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Microsoft’s changes in response to the Digital Markets Act already included allowing Windows machines in the regions it covers to uninstall Edge and remove Bing results from Windows search, but now the list is growing in some meaningful ways. New features announced Monday for Microsoft Windows users in the European Economic Area (the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway) include the option to uninstall the Microsoft Store and avoid extra nags or prompts asking them to set Microsoft Edge as the default browser unless they choose to open it.

That last one is one I’d like to have readily available in the United States, and according to Microsoft, it’s already live in the EEA, starting with Edge version 137.0.3296.52 that rolled out on May 29th.

Screenshot showing new options on the Windows default browser setting

Additionally, setting a different browser, like Chrome, Firefox, Brave, or something else, will pin it to the taskbar unless the user chooses not to. While setting a different browser default already attaches it to a few link and file types like https and .html, now users in the EEA will see it apply to more types like “read,” ftp, and .svg. The default browser changes are live for some users in the beta channel and are set to roll out widely on Windows 10 and Windows 11 in July.

Microsoft Start menu showing the option to uninstall the Microsoft Store

Microsoft also explained that even after removing the Store app from Start and Settings, “Apps installed and distributed from the Microsoft Store will continue to get updates,” and it can always be reinstalled.

Other changes mentioned include automatically enabling third-party apps to add their web search results in Windows Search upon installation, and the option to move search providers around based on user preference. With updates rolling out in “early June,” the Microsoft Bing app, as well as the Widgets Board and Lock Screen, will open web content with the default browser instead.


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iPhone repair kit (2022)

Texas moved closer to becoming the next state with a right to repair law on the books, as the state Senate unanimously voted 31 – 0 to finalize HB 2963 this weekend. It would require manufacturers to make spare parts, manuals, and necessary tools available for equipment sold or used in the country’s second most populated state.

As more states have passed right to repair laws, we’ve seen repair options and information becoming more widely available nationwide from companies like Apple and Samsung. If the bill is signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, that will add another significant market with these requirements in place.

A press release from the United States Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), which has pushed for repairability laws nationwide, noted that this would make Texas the ninth state with a right to repair rule, and the seventh with a version that includes consumer electronics. It follows New York, Colorado, Minnesota, California, Oregon, Maine, and most recently, Washington, and would be the first state on the list with a Republican-controlled government.

“More repair means less waste. Texas produces some 621,000 tons of electronic waste per year, which creates an expensive and toxic mess. Now, thanks to this bipartisan win, Texans can fix that,” said Environment Texas executive director Luke Metzger.


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An image showing Ukranian drones Russian Governor Igor Ivanovich Kobzev shares an image of the strike’s aftermath in the Irkutsk region. | Image: Telegram

Ukraine launched a surprise attack on Russia that targeted more than 40 of the country's military aircraft on Sunday. The mission, called Operation Spiderweb, involved sending 117 drones over Russia's borders and into several of its airfields. It was the Ukrainian military's longest-ranged attack yet, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but it also pulls back the curtain on an elaborate campaign to put raw footage of the strike in front of a global audience.

Within just hours, three videos of the strike spread from Ukraine's federal security agency to a journalist based in the country, later spilling into social media and news outlets worldwide. The videos appear to be filmed from the perspective of a drone, complete with an overlay of information about the drone's telemetry.

In one video, the drone flies over an airfield, passing clouds of dark gray smoke billowing from multiple warplanes. Another clip apparently captures the moment a plane explodes into a tower of flames. The third shows a drone descending toward an aircraft, with the video suddenly freezing and displaying the message "Warning no data" upon reaching the plane. The Ukrainian government would later repor …

Read the full story at The Verge.


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Rivian is overhauling the charging experience for its EV customers, offering them more information about how their battery-powered vehicles take in and use energy.

The automaker is rolling out a software update to its vehicles and smartphone app that aims to give its customers a more thorough and holistic view of their vehicle’s charging capabilities, while also offering faster charging speeds to all of its EVs. The changes come as Rivian navigates a tougher charging environment, with public EV charging still experiencing notable gaps and federal spending on charging installations drying up.

The new update allows Rivian owners to see “where their energy is going” in real time, says Wassym Bensaid, chief software officer at the company. The updated Energy app will display detailed graphs explaining how energy is used when the vehicle is idle and will provide tips on how to best conserve energy and range, he says.

“The idea is [to] democratize the access in terms of ‘energy in’ with charging and then ‘energy out’ with how you’re spending your range” Bensaid says.

The Energy app will also now include two tabs: “Charging” for energy intake and “Energy Monitor” for energy output. The Charging tab shows EV owners how much energy is flowing directly into their battery pack during a charge session, as compared to the energy being used by other vehicle systems.

When they’re actively charging, the app provides a detailed breakdown of where the energy is going, including battery, overall system consumption, HVAC usage, and any connected accessories. And in the Energy Monitor tab, there’s a new chart that shows customers how climate, outlets, and drive systems are consuming energy when they’re driving or parked.

A new “Trip Target” feature provides charging recommendations when using navigation for a trip that includes a charging stop. Once the charging session has started, the app will calculate and notify the customer the moment they reach the ideal charge level for the rest of the trip. No more waiting until it gets to 100 percent (or 80 percent if you’re concerned about battery health).

Under Energy Monitor, there’s a new interactive graph that shows projected range impact over time while driving or parked, based on insights from the owner’s recent driving history. An animated Yeti character (Rivian’s mascot) will use facial expressions to show whether the owner’s efficiency is high, low, or normal for current conditions, and there will be helpful tips for maximizing a vehicle’s efficiency.

In addition to the app improvements, Rivian is also making it easier — and faster — to charge its vehicles. The company is adding a “highly requested” feature to precondition the battery on demand. Owners can warm or cool their battery pack when they want, even before navigating to a charger, which can help optimize charging speeds. A clear banner will indicate when the battery is warming or cooling and when preconditioning is complete.

“The idea is [to] democratize the access in terms of ‘energy in’ with charging and then ‘energy out’ with how you’re spending your range.”

Both Rivian’s first-generation and second-generation EVs are getting faster DC charging thanks to a software update. The Gen 2 Large Pack gets an extra boost, charging even faster at a speed of up to 215kW, which can add 15 percent of range in just 15 minutes of charging, the company says. Rivian achieved this by optimizing battery temperatures in simulation through individual cell improvements and then virtually testing and refining the solutions in a simulated environment with real-world conditions. The company’s engineers then validated the new optimized temperatures with actual vehicles.

But this update is just the beginning of Rivian’s planned improvements to the charging experience. Bensaid says that in the coming month, the company will roll out a new “Smart Charging” feature that allows customers to time their home-charging sessions to save money on their energy bill, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and reduce their carbon footprint. Next year, Rivian will launch a new bidirectional charging feature that allows people to use their vehicles as mobile power generators to send power to electronic devices, other EVs, or even their own home.

“Utilities and the grid is so fragmented, like I’m personally even not aware about promotional rates in my area,” Bensaid says. “Having a solution where we make that super easy for customers — you just configure things once and then software does it for you automatically behind the scenes — I mean, that will be a game changer.”


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Google Wallet will soon no longer let you pay with your PayPal account in the US. On a help center page spotted by Android Authority, Google says it will stop supporting the payment method and automatically delete linked PayPal accounts on June 13th, 2025.

The company has also stopped letting users link PayPal accounts to Wallet as of April 11th. Now, users who previously relied on PayPal to quickly connect their payment methods with Google Wallet will have to manually add a credit card, debit card, or bank information if they want to keep using the app.

Google notes that it will still accept PayPal-branded debit cards. “To deliver smart, flexible, and more rewarding ways to pay, PayPal constantly improves their offerings,” Google writes in a FAQ, while referring users to an email sent by PayPal.

The Verge reached out to PayPal with a request for more information but didn’t immediately hear back.

If you use a linked PayPal account for recurring payments, Google says you’ll need to change your payment method on the merchant’s website to keep using the service. Google Wallet will also no longer display your PayPal transaction history, which you’ll now have to view on PayPal’s website or app. Google Wallet’s PayPal integration will still work for users in Germany.

PayPal first rolled out support for Google Wallet — then called Android Pay — in 2017. Its rival digital wallet also continues to evolve, with the PayPal app adding tap-to-pay on iPhones in Germany and rolling out a way for groups to pool money.


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Sonos Ace against a green background

June is here, and with it comes a wave of Father’s Day sales from a range of retailers — including Sonos, which is discounting everything from the Arc Ultra soundbar to the excellent Era 100 smart speaker. The Sonos Ace deal particularly stands out, as the wireless headphones are available from Amazon, Best Buy, and Sonos for an all-time low of $329 ($120 off) through Sunday, June 15th.

