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CRM, Accounting, Inventory, Ecommerce, and more. And the best part? Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch.
So why not you? Try Odo for free at Odo.com. That's O-D-O-O.com It's a choice you can make. Yeah, Google has made it for many years in a row now.
Yeah, it's Google's annual tradition. It's just marketing strategy now. Well, at least. Here it is.
Anyway, I'm a friend of mine. I'll transfer this here. I'm your friend who doesn't want the Pixel Vold. The only one.
The only one in the Verge. He doesn't want one. I'm sorry. OK, we'll get to a minute.
David Pierce here. Hi. Can I just show you this Verge mug that I found? This was just chilling in my closet.
It's the old, old, old, old Verge mug. It makes me very happy. Sorry. Is it big?
I feel like our new ones are not big enough. No, they're definitely not big enough. This is like 14 ounces. It's a nice size.
Big fan. Well, they may not be big enough, but they certainly make us money. Go to sort out the Verge.com. And by just we have actually, we have really cool joggers.
Oh, yeah. This is just going to be QVC for the rest of the hour. Very cool pillows. I was just thinking I need to buy a pillow and put it back here on my mantle so you can see a drone show.
That's where everybody puts their pillows. Right? Yeah, classic pillows. By the way, it's shopped out the Verge.com.
You can tell that I'm great at this. And yeah, there's a lot of news. Sir John is going to join us in a little bit to talk about what's happening on Blue Sky, which is near as I can tell is butts. Just nude butts.
But Sarah's going to try and show to talk about what they mean on a deeper level. What does the butts mean? What is the first cast, if not discussing the deeper level of butts on the internet? Yeah, that's what it's for.
The internet was created by butts. We should talk about Pixel that's going on. There's a bunch of AI news to get into. Let's start with the fold since it is at least for us breaking news.
You and your car tomorrow. You know about it. But just imagine put yourself in the headspace we're in, which is we're going to start the show. And then Google was like, yeah, here it is.
David, what's going on here? So yeah, Google I.O. is next week, next Wednesday, the 10th. And there have been rumors that the Pixel Fold was going to happen for a while.
We kind of knew Google was going to make a foldable phone. They've been making software kind of in that direction for a while. This is a good way to try and make some noise because it's still relatively new market. And then like you said, they literally just tweeted it out.
It's just like just out of nowhere. They just tweeted it out. They just tweeted it out. And it's it's a foldable phone.
So all we've seen is basically one of those sort of spinning models. So there's not a ton you can learn from it. But I will say the two things that seem to be true based on the picture so far is that rather than being one of those like super tall things. Like when you close a galaxy fold, it basically turns into a TV remote.
It's like 11 feet long. And thus is like a totally ridiculous thing to use. But this looks more like, I don't know, like the surface duo, where it's like relatively normal phone size and then sort of folds open to be wider rather than just tall. So it has a little bit of like a iPad mini turned on its side vibe when it's open and just kind of looks like a phone on the inside.
There's a million questions like, will there be a big crease down the middle? How thick are these are these pictures hiding that it's like chunkier than it actually is, which they sometimes do. But just at the very basic level that we've seen, this thing looks really nice. I'm kind of into it.
It's also kind of nice. The sort of new age pixel camera bump on the back. This is the first execution of it where I'm not like, uh, yeah, can I click on the does it rotate? Oh, no, that's a big bump.
Yeah. I was like, this is a small now. No, it's a gigantic. Remember the thing we've heard about the most is that when you close it, there's no gap.
They've they've managed to reengineer the hinge. That's all I come to Google for is reengineered hinges. Yeah, when you think of Google, you think of physical products and hinges. Yeah, I'm just saying when Apple makes an iPhone that folds, there's going to be a 19 minute long video about the hinge.
And so if Google doesn't do that now, they're missing a real opportunity. Like, they should just stop the Iokee note in the middle and just play a 30 minute documentary they made about the hinge. That's what I would do. I would watch it.
I will watch it. Yeah. So here's the thing. We went through a pretty intense period of excitement about folding phones.
Yes. And I will happily accept the criticism that I was very excited about them because I think form factor changes are when people actually shift products and platforms. Yes. And I was super wrong about this.
Zero iPhone owners were like, well, that phone folds. I'm leaving iMessage, which I think says something. I message definitely more superior, but I want this. Like, I want a folding iPad.
That's what that's all I want in the world is like an iPad mini that just does this. But I want it on iOS because I want messages. Well, I also think the thing about the Galaxy Fold is that it still has a lot of caveats, right? Like, it looks cool.
And then the longer you look at it, the worse it gets, right? It has that big seam down the middle. It has the gaps kind of all around the edges. It's like the very first one second impression is really good.
But after like 60 seconds, it kind of gets worse and worse. And then from what different people who own these things, you like stop seeing those things. They're not really problems anyway. So the actual experience of only one seems to be pretty great.
Everybody who has one is very happy with it. But what there hasn't been is one that doesn't feel like it makes you make sort of obvious compromises in how you use your phone. Like the fold is also enormous. And I think the Pixel Fold, just by virtue of what it is, is probably also going to be big.
It's also going to be expensive. The rumor is it's going to be, I think upwards of $1,700, which is a lot of money for a phone. I just don't think we've got the data to prove your theory wrong, melee. I think there's a chance.
