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- [00:02]
Nilay Patel
Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of 5G connections. I'm your friend David Pearce, and today on the show we're going to talk about phones. Kind of. We're going to talk about this new set of AI devices that appear to be coming for us that are not phones. At least the companies who are making them claim that they're not phones. But they seem to be a lot like phones. They're AI centric. They are, in some cases made by companies who want you to use their AI products, and they're trying desperately to unseat the smartphone while seemingly discovering that the only way to do that is to make a smartphone. David Amell, who's with the Verge, this summer is going to come on and we're going to Talk through what OpenAI, SpaceX and Amazon and potentially many others are up to, and whether any of them can build anything that isn't a smartphone that actually makes you replace your smartphone. All that's coming in just a second. But first, here's what else is happening on the Verge today. This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Monday, July 27, 2026. A bunch of big AI companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, SpaceX, IBM and a whole host of others, are creating a new group called the Open Secure AI Alliance. It comes after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang shared an open letter last week arguing in favor of open models in general. It became a whole thing over the weekend. Who signed that letter and who didn't? That particular drama isn't all that interesting, but the US AI industry is clearly concerned with how fast China's AI is improving. And in part, it's improving that fast because its models are so much more open. That means some big questions are left to answer about how we build and share AI going forward. Meanwhile, it appears Amazon is gearing up to start competing for real with Starlink for satellite Internet supremacy. It filed an FCC application over the weekend to deploy 5,105 new satellites starting in 2028, and said it plans to partner with mobile carriers to offer direct to satellite service. Kind of like Starlink does with T Mobile right now. Right now, Amazon's LEO service is way behind Starlink. Way behind. But the company bought Globalstar's network earlier this year and has said it intends to offer its own service going forward. There's even been a rumor recently that Amazon might be building a phone again. I wonder if those things are connected. And finally, the Verge's Antonio DiBenedetto just dropped his review of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro, which is frankly one of the most exciting things to happen to Windows PCs this year. It's modular, it's repairable, it has good battery life and performance and almost everything else you would want. It is also thanks to the ongoing ram shortage, $3,100. That's up 800 bucks since it was announced just in April. Ramageddon comes for us all. You can read more about all this@the verge.com that is 90 seconds on the Verge for Monday, July 27th.
- [02:35]
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- [03:16]
Monday.com Advertiser
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- [03:29]
Nilay Patel
Monday.com all right, let's talk phones that aren't phones. David Amell is here. Hey buddy.
- [03:35]
David Amell
Hello.
- [03:36]
Nilay Patel
The Verge is David Amell. Waveforms David Amell David davidamill.com's David Amell. That's right, just the David Amell. He's here.
- [03:43]
David Amell
Right.
- [03:44]
Nilay Patel
Good to have you back. So I've brought you here to talk about phones, but not actually to talk about phones. I've just become obsessed with this thing that seems to be happening where a bunch of companies are looking for a way to put AI into a device that makes it the most important thing in your life. And basically, if you're not Apple or Google, you can't. You just. You just don't have an option. For a bunch of reasons we should probably get into here, but what you now have a bunch of other companies doing, I think most reported OpenAI, SpaceX and Amazon are all believed to be reported to be in the process of making something that they would love you to believe is not a phone, but might have an awful lot in common with a phone. And what I want to try to figure out here is whether a that's possible, B what it would be. And like at what point is your not phone just a phone? And what's the line you need to avoid crossing and see whether this could even possibly work. Does this all make sense to you? This seems like a crazy moment that we're in in not phone phone world.
- [04:48]
David Amell
You asked me if it makes sense to me. The idea makes sense to me. The what would this even be? Does not really make a lot of sense to me. Yeah.
- [04:55]
Nilay Patel
Okay, good. So let's talk this out a little bit because I think if I'm OpenAI, I assume the thing I want is a chat GPT forward device available to you at all times. Is it, is there anything more to it than that? Do you think I'm missing anything here?
- [05:13]
David Amell
It seems like that, I mean they're going through all the, you know, they make all of these things where they just build the UI on the fly and they just move through intent based operating. Like the, the main, the main paradigm shift that I think a lot of these companies are trying to do is that they're trying to move from a tool based model where you use your phone as a tool, each individual app is a tool, you jump to the tools to an intent based model where you can use natural language and your intent becomes the thing and then the apps become the piping for the thing. Uh, but if you make a wholly new device that just tries to ignore all of these apps, what are people actually going to be doing? Right, because we, we use ChatGPT and we use anthropic to like create things to then put on the tools that we use every day.
- [06:01]
Monday.com Advertiser
Right.
- [06:01]
David Amell
And this is where I get confused about what exactly are they trying to make, you know?
- [06:06]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. So I think even as a user I struggle with the question of what this would look like in a way that I find compelling. And I think, I think you're right that the thing they're trying to do is upend the idea that the first thing I do is open an app to do something right. Every time I want to do anything, the first thing I have to do is open an app and log into that app. And I think there's actually a pretty strong argument to be made that that sucks, that actually it's really inefficient and remembering where everything is, is really complicated. And doing things that might exist between multiple platforms is vastly too complicated. I am, I am a long term believer that Apple Shortcuts is a terrible solution to a very real problem. So the idea of saying, okay, we want to flip that on its head and actually just let you worry less about where things are and sort of the individual silos on your phone and more about the thing you want to accomplish. A hundred percent makes some sense to me, but I don't think, I just don't think what I want is for my phone to unlock into a chat window.
- [07:03]
David Amell
Right.
- [07:04]
Nilay Patel
Is that, is there, is there something else you can imagine that might look like?
- [07:09]
David Amell
Oh, that's hard.
- [07:10]
Nilay Patel
Um, this probably is like the many billion dollar question that a lot of people are R and D ing their way through right now.
- [07:17]
David Amell
Yeah, it probably is. I assume that they probably have a bunch of ideas in a lab somewhere where you open your phone and they try to just guess your intent based on the things that you've done before. And the secondary model is to open a chat window. You know what I mean? They probably just want to try to predict what you want to do before you want to do it. But, but my question again becomes like, well, if apps don't exist, then what do you actually do with a device like this? You know, and maybe apps do exist, you know, OpenAI, their device is apparently going to be an Android phone. Is that sort of the idea? It's like an Android based device.
- [07:50]
Nilay Patel
That seems to be the running theory. But Android based device can mean a lot of things, right? You can, you can run a version of Android that has absolutely nothing in common with what most people perceive to be an Android phone. Like your, your dishwasher is an Android device at this point. So I think that that could mean a lot of things. But I do think there is it, there is a case to be made that it might be a regular, regular, normal Android phone with a very chat GPT ish launcher.
- [08:16]
David Amell
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I could kind of see that. The hard part about that is like, it feels like the idea of an app and the buttons inside of an app are buttons for a reason. Right? Like if you're typing a prompt, that takes like so much longer than just like tapping a bunch of buttons to get to the point where you want to be. If you're on like a multi chain, like do this with this, this app and then send it to this person and then edit it this way I could see it being, you know, based around typing or your voice or something like that. But right now the like input mechanism of buttons is actually quite efficient compared to anything else that they might want to use it for.
- [08:54]
Nilay Patel
So it's very true. Yeah. One, one very simple way I've been trying to think about this is, okay, what if you unlock your phone and the first thing it drops you to is not your home screen of App icons, but the Gemini app. And you can still, you know, you can swipe again and get to your apps. And actually, in theory, they're all there, but we've just sort of flipped the layers, right? That the thing on top is the AI system, and underneath it is all of the apps that you maybe want to tap on. Does that do anything for you?
- [09:22]
David Amell
And, you know, okay, I. I'd say that the. The new Siri is probably a good way to look at this. Now, anytime I want to do basically anything, unless it's literally like texting the first person in my contacts list, I just pull down from the top and I asked Siri to do it.
- [09:36]
Nilay Patel
Interesting.
- [09:36]
David Amell
So in a way, that is kind of what you're describing, and that means
- [09:41]
Nilay Patel
you actually change that behavior fairly quickly. This is the thing I was gonna ask you about, is how much inertia there is in smartphones. But if you were able to do that just in the course of a couple of developer betas, that. That strikes me as kind of a meaningful change to make.
