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Podcast

Is Google Search Cooked? + We’re Getting a U.S. Crypto Reserve? + What You’re Vibecoding

Hard Fork

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  • Curved Monitor Inspiration
    • Kevin Roose was inspired by a photo of Elon Musk’s curved monitor.
    • He bought a similar monitor and now enjoys looking at (and ignoring) many emails. Transcript: Kevin Roose Well, Casey, it finally happened to me this week. I was radicalized by Elon Musk. Casey Newton Radicalized in what way? Kevin Roose Well, not into shifting my politics. But I don’t know if you saw, there was a big story in the New York Times a couple days ago that included in its many revelations a picture of Elon Musk’s desk in the Eisenhower Executive Office building next to the White House. I have not seen this picture. And I’ll show it to you. Okay. Do you know what is on this desk? A Doge sign, a Make America Great Again hat, what appears to be like a big gaming PC, and then in the middle of the desk, very austere setup here, is a huge, wide, curved computer monitor. And I saw that photo, and I thought, you know what? I want one of those. Casey Newton Because you thought Elon Musk, whatever you think of him, he does clearly get a lot done, and so maybe if you had a big, curvy monitor like he does, maybe you’d also get a lot done. Well, yeah, I thought these are basically for gamers. Kevin Roose I had never seen one in like an actual office where people work. Kevin, you have to come to my office. Casey Newton My monitor has curves and swerves like you wouldn’t believe. Kevin Roose Really? Casey Newton It is so big and curvy. I love my curvy monitor. Kevin Roose I’m a flat monitor guy, or have been. But this week I decided to take the plunge, and so I went on to Facebook Marketplace, and I got myself… I two-year Dell mega monitor that is curved, and I didn’t go for the biggest one that is like a full 180-degree wraparound. The full wraparound. IMAX experience, but I do have now a very large curved monitor, and I got to say, I love it. And how has it changed the way you use your computer? I’m looking at so many emails. I am looking at and not responding to so many emails. Yeah. (Time 0:00:33)
  • Google’s AI Mode
    • Google’s new AI Mode is a response to competition from AI chatbots.
    • It aims to integrate AI directly into search, potentially changing how we access information online. Transcript: Casey Newton Well, Kevin, every once in a while, we get a preview of a very big change to the internet, and I think we might have gotten one of those this week. Tell me about it. So on Wednesday, Google said that in addition to expanding AI overviews to more users and upgrading the underlying model to Gemini 2.0, it is also introducing a brand new search mode Called AI mode, and it seems likely to me that this may be the future of Google. Kevin Roose Yeah, this is, I would say, at a minimum, a much better name than we have seen for any AI feature that Google has released over the past couple of years. AI Mode, it’s a mode, it does AI. Seems pretty straightforward to me. Casey Newton Yeah, and where other companies might have called this X-73 Google just picked a normal name for it, which isn’t something that Google does a lot. That’s true. So right now they’re calling this an early experiment. It is rolling out now to paid subscribers to Google One’s AI premium subscription service. And even if you pay, you also have to opt into it through something called Google Labs, which is a feature that Google has to let you opt into trying new stuff. So it’s kind of hidden away. We have asked if we could use it right away, and they said no. So we don’t have a direct report for you today, but what we can tell you is that AI Mode is Google’s answer to bringing something like ChatGPT directly into search, right? So, so far, it has been dabbling, it’s been sprinkling these little AI overviews on top of the traditional 10 blue links. I’m sure you’ve all seen those. But while right now AI mode is separate from search, if it succeeds, I suspect it will gradually merge into the main Google search results page. (Time 0:02:55)
  • AI Mode vs. Chatbots
    • Google’s AI Mode offers a more chatbot-like search experience.
    • It prominently features links to websites, unlike pure chatbots. Transcript: Casey Newton So AI mode is a new mode within Google search, where if you ask a query that might be a little bit better suited to a chatbot, you can click over and it is going to give you a slightly more chatbot-like Experience. But it is different from something like the Gemini app, which is Google’s sort of straight-up chat GPT competitor, in a couple of pretty interesting ways. There are very prominent links to websites within AI mode in what a user interface designer would call a carousel, you know, those little horizontally scrolling bars of links. And so as you move through the answer to your query in AI mode, Google is going to say, here are some actual websites you could visit to get more of that information. Kevin Roose And you just said this is rolling out to like a small subset of paying Google users who have subscribed to this like Google One AI plan. Presumably, this is something that they’re interested in building into the Google experience for everyone eventually, right? Or is this going to remain small? Casey Newton So I talked with Google yesterday and tried to get a sense of that. And the company was loathe to make too many predictions here. This really is an experiment, they told me. And if it goes super, super badly, they could presumably pull the plug. But I don’t think that is going to happen. I think Google realizes that this is a once-in chance to reinvent the search experience. And that is going to mean a fundamentally different way of presenting information. (Time 0:06:32)
  • AI Mode’s Search Approach
    • AI Mode answers queries with short essays and provides links to source websites.
    • This differs from traditional search results or simple AI overviews. Transcript: Kevin Roose And that’s what AI mode is. So I haven’t tested out AI mode on Google either. They have not made it available to me, but there are some screenshots floating around. I think maybe we should just describe what this is going to look like for people. They have a screenshot of someone asking the question, explain how deja vu works and how it relates to memory. Now, I got a feeling I’ve heard that question before. Casey Newton I thought we talked about that on a previous episode. Kevin Roose Okay, we made the same joke. Good for us. So in the AI mode, instead of showing the user a list of links or an AI overview, it sort of writes them a little essay. It says, deja vu is that strange and fleeting feeling of having experienced something before, even though you know you haven’t. It’s like your brain is playing tricks, creating a sense of familiarity with a situation that’s brand new. And it continues on, and then it has a little thing at the top right under the query that says four sites, and you can click to expand, and it gives you little icons of which sites it’s pulling The stuff from. But basically, this is Google’s version of what tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity have been doing for a while now, which is sort of replacing the 10 blue links altogether with this more Bespoke AI response. (Time 0:08:00)
  • Chegg’s Lawsuit Against Google
    • Chegg, a homework-help website, sued Google, claiming AI overviews stole their traffic.
    • Chegg’s stock plummeted, highlighting AI’s disruptive potential. Transcript: Casey Newton There was this fascinating lawsuit that got filed last week by a company called Chegg. Do you know Chegg? The homework cheating app. Exactly. So if you’ve been in college any time in the past 15 years, statistically, you use Chegg to cheat on your homework. It offers a database of more than 100 million answers test questions, and it has been charging students about 15 bucks a month to use this thing. Well, then along comes Google and its AI overviews. And using who knows what methods, but I’m going to assume they did some pretty aggressive scraping of Chegg and other websites, they started to put the answers to all these homework Questions directly in the AI overviews. All of a sudden, there is no need to visit Chegg. And Chegg, Kevin, is now on life support. This is a company that was riding high during the pandemic. It was valued at $12 billion in 2021. And now its stock is basically a penny stock, and it is exploring strategic alternatives, which is sort of corporate speak for we’re going to have to unload this thing in a fire sale. And in their lawsuit, Chegg said that traffic rightfully belonged to us and Google destroyed us with AI overviews. You really disrupted us in the homework cheating business. I realize as I’m saying this, that Chegg is not a sympathetic company and no one is going to be sorry to see it go who does not work at Chegg. But I’m telling you, this is a bellwether. Chegg is not going to be the last business to be completely disrupted by AI. (Time 0:16:42)
  • Types of Online Queries
    • Two types of online queries exist: those needing ‘good enough’ answers and those needing precise information.
    • Most queries are the former, benefiting from AI chatbots, while the latter still relies on source links. Transcript: Casey Newton So I think there’s basically two kinds of queries that you can make. One query is an answer where you just need something that is good enough, right? You need to satisfy your curiosity about something. And if it’s a little bit wrong in 5% in either direction, you don’t really care because you’re just looking for the gist of something. I think this is the vast majority of all queries. There is a second kind of query though, which is I need the actual information because my health, my money, my job depends on it. These are the cases where I think that people are actually clicking on the links. I’m a journalist. I’m constantly Googling for information. I cannot rely on an AI overview for one thing because if I’m going to put a statistic, a historical fact into my newsletter, I need to know what the original source is. And I need to know that I trust the original source, which means that if that link is going to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, I’m going to the original website. I’m scanning to that paragraph. I’m seeing it with my own eyes before I’m going to trust that that is real. So I think that’s a really good thing that people should do in a lot of cases. But I’m also not naive. That is a minority use case for specialists. The vast majority of people, Kevin, do not need that level of clarity, and they are not clicking those dang links. (Time 0:18:36)
  • AI’s Impact on Publishers
    • AI search tools may cause significant traffic loss for publishers, even if current predictions are overstated.
