It's time to review the highlights I'm joined by my co-anchor Snoop and what up? Doh Snoop number one has to be getting the new iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence at T-Mobile. Yeah, you should hustle down a T-Mobile like a dog chasing the squirrel chasing the night. That's a nice analogy Snoop. On the highlight number two a T-Mobile family is can save 20% every month versus the other big guys very impressive. Take it away Snoop.
Head to T-Mobile.com and get the new iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence on them. Now drop that jingle. See how you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash the way Apple Intelligence coming fall 2024. Hello and welcome Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Face Computers. In the trademark Vergecast matrix of wearable stuff. I don't want to start with a swear word but if you know, it's usually a swear word. Hi, I'm your friend Neil, I Alex Trans is here.
I'm also wearing my augmented reality glasses now. Because they pass light through them? Yeah, they pass light through them and everything is augmented now. I can see. It's been augmented into focus. Yeah, I got you. David Pierce is here. Hello. And Alex Heath is here. Alex, are you actually wearing a face computer? I am. But you'll never know. It's big week in tech news. Quite a lot going on. It was a meta connect.
Alex was there along with Kylie Robinson and J Peter's. Alex, you wore the Orion AR glasses, the demo. You interviewed Zuckerberg. We got to talk all about that. There's tons of other news out of meta connect. And then there's chaos at OpenAI, which a company for being as successful as it is remains mired in nothing but pure chaos. We could just snip that and play it every single week on the Vergecast. Just that thing you just said is like it's just a universally true statement at this point.
Yeah, we have to talk about that. And then we have lightning round. Unsponsored. Still. I have walked into rooms at this company and demanded why the lightning around is unsponsored. Was anybody else in the room? No one else was in the rooms. This is the I'm getting. I'm working up to the final result. But you walk into a room, you know, where Eater is having a staff meeting, demanding the lightning round be sponsored.
And they're like, I don't we're doing a roundup on cakes. Like get out of here. I'm working on it every day, closer to the goal. Okay, let's start with meta. Alex, you wore the Orion. I think the Orion is the thing to talk about. They've been working on this for 10 years. Reality Labs burning billions of dollars a year. They did it. They made AR glasses. But you can't buy them and they cost $10,000. Kind of. Yeah, you can't buy them. So they are glasses in the sense that you can put them on.
And they work to a degree. I wrote this in the story and I had a hard time writing about this because I've been getting a lot of almost products put on my face recently, like just coming off the snap. We do have a series of photos of you that is incredible right now. Yeah, I need to make like a photo book to just have it home and look at it and go like, that's a cry for help. Me wearing all these face computers. Yeah, it's a really impressive demo. I think
meta is doing the demos because it knows it's impressive. But it's not a product. So I mean, I wrote this in the story. It's not vaporware. Like it's very real and it's not a simulation. It's not totally on rails. I used it for probably a total of two and a half hours between the two days we were shooting. And I had enough opportunity to go off of the beaten path a little bit and make sure I wasn't just getting piped in a complete simulation. And it's a real working piece of kit.
But it's not a product. And that says a lot about the state of AR and these glasses. And at the same time, I finally feel like I've been running about this for so long, banging my head against the wall and being like, what am I doing? This is never going to happen. And I finally feel after this week that AR glasses I may actually want to use are not a pipe dream. Yeah. I want to argue with you about the definition of the word vaporware, which is very important to me personally.
And holograms. And holograms. So let's start. That's Alex. I got in a real fight about what the word hologram screens this week. We'll get it in promise. I promise. But let's start with what it is, right? Because AR glasses, you're correct. The industry has been talking about them for a long time. Magic leap promised AR glasses years ago. If you will remember their founder, claimed that he could hack the GPU of your brain. This is a real thing. And that was in reference
to a display technology. Because this is the challenge. How do we build a display that you can look through? That can augment reality? Have the processing power to see reality and augment it, have connectivity, have a battery that and no one can solve these problems. Most of all, the display. The thing doesn't exist. The thing that you look through to perceive the world and then layer information over stuff, you could maybe solve battery and processing and all this stuff
in your way in a backpack. But the actual display technology to make it good has more or less not existed in any realistic way. And magically you've had to give up on their idea and they try another thing. And HoloLens was another thing with a tiny field of view. And there's a long list of things with bad field of view. And it seems like that's the thing that I solved most of all here. Yeah. As a quote that really stuck out to me from the product lead when I was getting my demo,
was that the display was a scientific breakthrough problem they had to solve. And now they're in the engineering problem solving phase of making these glasses work at a price point that people can actually buy. And that really stuck with me. You're right that the display is the hardest part. The distinction between AR glasses like these in the Vision Pro or the Metacrest is that yes,
you can do mixed reality in the Pro and the Quest in the Vision and the Quest. But what they're doing is fully enclosing your face in a computer, piping video and mixing all that in the displays. These are literally just these glasses Orion are letting light in their actual glasses. And so the challenge there is much different. And Meta has a lot of good ideas here. And they also, I think, realized that the specific optical stack that they went with for Orion was just
in its like, it's bookably hard to manufacture. And it's these lenses are made of silicon carbide, which is also used in like space. It's used in EVs. It's rimmels. It's like you use for cutting tools. It's really like a giant crystal. And so it's also used for wedding rings sometimes. So basically it's like having two fake diamonds on your face. Yeah. And they were talking to me about this in this like challenge of the yields on this. It's like, yeah, you have to
cut the crystal perfectly. He's like, and there's not enough of it in the world. So we're growing crystals. We're growing like big ass silicon carbide. I'm sorry. The image of Mark Zuckerberg walking into the basement is layer looking at his like crystal farm and a haze of like purple smoke. And me like, I will conquer the world. Thought maybe like, I'm go get it, Mark. Yeah. Like, yeah. Very distinct. But you have to be that person to do this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And that's another thing of all this that we'll get into. This is like, I think this is a device that only Meta could have built in a way that they can show to the world because for a lot of reasons that are because everybody else would expect it to ship. Yeah. Like everybody else does hardware more often. So we'd be like, okay, but when? I think if Meta was not a founder mode company to the fullest extent, this thing would have been killed a long time ago. So can I read you? I just
want to read you a quote from Ben Thompson who writes a news that are called Shrekery. He tried on Orion and he just said this thing that it just made me start laughing a lot. And I'll explain why it made me laugh so hard. Here's a clip. The difference from the quest and he's talking about Orion. The obvious limitations that display particularly well resolution felt immaterial.
The difference from the quest or vision pro is that actually looking at reality is so dramatically different from even best in class pass through that holographic video quality doesn't really matter. Even the highest quality presentation layer will pale in comparison to reality. Yeah, dude. I mean, this is very funny. He's presenting this as like a, right? And it's banned and that's how he writes and that's fun. But if you'll recall, my review of the vision pro
was looking at display sucks. Like this is the end of the road for video pass through. If you want to put a screen in front of your head in a VR headset and then do camera-based pass through, this is as good as it will ever be and there's nowhere near good enough. At the time, many people disagree to that. I believe that I have been proven to be correct to have the value of the vision pro over time. Still not pleased with myself that I gave it a
seven. Seven out of ten. So good. But like this is the thing, right? Meta built the displays that grew the crystals Zuckerberg is like, I'm spending the money. I can't be fired because I own super voting shares of this company. Here's, here it is. I made the displays. When you say it's not a product, did he make the rest of it? Like, is the software good? There is an OS. Right. So I guess I'll just quickly explain like how we got to where we are. They started developing this about 10
years ago. This is like Zuckerberg's big bet to maybe control the next computing platform. If you buy into the idea that face computers are made, that in 2022, it became, I think everyone remembers the year of efficiency. Meta stock was not doing as well. They were cutting back budgets and they decided looking at how expensive it was going to be to create Orion. I'm told that the cost of build is somewhere around $10,000 per pair. And that the display stack, especially the lenses, the silicon
carbide was just not something that would scale. They decided to make it a prototype internally. And then there was debate after that of, okay, do we show it to the world at all? Is it good enough? And I mean, a thing that stuck out to me that BOSS, the CTO, told me was like, we just, we just didn't think this was going to work at all. When we set out to build this, we thought maybe a 10% chance we actually get to a working device. And I think he literally said I was just like,
holy shit, it works. And I think they were amazed that it works. And so they started in earnest on the software stack like three months ago, deciding that they were going to show it off at connect. So it does have an OS, they have pretty concrete ideas, especially on the interaction elements of it, which we'll get into. The software is bare bones. They've got some demo apps. They had Instagram, you and I did a call over Messenger, Neely, that got a web browser. But these are like the early
primitives of how you would bring 2D experiences into 3D space. It's like a, it's like Vision Pro. It's like a floating pain. I think the work they're doing now that they have a working kit is in the next couple of years. How do you actually make uniquely 3D augmented type interfaces? Which is like you just have to have the thing on your face. You have to be able to use it. And for the longest time, this hasn't been something that even resembles an actual pair of glasses.
Like the thing they showed me that it was even like in 2022, it had like a backpack. I mean, it was just the iteration they'd done even in just the last couple of years is pretty remarkable. Yeah. So yeah, the software had enough ideas in it to where I went, okay, they have ideas of where this is going. It's still super rough. But like the AI stuff, especially, it's compelling.
What other do you get to actually do in the headset? Yeah, we did web browsing video calling basic kind of Instagram stuff, calling in a 2D HD pane, which like Neely, beamed in that way. And I could see him. He couldn't see me because they, there's all these things
in a rhyme that they just turned off because they decided to not make it a product. Like they have inward facing cameras that could potentially map your face to an avatar to show someone and they just haven't turned off because like they're not, it's not being used for that now. Yeah, but they could also just look like garbage. Yeah. So we did that. Some of that employees came in as avatars like floating, like think of the horizon quest avatar style.
