Hello! This is The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge... and your life. Every Friday, Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn make sense of the week's tech news with help from our wide-ranging staff. Join us every week for a fun, deeply nerdy, often off-the-rails conversation about what's happening now (and next) in technology and gadgets.
What $200 of ChatGPT is really worth
AI and politics, politics and AI. That's the story of 2025. On this episode, The Verge's Kylie Robison joins the show to talk about ChatGPT's big new features, Operator and deep research, both of which promise to make the chatbot more useful and more autonomous. To access either one costs $200 a month — is it worth it? After that, The Verge's Liz Lopatto catches us up on the latest from Elon Musk and Doge, including why Musk is doing this thing, this way. Liz also makes the case that this isn't going to slow down anytime soon. Finally, Nilay Patel helps us answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline, and tells us how he felt about the Super Bowl's 4K stream.
Further reading:
- OpenAI’s new Operator AI agent can do things on the web for you
- ChatGPT’s agent can now do deep research for you
- I tested ChatGPT’s deep research with the most misunderstood law on the internet
- Elon Musk’s rapid unscheduled disassembly of the US government
- DOGE wreaked havoc on the government in just one week
- Federal judge blocks DOGE from accessing sensitive Treasury records
- How Elon Musk’s Department of Energy access could pose a nuclear threat
- What we know about President Elon’s government takeover
Email us at vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices