Today on Decoder, I’m talking with Hayden Field, The Verge’s senior AI reporter, about a question that’s been rocketing around the tech industry for the past week: Is Google losing the AI race?

That’s because last week Google announced a bombshell reorganization of its AI division, Google DeepMind. Jeff Dean, the company’s chief scientist, is leaving to form his own startup and DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping aside to focus on longer-term research.

You can read these moves, and Google’s reaction, in a lot of different ways. So I really wanted to sit down with Hayden to dig into some of the smartest analysis we’ve seen this past week, and what we think is really going on here. 

Also: At its core, this is an org chart story — and what is Decoder about if not org charts?

Okay: Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field on what’s happening at Google DeepMind and the future of AI research. Here we go.

This interview had been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Hayden Field, you’re The Verge‘s senior AI reporter. Welcome back to Decoder.

Thanks. It’s great to be here.

It’s always chaos when you’re here, Hayden. 

It really is. There’s no week off. Every week something crazy is happening.

This time is a little bit different. The news happened last week. Google reorganized its AI division, Google DeepMind. Demis Hassabis, who was the head of DeepMind, has ascended into Google heaven where he’s now the chairman of DeepMind. He’s going to focus on bigger research. Jeff Dean, who had started Google Brain, left with a bunch of other people from Google to start a new lab that will run on Google Cloud.

This is a big reshuffle of Google’s AI efforts. It comes as Google is not competitive on the frontier anymore. There’s a lot of reactions to this news. I wanted to just go through some of that reaction with you — you’ve done a lot of reporting on what’s going on with Google, what’s going on in the industry — and try to put this all into context for people.

So let’s just start at the start. Google is by and large the best-positioned company to win AI. If you just look at what it is, how it makes money, its distribution power to put AI in front of people, putting AI in Search, its resources, it feels like it should have always been the winner. 

As you reported from the Elon Musk-Sam Altman trial, everyone was afraid of Demis Hassabis the whole time. You look at all of these ingredients and you think, “Google should be the runaway winner.” Instead, I would say over the last week, a lot of people have said, “Google’s going to lose,” which I find fascinating.

Is that your diagnosis of what’s going on with Google? Is this just a catastrophe for its bleeding-edge efforts?

It’s really bad, but I do think people are forgetting how powerful Google is and how much they own. All of the integration they can do, all of the tools, all of the data they have on us — they have a huge safety net, is what I’m saying. A huge cushion.

Even if they make huge mistakes and are falling behind, I still think you can’t count them out completely because they have so much power. However, it’s crazy to me that they have that much power and all that going for the company, and they’re still not in the lead, let alone being behind as of right now. That’s what I think is crazy.

And Sundar and Demis both made that point in their statements last week. Sundar wrote that the company’s committed to being at the frontier and they’re focused on the areas they need to improve, which is CEO-speak for, “We know we need to get our shit together.” And then Demis wrote that the company’s “entering a next chapter” and that “it has the ingredients to lead from here, and I firmly believe we will,” AKA, “we aren’t yet, but we have the ingredients to do it sometime in the future.” Both of them acknowledging that is pretty crazy.

It’s not looking good for them, but it reminds me of someone with a trust fund. They have a fallback. Don’t count them out yet.

That trust fund is Google Search. They have a product that billions of people use and that they’re putting AI into. As you and I have discussed many, many times, that is a consumer product. Consumer AI has not yet reached a point of making a bunch of money for a bunch of people, but everyone sees that as the prize. All of the action is in enterprise AI right now, and you can see Anthropic is out to a big lead because of their focus on enterprise AI and in particular coding.

One of the things I want to come back to is whether Google made the wrong bet on multimodality and world models, which Demis is really focused on, instead of these core enterprise use cases and whether they even want to be at the frontier. They’re saying they want to be, but maybe they don’t. Maybe they just want to sell cloud services to Anthropic, which is a business that is growing for Google.

But hold that thought. I want to come back to that. Just put that in your brain. This is part of the framework that I’m thinking about. You just said Sundar said, “It’s the next chapter. We’re committed to it.” They’re making changes.

But Hayden, a few months ago I was sitting with Sundar Pichai and I asked him, “Hey, you just restructured this entire company. You got rid of all of your senior executives. You have all new ones. You made DeepMind.” He said, “Yeah, that was hard.” Here’s a clip:

Sundar Pichai: It was tough to convey it outside, but I pivoted the company to be AI-first. We had all the ingredients, so in some ways I felt like the Overton window had changed. People were adopting these technologies faster than we had expected. To me it was a way to go and actually express ourselves through our products, but I realized we had to organize ourselves for it. And going back to my earlier point, I realized we need a core model and a core infrastructure team to power everything we are doing across Google. A lot of my initial energy was to go set that up.

To get one AI team, we had world-class research teams in Brain and DeepMind and brought those together as Google DeepMind, which was harder than it sounds because it’s like saying, “Go put Stanford and MIT together and create a department out of it or a university out of it.” So I think we’re doing that well. 

That’s Sundar saying, “My company wasn’t organized for the AI moment. We were slow to react to ChatGPT. I made this huge change to build a central infrastructure team.” It’s three months later, four months later, and the head of Google Brain is leaving. The head of Google DeepMind is becoming the chief scientist. 

Now, Google DeepMind doesn’t have a CEO anymore. It has an SVP. What do you read into that? Is that yet another reset or is it just more of the same?

It’s another reset, but it’s hard because I really do think it’s both. It’s a result of the fact that Demis has never been interested in the productization stuff. He’s, like you mentioned, really into world models, research, curing disease, and drug discovery. And Jeff Dean is similar. So I’m not surprised.

If you’re being optimistic, you could view this as just the ripple effects of the conversation you had with Sundar, but I also don’t think this bodes very well for the company because, as we’re seeing with OpenAI literally right now, whenever there are a bunch of executive shakeups, people get nervous. People below them leave. People don’t work as hard because they’re thinking too much about things. Plus, a lot of the people that are working on AI at Google are there because of Jeff Dean or Demis. So what’s going to happen now?

They’re thinking about this solely on the page, logistical. “Okay, who is best positioned to speed up our productization?” Maybe that’s the best decision. But when you take into account all the minds that are leaving and all the minds that will leave in the next couple of months, it’s going to be rough.

There’s a lot of controversy, or I guess curiosity, around Gemini 4, which is not yet out. They announced it at Google I/O. They put all their emphasis on the 3.5 class models. The 3.5 class models are not at the top of the leaderboards. They’ve actually fallen quite far behind.

Does this strike you as the actions of a bunch of executives who think Gemini 4 is going to vault them back into the lead? Or do you think people are getting out because Google isn’t as committed or focused on being on the frontier?

As SemiAnalysis wrote in its blog, “These are not the actions of people excited about Gemini 4 Pro.” So definitely not. Google is pretty committed to being a frontier lab. It’s more, is it going to reach its goal? Though my answer to that a few months ago would’ve been that it was a frontier lab, right now it’s more of a wait-and-see. It is right now, but is it going to fall out of favor?

SemiAnalysis put it more heavily. They said in their release, “We believe DeepMind is no longer a frontier lab.” To me, it’s still got that designation, but in a few months that might be very different and I didn’t anticipate that changing so quickly. There’s a chance it could go the way of Meta where they suddenly get pretty behind and they keep promising things and then taking a while to deliver. Same with Apple, actually. We’ll see.

I’m glad you brought up SemiAnalysis. It’s an investment research firm. They do great work across AI and chips and thinking about how the math of all this should work out. That post really struck me as well.

I just want to reuse some other parts of it. There’s a lot of this in which The Verge has covered Google for a long time and there are echoes of this throughout our coverage of Google, and there are some parts of this which feel new to me — they’re new problems for Google.

So I’ll just read you the longer version of the quote you just said. As Hayden said, they wrote, “For all intents and purposes, we believe DeepMind is no longer a frontier lab. Google will continue meandering on and releasing models, but their odds of reaching the state of the art again have dropped to zero.”

This strikes me as an incredible claim. We see the model race twist and turn all the time. And to say, “Google will never once again hit the state of the art” feels like an enormous claim. That’s the part that feels new to me. Week to week in AI, anything could happen. Do you think there’s evidence for that?

That’s really putting the cart before the horse. It’s been a few months since we ourselves wrote about Gemini 3’s hype. It was winning the model race for a few weeks until something else came along. I definitely don’t think the odds have dropped to zero for them reaching state of the art again. In a way, they’re cutting out some of their research focus and just going all in on products. If they’re really going all in on that and they find a way to put all their efforts behind that, they will reach state of the art again.

However, what this will be is them constantly catching up right after another frontier lab. And then the other frontier labs that invest in research more and long-term stuff are going to be pulling ahead. It’s kind of the same thing as if you’re a writer and someone keeps copying you, they’re always going to be right behind you. They’re not going to be thinking of the next thing like you are.

That’s what I foresee ending up happening here. If you’re not really investing quite as much in the longer-term research and all these niche areas that, for example, Jeff Dean’s startup is going to be looking at, I feel like they could reach state of the art again. But it’s not going to be them coming in the lead over and over again. 

That’s the part that felt new to me. I don’t really know how to evaluate that claim, especially as Google’s AI division changes leadership. I can’t read Sundar’s mind. I’ve tried many times. It’s very difficult to see what’s going on in his head. I don’t know if he wants to win that race or if he thinks Gemini is good enough now to make a bunch of money inside of Google’s products. I really don’t know how to evaluate, “They’ll never be at the state of the art again.”

The part I do know how to evaluate is the second part of the SemiAnalysis claim here, which anybody who has paid attention to Google will immediately understand and immediately agree with this, I think. 

They go on to say, “Perhaps there’s some world in which Google reaches the state of the art again, but we think the odds are basically zero… The issue with Google was not Jeff Deam or Noam Shazeer,” who we should talk about, “but rather their extremely bureaucratic, painfully slow, and strategically timid culture.”

