Google's new speaker and your smart home questions

David Pierce· Host0:00

[upbeat music] Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Ultrawideband Door Locks. I'm your friend, David Pierce, and today on the show we are answering your questions about the smart home. We get a lot of questions about the smart home. I would say that is the single most popular thing on the Vergecast hotline, eight six six VERGE one one, or send us an email, vergecast@theverge.com. So every once in a while, Jen Tuohy comes on the show and just answers as many of your questions as we can. We also have the new Google Home speaker in-house. We've been testing this new smart home device from Google, and we both have some thoughts about what this thing actually is. We're gonna get to all of that in just a second, but first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. [upbeat music] This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, June 24th, 2026. OpenAI just revealed its first AI chip, which is for some reason called Jalapeno. I don't know. It's specifically an inference chip, which means it's not for training huge models, but for interacting with them. OpenAI has been working with Broadcom on these chips, and if they're good, they're actually a huge deal. NVIDIA became the world's most valuable company in large part by having the best AI chips around, and everyone else would love to control their own destiny a little more and stop needing NVIDIA so badly. Plus, OpenAI desperately needs to figure out a way to make AI usage cheaper and more energy efficient, all of which it says Jalapeno will do. We'll see about all that when it launches later this year. Meanwhile, big day for price reveals. We finally know what Grand Theft Auto VI will cost when it finally, actually, apparently, for real, seriously launches this November. It's gonna be 80 bucks for the standard version,