But legs, legs, legs and like full body scale across the world. $10,000 legs, yeah. And then we did like a coat. They have their hyper realistic kind of uncanny valley codec avatars. Someone called in as one of those as well. And then there were some games and the games were actually, you know, I've done a lot of really kind of, I would say just gimmicky AR games in my career and the games were actually decent like the interactions because they've nailed
a lot of the interaction elements and input elements of the glasses. The game experience was was actually surprisingly good. And they have some connected ones where like you scan a QR code. You're in this pond game immediately with someone else wearing the glasses who just scanned it. And that's how I did it was Zuckerberg in the video. You can see on all of the Virgis channels. He beat me, of course, in pond. Did they have a laser tag game? That's my AR dream.
Yeah, that would be cool. They had this kind of space invaders-esque game where your head was moved the ship and the bands, which we'll talk about, was the lasers for the ship. So here's what I'm curious about. They've built a lot of stuff in the quest, right? Like they've taken Android. They've built an entire operating system. They have a store. A lot of that is complete. And I've always assumed based on what Mark and others have said is that they're doing all that work
there and that form factor and that lets them build the software experiences. And then they're building the Ray bands and the other form factor. And then Orion is like the goal. Are they using any of the stuff from the quest? Like any of the user interface gestures? Is it Android? Yeah, it's Android-based. It's a similar kind of app launcher UI. The thing with the app launcher though that's different is like it's much more minimal and your
finger gesture brings it up and then takes it away just as quickly. They're very different products. I mean the avatar was the same as what you would see on a quest game. But I'm just getting it. Zuck has laid out the idea that the meta-ray bands are on one side of the spectrum and the headset is on the other side where this is not the right form factor but I can do everything in it. And the ray bands are the right form factor. I can't do anything in
them hardly. And in the middle are these glasses. These products are going to converge towards the glasses. So it just seems interesting to me that they haven't used all the stuff from the quest because that was the plan that they sort of articulate. Well, like I said, they started doing the software for this like three months ago. Sure. And I will say the coolest thing, David, to your earlier question that we did was this meta AI thing where they laid out all these ingredients
first, moving on a table. They gave me the prompts which means they tuned it a little bit, right? But there's just a guy in the background. No, I missed a round with it to know that it was actually it was a model running. But it wasn't Tom Brady being like, all right, smoothie. Yeah. But it was like, I asked it to make a smoothie. I think green and Senate popped up like a recipe pain above me with I could like click through the different steps. Can I just quickly be the
the turd and the punch bowl on this particular demo? Because I've seen a bunch of people talking about this particular demo. And I am so spectacularly unimpressed with that demo. And I would like you to tell me why I'm wrong. So first of all, if you go look at that demo, every single thing on that table says what it is with big ass letters. And you know, it's a really easy thing to do. It does. The bag of dates says dates in big ass letters. And the bag at the box of matcha says matcha in
big ass letters. Like those are not hard computer problems to solve. It recognized to find out that you're listening to this in your car. I want you to know that right now Alex Heath is scrolling through a picture to confirm or deny that the bag of date says dates on it. There are two things on the table that don't say in words what they are on the box. It's the banana and it's the pineapple. And it identifies the banana, which is again, a really easy thing for a
computer to do. And it misses the pineapple entirely. Again, I'm just I'm just putting this out there. If you're listening, you know, when you're on a Google Meet call with someone and their face instantly goes to I'm browsing the web face. I've never seen anyone move to I'm browsing the web face as fast as Alex. Well, okay, you're right. So David, big box that says dates on it is not a hard computer problem to solve. David, so the pineapple it missed in the video I did was
Zuck. It got it right the first day I did it. Okay, that's good. That's encouraging. So you still have the two most distinctive fruits that you could have possibly picked. I'm just saying this demo is the easiest possible version of this demo. And still it gives you a recipe that involves not everything on the table and a bunch of stuff you don't have on the table. So I get to the end of that demo and I'm like, what problem did we just solve? David, I fully agree with your
your big point. Like, yes, there's a lot of smoke and mirrors here. The bar is also low. That what they were trying to communicate is like, oh, what happens when you have the visual AI in the Ray bands with a display? And so what I'm talking about is not the fact that it recognizes everything right or wrong. It's just this idea of like that visual AI with a display. And then, oh, I can actually like, I don't have to like just listen to the recipe. I can see it
and I can move it around and I can make it big. That was cool. The thing in the demo where it popped up above it saying what each thing was, I actually thought was like, that's a really cool little bit of UI that it was like, this is the cacao. Never mind that there was a box that said cacao right underneath the label. But still, like, I actually thought the UI was very cool for what amounted to a not particularly impressive problem. So looking at it as like, here is how you do
this, I think is actually very clever. I just was so like there are so many people were like, oh my god, the smoothie thing. And it's like, did we actually do anything here? Also to make a smoothie, you just dump everything. I was going to say like, yeah, like that's the blender. It's just a technique here that the AI is going to walk you through. You hit Paul's a couple times and then you hit. Should have showed us you make bread.
So on this smoothie thing just really quick, I kind of freaked out not because of how crazy I thought it was. It correctly identified a pineapple the first time, David. They had been doing all these little Easter eggs for me throughout my, I spent like a full day at meta and I'd done a bunch of other demos before this. And they were like dropping little things all throughout my demos. The text that came up in the glasses was like an employee being like, hey, I've got the scoop for
you on the next AR glasses. I need to go like step out of the room to like, not get caught. And then they by the time I got to the smoothie, I do, I make smoothies every morning. And so by the, I thought I was like, did they, did they have cameras in my house? Like, I got to the point I just turned around to the room because there's like 12 people in the room. And I'm just like, are you guys like watching me at home?
Are you listening to me on my phone? Just saying it to your network. Yeah. Yeah. It was the smoothie thing felt special. And so I was actually very disappointed to see that everyone got this smoothie demo. So I want to come back to whether the demo is real or fake in the debate about what the word of paper where it means. But you talked about the control. Yeah.
The wristband several times. Let's explain that real quick first because there's a part of this where the, the neural wristband is the most ready to go product, which is fascinating in and of itself. Kind of the coolest I think. Yeah. It's done. It's one part of the dream for sure. It's very clear that the band is done. I also know this because they're releasing a pair of glasses with a very small heads up display. It's not full. They will use the band. I'm pretty sure
next year. It was very clear that the band is done. And that's why I spent more time in the story than I originally thought writing about the band. Also because it was genuinely, I mean, I think I said this in the video. It was one of the coolest experiences with a new piece of technology I've ever had because there's no calibration. You just, you put it on. You go through the gestures. And it has this haptic feedback in the band that kind of reinforces when you're doing it correctly.
I did that for like 10 seconds. And I was just flying through the thing. And to the point where I had to take them off at one point and put them back on and like go back through this setup. And I didn't even, I just did it on my own. And like it, it just clicked so fast. And it's so precise. And yeah, it uses EMG, electro-miography. And it's not reading your thoughts, but it's interpreting neural signals through the movements of your wrist and translating those into input in the glasses.
And met a bot, a startup that we have covered extensively. I believe Adi covered this even before they sold to Facebook. This was like in 2019, Control Labs. And it's this tech. And it's really powerful. I think they've stumbled onto something here that I haven't seen for headsets, which is how do you control them without putting your hands out in front of you? You know, like I used
the spectacles, which rely on just hand tracking the week before. And I was thinking when I was like flying to Meta the next week, like in my airplane seat, it's like, you're not going to stick your hands out like in an airplane seat to control your glasses. Well, North glasses did that too, right? They had like a ring that would be used to control it. It was like a joystick on a ring. Yeah, it wasn't as cool. Yeah, but this is like moving your hands out in front of you.
This is like hyper precise click-like input that you can do with very, very small hand gestures in your pockets or behind your back. And I just, I mean, I like audibly gasped when I started using it. This is like cool technology we've seen for ages, right? Well, control labs has been around. Yeah, like control labs, we saw we've seen like horrible products from small startups using this stuff before, but it's also like just regularly used in prosthetics now, particularly like hand
prosthetics and arm prosthetics to give that movement. So it's like, it's really cool to see it come to consumer products. Yeah, I'd never seen EMG in a consumer products. So it was, it was really cool. One in 2014 called like the frog or something. Does nobody remember this? No. I like, I swear that there was a real bomb. Yeah, we were like, that's my face right now. Alex, the thing you said in your story that most got me was the the moment where you're,
like you had your hands in your jacket pockets and you're controlling the thing. And that's the moment where you're like, oh, this is obviously the correct answer for this. And I think I'm fascinated by the whole kind of kit that they put together where it's the it's the glasses. There's the wireless compute puck that feels like you put it in like your jacket pocket or your backpack or back pocket or whatever. And then it's the band. And I think at least for now, that strikes me as like
the exact right three parts in the right way. I think like the vision pros cable thing is wrong. The only hand motions that the cameras can see in front of your face is wrong. Like I honestly believe met I got that part of this thing like exactly correct. And it just feels like you instantly are like using it in a way that feels way more natural. Then even like Nealize experience with the vision pro where you like you you still have to sort of keep your hands on like the
front plane of your body and in view. And that is just an amount of thinking that you don't have to do with this. And that feels much better. Yeah. I totally agree. I want to talk about the puck just I guess on the band though to what meta hopes is that over time the band becomes its own platform in that it interfaces with appliances it interfaces with your car other gadgets. And the idea is like this is probably a 10 to 15 year out thing. Honestly for it to really you know interfaces with your
car. Yeah. So the idea is like you're walking around with these glasses you look at your car. And you want to start the engine as you're walking up to it you do a little tap because it sees that you're looking at your car the band is connected. There's an API you're logged in and you turn your AC on or you turn this is the idea of a man who can grow crystals in the basement. Yeah. Well it's honestly it's there's several leaps to get there. It's not like the ecosystem of it all
will be tough to develop until their scale with these glasses. But it's pretty obvious to think about okay if I'm wearing contextually you know spatially wear glasses at all times and I'm walking around my house and I look at my thermostat and I want to change the setting. Why can my band not because it's all connected why can my band not adjust the thermostat. And that's that's the idea they have. I think it's why I can't turn reality into a bitmap display with windows and a mouse.
