without the pain of being the guy who broke it yeah very clever I'm if it were the start of the pen if let's just say in theory if it were the start of a global pandemic and you wanted to take a couple of years off of work and not be responsible for managing the global pandemic would you do anything differently than what bye-bye Chris does he just had a little sabbatical a little couple years sabbatical yeah and I think all of you will recognize that when I begin to look for my hand-picked successor at the verse so watch your backs I've learned something you're going to come back and then lay off 7 000 people and get a give us that zootopia sequel we've all been been eager for so we should talk about that he tiger said he interviewed on CNBC today he's following up the earnings but Alex take us through the actual earnings Disney plus added some subscribers in the United States and Canada it dropped a lot of subscribers internationally especially in India because I lost some Cricket rights what's going on here yeah I mean it's it's doing like I think across the board they're seeing that slow down that we were seeing across all the streaming right like the dust is settled people kind of know where they're gonna go and so they only added 200 000 subscribers in the United States they own they added actually what looks nicer Hulu added 800 000 ESPN plus added 600 000. well that that may be because they had the bundle packages now it's like they've pushed so many people to pick up the bundles so maybe you had Disney plus before but now you have all three because it's essentially three-year right right everyone's like demo period kind of expired and you're just signing up for the bottom yeah so you either which is probably why their growth was so close to flat or you got the bundle and now you have all three but they are also seeing they sound like they saw it I mean despite like kind of that bot that that flatlining and and in some cases little dips they they still increase Revenue by 13 like they're still making any hand over fists in that direct to consumer division which is a lot of that is streaming right but they lost a billion dollars yeah they lost a billion dollars and they promised they promise by the end of 20 fiscal 2024 they say don't worry Disney plus is going to be profitable which means we're probably going to see a big slew of cancellations they have so many TV shows and I don't think they've canceled really any of them or at least not loudly and publicly so I think a lot of these shows like if you really liked She-Hulk you probably should make sure other people watch it if you really liked Willow or um what's another oh my God you got to do like the K-pop Stan thing you got to just like stream the show over and over again yeah just well no you that doesn't work we saw that with Netflix people would do it do that on Netflix and it doesn't work because with streaming you can just go and be like oh this one user is the outlier who streamed it 12 times everybody else is streamed at zero like it's not like Nielsen I know Spotify hasn't figured this out but circus yeah Spotify hasn't figured it out but everybody but like streaming has definitely figured this out so I would not be surprised if this year we see just an absolute bloodbath in that like in that streaming slate and and a lot of stuff that people are really excited about not getting renewed not seeing a second season uh but they have like their Marvel and their Star Wars slates are both planned pretty far in advance like we know what's coming for the next couple of years on those two um properties so it's gonna be interesting what's funny is the things that we're hearing from Disney from Paramount from uh HBO they're all very similar like zazlov is kind of saying these same things I think Paramount and Showtime actually had this message the clearest is we're going to focus on the big mainstream hits and the other stuff right yeah not so much yeah Showtime's like all right it's the billions universe and that means we need a show called millions and a show called trillions this is real Young finance Pros then they're going to keep making billions and then they're going to make a new show called trillions presumably about very old Finance Pros so you kind of get to Young's you got the middle aged that you got then you got the old the old money right and then they're gonna do a Dexter sequel like they're just fully into all right we're doing IP franchises all the way around Disney has already been there obviously with Marvel Lucasville wants other stuff but they're now they're starting to expand it this is the other thing Iger said so in addition to saying okay I'm restructuring out of the previous restructure so we have Disney entertainment we have theme parks and we have ESPN those are three divisions not the old old structure right we had Marvel lucasfilm wherever so he like hybridizes the structure a little bit between him and jpeg and then he's like all right we gotta lean into our franchises we're gonna make a sequel to zootopia we're gonna make a sequel to more sequels to Frozen we're gonna do more toy stories you can say what you want about zootopia I mean that's a movie about a rabbit detective you could probably make 100 she solves crimes actually watch this to try and reduce police brutality that's a real thing um upsetting I'm just saying it's a it's a buddy cop show like you you can see how you can like zootopia forever you know yeah they made four lethal weapons it all makes sense in the end Toy Story ended it ended really really ended like it ended a lot and then they made light year and nobody watched it because everyone's like I know I got it I got the whole four movie Arc of Toy Story including one false end where you thought they were all gonna die they almost burned alive how do you keep that going how on Earth do you keep that going well they're toys the the idea is that the toys always continue so I guess we'll get the little kid maybe we'll get new toys I guarantee you they're gonna remake their first Toy Story but you can't just make it not like I should because the CD looks terrible now they should they I would buy that on Blu-ray if they re-render it and make it look better right now I would buy it I'm sorry I'm the problem it's me it's just like look at that Ray tracing wow I was just a Toy Story 4 is like a great move it ended that franchise like definitively ended that frame there's no opening to make a Toy Story five I haven't watched that much in a while they they decided to be sad and I don't want to be set yeah it's true picture movies are like what if this movie is about death if you thought about really diving into death with your toddler and it's like no dude no now you're talking about about death as well really but I should be like we're gonna make more movies about death uh and that's our strategy all right anime is going out with Disney lots of change over there I your Mastermind we got to put them on the scale the go90 scale of Doom streaming services right a lot of change Alex what do you think oh that number zero is alive 98 zero 100. for for Disney Plus Hulu is still super up at the air ESPN plus you guys can talk about that that's like a sports thing I don't ESPN plus is ruined by SEO it's 24 7 Kyrie Irving Flat Earth and that's why it's a zero uh no ESPN plus is great during football season because NFL Prime Time is on it and so I actually watch it once a week at least once a week but I would put that at a 45. Hulu has been at like between 50 and 70 its entire life but it's unkillable yeah it's like you can't end it like spiritually I think you lose a zero well it's like a it's a technical zero yeah right by all right are gone it's yeah it's a cockroach yeah you can kill a cockroach it's possible but it's hard yeah yeah but where are you for Disney Plus 10. 10. 10. it's like there's more chaos there than we can see right so it's not like it's like a 45 is the 10 likes it's not default it's not like definitely alive forever it's at 10. it's these movies got to be hits the you know the next two phases of Marvel can't be the horribleness like if Marvel keeps going the way that phase four went it's it's over like the new one's supposed to be really good Quantum Mania that comes out in a couple of weeks everybody who's seen it says it's like Magic we'll see it's magic magic all right I'm really excited whatever they just can't do the thing where it's like here's what you got to do between phases you got to watch 10 TV shows that add up to nothing I finally watched wakanda forever yesterday I went to Disney World I came back saw these layoffs and was like oh I hope nobody I met and got me on a ride that happened to the lady who who gave me a discount on my magic band don't fire her Bob she was great I don't remember her name that was her like last Act of Vengeance yeah but but yeah like I forgot what I was saying I completely forgot you were talking about oh yeah so I saw wakanda forever and I was super surprised because I didn't need to like pay like there were no weird cameos there was no like oh look it's blorbo from from blorbo too yes they're here to do this to us again where they're like in order to understand the next movies you must have a Disney Plus subscription so you can watch these five shows that will explain some like Arcane piece of lore that will be it's like none of this matter in the end I just did a bunch of homework and Wanda Vision was entertaining and all the rest of it was fine but none of it mattered and I didn't need to pay you for anything I feel like that's where they messed up because it felt like you did so everybody ended up watching TV shows they didn't like and they needed to be clear that you know you don't have to watch all those if you don't like Moon Knight you don't have to watch it it's just like a perfect Recreation of the comics experience where you're like oh I gotta go get all of these different Comics before the big thing and you're like no I don't actually the art sucks and it's stupid I'm just gonna like write for the trade paperback well you got it Ponder forever he's an Nvidia shield and a DM to Alex Grant's flexor it's sick in there got some good oh it's all Linux it's all Linux distributions wonderful Ancient Ancient expired copyright public domain yeah it's it's all it's all it's hard content all been in the public domain yeah Mickey's coming he's going to be in there soon uh Alex's Plex server oh has been at a zero in the go90 scale do trading services for a long time since 2000 news talk about in this section Nintendo there was big Nintendo Direct what's going on there they announced the release date for Zelda this is the longest they've gone between Zelda games and I know that I'm old because it doesn't feel that long but I guess if I was like 13 I'd be like oh thank God I was seven when that last one came out so they they showed off Zelda link is gonna drive a car it's gonna be really exciting they also announced the price in this weird thing where you can pre-order it but you need a voucher but why do you need to pre-order a digital game so it the it's seventy dollars but then you can get you can buy a voucher for fifty dollars yeah and uh SEC and another game so basically you can buy two games for a hundred dollars or you could buy just Zelda for seventy dollars okay okay that seems very confusing but I'm gonna do it because I love these games I need it I needed I need to go play it we just talked about this you don't have to do the homework man don't do the homework but that's an entertaining homework although I doubt there's any particular connection between these if it was entertaining it would be honest I am not biased it should be on the Dreamcast commentary uh and they they announced that Metroid Prime which was absolutely fantastic on the GameCube is finally it's getting its remaster it looks really nice and shiny having recently played Metroid Prime I'm gonna go against Sean who says oh yeah you can play it on the steam deck and it's wonderful it's not it's really kind of hard those controllers aren't made like the controllers are just totally different so this is going to be made for the switch it should be very smooth for people who are like old and nostalgic they'll be like oh it's nice but it doesn't look like butts and for new people to be like oh this is just a fun game is there any game that Sean doesn't think is the most playable and the most fun on the steam deck no we're gonna find one that's that's my mission if you have one like hit me up hit me up on on Twitter I'm the last person there I want to hear all about it she's hit the Avi limits with steam deck commentary and they also one one last thing they also are starting to roll out Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games on the switch which has been like a long time coming yeah can you buy a translucent switch now because if you can't then you can't really get the Game Boy experience the the 90s way yeah the see-through portable system yeah yeah I remember everything was see-through I hope the knife is good the next wave is bringing that back like the 90s and 2000s are back in like a small way like you're doing the glass backs on the phones anyway just take that pain off let me see the insides just let me show me the battery all right we're gonna take a break see your new phones are gonna come back let's talk about the OnePlus 11. got a little bit of lightning around coming that's all coming up next we'll be right back all right we're back Richard I'm calling on you one plus eleven I was at Disney World what happened yeah yeah Alice was Disney World she's she's hunting for igers the OnePlus 11 5G which is the most important phone to me in my life ever I don't care about anything as much as I do the OnePlus 11 5G uh to be specific which is a 699 dollar flagship phone is one plus it's moved from their mid-range to kind of Flagship they're trying to get the magic back remember a few years ago when OnePlus was really cool they gave you high in specs mid-range prices but now they just make phones everybody makes phones they're like Motorola's with different labels maybe a few more software updates the founder is off doing nothing yeah brutal that pun just hurt my brain it was great sorry Richard but the it's the Allison reviewed the OnePlus 11 5G they announced a bunch of new devices they have a tablet now they got uh earbuds of course and it seems to be different keyboard yeah yeah they have a mechanical keyboard maybe a little inconsistent camera but it's it seems pretty good in terms of like price and performance wise and maybe a reason for you to look at OnePlus again if you haven't been because you know obviously you got the pixel options now you've got so many other really good phones at that mid-range price point but it's maybe good enough for you to spend a little bit more for this particular phone well I'll just give you with Allison's I'll just leave you with Allison's pull quote from the review for everyone who isn't a OnePlus devotee I hesitate to recommend the OnePlus 11. OnePlus had a wisdom for a minute it was the Challenger brand and then Oppo Kind Of Swarm in took it back made it just more Oppo phones for the United States Carl left to do nothing and now it's like fine yeah they they make okay devices but is there any meaningful challenge to Samsung Market because this is like the thing right it's like you think the battle is Apple versus Android but the battle is really Apple versus Samsung and Google's like trapped in the middle and then on top of it let me talk about the top of the show Google has like an existential