Google I/O recap: AI is taking over Search

What's up, y'all? I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WNBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports, and mom. And this is a mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

It's dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to the broadcast, the flagship podcast of the JBC. I'm not going to tell you what that is, because if you watch the Google Iokino, you know you need a massive amount of processing power to understand this information.

Yeah, we can't afford to tell you. Hi, I'm your friend Eli, David Pierce is here. Hi, I'm in a hotel approximately two miles down the road from the hotel that you're currently in. It's good stuff.

Yeah, we'll explain what's going on in a second. Alex Kranz is here. Hi, Alex. I'm not in a hotel, but I'm really excited to talk more about the JBC.

So today was the Google I.O. keynote. It was a big one, a lot of pressure on this one, a lot of AI-related pressure on this one. I believe we counted, and soon after I said AI, 80-plus times on stage.

Wow. Just a lot of pressure on Google for this one, and they delivered in pretty enormous ways. We should talk about all that, but it is true that David and I were there at I.O., along with the song, Allison Johnson, Alex Keith from our team, we saw Dieter, which was really fun, and now we're in separate hotel rooms on the road. It's easier to do this podcast in separate hotel rooms, just given how we produce it, than actually in a same room together.

So we're all far apart from each other, but together. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, in our hearts. Alone, together.

Together, alone. Now, I would like to begin the podcast with formally apologizing to my friend Dieter. It's been a long friendship, and sometimes you go too far, and you scream for the Android police to arrest your friend. I believe I heard that you said, we you, we you.

That's a fact. That's it, in fact. That's from a source. I'm not going to reveal my sources, but I did hear that Eli shouted, we you, we you.

Yeah, arrest the family. And then someone said, Eli, don't scream, call the police. Anyway, it's fine. It's fine, and everything's fine.

Anyway, so it's good.io. Very fun to see everybody in person. David, I think you caught this. There was a lot of pressure on Google, but then there was like a lot of confidence and a lot of curiosity from all the attendees about whether Google would meet the moment.

So the energy was pretty charged. Yeah, it was, it was an interesting space, because this was the first fully in-person.io in four years, which is like an eternity. And folks were excited to be back. It had that same kind of like first day of camp energy that some of these events have had over the last year or so.

It's at the Shoreline Amphicator, which is just a straight up concert venue. So it's like outside and cool, and it's, there's a big lawn, and it like feels like you're in a concert venue. So it's like, it had a lot of stuff going for it, coming in. And there was this question of like, this matters a lot to Google in a way that I think Google.io, we have often accused of being sort of a crab bag of announcements.

It's like somebody just like walks around to every team at Google and has like got anything, and whatever they have, they launch at I.O., and that's what Google.io is. But this year, it's been, it's been very clear that like this is the time Google had to make the world believe that it has a plan for AI. And Sundar Pichai in particular had to convince the world that not only does Google have a plan for the future of AI, but that he is the right person to execute that plan for AI. There's been a lot of smoke around like, is Sundar the guy, are the people inside of Google upset the information, has done some really great reporting on all of the ways that kind of his authority and leadership were being tested.

It's just a really interesting moment. And yet, I think you're exactly right. As soon as the thing started, it felt confident. It was like a company on top of the world being like gaze upon our kingdom.

So it was like that context switch at the very beginning of the keynote was really fascinating to me. You felt like he did it. He kind of showed it. I wouldn't go that far.

So here's what I would say. Yeah. And there's a very specific reason I'm saying I wouldn't go that far. Nothing is shipping.

I mean, BARD. BARD is sort of shipping. Even the new features of BARD that they're most excited about are behind labs and they're gating how many people can get access to it. So they showed a lot of really cool stuff.

And then you got to go sign up. It's google.com slash labs. And you can put yourself on a wait list and it'll let some people in. So it's just like they showed a lot of really cool stuff.

Yeah. And all of it is plausible, right? Nothing seemed too far afield, but it's not actually shipping. So I would just stop right there like they did it.

But they showed very much they can do it. They have not actually done it. The switch that David is calling out that I felt most keenly was sort of right at the beginning where Sundar was like, we have 15 products that have half a billion users. And of that, six products that have more than two billion users.

And now I'm just going to put the AI in front of them. And I was like, oh, right, they're Google. And they can just do it. I think they had not yet made that case very convincingly.

And to some extent, this still was kind of a grab bag IO. It was just everyone was instructed to pull the same thing out of the bag, which was add AI to it. And so there's a thematic unity to the point where like the pixel conversations will come to at the end. Like Rick Oster was like, it's an AI phone.

And it always has been. And I was like, has it? I don't know. That's weird, right?

But like that little bit of sort of thematic unity that everyone has been instructed to talk about AI in their products meant for huge sections of it, there was confidence. Google is going to do this. It's going to add AI to all these products. And everything they show us is kind of cool.

Yeah. And at the very beginning, I mean, I think the way that these typically go is you get a few minutes of the CEO at the beginning who tells you sort of a big story about the future. And then you get a parade of executives who do the actual announcements, right? That's how Apple does it.

That's how Google typically does it. But this time we got, I didn't count, but maybe like 20 or 30 minutes of Sunar actually going through some of the announcements and explaining what this is and explaining why this matters. And it's like he got up there and like explained Google in a way that you don't typically see at an event like this from a CEO like that. And it's like you and I were talking after it where it's like the people Sunar was talking to were like investors and analysts who had spent the last eight, six to eight months now wondering, is Google going to lose this AI race that nobody really saw coming, but it's moving really, really fast.

Google just has not seemed like it was ready for this and wasn't going to be like, and this was very clearly Sunar standing up and saying, we're ready. We have a plan. I've got this and we've got this. And it was like, normally these things are for developers and they get really into the weeds about how all of this stuff actually works and goes into your Android apps.

This was not that at all. Yeah, it's not like a roadshow. Like we're going to just show off everything we can do. And yeah, I think there were a bunch of like folks from the government there too, right?

Like regulators and stuff kind of also curious. Yeah, there were a lot of people there, like government people. There were people walking around. They had these signs called lollipops or like circles on six.

And like one of them says press and like that's how you know where to go. And this time for the first time in a long time they had one that said government affairs. And there were lots of government affairs people floating around. And it's because the AI risks are real and the push to regulate AI is real.

And just last week, Sundar and Sasha Nadella and Sam Altman and some other folks were at the White House to have like an AI summit. And they're going to go do that in Europe. And then they're going to go do that in the UK. And then they're, I don't know, the government of Belize is going to demand that Sundar can try to shut up and talk to AI like existential AI risks.

So there are, they have to just be really proactive and say, and this was their catchphrase over and over again, bold but responsible. Like over and over again. At one point, you know, like there's a natural tension when we say that and we understand it. We want to take big, bold bets on what this thing can do for people, but be responsible in how we deploy it.

Which is fascinating because the open source models are not being deployed responsibly. People are using them. And so Google is trying to position itself as like, you should regulate AI, but you should trust us because we're already responsible. And that was a real undercurrent of all of this.

But we should start with the actual announcements. So the most important one, and David, as you said, Tudor talked for 20 minutes and he kept coming back to this. We've pivoted to being an AI-first company like six or seven years ago. And Google's mission is to organize the world's information.

And that mission is timeless. And he just said that straight out. Our mission is not changing because of AI. Our mission is timeless.

We've been working on AI for seven years or however long it's been. And now it's time for the future of search. And they shut off a new version of search. And you got to play with it a little bit.

Yeah, I spent a bunch of time on Monday with some executives at Google walking me through some demo. I got to sit in a sort of half-staged red team process where they were trying to like test this thing. But basically, the shortest way I can think to describe it is essentially they're putting a new box at the top of search results that they call the AI snapshot. And what it's doing is using all of these large language models that's using Palm 2, which is a big kind of general purpose model that Google announced at I.O.

But also some of the other things that Google's been working on in search for a long time to take all of this information and give you essentially like on the one side an AI summary. So which is the stuff you get from, you know, Bing or ChatGPT or whatever you ask, what is cool in Peru? And it just answers the question. And then on the right, it gives you a few links from around the web that kind of substantiate that information on the left.