Yeah with with a camera and a controller and good enough processing you can get a pretty long way towards that. Yeah. So people will see the band soon like in the like next year. And I got to do an update real fast. Yeah. I found the band. It was called the myo. It cost $200. They first started reporting on it in 2013 came out in 2016 and you were at like on the middle of your four. Oh sure. Yeah. To control your your laptop. And also to keep this sweat away from
you while you play tennis. Yeah. It's so ugly. And I remember this thing. I tried this thing. The thing looks like a ball of angles. It really does. And it uses EMG trends. Yeah. Yeah. It used EMG like like that particular technology the EMG technology has been around a while. We've seen it and other stuff. But it's always like been kind of nobody's gotten the software part of it right. And the form factor. It looks like a fit. Yeah. Yeah. Like this thing is not bulky.
And it and it just. Yeah. This one's cool. Did you have to wear it tightly around your wrist? It's tight. But it's not like like there there are sensors that indent a little bit into your skin. But it wasn't like uncomfortable. I wore it. I left the the demo room with it still on to go interview Zuckerberg. And like they came running after me. I'm like you still got the band on. Like keep running. Like please let us keep that. So if we're talking about you know the three parts
of this I guess on the puck. I just like David I agree with you that this feels like the right combination for now. They obviously don't want the puck to be in the picture long-term. Sure. But I think we're a long way away from that. Yeah. They made the decision which I think is the correct call is that they want the glasses to be as light as possible and to not burn your face which is you know what I've experienced a lot not literally burning but just they get really hot.
And so they made the decision to offload most of the app logic onto the puck. They invented their own Wi-Fi protocol. And it has to be 12 to 13 feet max away at all times where the glasses just don't work. And we call it a puck and not a computer. I mean why do they call them glasses and not a computer? Yeah. Is it a circle? Yeah. It's like it looks like one of the big like iPhone brick chargers you could like put on the back of the iPhone. It's like MagSafe.
Like a big ass anchor. Yeah. It looks like you could put it in your back pocket but you want to wear a belt. Okay. I could put it in my back pocket because I have huge back pockets but yeah I mean the idea is like is Shenko's just learned? Is it worth flex? Yeah. I know you live in LA but like how bad is it gotten over there? It's pretty bad. Yeah. So the puck is the right trade off to make because these glasses only weigh 98 grams whereas the Vision Pro is like 5, 6X that. And like I said I
were them for two hours and I never felt like uncomfortable. And if anything about the two hours I was informed as we were wrapping like you know there's a bunch of met up employees in the room. I think I was the second journalist ever to try them. I've also written about these extensively so they were really like on edge and they towards the end like I took them off and I could just hear everyone like breathe a sigh of relief and they were like you just broke the record for longest
demo. Actually the longest continuous wear of them at two hours were like yeah we thought they would just like crap out by now. Was there a battery indicator or anything? No, no there wasn't and they didn't swap them out or anything. That's cool. Yeah. Okay you wear glasses. How heavy versus the one you're wearing now which seemed fairly light. Like you notice but like I have a pair of chunky LA glasses that honestly felt in the same ballpark. It wasn't too heavy because like it was only
ears. It was just those ear pieces. No no pressure on the ears. I mean if anything it's a little in the front ear face but and the thing that struck me was you know they told me definitively like the frames will be half as thick in the consumer version. Okay wait that's it that's my cue. Are you sure they're really good? Okay so just describe the product that you saw which is a very impressive demo right lots of people saw the demo everyone is suitably impressed.
Great. The thing that they accomplished that no one else has been able to accomplish is getting that display to work in that form factor. 98 grams on your face two hours of battery life you can look at reality through the lenses and it will put from what I understand labels above boxes of cocoa. Yeah. That's wonderful. Mark Zuckerberg and Paik Pong with you they had right they they've
iterated it and developed the existing EMG control band. We put a computer in a giant battery and our sending signals from it wirelessly to something else challenging because I got to do it in real time but right a thing that existed we put it all together in a product and we sell it far far away right like I'm giving them credit for a bunch of stuff some stuff they iterated some stuff they bought some stuff they had to build from scratch and spend billions of dollars that
basically no one else has managed to crack yet all great. It's a long way from here to there. Three years. So that's their promise and so like you know the thing I would say is like it's a vapor till it ships and meta has the extraordinarily opportunity to show a thing that isn't shipping right like I they're all proud of it you can see they're bursting with pride they
in particular built a display technology they can demo for two hours with a variety of people doing stuff that no one else has been able to do magically hack them GPU of your brain I think is the closest to this and they had people sitting down next to a box the size of a refrigerator and they couldn't ship it. What is the the and meta doesn't have to do that right they're selling the quest they make a bunch of money selling ads they got Kristen Bell being an AI voice that they
have a whole business that's running they can subsidize this thing. It's still vapor in my opinion like they have to ship it they're just able to be confident that they've gotten this far but it's unclear to me what this actually looks like as a product because I sincerely
doubt it will have a wireless compute puck and like once they start shipping the neural wristband it won't take on a life of its own in some other way and it will be completely divorced from the quest ecosystem there they're just like there's a set of unanswered questions here that I think
it's very tempting to pre-answer or imagine and that honestly is the fun part and I'm excited to do the senate that with all of you but it's also like three years a long time a lot of things can change in three years and a lot of other things have to go right like the lenses in your story
they're planning to ship regular lenses right they're going to go from silicon carbide to glass well they wouldn't tell me the material and the truth is that they're parallel pathing like four or five different options so there are but if your big innovation is the display and you're like we
have four options to bring this display to mark you actually have them picked I think you're being simplistic when you say display because the display is the projectors the waveguides and the lenses the lenses specifically are what they can't manufacture in a cheap enough way at scale so the lenses
will be different the projectors are on the path of what I saw going to be the same kind of technology they invented them you know from scratch the waveguides the same they wouldn't tell me what the lenses are not because I don't think they don't know necessarily but because they haven't fully
decided because they're locking these things in on like a timeline that is aggressive but also they don't want to speak before they like if they would have said you know let me back up like they decided to not ship Orion two years ago so the timeline for this hardware stuff is farther
out they when they when they say you know this is coming in a few years it's not like we have not set anything up for this to happen in three years they have they're on a believe me the heads will roll if there is not a consumer version of these air classes in a few years but those are the stakes
the stakes are we are rather we're all double clicking on cars do you know see what happens or heads will roll like I don't want to try away from the stakes yeah I the part of me that says it's great to imagine how these products might work especially products that are meant to
deliver AI is a new platform that replace smartphones on balance I don't believe you know that probably doesn't work is like the right answer and the fact that they got the display to work which no one else has ever achieved as far as I can tell is incredible now comes like an incredible
hard part okay but let's talk about these lenses though because like the lenses is part of the magic of these things right like they they went with this really expensive product to do this to have the best light refraction and stuff and that's because that material exists in the world I mean
it doesn't a very little of it exists in the world they usually make it all but like they have to do all of that now they're going to have to go to a whole different thing we presumably would have a lower price but similar qualities and that seems not like an engineering but like a science
problem and that seems like a big science problem for them to have I don't think they see it that way I think the sure they don't yeah I I kind of agree with you I mean look here's what they told me the consumer version will be the frames will be about half as thick projector technology the
projector technology will be very similar will be in line with what I saw the way of guides will the field of view which was 70 degrees which is super wide will be slightly smaller but not like dramatically and the puck will exist the band will exist like it's just the lenses that they I think
are looking at a few options and they don't have to make the call right now so they're not committing to it and on the why they're not using silicon carbide and why they did it in the first place is they told me they had hoped at the rest of the industry whether it was other companies doing
our headsets or even the EV industry for example which hasn't grown in the last five years I think as everyone thought it would maybe five years ago which is when they began the manufacturing of Orion and Ernest they thought the rest of the industry would go to silicon carbide and
build up the intramanies of scale with them and they ended up being the only company that was printed through this this is a really interesting bet right you think Apple and Google and Samsung are all going to go forward invest in technology and you'll just you'll catch the tailwind and that's
not happened yeah they thought economies of scale would make silicon carbide more efficient and less cost later produce and that didn't happen I mean boss told me 90% of the cost is the lenses so yeah because it's like having two diamond rings on your face yeah I'm just I'm coming back to
the thing no one has solved is the displays so whether the lenses are the key element of the displays or just they happen to have a lot of silicon carbide and they use them this time like I don't I'm curious to know like how much of the thing that they demoed is down to that lens because everybody's
vision is the same right we're gonna put glasses in your face you're gonna look at the world we're in a layer digital information over the world and then you're gonna be able to take action on it this is Apple's vision and they couldn't build it so they built the vision pro and if Apple is like
we can't make it good enough on a timeline to sell here's a VR headset that fakes it meta doesn't have to do that right meta's business is good enough to keep funneling money into this R&D project I think I think I'm curious to read on zuck wanting to show it yeah because I think
he he was just having the time of his life yesterday that I connect like showing up all the toys that he's built and like how far ahead of both Apple and Google in various ways there were a lot of shots at Apple and Google and I can't wait me like you and I have paid a lot of attention to
these companies this year and have talked about this would you bet four or against Apple having something that looks and works an awful lot like Orion and is just as expensive to make in existence in their offices right now I would say they probably have 500 variations of something that looks
and works exactly like Orion and Apple is not the kind of company that shows off science projects like this at all they just won't do it they've talked about it right I mean like Tim Cook in the lead up to the vision before the vision pro existed Tim Cook was like I'm making glasses like I'm
been a everything that he ever described was Orion so I think zuck loves the fact that he showed off the thing that Apple has been describing for years well before Apple was ready to do it I do wonder like when Apple's like we need chips they go to TSMC and they're like we're going to buy
all the chips we're going to build you a factory corning but it's you are we don't want to own it we just want to build it for you so we have the capacity for it you run it we're not putting that on our books like that's the level that Apple makes investments at and I I don't think they were