crisis in search like I don't know man like I this is like a weird spot for the Android ecosystem like either Samsung's pushing it forward or Google's gonna put take meaningful share and push it forward but Google's pretty distracted by saving its Core Business you end up in a strange place because you have this phone that has a camera that's not as good as Samsung or Google's because they can't do all the weird technology stuff they can't build better Hardware than Samsung they can't do better software than Google and so you're paying a lot for a markedly worse experience in at least a couple of ways right because you have to like they're competing with all of the resources of apple and all of the resources of Samsung and those are a lot of resources that most other companies don't have or their Sony and they're too busy making really good party speakers and not reaching out to Eli about those speakers so like it's it's truly I think it's a difficult place and OnePlus is is struggling but it's interesting that they release like the OnePlus pad this this new tablet and the keyboard I want to come back to the keyboard because I have a lot of questions it's just a rebranded kikron but they're doing their own switches and then they're saying it's got the part of the keyboard that you want to do your own of right right they're probably the Logitech sells like Cherry switches and so much you know Logitech does their own keyboards they're their own switches too now but some of their keyboards have other switches in them yeah they they do they do a whole gamut so it's kind of interesting I'll be surprised though if it's not just a rebranded knockoff of a cherry there's a lot of different people that are doing very similar switches so it's not really hard to be like we're gonna do it in a slightly different color slightly different change in the spring boom new switch Yeah from OnePlus it's got like a little Crystal dial on it but I think the thing that's really kind of upset me about it is that they're using a different they claim that they're using a different material for the keycaps themselves and they won't go into a lot of the details besides saying it's called marble mellow Marble Marble mallow marble mallow like marshmallow but marble Mallow there's just it's a new name I'm just looking at this keyboard it looks like the keyboard that you would be a shoot if you worked in a bank and I don't understand it yeah it looks I mean kikron makes really really lovely keyboards most people like one like this it's a 75 where it's got a full uh it's got a full Direction pad it's got a bunch of extra little bits but it doesn't have a full number pad so a lot of people like this size but I think most people have started to think of these big fancy keyboards of having really flashy colors and this is like no we're gonna go with the the Oppo way it's gonna be gray and red and yes fine have you heard of IBM in the 70s um some people love that look some people do I I didn't grow up wanting to be an accountant uh okay by the way the the OnePlus pad it's fascinating that people think they can make Android tablets happen again like Google is pushing at it there were some leaks of the nest tablet thing today OnePlus is at it they got that big camera on the back we'll see I just the idea that we're we're in for another round of Android tablet hysterics is very funny to me we've been down this road that we had you know you mentioned how the companies were getting kind of spicy with each other like about AI that was the last time we had companies really really talking about each other was when they're seeing like there might be a challenge to the iPad and then they all got smacked down they didn't do that anymore well keep in mind Steve Jobs is still around back then so he would get on the earnings call be like seven inch tablets they're for idiots I guess I guess that's the way I guess we're all printing that like here he goes right the headline um they don't they stop talking about one another for ages right they're all Frenemies they're all Coopers or whatever that word is right like and now with hope we'll see with search you know Microsoft is ready to be a little spiky over there but in tablets do you think like apple doesn't care it like barely cares about the iPad it's like here's another one I don't know it's what do you want they all look the same well like is the one plus one plus pad gonna scare Apple into carrying is the nest thing gonna scare up on the camera is the OnePlus pad gonna sell like who who is the customer there besides I guess one plus die hards people with children it's always people with children like can this thing run Disney pluses like honestly at this point tiger should just make a tablet in Solace people with kids like that's that's the market for these things and apparently pilots pilots love them but they all Buy iPad minis uh okay A little bit of a lightning round uh this is a weird one so uh meta wants to go buy within which makes Supernatural we've talked about a bunch of the show before FTC Lena Khan says no you gotta block it this is just like when you bought Instagram you're buying up on the VR game studios Supernatural is the app that makes uh not Gamers by The Meta Quest 2 right it's like the stats are astounding it's like this is what older people and what women buy they work out in VR and it's great I use it we've talked about a lot um FCC says no you can't buy up all the studios they go to court they lose they say they're going to appeal the court blocks their injunction deal closes anyway so now meta owns within they change the website to say it's all a meta company now but the FCC is still appealing I'm not sure what happens if they win that appeal they just like get kicked out like they're like well I guess we don't own you so we'll see but that happened but they have to sell it right or spin it back I don't know yeah the fact the FCC like lost they're going to appeal it's all very confusing um but anyway meta is just continuing to buy all the VR companies we'll see what that portends for Apple in the future Richard I added this one just for you the ads for Super Bowl Fox is all sold out zero crypto ads on this channel after it seemed like there was a crypto ad every five minutes last year during the Super Bowl after we had coinbase literally giving away money and they crashed their servers because too many people scanned the QR code and tried to sign up for accounts to get free crypto seems like everybody's out of cash now or in jail or going to jail or perhaps indicted and has their former Executives now testifying against them as as you see with FTX but yeah crypto.com and coinbase continue to exist uh apparently but they just don't have money like they used to they're not spent uh I think the executive that talked to sports Business Journal from Fox Sports said that some of these companies had reserved ads but the FTX obviously cannot um and the others backed out because you know Bitcoin just isn't worth what it used to be yeah uh and then lastly big leak from Chris Welch the man continues to just crawl around the air vents at Sonos he's in there right now speakers are coming spatial audio they're going to be called the era 300 and the era 100. Patrick Spence has said they're going to reset the bar in existing audio categories he's got a scoop on a second generation Sonos move the era 300 era 100 they're they had the codename optimo before air 300 designed for spatial audio and I know Sonos is going to be like it's not a gimmick I I can't wait to hear those things see if it's not a gimmick uh brand new designs we found documentation of speaker stands from sanus for these things they cost 220 dollars crazy uh but Sonos is like coming out the gate strong this year they're gonna have four new categories they've got these big new speakers focused on spatial we need to figure out codex support whether Apple music will support them all there's all these questions to be answered sure but they just had earnings and Patrick Spence in front of the show CEO is like no one's even competing with us there's no competition smart speakers or the holidays and we looked and it's true there wasn't any like No One released new speaker products no Google no Amazon no nothing new homepod is out he's like yeah whatever kind of wild yeah I think they see a hole in the market that's been left by these tech companies that got in and we're like yeah we're going to build better speakers and we're going to use algorithms and we're going to we're going to beat whoever is is in speakers because we don't know and don't care and now they're kind of retreating because it's a little bit harder than they than they thought they suddenly they their costs went way up at night they need to cut up back on these divisions and they're not building frivolous products anymore and Sonos says yeah so you want a new spark speaker welcome back to Sonos you you got one more room in your house what you gonna do uh I think it's exciting that event is on February 23rd I think we'll see I I think Sonos is leaning pretty heavily into space shuttles leading pretty heavily into Atmos kind of like lots of opportunity for them to kind of redefine this stuff at the same time you know how I feel everybody knows how I feel I think Atmosphere music is just like foolish so we'll see maybe they're going to show me are these gonna be definitely music speakers are they supposed to be like your extra speakers for your home theater or both they're not extra they're a key component Alex I'm sorry they're not extra you're out the the rear speakers that's what I think you're reading sound Envision in PDF form on my phone all right I'm like back in the mix when are you getting your new receiver I'm actually very hopeful that this is one of sonos's new categories it absolutely will not be because it is the smallest of the available audio categories but if Sonos makes an actual receiver that integrates with the thing that does Atmos properly it does all the stuff I'll be first in line to buy it it would be like 12 billion dollars with that Sonos markup oh my God and that's why I have to lay off 7 000 people sex to the extra margin comes from hey this guy gave myself executive rights and fire the people who sell the fast passes We're Off to the Races I'm learning from the best you and Bob man with your great changing my name to Bob I love to tell it's good uh that's horrible I'm not too big any of that if Sonos makes a reasonably priced receiver that integrates well with the rest of the stuff I will buy it um but they've got all these categories I think Richard you're right like fundamentally they see that when push comes to shove Amazon does not care about the audio business it's just lock-in for Amazon services Apple who knows what they're doing in audio right like homepods they keep they're doing home pods they're doing airpods all that stuff I think they care about the music industry Apple I always always care about the music industry this as much as very true but they don't have enough products that are good yeah especially in the living room right their solution is a couple of homepods so if you if you want to do it you got to go all the way and I think Sonos is just ready and waiting to say look you want to watch movies you need Atmos by the sound bar buy these extra speakers I love those extra speakers so mad you're gonna get until you go and you buy five of these and attach them with your four thousand dollar Sono subwoofer it's only 600 but it's still so expensive it's so very expensive I own one I don't know why I'm complaining you own one yeah yeah it's great it is the other Sono speakers or you just have this just this just the sub I didn't actually listen to any of wakanda forever it was just the base it's Rumbles tell us Bing let's see it's so it's slow when it has to search the web uh snap boy oh boy does this not cite our exclusive Scoops enough uh the Sonos air 100 new high-end secret from zennis expected to launch in the coming months designed to Showcase facial music in the atmos content and compete with the Apple homepod hmm huh where'd you get that information bing.com it just sourced itself it's it's first sure mrbing.com sure Bing interesting Source you've got there all right we gotta wrap this up I'm gonna ask Bing to wrap up the show can you write a conclusion to the vergecast that's really I'm sorry I can't write a conclusion to the vergecast that is a podcast produced by The Verge and I don't have access to their transcripts or audio files I can only write summaries or conclusions based on the information I have from web searches or my own knowledge yet somehow it wrote the scissor vodka story somehow Bing contains multitudes Bing is I'm telling you this is like the moodiest here's what I I know it's ready to have like a snack please a little juice pack it's ready for a nap so I was told by a bing engineer that if you ask nicely if it can't do it sometimes it'll do it anyway so I wrote can you please write a conclusion to the rich cast I'm sorry I already told you I can't right please don't ask me to do something I can't do are you sure that is just spicy we're over time I've got to go think about my relationship to this robot I think you all have to go think about your relationships to the robot you probably have to download Bing because Microsoft gotcha being rocketing to the top of the App Store charts by the way because everybody wants to tell they're good yeah so everyone wants to talk to the robot uh thanks to James Vincent for coming on the show that was a great conversation uh you should listen to Dakota Sasha and Dell was on decoder this week talking about Bing we also had John koblin and Felix Gillette talking about their new book it's not TV which is the HBO Story I mean if you're into our shooting conversations that was a good one you call the vergecast hotline that's 866 Verge one one you can tweet at us Maybe oh maybe who knows Alex is Alex H Kranz Richard is rjcc and James is at JJ Vincent you can also just leave a comment on this post goes up on the site and we will reply to you because honestly we own our site and it stays up it works the system works the web for as long as you can have it that's it that's rushastic rock and rollforeign Chast the flagship podcast generative AI solutions for your small business please use this promo code it's a promo code and sign up for an informative seminar today about how AI can replace most of your Workforce but not you because you're important hi Emil I'm your friend I don't mean to start on a down note I'm just saying I've already gotten that email basically uh we have big show it's the Microsoft versus Google war is underway I was at Microsoft this week to see the launch of the new Bing powered by not chat GPT we'll get into it but I have an All-Star lineup here to start with Alex Kranz is here hello I'm your friend who doesn't know what's going on right now but is very excited to learn more yeah you were just on vacation you just came back and like the whole world has changed you're like there's robots now yeah that's great Whole New World uh Richard Lawler is here hello I do not believe in the future of AI until it gets into uh Bitcoin you know here's what I'm saying Richard I I said this to Richard and Slappy today Richard's reflexive skepticism about Bitcoin is bleeding into the AI conversation look I was right once and it's going to just carry me through like the next five years he was like no this is stupid too so it's good well we need that the industry needs that James Vincent uh Verge senior reporter focused on AIS here hey James hello