What an AI-designed car looks like
5/5/20261 hr 11 min
Car companies are beginning to use AI tools to radically speed up their development process, which could change the cars we drive forever — and have some big effects on the people who make them now. Verge contributor Tim Stevens explains. Then, The Verge’s Hayden Field catches us up on Codex vs. Claude Code, Anthropic vs. the US government, the vibes at OpenAI, and more, before helping answer a question on the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email vergecast@theverge.com!) about whether all the recent tech layoffs are really about AI. Further reading: The AI-designed car is taking shape | The Verge Pentagon strikes classified AI deals with OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia — but not Anthropic Google employees ask Sundar Pichai to say no to classified military AI use | The Verge Anthropic’s new cybersecurity model could get it back in the government’s good graces | The Verge Microsoft and OpenAI’s famed AGI agreement is dead | The Verge Here’s how the new Microsoft and OpenAI deal breaks down | The Verge ChatGPT downloads are slowing — and may cause problems for OpenAI’s IPO | The Verge Claude can now plug directly into Photoshop, Blender, and Ableton | The Verge OpenAI’s new security model is for ‘critical cyber defenders’ only | The Verge Anthropic releases a new Opus model amid Mythos Preview buzz | The Verge Jack Dorsey’s Block cuts nearly half of its staff in AI gamble | The Verge Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11. Timestamps are approximate.) 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:00 Today Show Preview 00:04:00 Car Design Primer 00:08:00 AI Speeds Up Design 00:13:00 Clay Models and Craft 00:15:00 Jobs Pipeline Risk 00:18:00 Software Defined Cars 00:20:00 Regulation and Safety 00:27:00 Slate Truck Update 00:34:00 Claude Code vs Codex 00:42:00 OpenAI Vibes Check 00:44:00 PR vs AI Doomerism 00:48:00 Pentagon Deals Exclude Anthropic 00:53:00 Mythos Reality Check 00:56:00 RIP AGI Moment 01:04:00 Hotline AI Layoffs ROI 01:13:00 Wrap Up and Sign Off Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDavid Pierce· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of swoopy cars. I'm your friend David Pierce, and here's a tiny little bit of inside baseball podcast shenanigans. I have been making more and more video stuff over the last couple of years. Podcasts are shifting to videos in ways that, frankly, I, I continue to be deeply conflicted about. I am mostly an audio podcast consumer. I spent most of my career making audio podcasts, and learning how to do this thing on video in a way that is both video first and audio first has been really interesting and really challenging. It has also meant that the way my home office looks is very important. Um, I want you to understand [chuckles] if you're watching this, every single thing in this room that you can't see is a mess. There's a giant shelf full of just unordered crap over there. There's a bunch of bubble wrap over here from a thing that I was taking out. There's a giant load of, of clean laundry right on the other side of the camera. There's just a lot going on. But the newest thing is we're also spending a lot of time making more clips out of our shows, because that is the, the main way people find stuff now is through clips on their feeds. I think that is increasingly just a kind of content, but it is also a way that people discover our shows. So thinking more about clips, what that has meant [chuckles] is that I have to sit further back from the camera because otherwise we get a lot of social videos that are just, like, my face sorta smushed into the screen, and it's like I'm yelling at you out of your phone. The solution is