Things Nilay Says on Podcasts

Yeah. Like no buttons or whatever that is, whatever Apple thing is, but it needs to work with the big ecosystem of matter devices. There's some reporting out there that, you know, this is a big reset for matter too and HomeKit in general. But the point that I have just been making for ages that Jen has been making for ages is that you cannot sell a smart home in a box.

Right.

Or you're Apple and you try to convince everybody that Siri AI is ready to be that thing. And unless there is some enormous advance coming next week, it isn't. Like the more I use Siri AI, the less impressed I am by Siri AI. It is, I think Gemini in 2023 is actually the exact right place to situate it because it does some of the things, right? Like some very basic things Siri used to not be able to do, like answer questions or find information for you. It can now do. And that's not nothing. That's that's useful. It

can search your text messages and email like never before.

It sure can. And it actually does that passably well. That is not bleeding edge AI technology, but it does work. All of this other stuff, the like just make sense of the world around me stuff, actually is bleeding edge AI technology. And I don't see any of it in Siri right

And so either we're going to have AGI or not. And if I don't get there first, then something bad will happen. And so some bad things have to happen. Like, that's how he sounds. I know that's just how he sounds to people, that he has to get there. We've got to do this. So you deal with it. Deal with the data centers. Deal with the teens getting AI psychosis. Like all of that is fine because we have to do this and I can't possibly slow down or be more careful. And so if he's talking about the straight up societal trade-off, like the reason the decoder tagline is big ideas and other problems is like it is embedded in the very notion of the big idea that you will have to answer for some problems that you have caused.

Yep.

Right. Yeah. And they also, well, at some point, at some point, you and I are going to have a long, deep conversation that may or may not ever make it onto a podcast about this thing where they've all decided that AI is alive. And deserves feelings and fair treatment and all of this weird. Like the fact that the clawed terms now prohibit you from being mean to Claude for too long is just like buck wild in a way that I'm actually like just out of my mind about. But in this one, I just kept thinking about the fact that Sam Altman, in this case and in basically every case, is just completely unable to articulate the good thing that AI is going to do. He's like, yes, all this bad stuff is going to happen, but it's going to do so much more good stuff. And it's like, well, what, Sam? It's going to put everybody out of jobs. It might kill all of us. What's the good part? Well, it's going to monitor

your email for class

action. It's going to like

spectrum. That's the spectrum. The cute,

sexy graph. Yeah, it's going to be really, it's going to be really disturbing to see when we go more along that graph. But yeah, I think that the point is they're supposed to be disarming and that people should really think twice before giving too much of their data or just pick and choose what you're comfortable giving, right? Like how you did with the spam email versus your regular email or saying no to your credit card. These are both new products. So kind of just see how the cookie crumbles before you decide to just, you know, give everything over. We're already seeing a bunch of changes week to week with how people are using Muse or what they're upset about. So, you know, just kind of see how it shakes out.

That is a great term for a corrupt butler. Yeah, that is not what I want. And I don't think many people do. It's just crazy to me that like we've gotten so far from what people really want, which is they want to trust a recommendation and they don't want to be scammed. The leaders in AI don't think about how this has been, how certain things have been mirrored in other industries. Like think about when people were paying for reviews for their businesses or like paying to delete reviews for their businesses. That was a huge uproar or influencers getting paid to recommend things without disclosing that it was an ad. Then we saw the rise of micro-influencers who were more valuable for a while because they were seen as more trustworthy. They didn't have that many followers. So the things they recommended must be really good, right? And then we saw the, okay, well, their hashtag ad, but also they only said they were going to recommend things they really believe in. So it's okay that it's an ad. It's like these mental gymnastics that people have to do to figure out what is really a trustworthy recommendation these days. What is going to convince people that an AI recommendation is trustworthy if it can be bought? So I think that's something that these companies are really going to have to reckon with. You know, the ChatGPT ads blowback was huge and OpenAI had to say, look, it's going to be a clearly disclosed ad underneath your query, not influencing your query. So, I mean, if you're using Muse to shop and it's an undisclosed, like potential, you know, meta customer that you're being redirected to to buy those shoes instead of these other ones, I feel like so many people aren't going to use it to shop.