- [09:53]
David Amell
Yeah, I mean, I will say that I was. At first, I was only doing it because I wanted to pressure test Siri as much as I possibly could and see, like, can it do this? Can it not do this? I don't think it can do this. Could it do it? But it has actually changed my behavior. And a lot of the time now I am just asking Siri questions. I mean, the biggest question is, like, Google search revenue is going to disappear because, you know, I'm just asking Siri all these questions, but Google already knows that.
- [10:18]
Nilay Patel
Wait, give me an example. What kinds of things have you discovered you can offload to Siri? AI.
- [10:22]
David Amell
Okay, so one big thing, I'm like, I was on Instagram yesterday morning, so I guess that's not like the first thing I do when I open my phone. But I'm on Instagram and I see that my favorite band is going to announce tickets for the show that they're going to have in December. And it doesn't say anywhere on the screen when they're going to release the tickets. They just announced the show. So I scroll down, I scroll down on the Siri thing, and I said, can you remind me to buy tickets to this when they go on sale? So it, like, searched the web, found when they're going to go on sale, and then it created a reminder to buy the tickets at the exact time that they went on sale, which was this morning.
- [10:59]
Nilay Patel
That might be the single most impressive Siri demo anyone has ever seriously, that is like, that's the dream. That's like the stuff they put in advertising videos that never actually work the way they're supposed to. That's awesome.
- [11:10]
David Amell
It's pretty awesome. It's pretty awesome. The, the other question though becomes like, if it's using an Android phone or if it's using Gemini. Like Google's kind of like paradigm for these AI based, you know, for, for Gemini controlling your phone is that it's sort of agentically clicking around. So obviously like how the phone is controlled is, is very important. You know, Apple's version of this is we're going to ask developers to put in all of these schemas and pipes to make sure that this actually works. Whereas Google's just tapping. If you land on like gem, a Gemini, you know, you just land in Gemini, is it going to then swipe out of Gemini, enter another app, click on that app? Because the current version of that, as Allison has shown in her article, it like works, but it's very slow.
- [11:55]
Nilay Patel
Yes.
- [11:57]
David Amell
And I think it's also going to require a lot of trust. You know, if you just ask the chat GPT app on your phone to order you Starbucks, there's a lot of trust built in there. Is it my red address? Did it get my order correct? Did it remember to do one pump of vanilla instead of two? I don't know. I think it might take a little while longer. And I'm very curious what these companies are thinking deep down in their labs on how these interaction paradigms would actually work.
- [12:23]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, I tend to agree. And I think what's so funny about the Siri example is I think you both just described exactly why every company is running at this idea. Because if you can do enough things like that for people, it starts to feel like a actually genuine paradigm shift in how we use our phones. And also Apple is never, ever, ever, ever going to let anyone other than Siri do that thing. Right. And so if you want to do that thing, you have to build something else. And this is to be perfectly honest, like, I don't spend a lot of my time feeling sympathy for OpenAI, SpaceX and Amazon, but I do sort of feel for them in this case because you, you talk yourself into this long enough and you get to the point where to say, oh, to do that for David Amell, we have to have an Instagram app. And then you've built a smartphone, like you just did it. You do that three times and you have made a smartphone. And you can see why everyone talks their way into phones Like, I remember talking to Carl Pei, the CEO of Nothing, years ago when they were starting, and he was like, I have, you know, giant ideas about the future and we want to build lots of new things. I'm still waiting for any of those to come to fruition. But my question to him was, well, then, why make a phone? You think, you know, what's next? Why make a phone now just start going and doing the next thing. And his answer was just, essentially, we have to make a phone. If we don't do the phone, we can't do any of the rest of this. We have to make the thing that's in your pocket. We have to figure out how to make all of this work. And their answer has been build the ecosystem with, you know, earbuds and all this other stuff, then try to sort of back that into some stuff that only works on the Nothing phone, and then presumably start to try and flip the form factor. So you, like have to do it in a bunch of steps, but you do kind of have to make a phone first.