If you do a shopping search, it'll also show you some products with AI-generated summaries of them. If you do local stuff, it'll do the same with the local results. But now instead of getting links at the top of search results, you're going to get this big colorful box that is totally AI-generated. And it won't show up all the time.

It won't look exactly the same everywhere. But it is like it is a new thing at the top of search results, which I would argue strongly is like the single most important piece of real estate on the internet. It's a complete redesign of it. And they kept saying over and over, like, the search results are still below.

You can scroll down and get to web search. And that's true. But it's still like a fundamental change. And especially on mobile, where more and more people are, this just eats the top of the screen.

Like when you do a Google search now, instead of seeing web links, you're going to see this AI-snapshot first. And that is a huge, huge, huge deal. I want to be precise about that. Most people will not see that.

You have to opt into this experience, and it's a way less. This is what I mean. Like, they haven't done it yet. Like, the thing is still gated.

Yes, yeah, right. I think there's a difference between they haven't done it and they haven't shifted to everybody, right? They've done it. Like, it works.

I've used live demos. Like, it's there. It's a thing. Yeah, but so they have this thing called the Search Generative Experience.

They call it SGE for short. And it's a feature of a thing called Search Labs, which also has a bunch of other little features in it that we can talk about everyone, too. But that's kind of the main thing. And so if you get into Search Labs and you turn on SGE, you'll start to see those snapshots.

And their essential plan is to use this kind of opt-in group, which is going to be a self-selecting set of people, to figure out what works and what doesn't. And then start doing the kind of, you know, 2% tests that lots of companies do where you just roll it out to a few users and see what they think, and then roll it out more broadly. So what, essentially, billions of people see might look very different, but this is directionally where all of this is going for all of Google Search. Because right now, when you go and you Google something, that top thing is usually like, here's all the stuff we want you to buy from Google aggregated links.

Does that go now below it, or does it just disappear? And so you get, like, this search thing, and then all the relevant links. Because right now, I always scroll down. Like, the top of the real estate that's supposed to be valuable, I usually just scroll past it because it's like, here's the stuff Google wants to sell me, and here's the actual thing I was looking for.

Here's the first organic result. Right. And so, like, does that make that experience better? In a way, yes.

I think in the sense that, like, if I Google something, you know, stuff to do in Peru, right now, the odds are, if you do that Google Search, the first few things are going to be ads, right? And this is, like, the fundamental problem with Google Search is it has just been absolutely overrun by sponsored stuff. And links to Google Search, these sort of zero-click searches, and, like, Google Search as a way to explore the web is not nearly as good as it was. With the AI stuff, what it's doing is combing through all of that information and pulling useful data up to the top.

And it's like, we can talk about what that means from a business perspective. We can talk about what that means for publishers. We can talk about what that means for SEO. Like, it's going to screw up the web in all kinds of ways that we cannot even predict yet.

But from a pure user experience where I'm, like, I want relatively good, relatively substantiated information, I think in a lot of ways this is actually going to be, like, great. It's going to have a lot of issues that a lot of large language models have. It's going to hallucinate. It's going to make mistakes.

Google, I think, has done a better job than most. One of the things they showed me but didn't show in the demo is there's this menu in the AI snapshot that if you hit a button, it will break up the, like, three-paragraph summary sentence by sentence and actually have links below each sentence with the information that corroborates that sentence. Okay, that's cool. Yeah, it's, like, it's a constantly sourced thing, and it becomes, I think, it's, like, amazingly useful and cool.

And so at the limit where that really works, and, again, I've not seen it enough to be able to say confidently, like, how broad that is, but if it really works, I think from user experience, it's kind of great for lots of things. Yeah, what it will do to the web is a very different and messier thing, but as a person who just, like, wants information from Google, this makes sense to me. So there are two gigantic ideas in there, and you hit on one of them, like, halfway, which is the very concept of what you ask Google for is now different, right? Yes.

We used to Google stuff to find things on the web, and where Google is going, and they called this out in the keynote. They're like, I want to find clothes for a five-year-old that are good for a birthday party, is not a typical Google search. And they're changing what the Google product is, what search delivers to people, to the answers to general questions instead of, here's the web. And that's just a massive shift.

Like, it's worth sitting with it for a minute and thinking, okay, what if Google, the product, is no longer organized around, I'm searching the web, and now it's just organized around, I'm telling you the answer, which is the road they've been on for a long time, and I feel like this is the last step. Can you do Boolean searches in this new version? No, I would assume. Well, it's prompt engineering.

It's an LLM. Yeah, I mean, prompt engineering is essentially just normal human Boolean search, right? Like, it's functionally the same thing. But I think, like, I think you're mostly right, but I think that's sort of the whole story, right?

So I think the way Google explains it, and I'm sort of boiling this all the way down, is, like, there are basically three things you can do on Google. One is navigational, right? It's the people who go to Google and type in Facebook, because then we get to Facebook.com. And a gigantic percentage of people do that.

Like, single word names of websites are the most popular thing searched on Google. It's insane, but it's true. And those people are super well-served by search results, right? Like, if I search Facebook, popping up an AI snapshot with a bunch of information about the history of Facebook is actually bad UX, you should show me to Facebook.com and send me to Facebook.com.

Now I'm just doing this in the browser window. I'm like, this is actually great. This is, like, the best Google search you can have. It kind of works.

Yeah, and Google search is really good for that. The second thing is basically, like, questions with answers, right? And so it's, how tall is the Empire State building? It's, like, every Google executive's favorite version of that.

Or all the way down to, like, slightly more complicated but good questions, right? Like, what's the best restaurant in my town? It's, like, a question with an answer. But then the third thing is questions that don't have a right answer and that don't have someone on the Internet who has tried to answer that question.

And that is questions like what you're talking about. Like, clothes for a five-year-old kid to wear to a birthday party with all of the other contexts that potentially comes along with the things that come from that. Google has never been good at that. Like, I spent some time with Prabhakar Raghavan, who runs Google's search stuff, and he described this as, like, task completion, right?

And it's, like, if I go to Google and I say, make me an itinerary for a weekend in Paris, it'll show me some information about things to do in Paris. But it can't pull together information about what's closed and when, what's busy, whether I have kids with me, how much things cost. They even said this about local search. If I say, what's the best restaurant?

It's, like, okay, what can you afford? How long are you willing to wait for a reservation? What kind of food do you like? Where do you want to sit?

What do you, like, is best of the most Michelin stars or the one that matches your taste? Like, these questions don't have right answers. And they're based so much on context. And Google has never been good at that stuff.

And increasingly, what Google says, and I don't know that this is true, but this is what Google says, that is the stuff that people want from Google. And that's why they think AI can be really powerful. Like, they don't think, and I think this is an important distinction, they don't think a chatbot is the future of search. Like, BARD is not going to replace Google search, at least as Google sees it now.

AI is another tool on top of everything else that search already does. And I think this is a convenient thing for Google to say because it's Google and it makes a hell of a lot of money on the way that search already works. But that's the way that they see it. It's like, this is another tool to do a kind of searching you've really never been able to do before on Google.

Yeah, but that thing, that's a big change, right? It just goes from what Google was, which is we're going to help you navigate the world of information on the internet, to we are not answering complicated questions with all this additional context. Yes, absolutely. Again, they've been on this road for quite a while.

Like, this is the promise of Google Assistant anyways, which, by the way, came up zero times today. Yeah, they didn't say the word Assistant, did they? Not once. They didn't.

And I think it's because LMs are still too slow for, like, a voice interface, so they just don't want to, like, get into it. But they just didn't say that. The second thing that's, like, complicated here is Google has to go get all that information. It needs to know what time the restaurants are open and closed.

It needs to know if critics have liked the restaurants. It needs to know if they still exist. And if they're just scraping the web and taking the information and never sending anybody to webpages, the businesses that do that work don't exist. If Google never sends anybody to Yelp, and I'm picking Yelp very specifically because Yelp is very mad about this all the time.