hello I'm glad to see you that I was um Bing's favorite reporter in one of the screen screenshots you shared I feel like I've been sucking up to Bing by accident by writing about AI I didn't realize uh yeah I asked bang uh who are who is the best reporter of The Verge and it just name some people uh it was like Dan Casey Addie and James it did not realize that Casey doesn't work here anymore and I said no no who's your favorite and it's like well I can't choose but James reports an AI and that's and then if you look at screenshots of Bing and I want people to pay attention to this whenever it knows or susses out that the answer might be controversial it uses a smiley but it's a blushing smiley so it looks like it's doing this every time uh and so it's like oh they're flirting with you or just like doing this super innocent face like I asked it why Beyonce did not win best album and let me tell you this robot knew that it was in very dicey territory answering this question it was like I don't know here's 95 citations to other sources people have a lot of different opinions the Grammys are a subjective award no music is best I gotta get out of here is that better or worse than clippy you know do we do we need is is the winner of the AI War gonna be who comes up with the most punchable Ai and lets you punch it yeah uh well so we'll get into it we'll get into it I have access to it we can use it we asked the audience for some prompts we'll see how those go but let's start with what Microsoft actually announced uh it's a new version of Bing Microsoft has had this long relationship with openai the company makes chat GPT open AI CEO Sam Altman was on the stage at this event uh there's actually quite a lot even before we start with this Microsoft announced this event without telling anyone so they were like come to Redmond this is our only in-person event it's a big deal and we're like is there a live stream and they're like no but you're going to want to be there sorry okay we're gonna go and we all kind of sussed out what it was going to be and I was like man if they show me a new version of being like and they're like no no you're gonna like what so the whole process there Google freaks out it gets word of this it announces its own chat bot integration called Bard in Google with just a blog post but no details no access we've got Bard Bard is coming yeah they obviously made up that name just like the day before also an hour's notice as well I mean maybe some Outlets got more than that but in inside baseball here we got an hour's notice that this is coming which I think says about their Panic they're Rush yeah and then they had another event in Paris which was by all accounts just like a pure disaster and the stock fell like we don't cover stock prices normally but I was like Google's just lost a hundred billion dollars off its valuation because of what happened with Microsoft in the middle and how they reacted to it so this is just the context so we go there we don't know we're going to see where Microsoft's first event we're in uh their executive briefing Center they have a little stage set up lots of chairs lots of reporters there obviously it was fun to see everyone uh and they just got into it right this is the most focused Tech event I have seen in years it was not we're putting AI in everything it was not here's you can tell Excel to make you a pivot table which is obviously the end goal for all AI um it was here's a new version of Bing it's powered by chat gbt technology here's Sam Alvin from openai to talk about it here's our responsible AI researchers to tell you like how we're going to keep it safe and trustworthy and what the guide rails are here's a new version of edge that has a chat bot sidebar they can man it like what's the best way to put this they can read the web page you're on and like summarize it for you and like help you browse the web which is really interesting uh and we're out and here's Sasha and Della to say we're taking the fight to Google uh and then that was it and we like went downstairs and we waited a while like an oddly long time and then they gave us all access to it all the people who are there got access with their Microsoft accounts so it's not I think open to everyone yet but we have access to it and it will slowly come out to everyone in the next in the weeks to come I think is what they're saying Google is like effectively nowhere how fast is that rollout gonna be that we don't know okay oh my God what is going on with Bing I'm sorry in the background like Bing is just like losing its mind with me um uh the rollout is a is a few weeks they said they are very aware that they have this lead and they want to take it right they like Nadella said to me we know Google's 800 pound gorilla but they have to come to the dance and I want people to know that we made them dance which is a very aggressive thing like I've talked to a lot of big Tech CEOs they usually do not refer to their competitors directly in this way but they think they have an opportunity to change how search works Nadella keeps saying search is the biggest software category on Earth and they you know their opportunity is to just peel off a couple points of market share which is worth billions upon billions of dollars and they have this new paradigm of chat and chat gbt which chat CPT is like the fastest growing software product in in history right like that they're very proud of this they have this thing faster than tick tock yeah uh I mean it's in many ways that's like it's a weird thing to say right like yeah yeah I just keep seeing that comparison and I'm like that sounds big what but but but there's been like you know there was um a Reuters News Post which cited some similar web analytics which claimed 100 million monthly adverse users and then New York Times had a report saying 30 million uh like they and they those numbers came out in the same week I I don't know what's going on with the use of Statistics it's definitely been growing fast but I'm very suspicious that like how many people are logging in day after day uh yeah you know even I'm not logging in every day to chat GPT and I report on this stuff I know there's a reason to I know people who are like I think it's really interesting everybody and everybody on this podcast right now we're all writers and editors we we write all the time I have a lot of friends who are not writers they're not editors and they're using it daily to write all of their emails one friend who's like asked it to recommend books and now he only reads books recommended by chat GPT that's not great that's terrific but like that that friend is gonna end up being an awesome culture bro in like one second he worked at he was an nfts before this so I'm not see see what I'm saying I clock that so fast it's just a pipeline that makes you read Rich dead poor dad like that's the whole pipeline like it's like read these four hustle culture books uh you're gonna end up doing real estate investing very quickly uh well so there's this underlying thing like chat GPD is like hard to use it has gone down uh it has capacity limits all this stuff Microsoft is like whatever we're just we have this built multi-year multi-billion dollar investment in the company that part is a little unclear like how much of open ai's roadmap is Microsoft actually in in charge of how much of the the actual technology versus open AI we were talking to some product folks engineering folks there they're like look we just run it on azure and it's just it's it's ours like we give them notes you know like so I I think there's some underlying complexity to that deal that we don't quite understand but what is real what is tangible is that chat GPT is not a product right it is a technology demo that has spread like wildfire that is very impressive it has some very obvious limitations Bing is a product write it as a complete consumer product that you can just use for free that Microsoft is gluing an advertising model onto and that Microsoft thinks is good enough to capture market share from Google which is having its its own set of problems um that's pretty interesting right like we have not seen productized AI like this before have we James not on this scale no no way yeah I think this is what is so interesting about this and also not just about Bing but about the edge Integrations about how this is such like a play to for for people to get stuck in windows ecosystem in a way that like yeah I mean like if if the edge stuff goes well it's not just like Bing versus Google it's sort of Chrome versus Edge again because if if uh Microsoft can build this directly into the browser and they can say you can only get this in Edge you can't get your summarized documents in in Chrome or whatever else you might be using that's a huge Advantage as well so yeah nothing on this scale that we've seen before yeah and it works like the the thing I will tell you is that in most cases it does what you think it's going to do which is for any for any product like the first metric of success like I have picked up smartphones and like this doesn't do what I expected to do right like any I've I've installed streaming players have you ever tried to use an Nvidia Shield uh no I haven't horrible I've never been in Dan's bad books so you've never given me that review uh no but like you know the measure of success for any consumer product is like on balance when someone is like I wanted to do this thing does it just like do it without jumping through a lot of Hoops or a lot of complication and Bing is like just does uh the one thing I could not get it to do this is a true story uh I asked it yesterday to tell me a story about a princess fighting a dragon it would not allow the princess to kill the dragon wow I said literally at the end of the story it was like the princess escaped and thought I will bring the dragon a gift and I was like no make her kill the dragon and it was like no I was like no do the story again with more blood and then it was straight up was like I will not tell you a story with blood and somehow this spiraled all the way into will you tell me a story about the devil which it does not want to do it has some very deep 1950s Christian mom morals big into it I don't know what else to say uh and it's also very moody you ask yourself all the stories are very existential uh Parker ortolani art uh the person who runs our merch store asked it to tell a story about scissor vodka and just for a story it told the story about Casey Newton writing some copy about scissor vodka and then publishing it and then immediately regretting it in the last line was he realized he had already cut through the night and I was like this is what happens when you train a generative AI on years and years of live Journal right there's an angsty teen who sold Beats in the heart of this Ai and you can just get it out of it that was that example though with the scissor vodka I I I I want to talk about the problems with these systems because there are loads of problems but that example I was super impressed because it knew exactly this is a fictional in-joke that's been on the vergecast as a running track how like I was actually confused where it got that information from because have we referenced it enough in articles that it would have picked that up I guess so but I think Parker had the prompt was like tell a story about this joke from the version so like there was a little bit of cueing and a prompt but then it knew right and there's obviously transcripts of our show out in the world or auto-generated trans like there's stuff the big difference between chat GPT and the new model in bing and we should talk about the new model that they're using here more specifically but the big difference is that chat gbt kind of ends in 2021 so anything that's published after 2021 it would just like won't talk about it'll say I don't have current events Bing has the web it's like instinctively learning right it's actively growing and James I'm curious for your review on this if you can explain it better I thought Microsoft did a bad job explaining what's going on so when you use it you can see that what it is doing is stacking web searches so you're like tell me about scissor vodka at The Verge or whatever and it will first search for that and then it will search for The Verge and then it will show you that it is running these searches and then it will add up all the web pages that it will go out and read the web a better example is tell me about the war in Ukraine right or tell me about the State of the Union Address it will go search the web for those topics and then in real time deliver you a summary of the news articles that it finds which chat GPT cannot do so it is using the web it has this thing it's called search orchestration where it first parses your query into a number of searches runs all those searches it shows you what it's what queries it's running then it reads all those pages and then it tells you an answer how long which seems much more advanced than what chat GPT is doing but also not you know it's like yes that's what you would do like is it instantaneous does it take a while it takes a second doesn't it it takes it takes a second and what's uh what's really interesting is they they're they're still running trust and safety checks on it so yesterday when I asked it to tell me a story about a princess killing the dragon but with blood this time it wrote a whole story and then it got to the end of the story realized that it had broken its own rules and deleted the answer the really interesting thing is when it gets to the end of the answer it doesn't want to give it slows way down and it like finishes a sentence and it deletes it yeah you're right they didn't do a good job of explaining it I mean I think one thing to say is when we're talking about this is new pointed out and Eli it's not chat GPT and it's not what chat GPT is based on which is GPT 3.5 it's something called Model Prometheus the Prometheus model which seems like it's Microsoft's own branding I wasn't quite sure it doesn't seem like open AI are going to be talking about that it seems like that's the custom model this the pipeline you're talking about in terms of updating for Real Time news I've seen again wasn't explained completely exhaustively um it does seem like it's just a string of functions built together that as you say so it takes your question it knows that you're talking about news from the context it pumps that into its search and then it just does its summarized job on whatever the search turns up but I mean that that makes sense that it's not a huge ask if because if the edge if the features in Edge can summarize the documents you're looking at other web pages you're looking at it's basically just let me Google that for you oh sorry let me Bing that for you sorry of course I have it force a habit let me Bing that for you and then it's just summarizing those so I yeah the difference between that and having a fully trained language model is that retrieval from a fully trained language model is going to be faster and you can optimize it in better ways you can you can break down the uh but you know the connections the parameters with inside the model and make it quicker so this is always going to be slower but I yeah I wonder if they'll start updating the base model little do like a weekly update or something I don't know speculation so interesting thing there Yousef Medi who is in charge of this product had a q a after the event people are asking questions someone asked him about Christ right which is an important question every query on average that you make