- [14:03]
David Amell
Right.
- [14:04]
Nilay Patel
So do you think it's possible that at the end of this OpenAI and Amazon and SpaceX, if they all ship something, it might just be an Android phone or something essentially identical to an Android phone?
- [14:17]
David Amell
I think it's essentially going to be an Android phone. I mean, we saw the rabbit R1, like try to do something now, given that was super early and it didn't work and what they said it did, it couldn't really do. But that was also just an Android phone. You know what I mean? It was like we made it a different shape and, you know, it's like, are there models embedded enough into your life for your daily interaction paradigms that you are going to want to use that model to interact with those things that you do every single day?
- [14:50]
Odoo Advertiser
Right.
- [14:50]
David Amell
I don't know. I mean, Google has the best shot with Gemini. Apple has a very good shot. You talked about the earbuds with the cameras. I don't know what their interaction paradigm with those cameras is going to be, but they already, like, if Carl Pei said we have to make the phone first and then we can make the smart things that attach to the Nothing phone later, that's exactly what Apple's doing. Yeah, a third party coming in and doing that. It's just like, is anybody that invested in GROK that they want a GROK device? Like, I don't, I just, I, you know, I don't like being pessimistic and being like, there is a duopoly, but there is a duopoly.
- [15:27]
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- [16:32]
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- [17:11]
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- [17:47]
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- [18:20]
Nilay Patel
at this point, particularly in the US there are only two phones that matter. There's the iPhone and there's whatever Samsung shipped. That's it. I love the Pixel. I think more people should buy the Pixel. People don't buy the Pixel. People buy Samsung phones and they buy iPhones. Is it even conceivable to you that OpenAI could show up with a pretty good Android phone and make a meaningful number of people switch?
- [18:43]
David Amell
What was the, the positivity rate around AI in the United States again? Like lower than the Democratic Party.
- [18:50]
Nilay Patel
Real, real, real bad.
- [18:51]
David Amell
I don't think they can do that. They might get like a quarter of San Francisco maybe. Yeah, but they're not going to get anybody else. And also, you know, the problem that that puts you into as well is that if you buy a device made by a model maker, it's inherently if not only going to work with that model maker or works best with that model maker. And it doesn't really feel like a lot of people have allegiance to any particular model. I guess there's a little bit of allegiance to like Claude, but that's because they're supposedly the company that's trying to do the right thing.
- [19:26]
Nilay Patel
Well, ironically, I think the allegiance to Claude is as much a referendum on people don't like OpenAI as it is anything else.
- [19:33]
David Amell
Yeah, that is also very true. That is also very true. But, but either, I mean, as soon as I'm, I don't know, I'm a big believer in like these open source models are starting to get crazy and as soon as RAM gets cheaper again, I think people are going to start running their own, especially at business scale, you know, if you can, if you can buy RAM cheaply. Again, a lot of these open source models are almost as good and you just really don't need to use any of these model providers. So I don't know, a device for me makes no sense. I think a smartphone running the, what these companies want you to use makes sense. And it is the most basic thing that we've always had. But disrupting that, that interaction paradigm is like, I don't see how you do it. Especially like you were saying, you either open up to a chat box, which is kind of annoying to open up to every single time you unlock your phone or you have to talk to it. And the reason that things that you have to talk to in order to interact with them don't work is because we live in a society. So, you know, the vision pro, very isolating. Everything's isolating, isolating things don't work.
- [20:40]
Nilay Patel
I will say I am extremely bullish on doing more things on your phone with voice and fewer with a keyboard. Good dictation on a smartphone is life changing. Like I did this big experiment earlier this year where I tried desperately to get rid of my iPhone, tried all the other Android phones and then came back to the iPhone because I'm a deeply broken person. But you and everybody else biggest, the biggest thing I discovered, my absolute favorite thing about the day to day experience of Android is how much better dictation was.
- [21:10]
David Amell
Oh my God.
- [21:11]
Nilay Patel
Gemini is better. Voice recognition in general is vastly better on Android. But my ability to successfully type text messages on an Android phone leaps and bounds beyond what I've ever experienced on an iPhone. And it was wonderful.