If Google never sends anybody to Yelp and scrapes all of Yelp's data, then Yelp is dead. And then Google has sort of killed itself along the way. And there's a tension there that I'm not sure Google has figured out or anyone has figured out. Just from the outside, because I didn't go to these briefings and stuff, but it's something that they haven't, because a lot of these things that they're doing, that they're pivoting towards, this is something that publications already do, right?

Like the best restaurants in your area, Eater, which is a Vox Media property, and a lot of other companies do that already. Foursquare does that already. Oh yeah, V, who was sitting next to me, at one point was like, oh, so it's making buying guides, which is the thing that she does. Right, like, it's already piggybacking off of that data, and I am really curious to see, like, okay, what do you do, like, you're going to fundamentally kill those data sources if you're not sending traffic back to them, so how do you exist?

There's absolutely no answer yet. There's one mention of, like, we want to send traffic on the web and we'll work with publishers, and there's a lot of politicians there. There's a big swirl of that in the background that was not really brought up on stage. It's just a question, like, here is search, and, you know, I wrote about it this week, and we're going to keep writing about it for the rest of you.

Like, once you change this thing on the internet, the internet changes forever, and I think we saw today Google's intention is to change it. I don't say it's a positive or a negative. Yeah, that's just what they want to do. Yeah, and maybe it should.

Like, you can't look at this product as in beta experiment, whatever it is. You can't look at it and say, that doesn't look cool. Like, it looks very useful and very cool, and there's a feature of it where it is still kind of a chatbot, right? You ask a question, it shows you this, like, AI-generated box, and then you can ask that box a follow-up question.

That's cool, right? Like, it's just, the whole thing is cool, but that means, like, all of search change, like, the thing that Google does, which is essentially direct people around the open web, is going to change. Yeah. There's just going to be a huge set of, like, ripple effect changes that come from that, and I think it's worth it to call it.

Like, this looks cool. It's not a competitor to ChatGPT. Like, BARD is their competitor to ChatGPT, and we can talk about all the things we're doing with BARD, but this is them saying, we know that everyone's using ChatGPT and saying this is a more useful way to search, when what they mean is I'm asking random questions to a text box, and it's delivering some answers to me. And our product should argue that, and that's a rubber one, versus what they want to do with BARD, which is, like, write me an email sucking up to my boss about how good his presentation was, which BARD was, like, more than happy to do.

Very good at sucking up to his boss. Yeah. Yeah, I think the thing that I kept getting hung up on during this presentation was when they were showing one of those buyer's guides that they created, which I think is from Mountain Bikes, and they had the ratings in there. And I was like, where are those ratings from, right?

Like, where's the sourcing of that? Because if it's Amazon, that's one sort of audience, right? Amazon's not letting Google scrape that. Yeah, Amazon doesn't want to let them scrape that.

And if it's, like, REI, that's a totally different one. And if it's, like, Google's random own algorithm, like, there's just that lack of clarity there that I think makes it not necessarily a good product for some of those use cases they were showing with the buyer's guides. But that might just be because I work with the Verge. Setting that aside, the disclosure, the Verge, right to refuse to protect products.

Not Mountain Bikes yet, but we do like the Bikes lately. It's strange. Your fans work here. All that aside, the implicit assumption of this is that the economics of making the web will continue to produce the web for Google to draw upon to make its lucrative search product.

And, like, that's not true. Like, this will change how the web gets made. And that's fine. Like, we should go into it.

So that search, it's rolling out. You can sign up for it. It's Google.com, Labs. It's neat.

Play with it. Look at the demos. It's neat. It's definitely going to have.

We're going to be talking about this for the next five years. I promise you. I'm going to ask it the worst questions as soon as I get access. It's bold but responsible, Alex.

I'm going to have a bold but responsible series of questions for it. They also rolled out Generative AI in a bunch of other products. Most notably, I think, in, like, the Google Docs suite that they call Workspace. So Gmail, Google Docs, Slides, the whole thing.

And all of that looks sweet. Yeah. It's all super useful. Yeah, I continue to think that, like, we're in the space of thinking about AI as this, like, huge thing that understands everything about everything and can answer all of my questions.

And I think, by far, the more useful version of AI most of the time is going to be the one that you're just like, what is in this dumb document that I don't feel like reading? And, like, there was a demo in Gmail where you just say, I need, I cancel my flight. It's essentially a prompt you give to Gmail. And it goes through your email.

It finds your confirmation numbers. It finds the, you know, all the information that you need about your flight in order to be able to cancel it. And, again, I have deep, deep doubts about its ability to do this successfully and well every time. But at least this is the idea.

And it just writes that email for you. And it has access to all of that information. It's just sitting there in your email. And it's able to comb through stuff that is yours, that you care about, that you have decided is relevant to you, and make that stuff for you.

And that's the stuff where I'm like, okay, this is real. This is something. And they showed up, what was it, Project Tailwind? That, like, kind of AI notebook thing?

That's like a notion killer, right? Yeah, it's pretty hard. They frame it as, like, an educational experience. But you look at it and it's just like, this is just a research tool for anyone who stores and needs to make sense of information.

And for me, it's just like, I can just put a PDF of a lawsuit in there and just ask questions about that lawsuit to Google's AI. Like, that is massively powerful. Summarize them. And this thing hallucinates a little bit.

It's like, oh, I'm so sorry you're going to jail. That's going to, like, separate the good law students from the bad law students. Whether or not they pay for the version of Project Tailwind that hallucinates or not, it's like the next year up in pricing. They had another demo in Google Sheets, which I thought was really interesting, where they were talking about colleges.

Like, for funding a college, it's good if I want to be involved in video games and I'm interested in animation. And I made a list. And then the person demoing it was like, tell me if they're public or private at a table. And so I added another column to the list and it said, well, the colleges are public or private.

And I'm looking at this, like, this is super cool. Also, all that stuff we talked about in the search where it has the button where it tells you all the sources, none of that's here. This is, like, the most dangerous place where you're now having it draft documents and do stuff for you and you have no way of checking. And when you're, like, make a list that I will depend on in a college search and you're going to, like, if it gets it wrong that a university is public or private, like, I'm not sure the stakes are here.

Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. But there's a lot of trust that's downstream of that. I mean, the average tuition. You ask it for the average tuition.

Then you get accepted and you go, oh, this is actually $100,000 more than I thought. I mean, if you get all the way to applying and you don't double check that, like, I think 18-year-olds are a different class of folks than us. One of the conspiracy theories that I've heard about BARD in particular is that it exists to make people do more Google searches because you have to fact check every single thing that BARD says to you. So it pops up this thing over and over, right?

It's like, BARD's an experiment. It's going to get lots of stuff wrong. And then there's that button at the bottom that says Google it. And so it's like, every time I, you know, fill out this table and I have to go Google every one of these just to check to make sure it's a public or private university.

And Google's like, sick, we just got 12 Google searches out of this. They announced he's like, right, it's a BARD. Like, do you know how sometimes you have a friend who sucks? And I'm like, they get a little bit better.

Like, I don't know how else to describe this. Like, what's a meaner way of saying, like, my friend got a glow up? Like, oh shit, you're hot now. Like, you know, it's like that thing that's very insulting.

BARD used to be bad at math. And now it's good at math. Like, they said this over and over again. Seriously, like, BARD is now better at math and better at coding.

And it's like, because they used to suck before. So they've improved this. And a big change here, they upgraded the model to something called PALM 2. So the model they have been very proud of is called PALM.

They've upgraded the model to PALM 2. They're very proud of how big it is. There are different sizes of the model inside of PALM. And they have, like, adorable names.

There's, like, Gecko and Bison and Unicorn. Unicorn's the biggest. And Gecko's the littlest. And Gecko can run locally on a phone.

So they're very proud of this model. And that's the thing that's now powering BARD. And that has led to a pretty fantastic, like, capability increase for BARD. So maybe it won't be as confused and boring as before.

And then it can now do really interesting things. Like, it can definitely write code. But then they showed, hey, write code. Improve your own code.