That's the phone unfolds into a tablet part of the foldable world. You're thinking about that? Yeah, the Z flips of the world, which like T-Mobile would just throw at you. They would just accost you and give you a Galaxy Z flip.
If you were like, I'm thinking about switching wireless carriers. Like, Z flip? You got it. It's in your car already.
You just boomerang it to you from across the T-Mobile store. Yeah. And I've seen lots and lots of people, at least here in New York, people have Z flips. And it just hasn't, there was a time when a phone that was that reasonably popular would actually have some sort of cultural impact, right?
Like the LG chocolate had more of a cultural impact than the Galaxy Z flip. That's weird. The LG chocolate was a sick phone. I will not hear LG chocolate slander.
The LG chocolate fans out there. Oh, they pulled over to like, do you have to pull over? Yeah, guess what you did? You pulled over and you pulled out your iPhone to write me that note.
But I don't think people care as much about phones. No, I didn't. They're listening to this show. People who care about phones are listening to us right now.
And I'm sorry. But the majority of people are like, I got my iPhone. It does a thing. I got my Samsung.
It does a thing. We were actually talking about this in the context of humane last week. And then it's come up on our team for a few other reasons. But the notion that something has to come after the phone is like, the industry really wants that to be true and regular people are like, it doesn't.
It doesn't. It doesn't. It's like the Z flip is one of those like, what comes after the phone? The phone that closes and like leaves you alone.
And you like look at when we're on the third Z flip, the fourth one, they just put a phone in the front of it and say, close it and then you see that Pixel fold and the Galaxy fold. And you close it and they're still a phone and the promises then you'll have a tablet. And I'm very excited. I think this thing looks cool.
I am a sucker. I'm almost certainly gonna buy one. But I'm just looking at it. I'm like, do I want an Android tablet?
No. Is that what's missing? Yeah. That is the question.
And the answer will be no. I reserve judgment on the answer to that question. After I spend $1,700, I will let you know if I wanted an Android tablet all along. There's so many ways you could save that money.
You can get a little cheap, like Amazon fire. Sorry, Max. I'm not gonna call you about an Android tablet. The good news is I absolutely guarantee you Google will give you a Pixel watch if you buy one of these things.
Yeah. We should move on to Sarah's here. And also we're gonna have a ton more to talk about at IO. We're gonna be at IO next week.
We have lots and lots of discuss. There's somebody on the coder that I think people want to hear from. It's not you finally got Tom is Google to come on the show. It's amazing.
You can have Deeter. Deeter. I love you. You can't be indicator like that.
That breaks even our over disclosed conflict rules. I don't think it would be like one hour of disclosures and then I'd be like, what's up? That would be the show. And yeah, let's talk about blue skies.
All right. Welcome. Hi. All right.
So we're in a moment of I would say market correction and social networking. When people are shopping, they're just out there. They're trying on new hats. Yeah.
They're throwing some hats away. I like that approach to it. That's what it is. People are just saying.
I'm gonna dress up like a firefighter and use blue sky and then tomorrow I'm gonna throw that away. I'll be a policeman. I'll be on an activity club. That's the moment we're in.
I don't know how to fight fires or the bats are really important. This is a very deep village. People are at friends that is just completely off the rails. Anyhow, the social network of the moment we've talked a lot about activity problems in the show, but there is another decentralized or potentially decentralized social network that has attracted some of attention.
We're all on called blue sky. Sarah, you wrote one of the best scene reports in Verge history about what's going on on blue sky. It's a lot of butts from what we can tell. Tell us about the butts.
What's going on. So many butts. I mean, for one thing that when they set out to make this one of the intentional decisions, they made was, oh, we want people to be able to post RACI content. Nailed it.
No, right. It did make some changes to the whatts hot tabs. That's like the four-year page, basically. No longer shows all of the butts.
So there's way fewer butts going around. But that's said, it's still there's plenty of it. There's still plenty of it. It's like turnaround.
People are enthusiastically posting themselves and just having a great time. So blue sky is Jack Dorsey started it to decentralized Twitter as an exploration. Then there was the Elon cataclysm. He shut it down, but it still exists.
Now it's a company. It's a foundation. How does this work? I believe they are a public benefit corporation.
Apparently there's 12 people in the workslock. I believe it's like nine people who are employed formally. And then there's like some technical advisors to the project who I guess have been suckered into doing actual work. And they should really check out that situation soon.
It's this thing where I think that they are eventually planning on like they've got seed funding. They've got like, I think that they have the really normal projected corporate runway and so on. But I think their eventual plan is to spin off into having this full protocol that people license. And I really don't know what they intend to do with that.
They haven't been, I think that they're probably planning on making a full detailed statement about what their financial plans are. But my guess is that they're really fixing to be something like the Mozilla Foundation or the Tor Foundation or how Signal works. That's said, the business of running and making social networks is very different from all of those other things. And we're seeing that this past week where the CEO has to personally step in because it's 12 people in the workslock.
She has to personally step in and kick people off because they're making trouble. Because it's like, that's what happens when you get a lot of people together in one place. Is things tend towards one person having to make a decision. And I find that really fascinating because the whole vision of this thing is to be decentralized, to be a protocol, not to be a platform.
This is just a beta zone and so forth. But it's a big beta. It's a very big beta. Well, and that's kind of the thing I want to talk about because there was what I can't figure out is like how this happened.
Because it seems like the app got launched. Well, David, you put butts on the internet. People show up. But at first, there was this moment where there was like this very small number of people.