- [21:24]
David Amell
Yeah.
- [21:24]
Nilay Patel
And I think in general I've been testing all these dictation apps on the Mac too. And the idea that they're starting to understand which app you're in and actually communicate and transcribe differently based on the apps. I think that's a, that's pure AI and that's very powerful and is going to be very exciting. That is OpenAI showing up and being like, we have a better dictation model on our phone. You should buy our phone instead. Is not going to work.
- [21:45]
David Amell
No.
- [21:46]
Nilay Patel
But Amazon is the one of these that I'm the most stuck on because right. Amazon 2014 tried the fire phone. Obviously didn't work and it was full of bad ideas. I think the most bad idea being that what people mostly want is a closer connection to Amazon.com all the time. That is just not correct. And then there is there's been this reporting that Amazon is building a phone again. It's internally known as Transformer, which is a rad name for a phone. They should just call it that. But let me just read you two quotes. This is from a Reuters story about this phone.
- [22:19]
David Amell
Okay, I'm ready.
- [22:19]
Nilay Patel
It says the phone is seen as a potential mobile personalization device that can sync with home voice assistant, Alexa and serve as a conduit to Amazon customers throughout the day. The people said, quote number two, as envisioned, the new phone's personalization features would make buying from Amazon.com watching Prime Video, listening to prime music, or ordering food from partners like GrubHub easier than ever.
- [22:38]
David Amell
Oh my God.
- [22:39]
Nilay Patel
Amazon has learned nothing, David. They're just doing it again.
- [22:45]
David Amell
Does anyone really want capitalism os? That's basically what that is.
- [22:49]
Accenture Advertiser
Truly.
- [22:50]
David Amell
Oh, my God. I, I don't watch TV really at all. But I was over at a friend's place and they had a prime TV show on. I think they were watching Fallout or something. I did not know that there are literal buttons on the ads that you can just buy and add to your Amazon cart while you're watching the TV show.
- [23:09]
Monday.com Advertiser
Oh yeah.
- [23:09]
David Amell
And I really feel like that's so Black Mirror. And I just don't. Does any. Nobody actually wants that. Like, nobody wants to have their escapism and just inject consumerism into their escapism. I don't see that working.
- [23:24]
Nilay Patel
You know who wants that? Every ad executive in the world. They want you to want that so very badly. But yeah, this to me is Amazon. And there's even a line in that Reuters story that says Amazon understands that putting AI front and center in this way is actually not what people are looking for, so they decided to put prime video there.
- [23:44]
David Amell
What?
- [23:45]
Nilay Patel
This, this to me is just like this whole idea is just completely doomed on its face. To me, I've only come up with one theory about what might work here and why all these companies might be doing this. And I just want to run this by you and I want to know what you think.
- [23:59]
David Amell
Let's see.
- [24:00]
Nilay Patel
I think there's a world in which a few years from now, most of the job of our phones, or if not most of the job, a lot of the job of our phones is essentially to be a brick of compute and network connectivity. And that actually trying to put a lot of, a lot of LLM stuff and a lot of battery and a lot of processing into your headphones or your watch or whatever else is a bad idea. But if you can just have a, a, a brick full of battery and LTE on in your pocket at all times, you don't need that. You, you can, you can do all the stuff you want to do with your nifty headphones through the phone. And that's actually, no one will feel like that's weird because that's how we've been doing it for a very long time.
- [24:43]
David Amell
Yeah.
- [24:43]
Nilay Patel
So maybe if I'm open AI, what I'm trying to do is not sell you a thing that makes phone calls and sends text messages and open Instagram at all. What I'm trying to sell you is literally just a box of ChatGPT. But that's not even the point. The point is just to be compute, battery, network connectivity and that if they can figure out a way to do that that is slim and good looking and does give you some kind of readout when ChatGPT needs to show you something that maybe that can Work. This is the only theory I've come up with that makes any sense to me. I want to know what you think.
- [25:18]
Accenture Advertiser
Yeah.
- [25:18]
David Amell
My question becomes, why didn't they just move forward with the earbuds that leaked that were fake with Score Niverson or whoever that guy was?