able to pull off this form factor and even with the vision pro the form factor devices are like now in retrospect like ludicrous right like the battery pack all the stuff right the hand tracking and actually you know even the Orion right that uses your eyes for the pointer still feels
a bit missed to me that's still overloading in input within outputs I disagree because of the band the eyes when they're your drag and not your click it's and the click is not sticking hands up it works pretty well like I I thought the same thing with the vision pro
when you if you try Orion at some point I'd be curious to hear how you think when you try it because the eye tracking was was surprisingly good with the band when you were having like the conversation with Neely were you able to also do other stuff at the same time like yeah
because I'm just curious like how that works if you're like looking at him and then you need to move something over here and that means you have to drag it so you have to look away from him no and potentially awkward way you could stick your hand out and pinch it and drag it or you could glance at it really quick tap your fingers together so to oh because it does hand tracking too it does hand tracking and it will merge hand tracking with all of it anytime you put your hands up smart yeah
well the reason I brought brought all this up is like Apple solved a Apple punted on the big problem when we just lay problem and then tried to solve a bunch of the other problems early show you what a bunch of the other problems could look like if they were solved like hand tracking like windows
and space spatial compute all this stuff but they couldn't solve the display problems that you had up with the vision pro even in the compromise state of the vision press form factor meta has solved the display problem at least we think in a way to cost $10,000 and we have yet to see how they
will solve the rest of the problems and that is kind of just an interesting place I agree here's the company that could not solve the display but they shipped the product like the operating system and the app model and the blah blah blah and then here's the company that solve the display but
can't ship it because it's too expensive eventually it seems like the answer is going to be someone will get to the right answer in the middle first but again I keep coming back to like he's last year when meta tried to front run the vision pro one of the things that Zuckerberg basically said was
we could have done something as good as the vision pro but it would have been as expensive as the vision pro and we don't want to do that I think it is perfectly plausible that at a bunch of other companies in the tech industry right now there is a thing that looks and works and costs
just like Orion and then there's whatever snap has which is just I was going to say the difference is there only two companies willing to show it to people and of those two meta is just absolutely kicking snaps ass but in a certain way kudos to meta for being the ones who are actually willing
to be out in public sort of showing the state of the art on what they're working on but I genuinely wonder how far ahead it actually is because the gap between we've made a thousand of these and they cost ten thousand dollars each and we can make millions of them at a reasonable price is so much
bigger than anybody ever makes it out to be including experienced hardware companies like the gap between I can make one and I can make a thousand is huge and like kudos to meta they're there but thousands to millions is a completely different thing wait wait wait but have we seen people
wearing is there an increased use of glassware in like at Google at Apple like does it just seem like more people have bad vision and thick glasses I mean Google's been showing off the their their prototype glasses in a bunch of Google videos recently like they're that kind of
look like the size and shape of Orion like this stuff is just out there I just as the verges foremost phase computer expert again this is a cry for help this is not a brag I actually will push back on you guys I do not think anyone has anything working in this form factor as a standalone
kit that is not completely on rails or something on a desk that you look through I don't think that actually exists can I just further sake of our own comments can I just say a bunch of nouns so that people what howl lens x real to pro air or whatever it's called HTC other companies yes
I know other companies have made glasses before I know that the whole Alex and I have both changed spark plugs wearing a whole lens like the the form factor innovation here is real yeah like getting it down the glasses I'm not trying to take away from that I'm just pointing at like
it's vapor till it ships like it's one of our rules right and the the distance from what we see today to a product all the questions have to answer in the middle this is what I was asking at the quest is like they've answered a bunch of these questions with the quest I suspect they think
that some of those answers are the wrong answers actually and they need to go in a different way to enable some of the things they want with true air glasses I think that's right I also just think that before this week I honestly didn't know where they were at with this in terms of how they were
going to do it and I feel like after this week they actually have the right approach of how they're going about it which is just relentlessly focusing on the form factor which meta has made a lot of hardware mistakes over the years and has I think just not had the right priorities in terms of
what they're building and what it's for or even understanding what it's for it took them 10 years really to understand that the quest is really just a gaming device even still yeah how much do you think that's the Rayban lesson that's part of it but I just I think I think there's clarity here
about why people would want these and like something Zuckerberg told me was I thought pretty illustrative of this is like we want them to be just as good when they're off because we know that you're not going to have the AR on maybe most of the day and so focusing on that first
and letting the technology then kind of fill in I think is the right approach versus just how they've approached hardware so far which is like let's just put as much technology in something as we can and see how people will use it and here they're like no we know how people will use this it's
utility it's like heads up lightweight interactions video calling and AI and but the form factor is primary and that's what like that's the intro of the piece like I walk in and I'm looking at them you know I'm probably four feet away and I you can't tell you can't tell that they're AR glasses
and it's like yeah even that and as a prototype and I struggle with this because yeah me like this is vapor until it ships but it's it's also not like it's somewhere between a mirage and a product like it's it is real like I touched it I used it but it's not it's not
productized so seeing that and going wow like the form like and it's going to be half as thick in a few years like okay I finally see where this is going especially with the band and I feel like before this week even I as someone who's been reporting on this a lot couldn't really see where
they were going and I think they feel so confident in where they're going and the clarity of what they're going to do that that's why they shut it off this week and also I think Zach just thinks it's really cool yeah and he's right it is really cool no one else has done I again I'm
just not taking anything away from no one else has pulled off the display like 100 million of dollars or not billions of dollars have been thrown at this problem of can I put lenses in front of your face they can convincingly and 3d augment reality not just show you a TV like the X-ray
glasses do and not require to wear a hollow lens and still have no field of view like billions upon billions of dollars in a scenario and turn on this problem and only meta has allowed people to wear it for two hours and it's not an overestimation to say that they have
probably spent snaps market cap on Orion in the last 10 years and it's like no other company would do this like like Apple killed the car project because it's like we don't see a realistic timeline to shipping we're not even sure what it is like this is a uniquely meta thing and it's
it's like a personal thing for Zuckerberg which is just like screw Apple and Google I'm never going through this shit again um on mobile you know that he's gone through actually hold right there Alex I want to talk about zuck versus Apple and Google and I want to talk with the Ray bands a bit but we got to take a break so let's take a break and come back and then we can talk about zucks more with Tim Cook. It's time to review the top three highlights of the day I'm joined as always
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Alright we're back. He threw up before the break we're talking about Zuck and you said he doesn't want to go through this shit again which is you you just interviewed him for quite a long time. You saw him on stage at Metaconnect. I mean he is I mean the hairs flow in the the Latin t-shirts are in Latin he's feeling himself he's bringing out he's got to change he's bringing out MMA fighters
for Meta Rayman demos just for the hell of it at this point. Take mine out. He's like I can produce and the MMA will lightweight champion of the world it will like here he is get out of here.
It's great it's it's all good but the the thing that strikes me about that is yes there's a politics of it which maybe we should talk about a little bit but he really thinks that these glasses are the next great computing platform and he wants to win that fight more than anything and he probably perceives that he's ahead but put that in context of why he does not
want to lose to Apple and Google. There's so many reasons do you guys remember when all of Facebook's internal apps went down for like a full day in the entire company like ground tool. Yeah because Apple revoked its developer license. I do. That's just one example. There's there's app tracking transparency. I don't want it to get into a moral debate about that but like it objectively like killed billions of dollars of Meta's ad revenue. There's all of the app store
policies that he's talked about for a very long time. Like people think of Meta as just an app developer and they are really in terms of their business but they came up you know 20 years ago they watched mobile happen. They tried to do a phone failed at it. Zuckerberg has always wanted to be in control of a platform and this is something that I think like companies that were born in the mobile era don't even really like think as possible because it's like you just come into the reality
you're in but he knows what the reality was before mobile when he was building Facebook early on and I think they really feel that you know if Apple does glasses and the Vision Pro people start using it and they ship a cheaper one and these become you know they start selling maybe they don't let Meta's apps on there at all and there's this just real tension there of who has the distribution
control. It's why Google pays billions of dollars to Apple to have search in Safari. Whoever controls how you access your thing ultimately has leverage over you and Zuckerberg's been feeling that pretty acutely for 10 plus years and so yeah this is like a this is a as much about like inventing the futures that is correct in the past and I don't think any company without that unique
context would be doing this and I think that so that's a uniquely matter thing. Can I just read a quote from the interview that I thought was was very telling you you guys spent a long time talking about basically what AR and AI are going to do to the next generation gadgets and then what he
says is for what it's worth I also think that all the AI work is going to make phones a lot more exciting you know blah blah blah AI is cool if I were at any of the other companies trying to design with the next few versions of iPhone or Google's phones should be I think that there's a long and interesting roadmap of things that they can do with AI that as an app developer we can't. Like to me that's the whole thing right here. He's like if I am convinced that if Meta had its way
the puck wouldn't exist on Orion the puck would be your phone. Yes that's what those companies want and they just can't do it because the only companies that are ever going to be allowed to do it are Google and Apple and and like and so if I'm Mark I'm like oh a gigantic part of what I am doing should be tethered to this thing that I'm just not allowed to touch and that would piss me off. They're so mad that they can't automatically sink photos off your Ray bands and your iPhone camera
roll. Yes they can do it on Android. It's super annoying. It's so dumb. Yeah they can do it on Android because the APIs are there. Andrew's a little looser iOS no like the reason the first ones the first Ray bands also had a lot of issues they had a lot of Bluetooth pairing issues and like limitations with what they could do with Apple and Apple is because of the EU gradually being forced open up its APIs but yeah they're like they're pissed they can't sink photos to a camera roll.
