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Chapter 1: What is the absurd pivot of Allbirds to AI about?
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Chapter 2: Why are there attacks on Sam Altman and what do they signify?
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Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Long Blockchain Corporation, which until this week was the silliest thing a company has done in recent memory to capitalize on wild technology trends. This, you will remember, is when Long Island Iced Tea rebranded as the Long Blockchain Corporation in order to make a bunch of money. And it worked.
Chapter 3: How does Gen Z feel about AI and its implications?
This is what we do now. I'm your friend, David Pierce. Neil Eptel is here. Hey, buddy. Hello. So the news on this one, let's just get right into this one.
This is, I think, the silliest thing that has happened in the tech industry in a minute, and I'm very excited about it, was that Allbirds, which most people would know as a shoe company, which also kind of came up at a really interesting time in the tech industry when all you had to do was convince a bunch of people that you were a tech company. Yeah. And they would just give you lots of money.
So Allbirds, a shoe company,
got like a tech company valuation it was one point valued at four billion dollars they had a huge office in san francisco they were gonna like reshape footwear i don't know they were gonna do something and then everybody realized they were a shoe company and it all kind of fell apart uh and then this week decided that no they are not a shoe company they are an ai company they
And guess what, Neil? It worked. Their stock briefly went up. I think it was over 700%. It has settled back down a bit, but it's still way up even over where it was a few days ago. Because their big plan, as I understand it, is to get GPUs and rent them for you.
They're just going to go get some compute and rent it to other people, which I would point out is everyone's idea for the future of technology right now. Yeah. It's also still a shoe company. It's not even a shoe company. They're selling the shoe company. It's like the shell of a shoe company.
Yeah, they're selling off the name Allbirds and their assets, which are the shoes and the ability to make shoes, for $39 million to a company called American Exchange. Once worth $4 billion, just as a reminder.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the Ticketmaster monopoly verdict?
And they're closing all their stores. And then the shell, the public shell company that was Allbirds, is being renamed to New Bird AI. It's fantastic. Which will be, quote, a fully integrated GPU as a service and AI native cloud solutions provider. And I just want to point out, this is real. They are initializing GPU as a service as GPU-S. Well, I don't like that. So GPU-A-A-S? GPU-S, baby.
The capitalization alone in that acronym is just awful. The hottest category on Tinder.
Chapter 5: How are pricing issues affecting tech products like Microsoft Surface?
You're not wrong. You go to Palo Alto. That's going to get you some swipes. Newbird AI expects to use the initial capital from this sale to acquire high-performance GPS assets, or GPU-ass, if you will, which will be deployed to serve customers requiring dedicated access to AI compute capacity. This is so dumb. It is. Well, it's not even it's not even dumb. It's worse than dumb. It's nothing.
Do you know what I mean? Like this is this is the most nonsensical sort of buzzword capitalization we've seen in a while. And you and I were not around in covering this stuff in the early dot com days. But a few people have compared this to that when like in the mid 90s.
If you just did anything but you put dot com at the end of your company, it signaled to a bunch of investors on Wall Street that, oh, they know the Internet and they just like want to be next to that thing. So they will pour money into your business. This sounds stupid and it sounds like anyone paying attention would not possibly fall for this over and over again.
And yet, historically speaking, everyone has fallen for this over and over again. Everybody piled into mobile when mobile was becoming a thing. It was a joke on the show Silicon Valley, the mo, lo, so, the mobile, local, social, and so, lo, mo. And then we did it all again with crypto and we did it all again with Web3. And now we are doing it maybe at the biggest scale ever with AI.
If you just say you're AI. I mean, actually, the funniest thing about this is that Their scale is so small as to be useless. They're selling the company, the actual shoe company for $39 million. And they're going to raise $50 million from an unnamed investor. If you would wish to name yourself investor, please, please call us and let us know who you are.
And I will tell you that you are blowing $50 million to your face. So they're going to have a total of $89 million. to compete with Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure and Nvidia's weird circular finance neoclouds. what are you doing? Like Sam Altman is like, here's what I need. All of the money in the world to build Stargate.
And they're like, we have $89 million worth of GPUs, which at today's prices is six GPUs. Yeah. This is, I, it, none of it makes any sense, but it, it sextupled the stock price job done. Like if you ever want an indication that all of this is just nonsense to juice money out of dumb investors and, Here it is. I present to you NewBirds AI as a service. It's very good.