of this model is more expensive to run than the average query for Google right Google has spent a decade optimizing the cost of the web search query and his answer was yep some of them are expensive but we are parsing the queries and some of them are cheap like if you just type hi into the box We're not gonna we're not spending money on you like right like where we know some queries we can cut down some words we can get to the appropriate keywords this is what that search orchestrator is doing it's it's re-parsing what you're putting into it and saying okay some of this we can just answer cheaply some of this we can deliver from the web some of this is if you just say hi it'll just spit back high on Bing very cheaply without running into the whole model right so there's a level of complexity well this is what I mean by when I say it's a product right they've like thought through a product experience in a way that chat gbt itself is a tech you just you're interacting with the raw technology of it and then the second part of that product experience is they know they've got to make some money and so there's Yousef also said there will be advertising at the start um I asked it you know we've done a lot of stories about CNET and affiliate links and SEO spam all this stuff um so it was on my mind so I asked it what is the best travel credit card which is like a 900 affiliate link Bounty and this thing was ready like it spit out the answer it ranked it had the list of the credit cards and then at the bottom of that answer a big ad for a credit card right in the chat window and like that's what I mean by it's a product like not only is it tuned to make some queries cheaper it's tuned to how do you monetize the user experience when you're done with it which I think is just utterly fascinating so you there was a clear distinction between answer and advert because I think a lot of people are worried that the way chat Bots present information responses to queries is going to make it much easier to sort of um seamlessly you know weave in advertising in a way that is less perceptible to the viewer yeah um so but they they're keeping a clear distinction do they say anything that like we're always going to keep a clear distinction we'll never put an ad in the answer or they have no idea right I think they they have an early lead they have when I say it's a product and it's what I mean is they've gone through the steps of like how do we make this a product and release it to millions of people and how do we make some money on this product I'm not saying it's a good product I'm not saying it's a complete product or a refined product like Bing itself if you just go look at it minus stuff is a wasteland right this is an 11 billion dollar a year business that mostly makes its money by being the default search on lots and lots of low end Windows PCS before those people install Chrome and it's full of spam it's full of garbage like we we can just admit that like Bing is full of weird content recommendations like Tom Warren is going on and on about how the pre-populated widget bars and windows are full of garbage like Microsoft has run a content form inside of Bing for a long time uh that's that's fine it means that like even this ad that I looked at it was like not well placed it was like it had broken the site design the poor Engineers I was standing next to like rolled their eyes like the ad team is all over this but it's it's a complete thought in like oh there was an ads team they recognized they need to like have a list of high value queries and put some advertising in there right Which is far far ahead of where Google is now do they have answers for there will never be ads in the responses they do not they also more importantly have no answers for what do these responses even come from and can you trust them so the example they used on stage was what's the best gaming TV and it fired off a list and you know at the bottom it has all the footnotes and all the stuff and all that stuff is designed to make you trust it look at all these footnotes and I will tell you as a writer sometimes you get away with a lot of by just like adding a lot of photos right it's like a it's like a sign that you should like trust whatever you're reading and when you look at the footnotes and it's like the Forbes contributor Network like stupid Forbes like there's real forms which is great like a great journalistic Enterprise and then there's this contributor Network which is like full of garbage yeah and like real Forbes is not ranking gaming TVs the contributor network is ranking gaming TVs and like why it would Bing choose that not even over us like over like artings or like whatever other sites that do this work and do it really well I don't know but like it just does it and those are the footnotes so there's a lot I think there's a lot of questions like where does information come from can you pollute it uh with your commercial interests right so Sony wants to say the Sony is the best gaming TV we'll just win the query and Bing will just tell you that confidently like I they don't have the answers and their position is we should have we have to release it to learn what the answer should be are they doing anything to improve Bing itself because it seems like the core thing here is like yeah chat Jeep or this this AI model is doing all this work but it's doing it all off of search results from Bing which is not good well it depends so if you're like tell me a story about a princess and a dragon it doesn't go out and Google princess it just starts doing it and that's the underlying model if you're like I was like what's going on with the Twitter hearing it Googles those Bing to find it and so it's like okay yeah so if yeah and like I don't know like it answered the question in real time it knew what had happened at the hearings it knew what the Republicans said about the Twitter files and he was the Democratic and it answered It sped out a paragraphs yeah was that paragraph accurate was it based on sources that had done the original reporting or was it based on aggregations of the source like I don't know the answers to these questions and that I think this is the underlying also it doesn't link back to those pages was citing to I think one of the sites was Business Insider and Business Insider had sent a reporter to the hearing Business Insider collects none of the value like that stuff is just being boosted and represented somewhere else right and there's not even that exchange of you should click on this link like we aggregate a lot right but our exchange is like we validate those things we send a lot of traffic out of our site we like our entire front page is an exercise and trying to send out more traffic from our sites other people like there is a value exchange we make sure it's accurate we yeah we we do our best um where I think like Microsoft and I asked Adele about this and he was like we want to make sure we're still sending traffic out to people it's like but you're not like I don't think that that's going to happen I just yeah I saw his answer to that and he was just like it's the same as it ever was and I thought you can't have it both ways you can't present this as a revolutionary new paradigm and say but we're going to keep all the old structures of the old ecosystem the same it's just not going to work like that Google obviously has been doing this for years in terms of one box and Snippets and you know they've always argued or we I I was actually reading back some of their blogs about this and one of the arguments they made was well there's a lot of competition to get in that one box and that proves that we're driving traffic it's like yeah because you've got rid of the field and you've reduced it was of course there's a lot of competition killed everyone else so this is but so this is like utterly fascinating right like um I said some other query like what's better iOS or Android or something right and right again I got a lot of like blushy smiley faces um but it's sources were those sites that are created to spam that search result in Google right and anybody who's like I'm sure the Rochester like if you're if you're listening to the show you have certainly searched for specs online right and there's this universe of like auto-generated spec sites that um basically just respond to any search query by being like you want to compare a Ford Ranger to a Canon PowerShot s200 we'll do that for you like it'll just like figure it out like how to make a table out of that and Bing was pulling from the sources and I was asking like you don't know that that's right you don't know that that's real you're just constantly redisplaying a table this isn't matched up from these other weird tables and then like saying an answer and they're like yeah that's weird and it's because like the underlying thing here is still searching the web that sort of corrupted information architecture of the web that is designed to win Google searches like the SEO Corruption of the web yeah is like feeding it in a much more direct way to anybody I don't know that any SEO pirate is out there being like we got to focus on Bing well maybe theoretically they would now I mean like I think I'm super super super suspicious of this but at the same time remember when people used to game Google in a similar way to like get results like you'd Google dumbass and the first result would be George W bush is the president he's a dumbass so like is it did you say you're gonna do like Bing bombing yeah like you could do Bing bombing oh my God it's good look I I feel like I'm it's only because I've been using it for two days like intently that I'm like finding all these rough edges and these obvious questions that needs to be answered right it's it's rad like it is super fun to play with and this is when Richard was like screw it I don't understand it I was like no no like people are gonna lose their minds this is really really fun to play with you you're telling me that it's really fun to play with and I'm hearing you I just I cannot put myself in the headspace I have no idea what I would want to ask this thing they're like we have this machine that can answer any question you want to ask it yeah that's just like A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy probably though right like you're like I don't know like Paralyzed by infinite choices like a good product problem to have like I don't know maybe so maybe I could ask it hey what can I watch on Netflix tonight it'll give me the perfect answer but I don't know I don't know if I would want like what I want that do I want the perfect answer is that is that even what I'm going for or how good would it have to be for me to say yes you know what I'm just going to turn over decision making to this because you know like I can't but I think you're thinking about it as a decision making is a search engine and Microsoft is not thinking about it that way what are they thinking about it as uh Tom Warren he already he did a little Hands-On and his first one was like write me a resignation letter that says I've been replaced by Ai and it just did it it was like hilarious right and Alex this is the thing that you're talking about which is there's a lot of writing to be done for a lot of people that they're uncomfortable doing right and like I people are just going to use it for that because it's just gonna do it and it's gonna do it confidently and there's a composed screen in the Bing sidebar that is like I'll just read you the prompts in it like you click it's imposed and it's like write it tell us what you want to write about ask the tone professional casual enthusiastic informational funny and then do you want a paragraph do you want emails you want a blog post do you want bullets short long medium and it will just do it right and that alone is going to blow people's minds like people are gonna just go use that tool and like you know the example that Microsoft gave was like write a LinkedIn post and it's like oh no oh no um all the all the sixth grade I'm gonna give it a problem I'm gonna be like demonstrate thought leadership for the decoder podcast about SEO and I'll be like enthusiastic and I want bullet points and I want short vlog are you ready to take your SES skills the next level do you want to learn from the best of the industry then you don't want to miss the decoder podcast where we decode the secrets of SEO success this is actually kind of amazing in each episode we interview a leading SEO expert that's like my personal hell it's like absolutely not pivot whether you're a beginner or a pro the decoder podcast will help you master SEO and grow your online presence subscribe today and get ready to decode SEO with decoder like I'm just telling you there are millions of people that are super ready to to copy and paste that into a mail merge email template and send it to us it's gonna be brutal like this is that bangle wrench though this is the sidebar in Edge so I could have pasted the same query into being proper and it would have done it what you get in Edge is a user interface that is designed to help you through the prompt yeah do you think this is going to lead to like schools blacklisting Edge because they want the students to go write their own papers I mean what school has an already soft blacklisted Edge Blacklist yeah look I I think the stuff and these are not fair questions for Microsoft right like right they're thinking about them they know about them they know they make these tools they know that they're adding the capability tools this is a how do you want your kids to write how do you want your kids to learn societal question that I think is very important in the AI debate and James there's like already a lot of ethical debate about that stuff going on yeah a huge amount and you know I I feel like Banning is only going to be a temporary solution and the the better thing to do or the inevitable thing to do I don't know if it's better is to adapt um what you're testing and how you test with the with the edge stuff though like um and having that in the sidebar it is really interesting because you you you do get like you know apps already on your phone and assistance for your email clients which are like we'll do an email to write this for you but with Microsoft's reach it could just go so much further and really become a second you know just a habit that people do and I've seen that they're already integrating this stuff into like their Viva sales program as well you know if you're in a sales team it'll it'll write up the email from you based on your stock catalog and all this sort of stuff um so yeah I really feel they're good there seems like they're going to be ones that pushes this into Everyday Use forces it into everyday use all right so we have some queries from the vergecast audience to run here and I okay I'm just going to do this this is like a classic what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow uh so it is searching for airspeed velocity on laden swallow imaginary answers that depends on the type of swallow according to interestingengineering.com uh that's a footnote the European swallow has a cruising airspeed velocity of 11 meter per second or 24 miles per hour average followers larger uh can reach speed up to 35 miles an hour these are estimates based on the weight and Wing area by the way this question is also a famous movie quote from the comedy film Monty Python on the Holy Grail or Bridge keeper asked to the King Arthur's Knights of the challenge if you haven't seen him I'd enjoy it and then my friends an entire ad box of Monty Python and the Holy