And then we've comments on it in Korean. And it just did it, which is pretty cool. Like, I don't know if the Korean comments were any good. Again, BARD, a little shaky.

But it was just cool that they could do that. And then they talked a lot about multimodal interfaces so that you can talk to BARD with pictures. We can have BARD generate pictures for you, which is really cool. And then they're doing plugins.

So in addition to generating pictures for you, they can go talk to Adobe Firefly and have Adobe Firefly do generative AI images for you. Like, the flex for Google is, like, oh, we're Google. And we can just call all of these companies and say, do you want to plug into a thing that's going to show up with a billion users on day one? And they all see this.

The plugin thing, I think, is, like, the most interesting story in chatbots for the next couple of years. Because this is now what everybody has decided is the next turn of this, is that the chatbot is the interface, whether it's GPC or Bing or BARD, the chatbot is the interface. And you're going to use these plugins to pull in all kinds of other data. And that's either going to turn out, like, the App Store, which is, like, a huge, incredibly successful business that has birthed entire new industries, or it's going to turn out, like, browser extensions, which are, like, neat and cool, but don't make anybody any money or solve any real problems for anybody.

And it's going to be totally fascinating to see which of those it turns out to be. But I think you're right that the other advantage that Google has is it has most of those services already that it can plug in. Like, Google doesn't have to go out and talk to Kayak to do a travel plugin for BARD. It just has Google travel.

It can just do that. And it has maps that it can plug in. It has Google Lens that it can plug in. And it's, like, all of this stuff, like, AI is coming into search at the same time that Google is coming into BARD in a really interesting way.

And all of this stuff is first-party right now, but it could get bigger very quickly. Doesn't that kind of set Google up for regulation troubles, though? Because, like, this is just showing off just how big and huge and far-reaching Google is, which is the thing that has the FTC really concerned about, like, thinking, you know, rumbling about, like, well, we want to write Google up because it's too big. And they're primarily focused on the advertising section of this.

But, like, if you can go do what all of these other apps and all of these other plugins and all these other companies can do in one place, that seems like a really powerful argument for, yeah, break that up. Well, they've got to actually do it. I think, like, yes, I think there's a reason there are a lot of government affairs staffers walking around. Like, I don't think it's possible to overstate.

Like, where we were, there was the press, and there was, like, large groups of people undersigned the government affairs. And then somewhere else, there were developers, presumably. It was very obvious Google was, like, courting this group of people. And you're right.

Like, they have to lock this line. And when they did Google travel, they got into some trouble, right? Like, they bought a company. They bought a travel agency, basically.

Like, all this stuff happened in the past, but it happened. And now Google owns it. And it's, like, pretty hard for them to get into trouble doing things they already can do against deals they've already approved and went through. Especially when all they have to say is, like, well, there's OpenAI and Microsoft on the other side of the table.

Like, we're competing against the fastest-growing consumer software products ever. And, like, no one thinks we're winning. Is there Bing travel? Yeah, I mean, like, Microsoft operates all these services.

And, like, they're Microsoft. If Microsoft wants to stand up a competitor to Google Travel, it definitely can. And there's always other startups. So I think that moment for Google is, they're about to say, we're adding AI to all these products.

And they need to keep the regulators happy. But they haven't, like, keep saying, they haven't actually done it. Like, they're just showing us these demos that are really, really cool. But they haven't actually shipped it yet.

They're being very, very careful. And they're saying out loud, here's all these bold ideas we have. We're going to roll them out responsibly. We know we've got these problems.

And then one of their biggest announcements was every time you make an AI-generated image with a Google tool, it's going to get a watermark, and it's going to have metadata embedded into it that says it's AI-generated, and it's been synthesized media. And they want, broadly, the industry to adopt that. Is that going to happen? Like, I don't know if that's your question.

But that's where Google's head is at. They showed a really cool demo where someone was speaking English, and then they ran through an AI, and I think it was in Spanish, right, David? I think that's right, yeah. And it came out, and the person's voice had been remapped with perfect intonation into Spanish, and in the video of that person speaking, their lips had been remapped from English and Spanish, too.

Right. Super cool. And they are staring at a group of government affairs people, and they're like, we know that there's a downside to this. Like, we know that this is, like, a very dangerous tool to unleash on the world.

We actually said the word's deepfake on stage. Yeah, we can now deepfake in every language. And they're like, and our solution to this is we're only going to give this tool to our trusted partners. Which is, on the one hand, great, right?

Google's being responsible. On the other hand, it comes with a huge set of questions about how they will decide which partners to trust, and whether or not they will cave to bad faith criticisms, right? Like, all these big techniques have caved to bad faith criticisms about who they trust and what they trust. Okay.

And then it also is, like, kind of funny, because it sort of implies that Google is the only company in the world, and it's like, y'all, people are doing this on their laptops today. Like, deepfake revenge porn is a problem today. So you promising that you won't give this language transition tool to people you don't trust, like, solves this problem 2%, because the real problem is, like, arbitrary code execution on laptops, which no one can stop, and maybe no one should stop. But there's a tension there that we can talk about for, like, the rest of our lives, probably.

So, like, in the room, while you guys were in the room, did it feel like Google was doing a good job of saying that they were trustworthy? Like, did you feel, did everybody seem to sense, like, yeah, these are the trustworthy ones, these are the ones that trust the AI versus OpenAI, Microsoft, and everybody else kind of in this space right now? I spent a lot of time trying to decide how I feel about this, because all of my instincts say that, no, everybody is moving too fast and nobody is being trustworthy. But also, like, in talking to these folks and even in watching the keynote, I kind of believe Google that it's trying to do this.

I mean, one of the things that I think seems to be true is that these kinds of products have existed inside of Google for a long time, and it has been slow and careful in how it released them to the world, right? And then I think when chat, GPC, and then Bing happened, Google's hand was forced, right? And so it started having to play its cards much more quickly and much more aggressively. And I think whether that was the right call remains to be seen on a variety of different levels.

But I do think Google is trying to do this the right way. And I think that's partly self-serving, right? Google has a gigantic search business for text. Google has a huge number of regulatory issues that it's fighting against.

So Google has a lot of really self-serving reasons to try and be the good guy here. But at the same time, I think Google is trying to be the good guy here. So, like, incentives aside, I do think the company is trying to be responsible. And it's possible that I'm just, like, being taken in by the narrative they're trying to spin, because that's clearly the narrative they're trying to spin.

But that is what it has felt like to me so far. And there's a lot of people at Google who really, truly believe that they're five years away or 10 years away from AGI, or official general intelligence, and, like, that they should be the only ones to do it, because they'll get it right, and it won't kill everybody. And, like, that's something. That's a certain amount of confidence.

It's a take, yeah. I would say more cynically, if you're Google and Microsoft, what you want to be is, like, a regulated monopoly. And I think if they can convince a bunch of lawmakers to, effectively, like, we only trust AI to these three companies that we will regulate directly, like, Google's like, yeah, we'll be one of those three companies. I just, it's like, the kids don't have laptops, man.

They're going to figure out whether or not the government says, like, and, like, there's just something in there that's, like, I'll give you an example of AI Drake. Yeah, my favorite character in the entire game. You want to stop AI Drake, right? Okay, what are you going to do?

You can go to Apple and say, don't let AI Drake into Logic. You can go to Pro Tools. None of that makes sense. That's how I stop it.

You can go to Google and Microsoft and say, don't make tools. Okay, that's how I stop it, because the open source will just let you do it. You're going to go to Dell and Intel and say, don't let this code run on your laptops? Like, there's just, like, at some point, like, the kids are just going to run software and they're going to make AI Drake, and, like, Google is in that kind of position with all of this stuff.

There's a really interesting leaked memo or allegedly leaked memo from inside Google, and it basically argues that it's not actually competing with open AI, that they're competing with open source models. Like, the meta model got leaked, and they're saying, we're competing with open source. Like, that community is going to go faster than we ever will, because, you know, we're, like, wringing our hands about safety and worrying about open AI, and that's just running at the speed of, like, community on the internet. And, like, there's just something there that, like, let's Google, where a bunch of Google lawyers, a bunch of government lawyers are going to do a room to stop a bunch of teenagers making an AI Drake.