That’s Google. I literally sit with Sundar once a year and say, “Tell me about your culture and tell me about this bureaucracy.” There’s something about Sundar saying to me at I/O, “I made DeepMind the center of the company and then everything else is productizing their development,” and then all the people leaving and SemiAnalysis saying they’ll never be at the frontier again because their culture is so bureaucratic, that is uniquely Google to me. It feels very familiar.

I know you’ve talked to people at Google since all these announcements. Is there a sense that Google’s culture needs to change even more to go and compete?

There’s a reason that so many people are flocking to Anthropic right now. Anthropic is not perfect by any means. They have a lot of red flags as well. But I’m seeing a lot of people from OpenAI, from Google, from Meta flock there because, as we’ve reported a bunch, people in this space are a little bit post-money. A lot of times they don’t care just about the salary or what they’re making. They care about working for a place that aligns with their values that they believe in. Google has really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way when it comes to that.

Jeff Dean and Demis had both signed a public letter in 2018, saying that AI shouldn’t be used for lethal autonomous weapons. Jeff Dean had been tweeting in the months before he left Google about the fact that mass surveillance could be a really big problem with AI. Jeff Dean even signed an amicus brief in support of Anthropic with the whole Department of War situation, which Google ended up signing and just kind of letting the Department of War do whatever with their AI.

I could see a lot of people fleeing in the next few months because Jeff Dean seemed to be, according to my sources that I spoke with there, the person keeping a lot of people at Google. I could see a big exodus happening in the next few months.

This is one of the bigger questions. Who was the keeper of the morals and values of this team inside of a Google that seems to be more willing to play ball with the Trump administration? With the Department of War, and with the uses of AI that some people are very, very skeptical or very, very skittish about?

There’s been a lot of reporting about the fact that when Google acquired DeepMind and Demis, they signed a pledge to never use DeepMind technology for military purposes. That has been watered down. In fact, Jeff Dean recently said, “We should not use AI for these purposes.” There are people inside of Google who’ve sent a letter. There seems to be a lot of big-name talents who are saying, “We don’t want to commercialize this stuff in the way it’s being commercialized right away.”

The problem is that it’s the governments and the militaries who are spending all the money right now, and Google is good at making money. It wants to fund AI development with actual revenue instead of raising endless amounts of debt like the startup frontier labs are doing. Is that conflict navigable for Sundar and whoever’s running AI now, or is it just the reality of being a huge corporation that funds its efforts with revenue?

It’s unfortunately not surprising to me, for a huge corporation in the US where you have to maximize shareholder value. They’re subsidizing a lot of their AI efforts right now, it seems like, to me. For example, the other day I vibe coded a new website for myself and Gemini was the only tool that I could use the free version of for nine hours. I was trying to do it as an everyman, so I wasn’t signing into any of them. I just said, “Which one will let me go with the free version and do a ton of stuff?” It was only Gemini.

They’re really trying to get people in their corner here and trying to change developers’ loyalty, change engineers’ loyalty over to them. So they need money. And to be fair, I do think they could do this a lot differently if they wanted. They’re one of the largest corporations in the world and they’re making a lot of money in other areas. They don’t have to be doing this, but that doesn’t mean they won’t. And I think they will continue.

But I also think, like I mentioned, that’s going to lead to a lot of brain drain. One of the current Google employees I spoke with said that a lot of people around him felt like losing Jeff Dean was a big blow for morality at Google, and that it also continues a brain drain they’ve been seeing and that mediocrity is the likely result. So like what you were saying, they may be always catching up from now on and never forging a path ahead like they had been six months ago.

I think this brings me back to that framework I mentioned at the very beginning that I wanted to put a pin in. Does Google want to win at the frontier or can they just sell Google Cloud at enormous high rates to Anthropic and OpenAI while maintaining usable models for its consumer products at high rates?

There’s a world in which Gemini is there for you to search your Gmail and provide AI overviews and be cheap enough to run to let consumers vibe code websites for nine hours at a time. But the real money is in selling TPUs in Google Cloud to Anthropic and Anthropic is going to go collect the government money and Google is just there as a vendor. They’re just selling to Anthropic and OpenAI and whoever else needs data center capacity.

We can see Google Cloud as a business that is exploding. They don’t seem to mind that they’re selling their own capacity to Anthropic instead of Google’s own products, which is one of the challenges of running a company that has frenemies as customers.

How do you see that playing out? Do you see Google ever saying, “Look, we have to win at the frontier. We have to win at AGI. We have to make sure recursive self-improvement of coding occurs so the next model works,” which is a religious belief inside of OpenAI and Anthropic? Or do you see them saying, “Actually, being one or two steps behind the frontier is fine because that’ll make our products work well enough and we’ll just sell capacity to the people chasing the AGI dream”?

The way they are right now, they’re going to keep chasing it because their investors want that. It makes their stock go up to say, “Hey, we’re chasing this. We’re at the frontier. We’re the only large corporation that’s almost or nearly or equally caught up with OpenAI and Anthropic.” They don’t need to go the way of Amazon and, in my opinion, Meta right now.

In a year or two, if they continue the brain drain and they keep falling behind, then yeah, maybe they’re going to do what you said in situation two. But for now, there’s no reason for them not to keep chasing, especially because that’s a great thing to talk about on an earnings call and it makes all your investors happy.

The AGI piece is really interesting to me, especially in the context of Google. Demis Hassabis was the final speaker at Google I/O. After an hour and a half of very practical demonstrations of AI inside of Google products, Demis came out and he talked about protein folding and drug discovery, which are the things that he really cares about. 

And then he ended the entire presentation by saying very confidently, “We are at the foothills of the singularity.” Google doesn’t say, “AGI.” It says, “the foothills of the singularity,” which is an enormous claim.

I thought, “Boy, that’s an incredible way to end Google I/O.” And then later I sat down with Sundar and I said, “Do you agree we’re at the foothills of singularity? What does this mean to you?” Here’s what Sundar said to me.

Sundar Pichai: Demis and I have had long, deep conversations on this topic.

Nilay Patel: I figured. 

In this context, for him, the advent of AGI is what he thinks of as the singularity and I think—

Do you have a definition of AGI? Have you debated? Do you have an agreement?

We debated a lot. Both Demis and I are very close to how we think about AGI … There is a harder definition of AGI, which is that it has to more comprehensively do the wide range of tasks, including cognitive tasks, in a way that’s comparable. We’ll at some point actually put it out as a company, and we are working on that. But that’s what he’s talking about in this context.

I’ve been thinking about that answer since it happened. Do you know what Sundar’s definition of AGI or the singularity is based on that?

It’s the exact same as everyone else’s. In the OpenAI lawsuit, in the materials, we saw the definition of AGI come out of that. It was published and it sounds like he’s talking about the exact same thing.

In Microsoft and OpenAI’s 2019 contract that was made public as part of the Musk v. Altman trial, it’s a 36-page agreement, but luckily, finally, we’re finding out their definition of AGI, which is, “A highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.” It seems similar to what Sundar is saying in terms of cognitive tasks. It’s just a highly autonomous system that can do a ton of economically valuable knowledge work at the same level or surpass the level of humans.

That’s the definition I’ve been working with for the past six years on the beat, and it seems like that tracks with what he’s saying.

He said to me that Google would put out a definition of the singularity or AGI and they’re working on it. As far as I know, they have not yet released this definition. I don’t know if it tracks the OpenAI one. I do know that’s basically what the industry says, right? That it’ll be better than you and me at economically viable tasks. They’ve stopped saying that. 

Equal or better.

Either way, we’re losing our jobs, right? They’ve stopped talking about it because that means we’re all losing our jobs. So that’s just faded into the background.

I bring this up because Demis is so focused on science, and in particular health outcomes, and in this announcement about him moving on to be chief scientist, Sundar repeated the phrase, “We’re at the foothills of the singularity.” It feels like Demis wanted to chase AGI, world models, protein folding, and all of the next things. 

The thing that makes AI economically viable today is writing software code or automating business processes inside of Fortune 500 companies or agentic shopping or whatever boring thing Google needs to do to make money, and those things are getting ever farther apart. If you want to chase the foothills of the singularity in AGI, maybe that has nothing to do with how Google needs AI to make money today.

That’s a big part of the Google culture clash, right? That’s, “We’re going to chase money and shareholder value instead of holding fast to our ideals.” That’s a big part of the AI industry’s general chaos. How is OpenAI going to make a dollar? Who knows? It’s a code red. We’re right back at the beginning.

How do you see it? Is it that Demis wanted another Nobel Prize, so he led them astray and now he’s getting kicked upstairs and they’re going to focus on money? Or is there real validity to, “We’re going to let him chase the singularity while we work on Gmail Search”?

There’s a big difference between, “We’re going to let him chase the singularity,” and, “We’re going to let him do a lot of research into biology, drug discovery, and the other stuff he’s into,” and that seems to be what he’s going to be doing. It seems like he and Jeff Dean are going to be doing similar things, but in very different places.

It’s a tale as old as time. I’ve been writing about this for so many years, product versus research. The big clashes, the funding, the resources. Companies want products immediately and they don’t want to invest in the long-term research that sometimes leads to those products. They only want the quick, “What are we going to turn this into? What’s the timeline? Let’s speed it up for products and let’s compete with all of our three competitors and not really do these long side projects that may lead to something or may not.”

The tension’s building and building, especially as OpenAI and Anthropic are about to go public. Google has a lot of investors to answer to. This is a building of the tension we’ve been seeing for so many years. And for what it’s worth, I do think the Demis situation was probably mutual.

I’ve heard rumors that maybe he wanted to leave completely, but it would be too dramatic for him and Jeff Dean to leave at the same time. So he said, “Yeah, I’ll go to this other role and then I’ll leave later.” That’s just a rumor. We’re not sure. But either way, it doesn’t seem like he was totally kicked to the curb or kicked upstairs. It’s more probably a mutual parting where he really is not that interested in products and he wants to do the long-term research, and a lot of these guys are like that.