So I get it on the meta side. I understand why they would think about monetization that way. They're a consumer company. This is a consumer product. They know the second they charge even a dollar for it, the uptake will drop precipitously. So they got to keep it free. And then a bunch of people are going to want to shop and go buy me a new iPhone cable. You know, at the end of the day, it's all just the same Amazon garbage anyway. So whatever. And then they can run an auction on the back end to be like, who wants to pay us meta the most for the privilege of selling an unbranded USB-C cable to this customer? And they'll run some auction. And that will, in its way, just sort of maximize the money that gets turned around. And that is broadly how advertising works today. That's how the Google search results page worked until recently when that is full of AI. And they're probably going to do the same thing. Meta can do that because they already have a giant advertising business that prints money. They can give away a consumer product. Mark Zuckerberg has been shown willing to blow money trying to win a market like he did with Reality Labs for years and years and years. And they can just run it till it works. OpenAI, even at $100 a month, is probably not making money on those customers. In fact, I think we know they're not making money on those customers. They don't have any monetization. And when they do try to turn on ads, people get mad at them. How can they keep up with Zuck?

Only via enterprise. I think that's why they are pushing this so hard. You know, we saw a ton of enterprise discussion, demo videos, customer feedback, tons of stuff at Dev Day. And that's why they're pushing this so hard because they can't keep up with Zuck on the consumer front. They just can't.

I just, here's what I'm just gonna, I'm gonna give my moment in the side. I think the Version History Hall of Fame has room in it for but one Chromebook, and it's not this one.

That's fair. I actually, I think I, I think I agree with that. Um, it's the pixel book. I'm glad we've discussed this. This is great. It's the forthcoming Google book. Um, all right, so it fails the test, but we have one more question, which is, did it change history? Is there a world before this and a world after it? I think this one's in my book actually kind of an easy yes. I think there is, you, you can make a pretty easy case that this changed the nature of computing and the way that the kinds of devices that we use, what we expect from our computers, where the apps live. You and I talk all the time about where the apps are. This definitely pushed ahead the idea that apps can be in the web.

Native Windows app? It's been years since I did that. You see what I'm saying?

Like, even Microsoft Office is a web app. Like, it's crazy how right Google was about where the applications would live. And so just on that alone, you're like, yeah, this changed the world. Yeah.

Marquez, what do you think? Any objection?

of implies that at some point they'll be profitable on that scale. Like they will just be selling the model and they will not be training anyone or something. OpenAI has announced similar kinds of numbers. Once you get there, your ability to invest heavily in extremely novel regulatory schemes and safety concerns, it starts to get pressured. Should you spend money on developing intense safety systems that limit your competitiveness or should you pay a dividend to your shareholders? As a public company, it's unclear which way that should go. probably everyone listening is like safety you should spend the money on safety but the the actual investor pressure in modern america is the other way right sure especially given the amount of money that has gone into these companies and you might be seeking a return on so i i think for those two companies in particular there's a reason altman is doing interviews where he's saying for safety reasons we might slow down the ipo right we might avoid the pressure of capitalism for like one more turn while we try to figure out these costs I don't know that's going to work, but I think that's why he's saying it. I think Elon is just behind. I think he would love a pause because he's out there saying Grok is not competitive at the frontier and it will take until the next two versions of Grok to be totally competitive with Anthropic. Of course he would love a pause. Elon also runs a giant social media website and a car company with a cloud service that is faced with cyber attacks all day long. So I'm sure he understands the very huge nature of state-sponsored cyber attacks on X. Obviously. Dennis Isabas at Google. Google also understands what cyber capabilities are like when they advance and they have very advanced models of their own. So I think there's just a swirl of motivations, but truly at the core is the fact that they do not like or trust each other. Elon sued Sam over the very existence of OpenAI. Anthropic exists because all of those people did not trust OpenAI's commitment to safety. In the course of that trial between Elon and Altman, everyone is emailing about how much they're afraid of Dennis Asabas and his capability at Google. Like there's not trust in this industry in that way that would allow, you know, a bunch of car makers to get together and be like, we're all doing seatbelts. Like even that didn't happen. The government had to say we're all doing seatbelts.