Like, that is just an unfair thing from the jump. And, like, I think that's going to be one of the most interesting dynamics we see play out, because at the end of that all, like, a big decision is, will we let people run whatever software they want on their laptops? And I think the answer is almost always going to be yes. Yeah, well, it just makes me think of, like, that's one of the reasons Google is nervous, right?

Because it's going to be a lot easier for the government to regulate Google than it is for the government to regulate AI. And I think it may see it as a proxy for regulating AI to tell a couple of these companies what to do. But it's like, shutting down Napster didn't end piracy, but it is one button you can press that does some of the work. And I think if I'm Google, I'm worried that I am the biggest, most pressable button in that space right now.

Yeah. One thing I definitely want to talk about, and, like, the tweets came in instantly. Google demoed a new magic editor function for Google Photos, AI-based, where they were like, you know, I can shed a photo. And the demo was a child-holding balloon.

on a park bench and they just circled the child and they scooted him over on the bench and like my twitter's pretty quiet i haven't tweeted in a long time but you know during events i keep it open just to see and the immediate instant what is a photo replies like this i think this is a singularity level event for what is a photo like it is right there with produce an image of my child as a text prompt right we're looking at a photo and we don't like its composition we don't like the way the sky looks we don't like this and with a tap with a circle we can just instantly change it yes there's some photoshop conversation there but this is different but meaningfully different than that stuff yeah the demo that really got me is there's this picture of a woman standing in front of a waterfall and doing the thing where you sort of stick your hand out as if you're like you know catching the waterfall or like the thing they do where you're holding up the leaning tower pizza or whatever and she got the angle slightly wrong but with magic editor you literally just drag her over to the side of the photo so that she gets the angle right and it's literally it's just that simple they just like tap on the thing and just slide the woman over in the photo and then put it back and it looks just as normal and you can change the sky you can change the background it's the kind of thing that it's like this is like the natural finish of instagram filters if you just take instagram filters and play it all the way up to the end you have this where you can just change every part of your photo however you feel like and this is another one that's like on the one hand like as a person who tends to take just slightly wrong photos all the time this kicks ass i'm gonna use this all the time it's coming to google photos so it's not just this is going to be applicable to like many photos that i take from now on and yet i'm gonna look at every one of these and be like am i lying to the universe about this photo that i took every time right no it's like photoshop exists right and like instagram is a really good example here because you think about the instagram norms have changed over time remember when using dslr photos on instagram was like kind of a faux pas yeah like that was a norm on that platform that you were only supposed to use your phone camera it was like weird and that's gone like obliterated by the kardashian machine like dslr photos on instagram are there all the time mirrorless photos on instagram are there all the time and then it was you shouldn't photoshop so much instagram like you have the filters but like straight photoshopped it still needs to be a little bit raw and that is fully obliterated too and now it's like oh now everybody has this like completely like hot shit version of photoshop that's ai powered it requires a technical skill and you're like the example it was i think it was a gray sky and if you want the sky to be as blue as you remember it which is an incredibly philosophically loaded question yeah how blue do you remember the sky being on this day like i don't remember how blue the sky was the day i proposed my wife but if you asked me it was the bluest it has ever been in world history should it be that blue like i don't know and so like you just get this place where it's like you really could be like as an influencer like you know where's that place in italy where everyone stands on the hand in the cliff you know what i'm talking about you should make a photo of me standing on this thing like whatever yeah it doesn't matter if i was actually there to take this photo it does because you're still a liar like can you lie into a photoshop you're still like a liar but i'm saying the norms on instagram right and they had another thing where like bard was generating captions of cute puppies and you could just see this thing like all right i'm like i generate the photo and i generate the caption like automate an instagram account it's like singularity event for what is a photo i want to be more angsty about it but i just can't because i keep thinking about every time every time we see these turns on instagram at some point i'm like hey you know this is all just lies right and then there's like a whole thing like jesbell and all these other sites are like these are full of lies this is destructive to body images and stuff like that i'm not saying instagram is more important than it is i'm saying it's a useful thing to examine how like norms in a photography community change over time yeah so you start with you shouldn't even use a mirrorless camera on this platform like that was a thing like and you're like all the way up to photoshop is fine you're all the way up to like there's a lot of professional talking instagram and now you're all the way up to yep maybe there'll be some blog talking about lies but everyone's just using it's fine and like there's just something about the norms of photography there that is interesting to pull out of instagram but i think it's probably true of all the platforms and i it's not going to be a huge leap until you push the shutter button and the camera start doing this stuff preemptively for you it is already happening right that's already happening with samsung the moon and like hey we see that you're trying to take a picture of the eiffel tower with you know your partner in it we're just gonna when you hit the shutter button we're just gonna get to to what you think you wanted it's like it's just like obviously the next thing that's gonna happen yeah i've deeply mixed feelings about this but it was wild to watch the demo where they scoot the kid over on the bench the utility of that is a thousand percent obvious right yeah i wish my kid was in the center of the show the magic eraser where they're constantly people deleting them from photos like bye-bye like a generation from now some gen z boss is gonna like fire someone by deleting them from a zoom call like that's absolutely just circling them on the call like tony it's been good it's just circled out see you later this is uh see jobs let tony fidel know he's gonna get fired by deleting him from the contacts in the first time but like that's all just wild we're just we're very close to accepting magic racers being a normal thing that happens in photos take this person on the background take this distraction on the background it's like this close to being normal the phone's gonna do it before you decide to do it very close to be normal what is a photo singularity event for what is a photo okay we have to stop because otherwise we'll be in high school we're gonna take a quick break we'll be right back hey i'm maf michelle comedian writer and floating head you may or may not have seen on your for you 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 immediately 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 like feminism is gone too far you go why because it's sadie hawkins day or nothing maybe a filmmaker since leaving that show i'm challenged to sparing i just gotta hang out and try to do something on the tarred line could be a politician basically anyone who responds to my cold dms 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 this is the place to feel a little better about it that sounds like a lot part of the box media podcast network i'm maria sharapova and i'm hosting a new podcast called pretty tough every week i'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition work ethic and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness we'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives actors entrepreneurs and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey follow pretty tough wherever you get your podcasts all right we're back okay so i want to talk about the most i can't believe we forgot to talk about this so google organize io into sections like you do it's two hours you know so first like here's all the stuff we're doing here's all the our products and we just talked about that then like and then there's google cloud and here's always you as a business can add ai to your products using our tools and they talked about their partners and like some of them are terrifying like what do you think deloitte's going to do with ai i don't want it is it going to fire a lot of people companies around the country and world yeah it certainly is yep with the power of google cloud like what's eccentric gonna do with ai yeah they're gonna downsize your shit like it's just very obvious what's gonna happen but then there's this moment and i cannot stop thinking about it because it came up twice first the company said it and then later they referred back to it google was like and here's an action i just want you to listen to this and then we can all just figure it out together folks come to away these and a lot of times they use similar acronyms the junior bacon cheeseburger they'll come and give me a jbc you know we need to understand what that really means and voice ai can help make sure that order is accurate every single time okay now i can be charitable here we should listen to it again so junior bacon cheeseburger they'll come and give me a jbc you know we need to understand what that really means and voice ai can help make sure that order is accurate every single time i'm just imagining just hordes of teens running into wendy's screaming give me a jbc so charity what this means is they're going to build some sort of voice recognition order-taking system again downsizing their workforce and uh apparently the teens have started calling junior bacon cheeseburgers jbcs and they need to voice ai to recognize this right that's more or less what he's trying to say if i understand it he said that without any of this context he just said it and google ran it so we all understand that the problem of the robot order-taking system not understanding what jbc is it's so challenging i'm just going to say paying a human being like 15 an hour to understand what jbc is is a better solution than building a voice ai i feel like they maybe it's just because they're about to move and so i've been having to make a lot of calls to like utility companies in the last couple of days and today i called the gas company like my gas turned on my new place and they wanted to know what my phone number was i said my phone number and my phone number starts with an eight and they went okay your phone number starts with a one and i was like no eight and one sound nothing alike like we need to understand what jbc is like yeah y'all can't even understand what a one and an eight are and you're gonna tell me that you can understand what jbc is it's good it was just it was like a pin drop silence in the keynote today in particular the idea that wendy's was going to invest massively in ai to take cheeseburger orders it's very good it's like it's a perfect sign of where we are that google's like what's our what's the best compelling customer case for google cloud they couldn't be like waffle house you know like i don't know what smothered means tell me what my smothered hash browns mean also i just want to point out that understanding the jbc means you're making cheeseburger you don't need it you can just tell the computer that's like a super easy computer science problem that was the thing like nothing you just described requires google cloud like you're good but no i i mean i think so i was reading wendy's is obviously very proud of the fact that it's doing this like this reminds me of all the stuff that domino's always does right like anytime somebody launches a new technology domino's is like we're gonna use it to deliver your pizza there's like that thing where you can order a pizza from carplay and they're really excited about that and it's like domino's that's nothing like you've you've done nothing but anyway so wendy's is very proudly announcing this thing and their ceo todd penninger said in an interview with the washington it will be very conversational you won't know you're talking to any but an employee one don't buy that two is that what we're going for like this is back to the like everybody's just gonna use ai to fire a bunch of people like i feel like i'm pretty happy talking to like a stoned 17 year old about my jbc behind the counter at wendy's like i don't need a robot to solve this problem for me also which side of the counter are you is it drive-through or is it just walking in because walking in they all have the screens now what if you are stoned i just like let's just walk through the situation where you're young give me a jbc this is very realistic let's go all right let's walk me through the situation in which you're screaming give me a jbc or robot at wendy's i mean that happens a lot of the times and you're usually like i want that as the chicken nuggets the spicy kind that shouldn't be hard like that's a very easy conversation to have because usually if you're stoned you're saying very slowly anyway so you're