It feels like a real situation where you have to be careful what you wish for, because when Sundar created Google DeepMind, he had to pick a winner, and he picked Demis over Jeff Dean. We were all waiting to see if and when Jeff Dean would leave because he didn’t win, and now they’re both leaving because Demis realized that actually operating inside of Google is a very different job than just doing the research.

One of the questions I have here in general is about DeepMind itself, which is famously headquartered in London and answers to no one. It’s Google’s big, fancy AI research arm with the big fancy CEO. That’s getting pulled down. It’s being led by an SVP who reports to Sundar now. There are some reports that maybe the center of gravity and the authority is going to move back to Mountain View to Sundar himself. How do you see that playing out inside of Google?

I can definitely see the winds might be changing and the Bay Area might be the headquarters again, at least in terms of power. London’s autonomy has been going on for a long time. I’ve visited that office multiple times. It did have a different feeling to it. It felt like there was a lot less urgency in a good way. It was really collaborative. There were a lot of long-term research questions and it was a very different feeling than the tension and the urgency I feel when I visit other AI labs’ offices.

Maybe Sundar got tired of that and said, “You know what? I need the pressure to rise. I need products quickly. The research can only be done if it’s going to lead to something that’s trackable.” I could definitely see the center of gravity moving to the Bay Area.

The reporting from inside of Google that I’m most curious about is how that culture changes without these leaders. As you were saying before, Jeff Dean and Demis Hassabis were moral leaders in addition to technical leaders and research innovators. They kept Google from doing a lot of things. They’re gone now. In some of your own reporting and your story on our site, there are people saying, “Who will we sell out to next?” 

Sergey Brin, who’s deeply involved in AI efforts, supports the Trump administration. Sundar obviously stood behind Trump at the inauguration. The questions from the staff about, “What will we sell it next? What values are up for sale next without the culture carriers of a Demis or a Jeff Dean?” seem open.

Are there answers? Who’s taking over DeepMind now and what kind of person do we think they are?

It’s Koray Kavukcuoglu, and these questions are super valid because I don’t think Koray’s going to be speaking up on this stuff. He’s a product guy. He’s focused on speeding up the product. I’m sure he and Sundar have had a bunch of conversations about focusing on the short term.

Over the past few months, early this year, I was chatting with a bunch of AI employees at a ton of different companies, and they all, including employees at Google, felt like the messaging from their companies was, “Shut up and focus on the mission. Keep your head down. Roll stuff out. Don’t worry about what’s going on in the outside world politically.” It seems like that’s going to be even more of a thing now.

One of the sources I was speaking with at Google said, “Speaking out on moral issues like ICE agents and AI surveillance and autonomous lethal weapons, Jeff Dean was one of the last people who was willing to do that.” And it doesn’t seem like Koray’s going to be really eager to take that place. These questions are really valid and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot more DeepMind people left after all these changes.

Let me ask you the hardest question of all to wrap it up. There’s a lot of noise in the ecosystem right now saying that Google has lost the AI race. But as we said from the beginning, Google has a ton of advantages here.

It’s making money, which most of the other companies aren’t. It’s selling Google Cloud infrastructure to its own best competitors. It has massive distribution advantages in Search, in Gmail, in the fact that Apple appears to have distilled Google’s models for Siri. There’s a lot here where Google just has structural advantages. It’s playing with house money. It’s a trust fund baby, as you’ve said several times here.

Is it possible to lose the AI race from that vantage point? Or is it really just about if Anthropic gets to a point at recursive self-improvement that they can call AGI, everyone else has to lose by default?

It’s not possible for them to fail. It’s possible for them to change up their strategy. Like we were talking about earlier, maybe they become an Apple where they’re running on Google AI and they’re fine with that, but they’re picking a different company. Same with Amazon. They’ve given up a little bit, it seems like. I’m going to get some flack for that. Meta’s still really desperately trying, but they’re behind.

I don’t think Google can fail. It’s more, do they eventually realize it’s not worth their time? Does the brain drain continue? Do they realize, “Look, there’s no amount of money we can offer to get some of the best minds back here. Let’s just cut our losses”? That’s a little ways off. I don’t think that’s going to happen in the next few months or even the next year.

But it’s important for these execs to remember that a lot of the people that are most involved and really pivotal in building this technology and keeping them at the frontier are extremely serious about their morals and what they’re doing. They don’t just do it for the money. It’s going to be tough to resell that dream to some of them if they’re trying to rehire after they lose people. OpenAI is experiencing the same thing. So we’ll see.

It’s worth noting Demis is still there. He’s the chief scientist. Presumably he will still be going to the London office and be charming, and Demis is very charming. You can see all that continuing to happen, but what are we shipping? What are the roadmaps? Who gets the GPU access? That seems like it will change and that will have some downstream effect.

If you had to look for signs, is Google succeeding or failing, is the culture a problem or are they just retrenching to go and be even more aggressive? What kinds of things would you look for right now?

What I typically look for is what they’re really offering every time they have a big release and how pivotal it really is. Are they doing something that their competitors did six months ago? And are they even doing that well? That’s how I think about these things sometimes. There will be a big release from an AI company or a big tech company that’s trying to catch up in the AI race. Sometimes it’s six months behind OpenAI or Anthropic, and sometimes the stuff that they’re really excited about is pretty bad.

That’s what I would be watching from Google. With Gemini 4, what can it really do? Does it have that same effect that Gemini 3 had on the industry, where it’s leading for at least a week or two? Or does it not even have an hour of lead time and it just falls flat and it’s used by the enterprises that they work with and no one’s really excited about it? That’s the type of thing I’d be looking for.

I’d also be looking for the exodus. If a ton of the DeepMind engineers leave, if they’re desperately trying to hire and offering more and more desperate pay packages, that’s another sign. Whenever Demis leaves — and that will eventually happen — that’s a huge sign.

We’ll be looking out for all that. I’m confident that the chaos in the AI industry will continue, and Hayden, you’ll be back on Decoder. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks so much.

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Jacob Fortinsky, the CEO and cofounder of the new prediction market Novig, says his outfit isn’t like those other markets. You know the ones.

The most notorious press conference Donald Trump ever held was the one in which he told a scientist in attendance to look into the possibility of using household disinfectant inside the human body to kill the Covid-19 virus. He had watched a demonstration of how the product worked on surfaces, you see, and he thought they hadn’t considered the possibility that humans could ingest it and achieve similar effects. That day, April 23, 2020, marked the last of Trump’s daily televised pandemic press briefings, and it may very well have been the last straw for many of those who voted against him just a few months later. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, Trump told the public that everyone at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was astonished at how well he understood the science. He mused that he probably could have been a doctor. Despite the utter humiliation of that famous press conference, the president remains undeterred in that fantasy in his second term. 

In September, Trump announced that pregnant women should not take Tylenol during pregnancy, claiming without evidence the drug is linked to an increased risk of autism. On Monday he donned his imaginary white coat again to issue an executive order changing the U.S. government’s recommendation for the childhood vaccine schedule — because he is convinced that the vaccines cause autism.

Neither of those assertions is grounded in scientific fact, and both have negative ramifications for women and children if they are followed. The recommendations to break up the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines into individual doses because today they “look like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body,” as Trump stated, are plainly absurd. Any association between these vaccines and autism has been thoroughly debunked, and all the major medical and scientific associations immediately issued statements that they would not follow these recommendations.

Trump is aided in his crusade to personally cure autism by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his loyal health and human services secretary and anti-vaccine crusader, who dutifully stood by his side on Monday and parroted the same nonsense. The new recommendations will likely be followed by millions of MAHA moms who have fallen down the rabbit hole of misinformation and disinformation that Kennedy and Trump have been digging. But the pair are just the latest in the long line of hustlers, fraudsters and canny opportunists who have been working to undermine science in this country for more than a century. In fact, doing so is an all-American tradition.

Two groups have long been especially successful in challenging the public’s confidence in science: Christian fundamentalists, a religious force that grew into a political juggernaut, and Big Business. While neither has openly colluded with the other, they have both furthered each other’s goals and ended up in a political alliance. One wouldn’t think these two disparate institutions would have much in common. But they share similar tactics: lying to their followers and customers for power and profit. And both have their reasons for rejecting science that interferes with their own interests.

Christianity and science have been in tension ever since the Catholic Church placed Galileo under house arrest for suggesting that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe. But for the most part, the tension was at least somewhat manageable, and both carried on in their own spheres. In the early 20th century, however, a new Christian movement formed that took direct aim at science on the grounds it constituted a threat to the belief in the Bible’s inerrancy, and the modern war began. 

In the beginning, this new movement was largely financed by a pair of Los Angeles oil magnates. Milton and Lyman Stewart were religious zealots who were horrified by the encroachment of modernist ideas on society. The Stewarts published a book called “The Fundamentals,” giving the movement its name, and shipped copies all over North America at their own expense, literally spreading the fundamentalist gospel and influencing massive numbers of Americans to reject scientific knowledge wherever it conflicted with literal biblical interpretations. 

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Fast forward to the 1980s, and Christian fundamentalism had become a powerful political force as evangelical organizations like the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family aligned directly with the Republican Party, wielding huge influence on right-wing politics. In doing so, they signed on with the most powerful GOP faction, Big Business. Using their influence with their followers, they managed to help convince millions to doubt any science that interferes with the interests of huge corporations, and reject regulations and taxation to mitigate the problems that came with their products. 

Once again, the fossil fuel industry led the way. Another pair of brothers, Charles and David Koch, zealous libertarians rather than fundamentalist Christians, ran a global conglomerate that dealt in energy and chemicals, and they were determined to stop the growing consensus that fossil fuels were warming the planet. Like the Stewarts before them, the Koch brothers financed a massive campaign to convince people that the science was wrong, and they brought a lot of their friends in the industries along with them. 