The Sonos Ace offer top-notch sound quality and solid noise cancellation, with an exceptionally natural-sounding transparency mode for when you want to let the outside world in. What separates the over-ears from other pairs of noise-canceling headphones, though, is their unique integration with the Sonos ecosystem. Although they don’t work over Wi-Fi, the company’s TV Audio Swap feature does let you easily transfer audio to the headphones from a Sonos soundbar like the Arc or either generation of the Sonos Beam, allowing for private TV listening at the press of a button. The private listening mode also supports spatial audio / head tracking and works with any device plugged into your TV, including gaming consoles.

Build-wise, the Sonos Ace are comfortable and stylish, with magnetic memory foam ear cups and stainless steel slider arms for a more secure fit. They also offer up to 30 hours of battery life and USB-C, making them a solid choice for all-day use, as well as multipoint Bluetooth support, allowing multitaskers to pair them with two devices simultaneously.

Read our Sonos Ace review.

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The Pixel 10 phones are likely to look an awful lot like last year’s Pixel 9 models.

Google will reportedly launch the Pixel 10 series at a Made by Google event on August 13th, with the handsets arriving in stores a week later on the 20th.

Leaker @MysteryLupin was the first to tip the launch date, which Android Headlines echoed just minutes later, adding in the extra detail of when the phones will actually reach buyers. This year Google is expected to launch four Pixel 10 phones, with a regular model, Pro, Pro XL, and Pro Fold. It’s likely Google will announce the Pixel Watch 4 at the same event.

Plenty of details about the Pixel 10 series have leaked so far. The base model is expected to join the others in having three cameras, adding a telephoto to its lineup, but will make some camera quality tradeoffs to get there. The Pro models, including the Fold, are rumored to change less, with near-identical camera hardware and designs to last year, leaning instead on an upgraded Tensor G5 chipset with advanced AI features to motivate Pixel fans to upgrade.

As for the Pixel Watch 4, leaked renders suggest it’ll be thicker than the previous generation, which may mean a bigger battery. Google has apparently tweaked the watch’s charging tech, too, and added a couple of mysterious new buttons. It should also mark the debut of Google’s Gemini AI assistant on its smartwatches, while all the new Pixel devices will boast the company’s youthful new Material 3 Expressive design language on the software side.

Last year’s Pixel 9 series also launched on August 13th, though those phones took longer to go on sale, with the 9 Pro Fold not arriving for almost a month.


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Almost all of The Verge’s staff have had the experience of moving to a new house or apartment. While the experience was different for everyone, one thing we all had in common is that, during this highly stressful process, we had each discovered at least one tool, app, or other gadget that turned out to be really (and sometimes unexpectedly) helpful in making things just a little bit easier.

Here are some of the items — tech and otherwise — that could be useful if you’re moving from one home to another.

Sharpie markers

My partner and I have many years’ worth of books in our basement, and we’ve finally gotten around to sorting them into what we want to keep, what we think we can sell, and what we’ve decided to donate (many, many of them). In order to make sure the right boxes of books go to the right places, I use thick-tipped Sharpies to write on the sides and tops of the boxes, using labels like: Shelve, Store, Autographed, or Book Fairies (yes, that’s the name of the charity). The words are very visible and won’t smear off — and I can be sure I won’t give away my beloved childhood copy of Little Women by accident. — Barbara Krasnoff, reviews editor

Colored dot stickers

They’re cheap, easy to get, and already color-coded for you. Here’s my advice: color-code your boxes by room, one on every side, making it quick and easy to figure out where every single box and container should go. Then grab one of those Sharpies, write numbers on them, and keep a Google Sheet or other spreadsheet telling you where all your stuff is and where it’s supposed to go. — Kate Cox, senior producer, Decoder

A roll of shrink-wrap with handles

It’s been nearly six years since I last moved, but the one tool that still stands out in my mind as the absolute hero of the ordeal was a simple 15-inch wide roll of plastic stretch wrap. It was not only an easy way to secure random piles of disassembled furniture and keep all the parts organized, it also came in handy for sealing up overpacked boxes that were on the verge of tearing, protecting couch cushions inside a dirty moving truck, and preventing dresser drawers from opening in transit. It was also useful for creating impromptu bags for holding miscellaneous furniture hardware. You’ll want to ensure you buy a roll with handles, which make it much easier to wrap around things. — Andrew Liszewski, senior reporter, news

Paper packing tape

“You’ve gotta use this tape, it’s amazing,” said the girl at the U-Haul store, so I bought exactly two rolls, because I had already bought a six-pack of the regular plastic packing tape and I am an old soul who is suspicious of new-fangled things, especially when someone appears to be trying to upsell me on something at the counter. Over the week, as our paper tape supply steadily diminished, we fought over who got custody of the paper tape and who was consigned to the hell of packing with subpar plastic tape.

Paper tape is better by every possible metric. It’s quite sturdy but you can tear it with your hands. There’s no need for a tape cutter or a tape gun. It doesn’t get tangled. It’s easy to find the end and lift it off the roll without it splitting. You can write right on it if you need to. I was concerned that paper tape would be flimsier or less sticky; there was no noticeable difference between the boxes that were taped up with plastic versus paper tape, except that a few times when I had used plastic tape, I injured myself on the serrated tape gun and spurted blood everywhere. — Sarah Jeong, features editor

Protective gloves

Funnily enough, I had already had the premonition that I was, at some point during this move, going to cut myself. This has somehow happened with every move I’ve done. I don’t know what this says about me, other than I have pathetic, soft little hands that are only fit for typing at a computer.

For that reason, I bought these Bellingham Wonder Grip gardening gloves in size XS. I picked them because they were the smallest gloves at the Ace Hardware I was in. As it turns out, these are the only work gloves that have ever properly fit my tiny, tiny adult hands, which makes a huge difference when you’re trying to get an actual grip on heavy objects. The gloves are protective, but aren’t so thick that you lose manual dexterity. This is nice, because the last thing you want while packing or unpacking is to have to take your gloves off and on and off and on.

If you, like me, are prone to paper cuts while packing, moving, or opening boxes, you should consider buying a pair of these gloves, which come in a nicely inclusive range of sizes that will accommodate even people with weak little hands who have trouble holding onto their iPhones, let alone anything actually heavy. — Sarah Jeong, features editor

Cross-line laser level

If you’re mounting something to a wall, whether it’s a simple framed photo, a gallery wall of artwork, or a massive shelf, a cross-line laser is incredibly handy. Just flip it on, and perfectly level lasers shine across your room in both vertical and horizontal directions. It’s helpful for a variety of home DIY projects as well as simple redecorating. It’s still good to use a trusty old bubble level in tandem with it, but the laser gives you a convenient shortcut that makes mounting and measuring easier and faster. And it’s friggin’ laser beams! — Antonio G. Di Benedetto, reviewer

Stud finder

You can use a strong magnet to find metal screws and pinpoint the location of wooden studs behind drywall for securely hanging pictures or a TV mount. But Franklin Sensors’ ProSensor M210 Stud Finder makes that task so much easier. Using 13 sensors and 21 LEDs that light up to indicate areas behind the drywall that have a greater density, you can quickly determine the location, size, and center of hidden studs. It also works with wood and plaster finishes, and, for an extra level of safety, it includes a live wire meter that warns you where it may not be safe to drill. — Andrew Liszewski, senior reporter, news

Electric screwdriver

If you own a drill that comes with screwdriver and hex key attachments, then you might think that adding an electric screwdriver to your toolbox is kinda pointless. After finding myself fighting with my partner over who gets to use said drill during my last move, however, I don’t ever want to be without a backup option again. We had mountains of Ikea furniture to assemble, shelves to put up, and an assortment of random hole-drilling or screw-related tasks that needed to be done to turn our apartment into a home.

Nobody wants to get stuck using a manual screwdriver when time is of the essence and your friend, partner, or parent needs the drill more than you do. Electric screwdrivers are also far lighter than hefty drills, so your wrists will thank you after several hours of assembling flatpack furniture. – Jess Weatherbed, news writer

Night-lights

Navigating my home in the middle of the night with the lights off is easy now that my brain has memorized the floor plan, but during the first week of living here, the potential for stubbed toes was high. Shortly after I moved in, I installed SnapPower’s outlet covers, which feature integrated night-lights that draw power without the need for doing any wiring. Supporting both duplex (roundish) and decor (rectangular) outlet styles, the cheapest $21 version features a light sensor that automatically turns it on when it’s dark. A pricier $24 version includes a motion sensor that only activates when you’re nearby, with options for brightness and how long the LEDs stay on. — Andrew Liszewski, senior reporter, news


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If you’re picking up a Switch 2 this week, resist the urge to remove the screen protector you’ll find applied to the console out of the box. This is actually a “film layer designed to prevent fragments scattering in the event of damage,” and the Switch 2’s European safety manual, spotted by fan site NintendoSoup, specifically warns not to peel it off.