But why doesn't meta complain more I guess like like we saw this in the epic. No no but they can play in all the time we saw epic put their their money where their mouth is like does meta do that it doesn't seem like they do. Well meta is also monopolistic. Yeah I was like is it because they know
that like Lena will be like yeah yeah that's true we are. I mean this is what I mean by the politics of it all and yeah Alex and your talk like Mark just come like there's just hard shots the EU like throughout your interview where he's like they should figure out what they want and it's like
dude what they want is like slightly better Bluetooth and office right they want to open interrupt between messaging platforms and so that is bad for WhatsApp like straight up I think they're trapped between we would love for you to kick open the doors on iOS but also don't do that to any of our platforms that have the same kind of. Well that's I mean they're being forced to do interrupt with WhatsApp like we just wrote about you're going to be able to message people outside
of WhatsApp. Yeah I yes there's truth to what you're saying I would argue like Apple is still super locks down and it's opening up over time but I don't think they think Apple will open up soon enough and so it's like we need to just invent the next thing. Well and I think my read of this is that if you're meta the easiest way to get where you're going would be to start all of this cool AR stuff as an accessory to your phone right and the reason that the Ray bands have worked
is that they are an accessory to your phone they're they're a vastly underpowered accessory to your phone just because of what they're allowed to do but also the restrictions of the technology and stuff but like the 1.5 step of this transition you would want to be your your phone becomes the
computer and then you you have a bunch of new wearable accessories that you use you're just not allowed to build that and so what all these companies have to do is basically like engineer a giant societal shift out of nowhere because the like gradual change that actually would make this make sense is just walled off to all but two companies on the planet and if I were anybody but one
of those two companies I would be really pissed about that. So what has Zuckerberg done he has gone and linked up with the Italians and the French because it's technically as Elisor Luxardica the parent company of Ray band is French and Italian but what did you think Neely of his comment so
they've just done a 10 year deal with Elisor Luxardica the ideas that Metta's tech stack is something Elisor will be able to put into any of its lines it owns a ton of brands Oakley Ray and it's a monopoly it's a monopoly you and I are both wearing glasses made by them right now presumably yeah
yeah look at your glasses probably made by excellent yeah they just bought supreme so supreme glasses he confirmed in our view that they're buying a stake in Elisor Luxardica which was news but his comment about he thinks that Elisor will be for Europe and smart glasses what Samsung
was for Korea and phones incredible it's a good line it's a great line it is extraordinarily presumptuous in the best possible way yeah right if you're at Samsung you're like yo we were Samsung we make ships like our nuclear reactor division is doing just fine so that is confusing
but what he means is Android is the operating system enabled Samsung to enter the mobile phone market Samsung is now even more Samsung that was before I would point out by the way a Saturday Samsung alert if you are over trustless you know that Samsung required all this executive
swork six days in the office to insert a sense of urgency and crisis into the company they don't make anything so all they can do is come up with deals they cut the price of one of their gaming monitors by 50% and gave you not one but two TVs for free if you buy one incredible it's on the website
it's not a same thing everybody you have to go on that tangent you have to say it's just incredible every part of every part of Saturday Samsung it is better than I see but what he's saying is there was a hardware vendor in Samsung and Android came along provided at the operating system and the
opportunity to go address the world market and now they are Samsung yeah again extraordinarily presumptuous in the best way are you saying that S. Lourle Laxatica is a hardware maker and are something is the operating system that will let you go become Samsung well you're missing some
key components right as Loura Sauti doesn't make chips Samsung makes fucking DRAM like they're like the hardware maker they make OLED displays and chips the first the first processor was a Samsung ARM processor right so like the industry was built on top of Samsung from the jump I'm pretty sure
I'm looking at these new transparent ray bands they announced I'm sorry Tom Warren translucent translucent really ran into like I work with a bunch of nerds this week yeah and I think it's a Qualcomm chip inside actually I'm just saying like all of that like Samsung's
latent capabilities were brought together because Google provided them an operating system that let them become dominant in phones yeah maybe Microsoft could have provided operating system you remember Samsung made a bunch of weeherd windows phones in the early days but does Laxatica have
chips and RAM or does it just have design chops and retail distribution I think that whole comment was basically another like shot at the EU because the big criticism of all the EU regulatory stuff is we the United States deeply weird libertarian unregulated United States makes the tech companies
and you make the taxes and all you have is Spotify which only ever complains about not having access to iOS and that basically is the the shape of the complaint and we have European listeners are going to argue with me about something or the other it's fine but that is the shape of the complaint
from Silicon Valley and I think Mark is saying look I'll take one of your companies and I'll turn them into Samsung just get the hell out of my way and I don't know that comparison holds up because again Laxatica does own everything but instead of DRAM fabs they own supreme yeah
it's just a very different yeah but potentially like as the as the proprietor of the Neilize insane theory of wearable bullshit I'm ready I'm ready to ignore open in the store I'm I'm walking right in you you have to acknowledge that making the DRAM and owning supreme might be
equally important in this like oh they are they think does it you can't sit here and tell me that fiddlingness and value are opposing things unless you agree that looking good on your face is important and there there are a small number of companies that are very very good at making
things that people like wearing on their face and I think you could argue that a lot of companies in tech have tried to like acquire or develop that capability and can't do it there's no way meta would have made this there's no way they would look anything like these it honestly it might be
easier to learn how to make DRAM as a company than to learn how to be cool yeah okay but can we just clip that that line and just put it on tech talk and just let it live its own life I sincerely brought up like a big history of technology say that is probably true easier and
D-Ram glass is so good it's I mean the ones that they wear like they got just a little right the Orion's because they look like buddy Holly glasses from the 50s which are actually kind of coming back like that was another thing that was another thing Zuckerberg said is like it's kind
of nice that chunky glasses are back in style like because Zuckerberg long game right like yeah he he he bought off a bunch of fashion houses in the background is like make the glasses bigger and like and you know it's like that scene from devil or sprout he turned all the knobs on Instagram to
make vintage cool again and now it's back I mean he's he's right he's right I was at the snap event the week before and I saw someone wearing what I thought were the new spectacles and they were product glasses I'm just saying Cerulean was picked in this room for you I agree I'm very
excited to get my clear ray bands on them they look so good they're pretty good they only make them in the small size and I have a huge head and I'm furious about this you're 49 or 50 or 50 type so that whatever what's the bigger go bigger big and two is like you 60 good just as big as they can be
no these two is like best brands are like sorry like yeah I know which is why I think you're probably a 50 I'm like a 49 50 these are comfortable stop measuring my head first of all I've just been enough with you in person to kind of you know map it in my mind I have a side hobby of head
measure yeah it's not problematic at all I'm just saying as big as they can get and I know Boz has an equally sized noggin that I know that he should have built the bigger ones because the regular ones coming to sizes and these only come in medium but I'm getting them on my day I'm
very excited it's the first time I've got them I think the clear ones look sick I'm excited to do all the stuff with them the the jump that I'm curious about right because now meta AI is more conversational look and remember things they've added some capability to it that's all running
in their cloud still right like you talk to the glasses it talks to your phone it uses your phone's connection they've got a decent amount that's on device now on the glasses on device yeah because they're they're doing with llama these super fine tune distilled models so the latency on
these is like pretty incredible in terms of how quick the AI is it's not humane pin wait a minute to set a timer it's like answer something in like a second right or like tell me what's in this photo and it does it in a couple seconds and I got the dim of the new AI stuff that they're adding to the
Ray bands so to Kylie so to Jay and it's like wow okay they're they're understanding this form factor and what's unique about it so being able to like look at a phone number and say call that phone number and it just calls it and the call comes in on your glasses because it's paired to your
phone or scan that QR code like you're looking at a menu the web page for the menu just gets sent to your phone like breaking down some of the interactions you would do the phone that require extra steps and like just like taking a step away is like an kind of an aha moment when you do it you're
like oh like this is where it's going yeah and it's the first time that I feel like AI makes sense and awareable and did you guys watch the keynote in the live translation demo that's up to yeah that's when he brought out the NNI fighter yeah he said you'll yell some words at me in spanish
that is wild that is wild that is like that is like Putin's earpiece on stage like at scale you know for like anyone and it works I mean it was a thing like Google promised a couple of years ago right yeah I think that the really interesting part of this is these ideas are all just the
ideas like these are the demos we have been hearing about were promised for a decade if not more right live translation like Apple has live translation on your iPhone you're open to happen it'll do it Google can do it it's the form factor like you're saying ox that like okay we've put
this in glasses your phone is away there's no screen there's just an ambient computer another thing that has been promised for a billion years and it's just paying attention and helping you out as you go through your day does that ambient computer require sending an awful lot of data
to meta it sure does right it just really really does but that's the trade off all the way down to one day I'm guessing Orion will have my dream feature which is I will look at someone and it will tell me their name and that will work absolutely require meta searching its gigantic worldwide
surveillance database of names and faces but like they're gonna be a technical name I was waiting for you to bring this up in my Orion demo the VP of wearables at meta said we're excited about name tags yeah it is it is the feature if you can be name tags it doesn't matter I will wear the backpack
yeah right like all day long everybody at CES I want to double click on what you said like that the phones have live translation because I think this is important when we're talking about like these form factors yes they do like especially iOS 18 it's really easy to just do like live
language translation from the action button from the action button there's something about not having your phone out though that feels like oh I would actually use this I like think about like talking to someone in another language and holding your phone between you it's like an interview like it's just awkward but it's like oh wait when this is an a form factor where like they can't even hear that what they're saying is being translated to me in my language and I'm not even pulling
a device out like all of a sudden these features make sense as like something you would use in the world and I think that's what these mean like these it's like taking all these concepts and like putting in a device that like oh like you'd actually do this yeah because they are cuter than the
pixel buds no disrespect well so here these are they're just again the ideas the end state the goals very familiar everybody shares them the demos as described the very familiar everybody has the same ones it's really down to where is a form factor how fast can we get there can we ship it at