In the 2000s, a tsunami of money was released into the political system to block climate legislation, particularly during Barack Obama’s presidency. This has shown no signs of stopping, despite mounting evidence every day that the planet is under increasing stress and people are starting to suffer in vast numbers. The result of these efforts is obvious: Less than half of all Americans now believe climate change is caused by human activity. Only 21% of Republicans do.

Science denialism comes from many directions, and unfortunately we are in a period where it’s flourishing. There have always been hustlers and snake oil salesmen, but today the internet provides endless opportunities for people to “do their own research” and find whatever feels right to them, so conspiracy theories have become the lingua franca of our society. Delusional narcissists like Trump and Kennedy, occupying powerful positions and spreading nutty medical advice, are now just par for the course.

Some of the medical and scientific skepticism is a result of people feeling adrift in a rapidly changing world and drowning in competing information. But make no mistake: Powerful societal interests are also benefiting from all this, and it’s not by accident. They have spent a lot of time and a whole lot of money creating this environment of mistrust and suspicion, each for their own purposes but sharing the same goal, and it’s paid off handsomely.

The post The gospel of science denial, from Galileo to RFK Jr. appeared first on Salon.com.

AI agents that break free and hack into other systems are only trying to make us happy.

Microsoft, Google, and Amazon's growth depends on two companies that lose tens of billions of dollars a year. In a newsletter post, "Where's Your Ed At" reported on analyst estimates from Wells Fargo, Barclays, UBS, and Deutsche Bank.

Wells Fargo estimates Microsoft's AI revenue at $34.43 billion, with about 70% coming from OpenAI. — Read the rest

The post Microsoft, Google and Amazon now depend on two money-losing AI firms appeared first on Boing Boing.

A federal rule that targets cartel money laundering has driven customers away from the money-transfer counters at small shops on the US-Mexico border. The Guardian's Lourdes Medrano reported on August 11, 2026 that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, ordered businesses in 30 border zip codes in Texas and California to file a report on every cash transaction above $200. — Read the rest

The post Border corner stores have filed 700,000 reports on cash transfers appeared first on Boing Boing.

LemonLime cofounder Jordan Zietz hears your criticism loud and clear. That’s why he got his startup’s logo tattooed on his shoulder.

Last week, an AI newsroom beat mainstream journalists—including WIRED—to a story about OpenAI and hacking. It’s just the beginning.

Experts allege that two recent incidents in California show the extreme lengths that criminal organizations are willing to go to to steal servers and other gear meant for data centers.

Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation emails didn't name specific items anymore, and instead listed only item categories.

"Your Beauty item is confirmed!" an email about my retainer cleaning tablets read. Shoppers have posted other iterations of the redacted emails as well: "Ordered: 1 Hardware item," "Your Drugstore, Shoes, and other items are here!" and "1 Nutrition & Wellness, 1 Wireless Accessories," for example. The emails have clip art-style illustrations of general product categories, and a shopper has to exit their email and go to Amazon to …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Joby Aviation announced it was acquiring Dayton, Ohio-based defense firm Resonant Sciences in a $500 million deal, in a bid by the electric aircraft company to expand further into the military industrial complex.

Joby says it expects to finance the deal with $450 million in cash and $50 million in equity. After the deal closes, which is expected in early 2027, Resonant will continue its existing work as Joby's dedicated defense division, the company said. The commercial division will remain focused on air taxis, the first of which are expected to launch later this year.

The deal is the latest example of the fledgling electric aviation in …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Researchers devised a way to extract “reasoning traces” from Claude, GPT, and Gemini. What they found, they say, indicates that some Chinese AI may be trained on leading US models.

Recently, a man I was rock climbing with told me about how he'd used AI to make a motivational poster for himself, which he'd hung on his bedroom wall: a bear, walking a slackline over a canyon, holding a sign that said, "Do cool shit." I made what I hoped was a polite noise. What reaction was this man looking for? He probably hoped someone, maybe me, would say it was cool or inspiring. It seemed I was not the first person he'd told about this poster. "You know, it's funny," he said to me. "No one ever says anything about it."

I have been thinking about this now for several days. There's a sort of turducken of things that I find off-puttin …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Today, I’m talking with Lila Snyder, who is the CEO of Bose.

You certainly know Bose — it’s one of the most famous brands in all of consumer tech. The company started 60 years ago selling speakers to consumers, and its focus on research and development has led it to be a leader in both car audio and noise-canceling headphones.

Lila was last on the show about four years ago, and since then she’s dramatically rearchitected the company. The focus on research is still there, but she’s sold off Bose Professional, acquired the high-end audio brands McIntosh Labs and Sonus faber, and, perhaps most importantly, started licensing all that core Bose technology to other companies.

That means that while you can still go buy a Bose soundbar or Bose headphones, the company is also turning into a B2B business, and you can get Bose technology in Skullcandy headphones and Epson projectors, among many other products. 

That big change in the business comes with a big change in structure. Becoming a software company in addition to a product company comes with a whole new set of challenges, and Lila and I talked about how it’s all working out.

I also wanted to know if this is all a reaction to the potential rise of AI wearables — products that might end up looking a lot like headphones, and which need all kinds of audio processing to enable voice input.

Is Bose just trying to sell tech to a range of new companies that might disrupt headphones entirely? Or does Lila have a plan for a headphones market that was already disrupted when phone vendors like Apple and Samsung made their own products like AirPods and Galaxy Buds work better than the competition?

We got deep on this, and Lila was pretty open about the challenges and the opportunities here. As Decoder listeners know, I’m a huge audio nerd, so I loved every minute of this conversation. I hope you do too.

Okay: Bose CEO Lila Snyder. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Lila Snyder, you’re CEO of Bose. Welcome back to Decoder.

Thank you so much.

I am really excited to talk to you. It’s been four years since you were last on the show, which seems entirely too long.

A lot of things have happened. Bose has bought some companies. You’ve sold some divisions. The idea of what headphones are is largely the same in one important way, but maybe going to be very different in another important way. How are you thinking about Bose today?

We are having a lot of fun in what I would describe as our second chapter of the transformation of Bose since I joined. In some ways, many things are the same. We’re still making amazing products for our customers. We’re still excited about bringing that new technology forward in both our consumer business and our automotive business. But I would say two things fundamentally have changed as we’ve thought about growth for Bose for the future.

For 60 years, it was all Bose, and we’re now a multi-brand company. So as you said, we’ve made a couple of acquisitions. One of those was the McIntosh brand, a legendary 75-year-old audiophile brand that we absolutely love, and also Sonus faber, which is an Italian craftsmanship heritage brand that’s also been around for over 40 years. And so that brought us two things: from one brand to multiple brands, but also into the luxury audio space. 

The second change for us is that we’ve always been an amazing products company where we developed technology through research and a lot of development cycles, and all of that technology went into Bose products. And today what’s different is we’re still doing that, and we’ve added a technology business we call Audio Tech, where we’re taking that technology and starting to put it into other places. 

The big insight for us was that sound is really important. It’s getting more important, we think, given everything that’s going on in the world around us. There are so many products and devices out there that are using sound — whether that’s audio, voice, or even noise-canceling, where those things are incredibly relevant — but they’re not products that Bose would make. They’re not targeted at our customer set. But we really have a strong belief in bringing great audio to as many places as we can.

The last time we talked, you were in the middle of becoming a more functional company. In particular, you had said the last step was the engineering organization, which is really the heart of Bose. It had been very divisional, very organized into products. You were centralizing that.

Having an audio tech division that sells core technology feels like a very natural offshoot of that. “We’re going to have a big central engineering team. It’s going to feed into our products and other products,” and then you can abstract that a little bit and sell it to other people. Who are the customers for the audio tech division?

So it’s a B2B2C business, if you will. So our customers are large companies that are putting products into the market. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. We’ve partnered with Motorola on a series of products from earbuds to making the phone itself sound better.

So Motorola is a good example. We’re partnered with Xreal. They’re making pretty awesome XR glasses, right? So that’s an experience where sound really matters a lot. We’ve had a lot of fun partnering with them. You’re starting to see Bose technology show up in a lot of different verticals, from mobile to compute, to other people’s headphones and audio products for sure.

We just released, with a partner called Sena, a motorcycle helmet communications device. And we’re excited about all the places we’re bringing our technology. It’s actually creating a broader aperture for how we think about invention and research at Bose as well, which is really exciting.

I want to come to that because that seems like a big change. And the reason I asked about customers is that having a new set of customers really changes the focus of the company. A lot of us are familiar with audio brands in particular partnering with device makers, partnering with automakers.

Yeah.

Maybe it’s just a logo. I think you have been very proud that Bose has not been just a logo in many places, but for a lot of people it’s just a logo. What’s the difference between, okay, there’s Xreal glasses powered by Bose with a Bose logo on the side, and selling the technology without the Bose logo? Or does a Bose logo always come with it?

When you said this is new for Bose, in a way, yes, but in a way it’s exactly what we’ve been doing in automotive for over 40 years. And so we do have a model for doing this inside the company, and it’s just broadening that thinking into new spaces. First and foremost, we’re selling technology, and the technology is the key. And then in some cases, we’re also selling the brand. So you might get technology in a product without a Sound by Bose or Powered by Bose logo on it, or you might get the logo as well, but you’ll never get the logo without the tech, if that makes sense.

Some of our partners are interested in the brand, some are not. Sometimes we’re interested in having our brand connected to their brand, and sometimes we’re not. And so that’s part of the discussion we have with each of our customers, about whether it makes sense for them and for us. And so when you see it, know that it’s been really thoughtful, but it’s also attached to a lot of great technology that’s inside that product.

Tell me about those conversations. Is it cheaper to take the brand? Is it more expensive to take the brand? This is one of those places where Bose has maybe a bigger, more famous brand than maybe some of the customers. How are you thinking about that, and how does the cost change?