This advice might sound familiar, because the Switch OLED had a similar anti-scattering layer with the same warning. In both cases, the goal is to minimize the spread of glass splinters if the screen gets smashed. Foldable phones also commonly ship with protective anti-scratch films that mustn’t be removed, which infamously caused problems when the first Galaxy Fold reviewers did exactly that.

The Switch 2 safety document includes a host of other helpful tips / attempts to cover Nintendo from lawsuits, ranging from the inane (“Be aware of your surroundings”) to the unexpectedly technical (“Pay attention to the load capacity of the circuit when choosing where to plug the product in.”) Nintendo recommends you avoid using the Switch 2 in dusty, smoky, or humid environments; that you stick to playing it in temperatures between 5 and 35 degrees Celsius; and that you charge the batteries at least once every six months.

The new Joy-Con controllers get their own set of warnings. There’s the usual caution about using straps to avoid throwing a Joy-Con into your TV, but the document also warns against placing stickers over the controllers’ shoulder buttons, which might impede the magnets used to attach them to the console. Nintendo also recommends using a mousemat when using the new mouse control mode to avoid scratching up whatever surface you’re playing on.


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After only two short seasons, Ncuti Gatwa's time as Doctor Who has come to a (rather disappointing) end.

Note: this post contains spoilers for this past weekend's Doctor Who season finale.

In the final moments of "The Reality War," the Fifteenth Doctor (Gatwa) sacrificed his current form to save the life of a child, and in classic Doctor Who fashion, the Time Lord's regeneration process ended with him getting a (sort of) new face. It's not exactly clear how or why, but the Doctor regenerated into a form that looks a lot like Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), the human companion to the Ninth (Christopher Eccleston) and Tenth Doctor (David Tennant).

This is the second time in recent Doctor Who history that the titular character has regenerated into a body portrayed by a series veteran. Previously, Tennant returned to become the Fourteenth Doctor after the Thirteenth (Jodie Whittaker) regenerated. "The Reality War" strongly implies that the Sixteenth Doctor might have transformed into a Rose Tyler facsimile for emotional reasons. But, notably, the episode's credits do not specify who her new character is.

In a statement about her Who reveal, Piper noted how she has "always said I would …

Read the full story at The Verge.


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People Can Fly has announced it has cancelled two in-development projects and will undergo a round of layoffs.

“Today we made the very difficult decision to suspend the development of project Gemini and project Bifrost,” wrote People Can Fly CEO Sebastian Wojciechowski on the studio’s LinkedIn page. “As a result we have to significantly regroup as a studio and scale down our teams.” Little was known publicly about either project.

The Warsaw-based studio known for Bulletstorm and Outriders  has been having difficulties with some of its in-development projects for a while now. In December, a notice from the company stated it would suspend production on a project codenamed Victoria and reduce the team working on Bifrost. In today’s announcement, Wojciechowski wrote that cancellations were due to an unspecified publisher’s failure to present necessary publishing agreements, and a “lack of communication” regarding whether or not the publisher wants to continue with development.

The statement also attributed the cancellations to issues with the publisher’s cash flow stating it, “showed a lack of prospects for securing organizational resources and funds necessary to continue the production.” And the name of the publisher? It isn’t exactly a mystery. In the developer’s statement from December, People Can Fly named its collaborator on Project Gemini as Square Enix.People Can Fly — which was acquired by Epic Games in 2012 before going independent again in 2015 — will continue development on Xbox’s next Gears of War title, Gears of War: E-Day, as a partner studio working with The Coalition.


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Nvidia’s Arm-based PC chip could make its debut in Alienware’s laptops later this year or in early 2026, according to a report from the Taiwanese publication United Daily News. The chipmaking giant is reportedly working with MediaTek to develop an accelerated processing unit (APU) that combines an Arm-powered CPU with Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU architecture.

Nvidia is already popular in traditional gaming laptops using Intel or AMD chips, but an Arm CPU entry may well improve the Windows on Arm gaming situation. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips have to run games emulated using Microsoft’s Prism software, and game compatibility and performance is severely limited on Qualcomm’s GPUs right now.

We first heard rumors about Nvidia’s Arm-based chip in 2023, which could serve as yet another competitor to Intel’s chips and the Arm processors built by Qualcomm. Last week, a video from YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead showed off what appears to be a leaked image of Nvidia’s rumored APU, with sources suggesting it could run between 80W and 120W.

In January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during an investor’s presentation that the company has “plans” for the Arm-based CPU installed inside Digits, its personal AI supercomputer, Reuters reported at the time. Dell CEO Michael Dell also hinted at the possibility of launching an AI PC with Nvidia, as he replied, “come back next year” when asked about Nvidia’s presence in the AI PC market during an interview in 2024.

Nvidia isn’t the only company that could challenge Qualcomm’s dominance in the Arm-based CPU space. MediaTek is also rumored to be working on an Arm chip of its own, while recent reports also suggest AMD is developing an Arm-based chip for Microsoft Surface laptops.


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Today, I’m talking with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. This is Brian’s fourth time on the show, and he’s one of my favorite guests because he’s so clearly obsessed with things like company structure, design, and decision-making. You know, Decoder stuff.

We had Brian on the show last fall to talk about “founder mode,” a buzzy phrase inspired by a talk that Brian gave about his detail-oriented management style. As we were walking out of the studio, Brian told me he had some big news he was incredibly excited about but couldn’t tell me about yet. That news was a redesign of the Airbnb app with a striking new design language; new curated experiences in various cities, some led by celebrities and athletes; and a whole new services feature that lets you book things like private chefs and photographers.

You’ll hear Brian describe all this as a full-scale rethink of Airbnb, everything from how individual properties are stored in the company’s databases to how the actual company is structured, or changed, in order to get to where he wants to be five years from now.

Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here!

That would be a great episode of Decoder all on its own. But if you’ve been listening to the past few episodes, you know that I’m particularly interested in what happens to services like Airbnb, Uber, and DoorDash as new kinds of AI assistants and agents get more popular. Google just announced new agent features in Chrome and in various research prototypes, Microsoft is rapidly pushing on some of the core technologies to make agentic systems happen, and there are lots and lots of demos and test projects out there showing off what the next generation of automation might be able to accomplish.

But all of those things disintermediate service providers — after all, if you can just ask an AI assistant to bring you interesting vacation listings, get you a ride to the airport, or book a private chef, you might never actually open that beautiful new Airbnb app and see all the new things they’re trying to sell you to grow their business. So Brian and I talked about this quite a bit. This will be the next set of high-stakes negotiations in tech and business, and it’s clear he’s been thinking about it a lot.

It also wouldn’t be a Brian Chesky episode if I didn’t take the time to ask him about OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman — Brian is close friends with Sam, and he was a part of the drama that saw Sam fired and brought back to the company last year. He also introduced Sam and Jony Ive — an introduction that led to Jony taking over all design responsibility at OpenAI. So I did my best to see if Brian would reveal anything about what they’re all working on. You can tell me how well I did.

There is a lot going on in this one. At one point, Brian explains the difference between a product manager and a program manager by talking about architects and general contractors. It’s pure Decoder bait through and through.

Okay: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Brian Chesky, you’re the cofounder and CEO of Airbnb. Welcome back to your fourth time on Decoder**.**

I love being here.

I’m very excited to talk to you. I’ve always enjoyed talking to you about management and running companies and strategy. You have very different ideas from a lot of the folks we talk to. It’s always interesting. And then there’s news. There’s big news that I want to talk about. You were last on the show back in October, and as we were walking out and you were getting on the elevator, you said, “I’ve got something really big. I can’t wait to come back and talk to you about it.” And that happened. You’ve launched Airbnb Experiences. You’ve launched all kinds of new services on Airbnb. Tell us what’s going on.

The story, just the short version, started 17 years ago when we hosted three guests that first weekend, and that really inspired the creation of this company. Something remarkable happened. These three strangers came into our home and we rented our space to them, but we also hung out with them all weekend. And as we’re waving them goodbye, I remember Joe [Gebbia] and I — we were roommates — were thinking there was a bigger idea here, but the bigger idea was not merely just renting your space. The bigger idea was what happens when strangers come together, and what if you could build this people-to-people marketplace where people could share not only their home but every part of their lives. And years later, once Airbnb took off, people asked me, “Well, what’s next for Airbnb? You’ve already monetized people’s biggest asset, their home. What’s next, their car?”

I started thinking to myself, I don’t believe the biggest asset in people’s lives is their home. It’s their time. There was a book written about Amazon called The Everything Store, but it probably should be parenthetically called “Everything in a Cardboard Box Store.” It’s not actually everything, and in fact, more and more of the economy is moving to services and eventually experiences, and we just thought this was an incredible opportunity for the company because when it comes to travel, more people stay in hotels than homes. One of the top reasons they like hotels is there’s a lot of services and comforts. We thought, “What if we could provide all the services in a hotel and more at a home?” And then we thought people travel to do things, but it’s hard to do really cool, authentic things even though people travel to have local travel experiences.