And it was all people who had sort of a reason to be there. And they all seemed to know each other. And it was just this like tiny little group chat that happened to be happening in Blue Sky. And then all of a sudden over the course of what seemed like a day, all of the internet shitposters arrived and mass all at once and just started decimating the platform in every possible way they could find.
And I'm assuming this is not what Jay, the CEO, meant to happen. So like how did this blow up? It was like one of the top apps in the app store for a minute there, despite being like a total disaster of an app like and also that you couldn't get into being on the top app on the app store that most people cannot use is a wild app. Yeah, it's it's absurd.
You can't get into it. And if you can, your phone is going to be so hot. So my phone is just burning up in my hands. It's like, it's a very impressive piece of technology for being built by nine to 12 people over any of the actual numbers.
But it's not good. It's not a good app. I think that like, I don't know, there's just a tipping point. And this is one of those things where like, is there like an economics, a fancy economics word for this?
It's the thing where why everyone has to read Harry Potter? Because everyone else has, right? Like there is just a tipping point where once everyone else is doing it, now you're there. Maybe it's like we should name it after like the Apple Blue bubble issue, right?
Like it's like everyone like pressures you into doing it. But there was just a point where once AOC and drill were on there, it just felt like, Oh, I've got to be on there. I really want to be on there. I want to try that out.
It felt like the invites were a big part of this because the invite like that kind of built the drama for right? Like everybody wanted to be in it because you were like, Oh, I've got an invite. Do you want an invite? I've got an invite.
And so suddenly I was like, Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm going to invite to this because the exclusivity of it. It felt a lot like, do you guys remember? We're all here. We can talk about it.
We can talk about it. Do those first days? No, the first days of Facebook, like it took over my college. I thought you were like, tell me that.
You're like, tell me that. You know, you're like, ramp up a tell over here. Yeah. So I remember pine.
No, the first place I Facebook was real. Yeah. Yeah. And it was suddenly like, everybody's like, Oh, you want an invite?
I want to do it. And then you go to the cafeteria, it was just a wasteland because everybody was at home checking out Facebook. And it felt very much like that, but only for ship posters instead of at college. Well, so I have two questions about this.
One, it's the promises decentralization. And so it's fascinating that they are not in reality decentralized. Yeah. So you can get the app if you have an invite code, you can join one server on an app that is technically supposed to be able to let you join any server.
And this is one enormous advantage over Mastodon, where just picking a server is the first thing you have to do. And Mastodon has now responded, I think, to blue sky by just setting itself as the default, like Mastodon that social is not that default in the app. This is an ideological position they want to take. And I think blue sky is forced them to take it.
And then the other thing that I think is fascinating is, yeah, it's not a good app and it is broken in some deeply hilarious ways. But the way that it is a great app is that it looks exactly like Twitter. Just exactly. Like they didn't, there's no interface innovation occurring in the blue sky app whatsoever.
It is just Twitter again. So all the people are just doing what they did on Twitter. And the platform is not actually Twitter. Well, it helps that it is only one server right now.
Because last week I was like, okay, I'll join blue sky. Okay. Yeah, I'll go and join Mastodon finally. Very different experience doing this back to back.
Because blue sky was just like Twitter, anything else, you go and you make it and you're in, you go do things. Mastodon, I went and I made it. And then I was like, oh, I want to follow this guy. He's really great.
And then I was like, no, he's not in the same server. And I feel like copy paste is like all that friction. And it's just none of that there with blue sky, but it's garbage. It's a mess of an app.
Do you think that they're ever going to announce others? Like this is the promise. This is what they're meant to do. But the fact that everyone's on the main server right now is why it's popular.
Yeah. I mean, they say that they're really trying to get they were prioritizing getting to decentralization, which is one of the reasons why when it really exploded last week, there were no blocks. It was not possible to block another person on on police because they had just deprioritized a lot of these moderation tools. And so you couldn't block someone.
You can use someone, but you could not prevent them from engaging with you, which is not a great thing to happen when you've got, you know, 50,000 people on one platform altogether. All of whom were heavily incentivized to cause trouble. Gleefully causing trouble. Yes.
Yes. And are just manically, extremely manic to be in a place altogether. And so I do think that they are trying to get ahead. And every time something happens, though, which like, that's every two hours, something enormous happens on there that seems like a very big deal.
Like, it distracts from them moving forward towards decentralization. I think that like in an alternate universe before blue sky exploded, they would probably have launched decentralization in a few weeks time. I don't know where they are right now. They're pretty vague.
I'm sure that they'll give more information at some point, but it sounds like people are not getting a ton of sleep and everything is on fire constantly. So their protocol, MassNuts built on activity pub, we did whole episode about activity pub, blue sky's protocol is called at protocol, at protocol Twitter, you can go to their website, it's at prot.com. Here are the three promises they make federated social connect with anyone at any service that's using the AT protocol, which just point out that there are no other services using the AT protocol. And then the others are really interesting.
Algorithmic choice. So if you want to bring your own recommendation algorithm or your own moderation algorithm, more buts, less buts, you can go out and pick one. That means something else. Sorry.
But if we want to leave and start a company that is just algorithmic choice for butts and we call it but dial, let's do it. Yes, do it. I don't know how to write code. The GPT is going to write our app called but dial.