Richard Lawler, who wrote the story, has a line in here. We asked Wharton professor Gad Allen about the news, and he said, calling this a pivot gives Allbirds too much credit. By the way, this thing you're pointing out about being confused about what were tech companies, sort of in the explosion of tech companies, when The Verge started, quite frankly, this is WeWork.
Like WeWork ran around calling itself a tech company and everyone woke up one day and was like, so you own a bunch of real estate? Where's the tech company part? And they had to talk about like elevating the world's consciousness with coworking or whatever it was in their S1 that collapsed. It was Blue Bottle Coffee, if you'll remember that. It is Warby Parker.
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Chapter 6: What is the latest in satellite internet advancements and competition?
Yep. Sure. So the reason... We have a lot of news to get to, by the way. There's actually a lot going on. This is kind of a lightning roundy episode because there's no sort of big giant new thing that happened, but there's a lot to talk about. Everything's crazy. The Verge cast. Everything's crazy. Don't be afraid. Welcome to the Verge cast.
I think there's some broader AI thing happening right now. And I just want to kind of talk through it. And I think... Allbirds is a useful place to start because it is such a silly version of, I think, the way in which all of this is getting away from everybody. That there is a sense of like, oh, I have to be in AI because it is the thing. And nobody knows what that thing is.
Nobody knows whether a shoe company can be the thing. But it's like the FOMO in a certain way is now so intense that all you have to do is stand on a street corner and say AI and people will buy your stock. but I think the, the, the other thing that has been happening this week is on a very different note is, is this stuff with Sam Altman.
And there have been these repeated attacks on Sam Altman's house and, and against him and these threats against him.
Chapter 7: What controversies surround the Trump Phone design?
And, uh, There's just, we've talked a lot about the vibe difference in AI, right? And the way that companies talk about what they're building versus the way that the users perceive it versus the way that sort of the world is receiving all of this from these companies and from this industry.
And in a bunch of different directions, it feels like all of this is coming to a head right at the same time.
Chapter 8: What are the implications of Neuralink's latest developments?
And there's some interesting data out this week to support that theory that we should talk about. But I don't know, you're sort of in the wind in this industry in a lot of the same ways that I am. Are you feeling this right now as much as I am? I am. And I think we've been talking about it
On this show for a while, on The Verge for a while, it does feel like it has come to some kind of head this week, specifically because the person who threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house had said, quote, we should be Luigi-ing some tech CEOs. And I want to talk about that and what that means. And that's a lot to unpack there.
I do think it is important to say, and I said this clearly on Decoder this week too, that violence is unacceptable. Political violence is unacceptable. You can be as mad at Sam Allman as you want. It's unacceptable to wish violence upon him or his family. At the same time, I also think it is unacceptable how helpless people feel.
And I think the people in power ought to take a real hard look at that because those ideas are all connected. These outbursts are coming from a feeling, a place of helplessness. And I think that's as unacceptable as the violence itself. So just to say it, I hope that's clear. We're going to talk about it, but I just don't want anyone to ever think that we're condoning violence in that way.
I think The Verge is an anti-war, anti-violence publication. We've been that way for a long time. We're going to stay that way. Saying we should be Luigi-ing some tech CEOs and then attacking Sam Altman, it is very bad for the tech industry to find its leaders occupying the same moral space as healthcare CEOs. Yep.
Like on whatever scale of cool CEOs there are, which maybe is all in the gutter, like maybe there's no more scale of cool CEOs. The reaction that the, you know, the murder of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare got was shocking to a lot of people. And then, you know, we saw it in our audience. We saw it in the wider culture. There were a lot of people like, yeah, that's it.
Yeah.
Right? Like, these people are all monsters. They've all profited from our pain. Fine. And we have sent Miyasato to cover the Luigi Nanjiani trial. And you see that dynamic playing out. That is not where tech CEOs have been. No. Like, not even very long ago, it was the opposite. Yeah.
And the idea that they had something to say that was interesting about remaking the world or innovation or design. We have long had tech CEOs on our website. We have had conferences with them. The Code Conference used to exist. Decoder exists. And the tenor of...
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