So we wanted to bring back Airbnb Experiences but in a whole different way. So we’ve announced a few things. Number one is Airbnb Services, to make your stay more special. You can Airbnb a chef to come to your home. You can Airbnb a masseuse, a personal trainer, a photographer to take your photos. Then we relaunched Airbnb Experiences, bringing in some of the most interesting people in the world. You can do these really cool activities with them. And then for the third thing we said, “Well, we want to make it really easy.”

Our app was designed to do one thing, which is book a home. And so we had to completely reimagine our app to not only book a home but book a service and experience. Well, along the way, we basically rebuilt our technology stack, rebuilt an entire app to become a platform that could book almost anything. In the process, we also created a whole new design language. We’ve departed from this flat design that I think was popular about 10 years ago on the internet, to this really cool, robust, dimensional, vibrant interface. It’s kind of the beginning of a whole new company. And I think this is just the beginning of the next chapter for Airbnb.

I have a lot of questions for you about the design aspects of this. We’re going to come to that. It’s interesting you talk about monetizing people’s time and then the actual services in the app. I think you’re starting with chefs. Private chefs are an industry, and it’s not like I’m a pretty good cook so I will come to your house in the way that I might have a room in my apartment and I’ll let you rent that for a day or two.

There’s a little bit of a gap there. Are you expecting most of the services to be provided by professionals who use Airbnb for discovery, or are you expecting it eventually to just be regular people providing whatever things they want to do in their extra time?

I think it really depends. I think with services it’s primarily going to be people who are professionals, and we’re going to give them a platform. We vet everyone. We make sure they have licenses. We make sure they have certifications, but it’s good to remember, a huge part of the American economy is a service economy, and I think a lot of the people in services have fairly unsteady incomes. They have unsteady demand. It’s very much word of mouth. You don’t know who’s great. There’s not a system of trust. I think what we’ve created is a system of trust where we can vet everyone and make sure they’re really, really excellent; our brand stands for quality, and that’s really where we want to go. I think experiences are a little different, because we want really interesting people, but for many of the experiences the hosts have never done this before.

For example, I was just on a photo tour with a photographer who’s got a million followers on Instagram, but he’s not a tour guide. But he takes you around SoHo to look at all the cast-iron architecture and teaches you how to take photos. Now, he’s not a professional tour guide. He’s never done this before. So I think there is this opportunity to take people with a skill and monetize it. I think down the road there could be ways to take this to even more casual people as well.

I’m one of these people. This is a very common story in New York where it was cheaper to buy a house in the Catskills in 2016 than to buy an apartment in New York City. So I bought a house in the Catskills. We ran it as our own Airbnb for a minute and then the pandemic happened and we moved into that house by accident for two years. This is a very cliche story. I apologize to the audience. If you live in this city, you’ve heard this story a million times and everywhere else it sounds insane. But then we moved in and then we left and as we left I thought, “Well, now I have a kid. I’m not going to have this side hustle of running this Airbnb.”

We turned it over to a professional management company, and it just runs the Airbnb for us and it’s great. It takes a cut and it’s fine, and it seems to be going well. But there’s a part here that’s a lot of what Airbnb has become. The actual experience is people’s homes, but they’re managed by professional vendors because they do a good job of it. They’re consistent. They manage the platform on behalf of whoever owns the houses. Are you expecting that layer to emerge in the services category as well?

Hard to say, but I don’t anticipate it. There’s a couple of points there. One of the things and one of the reasons we launched what we launched is, and I could go in really interesting places with this conversation, when people think of Airbnb, most people think of homes and of empty homes, homes you get all to yourself. And that is most of what we do every single day. We have nearly 4 million people a night staying in homes. In the vast majority of the homes, the host isn’t there, and a large percentage of them are using third-party services to help them, not the majority but a bunch of them. I think that in the future, I want Airbnb to be a bit more of a real community where you’re actually connecting with the host, and with services. I don’t think these things get industrialized.

If you want to get a chef to come to your home, you’re still going to get a chef. It’s going to be a real person. If you’re going to go on an experience with somebody, it’s still going to be a real person. I think we, the company, can provide a lot of that platform layer, but I do think that most of this is going to be peer-to-peer, person-to-person. I also think that if I were to zoom out for a second, I think we’re in a really, really interesting time in the world with Silicon Valley and tech. I think I heard the average Gen Zer is spending four hours a day on social media. I think AI is an incredibly exciting tool. Probably the most powerful tool developed in our lifetime or many lifetimes. Maybe the way to think about AI is as an accelerator. It’s an accelerator of the path we’re probably already on, and the path we’re already on is people spending a lot of time on devices, a lot of time living in a digital world, a lot of time consuming content.

I remember more than 15 years ago, 20 years ago, there was a thing called social networking. And it’s funny, that term doesn’t really exist anymore because around 2012, your friends became your followers and social networking became social media, and so then connecting became performing and the relationships became kind of parasocial. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but what’s clear is that there’s now a void, and there’s a void in people’s lives, which is people living in the real world, making real connections with real people, having real experiences, real memories, and this is where I’d like to take the company. I really want Airbnb to start to feel like more of a social network in the real world. We’ve made these experiences really social. I think it can be the platform to meet one another, to connect, and just to build this entire ecosystem around people, their passions, their skills, their time.

So you’re starting with 10 services. I think chefs are the first and the rest are, as you announced at the event keynote, you basically pointed at hotels. Here’s all the stuff hotels do, and then there’s some other stuff like photographers. How’d you pick those 10?

We basically just did a bunch of surveys with our guests and asked them, “What kind of services do you  want to use at your Airbnb?” There were a few around food: chefs, prepared meals, and catering. We noticed that people were booking entire homes. The homes come with really big kitchens. Not everyone wants to cook, and so the kitchen is often not used. So, what if somebody could come make food for you?

Photography was a very, very popular request on Airbnb, because we have a network of thousands of professional photographers. We photograph all these really wonderful homes on Airbnb that look really well when photographed. So, with a network of thousands of professional photographers, we thought, “What if we allowed that network to take photos on your trip?” We noticed one of the most shared types of photos or even videos on Instagram and TikTok were of travel. Travel photos, travel experiences, but people struggle to take really good photos.

One of the problems if you’re traveling with your family is you can’t really take a family photo unless one of you is not in it, unless you give your camera to somebody else. Then we thought about nails, makeup, and hair. Why would we do those? Well, a lot of people travel for special occasions, like weddings or other events, and so a lot of people need  these services, and it can be really difficult. Let’s  just imagine you live in New York and you’re going to Chicago and you need to get all these services. How would you find them? So this was kind of where we started. I think eventually, who knows, there could be literally hundreds of services that we could offer. The real question is could Airbnb one day go beyond travel? Could you use Airbnb to find services in your own city? And I don’t see why that’s not possible down the road.

We just had Dara Khosrowshahi from Uber on the show. He was talking about a similar shift for that app, where I think of Uber as the button that just brings you a Toyota Camry anywhere in the world, which was very difficult to pull off. It’s a simple thing to say. It’s very hard to do.

Now, Uber’s moving toward wanting you to use the app every day — it wants you to schedule rides and have this ongoing relationship with this platform as opposed to “I need a Toyota Camry, I’m going to push this button.” It sounds like you’re making a similar move, right? You might use Airbnb a couple of times a year now as you travel. You want people to use it every day.

Ultimately, what we really want to do is just be useful in people’s lives and be able to solve problems better than anyone else. If we can do that, we want to do that. Right now people use us to book one thing once or twice a year — a home. It turns out though that we’ve done 90 percent of the work to be able to go into a hundred other businesses. Not to say it’s not a lot of work to build those businesses, but from a platform standpoint, we’ve built this reputation system. We have these really robust profiles. We have 200 million verified identities. We handle more than $90 billion flowing through the platform every year. We’ve got one of the best design application teams in the world to make this product ostensible.

So I paid a lot of attention to Amazon, and Amazon in the late ’90s was a bookseller, as you recall. I’m not sure Jeff Bezos had the ambition at that moment — maybe he did — but he certainly went to these adjacencies, and the adjacencies were CDs and DVDs. Then he went to electronics to play them and then he went to toys and then the rest is history. I think there was this opportunity for us to be much more than a marketplace for vacation rentals and homes, and I think at the highest level what I want us to build is a community. Not just a marketplace, but a global community where you can literally travel anywhere, get anything you need for traveling, live anywhere, get anything you need in the real world, and essentially belong and connect with people anywhere.

So travel, live, and belong. I think that’s where we’re going to go. I think it’s probably a five-year journey to get there. I don’t want to say we’ve done most of the work from a technology application standpoint, but we’ve rebuilt the technology and rebuilt the application from the ground up to make it extensible enough to offer really anything.