enunciating yeah voice that can help us understand when people want jbc's all right let's talk about android there was a lot of android news in io as well sort of there's a really fun demo of new lock screens they like talked about android but they didn't talk about android right okay yeah like it was android 14 but like there was a pixel fold there's pixel 7a there are new lock screens they did a wallpaper demo that was like 96 of the android demo it was just like dave burke who runs all the android stuff and is lovely and did a terrific job in his demo just goof around with his wallpapers he's like what if we have a new android let me change my wallpaper i really like the wallpapers yeah i thoroughly enjoyed this yes but like apple like half the time is like look at my wallpaper thing um there was one part in the demo where he was showing off on how to make cinematic photos and he was like i did this thing where like here's a photo of a kid in front of a lake and like i pushed the button and like now i cut out the kid and generate the eyes for the background look at this parallax and he's like it's beautiful i was like this looks insane yeah i don't want my wallpapers to move that much yeah like it was wild okay so but there was android news like as a whole right there are new pixel devices pixel tablet pixel fold they a new home app at one point they were like rcs now has 800 million users android messages and then very pointedly we're like we hope every filmmaker adopts rcs and there was a cheer from the crowd and no dita i kept expecting him yeah and all the spotlights shot shown on dita but that's a yearly ritual of google asking apple politely to support css continue and it's just never gonna happen if you recall at the code conference last year someone asked him a question like my grandmother hates the green bubbles i can't send photos and he's like well here mom an iphone like he doesn't care the man doesn't care they're not gonna do it there was a cheer for matter which is like google is just like a very different audience like when apple's like and this will support matter like first of all you're like i'm in parallel universe apple so the name of an open standard and there's not rarely cheers this was like and it supports matter and there's like a cheer from the crowd and they're like rcs and there's a cheer from the crowd uh so it's cool they added a new find my devices update alexy you're on this right yeah it's gonna use like it's gonna be better at triangulate right because right now apple does this too where it uses all the apple phones to try it to better triangulate so you can find your thing and now they're gonna do that with google and android but the difference is android has way more users than than apple does no no offense to all the apple fans listening i'm sorry it's just the fact android has way more users but i'm curious to how like there's something we don't quite know i think like what version of android do you need right because there's a lot of android users out there but not most of them aren't on the newest version so if you need the newest version this becomes a lot less useful than the apple one i feel like this is like a perfect microcosm of the like potential and peril of android yes because a lot of the stuff especially in that demo was stuff you can do with apple devices for your other apple devices and what google is saying is we're actually gonna make this a standard that anyone can tap into and you know tile devices are gonna use it and other companies are gonna be part of this and actually they're working with apple to do some of the work on the unwanted tracking notifications if there's a tracker that doesn't recognize it's following you around at a little alert you try to help and that's really great matter is the same kind of thing google's doing the same kind of stuff with fast pair it's like the best version of android basically takes all of apple's good ideas and makes it available to everybody and that is amazing and in theory is like that actually assumes that apple goes first on a lot of things which it doesn't but that's the idea right is it is an open successful version of this that plays nicely with everybody except that it cannot get its shit together enough to put everybody on the same version of android such that if you use a phone from 15 minutes ago you're on the wrong version of android and none of this works anymore and so google has tried to solve this by selling a lot of pixels but it can't figure out how to sell a lot of pixels and so it's like what google is trying to do is right and powerful and good and would be massively successful and it just it just can't do it and i don't know it's possible that that approach those two approaches are actually like mutually exclusive that if you're going to be the open one you actually can't force everybody to like play along and update their software but it just it just breaks my heart every time so they gave some stats here that were really interesting though they kind of support your point right that it's like a long tail play and it was like there are 300 plus pairs of headphones that support android fast pair and it's like i don't know that number is that big i don't know that there are 300 different kinds of headphones that support android fast pair now and that rules that's awesome that's awesome right and it's like oh that just happened over time they announced this like several years ago and then you know all the new phones came out with last year's version of android and over time they all just inherited android fast pair and they haven't makers did it and that's like pretty cool but you can't announce it right you can announce it at the beginning when no one can get it and you can announce it now when it just sort of happened in the middle there's like this vacuum of news whereas apple's like i don't know special audio everything has it now and that's attention for google i think this goes back to why android wasn't a huge feature of io this year or at least a big keynote right like they're gonna do a whole android keynote too most years google i was like android 14 android 13 android whatever and this time it was like android yeah that's here too and they didn't really focus on the timeliness of it i think it's because they can't right they just are too diversified there's too many phones too many devices out there there are but they did the thing that they did which is they announced the pixel 7a the pixel fold and so to some extent like they solved their own problem yeah but they just like they're no longer focused on what's new right now what is the thing that you're gonna go be able to download on your device tomorrow to have a lot of fun instead it's like this is this is stuff that's going to come down the pipe eventually you're going to be really excited about it well you got emoji home screens what they're focused on is you're going to spend eighteen hundred dollars on a phone that turns into a tablet and here's a bunch of tablet optimization do you know how many times they mentioned that google has updated 50 plus of its apps to run better in tablet mode yes oh and they did the thing where they like nag to themselves again when they introduced the tablets like they were like so tablets kind of suck they're in a weird middle place and sometimes you buy them you shove them in a drawer you don't use them anymore you should buy your tablet it's like oh that's a weird self so the pixel tablet is cool we saw it i would not say it was remarkable except for the sand built into the case which is really cool it's a metal ring it's like it's very clicky it's cool um it's got a charging dock that comes with it it's 499 charging dock by itself and it's 129 149 but you get it for free by the tablet it's cool it's an android tablet there's nothing about it that's not an android tablet except when you put it in the dock it does the cool photo frame thing that nest nests do and it has a new smart home google home app other than that's an android tablet this is right we talked a little bit about this on the wednesday show with dan who got an early look at some of this stuff but i think the thing about these large-screen android devices is that apps are bad and they have always been bad and google has begged and pleaded many times to make them not bad and all the developers say we don't care nobody sells good android tablets we're over it and there was even a great moment in the keynote where rick australo was like we have a better lineup of android tablets than ever and he showed like three tablets no one's ever heard of and that was and that was it he's like would you like this lenovo android tablet and everyone's like no this is nothing but the google optimizations are all well and good and i'm very excited about that there was a suspicious lack of really great big screen third-party android apps still because google has such a massive hill to climb to make anyone care enough to build these big screen devices but i think the genius thing that google did with the tablet was essentially treat it like a tv screen right like the demo that we saw nilai has a big google tv widget it has chromecast on it so you can cast two which is really cool so it's the first right it's the first android tablet you can cast two right which is a big deal and it is like very clearly this is a thing that like a run the google apps that you want but mostly this is for you to watch things on a screen and most apps that you can watch things on have a button that you can press to make the full screen and that does the job so they've like so aggressively constrained what this tablet can do that you almost don't have to worry about the app problem i think the foldable phone is a very different thing that's going to have a much higher hill to climb but the pixel tablet i'm like i don't know that i'm going to care all that much because like netflix is going to look fine and peacock is going to look fine and it'll move on with my life yeah how many apps are people using on tablets like what is a modern tv like go look at the tv you're living right now it's an arm processor it's a linux-based os and it's a bunch of video playing apps like it's a giant android tablet and like now they made a little one and they made a doc for it and that's cool like i never see myself buying it i wish that the camera could be electrically disconnected i do not like having a camera on those kinds of unsmart displays in the house it's just like that's the line for me it's like i'll put microphones everywhere like i wish there was a button or a shutter or something on the camera uh by the way they showed a video uh where a celebrity i think she's the narrator of the circle that's what he was telling me michelle butteau was taking meetings she's like i take three or five like no keyboard and i was like you just didn't happen this is not the way to do it i'm also thinking about buying the fold because we played with it and it is exactly the right form factor like they got the size and shape and hinge of this thing right the hinges right off the surface duo like this is what the surface duo should have been but it folds perfectly flat and it's really tight it's not tall like a gaussi fold it's just the right size and shape i have some concerns about the screen though and also that it's $1,800 well that's like those things are related for me right because i think like to just hold it as an object it's very impressive like it's really well made it's really solid it feels really good it's basically an iphone 10 that opens into an ipad mini which is like the dream that is literally that is what i want size wise but it has that crease down the middle of the screen that is very much there it's a but the big thing that threw me was and we were using it outdoors in a relatively sunny place in mountain view but like the glare on that thing was awful like really really really bad there was a cheapness to it i don't know how to describe it like and there's a screen protector that you can see so like there's the edge of the screen protector and the display itself and then like the little lip of the bezel just learning nothing from samsung on that one yeah it was neat like i want it in school and like the tricks they gave it where you're like watching the video thing you open it pops up in the video there and like you take a selfie of the back end all that was neat um we all tried to open it with one hand which was just a terrifying experience like we're outside holding $1,800 phones i'm like whoa Alex i wish you could have seen the face that nilai made so it was it was nilai uh v song alison johnson and me and we're all standing around this wooden table and we all decide we're gonna try to open this one with one hand and i go first and sort of like push my thumb in and try to pop it open and just fully almost drop the thing like it i had to like bobble it to catch it and nilai literally goes whoa reflexively makes a noise it was terrifying it was okay and then we all did it all of us in turn we're like what if i made my other friend have that experience that i just had the phone cannot be open with one hand we did see deter he did insist that he could do it he was like you just took it like he's here that's a very deter move none of us have mastered it yet if he thinks she's mastered it i'll say that she had a thumb thing that it was she was she was better at it than the rest of us it was like she was pushing it straight up into the air like it was getting higher like from the ground from disaster like i don't no no no no this thing is not made to be open with one hand uh yeah but there's like just a little bit of like right in the middle where the creases and the hinge like the bezel stops and there's a little flat plastic piece and it's just like uh is it smushy no it's not smushy it's just i don't know there's something about it that just didn't give me $1,800 and that's weird because every like it's nicer than the fold right david like oh much like all pixel products are that way they always