When Nilay Patel was four years old, he drove a Chrysler into a small pond because he was trying to learn how the gearshift worked. Years later, he became a technology journalist. He has thus far remained dry. Nilay Patel is co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Verge, the technology and culture brand from Vox Media. In his decade at Vox Media, he’s grown The Verge into one of the largest and most influential tech sites, with a global audience of millions of monthly readers, and award-winning journalism with real-world impact. Honored in Adweek’s “Creative 100” in 2021, under Patel’s leadership, The Verge received its first Pulitzer and National Magazine Award nominations. Patel is a go-to expert voice in the tech space, hosting The Verge’s Webby award-winning podcasts, Decoder with Nilay Patel and The Vergecast, and appearing on CNBC as a regular contributor. He received an AB in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2003 and his J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 2006.
Nilay joins as the guest to discuss our AI coverage, controversial episodes, and what it takes to succeed or fail on Decoder.
Joanna Stern’s first video as a indie YouTuber is a look at the Unitree G1 robot, which a New York company called Robostore is importing for all kinds of customers. There is also a very romantic moment with saxophone music.
All the ad people I know keep saying “the content is the targeting” lately, and now I know why: Google and Meta are using AI to flip the online ad model upside down. Big dive in the NYT:
But the real business breakthroughs have come from targeting. It used to be that an advertiser would say, for example, “I want to target women in New York between the ages of 24 and 35.” Now it’s the opposite: Meta and Google are using A.I. to recommend customers the brands should be going after.
[The New York Times]
The NYT has a deep dive into the Google co-founder’s hard turn to the right, which is either because he hates the proposed billionaire tax in California or because he’s super into his hardcore MAGA girlfriend. (Or both.) In any case, he’s having “intimate” dinners with Trump — and bringing Sundar Pichai along for the ride.
[The New York Times]
UL CEO Jennifer Scanlon on why safety still matters in the AI era
Software brain is changing the world, but most people still aren’t buying.
Sullivan and Cromwell, the law firm representing President Trump in many of his cases and which handled the SpaceX and xAI merger, was just forced to apologize to a federal judge for filing documents full of fake case citations hallucinated by AI. The list of errors ran three pages long, the NYT reports. Just the latest in the legal profession forgetting that language is not actually intelligence.
[The New York Times]
Canva CEO Melanie Perkins dodged this question with a lot of charm and verve, but I wonder if the answer is quickly going from Adobe to Anthropic. More on this week’s Decoder!
Why Melanie Perkins is confident Canva can take on the big AI players.
The head of OpenAI has a reputation for deception. The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow on why that matters.