    • Even a 45% traffic reduction would be a major disruption for the media industry. Transcript: Kevin Roose Yes. No, and I think it’s worth saying, like, even if these predictions, these numbers were way off, say it was only half as bad as Tolbit says it is, and that these AI search tools only produce About 45% less traffic than the Google searches that preceded them, that would still be a cataclysmic event for much of the media industry. Totally. Casey Newton Now, Google has said, when I’ve asked about this, that the AI overviews, which again is not AI mode, but AI overviews are sort of like the walk-up to this AI mode. Those have led people to search more in general, right? So Google says basically people like AI overviews and they see them and they search more. And that leads to maybe more searches in the aggregate, but the impact on traffic to individual publishers does not seem to have been positive so far. Yeah. (Time 0:21:14)
  • Strategic Bitcoin Reserve
    • Trump signed an executive order to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
    • The reserve will hold Bitcoin seized by the government, with plans to acquire more. Transcript: Kevin Roose Thank you. Well, Casey, there is a lot to say about what is happening in Washington right now. Elon Musk and his Doge team are fanning out across the federal bureaucracy, slashing and burning wherever they go. But the story that I think we can really shed some useful light on here is about what’s been happening with crypto and crypto policy. Casey Newton Yeah, Kevin, we heard some news over the weekend that President Trump was interested in something called a crypto strategic reserve. And we thought that sounds just silly enough that it could be a hard fork segment. Yes. Kevin Roose And then on Thursday night, just as we were finishing up this episode, news broke that President Trump had signed an executive order establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve. And that announcement and the executive order attached to it clarified a few very important things. One is that this reserve will be filled with Bitcoin that is already owned by the federal government that was seized or forfeited as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings. Second thing is that the secretaries of Treasury and Commerce, according to this executive order, will be authorized to develop what they call budget neutral strategies for acquiring More Bitcoin. They say that this will not have an additional cost on the American taxpayer. And then the third thing that the executive order did is established a separate U.S. Digital asset stockpile, which consists of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets that are not Bitcoin. And with respect to this stockpile, the executive order said that the government won’t purchase any of these other non-Bitcoin crypto assets, but that if it gets some in the case of A criminal or civil proceeding, it will keep it and hold on to it as part of the stockpile. So we just want to note that that happened and that this conversation you’re about to hear took place before the order was official when a few more things were still up in the air. But I think it’s fair to say a really big deal. (Time 0:27:13)
  • Crypto Reserve Ambiguity
    • The concept of a “crypto reserve” lacks clarity and can encompass various ideas.
    • Proponents argue it’s in the US interest to hold crypto if it becomes a major global currency. Transcript: Kevin Roose So let’s start with some basic questions about this idea of a strategic United States crypto reserve. When did you start to hear about this and what is the basic idea? David Yaffe-Bellany So this was an idea that popped up on the campaign trail last year. President Trump started talking about it. Some kind of influential figures in the crypto Twitter sphere were talking a lot about it. But what it actually meant was pretty obscure then and remains pretty obscure now. Because when people say Bitcoin Reserve or Crypto Reserve, they really could be talking about 10 different sorts of ideas. Right. Kevin Roose And I want to understand this idea of a strategic reserve because my basic impression is that this is not a new idea. Governments have long stockpiled assets like gold or oil or other foreign currencies to basically give themselves some cushion against economic downturns or inflation or just maybe Running out of oil during a foreign conflict. So is this similar to those kind of strategic reserves? Why do people in crypto think that we need a U.S. Crypto reserve? Because crypto can’t power heavy machinery. It can’t feed people. It’s not useful in the way that some of these other assets are. David Yaffe-Bellany I think there are two key arguments that people in the crypto world are making. And the sort of more reserve-like argument for this is that at the moment, the reserve currency of the world is the dollar. The world runs on the dollar, but maybe not so far in the future. The world will run on Bitcoin or on cryptocurrencies more broadly, and it would be in the strategic interests of the United States to have a giant stockpile of crypto. (Time 0:31:45)
  • Government Involvement in Crypto
    • Some crypto enthusiasts oppose government involvement with Bitcoin.
    • They believe it contradicts Bitcoin’s apolitical nature and libertarian origins. Transcript: David Yaffe-Bellany The idea of a Bitcoin reserve before this whole notion of a crypto reserve came up. And so it’s definitely been divisive. I mean, crypto Bitcoin started as this, you know, renegade economic movement. And so to be kind of begging the government to like buy up a huge stockpile so that the price goes up seems sort of antithetical to a lot of those principles. And, you know, most people in the industry don’t really care about those principles anymore, but some still do. (Time 0:42:30)
  • Crypto Knowledge Gap
    • Most crypto experts who understand the complex ecosystem are invested in it.