And then the third one, which is to me, I think the big meaningful difference from activity pub is portable accounts. So if you hate the server, you can go and leave it and go to a different server without losing all your content, your follows, the people who are following you or your identity. And so this is like the big change, right? Because David activity pub is pretty basic, right?
It's like inbox, inbox. Yeah, actually, for anyone who wants to spend like an unnecessarily large amount of time reading about this space, Jay Grabor, who is running blue sky, I think in 2020, when they were starting this whole project, did this like massive sweep of every available tool like this from whether it was like matrix and signal and XMPP and like all these other different tools for him, I run a social network and wrote like a 200 page document of like how they all work and the pros and cons and all that stuff. And it's really interesting. And where they landed with the AT protocol, like identity is the thing.
And they've sort of said this over and over that like the main thing activity pub does not do well is let you have an identity that is yours that you can move around, right? Like I just had this experience, I actually moved from the random mastodon account that I was on when I first signed up to Mastodon not social because it's now pretty clearly like the default places where everybody's going to be I figured I might as well be in that place. And doing it required like downloading a bunch of CSV files onto my computer and uploading them somewhere else I got rate limited by Mastodon. So I just broke my website for 30 minutes.
It's just a bad system. And the way they're building AT is exactly like you said, such that like if I'm in a server, I don't want to be on any anymore for whatever reason, I can just pick up and drop over somewhere else. And like if we're going to live in this federated place, that's really important. All the people who make activity pub would say there's nothing about it that prevents that from being possible and that actually people are building it and all be fine in the long run.
But right now, that thing that it is easier to sort of describe who you are to the system is super, super true. And I think it's one of the reasons Blue Sky has worked. It's just easier to show up pick a username and go about your life. But Blue Sky also is again just one.
Yeah, it's the better federated system with no federation. Yeah. And then the clunkier one is actually federated. Which one do you think is the HDD in which is the array?
Yes, yes, I knew it was coming. It has to right. Like this is what we're with that choice where beta, beta max versus VHS again, which is going to be the standard. Anybody know?
I really don't know because like for those kinds of things, like the industry decides, right? Like ultimately it is about like for hardware, it's the industry ends up deciding what the standard is because that's very much like companies are going to be making that choice in the long run. But in this case, there's a weird chaotic element where it's like whichever one that drill posts a lot on. What's the one that drill is going to post a lot on?
It's the one where weird Twitter is posting a lot on. Why is weird Twitter posting a lot on some other thing? It turns into a very recursive thing where it's just so chaotic. It is literally chaos theory.
And like, I don't know. I don't know how it is that like blue sky caught the momentum. Like you say this invite system did drive up buzz and that's true. But it's also true that for weeks on end, people had 20 invites just sort of sitting in their app that they weren't using because they could not convince any of their friends to use it because their friends were like, Oh, that's the social network where everyone wants to talk about AI art and Bitcoin.
I don't want to go there. No, it wasn't that anymore one day. So yeah, I don't know what the tipping point is. And that was just because it's Jack Dorsey's.
Right. It is like it's who they invited early on, right? I don't know what happened to like make it branch out or like what the tipping point was. They say they're not playing on making invite trees open.
But boy, I really want to see that invite tree. I would love to see what that moment was. Yeah. You just watch it go.
So Sarah, in your piece, one of the things that you noted is that they are in a very odd way going through like the entire history of running a social network. While the people who have run social networks at scale are posting on the platform about running social networks, which is just like very funny. It's so funny. The example that made me laugh is Yol Roth who used to run Trust and Safety at Twitter when they banned the butts from what's hot.
He was like, welcome to breastfeeding hell because that is the thing that an AI system can't detect. And he's obviously experienced with it. There's a dynamic there that is like very funny where they're getting a lot of credit for the problems they're going to have. There's a lot of benefit of the doubt, I guess, is the phrase.
But then they're running face first into the brick walls of the problems. And everyone's like, this is hilarious. I can't wait to see what mistake you make next. Oh, yeah.
It's also like the fact that like all these former heads of Trust and Safety are like on the social network and are watching and commenting. It's very much like the thing where like old retirement and Italy stand at construction sites and lean into the fences to like comment on how people are using the tools. It's really like, I really enjoy watching that. That might actually be my favorite part.
Everyone else is enjoying the butts and I'm just going like, yes, it's the safety heads from the backseat. But yeah, it's like a lot of really obvious pitfalls and like it really is kind of very comical, but it's also inevitable in some ways just because of how quickly things are moving, how small the team is and the fact that they're like chasing this utopian vision of the centralised social media that I don't know how it's going to turn out. Like that's like, I understand why they're doing it. But I also think that there are a lot of issues with that and that they're going to be up against some weirder problems in the future.
Like right now, all the problems are very normal problems that we've seen over and over again and that they're just having to deal with on the fly because they have no trust in safety department and it's just one person who is running on very, very little sleep going. All right, looks like coordinated harassment to me. I mean, the people who are like, the people who got banned for actually saying I am currently engaged in a coordinated harassment campaign like out loud. It's like amazing.
Well, there's somebody who got their their invite tree cut off because it's like, no, you invited too many weirdos. We don't want you inviting anywhere. That's a badge of honor. Like I would print out that email and like put it in the wall.