Right, right. Exactly. So for a regular user, say like for people who are listening, they're like, I'm using it for meal prep and whatever else that has, whatever else you chat to your chat bot about. I guess the thing that has come up in my chats with friends is, am I part of the problem? Which maybe is a really self-centered way of thinking about this. But really, what do you say to people who are like, am I contributing to this in some way by chatting with whatever it is? Like, do I need to delete my claw or whatever it is?

well. Neil, thanks for coming back and talking with us about this. Yeah, so we'll include a link to Nilay Patel podcast decoder on our show notes page. And every weekend, you can find new episodes of Apple News in Conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab. That's the little headphones at the bottom to find it.

You're either all in on this model or maybe you're building with another. There's either speed or is it security? Or you're AWS AI. Don't pick a side. Pick them all. AWS AI is how.

I do. And I think we essentially failed to regulate social media. We essentially failed to regulate privacy. It is just a pure failure of our politics. There's not a privacy law in the United States of America. There's not a federal privacy law. And we are now contending with the effects of that, right? All over the place, people feel their privacy is being violated. They think that we know that the TVs are listening and watching to everything you consume. Everyone believes their phones are listening. The refrigerator

is listening and watching to everything you consume.

for it. Why can't we get AI to production? Our competitors are already. How do we keep data secure? When do we actually see ROI? All this talk about AI, but talk doesn't transform businesses. AWS AI cuts through the noise, making AI easier to securely deploy and scale with ready-to-use agents and the broadest set of AI tools and services. You can build, buy, or partner your way. Stop overthinking. Start building. AWS AI is how.

I want to go back to China, which you mentioned briefly, but so often it is cited as a reason to either not regulate or really try to not quote unquote fall behind, right? Is this this idea that we will fall behind China? Is that a legitimate concern in your opinion? Like, how should we be thinking about the U.S.'s AI development vis-a-vis China?

I'm going to make a comparison here that you will find very funny, but I spent 10 years of my career as a tech journalist listening to telecom executives tell me that we had to win the race to 5G. We had to do it. We had to spend all of the money. And if China got to 5G first, then they would have robot surgery and self-driving cars or whatever nonsense it was. And about halfway through that, I started asking every single politician, FCC chairperson, telecom executive that I came across, what happens if we lose? Like what, tell me what this race is to. What is the finish line of this race? And if we lose and I get a robot surgery self-driving car a year after the people in China, like what, what's the problem? Yeah. There was never an answer to this, right? It was the specter of the foreign power getting something before we did. And the best version of this was then all the startups will go to China because they'll have better infrastructure. None of this happened. And for the vast majority of people, their experience with 5G here in 2026 is this is pretty slow. Like it's not great. Like New York State is like a highly dense area with lots of cell towers. I'm like, this is still pretty slow, right? So the specter of China just looms in these kinds of races where you're trying to deploy a lot of capital and you just need an excuse. And so that's one framework for looking at it. The other framework, which I think many of the people in the industry are using and potentially Donald Trump is using is, well, if China gets to AGI first, they will have an offensive cyber capability. They will have an economic capability to develop new things and new manufacturing capabilities and new drugs that we will not be able to compete with. And something bad will happen to us because China will get to some capability before we do. And maybe you think that's true. Maybe you think China is going to get to an offensive cyber capability that is overwhelming. And then they, for some reason, choose to destroy the world with it. It is unclear why they would do that, given that we are their largest trading partner and like all the things are made there and sold here. Like you have to get to some next step that no one can quite articulate to me. And so I think the specter of China just looms as a way to say something scary that ends a conversation. China getting there first. I think anybody who makes that claim has to really articulate what about it is so scary that it prevents us from being responsible.

the deciding vote.

The cosine function. Got it. Nailed it.

you think the calculator division and TI is just a bunch of lawyers and accountants?

I think there's a strong chance there is no one left in the calculator division at TI. It's

just like. One Mac Mini running claw. That's exactly right. Just ordering stuff.