You launched riffs on some of these ideas before Experiences had been around. I think you had virtual experiences in the pandemic. You started testing experiences I think in 2014. What gives you the confidence that you’re going to pull it off this time?

It’s one of those things where sometimes if something doesn’t work the first time you ask, “Was it a bad idea or was it just…” There’s this great saying by Marc Andreessen, who was one of our early investors. He said, “There’s no ideas, just ideas that are too early.” And he basically made the comment that almost every idea that filled in the .com is now a popular app. Webvan is now basically Instacart and / or DoorDash. I’ve always believed there was a consumption from physical goods to services to eventually experiences and experiences at the top of the pyramid. I think that with social media, people want to share experiences. Social media influencers want to make extra money. How does a social media person, how does an influencer get paid right now? They build a huge audience and they do essentially paid promotions, or they try to parlay into creating a product.

One of the big things we notice is a lot of these really influential people, they don’t want to just broadcast and monetize attention. We think we can monetize their experience. And so we started seeing that. We thought the timing was right. Post-pandemic, people are looking for things to do. Social media is a great distribution channel. We have a huge audience, we have the capability to pull this off and people love experiences on Airbnb. They just didn’t really know about them.

So we’ve completely reimagined the product from the ground up. I think the big difference this time is we’re not going after traditional tour operators. We’re trying to find some of the most interesting people in culture around the world, like Olympians to do workouts with. It turns out this could be fairly scalable. We can get Michelin chefs to do cooking classes with you. So many people, I think in the future, are going to be offering experiences or going on experiences, and we just zoom out and say, “What are people going to do in the future?”

It’s pretty obvious we’re going to use more devices, and these devices are going to get more powerful and we’re going to be able to live in these digital worlds. That’s obvious. The question is, well, what else are we going to do? I think we’re going to use these devices to live in the physical world, and what jobs will AI not replace? I think that AI is not going to replace all these jobs that are people-to-people oriented, that are rooted in connection, rooted in skill, rooted in having an experience. So I think many times you want to either bet on a trend, or almost bet on the opposite of the trend, which is to say bet on the gap that a trend makes. If you’re betting on AI and the world being digitized, you also want to bet on this gap in the world, this huge void. People are going to need things to do, they’re going to need ways to make money. So I think this could be a whole new economy that could emerge.

You’re talking about curating the experiences that exist. The initialist is pretty fun. There’s a Patrick Mahomes experience, there’s something called the Otaku Hottie experience.

[Laughs] With Megan Thee Stallion.

I’m definitely signing up for that one. That’s a lot of input into the system. The benefit of traditional Airbnb is people put up their houses, you can get reviews, you’ve already built the system for that marketplace. People show up at houses and the house is not a variable. The house can’t have a bad day. Maybe it’s dirty and that’ll tank your reviews, but Megan Thee Stallion can have a bad day. There’s a variability to that experience. How do you defend against that?

Part of that is why we’re doing so much quality vetting. And I think in general, and I’ve talked about this a little bit in other conversations we’ve had, we have this philosophy and I learned this philosophy during Y Combinator. Paul Graham had this philosophy. He said, “Do things that don’t scale.” He said, “It’s better to have a hundred people love you than a million people sort of like you.” The way you grow something is you focus on just getting a hundred people to love you and maybe it means you do things by hand that seem completely unscalable. And then what you do is once you’ve figured it out, we might call this product market fit, then you use technology and the industrialized part of your brain to figure out how to create systems and software to scale it. We decided to do something similar with Experiences. We decided to try to build it out by hand.

We wanted to build out, get some of the biggest icons in the world, get some of the most interesting people in the world to get the network going, to show people what’s possible. And what we want to do is use software and community to scale this. I think it’s going to be a much more curated, hands-on scaling process than the original core business of homes. But it’s almost like the difference between Amazon and eBay, where Amazon did the hard work of building out fulfillment centers, and eBay didn’t, but ultimately, the best experience wins, and I do think with software and technology and community, we can do this.

So what I would imagine going forward is we recruit most of hosts, they come on the platform, it’s very hand curated, and then what we’re building are tools that will be very much assisted by AI, and we’ll get more and more automated to be able to do this, and we’ll get more of the communities reaching out to us to provide more experiences. I mean, for example, like Megan Thee Stallion, Patrick Mahomes, and a lot of other celebrities have reached out to us because of Experiences. But the other thing, and one of the reasons we want to get these celebrities in Airbnb is a lot of people say, “Well, if Megan Thee Stallion could do this, I would want to do this.”

It might be significantly lesser-known people, but it’s something to aspire to. Now, to the point that people can have bad days, I guess that’s what makes it real and authentic. These aren’t cookie-cutter experiences. This is real life, but I think there’s something wonderful about it. I think Airbnb is ultimately not a SKEU, it’s not a standardized product. People are living, they’re breathing, they have good days, they have bad days, but I think it’s really about authenticity, and I think that that connection is what makes it so exciting. That variability is what makes life so rich.

You have a version now, especially as you expand into delivering more and more services of what I’ve started calling the DoorDash problem, where the app is beautiful, now, you’ve invested a lot into the app. I want to talk about the decisions to do that. You want people to use your tool and all of the agentic AI executives who come on this show are like, “You’re just going to have Alexa book you an Airbnb,” and that they’re going to cut you out and this is the dream. You’re just going to say, “I want a sandwich,” and they’re going to go ping the DoorDash API, or they’re literally in some cases going to click around DoorDash’s website on your behalf and DoorDash gets none of the customer relationship.

You have a version of this problem now, right? I’m going to Toronto, get me an Airbnb. Some agent’s going to show up and now you’ve expanded the surface area of the problem. I need a chef. I’m going to go click on the Airbnb website. Have you thought about whether you’re going to work with those agentic AI systems or block them or build your own? Because that seems like the platform change that’s coming that no one has really worked out the business of yet.

I totally agree. First of all, let’s zoom out and ask how we think the future’s going to look. There’s this AI maximalist view that there’s going to be like one or two AI models and one or two applications that rule them all and you use this one app and this one model for everything in the world. If you take that to its logical conclusion, you also start to go to this place where almost one company rules everything, and I think there’s numerous problems with the AI maximalist view that it’s one company to rule them all. One problem with it is, I don’t know if everyone wants one company to have total power and primacy, but the other is just one company is not going to build the entire future. This entire future is going to be built by millions of people in thousands or even millions of companies.

There’s an alternative view, which is to say that AI can democratize the world. It’s almost like when technology stagnates the world consolidates, and when there’s this campaign explosion of technology that could actually create a lot more startups. I think that’s another alternative. I do think that every company is going to have to be an AI company or risk disintermediation. The models that are being developed we have access to as well. I think there’s a couple of things that are going to play out here. Number one, I think Airbnb will in and of itself be an AI application. We’re hiring really great people. I think we have one of the best software design teams in the world. We have great application layer design, and I think we can broaden and broaden our app. That’s partly what we’re trying to do.

The more companies become a platform, the more it’s the reason to go directly to that company. I think service experiences are just the beginning of things we can do on Airbnb. Also, I think Airbnb is a community, so you want to be able to connect with the guests and hosts. Our messaging platform is really important. The sense of trust is really, really critical. So number one, I think Airbnb is going to be like a concierge for your traveling, for your life, and maybe beyond. We’re going to try to be as broad as possible. The second thing is, I think these AI applications, these native AI companies (take OpenAI), are going to have software development kits. I think they’re going to have SDKs and just like Apple created the app store, but Apple didn’t build every app. Very few of the most popular apps are Apple native apps. Why isn’t Apple able to make the most popular apps? Because it’s just so much for one company to do, to make hardware, to make an operating system, and to make apps.

When the iPhone came out, all the apps except YouTube were native. Now all the apps I use, other than iMessage, are not made by Apple, except for maybe the calculator because I don’t really care to download my own calculator. This is probably where the world is going, that there are going to be companies that develop devices, there are going to be companies that develop operating systems, but I don’t know if there are going to be single apps just like with the App Store because every app is going to want to have its own interface. Every app is going to want to have its own kind of culture, and so this is my theory for where it goes, but there is a maximalist view that it’s all consolidated to one or two companies.

That maximalist view is, I think, best expressed by the companies that are promising agents. OpenAI is one of them. I know you have a relationship with OpenAI. I want to talk about the work you might be doing there, but they’ve built some agents and some prototypes of agents. There are other companies that have built even jankier prototypes of agents that at the beginning were just using testing software. They weren’t even using AI. There’s stuff like Model Context Protocol that Anthropic is doing, which sort of creates API layers for agents, right?

All of that basically implies I’m going to talk to my computer and the computer’s going to go do stuff for me. The next version of Siri, which is now delayed, the promise was you would talk to Siri and it would use the apps on your phone for you. I don’t know if that’s maximalist to “one or two companies will control everything,” but it is maximalist to “there’s a platform change coming and natural language will be the interface.”