- [25:26]
Nilay Patel
It's fair. Yeah.
- [25:27]
David Amell
You know, that makes a lot more sense, I think. Making earbuds that are specially tuned to work with ChatGPT in some way and having them like connect to your phone and work really well with the ChatGPT app. And when you set it up, it recommends that you change your default model to ChatGPT. Like, why do they need to work into building the actual box themselves like that? That is the hardest part. Building the box and getting people to buy the box is by far the hardest part. It's easy to just build an accessory. Like an accessory is like lower cost, easier to get people to buy, easier for people to use, changing their paradigms with. If you already have to buy earbuds, just buy the OpenAI earbuds. If you're really into ChatGPT. I don't, I don't know. I don't see any sort of acceleration mechanism in a dedicated device. You know, Google made the Tensor chip specifically because it really wanted to accelerate AI workflows. And that was before generative AI. It was when they were just doing all the machine learning stuff and that has worked out well for them. Part of the reason that the voice dictation you're talking about is better is because Tensor is very good at voice dictation. So it's like, I don't know, I still don't understand this hardware. They might be thinking something that I just am not even aware of, but it makes no sense to me. I think they should all make accessories. I would love to see, you know, anthropic ring or OpenAI earbuds or mini Max shoes or something.
- [26:56]
Accenture Advertiser
I don't know.
- [26:57]
David Amell
Anything. Anything.
- [26:58]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, anything.
- [26:59]
David Amell
You're normally going to get an idea
- [27:00]
Nilay Patel
whose time has come.
- [27:01]
David Amell
Yeah, you know, it will happen. It will happen.
- [27:04]
Nilay Patel
I mean, I do think the problem with that theory again, especially in the US is that a lot of people use iPhones and you just can't get that kind of access to an iPhone, especially for free. Right, Apple? Apple is happy to give you lots of things for 30%. And I think the, the obvious, like the animating principle at Meta right now I, I earnestly believe this in my bones. The main thing Meta is working on is ways around the Apple tax. That is like the leading product at is how do we get around the Apple tax? And I think there's a lot of that going on at these other companies too, where there is a sense that if we give, you know, if we build an accessory to the iPhone, actually what we're doing is we're inviting Apple to just Sherlock us with AirPods and that what we need to do is we need to get around it entirely. And many have tried for 15 years. This is, this was the idea behind the metaverse. There was some of this in all of the blockchain stuff. We've just, this is part of the animating principle behind smart glasses. We've been at this a long time and it's kind of why I think this question of what are these non phone phones is so interesting because I do think if there is a way around them, it is not to invent some completely new thing, it's to make better phones. It's possible again that they're so entrenched that everybody just buys the next iPhone or the next Galaxy phone, that none of this matters anyway. But like if I sort of Galaxy brain my way into this, right, where we're doing flip phones again, we're doing fold phones again, there is more energy than ever for people to get away from their phones. So that maybe there is a sliver of saying we have a new way to do it. That might be something. Yeah, but then, but then you go back to what you just said. People don't like AI. I just, I don't know, I'm so, I'm completely lost here as to what, what avenue in these companies could find. I understand why they're looking for it and I cannot, I can't find it.
- [28:56]
David Amell
I mean, OpenAI is trying to build their own chips, right? So like maybe in this fab, they're going to build smartphone chips and maybe those SmartPH chips will have accelerators for specific AI based tasks. Maybe. But then you're still using Android, right? So like if you use, and if you want to use Android and if you want to interact with the apps people use every day, you still have to use the Play Store, which also takes a percentage. It's not like the Apple tax is the only tax on the highway. But you know, you could just not use the Google Play Store. But then if ChatGPT is the only app on your phone, what the, what can that even do? I don't, I don't know. Unless OpenAI decides to build like a competitive ecosystem for every single thing that you do on your phone every single day. Are they going to build a Venmo that like enough people will use that they don't have to think about? Like I just, I mean maybe this is Elon Musk's idea with X being the everything happen. Like they made a Grok phone. It next could do your social media and also your payments.
- [29:56]
Nilay Patel
That's where we're going.