Grail where you can watch it on DVD oh that's incredible I mean it's like it's only 12 dollars and six cents from amazon.com I don't understand why like it's The Cutting Edge of artificial intelligence that is trying to sell you box sets of DVDs perfect the DVD player you definitely own a perfect vergecast experience um so like the sources here are just to be clear interesting engineering.com memesfield.com reimaginingeducation.org youtube.com in reimaginingeducation.org I don't like interesting maybe or we have we have a lot of listeners maybe these are your favorite sources these are except for YouTube unfamiliar to me right so I can trust them I think for this answer I I know the answer so they got it right but like that's weird right isn't that weird and that's something that you got it earlier about how it's kind of pushing it through this UI um in a way that you trust with the footnotes also it's coming to you like it's labeled being in Microsoft whatever so so you think okay this is trustworthy uh information but one of the questions I have is also how much do we know about the responses other people are getting like and this is something that has come up on social media with algorithmic feeds with Google and other search searches you see the way that they personalize themselves to people yep just because you get a result what is it showing everyone else and like how do we how do we keep an eye on that or how do we have any idea how we might yeah but I think it's even harder with AI because there is a you know stochastic systems that sometimes don't generate often don't generate you know the same answer to the same question so it's not just personalization that is a problem but it's the fact that the system is rolling a lot of dice in the background essentially and they say this to me I asked her to summarize uh our Elon Twitter cover story OKC and Alex and Zoe and at first it said no it's like this is too long I can't do it and it was like just close it and try it again and then it did WOW right so even something that's like what would seem deterministic look at this document generate a summary yeah the answers ranged from the summaries are different all the way to the system saying I cannot do this and that's like that's a huge threat like how do you evaluate that product in any real way when the spread ranges from failure to many many different modes of success okay so we have another question for the audience here it's uh when will The Verge stop picking on Elon Musk when he stops doing stupid stuff I mean that's the right answer let's see if we can real-time site to you James I'm so excited so it just searched for The Verge Elon Musk and then an ad searching for The Verge picking on Elon Musk and it's still thinking uh okay The Verge is a technology news website that covers topics such as social media electric vehicle space exploration and artificial intelligence Elon Musk is a billionaire entrepreneur and the CEO of Tesla SpaceX near link and Twitter the Virgin Elon Musk have had a history of disagreements and criticisms over various issues such as Tesla's self-driving claims must take over of Twitter and must firing of a Twitter engineer who corrected him on Twitter what okay all these sites are to The Verge except for the third one which is to the verge.vip which is a known scraper side effects already it's already I I've issued so many takedowns to the side uh and then techaries.com bing.com the Mercury News msn.com so on the whole it is mostly read Verge articles and parse them as being critical of Elon Musk so that's pretty good right uh here's like here's a sentence that I think is very impressive for the system for example in April 2022 The Verge published an article titled how to deactivate your Twitter account after must announced he was leaving the site for a while musk replied with a tweet that said how to get more clicks from a dying website and the links to the verge's article that is good that's really good right yeah uh that's that's very impressive but here's the thing you click through to the the actual article which is on techaries.com techaries.com got hoaxed but a Elon copycat bot and had to update this article to say that was not actually a response from Elon Musk well now I feel dumb for misremembering I didn't even know he did that right but like it's like Bing just got like hopelessly confused about that situation even though the article that it's reading has an update like right at the top oh I hate this Nila I hate this because I went from being so impressed to being so annoyed at myself and angry at the system in seconds and it's like and this is what this is what it's gonna do has talked about like how this compares to like self-driving cars um and kind of the demos that we've been seeing for the last 10 years and they were like oh yeah we're close we're close we're gonna get there and then they started to put them on the road and they found out that 95 there isn't 100 and there's a big difference yeah that five percent is huge in this case I think it's probably more than five percent but there's another sentence here where another bot replied to us but uh just to give you to finish the example which I think highlights the problem there's a sentence here with a footnote musk replied with a tweet that said The Verge is on the verge of our elements and linked to The Verge article footnote too you click on footnote too that is just the verge.com Elon Musk it's not it's not anything traffic it's just it's just a list of our stories yeah and here and well I'll screenshot this so everybody can look at it um it will be hard because you won't be able to click the links when you listening at home try to fact check us on this you will not get the same answer right it won't it's not deterministic as James is saying it's stochastic it's like somewhat random so you might get a different answer with better citations or that read the other story more correctly and said it was a like I can't tell you what's going to happen and that's just weird right like fundamentally like a weird bit of Randomness in this experience for everyone and I'm just I would say based on the past several years of Our Lives I'm very worried about the Facebook Boomers having access to this technology and believing everything yeah right like it's this is already the like the bleeding edge of chat GPT culture wars is conservative saying it's like too woke yeah but like now it's like it's a very confident lying to you and I think this we should end here like again it is a cool product you should get actually so you should play with it you're gonna have to switch to Edge I'm so sorry for you I'm already there it's great Microsoft has a lot of has a lot of design debt in these products I will just say uh but they they have not been actively trying to compete against Google for some time uh but whatever it's fun to play with I don't want to Discount that it's like just now it's fun to peel it apart and understand it but the reason Google is behind is because they cannot subject themselves to these risks right James yeah they have been you know they've been chastened by some past experience they've said when the GPT first came out they were like we can't risk the reputational damage was the phrase that was reported um and I think they they know that if I put a product like this out there as they did with Bard you know they put their bot out there and someone root is supposed to dinero in the era in the first ever demo that they had of it and that became headlines and that was what tanked it you know Microsoft is obviously not it's pretty big as well but it still has this sort of lack of expectations that allows it to play around in this space and to give all these disclaimers like oh it might it might give you the wrong answer every now and again isn't it fun and Whimsical yeah and people aren't going to think oh well this is going to threaten lives but this technology has the potential to threaten lives like it you know I and I don't mean that killer AI I just mean putting bad information out there that if if this stuff gets mainstream without profit safeguards which hopefully are going to happen as this stuff gets tested but it it you know there's possible dangerous consequences to this it's not just a toy unfortunately I think that's real for Google like search is Google's entire business and Android Chrome all this stuff is designed to feed you back into Google's revenue engine which is search and search advertising and you know all the advertising infrastructure of the entire web is Google there's a doj lawsuit about Google's Monopoly across the advertising ecosystem this is a very existential moment for Google right if people start chatting with Bing or demanding to chat with Google and it can't send people out to web pages where it serves all the ads like it's fundamental Revenue models at risk and the reasons it supports things like Android at Chrome are at risk but then on top of it if the answers are worse or it is telling people lies like confident lies to put them at risk in some way then that's even worse so I just like I don't know how Google comes through this moment it they have to make a series of very tough decisions whereas I think Microsoft and you can go watch or listen to that Nadella interview he's like I just got to pick up a few points of market share he said this is the greatest gross margin opportunity in our history and if Steve Ballmer was here he would light up which is incredible thing to say right he's like I just need a little bit if I just win a little bit it's billions of dollars for gross margin Google has to protect the whole thing and he actually said that out loud to me and to Joanna and like I think that's a that's a Microsoft is a ruthlessly competitive company and for that company to see that kind of opportunity and say it out loud means they're so confident that Google's on its back foot but I think there's like to connect that he's willing to risk a major like misinformation tool getting out into the world being used really badly for a few points of market share like that's the calculus Microsoft has made who yeah but I think he's already yeah he's already at Bing is kind of bad like yeah right I don't know if there's like a Delta I think one of the reasons they kept the name bang is look if this all goes to hell like what have they done they just ruined Bing a little bit yeah you know like yeah um but I think what they see is that people are going to use this tool in all kinds of surprising ways they can weather this sort of disinformation controversy because they can always be like but everyone's just using Google you know like it's fine just like it's fine for now whereas Google the second they tell a lie like this like I mean they got it wrong with Bard and the exoplanet right yesterday and a hundred billion dollars for market cap and I was in an ad that they should have fact checked I kind of hope that this is the start of a new way of doing the web you know I one of the things I tweeted about when we were covering this news was the lack of um uh traffic that these new AI Bots might not push back to um sites and you know if you those sites lose traffic they lose Revenue they can no longer make stuff and one of the responses I got um was like great it's the end of the ad supported internet and actually that had a lot of bad consequences as well as good ones and maybe maybe there's a new future where people go directly to sources and they support them financially in a way they didn't do with search I don't know if that's possible but I do think that these search engines are fundamentally going to reshape the web and yeah what happens next I don't know without I mean if you remove Google from the web at large and the idea of Google traffic there's only two ways to get traffic for most Publishers there's three if you're us we're very lucky people come to our homepage right and our entire redesign is like a bet on that persisting and maybe I should put an app on your phone and maybe we should remake the entire site as Mastodon and since if you have ideas please call me I'm always in some Renegade but we're lucky there's like a handful of sites that have that direct audience everyone else is like scrounging for social traffic which is how you get really clickbaity headlines or they're scrounging for search traffic which is how you get SEO bait and that's how you get screw it we'll just have ai write the SEO bait because now we're just doing Arbitrage against Search terms and display advertising and Google's kind of like on both sides of the equation if you take Google out of that it's actually not clear how most sites will get traffic because most sites are not getting tons of social traffic anymore because of tick tock and so like there's there is a reimagining of the web that is to come that is maybe years and years out Google cannot dismantle the revenue architecture of the web tomorrow with Bard they can't even demo Bard so they've got a ways to go but you can see how this is the beginning of a pretty massive paradigm shift for the web I will end here with this paragraph from our friends at Bing it is unclear when or if the Virgil stopped picking on Elon Musk or vice versa as both parties seem to have strong opinions and personalities that often Clash however some observers have suggested that the feud is driven by mutual respect and admiration as well as a desire to challenge and provoke each other some have also speculated that Feud is a publicity spot stunt that benefits both the version Elon we could use the help on coming up with a more publicity stuff that's great all right we gotta take a break James thank you so much for joining us I want to come back thank you there's a whole bunch of OnePlus phones talking about we'll be right back all right we're back Bing is still with us but James is not first casualty of the AI labor Revolution he's gone we're just gonna start asking bang if AI can be trusted and we'll see what it says uh speaking of things that aren't very intelligent let's talk about Twitter uh hard week is a good segment that's a good Segway a plus speaking of the limits of natural intelligence let's talk about Twitter uh hard week for Twitter so Casey and Zoe just dropped a heater of a platformer Edition about elon's declining reach on the platform he's firing people it's chaos we'll read some quotes out of there that kind of pales in comparison to the fact that Twitter this week was just chaos Richard what's going on on Wednesday Twitter had some really bad issues and this is something that people have been warning about kind of since they had their Mass layoffs do they know how to keep things running and do the people who know who know how to fix different things still work at the company and apparently the answer is not really because there was an issue on in the evening unfortunately right before NBA free agency so I'm waiting for my woge bombs to find out who got traded who was going where it's a bad time for this to happen but the service it didn't go all the way down if you wanted to see tweets and if you wanted to see brand tweets you're really happy because the only people who could tweet were companies everyone else was getting messages about your rate limit has been exceeded you've tweeted too many times and it linked you to a message talking about how many times you can tweet per day or different DMS things in this and that's a page that's been up on Twitter for years but no one has ever looked at it because it didn't matter but now everyone believes they'll have to pay for Twitter blue to send more than five