Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of music that sounds eerily but not exactly

like other music. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show we're talking about

training data. It's the raw materials of everything that is AI, and we probably don't

understand it or talk about it enough. I'm talking to Alex Reisner,

who's a staff writer at The Atlantic, and over the last couple of years, he has spent a lot of

time investigating training data and how all of these books and all of these articles and all

of these YouTube videos and all of these songs are compiled into these gigantic data sets

that AI companies then use to form the basis of their models.

I think the way that these models are created and the sources of these data has a lot to do with the way that we feel about AI,

particularly generative AI as a creative expression.

And understanding how this data works, where it comes from, and how it gets used, I think is really important.

So we're going to have Alex on, we're going to dig into it. I'm very excited about it.

But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today.

This is 90 seconds on the verge for Thursday, June 25th, 2026.

Apple just raised the prices of a huge number of its most important products.

iPads and Macbooks in

particular are now up anywhere from $100 to $500, and even like the Apple TV is way up. It's now

$200, roughly the price of 900 Amazon Fire Six. We knew this was coming, but this is still a big

moment. Apple is as well managedmanaged a supply chain company as anybody

and exists at really high margins.

If it can't keep prices down in this era of AI-driven shortages of memory and storage,

nobody can.

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