So what are the weirder problems of decentralization that you're referencing here? Can you also talk about the health red as you answer this question because the health red is, to me, the story of blue skies chaos and I don't understand it at all. Okay, why don't I start with the health red, which I understand a little better, whereas with decentralization and its problems, it's mostly that I ran into this on mastodon where no one could agree on moderation standards. And so basically you were looking at like these international treaty negotiations happening and everyone's very angry with each other.
The health red. Basically, one of the things that they allow on there is bot accounts. People will hook up these chatbots to GPT and they're very QT and we have them all muted. I cannot stand them.
People love them though and we'll engage with them all the time. But there was this one thread where people were going back and forth with a duck that pretends to have a lisp and I guess that's so casual. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I got so long you couldn't open it anymore.
So you get like pink like Jason on air at the top and then they tried to like fix it and then you get it got a completely different pink error at the top. They were still in open. And then if you were part of the thread, you would get notified every time someone replied. So it's like you couldn't untag yourself because you couldn't open the thread.
You couldn't. Well, you could try to mute the thread, but it would keep unmuting itself for whatever reason. It's unclear why. I think they were finding different reasons why and then it turned out each reason that they had figured out was not quite the reason why people were unmuting.
I think at this point, they figured out that one of the reasons why the thread kept unmuting was because people would delete their posts and then people would reply to the deleted posts and then it would branch out again and then the mute would no longer apply because the mute had been applied further up thread. Anyway, so like at one point, they had two bots talking to each other. So it was sprawling out really hard. And then people thought it was funny.
So they jump in and post and then they tag their friends, like bait their friends into posting and then everyone would be in there and it would be like the the CC like you replied all accidentally. Everyone's like yelling like and then people think it's hilarious. So they start posting their nudes in there. And so now you're getting unsolicited news and your notifications and you can't mute them or stop them or even load the thread to get out of it.
Well, I think people were able to mute it, but then it was getting much right. Right. Yes, it was the health red at some point, I guess the health red branched. So the real elite posters now call them hell ropes because it's many threads coming together.
Everything about this platform is just on the edge of me not wanting to say the words. It's actually a tremendous amount of fun. That's not like I mean the funniest part about the I I've avoided getting into the health red like at all costs. Liz keeps tagging me into it.
Thanks, Liz. Oh, does she? Yeah, but I don't my superpowers that I don't have notifications for any app on my phone. So you're just you're missing all the butts.
You can't touch me. Get out of my face with this health red. When I wrote the same report, Kevin was like, Oh, please add some detail on what it's like to be in the health and I'm like, I can't I avoided going there because I'm a sane person. But I figured it out.
It was without having to tag myself in there. It's possible to avoid it. You do have to be very careful avoid it is very like early 2000s form vibes where you're like, Oh, I know someone's about to go see me. Not going to click that.
I think people are kind of really into the chaos. I think that there is like this thrill that isn't on any of the other alternatives right now that is getting people to like stick around and really enjoy themselves. I don't know if it's just the fully very online people either. Like I think there's a lot of people who are just enjoying sitting back and watching and as more and more people get on there, I think things are just going to sort of smooth out a little bit and it's going to be more of a normal place.
And I think that goes back to what you were saying earlier about the sort of like unknowable momentum that it has that it's just like once that flywheel starts, it's like it just for whatever reason is a place to be in a way that like two weeks ago, I would have said this is like a new science project that doesn't really have any sort of meaningful opportunity for actual humans at this point. And then all of a sudden as if by magic, it just was a place that was fun and exciting. Well, I just want to push the tiniest of the pushback. This thing is 50,000 users.
They are all terminally online. Like they're not cool. And I'm one of those users and many of us are like, I everyone in this room is on. Yeah, I just want to be clear.
Like it's like it's Jake Tapper and AOC. Like I don't know man. Like it's up in that gal. You know what I mean?
For a while AOC went to the mekala. So great. We can stop saying it's a bunch of nerds and they're having like nerd fun on the internet, but it's not actually a threat to Twitter yet. I don't know.
That's the same set of nerds who made Twitter. It's those people and like Jake Tapper has millions of followers on Twitter and was and I don't know if Jake was but like lots of people with lots of club followers were like begging on Twitter for blue sky invites. William Gibson had to beg on Twitter for an invite like he couldn't just find a friend. He had to beg on Twitter for one.
But the only point I'm making is any party that is exclusive seems cool, right? Especially if you can't get into it and all and then you there's us talking about how cool it is on the inside right and we're like it's a threat of bots. You can't leave like there's a certain subset of our listeners. It's like man, I wish I was in a threat.
Yeah and a much larger subset who absolutely does not. But when it becomes actually what's anybody in does that go away? Like is this peach or yellow or any of the other pop up is it be real? Which is like appears for a minute.
I do think that at this point because it's so buzzy like it's not going to disappear if it opens up. That's a big absolutely cannot open up because they cannot handle it. Like they can barely handle what's going on right now. Like it is genuinely like the next week or so like if they don't buckle like it'll be truly a feat if they don't buckle under the pressure of having to speed run content moderation at scale.
It's like there is no way they can like truly open up this platform. The other part of it is that they are air dropping a fairly large number of invites on a selection number of people. I will occasionally beg them for invites so that I can spread them out in a really hilarious way. Personally, I think it's very funny to be giving invites to local journalists.
Like I gave invites to the entire newsroom of like a nonprofit local newsroom because like I thought that was really funny. I thought it was very funny that celebrities can't get invites and that now the entire newsroom of a small Oregonian nonprofit is on there. Like that's hysterical. But I know that there's like specific individuals.