You’ll mostly communicate with your computer by talking to it, and then it’ll just do stuff. And that’s the thing that disintermediates your interface. It disintermediates your customer relationship, and I don’t know why you would participate in it. I’ve asked this of all the companies that provide services, when you watch the Alexa demo and it’s like, “I got you a sandwich,” it’s like why would any of the delivery services disintermediate their customer relationship in that way.

Well, yeah, there’s a bunch of things here. One is it’s not clear to me that voice is the best way to do everything. It’s not even clear that voice is the best way to do most things. Let’s zoom out for a second. Just like I don’t think a chatbot interface was the best interface for most tasks, hence your iPhone. You don’t want to text the weather, you don’t want to text the calculator. You want a specific interface. I think a lot of the future is going to be more visual. I think the amount of bandwidth you can communicate through verbalizing words is very, very limited compared to seeing something, and hearing is very, very low bandwidth. So it’s great for certain things, but it is very, very limited in being able to do other things. I mean, get me an Airbnb. Well, what does that Airbnb look like?

What does it feel like? It gets very limited very, very quickly. And additionally, you’re right. These companies are going to have to want to participate in the platform, and I don’t think companies just want to be data layers, and so these platforms or these new interfaces are only as good as the companies that participate, and the companies will only participate if they can have a relationship with their own customer. So we’re going to have to figure out this new world. It’s going to be, I think, really, really interesting. I think the future’s going to be multimodal. Voice will be critical to it, but I think it’s going to be much more than voice. There will be some things that will be voice only, but I think there’s going to be things that go well beyond voice, because it’s hard to receive information from an audio standpoint to do most tasks. I mean, you can get only so far with it.

I’ve asked people on both sides of that debate how they think it might be resolved. They all have a similar answer, which is, well, we have to convince everyone to participate, and then the specifics go to, well, maybe we’ll just pay them more money than they would’ve otherwise gotten, right? It’ll be worth your while to be a data layer here. We’ll just pay you a transaction fee on top of what you might otherwise get. And then other people have a version of what you’re saying, which is actually what I want you to do is just open my interface inside of the agent and then I’ll have a customer relationship, and I have no idea how any of this will play out. Have you had these conversations? Have you talked to the various agentic companies and said, “Here’s what I actually want”?

I mean, one of the things I’ve talked to numerous companies, including Sam [Altman], about is there has to be some type of software development kit, an SDK, and it would be great for us to be able to think about this together and figure out is there a win-win? That’s the big question. Is there a win-win? And there probably is. It is so early that no one really knows. This is the very beginning, but ultimately, and this is what I told Sam, the right solution will be whatever’s best for the customer. Whatever’s best for the customer will win because they’ll ultimately vote. And so you’ve got to imagine what’s going to create the best experience. But I think my instinct is you will have very few devices, you’ll have very few operating systems, but you’ll have more apps. And I think that’s kind of the way computing has always been. That’s my instinct of where it goes.

I think increasingly more of these AI companies are going to have to choose to be either the language layer, the foundational layer, and that’s where a lot of them will go, or they can vertically integrate. But if a company vertically integrates like Apple, you can’t vertically integrate and be wide because there’s too many things to do. Imagine Apple trying to build the device, the operating system, the Airbnb app, and handle customer service and do this and do that and build the community and handle all the money and deal with trust and safety. So there’s just a lot of jobs to be done in society and every company has to bring its core skill set.

One of the things I think we’re great at is interface and interface design and the connection of the online world with the offline world. And so, ultimately, the best product will win, the best solution will win. Part of what we’re trying to do is broaden our offering as much  as possible, mostly for the customer and mostly not for strategic considerations because you have to align your interests with what the customer wants, but this is exactly where I think we could go.

The other thing I think about when you think about the service providers in the context of the agentic AI is I’ve seen a lot of demos where someone points a phone at a dishwasher and says, “My dishwasher is broken. Get me somebody to fix it.” And then the data provider is like a Thumbtack or an Angie’s List and it says, “I booked someone for you.”

Now, I’ve booked repair people on these services, and the problem is the individual repair people use that for discovery, but they don’t use it to actually run their back office. They’re not actually scheduling there. They would prefer you not to transact with them there because they have to pay fees. There’s a whole other side of it where you can tell the database that something happened, but the actual human being might not actually ever show up. And you’ve got to close that gap across all of the verticals that you’re now in. And one of the ways you close that gap is to just take it over and say, “We’re going to run your back office too.” Are you all the way there?

We’re going to get pretty vertically integrated so that we’re building the tools for these service providers. We’re building the tools for these hosts, and I think this maybe goes to a broader point, which is that most customers when they look at Airbnb see an app with five tabs, and they see an interface. It’s kind of similar to Amazon. When you see Amazon as a customer, all you see is the website, and then you see the cardboard box showing up. It turns out most of what we call Amazon — at least Amazon retail, not AWS — is not the website. It’s the fulfillment center. It’s everything that’s powering the website and fulfilling everything. I think the truth is that’s what’s going to be Airbnb.

You can almost think of Airbnb as three things. It’s the app that customers see, the guest app. There is this whole app the hosts use, which is probably even more robust than the guest app because that’s an app people use every day. And then there’s almost this third Airbnb, which is the biggest of all, which is the system that powers everything that makes all this possible. How do you make sure that when somebody wants to get a haircut, you have the tools to make sure that somebody can manage their business on Airbnb? But the bigger challenge is not even that. It’s how many people in New York City need to get a haircut every night, and what kind of price point do they want, and who’s vetting them and how do we make sure they show up? What happens when they don’t show up and what happens when they’re late?

There’s a thousand contingencies, and the question is how do you design a system elegantly [enough] to be able to solve all these different problems? And so there’s just going to be so much to do. And I think that’s what makes it so interesting, and one of the reasons it’s hard to fully disintermediate something like this is it’s the real world. If you think “what will AI automate?” It’s going to automate a lot of digital content. I think robotics and autonomy are  going to automate a lot of repetitive tasks. I think the service and experience economy — I mean, who knows in 10 years, 20 years what isn’t automated and what isn’t done by humanoids — but certainly in the next 10 years, I think that’s a lot of where the human-centric economy goes, where people are doing physical things in the real world.

I want to ask about the decision to do this. You and I have talked about decision-making a lot in the past. We talked about founder mode, which was a great conversation. You did a big story with Steven Levy at Wired, which is great. I recommend people go read it, and it basically sounds like you decided to do this, right? You took a lot of notes, you wandered around your house, you decided you’re going to do this. You had a meeting, and you said, “We’re doing this.” That’s a big decision. Did your team push back on you? Did you just roll over them? How did that work?

No. When I say I decided to do it, I guess the better way to say it is I decided one weekend to write a vision of this that then became a multi-month conversation with the team. And so it actually happened in the wake of the OpenAI situation.

Yeah, I was looking at the timing and I was thinking, “This is all happening at the same time.”

So the OpenAI thing, like Sam was fired from OpenAI on a Friday before Thanksgiving. I was pretty involved in that situation, more as just a helpful friend. From Friday to Tuesday, my parents and my sister and her husband were in town, and then they eventually left my house for Thanksgiving weekend to go to my brother-in-law’s family’s house. I had this weekend by myself with all this pent-up energy, and that’s when I basically just poured all these ideas down.

Now, these were things I was thinking about for a long time. It was basically, what if you could Airbnb the world? What if you could have Airbnb for everything? And I basically started saying, “Well, what would everything be?” And I wrote down a list of things, services, experiences. It was really three ideas. Idea number one was Airbnb is going to become a platform where you could go from short-term rentals — vacation rentals — to kind of everything you’d need to travel and live, kind of like Amazon went from books to everything.

The second idea was Airbnb, to the point of AI, was going to become an agentic app. It was going to become the ultimate concierge for traveling and living, and we’d become the ultimate agent. By the way, if you think the future of AI is agents, what are the most common agents in the world? Travel agents, customer service agents. That’s what we do. So we know a lot about that. The third was, and maybe most importantly, we were going to go from a marketplace to a community and put people at the center. So I wrote this out. It was like thousands of thousands of words. I tried to distill it, distill it, distill it finally to these three basic ideas. I shared it with an executive team, I think on a Monday morning, and I think the team was both enthusiastic and had a lot of questions.

Basically when I communicate, and now this goes to organizational stuff, I try to communicate in concentric circles. Some founders and CEOs just do things and just tell a few people and no one knows. That’s probably the worst thing because you’re not bringing people along. Some people have an idea and they email the entire company. I think that also is problematic because you don’t want to tell somebody and their manager at the same time. Because then people go to their manager and their manager’s not bought in. They’re like, “I don’t know what we’re doing. I’m not sure.” And people aren’t really bought into it, and then everything’s half-baked.