    • This creates a knowledge gap and limits objective policy discussions in Washington. Transcript: Kevin Roose So I want to bring this back to the question of the information gap that exists in crypto right now. My experience and maybe your experience, too, is that the people who understand crypto the deepest, who can talk about the L2s and the stable coins and the DEXs, most of them are invested In crypto in some way, which is why they have taken the time to understand all of the extremely complex parts of the crypto ecosystem. But what worries me about that is that there is essentially no principled opposition left, it seems to me, in Washington, D.C. The people who are making the policy, who are having the debates about the policy, they all come from the same universe of people who are bullish by and large about crypto. Maybe they have some disagreements about which crypto assets should be included in a strategic reserve or exactly how some regulations would be written. But there doesn’t seem to me to be anyone sort of left in Washington who knows what they’re talking about and can stand up to some of these schemes from the industry. Is that an accurate read of the situation? Yeah, I mean, partly this is a function of the changing administration. David Yaffe-Bellany I mean, there were a huge number of people in Washington who knew about crypto and were in positions of power. I mean, Gary Gemsler himself taught an MIT course on crypto. I mean, this wasn’t some naive guy who didn’t know the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum. He was running the SEC. Now he’s out and the crypto people sort of have the run of the town. I also think there’s an element of fatigue here that parallels kind of like the broader fatigue over what’s going on with Trump. I mean, some of the loudest crypto critics, you know, people like the actor Ben McKenzie, who was super vocal during the last kind of bull run and crypto crash. You know, those people sort of feel like they made their point. I mean, they were screaming about how dangerous crypto was, and then the whole thing crashed, and Sam Bankman-Fried went to prison, and they were proved right in a lot of ways. And yet, crypto came surging back, and I think a lot of people don’t have the energy to fight this fight all over again. (Time 0:48:08)
  • ConsultCraft App
    • An anesthesiologist, Lauren Buell, vibe-coded an app, ConsultCraft, to simulate case discussions.
    • The app provides real-time feedback and has been unexpectedly popular with colleagues. Transcript: Speaker 4 Name is Lauren Buell, and I’m a full-time practicing anesthesiologist based in Hanover, New Hampshire. Vibe Coding was clawed back in November of 2024 and created this app called ConsoleCraft that uses adaptive AI to simulate anesthesiology, case discussions, and provide real-time Feedback that’s based on case scripts and answers that are written by me. And I have no coding experience and just a very basic understanding of the command line. So it took me about six weeks in my spare time to make something that was functional enough that I could send it to my colleagues. And now it’s been about three months of adding new features and cases weekly, including a database so I can save transcripts for research. And, you know, I expected to hear mostly from my residents who were using it to prepare for their oral board exams, but I’ve also gotten a lot of positive feedback from colleagues who Say things like, you know, I haven’t really done that particular case in a while in the operating room, and this was a nice refresher, you know, has been really great to hear and really Unexpected. (Time 1:00:10)
  • Flavor Finder and Game Experiment
    • Matt, a graphic designer, used AI to build Flavor Finder, a flavor pairing tool.
    • He also experimented with creating a game combining Tic-Tac-Toe and Rock, Paper, Scissors. Transcript: Casey Newton True. Let’s hear from our next listener. Hey, Kevin and Casey. This is Matt. I’m a graphic designer. I live in Los Angeles, and I’ve been vibe coding for like six months. Kevin Roose I created a project called Flavor Finder with Claude, and it’s a combination of the data set of the Flavor Bible, which is an excellent cooking reference, along with the UI of a color Palette generator. So you can kind of go one by one and you can build the palette as you go, or you can just push generate and it will create a five ingredient flavor pairing that all of the ingredients pair Well together. You can lock ingredients and substitute, move them around. It’s actually been a really fun way to discover new stuff in the kitchen. Casey Newton Another exercise that I do with a lot of the LLMs is something I call Ro-Sham It’s a combination of the two worst games of all time, Tic-Tac and Rock, Paper, Scissors. And I just say, hey, create a little playable web app for me combining these two games. Kevin Roose They’re so bad. Make something fun. I have to say, unfortunately, it’s struggled to create anything that’s very entertaining. But it is an interesting way to kind of observe how an LLM is thinking. (Time 1:03:11)
  • Automating Photo Tasks
    • Zach, a photographer, used AI to create scripts for automating photo organization tasks.
    • While initially time-consuming, the script now saves him time on future projects. Transcript: Casey Newton Kevin and Casey. My name is Zach. I’m a photographer in New York City. And like Kevin, I was once a young nerd who bounced off of coding in exchange for photography and Flash and DreamWaver and all that. And lately I’ve been using like a combination of ChatGPT and Claude and DeepSeek to help me write these little custom shell or Python scripts that helped me with some mundane photo tasks. For example, I had a recent job where I had almost a thousand images that needed to be renamed based on the subject, moved into subfolders based on the name and exported from their layered Photoshop file into like JPEGs and TIFFs, different file sizes. It was a whole mess. And AI helped me write a script to automate this organization process. David Yaffe-Bellany It even tried to make a Photoshop script to help the export, but it was pretty bad at that language. But, you know, of course, with all the debugging, it probably took twice as long as it would have taken to do manually, but it was a lot more fun. And now I have this cool script I can tweak in the future. Thanks. Yeah. (Time 1:05:16)