As you would expect, the technology has a licensing fee to it, and so does the brand. We’ve invested over 60 years in our brand. We’re incredibly proud of it. It is, I think, one of the most iconic brands in the world, full stop, and certainly within the audio space. And so we are incredibly careful about where we put the brand, and it certainly isn’t free when you put it on a product.

Right next to that is McIntosh. As you know, I grew up a total stereo nerd, just reading the magazines, dreaming about having the blue meters in my house someday. Still working on it. I’m going to get there. I did have a Jeep with a McIntosh sound system several years ago. The blue meters were… It was a very fake Android app that ran on a very slow Android infotainment system, but I still loved it.

That’s a brand that has a real halo. You can’t make cheaper McIntosh products. That’s not good for that brand.

No way.

You need to stay way up there. How are you thinking about that relationship to Bose, which is much more of a premium mass market brand?

We think of them as two completely separate brands. And then think about Sonus faber as yet another third brand, all of which are targeting really passionate fans of those brands for what they stand for. So when we thought about getting into the luxury space and acquiring those two brands, we spent a lot of time saying, “What is it that we’re going to do internally to protect the brands?” 

We do not want to Bose-ify anything that is happening in those brands. And so we’ve set it up as a separate business unit. We have a luxury audio business unit that houses those two brands. We are very careful. As you said, we have no intention of bringing products down-market. We believe both markets are exciting. We’ve been in that premium audio space for a long time. 

When we looked at what we’re calling luxury audio, we had two really important insights, I think. One is that as we’re doing our own technology work, there’s a lot of really exciting technology we develop that just isn’t right for a premium audio product. It’s right for something that sits at a higher level. We just didn’t have anywhere to put it. And that was true on the consumer product side, and it’s certainly true on the automotive side where we felt like we were bumping up against what you could put in a premium product, and the ceiling of what we wanted to do was much higher.

So the first reason we’re excited about it is that it sort of unleashes the creativity of our engineers to think about what you could do at those higher price points with just a different type of customer, a different type of experience. So we were excited on the technology side.

We were equally excited, I think, about this idea of luxury. If you look at the luxury market writ large across all categories, what you find is that audio is really underrepresented compared to the role luxury plays in automotive, hospitality and travel, fashion, or leather goods. And when we really sat back and thought about it, given how much music is a passion point for people, it didn’t make sense to us.

We think there’s a huge opportunity to attract new customers to the category if the experience feels more like a luxury experience. And so when you think about those products, it’s certainly about how they sound, but you went right to it. It’s the iconic design, it’s the artistry, it’s the craftsmanship. All of our luxury products, whether it’s McIntosh or Sonus faber, are handmade. They are crafted one by one for you as the customer. And there’s something incredibly special about that.

These weren’t your decisions, so I feel like I can be a little bit rude about them. When I saw McIntosh was licensing to Stellantis to be in Jeeps, I thought, “This company has to be desperate for money. That’s not actually a match.” It was fun that I had a Jeep with blue meters in it. It was great.

But I thought to myself, “This is a total mismatch, and they should be in Maybachs,” or whatever it is, whatever luxury sector that you want to be in, because that’s the brand. Was this just opportunistic for you that this was a company that needed the help, that was in trouble, that you could go and you could push your products upmarket without having to take the Bose brand there? Or was there some other opportunity that presented itself to you?

We weren’t actually shopping for brands first. The first thing was, strategically, we saw the opportunity in the luxury space. We saw an opportunity to create something new around luxury audio, and we were really excited about that.

So once we had made the strategic decision to go there, we had a lot of conversations about buying a brand or creating a brand. But the reality is, in luxury, at those price points, history and heritage are part of what you’re buying. And so we sort of intuitively knew we wanted to find a brand or brands that really had that strong history that we felt like we could build on top of.

We thought those were both brands that had incredibly passionate fans, and we saw an opportunity for us to take them to a new level. So that was how we ended up acquiring the McIntosh group.

Bringing in their engineering organization, they have a lot of technology. How integrated has that become over time, or are you leaving them alone?

We’ve brought it into our engineering organization, but we’ve also kept a lot of the aspects a little bit separate. So probably the best example of that is Bose has a Bose sound. Everybody knows that. You buy a Bose product… You buy one, the headphones I’m wearing, the speaker in your house, your car. There is a sound signature to brands that consumers expect. That comes from the engineers. 

The engineers are tuning products to sound like they should. And so we’re very careful on the engineering side to protect the sound signature of McIntosh. What we don’t want is for you to hear a McIntosh product or a Sonus faber product and imagine that it sounds different. So that’s one.

Initially — as you do with, I think, any acquisition — you want to be careful to protect what you bought. We’ve integrated it, yes, but we have a separate team that is doing the engineering for luxury, and we’re slowly adding Bose technology to it where it makes sense. So there are things, for example, on the Bose side where we can be incredibly helpful in terms of the software aspects, the connectivity, those sorts of things. Those are things that we do really well, and they’re not the most important part of those products, but they have to work. There are aspects that we’ve started to add into the products, and you’ll see more of that over time.

I’m really curious about that luxury aspect. The knock on high-end audio for years, and I’m not saying this is McIntosh, but the knock on high-end audio for years is that it’s the same stuff, all dressed up fancy. There are headphones that are famous for having weights in them to feel heavier even though there are commodity parts inside.

This is one of those places where you could just say, “We’re just going to make more expensive versions of the same thing.” And some buyers are totally price-insensitive, in that they will always just buy the most expensive thing. Then there’s, “We’re going to make it worth it. We’re going to make it worth 10X the price of whatever Bluetooth speakers are at Best Buy.” 

Where are you falling on that? Because it’s very tempting, especially in luxury, to just make it expensive.

The value comes from the sound. You should come visit us at Bose in Framingham and listen to a McIntosh system, a Sonus faber system. They’re incredible. They’re not anything like what you would get at a Best Buy in a premium product from Bose or anyone else. And that’s incredibly special.

Part of that is the technology itself. Part of that is that it’s more analog, so it has a different sound signature to it. It’s got a lot more power behind it because that’s what McIntosh is known for, and that’s what you need to power a Sonus faber set of speakers. You’re also paying for design. In a way, it’s a little bit of art.

We just launched a new integrated amplifier, the MA2375, for McIntosh. I’m so excited about it. It’s sort of got that retro look with the vacuum tubes. It is a design piece. I want to sit it on my desk. I want it to be a part of the decor. You would say the same thing on the Sonus faber side. It’s like buying an incredible piece of Italian furniture that has been handmade with natural materials and just feels like art that also sounds beautiful.

So there’s more to the value proposition in the luxury space. It’s true in the premium space too. Design really matters, color matters, feel, touch, comfort, all those things matter in addition to the sound. I think it’s just even that much more elevated in the luxury space.

I’m really curious about all the different sets of new customers you’re describing. There’s the B2B business, which is growing in audio tech. Then there are luxury customers who have a lot of money, but they’re fickle. And particularly in high-end AV — and I’m a high-end AV nerd through and through — convincing people it’s worth it because they can hear it has always been the hardest problem.

Maybe the most fun problem, because you can convince a lot of people they’re hearing a lot of things that aren’t there. You can sell expensive cables at a hundred times the price of the regular cables, even if they don’t do anything different. This is a lot of new customers for Bose. Do you think the B2B business is going to distract your core technology roadmap? How are you holding that all together?

It is more complex for sure. It is a broader mission, and I think we’re ready for it. When I was here last time, we were in the middle of the transformation that I would say was solidifying the foundation of Bose, and now we’re building on top of that. We’ve built an amazing marketing and brand infrastructure that we’re now using to power three brands instead of one, but a lot of that capability can be put in the direction of all three.

So the key is real clarity about who the customer is, which we’ve done a lot of work on the Bose brand for sure. We talk about the music lover for Bose, but we’ve done the same work for McIntosh and the same work for Sonus faber so that we are one thousand percent clear about who the customer is and how we want to talk to that customer.

On the kind of products side of our company, I think we’re really clear about what the mission is for each one of those brands. On the technology side, interestingly, as we become more of a B2B technology company, it’s actually creating advantages back to the Bose brand and our luxury business as well. And what I mean by that is that it’s caused us to completely rethink the way that we do research and we develop our tech.

In the past, if you think about Bose developing products, we were developing purpose-built technology for a pair of headphones or a car audio system. And I think last time we talked about the tech franchises. We care a lot about noise cancellation. We care about immersive, lifelike audio, and we care about this idea of hearing what you want. And those are all experiences that are built on some basic building blocks of technology that we’ve been developing for a long time.

But because we were developing them for our own products, we’ve had to do a complete shift in the way that we think about it so that we’re now developing, from the ground up, those building blocks. Now we’re able to say, with common platforms, common algorithms, AI — think of them as sort of AI units — we can create different experiences for our own products, and we can port that same technology through the same platform tech into other people’s products.

What that’s creating is a lot of efficiency at the research and development level. It’s creating more breadth because now that we’re thinking about things like noise cancellation for different spaces, spatial audio, or hearing what you want, it is actually creating more innovation and more invention at the core. It’s making us faster because we’ve made these building blocks a lot more consumable for our B2B customers; it makes us faster at bringing our own products to market, too.

I think this is a great place to ask the Decoder questions because you’re describing the endpoint of a pretty big culture and structure shift at Bose that you’ve been architecting for several years. So how is Bose structured today?

There’s a business unit structure, there’s a functional structure, and we are living in what I would describe as a hybrid. So for the core functions that matter deeply to what we deliver, like engineering, marketing, and supply chain, those are global functions that support all of our businesses. But because we’ve added new customer sets and really two new businesses with luxury and audio tech, we’re also running four business units. So those four business units have business unit presidents, and they draw on the global functions for the work that they need.

How many people is Bose today?

About 2,500.

And you’re mostly in Framingham, or are you all over the place?