So what I did is I brought in my executive team, which was maybe 10 or 12 people. We beaded the idea up, I refined it, refined it. Then I kind of went to the next consensus circle of 20, 30 more people, and I just kept widening the aperture. There weren’t really a lot of edits from the original vision. It was very clear that this was inevitably where Airbnb was going to go. It was going to be a community where you could travel and live anywhere. AI was going to be the center. People’s profiles were going to be at the center.

Then we just started working on it, and we were actually transforming the company before everyone’s eyes. We basically rewrote the technology stack, rewrote the app, and it was great because we had to do it anyway to update our core business. So, we basically rebuilt the entire app. It worked out insofar as it actually advanced our core business, made our core business better, made our core business stronger, but we were able to turn all of our components into primitives that were extensible. So now it wasn’t a page for a home. It was a page for anything, if that makes sense. But we put on a new technology stack, and then on the page that was an anything page, the homes performed better, because we built it in a much better way.

That’s super interesting. So you’re abstracting the core of the platform and now you can sell basically anything?

You can sell and do almost anything. And so this gets to the point, which is to say … it’s an oversimplification to say there’s going to be these broad AI companies and there’s all these companies that are narrow verticals. Well, we’re going to be an AI company too, because it would be like saying we’re an electricity company or we’re an internet company. I think there’s AI-native companies, companies that were founded on the premise of AI, but even that’s not novel anymore. I mean, it’s basically every single startup in Y Combinator, and I’m on the board of YC, I see a lot of companies. Maybe 500 or a thousand companies come through YC every year now, and every one of them is an AI company. Just like every company 10 years ago was a mobile app, but companies weren’t native.

[Content truncated due to length...]


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14
 
 

Moving sucks. Ever since leaving college more than a decade ago, I've only lived in apartments, so I've had to get good at living small and managing my inventory of belongings before, during, and after a move.

A lot of what makes that possible is that I really like decluttering. But it didn't come naturally - it's a skill I've had to practice, learn, and occasionally fail at. So I thought I might share my experiences here in case you find it helpful for a current or future move.

I got good at decluttering when my wife (then girlfriend) and I decided to downsize from a one-bedroom apartment to a studio. We loved the one-bedroom for a lot of reasons, including its view of Seattle's Space Needle. But eventually, we realized we could afford to live in a more walkable part of the city if we could squeeze into a studio.

That meant reckoning with the volume of stuff we had each brought into the apartment. Our move into the one-bedroom apartment was two people stuffing their separate lives into one. Our move into a studio meant we had to really decide what would make the jump to the next phase of our lives. It was an emotional thing.

We made the decision to downsize a while before we …

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15
 
 

Hayden Field is joining The Verge as a senior AI reporter, where she will lead coverage of the biggest names in AI - including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Apple, and others - while also reporting on how these tools are being used, how they're reshaping society, and how regulators are responding. Field joins The Verge from CNBC, where she closely tracked the rise of generative AI and the companies determining its future. She begins her role today.

"AI has the potential to be a fundamental shift in how we interact with technology and what we think computers can do," said Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge. "Hayden's reporting has consistently delivered insightful coverage of AI's most pressing developments, and her deep sourcing and sharp analysis will be vital as The Verge continues to expand its AI coverage."

During her time at CNBC, Field reported on a wide array of topics, from corporate developments and regulatory scrutiny to ethical considerations and technological advancements. She's covered Elon Musk's xAI and its ambitious plans to raise billions to build a massive AI infrastructure powered by Nvidia hardware, analyzed the FTC's inquiry into major AI firms lik …

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16
 
 

An infected man in a forest being filmed on 20 iPhones for 28 Years Later. 20 iPhones: great for filming horror movies and protecting your modesty.

Upcoming horror threequel 28 Years Later is far from the first Hollywood movie to be shot with the help of an iPhone, but it might just be the first shot on 20 iPhones. That’s how many phones director Danny Boyle had mounted on a special rig for select shots in the movie, which releases June 20th.

For Boyle, shooting on iPhones is more than just a gimmick. He returns to the series after directing the 2002 original 28 Days Later, which was shot on a digital video camcorder, a meta nod to the fact that this was how home videos were shot at the time. He and returning cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle took that as an “influence” in choosing to shoot partially on a phone, the camcorder’s closest modern equivalent.

It was first reported last year that Boyle had shot 28 Years Later on an iPhone 15 Pro Max, but according to IGN the movie actually uses a mix of regular cameras, drones, and iPhones, including three special rigs designed to hold eight, 10, or 20 iPhones at once.

“There is an incredible shot in the second half [of the film] where we use the 20-rig camera, and you’ll know it when you see it,” Boyle told IGN. “It’s quite graphic but it’s a wonderful shot that uses that technique, and in a startling way that kind of kicks you into a new world rather than thinking you’ve seen it before.”

A naked man running through water filmed by a crane-mounted iPhone rig for 28 Years Later.

Boyle calls the 20-phone rig “basically a poor man’s bullet time,” explaining that it allowed the crew to shoot some of the film’s more violent scenes in new ways. “It gives you 180 degrees of vision of an action, and in the editing you can select any choice from it, either a conventional one-camera perspective or make your way instantly around reality, time-slicing the subject, jumping forward or backward for emphasis.”

It’s not the film’s only unusual cinematographic choice. It was also shot in an especially wide 2.76:1 aspect ratio, the equivalent of 70mm film, to keep viewers guessing about where the film’s infected could pop up: “If you’re on a widescreen format, they could be anywhere… you have to keep scanning, looking around for them.”


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17
 
 

An image of the Panasonic Z85 65-inch OLED TV imposed on a background consisting of price tag and shopping cart symbols.

Panasonic may not be as well-known in the US for its TVs as it is in other parts of the globe, but that’s starting to change. The company has a solid lineup of high-end TVs that are available through Amazon, one of which is selling at a great price right now. Its 65-inch Z85 OLED TV with Amazon’s Fire TV software built-in is $997.99, a whopping 45 percent off its original $1,799.99 price when it debuted in late 2024. That’s a good deal by itself, one that’s made better with a bundle that includes the aforementioned TV plus Panasonic’s wireless neck speaker for just $2 more (totaling $999.99).

The Z85 features HDMI 2.1 ports on two of its four HDMI ports (through which it can display 4K resolution at up to 120Hz), plus Dolby Vision and HDR10 Plus support. It ships with other bells and whistles that most people are looking for in a premium television (especially gamers), like variable refresh rate (VRR), plus adaptive sync via AMD’s FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync. Not bad at all for under $1K.

I looked up this model on RTINGS, a resource that I use for technical breakdowns that put TVs advertised specs to the test. For the price, this TV fares pretty well, but not as well as most brands’ flagship models when it comes to brightness or handling glare.

Some other sweet deals to get your week started

Sometimes, you just need a capable, lil’ portable battery — nothing that won’t easily fit into a small bag. For that, it’s easier than usual to recommend Anker’s 10,000mAh 30W battery, as it’s $12.94 at Amazon (originally $25.99, but regularly discounted). Its small capacity isn’t suited for laptops, but phones or tablets that need a quick, zippy charge are a great fit. Best of all? It has a built-in USB-C cable that doubles as a handle.If you enjoy movies and physical media, what better gadget to pair with your 4K TV than a 4K Blu-ray player? Panasonic is coming through, once again, with another good deal today. Its mid-range DP-UB420-K 4K Blu-ray player is selling for $217.99 at Amazon and $219.99 at Best Buy. Either price is among the lowest that we’ve seen for this media player in the past couple of months. This model supports HDR10 Plus, HDR10, and HLG formats, plus Wi-Fi support in case you need yet another device that can stream Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and YouTube. The big feature differentiating this model from the $398 DP-UB820-K is Dolby Vision HDR — the 420-K lacks it.One of the best deals of Sony’s Days of Plays promotion is on the digital slim PS5, which starts at $399.99 and comes with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. But for $449.99 at Best Buy, you can get the slim PS5 model that includes a disc drive, along with the free game. We recommend that model if you want to play disc-based games, as well as 4K Blu-rays and DVDs. Normally, the disc drive separately costs $79.99, so you’re getting $30 off of that accessory on top of the $50 Days of Play discount on the console bundle through June 11th.


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18
 
 

Laurene Powell Jobs and Jony Ive attend the WSJ. Magazine 2022 Innovator Awards at Museum of Modern Art on November 02, 2022 Laurene Powell Jobs (left) said that Ive’s design process is a “wondrous thing to behold.” | Image: Getty Images

The mysterious AI gadget being created by OpenAI and former Apple design chief Jony Ive has been given the thumbs up from Laurene Powell Jobs. In a new interview published by The Financial Times, the two reminisce about Jony Ive’s time working at Apple alongside Powell Jobs’ late husband, Steve, and trying to make up for the “unintentional” harms associated with those efforts.