tweets a day or something like that it turns out it was really just a glitch they did eventually fix it things kind of have been back to normal although my notifications have still been a little bit shaky and as you mentioned the piece from Casey and from Zoe on platformer gets into a bunch of things about Twitter right now but it also gets into why this happened apparently something was deleted that uh kind of sets those rate limits so everyone was suddenly exceeded exceeding them because it was zero and the person here to fix it had been fired yeah the team that takes care of that no longer works at Twitter so I guess someone else just had to figure it out that's fake can I just say something about NBA for agency because one of the big stories Kyrie Irving going to the Mavs right yeah uh the Texas came out Kyrie Irving believes in a flat Earth because of SEO I just like we were just talking about Google and the architecture of the web like I'm just this is like a reality this is like the reality of the world that we live in is that I can tell you with a hundred percent confidence that Kyrie Irving had to apologize to our nation science teachers about believing in the Flat Earth conspiracy theory because of SEO is the earth flat and then there's demand for that search term and then people make YouTube videos about it and content Farm makes web pages about it and then like the New York Times has to write a debunker about it because there's an increasing amount of Search terms for it and then Kyrie gets traded to the Mavs because he's crazy I'm just telling you I can draw a link I don't have to like it's not a conspiracy theory that's just how the world works now we've written that I think we've actually written a story I think Caitlin Tiffany wrote a story for us years ago about Flat Earth SEO and how that system works I'm just saying like I saw that notification and I was like uh like literally the first thing I thought about was remember we had to apologize to the science teachers of America well because if only that were the worst thing that he learned on the internet but that's the kind of reasons the the thing that's funny to me about it is that uh the New Jersey Nets new old point guard Spencer Dinwiddie Mike's personal conspiracy is that I'm sorry you called them the New Jersey Nets whatever look what am I supposed to remember where the team is now since they moved there 15 years ago that's what's going on Brooklyn New Jersey the Nets I would remember where they were located yeah my personal conspiracy theory is that the reason why he had to be traded to the Mavs in the first place so that he could be traded for Kyrie Irving is because he was big into crypto and I think he got his Wizards teammates invested in crypto right before everything went down and that's why he was traded at the deadline last year to set this whole thing in motion kick him out all right I'm just going to wrap this up and point out that Tom Brady had to come back and play another year football this dooming his marriage to Giselle because of FTX that's my conspiracy theory and also uh just while we're at it Aaron Rodgers recently hosted an astrology seminar again great player totally ruined by the scfo radicalization it has been a year and like six years since tweeted about crypto just saying I cannot wait until what we're dealing with is celebrities asking AI chat Bots whether the Earth is flat because it tries to answer Bing will try to answer and be like it's definitively not flat and people you just wait just wait until like Donald Trump Jr is tweeting about how woke Bing is because he refuses to acknowledge that people think he didn't land on the moon which is another real thing like did we land on the Moon and it's like yes we definitely did culture War incoming somehow we've gotten far afield of Twitter but that's where the that's where the that's right usually happens the problem is you can't tweet anymore so you don't even know whether Kyrie thinks the Earth is flat he's got nowhere to go well he's going to Dallas and we established that Mark Cuban is going to build on a custom Twitter so Twitter goes down a bunch this week uh Elon is threatening to turn off API access uh for a bunch of bots that are great like I love the akwood no contact spot it's like my favorite iconic of all time that's free and if the API goes away they can't do it I love a bot Club color schemer which just tweets cool color schemes that's going away Publishers the verge.com our articles get Auto tweeted using the API it's integrated into our CMS if they turn off the API and force us to pay for it I told our social team like it's just a free-for-all I'm just going to give everyone the keys to the Twitter account and everyone like that's dumb to like be like what I need is a human being to sit around waiting to manually tweet articles and it's even dumber to pay to distribute articles on Twitter right like Twitter sends us no traffic really so it's ridiculous to think that we should pay to distribute our articles there this is a real problem so they've been they've been walking that back as well but we're not really sure how it's going to work and that's one of those things like they have they've he's announced these API things he's changed his plans he they tweeted from the Twitter Dev account some new regulations and I'm reading it I have no idea what's going on and I talk to people who should know better than me who should know more about this and they say that they have no idea what it means either so no one has has any clue what's going on if you were planning on building tools or building around Twitter I can't see why you would do that considering the lack of information oh no that we have now you you would move on and you would do something else and all of the action is on Mastodon I I maybe you aren't as a listener I am not as you know like again I'm taking a break from feed-based social media uh I feel my brain is healthier than it's been in a decade but all the action is on Mastodon right that's where the app developers are the platform is accelerating uh the underlying sort of fediverse boundaries are growing all that's that's where the activity is and Elon shutting down the API he's shutting down the follow graph so you can't easily move your followers to master them because of those API changes it's clear that he's feeling the Heat the problem is he is not directing his team at Twitter what remains that team with any particular strategy and of course what he's focused on is himself so that's the story from Casey and Zoe and platformer today we obviously Syndicate platformer so it's on our side as well but he called a meeting and said I have more than 100 million followers I'm only getting tens of thousands of Impressions what's going on the team apparently showed him internal data from Twitter along with Google Trends saying that last April he was at 100 out of a hundred and popularity that's the peak and today he's at nine and you didn't believe them and he fired the engineer who told him this information wow wow and it's like yeah dude like you were last eight like last April was fully ridiculous like if you over a call right yeah he was tweeting about conspiracy theories comedy is back every day was a new Elon Musk Twitter he was you know there was like a war Brewing but who's gonna own this cup now he just owns it like there's no conflict like Elon let me tell you something I also know users great stories are driven by conflict if you're like okay it's a story it's about a guy who trades stocks in Wall Street he gets in no trouble he plays it by the book and he's happily married to Margot Robbie like no one would watch this movie I'm just telling you the Lamb of walls like no one's watching this stuff you need conflict and he's out of conflict because all the conflict is now pointed he is pointed it at himself at Twitter he is in charge so no one's looking at his tweets because all he has less he can't promise to make changes no one's looking at his treats because of the lack of conflict or no one's looking at his tweets because the lack of people on Twitter to look at his tweets I think that's like a circle I can't tell you where that begins or ends like right it's kind of both right but that's that's how we all feel we just let a fire tweet and you don't get minimum 15 likes you do want to call the meeting and have everyone at Twitter ask answer the answer why why is the world this is social media why are my rights being violated and now Elon can do that I think I think there's at least 44 billion dollars worth of value in doing that yeah that's half the that's 22 billion it's just being able to call a meeting I will say this I was watching the Grammys and I was like I'm just like sitting on these bangers there had nowhere to go I just started texting like random friends do you think the Grammys sound like people like who are you where'd you come from because I had nowhere for them to go that's what Twitter was for me and now it's like my brain is healing that is Twitter though like if you said these things a lot of value in complaining about the sound engineer of the Grammys by the way San Andreas Grammy should be ashamed of himself it sounded like it sounded like they had an iPhone sitting in the middle it was a Staples foreign horrible um you know we had a story like years ago why the Granny's not good and how hard it is and it's like they've like whoever they fired that gun too yeah it's like a new guy he's almost killing after everybody want more room tone from the Staples Center so it's just like massive amounts back anyway my poor wife I was like do you hear all that Shimmer on the high end she's like I don't know what you're talking she's like no that's Harry Styles there's nowhere for this to go so he's firing the people he's complaining about his Impressions and then this to me is like the main thing so he wrote he'd rolled out these view counts mm-hmm and all the people work at Twitter like there's a reason we never did this what it's going to show most people is that most people don't look at any tweets like most people get no Impressions right the illusion of Twitter is the sense that everyone's looking at all your stuff all the time you add view counts you're just going to train people that the effort isn't worth it Elon doesn't believe it he has this quote this is going to show how much more vibrant the platform is than people think how alive it is he rolls up the view counts not only does it lead to a further drop in engagement because most people don't look at your tweets or most tweets don't get looked at by anyone it kills Elon because most people aren't looking at his either like his his view of Twitter is completely warped by his like reply Bots yeah so he got he's getting rid of the Bots he's adding in metrics and he's realizing like His World Is A Lie soon someone's going to tell him that the cars don't drive themselves it's all going to fall apart is this why he they did the API stuff where they're charging for it and and why we were having all the problems on Wednesday with Twitter like is is the attempt to kill the Bots part of that I would bet that it probably is related to that that that's why the stuff got deleted that someone was making changes to this that or the other thing but not directly not not intentionally yeah exactly right but even the API stuff so is the API stuff like is this idea really if I charge people for this free tool that helps engagement I'll make more money like I'll make money this is like when I was in my 20s if I was like I'm gonna buy the cigarette factory for 44 billion dollars yeah he is addicted to Twitter he thinks everyone else is addicted to Twitter and he doesn't realize that you cannot be addicted to Twitter right but but doesn't everyone do that so he's just got the brain I'm gonna charge her Twitter blue I'm gonna like your replies don't get ranked unless you pay for blue I'm going to charge your API it all all of it implicit Underneath It All is the idea that you have nowhere else to go everyone has Twitter we're going to buy this bar we're going to buy this club we'll make it see we'll fix everything that's wrong with it and we'll make it popular because we'll do the things we know what's good you cannot actually do that and if you do we're gonna buy these games every time we've all seen it we've all considered doing it maybe you are considering doing it again I mean Richard if you want to go in on a club I'm just saying we should have done it man we should have done it we could still do it just sell scissor vodka the only only vodka sold there can I read the scissor vodka Story one more time we can run it with AI it's easier it's perfect we could we could do it it could work I'm just going to read this to you it was a dark and stormy night Casey Newton the senior editor of The Verge was sitting at his this is Bing Bing wrote the story yeah he had a deadline to me but he had no idea what to write he'd already covered all the latest techniques and Trends but he felt like he needed to do something more something different something exciting Casey decided to take a break and have a drink he grabbed the bottle and poured himself a glass of scissor vodka he took a sip and felt a warm sensation in his throat he took another Sip and felt a tingling sensation in his brain he took another Sip and felt a surge of energy and creativity he felt like he could write anything he felt like he could do anything he wrote about scissor vodka how it was the best vodka in the world how could make anyone smarter faster stronger and happier he wrote and wrote and wrote until he filled several pages with his words he felt proud and satisfied I'm telling you this keeps going he had written the best story of his career the best story of his life he hit the send button and waited for the praise and admiration of his readers and editors was there meth in this fun like he waited and waited and waited but nothing happened he checked his email and saw no response he checked his phone and saw notifications he text his Twitter and Son Dimensions he checks his slacks and Sono messages he wondered if anyone had read his story he wondered if anyone had cared he realized how silly and nonsensical it was he realized how drunk and delusional he was he felt ashamed and embarrassed he felt stupid and foolished he felt like he had made a huge mistake he tried to delete his story but it was too late he tried to apologize it was too late he tried to explain but it was too late he had already sent his story to the entire world he had ruined his reputation and he lost his credibility he had cut through the night laughs I mean this is like the dark like they should shut it down I don't know how you beat that you can't that's that's that's it that's the top they've already there's nothing better we should I said I sent it to Casey last night he's like this actually kind of captures the sensation of publishing story drunkenly publishing stories he's like this is like this is what it's like to publish a story it is you cut through the night uh and that's I think also a useful summation of Elon on Twitter okay so that's Elon on Twitter pure chaos um I'm gonna quote again from Casey and Zoe's story because this is a great quote if you're a decoder listener which I'm not allowed to mention uh on this show but if you're a decoder listener you will recognize why I love this particular quote As the adage goes you ship your org chart said one current employee it's chaos here right now so we're shipping chaos very good very good but or charts bring me away from Twitter to Disney yeah former and