scale are the phone makers the operating system vendors going to get in our way which is a big deal and you're kind of like okay well the closest apple is fundamentally is air pods yeah right like fundamentally the closest they are to this kind of idea is air pods or they haven't put glasses
in their face yet they have an apple watch but doesn't really do any AR stuff yeah they have pinchy pinch you can you can I mean honestly every time away with an apple watch I wear my meta ray bands the the number one feeling I have is boy I wish this actually tied in with my phone so I can
you Siri because then I would have access to all my stuff yeah Siri could just like you know like what text the wrong person at any point yeah I could just play my music okay so that's that is such air pods for Apple Alex you were just bringing up the pixel buds yeah that is
Googles although just Google remember that it made the pixel it made the pixel buds too which sure me like yeah the review came up the same time yeah the metal event so me like air pods great example with my AirPods I can say hey remind me about whatever I can say whatever I want it to remind me
about at a certain time right now get the notification and the reminders at with the ray bands you can say hey look at this and remind me about it at whatever time right because it can see yeah that's like that's wildly useful to me I cannot tell you how many times throughout the day I just want to
have a snapshot of whatever I'm looking at and go back to it later and like those ideas because you had literally have a camera on your face you can't do that with AirPods and so you're right like the closest we have are these earbuds that are internet connected and can hear our voice there's
something about adding the cameras though that's big so you know the the prevailing theory of why the camera control button is not just on the pro phone but also in the regular 16 is that Apple at visual intelligence and then you'll be able to quickly access the camera and look at stuff and
well when when you say theory you mean Apple just said that out loud in that many words well they haven't shipped it is vapor till the ships like no but I mean that is it's whether it's good or not is a question but like that is that is clearly that is half the purpose of the thing like
they have just said as much at this point my like whether Apple has its own unified theory of what it's doing is like sure I've used control center and IOSAT enough to be like did anybody pay attention but also there are there are increasingly convincing and well sourced rumors about things like
AirPods with a camera which what that look like and an Apple watch with a camera because I agree with you Heath like the camera is the thing yeah both both as the input and as like the activity right like I hear from people all the time for whom the reason to have the smart glasses
is to take pictures of your kids like or your pets or whoever like I'm convinced my dog knows when I take out my fun to take a picture of her I'm 100% sure and she runs away and now she doesn't anymore I can take pictures but it's awesome I can't wait to get these guys did you buy the glasses
to you David I already have two pairs okay I don't have a great answer for why I have to do what do you have like the large size of the small size because if you don't need the large size I'm in the market I have I don't know I also have a big head so we'll we'll have to figure this out
together um Alex how big do you think David said is we think 49 I'm gonna guess he's like a 4847 yeah I'm saying yeah it's not insulting to me 80 let's go the bigger the better uh all right let's we we this so we talked a lot about the meta stuff I want to make sure we talk about two other
pieces of meta connect that are important and then spend a little time in open AI uh before you go to lighting and the other piece of meta connect that I think is deeply fascinating is you guys did talk about AI a lot and how it would be expressed it seems like they're chasing a big
distribution advantage with glasses that maybe other people will catch up to but then there's like training data and open source models is Zuckerberg said and I think this is one of the shots at Google like I think all of the we're doing live demos were shots at Apple for doing infomercials I think
when he says things like we are the Linux of open source because llama is like that's a shot at Google right yeah we're just gonna have more distribution we're gonna have more development we're gonna be better at everybody else piece open always piece close which is usually Google's
model and that's just not how Google is doing it they had to suck up a lot of training data and you asked about people wanting to opt out there's all the celebrity's on Instagram right now saying opt me out of this his answer explain his answer then we just talk about a little bit because
it was really interesting yeah he said the quiet part out loud which is that everyone thinks their data is more valuable than it actually is for these models in aggregate it's valuable but when you're when you're a company like meta and it's like the entire world is your corpus of
information and the internet at large what exactly do you have to have and I think you know we were talking a lot about publishers and about how meta is basically throwing its hands up on news and you know Rupert Murdoch is in Australia saying pay me or I'm gonna take your news off and
Zuckerberg's like fine like whatever like people don't even like this um so we we're talking a lot about publishers but I think he's kind of just saying that look like yes you know people have feelings about their data being used to train these models um and yes we're all doing it but we
also like if you you know if you don't like it like go away like whatever it's really interesting to me about this is that's the lines the publishers like we will de-rank your news we won't have news on threads however you want to interpret all of the many things missing out of this area
said about that um there's no opt out for any user of these services unless you're in the EU from having your stuff trained on and guess where meta AI is not available in the EU right and so and he did say I remain it what eternally confident that we will launch this in the EU
something like that um on stage but there's just I would just draw a connection and I think it is very funny to dunk on people posting what amounts to chain letters on Instagram stories being like Deer Zuckerberg by the statute of Rome I command you from not we were doing this on our Facebook
walls like 15 years ago yeah this keeps happening yeah this is a chain letter like that's what it does and it's like people think the law is magic words you know and he just like issued an incantation to the internet like someone has to do it and it's like usually chain letters
have a lot more like promising death in them than these yeah I really miss that I wish if it was like send this to 12 of your friends or Zuckerberg will appear in your house it is Latin sure and beat the shit out of you that would be great have you ever fallen down the hole of uh courtroom
videos of people uh invoking the sovereign citizen defense yeah and like local courtrooms and then they're like shut up and the judges are like that that doesn't mean anything yeah you're going to jail to like by what authority in the judges I was like because I'm the judge and it's just like that
that's happening on and so and it is very funny it's Michael Scott on the office yelling I declare bankruptcy yeah he's exactly like he pulls him aside and says that's nothing and he goes I didn't say that I declared it that's what these people are doing so it is very funny and I and Tom Brady who
has a meta deal to use his face for a chatbot he's done it he did it he did it he did cancel the deal because that idea was bad and they came up with a better idea of what if we just use the celebrities voices and said they were the celebrities instead of pretending they were all their
characters yeah it was Tom Brady is like bury your workout partner yeah it was like very not crazy not crazy but it was his face and then Kristen Bell you can just chat with Kristen Bell she put up one of these the Kylie noticed because she's a crystal bell fan and so she's like you have a deal
with meta AI and you have an Instagram post saying don't use my stuff for meta AI well she said that was before she saw the zeros on the check yeah money money is cool yeah they're paying for these celebrity voices reporting millions for the rest of us yeah so here's what I will just say
about that thing the idea that you can negotiate with meta feels intuitive to everyone right or any platform I'm posting my stuff here I should be able to tell you how I want you to use it but you don't and the answer is well you already signed a terms of service and you go away you didn't
but everyone knows nobody reads that shit when half of your users are like collectively trying to renegotiate the terms of their agreement with you that means there's a problem like kind of they're doing it on your platform though that's the thing like well that's fine but like you can't
there's there's so other things in the world where like you don't get to negotiate on this level except for weird internet terms of service that everyone agrees no one reads right like and I would just say like if you are one of the many many many young staffers in DC who listens to the show
which is a weird audience that we have and I love you I'm glad that we're making the commute to your base and office in the capital better um you should look at all the people posting I don't want you to train on my data on meta's own platform and the basic response of yeah go fuck yourself
and be like oh this is actually what regulations are for right like the people are expressing that they do not like that the terms of this arrangement are not in their favor and no one is an individual has enough power to change it and Mark Zuckerberg is like everyone over values the value that
work in this context so I don't have to pay attention to it like that is actually the problem that like it doesn't matter if you're a Republican or a Democrat or a libertarian or whatever that thing is the problem the governments are meant to equalize how is this any different from using
data for ad targeting think about when we copy and pasted protest messages on Facebook 15 years ago what was it about it was I'm putting this all in the same line right this is all the same line if my point is when everyone is like I signed this agreement I didn't read it right and now I've
handed over whatever leverage I might have had because I signed this agreement that I didn't read and the second I made aware that I that by saying apricotabra this is like go back in my favor I will just happily start yelling apricotabra as loud as I can like that is that's the problem yeah but
that's also just like no one reads you lose and that's that's but like so who should read the you before you should we hire and you can't do and then what are you do you do you have bargaining power if you disagree with the terms no if the using I use the answer it's terms of service and ships it to
you are you like you know Tim paragraph five uh are you saying that social media needs to unionize I am saying terms of service agreement should be illegal like flatly because they're converse for president they are contracts no one reads and it's these moments I I just have a lot of empathy if
I have written the don't believe the Instagram meme story five times in that career and one time I got a call from Instagram like thank you so much and I was like I used to I don't like this um because it happens over and over again for a reason mm-hmm which is whenever you offer somebody
back the mechanism of control over their own information they're like yeah I'd like that back please yeah it universally yep and no one reads the agreements the agreements change all the time the agreements always change in favor of the platform using your data for more and more and more things
and then you get Zuckerberg saying everyone overestimates the value of their individual data and it's like who how what is the mechanism that you would balance this equation with there isn't one there isn't one and I think Zuckerberg's also thinking yeah guess what you're using
Instagram and you're going to keep he's not incentivized to say actually yeah we should deliver more value yeah like I didn't care he's like yeah give me all of your data for free so I can make lots of money and afford my cool shirts like of course he is look I'm not saying we all
shouldn't dunk on a bunch of people posting abracadabra to Instagram like we absolutely should we should absent is one of the funniest repeat memes that can possibly exist is people basically doing sovereign citizens like very funny but if you just I'm just try one step back from a place of empathy
it's a bunch of people communicating that they don't like the terms of the agreement and there's no mechanism to channel that into any change that agreement is not changing I fully agree with you and I that's how I frame it to him I'm like do you sympathize with this if you feeling people have
about this trade off and the sense that value is not flowing back to them and he said the thing about how everyone over values their data well there's also a sense of yeah if you feel this way stop using the product we were doing this about ad targeting and our data being used for ad targeting
15 years ago and copy paste messages on Facebook everyone's still using well not everyone three billion people apparently are still on Facebook so for them it's like the platforms they don't see any data to suggest that this value exchange is actually unfair because in their mind we would