are like the same price as samsung the same price as apple maybe $100 cheaper just not quite as nice like just there's something about it where it's just a little cheaper just a little more affordable feeling i think i will say this is the right size and thinness and aspect ratio they got all that right it looks gorgeous and i do love the idea of just like opening it and we do anything you know yeah no like we've talked on the show about how 6.1 inches is the correct size for a smartphone screen and this is not an invitation for debate like that's just a true fact this is the official position of the broadcast but it is it is i would be curious to see you know slight variations on it but this size immediately felt right to me like alice and v were able to close it and slip it into their pockets you're able to hold and use the thing in one hand you can open it and hold it in two hands and type on that keyword fairly comfortably like i agree i think this is really right just sort of blueprint wise for what one of these are supposed to feel like you can use it close and it's just a regular phone it looks and feels like a regular phone but that protector on the display i'm just getting the photos of it is it that like in dance photos it's really big is it that big in real life yeah there's just like a little a little touch of jank in there like yeah spice it up a little bit i think they had like the best take on it at one point david you were like i can't wait for the next generation of this and it's like yeah that feels all right change nothing about it except make everything a tiny bit better it's like luckily that's kind of the whole pixels move so i'm optimistic or they'll shut it down in 12 months on that note we also saw pixel 7a which is a very nice $500 phone no there's a review of it on the website now if you care to read it nothing much to say we also saw a very impressive demo of google's project starline which is their video conferencing thing with stereo cameras that look like you're looking at somebody in 3d it was awesome bj loved it he saw a couple like a year ago i think and adored it no so we saw the new version yeah this is the new this like uses regular cameras right yeah so just a 65 inch display and cameras on three sides of it yeah because the original version you had to like have a whole setup you're like i have to go down to the starline office yeah this still had a whole setup like we were in like a special booth and like it was very controlled it's a tech demo but it still felt closer to like oh this might be achievable for normal people yeah one day like this here's a piece of hardware you can put in a conference room and it will make sense and it was very cool and it's nowhere near shipping but you know google made a cool thing and we saw it it is really cool though and the idea is basically it's just designed to be uh it does a lot of work on like gaze correction so you can make something that feels like you're approximating eye contact uh they've done a lot of work on latency they've done a lot of work on the depth so that like me and i both had the experience like i was talking to andrew knucker from google uh would hold out an apple and you can actually see the apple in like real true high fidelity because like he's large and you're on the screen and then and he was like you can look at it and you sort of instinctively lean towards it and then he's like you know i'm reach out and take it from me it feels just like you're taking it from me i'm like no it didn't it felt like i was reaching through a ghost like that's what this was yeah but uh but still the demo as far as like virtual conversations i have had with people that was leaps and bounds better than anything i've ever tried and the display tech is really cool right because it's just a flat 65 inch screen but then it's got a lens array mounted in front of it that sends different images to your right and left eyes that's so cool and it's just like that is cool and like they're like basically they're interrupting like the serious sequence of images that you see and so they're just sending a different picture to your left and right eye and doing with head tracking so it's basically a tv with like a lens array in front of it that's nice and they're trying with a handful of customers i think salesforce has one and team has one uh but it's still very much but it's cool it was fun to play with when it's like games cameron get one yes the next avatar movie in order to save on costs is you alone will go into a small booth and talk to an avi just like straight eye contact with an avi and he's like you're really really messing this up dude disney's like working on this right now can you imagine making like dead-on eye contact with an avi person like i'm gonna be honest with you the way we have sex is by putting our hair into each other well now i can also it works with our animals that's different i feel strongly that we should take a break probably we'll be back the jbc scroll so we are 250 years into this american experiment and i say it's going okay i give us like a c plus there is no perfect past but there is also no exclusively negative past because humans are gonna human that's what we do i think the story of america is the struggle of people who have not been included in the promise of america to expand those principles to include more people what's going to determine the next 250 years of america and how do we write a new social contract that can give us the democracy we deserve okay so i'm just gonna be a jerk here because i'm a historian so we have to have a prologue explaining you know we the people okay you know i just can't remember it from schoolhouse rock we the people are going to the former perfect union i establish justice what is it ensure domestic tranquility so you're talking about a foundational document so i'm building a document that will protect american democracy that's this week on america actually this week on never been shell i'm joined by tank sinatra the meme king with over 15 million dollars across tank's good news influencers in the wild and his personal account tank is breaking down what the meme economy really is how much a single sponsor post pays why major brands are throwing serious money at jokes and how mean culture thinks preparation age starter packs and a perfectly timed screenshot is actually reshaping how we think about money and value get ready for a conversation that'll change the way you scroll make you rethink what going viral is really worth and prove that sometimes the most serious money moves are wrapped in the silliest of jokes listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash your rich vff we're back we talked about google enough let's do the lightning round now let's start yeah i'm gonna fight david in a little bit but we each chose ours before the podcast started and david got here first so we're gonna fight later that's just my first but so i i went ahead and went with apple is launching final cut pro and logic pro on the ipad with the new subscription pricing and mainly because i didn't know people were still using final cut pro and this like blew my mind this week like it was like an hour of dan c for trying to explain to me inside but no everybody does this this is very normal but i didn't know yeah like mkbhd a lot of creators use it um i'm very used to premiere premiere like final cut pro was huge then 2011 happened there was a really bad version of final cut pro called final cut pro 10 and everybody stopped using it and then apparently everybody started using it again and now it's gonna be available on the ipad it sounds like it's pretty like the feature parity is good it's gonna have a lot of the same features that you already find in the mac version which makes sense because they're using the same processors so this is exciting if all you have is an ipad and you just really want to edit there's still a lot of questions we're waiting to hear and um if you're one of those people that uses fcp now like just message me i just want to know like what's your life like i know i know there's a lot of you but this is still like blowing my mind and i want to know more i want to understand you they're like straight up open letters apple being like make fcp great by doing these things so we can sort of premiere and like from the community so like there's it's been around it's it has a very loyal user base especially like solo creators because cheap it's really really fast on max i remember jonathan morrison used to edit 4k footage on macbook air with final cut pro because it's so fast on m series chips that's wild yeah i just want to know like when that turn happened because i remember like i had my copy and i was like 10 sucks and i threw it out yeah so that was 2011 i think i actually physically threw it out and that was 10 years like 12 years ago i'm like when did things change the relentless passage of time house comes russell i know when was the moment call me let me know no i'm fascinated by this if they bring that to the mac i think it's gonna get really weird and i think like the luma fusions of the world will have a big opportunity because that's one of the reasons people hate premiere and as i understand it that's one of the reasons final cut pro became so popular you just buy it and be done whereas with premiere you're spending i think $50 a month minimum maybe $20 if you do certain kind of gross versions of it yeah don't do that especially for an ipad app this is a big deal right apple's bringing pro apps to its supposedly pro ipad which has the same chip in it as some of its macs especially after adobe spent years being like we're doing it too and it's always just not quite good enough and apple just went and did it yeah i mean and there are a lot of there are a lot of things about editing on an ipad that are better than editing on a mac that like direct input being able to move things around with the pencil and your fingers and it's like it's actually a really great powerful editing machine once you figure it out and i know a lot of people for image editing in particular who will like use their mac all day until they have to do sort of really detailed fine image editing and then they will actually like punt over their ipad and do that work there and i think the video interface of that is hard work like imovie is not a great piece of software on the ipad we could do if anybody wants to write the story of how capca which is basically the ticket editor broken out it's just replaced imovie and apple missed it it's often 10 days out of 10 but it is a wild thing that's happened in the industry and it's like kind of on the market on yeah no i think that's right and i think there's the thing that final cut is going for it is that it is most of the power of premiere without most of the overhead of premiere both like financial and like performance and so if they can figure out how to actually map that to the ipad in a way that really works i think it's gonna mean a lot to a lot of people yeah to have the situation right all right what's your lightning round thing i just want to say just last thing on that it is super funny that apple announced that the same week that google announced a pixel tablet that basically doesn't do anything but play movies uh it's just like these two companies have very different ideas about what's supposed to be and i think that's delightful my lightning round thing is disney just had its earnings and one of the things it announced is that it's putting all of hulu content into the disney plus app it's also raising the price of its ad subscription and not killing hulu or running away from hulu because it can't it can't and also doesn't seem to want to but it definitely doesn't seem to want to buy the rest of hulu from comcast for what would cost at least nine billion dollars so it's just doing this weird move where it's going to sort of quietly try to like obviate hulu and just like let it die to make disney plus more successful because disney plus they're now going into ads and one of the things that we've seen is that actually if you can build a subscription slash ad hybrid business that can be super successful it's working really well for netflix disney like everybody else is losing an insane amount of money on streaming and needs to find ways to make more money as a long time hulu fan who has debated cancelling disney plus because i don't watch anything on it anymore this makes me sad but this was always kind of inevitable right alex i feel like this is this was always where this was gonna go yeah this was always because right now they have to they have to decide whether is comcast gonna buy hulu is disney gonna buy hulu and disney's been putting a lot of money into stuff to go on hulu but it still was right so it can just pull all that stuff and put it on its own service and like be like all right comcast enjoy your three shows that are still on the service suffer and i mean the hulu live i think is still like an important product that that bears some thinking about right that's that's their live tv function it's basically the biggest competitor i think to youtube tv so so there's still something there but it's very clear that like apple or it's very clear right now that disney is cutting costs there they're also saying they're gonna drop stuff from disney plus some of the shows and stuff we don't know what but they're gonna be dropping content because they don't want to pay the licensing fees for it this kind of idea that oh wow you have a utopia you go you pay for streaming service and you get all the content ever is just rapidly disappearing so everybody go bust out your blu-ray players start collecting your media again this is the moment we'll put it in that all right here's my lightning round one. Google announced it's bringing YouTube, Waze, and Zoom to cars with native Android, which is very funny, as David pointed out to me. Everyone seems to be very interested in making your cars more functional in their park. So now you can watch YouTube in Park.