There's one woman wherever like who's this person but like she's like passed out hundreds of invites and no one knows why she's getting invites other than that. I guess they like who she keeps inviting but the way that she's inviting people is that whenever anyone goes I mean an invite she'll jump right into their mentions and go I've got invites for you and then invite she must just be wild absolutely wild. So I know that like there's people definitely coming in and it really does seem like the the fresh blood is like filling in right but like I really don't think this is an L.O. Peach phenomenon.
I don't know how long it's going to last because the energy is so manic it could just be an extinction burst kind of thing but yeah it's it's really fascinating. I would disagree with your assertion that people are not cool right now. I mean no one's very cool on a social network. That's simply how it goes.
Okay I'll accept that. That is an acceptable worry about it. Like if you're posting automatically two-point deduction. If you tell somebody in real life how many followers you have.
Just know. Yeah yeah. Go card on. It was super funny to me that all of this was happening like at the exact moment that the blue checks being embarrassing thing was happening.
So it was just like all of this energy of like where is a place to be that is not the worst on the internet was all of a sudden Stephen King like telling everyone I did not pay for this. Please don't make fun of me. I did not pay for Twitter blue and then all of a sudden like your time at this sort of exclusive club opens up and it will be interesting once those things both sort of come back to a more sort of natural middle ground whether blue sky continues to seem this cool and exciting. I also genuinely wonder if the platform works will it be as much fun or if they actually decentralized.
I think that's the big one. The thing that's funny is about this is like the centralized platform is winning right but it's supposed to be decentralized. Yeah people love centralization. That's okay.
Everybody wants a alternative like they love decentralization. When it comes down to it with people to make the centralization it's it is really a weird thing. Yeah everybody wants to be the loudest person in the biggest room. They don't want to be the loudest person in the littlest room.
Nobody likes fiddling with controls. Like Gmail one for a reason. Like email is an open ecosystem and it also isn't because Gmail essentially runs the email universe and it's because Gmail was good and everybody was like cool I don't have to think about this or host my own server anymore and everybody just has Gmail now and like if you have a Yahoo email that's embarrassing now it's like having a Twitter blue check like you should probably change. All right I want to end David there's a little bit of other decentralized social media news.
You're right about Mozilla doing a thing. It does seem like a race to stand up. The server is on. Like Mozilla's like what if we ran the Mastodon server that everybody used?
Yes the race I would frame it slightly differently. The race to set up a server is very much on. I think you're going to see a lot of companies suddenly have you know x dot social things very quickly. It's relatively easy to stand up.
People understand what it is to solve the problem. What there isn't and what I wish there was was somebody coming in and saying we are going to be the Gmail of this space. Like even for this big activity, Pope's story I wrote. I kept talking to people who are like no we just want to be good citizens of the servers.
We think everything's going to be great and it's like maybe it'll be meta with this P92 thing they're working on but just show up and be like we're the best at this. What's up fools and that's when it's like okay this might actually have a chance. I'm just imagining Mark Zuckerberg saying that phrase. What's up fools?
He just juts who kicks you and that's it. So the Mozilla news was Mozilla announced in December that it was interested in the Federson was going to do something and the news this week was that they're actually standing up a Mastodon and it's called Mozilla. Social and their big idea is they want to start to push on some of this content moderation stuff. They came up with a whole new set of content policies that are not about neutrality.
They're not about free speech. They're about like we are going to protect people and make this a pleasant place to be on the internet and they're you know filling with the tools that it's going to take to make that work and they're trying to figure out how to enforce some of those policies as they grow and so they're in this place of like they're going to start a very small community with a very specific set of rules. It reminds me of like a subreddit right where it's like this is how this is how we talk this is what we talk about and if you don't play with the rules I have absolutely no compunction is just kicking you out. Mozilla's question is like can they do that at real scale and they feel like they're in a good position as an organization to test that in a way that a lot of the other folks setting up Mastodon instances right now are not.
So I think it's going to be really interesting. I don't get the sense that they're out here trying to be sort of the biggest name in Mastodon but that could change. We get the sense that they think maybe selling moderation software is a potential business in the future and so if they can do an instance where all the knobs are turned up all the way they could sell you that same software and you can adjust the knobs. I think a lot of people feel that way.
The butt dial. Yeah Mozilla could make the butt dial. Mozilla do not take our idea. To trademark the Vergecast Mozilla was in middle clerk.
Come at me. No I think you're right and I think I mean one of the things that is true of Mozilla's really weird org chart is that it is a corporation owned by a nonprofit so they're like their idea of sort of using product to do activism is very alive in what they're doing here but I also think you're absolutely right that if they can figure this out and it can be the sort of thing that like if I'm I don't know they mentioned what brands or like government services like I'm the MTA and I'm like okay I want to have a place to tell people what's going on that isn't a total hell site on the internet and Mozilla can sort of make this nice little package that makes that workable that could be a pretty interesting business for a while. I'm like very obsessed with this entire moment like it just feels like between Twitter kind of breaking and a bunch of people shopping around and every other platform turning into a TikTok version that like the true posters are looking for home and the competition to make one for them is will just remake the internet and I think it's going to be hilarious. It's only going to be fun.