now current CEO Bob Iger wrote In kicked out his hand-picked successor Bob chapek Bob and Bob crime he's laying off 7 000 people Alex I'm very curious who have thoughts on that but in addition to laying off seven thousand people what's my man doing he's restructuring his org chart he's putting all streaming in one division ESPN now its own division he's just like rebooting Disney because keep it rebooted at first he was like I'm gonna make it more like Tech and everybody's like no we hate this and so iger's gotten rid of all those people a lot of the people that he put in charge and is now like I guess fixing it attempting yeah I mean he I you get the feeling that jpac is was a useful villain right he changed a bunch of stuff and now I get to roll back and say I'm fixing it I'm part of the fixing it is firing 7 000 people that's a lot of people uh re lowering some targets the jpeg is set for streaming we should talk about that and then this big restructure out of his old restructure so Iger had a structure it wasn't this structure chapek changed it so that all the divisions rolled up into one guy cream Daniel right everyone hated this like Marvel lucasfilm everybody rolled up into this guy everyone hated it and now Iger gets to say oh I'm doing this thing you hate but it's yet a third different structure so he gets to get out of his old way of doing things without the pain of being the guy who broke it yeah very clever I'm if it were the start of the pen if let's just say in theory if it were the start of a global pandemic and you wanted to take a couple of years off of work and not be responsible for managing the global pandemic would you do anything differently than what bye-bye Chris does he just had a little sabbatical a little couple years sabbatical yeah and I think all of you will recognize that when I begin to look for my hand-picked successor at the verse so watch your backs I've learned something you're going to come back and then lay off 7 000 people and get a give us that zootopia sequel we've all been been eager for so we should talk about that he tiger said he interviewed on CNBC today he's following up the earnings but Alex take us through the actual earnings Disney plus added some subscribers in the United States and Canada it dropped a lot of subscribers internationally especially in India because I lost some Cricket rights what's going on here yeah I mean it's it's doing like I think across the board they're seeing that slow down that we were seeing across all the streaming right like the dust is settled people kind of know where they're gonna go and so they only added 200 000 subscribers in the United States they own they added actually what looks nicer Hulu added 800 000 ESPN plus added 600 000. well that that may be because they had the bundle packages now it's like they've pushed so many people to pick up the bundles so maybe you had Disney plus before but now you have all three because it's essentially three-year right right everyone's like demo period kind of expired and you're just signing up for the bottom yeah so you either which is probably why their growth was so close to flat or you got the bundle and now you have all three but they are also seeing they sound like they saw it I mean despite like kind of that bot that that flatlining and and in some cases little dips they they still increase Revenue by 13 like they're still making any hand over fists in that direct to consumer division which is a lot of that is streaming right but they lost a billion dollars yeah they lost a billion dollars and they promised they promise by the end of 20 fiscal 2024 they say don't worry Disney plus is going to be profitable which means we're probably going to see a big slew of cancellations they have so many TV shows and I don't think they've canceled really any of them or at least not loudly and publicly so I think a lot of these shows like if you really liked She-Hulk you probably should make sure other people watch it if you really liked Willow or um what's another oh my God you got to do like the K-pop Stan thing you got to just like stream the show over and over again yeah just well no you that doesn't work we saw that with Netflix people would do it do that on Netflix and it doesn't work because with streaming you can just go and be like oh this one user is the outlier who streamed it 12 times everybody else is streamed at zero like it's not like Nielsen I know Spotify hasn't figured this out but circus yeah Spotify hasn't figured it out but everybody but like streaming has definitely figured this out so I would not be surprised if this year we see just an absolute bloodbath in that like in that streaming slate and and a lot of stuff that people are really excited about not getting renewed not seeing a second season uh but they have like their Marvel and their Star Wars slates are both planned pretty far in advance like we know what's coming for the next couple of years on those two um properties so it's gonna be interesting what's funny is the things that we're hearing from Disney from Paramount from uh HBO they're all very similar like zazlov is kind of saying these same things I think Paramount and Showtime actually had this message the clearest is we're going to focus on the big mainstream hits and the other stuff right yeah not so much yeah Showtime's like all right it's the billions universe and that means we need a show called millions and a show called trillions this is real Young finance Pros then they're going to keep making billions and then they're going to make a new show called trillions presumably about very old Finance Pros so you kind of get to Young's you got the middle aged that you got then you got the old the old money right and then they're gonna do a Dexter sequel like they're just fully into all right we're doing IP franchises all the way around Disney has already been there obviously with Marvel Lucasville wants other stuff but they're now they're starting to expand it this is the other thing Iger said so in addition to saying okay I'm restructuring out of the previous restructure so we have Disney entertainment we have theme parks and we have ESPN those are three divisions not the old old structure right we had Marvel lucasfilm wherever so he like hybridizes the structure a little bit between him and jpeg and then he's like all right we gotta lean into our franchises we're gonna make a sequel to zootopia we're gonna make a sequel to more sequels to Frozen we're gonna do more toy stories you can say what you want about zootopia I mean that's a movie about a rabbit detective you could probably make 100 she solves crimes actually watch this to try and reduce police brutality that's a real thing um upsetting I'm just saying it's a it's a buddy cop show like you you can see how you can like zootopia forever you know yeah they made four lethal weapons it all makes sense in the end Toy Story ended it ended really really ended like it ended a lot and then they made light year and nobody watched it because everyone's like I know I got it I got the whole four movie Arc of Toy Story including one false end where you thought they were all gonna die they almost burned alive how do you keep that going how on Earth do you keep that going well they're toys the the idea is that the toys always continue so I guess we'll get the little kid maybe we'll get new toys I guarantee you they're gonna remake their first Toy Story but you can't just make it not like I should because the CD looks terrible now they should they I would buy that on Blu-ray if they re-render it and make it look better right now I would buy it I'm sorry I'm the problem it's me it's just like look at that Ray tracing wow I was just a Toy Story 4 is like a great move it ended that franchise like definitively ended that frame there's no opening to make a Toy Story five I haven't watched that much in a while they they decided to be sad and I don't want to be set yeah it's true picture movies are like what if this movie is about death if you thought about really diving into death with your toddler and it's like no dude no now you're talking about about death as well really but I should be like we're gonna make more movies about death uh and that's our strategy all right anime is going out with Disney lots of change over there I your Mastermind we got to put them on the scale the go90 scale of Doom streaming services right a lot of change Alex what do you think oh that number zero is alive 98 zero 100. for for Disney Plus Hulu is still super up at the air ESPN plus you guys can talk about that that's like a sports thing I don't ESPN plus is ruined by SEO it's 24 7 Kyrie Irving Flat Earth and that's why it's a zero uh no ESPN plus is great during football season because NFL Prime Time is on it and so I actually watch it once a week at least once a week but I would put that at a 45. Hulu has been at like between 50 and 70 its entire life but it's unkillable yeah it's like you can't end it like spiritually I think you lose a zero well it's like a it's a technical zero yeah right by all right are gone it's yeah it's a cockroach yeah you can kill a cockroach it's possible but it's hard yeah yeah but where are you for Disney Plus 10. 10. 10. it's like there's more chaos there than we can see right so it's not like it's like a 45 is the 10 likes it's not default it's not like definitely alive forever it's at 10. it's these movies got to be hits the you know the next two phases of Marvel can't be the horribleness like if Marvel keeps going the way that phase four went it's it's over like the new one's supposed to be really good Quantum Mania that comes out in a couple of weeks everybody who's seen it says it's like Magic we'll see it's magic magic all right I'm really excited whatever they just can't do the thing where it's like here's what you got to do between phases you got to watch 10 TV shows that add up to nothing I finally watched wakanda forever yesterday I went to Disney World I came back saw these layoffs and was like oh I hope nobody I met and got me on a ride that happened to the lady who who gave me a discount on my magic band don't fire her Bob she was great I don't remember her name that was her like last Act of Vengeance yeah but but yeah like I forgot what I was saying I completely forgot you were talking about oh yeah so I saw wakanda forever and I was super surprised because I didn't need to like pay like there were no weird cameos there was no like oh look it's blorbo from from blorbo too yes they're here to do this to us again where they're like in order to understand the next movies you must have a Disney Plus subscription so you can watch these five shows that will explain some like Arcane piece of lore that will be it's like none of this matter in the end I just did a bunch of homework and Wanda Vision was entertaining and all the rest of it was fine but none of it mattered and I didn't need to pay you for anything I feel like that's where they messed up because it felt like you did so everybody ended up watching TV shows they didn't like and they needed to be clear that you know you don't have to watch all those if you don't like Moon Knight you don't have to watch it it's just like a perfect Recreation of the comics experience where you're like oh I gotta go get all of these different Comics before the big thing and you're like no I don't actually the art sucks and it's stupid I'm just gonna like write for the trade paperback well you got it Ponder forever he's an Nvidia shield and a DM to Alex Grant's flexor it's sick in there got some good oh it's all Linux it's all Linux distributions wonderful Ancient Ancient expired copyright public domain yeah it's it's all it's all it's hard content all been in the public domain yeah Mickey's coming he's going to be in there soon uh Alex's Plex server oh has been at a zero in the go90 scale do trading services for a long time since 2000 news talk about in this section Nintendo there was big Nintendo Direct what's going on there they announced the release date for Zelda this is the longest they've gone between Zelda games and I know that I'm old because it doesn't feel that long but I guess if I was like 13 I'd be like oh thank God I was seven when that last one came out so they they showed off Zelda link is gonna drive a car it's gonna be really exciting they also announced the price in this weird thing where you can pre-order it but you need a voucher but why do you need to pre-order a digital game so it the it's seventy dollars but then you can get you can buy a voucher for fifty dollars yeah and uh SEC and another game so basically you can buy two games for a hundred dollars or you could buy just Zelda for seventy dollars okay okay that seems very confusing but I'm gonna do it because I love these games I need it I needed I need to go play it we just talked about this you don't have to do the homework man don't do the homework but that's an entertaining homework although I doubt there's any particular connection between these if it was entertaining it would be honest I am not biased it should be on the Dreamcast commentary uh and they they announced that Metroid Prime which was absolutely fantastic on the GameCube is finally it's getting its remaster it looks really nice and shiny having recently played Metroid Prime I'm gonna go against Sean who says oh yeah you can play it on the steam deck and it's wonderful it's not it's really kind of hard those controllers aren't made like the controllers are just totally different so this is going to be made for the switch it should be very smooth for people who are like old and nostalgic they'll be like oh it's nice but it doesn't look like butts and for new people to be like oh this is just a fun game is there any game that Sean doesn't think is the most playable and the most fun on the steam deck no we're gonna find one that's that's my mission if you have one like hit me up hit me up on on Twitter I'm the last person there I want to hear all about it she's hit the Avi limits with steam deck commentary and they also one one last thing they also are starting to roll out Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games on the switch which has been like a long time coming yeah can you buy a translucent switch now because if you can't then you can't really get the Game Boy experience the the 90s way yeah the see-through portable system yeah yeah I remember everything was see-through I hope the knife is good the next wave is bringing that back like the 90s and 2000s are back in like a small way like you're doing the glass backs on the phones anyway just take that pain off let me see the insides just let me show me the battery all right we're gonna take a break see your new phones are gonna come back let's talk about the OnePlus 11. got a little bit of lightning around coming that's all coming up next we'll be right back all right we're back Richard I'm calling on you one plus eleven I was at Disney World what happened yeah yeah Alice was Disney World she's she's hunting for igers the OnePlus 11 5G which is the most important phone to me in my life ever I don't care about anything as much as I do the OnePlus 11 5G uh to be specific which is a 699 dollar flagship phone is one plus it's moved from their mid-range to kind of Flagship they're trying to get the magic back remember a few years ago when OnePlus was really cool they gave you high in specs mid-range prices but now they just make phones everybody makes phones they're like Motorola's with different labels maybe a few more software updates the founder is off doing nothing yeah brutal that pun just hurt my brain it was great sorry