- [29:56]
David Amell
Apparently people also don't like Elon Musk. So what's the. You gotta get people to like you. This is like, I feel like they, they've really. I don't even know what the right term is here, but the number one thing they need to do is get people to like their product before they try to sell a bunch of said product.
- [30:15]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, yeah, I agree. So to that end, actually I want you to rank these three companies for me. Let's, let's just say Amazon, SpaceX, OpenAI all ship something that is just a very AI centric smartphone. Like you define that however you want, but we're going to say they all sort of ship. I want you to rank 1 to 3 how you think they'd do.
- [30:35]
David Amell
Oh God.
- [30:37]
Nilay Patel
I think this is actually, this exercise is shockingly difficult, which is why I'm curious. Okay, okay, I found it. I immediately know the answer for me and I want to know the SpaceX
- [30:46]
David Amell
AI phone only have X on it or would it have other.
- [30:52]
Nilay Patel
Good question. That's the question. Ironically, I want to say yes, for the purposes of this exercise, but also given the way that Elon Musk has systematically kicked every other platform out of X, there's. I just feel like there's no shot Elon Musk lets you install Instagram on your SpaceX phone. I just don't see it. But let's just say for the purposes of our exercise, yes, these are sort of feature wise, functionally the same kinds of devices.
- [31:18]
David Amell
Okay, I'm close on OpenAI and SpaceX AI being number one. I think funny enough it seems like SpaceX AI being like four to five companies bundled into one kind of diluted their individual hate for any of the individual companies a little bit. You know what I mean? Like now when you think about Twitter, you're thinking about SpaceX and people don't dislike Space X that much like some people do. But so I would say SpaceX I would be number would be the most likely to win in my opinion. Oh, the Open A iPhone would be number two. And I just, I just do not see the Amazon phone unless it was like on sale on prime day for like $20, you know.
- [32:01]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, they did that with the prime with the fire phone and it's still.
- [32:05]
David Amell
Nobody wanted it. Yeah.
- [32:06]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. This was my list too. If only because Elon Musk, for. For all of his flaws, has a long history of being able to just horsepower things like this into existence and there are enough Elon fans out there that they would buy it. And I think, I think you're exactly right that. About the dilution of branding problems. And I think that is a big giant part of the reason that all of this has happened. Because for, you can say whatever you want about this company, but it is objectively rad that they launch and land rockets. It just rules. And so all they need to do is keep that image in your head and don't think so much about the rest and everything will be fine. And I think they can possibly do that successfully enough and tell a story about Starlink. And I think Starlink might end up buying a carrier, put the phone on that carrier like you, you can sort of see how that thing works. I don't think it becomes the iPhone, but I can sort of see how it would work. I also think they would make. They wouldn't make that thing. They would make a Grok phone and it would be a disaster.
- [33:05]
David Amell
That's what I was about to say. Less people, like, less people know about the Grok child porn image stuff than people know about the fact that they dislike Sam Altman. But less people, even less people know that Grok actually exists. So I don't think that they're going to be necessarily swayed by Grok. I think the dilution of Rocket company makes a phone is probably more interesting to people and Grok is just a side thing. They'll just say, oh, it has AI capabilities. Yeah, I agree. Which is sad because Grok is like the worst model in terms of what it's done for the world.
- [33:41]
Nilay Patel
But, you know, Grok is a horrific disaster that no one should ever interact with.
- [33:46]
MongoDB Advertiser
Ever.
- [33:46]
David Amell
That's right.
- [33:47]
Nilay Patel
But rockets are cool and it is possible to hold both of those ideas in your head at the same time. And this is, this is what we have to do here. Yeah. And then I agree. I had OpenAI second because I actually think if OpenAI had made a ChatGPT centric phone in like 2023, it might have had a real chance because the, the adoption was so huge. It seemed so exciting. There was so much enthusiasm about what was going on.
- [34:09]
David Amell
Yeah.