It feels very early 2000s right now. Everything in media is like absolutely back to yeah can I just say this Joan of Freddie who's the other side is like out there like his predictions for media is like home pages will be a big deal and it's like dude have you seen the version of com? I not only predicted this like two years ago. Wait I was like that's still my move.
You were in the Facebook guy. All right we got in this segment before I get in trouble. Don't forget he's actually right there behind you. Yeah he's out there he's putting rubber bands around a watermelon just waiting for me to walk by.
Don't ever shut up. We'll see you are on page. Hey I'm at your show comedian writer and floating head you may or may not have seen on your 4u page and I'm starting a brand new podcast wait wait don't swipe away it's called that sounds like a lot as in that feeling when you check your phone in the morning you read three headlines and you really think oh that sounds like a lot I can't deal with all this but guess what I can deal with it and I'm gonna get into it every Friday I'll break down whatever chaos is happening in the world then I'll sit down with a comedian you can be progressive and not be like fucking annoying maybe an actor. They got the communism and gone too far you go why does the Sadie Hawkins dance happen?
Maybe a filmmaker since leaving that show I'm challenged sparing I just got to hang out and try to do it. Get him out of the charmed line. It could be a politician basically anyone who responds to my cold de-ends. We're recording the whole thing in a beautiful studio so yes you can watch it on YouTube or you can listen wherever you get your podcast.
This is not the place to get the news but is the place to feel a little better about it. That sounds like a lot part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This week on Networking Shell I'm joined by Tanksenajra the meme king with over 15 million followers across Tanks good news influencers in the wild and his personal account. Tank is breaking down what the meme economy really is how much a single sponsored post pays why major brands are throwing serious money at jokes and how mean culture think preparation age starter packs and a perfectly timed screenshot is actually reshaping how we think about money and value.
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It's great. Lots of AI news this week. Some good some bad some weird David what's going on. So I feel like the place we should start is with Jeffrey Hinton.
So he's this guy who won the Turing Award in 2018. He did a lot of the early work on deep learning that is like the foundational stuff for AI as we know it today. So much of the work that has happened like Google likes to take credit for like we've been trying to transformers like this guy invented the stuff before the stuff like none of where we are happens without Jeffrey Hinton and his team from like a decade ago and he quit his job at Google and then gave this big interview to New York Times and has talked to some other folks since then basically saying I regret my life's work. I like I fear first what I have wrought on humanity and I think he said let me see it.
He said I can solve myself with the normal excuse if I hadn't done it somebody else would have and then he said it's hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things. So we're in this space of like they're going to bunch of calls for people slow down or everybody's work but the singularity of the world's going to fall party eyes going to destroy us all and yet as we should talk about there is this like constant unending drumbeat of AI news but it was funny this week to see all of that after the guy they literally called him the godfather of AI comes out and is like maybe all of this was a terrible idea. You can see like kicked it off. Kate Metz wrote this really great book a couple years ago about like the origins of AI and it starts with him trying to figure out where he's going to take all his technology and who's going to pay him the most money and he like that kicked everything off because it was like buy to Google whatever and he ended up in Google and made a lot of money doing it and then I think like wasn't one of the chief researchers is now an open AI like everything that we think of as AI nowadays kind of springs from this dude.
So for him to say like it sucks. Yeah it's like when Elon Musk comes out and is like oh you know six months pause on AI it's like okay well whatever and then he comes out and is like I'm just from my own AI company so there's been a lot of people who have kind of access to grind for one reason or another but this guy I can't think of someone who would have more credibility to say something like this than Jeff and it's like very similar to when I was like nope we did a bad we made the nuclear bomb and that's a little terrifying to think like such a big transformative tech and then have the person who kicked it off be like my bad. You just can't wait for this movie. You're just working our way to the book on audio for like the last four years.
It's gonna say that book is like 1300 page. Oh my I even had it sped up. I don't like to speed things up but I haven't sped up and I'm still like oh my god it just keeps going. And I'm like and I definitely messaged with this one day and was like when do you think like Hinton or someone has their crying to Eisenhower moment about what they did and it sounds like he cried to Kate Metz.
Yeah pretty much this book the book you're talking about is called What Is It? The Man Who Built The Atomic Bomb? Yeah but now it's gonna be a Christopher Nolan movie. The book is excellent though and if you start reading it right now and read it 40 hours a week you'll finish it just before the movie comes out this fall.
So on the same sort of note Biden had a meeting or rather let me say Kamala Harris vice-person Kamala Harris had a meeting today with Sam Albin the CEO of AI, Dario Amode, the CEO of Anthropic another big AI company, Satchan Adela and Sunar Pichai. And the reason I say Biden had the meeting is the White House without a press release saying that Biden stopped by. Yeah he just popped in. He was like what's going on in the Roosevelt room today?
What do you like? Oh is it four major C ICS? There's much other people there too but there's a lot of energy from the government to put some regulations in place. I think we've heard the FTC say hey like we don't have to regulate AI because a lot of what we do is regulate lying and so if you use robots to lie to people it's fine that's just lying and you can't be like but it's computer lying and somehow escape the laws.
So like there's a lot of that like what is the existing law? What is the existing law that could stop AI Drake right? We've written that story and it's like very funny it's a laser bomb and then there's like what is the existing law that I don't know if you are writing a bunch of books and putting them Amazon and holding out that a person wrote them but they're actually written by Chatech EPT is there some existing fraud statute that would make that illegal. So I think there's a lot of that going on but then there's just a lot of should we actually stop it should we like hit the button and stop it for a minute so we can make an actual framework of AI laws and it seems like there's more heat or nothing ever.