Richard but the it's the Allison reviewed the OnePlus 11 5G they announced a bunch of new devices they have a tablet now they got uh earbuds of course and it seems to be different keyboard yeah yeah they have a mechanical keyboard maybe a little inconsistent camera but it's it seems pretty good in terms of like price and performance wise and maybe a reason for you to look at OnePlus again if you haven't been because you know obviously you got the pixel options now you've got so many other really good phones at that mid-range price point but it's maybe good enough for you to spend a little bit more for this particular phone well I'll just give you with Allison's I'll just leave you with Allison's pull quote from the review for everyone who isn't a OnePlus devotee I hesitate to recommend the OnePlus 11. OnePlus had a wisdom for a minute it was the Challenger brand and then Oppo Kind Of Swarm in took it back made it just more Oppo phones for the United States Carl left to do nothing and now it's like fine yeah they they make okay devices but is there any meaningful challenge to Samsung Market because this is like the thing right it's like you think the battle is Apple versus Android but the battle is really Apple versus Samsung and Google's like trapped in the middle and then on top of it let me talk about the top of the show Google has like an existential crisis in search like I don't know man like I this is like a weird spot for the Android ecosystem like either Samsung's pushing it forward or Google's gonna put take meaningful share and push it forward but Google's pretty distracted by saving its Core Business you end up in a strange place because you have this phone that has a camera that's not as good as Samsung or Google's because they can't do all the weird technology stuff they can't build better Hardware than Samsung they can't do better software than Google and so you're paying a lot for a markedly worse experience in at least a couple of ways right because you have to like they're competing with all of the resources of apple and all of the resources of Samsung and those are a lot of resources that most other companies don't have or their Sony and they're too busy making really good party speakers and not reaching out to Eli about those speakers so like it's it's truly I think it's a difficult place and OnePlus is is struggling but it's interesting that they release like the OnePlus pad this this new tablet and the keyboard I want to come back to the keyboard because I have a lot of questions it's just a rebranded kikron but they're doing their own switches and then they're saying it's got the part of the keyboard that you want to do your own of right right they're probably the Logitech sells like Cherry switches and so much you know Logitech does their own keyboards they're their own switches too now but some of their keyboards have other switches in them yeah they they do they do a whole gamut so it's kind of interesting I'll be surprised though if it's not just a rebranded knockoff of a cherry there's a lot of different people that are doing very similar switches so it's not really hard to be like we're gonna do it in a slightly different color slightly different change in the spring boom new switch Yeah from OnePlus it's got like a little Crystal dial on it but I think the thing that's really kind of upset me about it is that they're using a different they claim that they're using a different material for the keycaps themselves and they won't go into a lot of the details besides saying it's called marble mellow Marble Marble mallow marble mallow like marshmallow but marble Mallow there's just it's a new name I'm just looking at this keyboard it looks like the keyboard that you would be a shoot if you worked in a bank and I don't understand it yeah it looks I mean kikron makes really really lovely keyboards most people like one like this it's a 75 where it's got a full uh it's got a full Direction pad it's got a bunch of extra little bits but it doesn't have a full number pad so a lot of people like this size but I think most people have started to think of these big fancy keyboards of having really flashy colors and this is like no we're gonna go with the the Oppo way it's gonna be gray and red and yes fine have you heard of IBM in the 70s um some people love that look some people do I I didn't grow up wanting to be an accountant uh okay by the way the the OnePlus pad it's fascinating that people think they can make Android tablets happen again like Google is pushing at it there were some leaks of the nest tablet thing today OnePlus is at it they got that big camera on the back we'll see I just the idea that we're we're in for another round of Android tablet hysterics is very funny to me we've been down this road that we had you know you mentioned how the companies were getting kind of spicy with each other like about AI that was the last time we had companies really really talking about each other was when they're seeing like there might be a challenge to the iPad and then they all got smacked down they didn't do that anymore well keep in mind Steve Jobs is still around back then so he would get on the earnings call be like seven inch tablets they're for idiots I guess I guess that's the way I guess we're all printing that like here he goes right the headline um they don't they stop talking about one another for ages right they're all Frenemies they're all Coopers or whatever that word is right like and now with hope we'll see with search you know Microsoft is ready to be a little spiky over there but in tablets do you think like apple doesn't care it like barely cares about the iPad it's like here's another one I don't know it's what do you want they all look the same well like is the one plus one plus pad gonna scare Apple into carrying is the nest thing gonna scare up on the camera is the OnePlus pad gonna sell like who who is the customer there besides I guess one plus die hards people with children it's always people with children like can this thing run Disney pluses like honestly at this point tiger should just make a tablet in Solace people with kids like that's that's the market for these things and apparently pilots pilots love them but they all Buy iPad minis uh okay A little bit of a lightning round uh this is a weird one so uh meta wants to go buy within which makes Supernatural we've talked about a bunch of the show before FTC Lena Khan says no you gotta block it this is just like when you bought Instagram you're buying up on the VR game studios Supernatural is the app that makes uh not Gamers by The Meta Quest 2 right it's like the stats are astounding it's like this is what older people and what women buy they work out in VR and it's great I use it we've talked about a lot um FCC says no you can't buy up all the studios they go to court they lose they say they're going to appeal the court blocks their injunction deal closes anyway so now meta owns within they change the website to say it's all a meta company now but the FCC is still appealing I'm not sure what happens if they win that appeal they just like get kicked out like they're like well I guess we don't own you so we'll see but that happened but they have to sell it right or spin it back I don't know yeah the fact the FCC like lost they're going to appeal it's all very confusing um but anyway meta is just continuing to buy all the VR companies we'll see what that portends for Apple in the future Richard I added this one just for you the ads for Super Bowl Fox is all sold out zero crypto ads on this channel after it seemed like there was a crypto ad every five minutes last year during the Super Bowl after we had coinbase literally giving away money and they crashed their servers because too many people scanned the QR code and tried to sign up for accounts to get free crypto seems like everybody's out of cash now or in jail or going to jail or perhaps indicted and has their former Executives now testifying against them as as you see with FTX but yeah crypto.com and coinbase continue to exist uh apparently but they just don't have money like they used to they're not spent uh I think the executive that talked to sports Business Journal from Fox Sports said that some of these companies had reserved ads but the FTX obviously cannot um and the others backed out because you know Bitcoin just isn't worth what it used to be yeah uh and then lastly big leak from Chris Welch the man continues to just crawl around the air vents at Sonos he's in there right now speakers are coming spatial audio they're going to be called the era 300 and the era 100. Patrick Spence has said they're going to reset the bar in existing audio categories he's got a scoop on a second generation Sonos move the era 300 era 100 they're they had the codename optimo before air 300 designed for spatial audio and I know Sonos is going to be like it's not a gimmick I I can't wait to hear those things see if it's not a gimmick uh brand new designs we found documentation of speaker stands from sanus for these things they cost 220 dollars crazy uh but Sonos is like coming out the gate strong this year they're gonna have four new categories they've got these big new speakers focused on spatial we need to figure out codex support whether Apple music will support them all there's all these questions to be answered sure but they just had earnings and Patrick Spence in front of the show CEO is like no one's even competing with us there's no competition smart speakers or the holidays and we looked and it's true there wasn't any like No One released new speaker products no Google no Amazon no nothing new homepod is out he's like yeah whatever kind of wild yeah I think they see a hole in the market that's been left by these tech companies that got in and we're like yeah we're going to build better speakers and we're going to use algorithms and we're going to we're going to beat whoever is is in speakers because we don't know and don't care and now they're kind of retreating because it's a little bit harder than they than they thought they suddenly they their costs went way up at night they need to cut up back on these divisions and they're not building frivolous products anymore and Sonos says yeah so you want a new spark speaker welcome back to Sonos you you got one more room in your house what you gonna do uh I think it's exciting that event is on February 23rd I think we'll see I I think Sonos is leaning pretty heavily into space shuttles leading pretty heavily into Atmos kind of like lots of opportunity for them to kind of redefine this stuff at the same time you know how I feel everybody knows how I feel I think Atmosphere music is just like foolish so we'll see maybe they're going to show me are these gonna be definitely music speakers are they supposed to be like your extra speakers for your home theater or both they're not extra they're a key component Alex I'm sorry they're not extra you're out the the rear speakers that's what I think you're reading sound Envision in PDF form on my phone all right I'm like back in the mix when are you getting your new receiver I'm actually very hopeful that this is one of sonos's new categories it absolutely will not be because it is the smallest of the available audio categories but if Sonos makes an actual receiver that integrates with the thing that does Atmos properly it does all the stuff I'll be first in line to buy it it would be like 12 billion dollars with that Sonos markup oh my God and that's why I have to lay off 7 000 people sex to the extra margin comes from hey this guy gave myself executive rights and fire the people who sell the fast passes We're Off to the Races I'm learning from the best you and Bob man with your great changing my name to Bob I love to tell it's good uh that's horrible I'm not too big any of that if Sonos makes a reasonably priced receiver that integrates well with the rest of the stuff I will buy it um but they've got all these categories I think Richard you're right like fundamentally they see that when push comes to shove Amazon does not care about the audio business it's just lock-in for Amazon services Apple who knows what they're doing in audio right like homepods they keep they're doing home pods they're doing airpods all that stuff I think they care about the music industry Apple I always always care about the music industry this as much as very true but they don't have enough products that are good yeah especially in the living room right their solution is a couple of homepods so if you if you want to do it you got to go all the way and I think Sonos is just ready and waiting to say look you want to watch movies you need Atmos by the sound bar buy these extra speakers I love those extra speakers so mad you're gonna get until you go and you buy five of these and attach them with your four thousand dollar Sono subwoofer it's only 600 but it's still so expensive it's so very expensive I own one I don't know why I'm complaining you own one yeah yeah it's great it is the other Sono speakers or you just have this just this just the sub I didn't actually listen to any of wakanda forever it was just the base it's Rumbles tell us Bing let's see it's so it's slow when it has to search the web uh snap boy oh boy does this not cite our exclusive Scoops enough uh the Sonos air 100 new high-end secret from zennis expected to launch in the coming months designed to Showcase facial music in the atmos content and compete with the Apple homepod hmm huh where'd you get that information bing.com it just sourced itself it's it's first sure mrbing.com sure Bing interesting Source you've got there all right we gotta wrap this up I'm gonna ask Bing to wrap up the show can you write a conclusion to the vergecast that's really I'm sorry I can't write a conclusion to the vergecast that is a podcast produced by The Verge and I don't have access to their transcripts or audio files I can only write summaries or conclusions based on the information I have from web searches or my own knowledge yet somehow it wrote the scissor vodka story somehow Bing contains multitudes Bing is I'm telling you this is like the moodiest here's what I I know it's ready to have like a snack please a little juice pack it's ready for a nap so I was told by a bing engineer that if you ask nicely if it can't do it sometimes it'll do it anyway so I wrote can you please write a conclusion to the rich cast I'm sorry I already told you I can't right please don't ask me to do something I can't do are you sure that is just spicy we're over time I've got to go think about my relationship to this robot I think you all have to go think about your relationships to the robot you probably have to download Bing because Microsoft gotcha being rocketing to the top of the App Store charts by the way because everybody wants to tell they're good yeah so everyone wants to talk to the robot uh thanks to James Vincent for coming on the show that was a great conversation uh you should listen to Dakota Sasha and Dell was on decoder this week talking about Bing we also had John koblin and Felix Gillette talking about their new book it's not TV which is the HBO Story I mean if you're into our shooting conversations that was a good one you call the vergecast hotline that's 866 Verge one one you can tweet at us Maybe oh maybe who knows Alex is Alex H Kranz Richard is rjcc and James is at JJ Vincent you can also just leave a comment on this post goes up on the site and we will reply to you because honestly we own our site and it stays up it works the system works the web for as long as you can have it that's it that's rushastic rock and roll\n"