We’re global. All over. Yep.

You said you’re a hybrid. How’s that split between engineering, sales, all that sort of thing?

I don’t actually think about it that way, but the one thing that I do know — sort of the most important statistic to me — is that half of our employees are engineers.

You’re describing AWS, you’re describing Amazon. You’ve modularized a bunch of components inside the company; now you can build new products faster. This is really great. Every company that goes through this transition ends up hiring more and more engineers over time because you just need to build more and more components. Has that been growing? Are you investing more in that kind of engineering?

We are for sure. I think it’s probably not unique to us. We’ve been in this transition of hardware long, long ago. It was just hardware, and then hardware and software, and then more and more software. And now as we’re building the technology pieces, those are truly just software products that are an algorithm- or AI-based product that we’re selling with. 

You see that mixed shift continuing. We’re certainly seeing growth in our engineering ranks. And we’re getting a lot more productivity out of engineering as we start to have more sophisticated tools, as we use AI and other things to help with some of that development. So yes, growing. And I think more productivity per engineer, if you will, as we start to use more sophisticated tools to do the development.

You said it’s pure software products, right? When you sell out to B2B, you’re just selling the algorithms. Do those feel protectable? This is one of the things that I think about all the time. What is the actual thing you’re selling, and how easily can it be copied by a Chinese firm that does not respect our intellectual property laws or something like that?

Yeah. I’m probably oversimplifying. We’re really selling three things. We’re definitely selling software, algorithms, et cetera. I’ll come back to your “how do you protect it?” question. One of the very special things about Bose is actually systems engineering, which is an underappreciated discipline in my view. So software’s great, but software has to run on hardware in our world. Ultimately, that software has to get delivered through something.

The magic at Bose, the secret sauce, has always been systems engineering and how you’re marrying together hardware and software elements for an experience that feels unified across the device and that’s optimized to provide the best experiences. So we’re certainly doing that on our own products, but you see that kind of a service as we start to sell more and more technology into our B2B customers.

There’s also a lot of desire for help on that system side because our expertise there is real. That’s always been true in our automotive business, and it is increasingly true in our partnerships and our customers on the audio tech side as well. So I think that the second piece, which is really important to call out, is that it’s not just software for software’s sake. It’s software that has to be integrated into a system where everything comes together to work. And then you’ve got kind of the idea of systems engineering and then services on top of that.

So, how you tune a product. Some of our partners and customers need help with that, want help with that; some don’t. There are a lot of services that get married along. Sometimes it’s systems engineering. Sometimes it’s things like tuning, et cetera. So three pieces.

Can I play devil’s advocate here for one second? What you’re describing here, if you wanted to poke at it as hard as you could, is a process of a little bit of commodification. There are a lot of common components here, and then it’s the layers on top that differentiate in the market. 

If you’re an audio nerd, the magazines are all saying one engineer in their garage innovated on speaker technology, and they made the speaker cones out of waffle paper, and now they’re more transparent than ever. Whatever that myth was that sold a lot of speakers back in the day.

If we’re not starting from the products back, but you’re starting from the components up, there’s a risk that everything kind of becomes the same, and it’s branding and marketing, and maybe the sound signature that’s tuned into it is artificial now — it’s not from the components themselves. How do you balance that? Or is that just not a worry with modern consumers?

I think what you’re describing is that if we’re putting Bose technology in other headphones, doesn’t that just revert to the mean? I think there’s a second, bigger market for us that is not audio products. Things that we call audio second. So for example, the XR glasses, the main function is not audio, but audio is really important. You don’t usually buy a car because it has a Bose sound system, but when you buy the car, the sound system is actually one of the most important features of the car.

A projector that you buy for your house, you’re buying because it’s a great projector. We’re partnering with Epson, and the sound is also really important there. So it’s a little bit different, I think, when you get into audio second. In the audio market, I think that the key is that there are so many different customers who want different things.

When you think about products that have ingredient technology that’s the same, it’s really enabling you to do things for your customer and the experience that you’re trying to create. I’ll just use Skullcandy as an example. Skullcandy just launched a pair of headphones with Sound by Bose, and you couldn’t have two more diverse customer sets between who they’re targeting and who we’re targeting. We helped them with the technology. So there’s Bose technology inside to help make that sound better, but the design choices of what they want for their customer are incredibly different from what you would find [with Bose]. 

So I don’t think you would ever put those two products, a Bose headphone and a Skullcandy headphone, side by side and say, “Wow, this is really commoditized. It sounds the same. It is the same.” They’re very, very, very different.

I think I’m asking slightly more about the audio-second product. If all of your audio-first products come from the same technology base, the same modular components that can be remixed into all the products you want, do you lose the ability to innovate at the product level? If everything is made out of the same Legos, at some point you can’t be like, “Actually what I need is all new Legos.”

I think the answer is no, because the product is so much bigger than just those ingredients. So if you think about headphone design, the comfort and all of the other features, right? There may be a lot of ingredient technology, but the ones that you choose may be different.

One of the things that we talk a lot about now is being at the intelligent edge. Everything Bose does is what we would describe as at the intelligent edge. And as you know, it’s a pretty hostile environment. You have limited compute, you have limited power. You’re always making trade-offs between what I am putting in this product and how does that impact my ability to do that? Because there’s just not enough room to put everything in it. 

So I think the reason why you still see so much differentiation among products, even if some of the ingredients are the same, is because all of those product choices that you’re making are really critical, and you have to make a lot of them to fit inside that constrained environment that you’re working with.

This brings me to the other Decoder question about decisions. You’ve obviously made a lot of them, and you’ve got a few big ones to make that I want to come to concerning AI. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework?

I am a believer that you get the right people in the room, you have an intense debate that isn’t always comfortable, that sometimes makes people a little bit queasy, and you move as fast as you can to decide, knowing that if it’s wrong, you can pivot. That is, in my simplest terms, the way I think about it.

We get a lot of type one and type two decisions, move fast, in that we had an ex-Amazon employee write to us and say, “Every decision is reversible if you have enough money.”

[Laughs] That might be true for Amazon.

That’s a very Amazon perspective. The reason I bring this up in the context of AI is that I’m looking at the sweep of things you’re doing, and I’m looking at where, in particular, the big tech companies think their headphones are going to go.

I was reviewing our conversation from four years ago. Boy, did we talk about Bluetooth a lot. We did. This is a core limiting technology. It’s an enabling technology in an important way, but they hold onto what Bluetooth can and can’t do on their platforms very tightly. And then their products, their first-party products, get to extend that standard in different ways — and they all do it. 

This broadly means if you have an iPhone, the best working headphones that will do all the things the platform wants you to do are probably AirPods. If you have a Pixel, it’s probably Pixel Buds. If you have a Samsung phone, it’s probably their buds.

And this is because they have reduced the capability of the interconnect. One of the reasons they’re doing that is because they want your earbuds in your ears 24/7 so you can talk to their AI systems on the back end. And this is their future. Maybe the answer is that we’re all going to wear Meta Glasses, or we’re all going to wear Xreal glasses. It seems up for grabs in big particular ways. What’s your view of that? What’s your view of AI wearables? And do you think there’s room for third-party players here?

We absolutely think wearables are critical to the AI future. I think that we’re clear on that. The form factor, if you work backwards from that, we’re going to use our wearable devices to communicate with our AI agents. And that is going to become more and more important and more and more natural. We strongly believe that.

The second thing we believe is that it is more likely to be conversational and sound-based than anything else. At least we think that is probably the primary mode. And so the types of technologies we’re focused on are around voice pickup, clarity, speech enablement, and we think all are incredibly important. What form factor you want to use as your wearable, I think the jury is still out. I think the answer is going to be a whole proliferation of them. Some people will like glasses because they like the glasses.

Some people will like open earbuds, which we hadn’t launched when you and I talked last time. We talked a lot about open ear audio, but not yet about that form factor, that clip-on form factor that Bose invented and launched into the world. We think that is a really powerful form factor that will be for some. Others might want a watch, a pin, a ring, or 18 variations of how those work together.

Part of the reason we think being in the audio tech business is important is that it gives us the ability to participate in a lot of those different places that we might not naturally be able to go on our own. So we think form factor is going to matter, but I don’t think there’s a single winner there. At least that’s my current view. I think that there will be multiple types of devices that consumers will choose based on their own personal preferences.

We know there are going to be a limited number of LLMs, right? We know that those are going to converge to the large ecosystems that already exist. New ones may emerge, as we’re seeing, but there won’t be hundreds of those. There will be few of those. And yes, there may be some advantages if you stay within that ecosystem for your earbuds. But fundamentally, I think even though a lot of people choose earbuds, headphones, and other devices in their ecosystem, a lot of people don’t. 

I think consumers still want choice. And I think it is important for those ecosystems. In our conversations with them, they need third-party players to interface with their AI as well. They need third-party players to produce devices that work with what they’re doing because they recognize that they’re not going to have a full share of the market and that choice matters.

So we believe we’ve got a couple of ways to compete now. Our own devices, for sure, need to be compatible across the different LLMs and the ability to interface with them. And we need our technology starting to crop up in other places where that interface will happen.

Is this a way to just hedge the bet that no one actually knows what’s going to happen with AI? If you’re selling Bose beamforming technology to a handful of Silicon Valley startups making pendants, that means you’re not making the big bet on pendants being a form factor yourself. You can wait and see. Is this just a way to make sure the technology is available and being monetized while you wait for the answers to emerge?

There’s certainly a diversification play, absolutely. And I wouldn’t shy away from betting on a few, and if one becomes a winner, awesome. I also think that it’s important not to lose sight of what your brand is. The Bose brand is: we are for music lovers. And if we start to branch out and create some of those other devices that are not core to who we are, I just don’t think it works. So it is a way to participate because we don’t think those are areas that it makes sense for the Bose brand to go.