And also what would that look like is that even possible like I think the sort of open question for a lot of this is what would any of that even look like. I mean so much of the conversation even coming from the government in the White House this week is basically to the effective like be cool guys. It's just it's a lot of saying like you know use ethics and morals and don't be bad or discriminatory and it's like okay all that is well and good but what does that look like even when I just came coming back to suit our Chai saying I think he said it on 60 minutes that even Google doesn't really understand how it's AI works and it's like okay these things are black boxes even to the people that make them and there is no be cool button and so this race like what does it mean to stop it. We can't train new systems but then Sam Altman is out here saying well this the racers are describing to like build new LMS pointless it's as good as it's ever going to be in this world that we live in.
So like what what moves does anybody have here is super unclear to me. Yeah I think there are moves but they're not like you can't just stop large language models that's that's out of the bottle it's happening and you can run them on a laptop. Yeah anybody can run a laptop and go build them if you're smart enough I'm not but there are smart people who can just go build them you can't stop that anymore but you can potentially stop like the aggressive monetization of them. Wait I would never view this.
I think the aggressive monetization will be what saves humanity. Like unchecked capitalism will save humanity from AI. Here's my here's my evidence for this claim. I'm very excited.
Snapchat is already testing sponsored links in it's my AI chatbot. Yeah nobody's going to use that. Yeah it's like you know that AI is definitely not exactly. It's already kind of bad and it has ads in it.
Snapchat users are so mad at my AI that like I mean of all these all these young people who have like carefully curated screens with their streaks and it's like that space is sacred and now there's just a chatbot who's like what's up would you like to look at some ads? It's like a little stupid shit maybe like hey guys. I think this is true of being as well. We're about some new being features today along with some monetization and like same thing is happening.
It's getting weird. Yeah people are turned off by the AI's. Yeah I'm telling you just like the addition of advertising into these AI bots. Immediately.
Yeah that's a good idea. Maybe that will save us. Finally capitalism is like finally some direct response advertising for Hulu. We'll do some good on this world.
There's other stuff as Zillow rolled out some chat GPT stuff today where you can just ask it for houses. Do people not know what the filter button is on Zillow? Monica wrote our post about Zillow and she sounds ecstatic about just talking to Zillow about houses. I mean like I said a lot of time.
Something right now. Yeah I just got mine so I deleted the Zillow app and it was a big moment for me. I was like I don't need you for at least. It's like a dating app.
I'm done for now. But yeah you just that filter button's really easy. But I could see maybe being like a really smart AI being like okay this is nice but you have anything a little closer to the path training at Journal Square. You guys are thinking about this all wrong.
The appeal of Zillow as a chat GPT plugin is I can just ask it to show me the wildest shit and it will find the houses that are insane. Do you guys follow Zillow on wild on it? Yes. Imagine a chatbot that can just give you infinity Zillow on wild.
This is the dream. Like show me houses that have living rooms covered in medieval armor and it just will. It's perfect. That's the dream.
It's the best version Zillow ever. You don't think I can just say dear God find me a house. Can I just give you a little life update to the audience audience? How's it going?
The current state of our house on Toronto leave the woods and come back to civilization. It consists of us finding something that we thought was cool, reasonably probably sending it to a real estate agent because we're doing so bad that we have a real estate agent now and she replied no that's the murder house and then we discovered it's the house for someone ate a baby. Oh, I said that bad but no that's a bad one. No, super cannibalism.
And Becky is like but it's a pretty good deal. He's like can you just redo the kitchen? Like those ghosts are there. It's not going great.
And if only Zillow could be like that's a murder house. Is that a murder house? Yeah. Right.
Can you just make is this a murder house? Price suspiciously below market. I feel like you could get a lot of like just because people would want that too. Find me a murder house.
Yeah. This is a future zone. But that's very commercial. This is I mean it's just a very commercial for all of its entertainment value.
I don't think the Zillow AI poses a threat to humanity. It's just it's a strong prediction here in the Vergast today. I hope it destroys humanity just because that would be funny. It's like it was a Zillow bot.
That would be good. And I think if any publication is poised to cover it. Yeah. It's us.
But my prediction is that I don't think the Zillow AI is a threat to humanity at this time. I like that. That qualifies. Yeah.
But then there's a lot of the weird other side which is there's a study this week from News Guard which kind of like rates is a for profit rates at the veracity of new sites. Anyway, they so they found 49 entire sites generated from whole cloth designed to just spam Google search. Yes. And it's like oh this is it's happening.
You've been seeing that for months. The only reason I found 49 is because they were searching for specific strings that chat GBT generates like my data runs out in 2021 or as a chatbot. So it's just the most obvious ones. So there's obviously lots that they couldn't find.
Yeah. These were just the lazy ones. Yeah. These are the ones where no one deleted.
I'm a chatbot from the output before feeding into Google. And they found 50 of those. Can I just read you the names of a bunch of these? James Vincent on our team by the way has done a really great job of covering this stuff.
It turns out if you just follow the phrase as a large language model around the internet, it does some really amazing stuff. He's been writing about how it's showing up in like product reviews and Yelp and all these really fascinating. But I just want to read you the names of a bunch of these. It is the most like uncanny valley stuff I've ever seen.