“Many of us would say we have an uneasy relationship with technology at the moment,” Ive said, adding that working on the incoming AI device alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is motivated by a sense that “humanity deserves better.” In May, Ive said his latest work is driven by owning the “unintended consequences” associated with the iPhone, alluding to smartphone-related concerns like users being addicted to screens and social media.

Ive again acknowledged this, and says the collaboration with Altman has revived his optimism for technology. “If you make something new, if you innovate, there will be consequences unforeseen, and some will be wonderful and some will be harmful. While some of the less positive consequences were unintentional, I still feel responsibility. And the manifestation of that is a determination to try and be useful.”

Powell Jobs, who has remained close friends with Ive since Steve Jobs passed in 2011, echoes his concerns, saying that “there are dark uses for certain types of technology,” even if it “wasn’t designed to have that result.”

Powell Jobs has invested in both Ive’s LoveFrom design and io hardware startups following his departure from Apple. Ive notes that “there wouldn’t be LoveFrom” if not for her involvement. Ive’s io company is being purchased by OpenAI for almost $6.5 billion, and with her investment, Powell Jobs stands to gain if the secretive gadget proves anywhere near as successful as the iPhone.

The pair gives away no extra details about the device that Ive is building with OpenAI, but Powell Jobs is expecting big things. She says she has watched “in real time how ideas go from a thought to some words, to some drawings, to some stories, and then to prototypes, and then a different type of prototype,” Powell Jobs said. “And then something that you think: I can’t imagine that getting any better. Then seeing the next version, which is even better. Just watching something brand new be manifested, it’s a wondrous thing to behold.”


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19
 
 

A close-up of a Rubik’s Cube inside the cube-solving robot. The student-built Purdubik’s Cube set a new Guinness World Record by solving a Rubik’s Cube in just 0.103 seconds. | Photo: Matthew Patrohay / Purdue University

A team of Purdue University students recently set a new Guinness World Record with their custom robot that solved a Rubik's Cube in just 0.103 seconds. That was about a third of the time it took the previous record-setting bot. But the new record wasn't achieved by simply building a robot that moves faster. The students used a combination of high-speed but low-res camera systems, a cube customized for improved strength, and a special solving technique popular among human speed cubers.

The Rubik's Cube-solving robot arms race kicked off in 2014, when a robot called Cubestormer 3 built with Lego Mindstorms parts and a Samsung Galaxy S4 solved the iconic puzzle in 3.253 seconds - faster than any human or robot could at the time. (The current world record for a human solving a Rubik's Cube belongs to Xuanyi Geng, who did it in just 3.05 seconds.) Over the course of a decade, engineers managed to reduce that record to just hundreds of milliseconds.

Last May, engineers at Mitsubishi Electric in Japan claimed the world record with a robot that solved a cube in 0.305 seconds. The record stood for almost a year before the team from Purdue's Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer …

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20
 
 

An image compilation showing various tech products scattered around with images of dads having a moment of bliss and relaxation.

Father's Day rules. It's a day to celebrate all that dads have contributed to the people, homes, and communities that they're a part of. Being a dad is a lot of work - something I can vouch for, being a relatively new one myself - so for Father's Day, why not give dear old dad a token of appreciation and love? Whether your dad prefers practical or clever gifts, we think you'll be pleased with the selection of picks below.

As usual, we lean pretty heavily on tech, but there are several non-tech suggestions that most dads will be happy to receive, all of which come courtesy of the thoughtful staff here at The Verge. If a fast-charging portable battery or Sony's collapsible WH-1000XM6 headphones won't do the trick, perhaps Kurt Vonnegut's recently discovered two-player board game or a mountable Lego van Gogh replica will?

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21
 
 

Just one day after Elon Musk’s public departure from his role as a White House employee, the Trump Administration pulled its nomination of Musk ally Jared Isaacman to become the new NASA Administrator. First reported earlier on Saturday by Semafor, citing anonymous sources, the move has been confirmed by White House spokesperson Liz Huston.

The New York Times reports, based on three unnamed sources, that Trump “told associates he intended to yank Mr. Isaacman’s nomination after learning that he had donated to prominent Democrats,” including Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. Isaacman, the billionaire founder and CEO of a payments company, Shift4, has purchased several spaceflights from Musk’s SpaceX. He flew on the Inspiration4 mission in 2021, and again last year on Polaris Dawn, completing the first commercial spacewalk.

As noted by Space.com, the White House also released an in-depth version of its NASA budget request for 2026 on Friday, proposing to cut its funding by nearly one-quarter, from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion, with funding for science programs dropping by 47 percent. In a statement released Friday, The Planetary Society called the budget justification “an extinction-level event for the space agency’s most productive, successful, and broadly supported activity: science,” that “wastes billions in prior taxpayer investment and slams the brakes on future exploration.”

Now, without Isaacman in place, Ars Technica quotes an unnamed former senior NASA leader who said the request is “just a going-out-of-business mode.”

In a statement emailed to media outlets including NBC, Huston wrote, “It’s essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda and a replacement will be announced directly by President Trump soon.” Despite being unable to confirm to the Senate whether Musk had been a part of his job interview, he had appeared set for an approval vote to replace former Florida Senator Bill Nelson. According to the NYT, Isaacman was informed of the decision on Friday and declined to comment when reached by phone.


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22
 
 

A captcha-like image that says “In God we trust” overlaid with the scales of justice.

Every few weeks, it seems like there's a new headline about a lawyer getting in trouble for submitting filings containing, in the words of one judge, "bogus AI-generated research." The details vary, but the throughline is the same: an attorney turns to a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT to help them with legal research (or worse, writing), the LLM hallucinates cases that don't exist, and the lawyer is none the wiser until the judge or opposing counsel points out their mistake. In some cases, including an aviation lawsuit from 2023, attorneys have had to pay fines for submitting filings with AI-generated hallucinations. So why haven't they stopped?

The answer mostly comes down to time crunches, and the way AI has crept into nearly every profession. Legal research databases like LexisNexis and Westlaw have AI integrations now. For lawyers juggling big caseloads, AI can seem like an incredibly efficient assistant. Most lawyers aren't necessarily using ChatGPT to write their filings, but they are increasingly using it and other LLMs for research. Yet many of these lawyers, like much of the public, don't understand exactly what LLMs are or how they work. One attorney who was sa …

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23
 
 

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 85, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, sorry in advance that this week is a tiny bit politics-y, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I've been reading about Sean Evans and music fraud and ayahuasca, playing with the new Obsidian Basesfeature, obsessing over every behind-the-scenes Final Reckoning video I can find, listening to MGK's "Cliche" more times than I'm proud of, installing some Elgato Key Lights to improve my WFH camera look, digging the latest beta of Artifacts, and downloading every podcast I can find because I have 20 hours of driving to do this weekend.

I also have for you a very funny new movie about tech CEOs, a new place to WhatsApp, a great new accessory for your phone, a helpful crypto politics explainer, and much more. Short week this week, but still lots going on. Let's do it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading / playing / watching / listening to / shopping for / doing with a Raspberry Pi this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else wh …

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24
 
 

Stranger Things‘ fifth and final season finally has a premiere date.

During its live Tudum event, Netflix announced that Stranger Things‘ fifth season will actually be split into three parts. Volume 1 is set to debut on November 26th, Volume 2 premieres on December 25th, and The Finale drops on New Years Eve. Along with the premiere dates, Netflix also shared a teaser showing off some of what Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin, (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Will (Noah Schnapp), and Max (Sadie Sink) are going to be up against when the show returns.

Initially, Netflix suggested that Stranger Things’ final chapter would be split into two pieces rather than three, but the new release plans seem like the company’s way of making sure that viewers stick around rather than inhaling the show in a couple of sittings. Though this is the end of the core Stranger Things series, Netflix still has live-action and animated spin-offs in the works. The streamer still hasn’t revealed any more concrete details about the spinoffs, but it probably won’t be long before that changes.


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25
 
 

A screenshot from Marvel Cosmic Invasion.

Dotemu is on a pretty good run. The video game studio and publisher has been around since 2007, and much of its history is largely working on remakes and remasters of older games. But it's also been involved with major hits in the form of sequels and new games that are in the spirit of older classics, including Streets of Rage 4 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge.

All of that work is culminating in what looks to be a promising 2025, with three new but classics-inspired games: Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, a new side-scroller for the series; Marvel Cosmic Invasion, an arcade-y beat-'em-up; and Absolum, an original beat-'em-up with roguelike elements.

"We're open to everything," CEO Cyrille Imbert tells The Verge. Despite his title, Imbert says his job involves acting like an executive producer to bring together concepts that answer specific needs for franchises.

Before Shredder's Revenge's 2022 release, for example, there hadn't been a good side-scrolling TMNT game for "a while," he says. (Turtles in Time, which helped inspire the game, came out in 1991.) "We were convinced that there was a need for that." There was: the game sold 1 million copies in its first week …

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