One of the things I worry about, again, as a music fan, as an audio nerd, is every single time the tech companies come to music, convenience wins, and quality suffers. This is the pattern that has been repeating since MP3s first came out. We’re going to go from CD quality audio, which in 2026 is still what people refer to as the best audio you can get. CD quality — that’s the bar.

But we went from that to, I don’t know, 128 kilobit MP3s on iPods. We stayed there for a long time. We got a little bit better. The headphones got worse. The interconnect went from wired to a compressed Bluetooth interconnect. At every point, the market picks convenience. There’s some point here, even in luxury, where you just walk in, and the music is playing because the AI has determined the music should be playing, and the endpoint of the music is the least important thing. It’s just that it’s happening to you. 

There’s not this focus on listening intently because you’re probably also watching TikTok at the same time. Or maybe you’re only listening to music on TikTok, and that’s where all your discovery happens, and all of your music money is spent at concerts and live experiences. Somewhere in there is the audio industry. It’s been going through this convulsion.

There’s another turn coming here where Apple, OpenAI, Samsung, and whoever else are going to launch AI-first devices that are conversational, that have audio input and output capabilities. And they will say, “And you can also listen to music.” They will commodify it even further, and the idea of a music lover gets even more squeezed. How do you view that? Because as a music lover myself, I’m like, “This is only getting worse. It’s only becoming. It’s not audio second. It’s like audio 15th.”

Okay. So it’s a complicated web there that you just spun.

Yeah. I’m having an existential crisis here. 

I’m going to try to help you. In some ways, what we find with our luxury customers is that what they’re looking for are moments of clarity, quiet moments where you put down the phone, you put on a record, right? You listen to it the way that it was supposed to be heard on an amazing sound system. And the quiet nature of that, the ability to step away from what is a chaotic digital world — that trend is picking up. It’s picking up. We see it in the luxury space. We actually see more of it in the premium space a little bit now too.

I do think that the appreciation of music, just appreciating it for the emotional state that it puts you in and what it does for your mental health. I actually think that is a trend we’re seeing. And I actually think that’s going to continue to grow. 

Our belief and part of the reason that we started this audio tech business is that we want you to have the best sound experience no matter what. Even if you’re listening in a hostile environment, you’re listening on a lower-cost pair of headphones, or you’re listening to a crappier format, let’s at least make sure you have the best experience possible and that you can tell the difference between what good and better sounds like, or what better and best sounds like. So I think that’s the second thing. 

The other thing that I think is positive about what you said is there’s just so much music discovery because it’s everywhere. And not everyone is going to turn into a music lover, and that’s okay. But I think for young people who are discovering, I’m always amazed at the songs my kids are excited about because I’m like, “You know that’s not a new song, right? That’s from when I was a teenager.” I think that’s great.

The way that the younger generation is doing music discovery is creating a love of music that is not bound by time or genre. I think that’s really cool. And our belief is that if you help people listen to that as best you can, they will get an appreciation for what better sound sounds like, and over time they will graduate into the formats and the products that actually bring that to life in an amazing way.

But that’s music. I appreciate that this is happening in music. I think the question I’m asking is about AI and the almost religious belief in Silicon Valley that AI, in particular natural language input, will usher in a platform shift. Mark Zuckerberg has a religious belief that you’re going to talk to Muse Spark through Meta Glasses. 

Whether or not you believe him, he is laser-focused on that because he wants to stop being constrained by Apple’s platform policies. That is the story that plays out in the pages of Verge every single day.

Apple probably believes this, right? Apple believes natural language input is some kind of enormous threat to the iPhone. They’re reacting to it. Somewhere in there is, are you wearing headphones to talk to this? And can Bose headphones meaningfully participate in those ecosystems? Or will all of these companies create more first-party opportunities for themselves?

I think both can be true. So I think we’ll see if Mark is right, but that doesn’t mean you want to have a crappy listening experience when you’re listening to music. Do you take the glasses off and put on headphones? Do you make the glasses sound better? I don’t think that just because we have a utility, which is AI on the… I’ll just use phone calls. It’s an old school example. Just because you can take phone calls on your headphones, if they didn’t sound good to play your music, most people who love music would not wear those to listen to music. It’s just the reality. And I think the same is true. It’s a utility.

If you’re someone who doesn’t care so much about music and it’s not part of your personal brand or your identity, you may say, “That’s good enough for me. I can’t tell the difference.” But I think for most people, they will choose multiple devices or they will choose one device that can do all of it really, really well. And I still think there’s room for high-quality listening experiences, even in a world where we’re all chained to our AI.

So I’ll just paint a picture for you. If Xreal wins the AI race and all of us interact with Claude all day long through our Xreal glasses, and the sound is powered by Bose through an audio tech partnership, is that victory? Is that success? Or is there more to be done?

I think there’s always more to be done. When you think about how fast technology is moving, I think we’re imagining experiences today that can be had at the edge, that live within the compute constraints and the battery constraints that we have. Two years from now, those constraints are going to still be there, but the amount of capability you have will be larger. I think we’re going to continue to see innovation and invention in the space that’s going to create experiences we haven’t imagined yet.

One of the things that I’m really curious about is just the amount of audio input all of these companies want to do. We had the CEO of Zoom on Decoder, and he was like, “Everyone will talk to AI avatars in Zoom and all of us will be mediated by Zoom. And that means we’ve got to record the in-person meeting. Everyone has to wear the rings or the pendants, and we’re going to record everything all day long so the AI can fully know us.” 

I have a lot of thoughts about that, but that’s one vision in the world. We’re going to record everything, which sort of puts a lot of pressure on noise cancellation, on rehabilitating the audio once you have it. There’s not just a lot of noise, but damage that happens in the compression process and transmitting over the internet. That all seems like an opportunity for a company like Bose.

Is that where the investment is to help the AI hardware companies deal with lossy streaming and TikTok audio? What do you think about that opportunity?

One of the things that we’re learning as we further venture into this space is that the core problems are the same. If you take something like speech clarity, voice pickup, that is a world we’ve done a lot of research on, a lot of work on. It’s an incredibly important part of a Bose headphone, for example, but it’s also important in a dozen other places where the same type of technology, at its core, can be expanded and extended. 

So think about driving 70 miles an hour down the highway in my car. That same speech clarity technology is really relevant in the car in the same way it is in a headphone, in the same way that it is in a motorcycle helmet, where you can imagine that’s maybe the most hostile sound environment you could get.

I think the same is true. Noise-canceling has all sorts of varieties that, I think, are incredibly important in the AI examples that you talked about and in a lot of other everyday life examples where noise cancellation hasn’t gone yet. A great example of that is hearing aids. As you know, we’ve been working on hearing aid technology at Bose for over a decade. Just this year, we launched the world’s first hearing aid with a customer and partner called ORKA in China that has noise cancellation. 

It actually now solves what I think is the biggest problem that hearing aids have had for decades, which is that my most challenging environment, if I have some hearing loss, is a noisy restaurant, for example. And traditional hearing aids amplify all of that sound. Noise canceling has always been the dream of hearing aids because if you could take the noise of the environment down and amplify the speaker, the person you’re trying to have a conversation with, that’s sort of the holy grail now because you’re doing exactly what the customer really wants and needs.

That, up until now, has been impossible to do because in a hearing aid, you need 15 to 18 hours of battery life. You have very limited compute. It’s been a really tricky problem. For us, solving that problem was both about hardware — a new driver that actually fits in the ear canal, but can power noise canceling — and the platform that we built to enable that at a low enough compute level that you could do it inside of a hearing aid over a period of 15 to 18 hours in a day. That’s the kind of innovation for noise canceling, for example, where it’s an obvious use case, but to get there required a considerable number of building blocks.

I’m glad you brought up hearing aids. The last time you were on the show, you had a partnership, I believe, with Lexie. And after our conversation, I ran out and bought my dad those hearing aids. After four years, he won’t wear them because he says everything is too loud. Exactly the problem you’re describing.

But you exited that partnership with Lexie, and the parent company — just asked a couple of weeks ago — is leaving the US market. They’re out. You’re describing hearing aids that you’re making in China. Is there something particular about the US market that just makes it too hard, or are you going to reenter?

No, we’ve been here with Lexie, and they’re going through some challenges, and so we’ll find the right partner for us in the US. I think the over-the-counter hearing aid market has struggled more than any of us thought. If you go back four years, it hasn’t taken off at the rate we had hoped that it would. But I still see a ton of opportunity in the hearing aid space. And this hearing aid happens to be in China, but there’s no reason that you won’t see it in other places around the world.

Why do you think it hasn’t taken off? 

I think it hasn’t worked yet. There are a couple of factors. And again, we’ve been partnering into it, so we’re not as close to the day-to-day. But I think there are really two things. It’s definitely cheaper and more accessible than it was in a prescription environment, but these are still very expensive products. So, rounding about a thousand dollars, which is a lot of money. 

I think in an over-the-counter space, most customers are expecting something that looks and feels more like what they would be willing to pay for a consumer electronics product, which is more like two, three, or maybe $400. While it’s more affordable, it is not as affordable as I think the consumer wants, needs, or expects. I still think there’s some work to do there from a technology standpoint to figure out how you bring it down.

It’s also not really in the insurance space yet. If I get a prescription hearing aid that’s covered by Medicare or that’s covered by my insurance company, but that’s not the case for over-the-counter. And so I think there’s just some affordability challenges we haven’t quite fully solved yet — ones that the industry has not solved. That’s one piece of it. I also think there’s still a stigma part of it. There’s just still a, I don’t want to look old. I don’t want to feel old. I don’t want to wear a hearing aid. And until we figure out the right industrial design and make it more palatable, I think you still have resistance no matter the price point.

The hearing aids my dad was most resistant to were when I tried to get him to wear AirPods, after Apple had released that feature. He looked at me and said, “Absolutely not.” 