stop using the services yeah yeah and that just presumes that people have that power and you can afford to do that delete Instagram yeah I would say these things are businesses for a lot of people right like this is a way they advertise their businesses this is a way they they advertise
themselves if if they're influencers like like most people in the Virgins newsroom are no longer posting on X like people can make decisions about that people can and I think even when they have career implications I think there's also a lot of journalists who are still on X I mean I think
yeah there is a power imbalance there that that Neely is speaking to of like these people have no power in this relationship it is gone it is if you want to use this suck it up and I think people slowly get tired of that right I think it's just that there are very few other relationships you
have if you are a creator and creators are mostly just business people at this point yeah they're all running content businesses on the terms of the platforms if you're a celebrity you're just a content business on the platform which is why I think the celebrities are so fast to be like don't
use my stuff like they know they do not want their voice and likeness to use without payment and I'm just all I'm saying is from a place of empathy one step back there's no mechanism to channel this frustration into anything and that is actually again it's I don't think you have to
be very political on either side of the spectrum like oh this is actually the thing we should this is what it's for right a lot of people like most people on the society would like to renegotiate the terms of their agreement with the large platforms that is called a privacy law right we're just
going to reset the floor of the agreement a lot of people want to reset the terms of how train how their content can be used for training that's just a AI training law like that it's just very simple and like I don't know what those laws should do or how they should read or whether you are a
conservative and you think the answer is like I don't know some weird public private partnership that the Heritage Foundation runs like those are those ideas or you're a hardcore liberal and you're like I will start a government commission and we will the government will set the rates
which is what we do in copyright law like there's a million solutions to this and I think that's a very liberal solution copyright I'm just saying there are government entities that set rates in other parts of this world but it's just I would just point like we're talking about AI and
distributing it who has the power where the models run and how powerful the experiences can be that you had Alex and underneath it all is like hey did all to all of these people feel ripped off is that is that okay and like Zuckerberg's answer is Zuckerberg's answer I assume
Darryl could try this about YouTube in the same kind of framework of a question how do you feel about opening a training on YouTube and he was like I think that would be inappropriate and it's like do you understand why all of your creators think that's inappropriate and he just like side at me
and I I suspect something else is going to happen there like some set of lawsuits or some scarlet Johansson open AI situation where it just becomes less and less tenable to be this this blithe about it we we should get off this point because we could do this for hours and we'll
end up talking about the Fediverse and it'll be a whole thing but let's do it but the thing is no one has any reason to believe that any of what you just said is true and what's actually happening is everybody is now saying the quiet part out loud Eric Schmidt is out here being like oh you want
data from the internet just steal it we stop a silly amount was like oh it's all free it's on the internet you can just have it like this is what everybody thinks and there has been absolutely nothing to convince them otherwise so far so if I'm or Zuckerberg why I'm gonna look around and be like oh
I'm gonna be the good guy here and it's gonna cost me in this race to AI that is suddenly the only thing anyone cares about like no of course he's not gonna do that right he's gonna say oh you like Instagram keep using Instagram we can do this for another hour but also his new attitude
which is like I no longer apologize for everything apologizing was a 20 year mistake that I'm not gonna make anymore no dude you grow the hair out you get a little older you know like I'm thinking about growing my hair out I watched that interview I was like oh I could get the is it the cauliflower
hair is that what they call I look when every every 12 year old in your way is gifted a gold chain and you have to make a decision and I made one decision and I'm saying I could remake that decision you could the hair is getting long you could yeah I feel like you're like you're a few
months away from curls oh this hair is very curly I could tomorrow we're not talking about this right now we are changing subject me last year so French and we need to go to a break yeah can we just before we go to break I do want to talk about the eye oh yeah it it God seems like chaos over
what is going on with Alex did you guys know that open a eyes and nonprofit do they know that I'm not sure they do I think they're finding out and that's what's going on honestly like at a very high level but everyone's leaving like mirror body the CTO is leaving Greg Brockman the president
apparently just vanished yeah there's this great photo of all of the like execs Alia Greg Mera and Sam together for this big New York Times profile this was like right before the boardroom boardroom coup which Nila was almost a year ago when you were at Disney no way yeah
isn't that crazy you were at Disney not getting to ride the rides almost a year ago because we were reporting on this which is yeah that's to me but there's this photo of him and all these execs and now they just photoshopped out everyone except Sam Altman who's the only one left and
what's happening is that open AI just raised the largest round of funding of all time I think they just went above Elon's mega round for XAI which was I think six billion on purpose of course optics they're valued at $150 billion which is more than the market cap of Goldman Sachs
guess what open AI is legally still a nonprofit they get tax breaks in the state of California as a nonprofit they make billions of dollars a year and so what's happening is this very chaotic fast transition from what was a research lab we're going to invent a GI all the Ilius stuff to in the
last year when Sam won the board coup no we are a large commercial for profit next big mega tech company and they hired a CFO they hired a CPO who used to run product at Instagram not the other one who used to run product at Instagram is an anthropic and they are very chaoticly turning
into a real big company and I think what you're seeing is a lot of the previous era being a abruptly managed out quitting what have you and it's the Altman show and he famously does not have equity in open AI has been doing a ton of interesting dealings with other startups and investments
around open AI it is now reportedly going to be getting a large stake in this new for-profit company that they're creating I will love to see how what the tax implications are of this transition more to come on that and the state of California really doesn't like when nonprofits
become for profits it's a very very contested thing and yeah I think that's what's happening at high level so Mira the CTO is out who was meamed with her reaction to did you use you to to train Sora they were very unhappy about that from what I understand and then there are a head of
research who literally just did an interview about the new reasoning model with Kylie a couple weeks ago who won out against Iliya in the research kind of group battle a year ago so yeah it's just like stuff's happening very fast and yeah big picture this is open AI entering a decidedly
commercial big tech company phase they are speedrunning that be terrifying for us given that they were supposed to be the safeguards of AI well yeah now you know it's doing Iliya is doing super safe whatever AI so it's gonna be super safe you haven't had the money you raise a much money
yeah you raise a much money but not as much no not as much but I mean they are speedrunning the Facebook Google Playbook which is move incredibly fast let regulation catch up let you know just outrun your competitors and it's intense I mean the vibes that we hear is that working inside
open AI is just it's way different than it was a couple years ago the pressure to ship the pressure to make things commercial and so that research culture that built the company originally is being just broken down and it's very messy right now yeah my sense of it David mentioned Mustafa
Seliman earlier who's just now the CEO of Microsoft AI is Microsoft is reacting to their former research investment becoming a product company but I mean like now we have a CEO of products yeah which I'm very curious to see how that relationship manages over time all right we should
take a break we're gonna go through the lightning round it's lightning speed yes we are so over at this point we'll grab back for you right it's time to review the top three highlights of the day I'm joined as always by my co-anchor Snoop hey what up dog Snoop number one has to be getting the
new iphone 16 pro with apple intelligence at T-Mobile yeah you should hustle down a T-Mobile like a dog chasing a squirrel chasing a nut nice analogy Snoop dogs do love to chase squirrels and squirrels love to chase those nuts on the highlight number two a T-Mobile family's can save 20% every month
versus the other big guys that is very impressive you know y'all can take some of those savings and buy some Snoop merchandise that's exactly what I'm planning on doing with my saving Snoop now take it away Snoop head to T-Mobile dot com and get the new iphone 16 pro with apple intelligence on them now drop that jingle the 24 month of the credits and eligible traded on go 5g next well qualified customers plus tax
and 30-grad dollar connection charge cancel entire account before receiving 24 bill credits and credits stop and balance our required finance agreement to ill credits end if you pay up the price early see how you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile dot com's less switch apple intelligence coming fall 2024 all right we're back we are so over we are often asked how long the show is supposed to be in the answer is not this long six and a half minutes but we're never going to tell you
actually a 90 second show we've gotten some incoming online air on sponsorships again I don't make the deals I just walk around vox muted demanding why the deals aren't made uh which has proven to be ineffective so I'm gonna try some new strategies but today we remain unsponsored which is a personal failure for somebody who complains about creator like influence and brand deals as much as I do I'm horrible at this which makes it that money anyway the lightning round is available sponsor I might
say your company's name if you give us a bunch of money or it might not because of ethics policy you won't know until you pay me money that's lightning round all right Alex let's start with you because I think you've got the most relevant lightning round item after that previous conversation
yeah trip michael denuret times has this great story about what johnny i've has been up to post apple and this design firm he founded called love from lots of nuggets in here I thought it was very interesting that he says in the story he interviewed ivin june and this came out the week of iphone
16 the timing was interesting um but yeah johnny's he's working I think the time's kind of buried the lead here uh he's literally it's like the last paragraph yeah story it's very very hard he confirms that he's working on some kind of AI device with open AI it sounds like they haven't
quite nailed down what it will be um what was the first time he'd confirmed it on the record um my understanding is that love from is super small it's like 40-50 people and there's only 10 people working on this project yeah and a wild detail in this story is as mr i've climbed a wooden
staircase to the studio second floor that morning and by the way he bought like a whole block a city block of downtown san francisco for their office um he said he spoke about love firms clients love from clients which pay the firm as much as two hundred million dollars annually
and that includes like air bnb for rari he just designed it three thousand dollar jacket with mongclair love from his like 50 people so how much money are they making it johnny i well it's crazy block in san francisco like they do it good Brian Chesky is paying him two hundred million dollars a year to like riff on what the air bnb logo should be can i can i just tell you a story about the air bnb johnny i have connection yeah which i because i was reading this and it says
what he worked on like they did the experiences where he can like live in a pineapple house or something what whatever i mean two hundred million dollars nonsense has happened right um air bnb last year the year before after the johnny i have stuff was out um like announced a bunch of
redesign stuff and like an app redesign all this stuff and we emailed them and we're like was this the stuff johnny i've worked on because obviously that is very relevant and interesting detail and they're like yeah and then we like probably like freaked out at us and they're like that's not