- [34:09]
Nilay Patel
We hadn't really had time for a. People who are going to develop these workflows who already develop these workflows. I think even, even if they ship this thing, there are going to be a lot of people who say, Well, I have ChatGPT voice mode wired to the action button on my iPhone. How is this more useful and chatgpt centric than that? And that's a set of power users who are already starting to learn how they do these things and are going to be hard to get to change. And everyone's opinion about Sam Altman OpenAI and AI in general has changed in the last three years. And I think that is a. It is still a hugely successful, very used product that I think people don't like nearly as much as they did a few years ago. And then Amazon Object disaster.
- [34:52]
David Amell
I just don't build a phone. They're trying just, just don't build a phone.
- [34:55]
Nilay Patel
I admire, I admire the code name. I admire the effort. Just kill the project. This.
- [35:01]
David Amell
I just don't even think that people associate SpaceX AI with data centers, which, you know, they're not. They probably don't have as many built out as OpenAI, et cetera, but they do have the mega data center thing that they're leasing to Anthropic.
- [35:15]
Thumbtack Advertiser
Yeah.
- [35:15]
David Amell
And Colossus. Colossus. They are a major data center player, but people don't associate them with it because there's just too many things to associate with that company. Because it's X and it's. And it's a rocket company and it's an AI company, but nobody thinks about the AI company. So, yeah, OpenAI is directly like, people's grievances are directly associated with OpenAI. When they think about artificial intelligence. It's like they're the ones building the data centers in my backyard. They're the reason RAM is so expensive. They're the reason that everyone's getting noise pollution in small towns.
- [35:49]
Thumbtack Advertiser
Yep.
- [35:49]
David Amell
It's. It's not. It's not great for them.
- [35:51]
Nilay Patel
That's a big branding hole to get out of. If you want to sell somebody a
- [35:54]
David Amell
smartphone, maybe just merge with four other companies and you'll be okay.
- [35:58]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, McDonald's, Taco Bell, open AI.
- [36:00]
David Amell
Oh, Taco Bell.
- [36:02]
Nilay Patel
Everybody loves Taco Bell.
- [36:03]
David Amell
You could never. That's true. That's a great point. That's a great point. That would help a lot, honestly.
- [36:09]
Nilay Patel
I think so. It's an idea who's. Whose time has come, for sure. All right, David, thank you for being here. If anyone out there has worked on one of these phones, has ideas about how these things should work, if you think you've figured out the next UI paradigm. If it's not a bunch of apps on a screen and it's not a chatbot, what is it? I honestly want to know. Send us concepts, send us your ideas. Send us weird things that you've worked on that you think are rad. I want to hear all about it. And then, David, as this stuff gets more real, you and I are going to have to talk about this again.
- [36:36]
David Amell
Oh, absolutely. We're going to get into it.
- [36:39]
Nilay Patel
Good to see you, bud. Thanks for being here.
- [36:40]
David Amell
Good to see you.
- [36:40]
Nilay Patel
All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to David for being here and thank you as always for watching and listening. I was serious, by the way. If you have even thoughts about this, I would love to see see Ideas, see Concepts. If you've built something funky that you think might be the future of AI on a smartphone, how to marry this idea of I want to open apps and look at them with Sometimes I want to use an AI agent to go to things on my behalf. This is the interface question I think of, like the next decade. And if you have thoughts, I would absolutely love to hear all of them. Call the hotline 866-Verge 11 Send us an email vergecasthevirge.com Looking forward to hearing from you. As a reminder, the best thing you can do to support everything the Verge is up to is to subscribe to the Verge theverge.com subscribe it gets you all of our podcasts ad free, including this one. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of whatever these weird phones turn out to be. Whenever they launch, we will be there. And so can you. Theverge.com subscribe the Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast network. The show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk and Aaron Locasio. We'll see you tomorrow. Rock and roll.
- [37:47]
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- [38:23]
Nilay Patel
Close your eyes.
- [38:24]
Monday.com Advertiser
Exhale.
- [38:25]
David Amell
Feel your body relax.
- [38:27]
Monday.com Advertiser
And let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast.
- [38:39]
Thumbtack Advertiser
And breathe.
- [38:40]
Monday.com Advertiser
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- [38:47]
Nilay Patel
Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.
- [38:51]
David Amell
1-800-contacts.