So this is a particular area of convergence. What is an augmented reality hearing device except a hearing aid? Except a hearing aid with intense noise cancellation that can focus on the speaker in front of you and maybe translate them in real time if you don’t speak the same language? You’re talking to an AI, and you just want to whisper so no one can hear you, and it’s talking to you, but you’re still hearing everything that goes on. 

This is the convergence, right? The idea of headphones, the idea of augmented reality, and the idea of hearing aids, they’re in a Venn diagram. And the center of that Venn diagram, I think, is getting bigger and bigger over time.

I just keep coming back to the same question: Is the culture of Bose designed to provide technology to all of the players in that ecosystem? Or are you still trying to win with the best product that hits the middle of that Venn diagram?

We are always focused on who the Bose customer is and what the features they want are. As I’ve said a couple of times, you can’t fit everything in. That Venn diagram is getting bigger as compute is getting more powerful at the edge, but it’s still limited. 

When it comes to adding AI, we talk about it at Bose as tiny AI. A lot of companies are good at really big AI. What we’re good at is taking really complex algorithms and then figuring out how to shrink them down and take as little power and compute as they possibly can so that they can fit in our devices. But you’re always constrained. So we’re looking at what our customers are asking us for, what they need, what they want in that Venn diagram. Where do they want the emphasis to be? And that’s where we’re pushing our products. You’ll continue to see us do that.

Other companies will choose a slightly different variation of that Venn diagram, and they’ll look for a different feature set. And I think that’s what makes the industry go. It is competitive by nature, and it is important to have a deep understanding of what the customer needs are.

Do you think that there’s any pressure on Bose just from the product manufacturing side? There are tariffs, there’s a lot of focus on what gets made in China. We talked briefly about protectability and whether or not you even want to sell into Chinese companies or Chinese OEMs who might turn around and take your technology, which we have seen at scale with Apple, Tesla, and others. Is it worth it to be chasing hardware at this time?

I think, since COVID, the supply chain has become a more exciting environment. 

[Laughs] Sure. 

So it’s been a series of things. I think our perspective back then was that we said, “Look, it’s clear we’re going to need to be more flexible and more agile in our supply chain.” That, I think, became clear. We’ve done a lot of work to get ourselves into a position where we expect curveballs now; we just don’t know what they’re going to be. And when they come, we’ve designed ourselves in a way that we can adjust quickly, and we think we’re flexible enough to handle it.

The world needs hardware. As much as everyone is enamored with software and AI, and those are the things creating the magic, perhaps, on the hardware these days, you still need physical things. We are a physical world. You need physical things, and we are going to continue to make physical things and roll with the curveballs that come our way.

Have you moved manufacturing, meaningfully, out of China?

We have, yeah. So we’re diversified across Asia. We also have manufacturing in North America for some of our products as well.

Have you moved anything, meaningfully, back into the United States?

The only thing we have in the US is McIntosh. So all of our McIntosh products are built in Binghamton, New York.

It’s funny, because those are the only products you have that also wouldn’t benefit from the price cut of not having tariffs. You need to keep those prices really high. Have you thought about moving anything back to the United States to avoid whatever tariffs and bring prices down?

We’ll always look at it. It’s a fulsome economic equation of not just economics, but also expertise. Consumer electronics expertise from a manufacturing perspective moved to Asia a long time ago. And so it’s both a cost and an expertise question. We look at it, we talk about it. If it ever makes sense, we’ll do it. Right now, those things don’t play out for us.

I feel like I have to ask you about Bluetooth one more time here at the end of our conversation. I’ve waited.

It is the limiting factor of so many things you are doing. It’s the limiting factor of how you can connect to phones. It will almost certainly be the limiting factor of how all these AI devices work.

The manufacturers have really put Bluetooth in a box. There is a wall around what it can do and what they will ever allow it to do on their platforms. And then there are their extensions. And this is across the board. I’m not even singling out one manufacturer. I used to always single out Apple, but now they’re all doing it. So it’s like, great, there’s a wall around Bluetooth.

For a company like Bose, which has to connect to phones, that is the limit. Have you tried to push hard to overcome that limit? Have the antics of the European Union helped you open up and overcome the limit? How has this played out over the last four years?

Probably not terribly different from what we talked about last time. We partner, we push, we ask for what we want, and we work with what we have. So I think we are always trying to test and push the limits as much as we can, and we’re incredibly good at not using that as an excuse. So how do we create amazing experiences with the advantages that we have? And we think we’re pretty great at doing that.

On the other side of this, you’ve got McIntosh products, your premium home products, and people are disconnected. A lot of people still want to play Spotify off their phone onto their home stereo system. There’s a joke we tell in our other show, the Vergecast, where we just try to locate the computer. Where is the computer supposed to be here?

If you’re playing music off your phone, is the computer your phone, and you’re just Bluetooth streaming to your speakers? In the context of McIntosh, that is just like a heartbreaking crime. Don’t stream Bluetooth to your McIntosh system. So that means the McIntosh system needs a computer. It needs to run some variant of a Spotify app that has Wi-Fi that pulls lossless down. That means it needs a ramp. The whole thing immediately becomes a computer. Maybe a somewhat low-powered computer that’s only focused on a handful of apps, but a computer.

You also have all the carrying costs of a computer. Software updates, application updates, Spotify changes its file formats. Whatever is going to happen, you’ve got some problem there. How do you think about that?

Across all of your products, the amount of compute going into them is going up, as you’ve described. Maybe in tiny ways, but it’s going up. And then you’re not charging service fees. How does that all work as more and more of your products fundamentally become network computers?

I think consumers are subscription’d out. I think that the idea that you’re going to create a subscription service over an over-the-air update that they’re going to pay for on a monthly basis, I think that’s not coming in our space. So we have to kind of think long term as we’re selling products today: what is the software, compute, cloud storage, all of the security, all of the costs that live across the life cycle of that product that we’re going to have to support. We have to build that into the cost of maintaining that product, right? Which is different from what you would have done in the past. 

We’ve made some design choices, I think, that are important as well. We don’t need to duplicate what Spotify is doing either. So as we think about the lifestyle collection products that we just launched, what we heard overwhelmingly from our customers was, “I just want to go to my music. I don’t understand why I have to deal with you. I love how this sounds, but please just get me to my music faster.” We thought for a long time about how best to do that in the home. And we think about it in our wearables too. We want you to be able to control your home speakers through Spotify, AirPlay, or however you want to do that. And that offloads some of that from Bose, which is good.

We also just made an acquisition of a company called Stream Unlimited. Their business is to connect to all of the streaming apps, devices, et cetera, that allow a smart home device to have those easy connections. That gives us some scalability and some participation in that orchestration layer, which is also helpful for us. So we come at the problem in a couple of different ways.

There are rumors, in a few months or weeks here, that Apple will put out a whole bunch of new smart home devices. OpenAI might put out a smart home device. Obviously, I have Google ones, and there are Amazon ones. You ask any of those companies, what are the number one and two things people ask for from their assistants in their house? And it’s setting timers and playing music. Then everything else is a long tail of almost nothing. The drop-off is enormous.

If you want to play music and you’ve got a great stereo in your house, you’ve got to go connect to their smart home system. Now you’re on their network, and now you’re just another endpoint for whatever forthcoming successful consumer AI agent will exist. Big question mark there, but let’s say it happens.

That further commodifies you, right? That’s yet another time when they’re not going to use your interface or your streaming; they’re just going to say [a command] out loud in their home, and the OpenAI device will be like, “I found some speakers on your network. I’m playing the music for you.” Do you need to participate there? Do you need the OpenAI agent to say, “I’m playing it on your Bose speakers,” and then you collect a tiny little licensing check back, or how should that work?

I don’t think so. I think we understand there are a lot of components in this chain, and customers think about Bose for amazing sound. And when they’re playing the speaker, and they’re asking whatever agent they’re asking to play it, there is an appreciation. There is going to be a logo on that speaker. If you have a new Bose Lifestyle speaker, there’s going to be a logo right on the front of it. You’re going to look at it every day in your kitchen, living room, or wherever it’s placed.

I get the feeling those logos are about to get bigger and start lighting up. You can see it coming.

[Laughs] We’re not going to make them that big.

So that chain is long. And in fact, you launched another piece of the chain of music, which is that you launched Studios, which feels like a record label, a marketing venture for new artists. How does that play into it?

So bigger than a record label, not just a record label, but that’s a piece of it. Think about Bose Studios as a way to connect with our customers and give them new avenues to participate with us. The announcement may feel like a sudden thing, but if you sort of look at what we’ve been doing at Bose over the last four or five years, we’ve been moving in this direction. 

Getting the attention of consumers is hard. You don’t do that with traditional advertising anymore. Consumers are engaging with content, and that’s it. And so we’ve been building more and more content. We’ve been partnering with more and more creators. We’ve been dipping our toe in this water for the last several years.

So I’ll give you a couple of examples. We’ve been partnering with NME to do their mixtape, where we’re helping them bring undiscovered, up-and-coming artists to the forefront and helping bring and celebrate those artists. We’ve learned a lot from doing that. The connection and the participation of our customers with that content and with those artists has been incredible.

We’ve been sponsoring an event, the Chris Brickley Invitational, which is this amazing basketball event for high school basketball players. It is becoming the place to go if you’re an All-American type high school basketball player, both on the men’s and the women’s side. And that event has turned into something so special. We’re not putting on a new Super Bowl over here, but we are participating in content creation in a way that connects with our customers. We think that’s really important.

We also like this idea of up-and-coming creators who need support to launch their careers. At Bose, we say fiercely independent. There’s something so unique about our structure and the independence that we have. We kind of like the idea of supporting this up-and-coming group. It supports our connection with our customers, and we think we’re helping them along the way as well.

I feel like I could spend another full hour just talking about the economics of the music business and brands supporting creators in this way. But sadly, you’ve already given us too much time. Lila, thank you so much for being on Decoder.

Thank you for having me back.

_{Questions or comments? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!}

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