wrong everyone's like take it down or like we said okay and we like adjust this right again like read it there's always like back and forth corrections in it because air bnb is trying to clarify this and i was like what is the point of john spending all this money in johnny i if you don't want to
say that he worked on the stuff yeah that's worth easily a hundred of the two hundred million is just able to put johnny i've in your press release check out the new air bnb app designed by johnny i've i don't branch as he's coming on to coder and a little bit i'm gonna ask you about it in addition
to talking about that remote which he's excited to talk about um but it's uh i read this profile i was like we tried to write the story about him design his app and they were like not into it they were like pushed back on this idea that he had done it super hard he's like the wizard of odds
he just needs to be in the background there's also the part to be he there's part in the story that i loved um where he designed a steering wheel for like an evee for arey and he's like he completely rethought what a steering wheel should be i'm like it's a circle oh he didn't do a yoke
stuff in his circle uh i'm a famous day car guy uh it's very good yeah so i just think it's like i've is clearly gearing up and i think there's a lot of pressure on him if this ai device is going to be real like that is eight that is your johnny i if like this thing has to work it has to
not be the humane pin and he's he's got evan's hanky who succeeded him at apple leading design at love from working on this device with him so it's it's a bunch of og apple people that have invented all of like the original apple stuff with him so that's a really interesting situation to
watch we've seen one company with a very similar description to that make a hardware and it didn't go super great so uh we'll see gosh yeah you know like he doesn't have for example apples famed antenna team which once had to save his ass from his own designs
wireless product it'll be super thin whatever it is you can you can bet it will be thin 25 minutes of that i'm very curious i mean that he after we just have the whole conversation meta they have all of the same product like apple is not going to give him hooks into ios
presumably or the reason that chatschibit he got an asses integrated ios 18 is when this device comes out timco can be like it's mine now i just have a feeling whatever it is it's going to be so deeply deeply weird then it's going to be awesome like i have the longer he's
away from apple he just is doing weirder and weirder stuff and so some kind of a i device from him is like yes i'm excited about it yeah i agree it's going to be insane and i love it altman probably isn't going to be excited about it because he wants something that he can sell and
make lots of money yeah i know but like is that the guy you hire if you want to make something really commercial and sell and make lots of money i mean you can you join on their staff done okay with that he's done yeah yeah he did right he made the iphone i applaud i applaud did decent
this is a design firm yeah i will say there's a picture of him in that profile where he's just holding his iphone in like a regular blue apple rubber case and i'm like that's not weird enough for shani i've and i got what he made the iphone he puts his feet on the couch that was the part
that got me like these gorgeous white couches and he had his shoes on him i was like oh hurts he can just get new ones all right uh crayons what's your own right i'm um shan got a hands-on with the ps5 pro and if you like to pixel peep it's gonna rule i do it's it's it's apparently it's
it he he says it really like lives up to the hype as far as like things just look a lot clearer they're a lot prettier it's awesome in that way but also it is still so much money and and you can there's a lot of photos in his piece where you can go and look and try to see the differences
and it is sort of like playing highlights as a kid you can see them but you got you got a look for them so i would say if you don't have a giant monitor that you sit like two feet from you're probably okay but otherwise this is cool i will say that i was in the queue to buy the
ps5 pro 30th anniversary edition and then i forgot i was in the queue i lost the place in line the one to really look at is in in david mage on omif before we recorded because i pointed it to the south is the ratcheting clank rift apart you can really see the ray tracing working
it's it's it's beautiful thank god i've always said that's the main thing missing from ratcheting clank rift apart is ray tracing that's the thing preventing me from enjoying ratcheting clank rift apart there's a very funny line in shons hands on where he he notes that all the controllers were
wired so they couldn't get far away from the screen and not see the ray tracing and yeah choice it's pretty good all right david what's yours while you're over here in the i denigrating google's headphones christwaiw to publish our view of the google pixel buds pro two which is a name that i
have never said correctly until just now so i'm very proud of you they're awesome they're they're smaller they sound better they're a little more expensive uh seem great but the thing i just want to point out is that google absolutely crushed this hardware cycle like in a way that google never has before the the tv streamer is great the buds are great the watches great the phones are great the foldable phones are great like google just like did the whole thing this year and that is sort
of wild to me do you think that's rick oshtalo now runs the whole thing it's deeter it's all jeez deeter no i think whatever and dan don't forget dan it's deeter and dan they did it thank you guys i think there's a certain amount of this that is like the compound interest phenomenon right it's
just like google's been at this a while and like hey google if you're listening this is why it's good to stick to things because you can make them better over time and then they're good and people like them yeah like that's a concept try it with other things but at any rate like what google did here
is not like reinvent the wheel as it is prone to do all the time it just made all of its products better and it did that a bunch of years in a row and i think that the thing rick oshtalo gets credit for is he has he has made a plan and stuck to it like i talked to him years ago at the very beginning
and i was like why on earth would anyone believe you that you're going to care about this for a long time and he's like i you shouldn't i don't know why you would but we are going to like we're we're bought into this and this feels like the first time the google is like really truly playing
hardware offense in like it's it's up there with everybody we gave the tv streamer a nine chris gave the pixel buds pro two a nine like these are some of the best products you can buy in their class and i don't think that has ever been true of google products before so i think that's
very cool i haven't i didn't put this in the i've interview because i i think it's unfair to say this until apple intelligence comes out and we can use the features but i spent a lot of time using a pixel line pro camera stuff while seeing that review compared to cameras and every time
i picked up a pixel i was like this phone is a lot more fun than ios right now yeah i mean it's just like bursting with idea the chaotic weird clippy level ideas every time you breathe it's like jennie yeah it's a little nuts but it's fun because it's just like ideas like new ideas
for what a phone could do or should do or why it should do anything at all and apple is like all the icons are brown huh you've been asking for big brown icons and now you can have them can i just say one more thing like the iPhone and then i will do my lighting around at them
uh control center total total chaos like a mess and they should just let me edit it on my mac hmm i feel the way about my home screen let me get let me do the home screen and control center on my mac and i can do phone mirroring you know i'm clicking right no no i want like full
like old school a doby page maker print layout you know like all the tools the mirror the the rulers and just let me just this is where we're past being able to do this on control center is like the once you get it set up it's pretty great but the thing is like and i feel the same way
about the home screen like if i drag an icon somewhere into a page that is already largely full of icons it takes a it takes a PhD to figure out where all those icons are yeah like it is it is just a mystery every single time the fastest most capable most efficient processors humankind has ever
created and it's like i don't know what's going on with these icons like too much for me man yeah yeah all right me live what's yours we have to end here uh because we've been talking about AI gadgets the whole time um only five thousand people use the rabbit R1 every day according to
the scene said how many people own it uh you gave an interview at some conference and the number is five thousand daily active users the rabbit that's more than i thought yeah i was like i'm surprised that many people have found a good use for the rabbit uh the other thing to note is if you you cannot recycle or resell a humane a ipin but you can just return it to the company for full price which kudos good to that good for them yeah you just send it back that is the correct thing to do
uh just in my bag wait i am curious i've spent a lot of time trying to get five percent of buyers five five thousand people is five percent of the rabbit R1 buyers well that's that's that's the hundred thousand is the biggest number we heard i actually think it's probably true that more
people bought it than that that's just the last number we heard uh is that higher or lower than you would have guessed like reasonably knowing that at least a hundred thousand people bought the thing most people buy gadgets intending to use them you think five thousand is is higher than you
would have expected do you use yours every day no it's sitting right here the batter has been dead since i'm gonna fire it back up the podcast from like a pile of dead useless gadget i do everything from a pile of dead useless gadgets yes that's that's what my job is i leave my life you know
everything you can't see in this maybe fake background of mine is just a pile of dead useless gadgets it's just slowly swelling that i also i have the the humane pin right here uh okay it's been it's been six months since these things came out almost uh i believe it was
april 11ths were a couple weeks away from the six month anniversary and i promised when i did them that in six months i would come back so god help me i have to fire these devices back up and see how it's going yeah i think i think it's substantially higher than i expected i expected the people who
work at the company to use this thing every day and everything else we'll see i wish i daily is daily is a lot i think i was the number was higher than this for like people who still turn it on sometimes yeah daily is a lot jesse lu the cio rabbit has told us he's coming on decoder i will let you know when that happens but he's he's we're booked that the the it's on my calendar i'm dying to ask him questions so let me know what your questions are uh and we'll see if we can get some answers
about the rabbit i will say to rabbits credit they have like continued to post through it like they they are not shy about the stuff they've been dealing with yeah no he's out there i mean he's obviously on a media tour right he's at his conference he he wants to be on decoder we're we're
gonna do it um i'm very curious like many of the things we talked about with metta can you get past the phone operating system or do you have to build your own hardware rabbit is an answer to that question yep but then you have to do all the rest of it we'll see yeah um all right we're
way over we got to wrap this thing does anybody else have any last minute zuckerberg style dunks on the whole industry to issue no all right let us know you can get hold of us there's quite a lot to talk about so we welcome your feedback leave us your voice mails you can send david a text to
his rabbit r1 i believe trying to figure out what other dead gadgets i have around here there's a lot i also have an office it's full of just slowly expanding with you my and i have a screen for a phone that i couldn't tell you what it is or why i have it but i have it that's enough that's
the verga's everybody will be back next week rock n roll and that's it for the verga's this week hey we'd love to hear from you give us a call at 866 verga 1-1 the verga cast is a production of the verga and box media podcast network our show is
produced by leham james will pour an air go mess and that's it we'll see you next week it's time to review the highlights i'm joined by my co-anchor snoo i would up down snoop number one has to be getting the new iphone 16 pro with apple intelligence at t-mobile yeah you should hustle down a t-mobile like a dog chasing squirrel chasing the nut at the nice analogy snooge on the highlight number two a t-mobile family can save 20% every month versus the other big guys very impressive take
it away snooge head to t-mobile dot com to get the new iphone 16 pro with apple intelligence on them now drop that jangle see how you can save versus the other big guys at t-mobile dot com slash switch apple intelligence coming fall 2024