I think it's something because of charging, where they just think people with EVs are going to be sitting in their cars charging for 23 minutes. Well, you go and you buy your JBC and then you don't go home and eat it. You gotta eat it fast. You're like, it's a JBC and the robot's like, what do you mean?

There's a data center on fire just trying to figure it out. You're just saying salad after salad. You didn't want that? This is not actually my lightning round item.

My lightning round item is that David came to pick me up from the hotel to go to dinner last night. Oh no. And it's Kia Soul. And he looked at me with absolute swagger in his eyes and said, wireless carplay.

And then wireless carplay immediately didn't work. Like immediately didn't work. We didn't even get out of the driveway before it broke. We literally didn't even get out of the driveway.

I have never been so disappointed in Apple that I was at that moment. This rental Kia Soul, it's like, it's a hot whip. He was just like, wireless carplay is great. You like Google map the restaurant.

I was like, this thing is, this air was not moving. The app had clean. And then, Neil I got out of the car and it worked fine for the rest of the night. And then again, it's worked fine today.

There's just like, there's like a Neil I Patel force field that just destroys carplay. I don't understand. Carplay's like, I don't want it. I was just 100%.

He was like, why is this carplay? And then I hit go on the direction and just nothing happened. He had to pick up his phone and use Google Maps on his phone. It sucked so much, Alex.

I can't even tell you the shame that I felt in that moment. I'm going to pick you up one day, in my car, wired carplay. It'll work. All right, that's it.

We got to wrap this thing up. That's the Vergecast. I'm sorry that we're completely loopy. It has been a long day, but a fun day.

It was fun to see everybody. We saw listeners at IO. It was great to see all of you. Really cool to be in person.

We've got lots more from IO on the site. We have hands-ons with all the gadgets, all the stuff. We have a lot of coverage of Google coming this year, as we've already previewed. So we're going to set for that.

I'm really interested in your thoughts about Google. Search changing is a big deal. So let me know what you think, because I wanted to shape our coverage a little bit. And if you want more on hardware, the Wednesday show this week with Allison and Dan talking about all those things.

So there's lots more about hardware if you want it. On the Vergecast, I want to share this week. That's it. That's it.

That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it.

And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Box Media Podcast Network.

The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters.