Editor-in-Chief
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.
The impossible dream of good workplace software
Can AI actually change our love-hate relationship with our tools?
Couple things here: It’s the DOJ, not Lina Khan’s FTC, that is currently pursuing a breakup of Google and in the middle of a giant Apple antitrust case, so it’s not even clear Cuban has pointed his ire at the correct target with this comment. And what a wild political re-alignment when AOC and JD Vance agree that Khan is doing a good job!
If you thought standard-issue ad tech was a little weird and creepy, get ready for the future: platforms letting marketers use all their data to make an infinite number of AI-generated ads specifically targeted to individual viewers. Digiday reports on TikTok’s Smart+, which competes with similar offerings from Meta and Google:
Marketers can let TikTok’s AI handle the heavy lifting — building and delivering ads to drive conversions, leads, or app downloads. […] The pitch is all about simplicity and speed — no more weeks of guesswork and endless A/B testing, according to Adolfo Fernandez, TikTok’s director, global head of product strategy and operations, commerce.
Super normal, everyone! No potential issues here!
That’s straight from Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu, who took great exception to our story from September 25th, which was sourced to a Fast Company article about his comments at one of their events. Jesse told me the actual daily user number was around 20,000, spiking up to 34,000 the day the company’s new LAM Playgrounds were launched, and that his actual comment was that 5,000 of those people were using the Rabbit at any given time. For context, Jesse also told me Rabbit has sold 100,000 R1s so far.
Fast Company has corrected its story, and we’ve updated our story as well. You can hear the whole conversation on Decoder.
Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn’t thinking too far ahead
Rabbit’s large action model is here, sort of — but everyone else is coming fast.
The Washington Post has a story about Mark Zuckerberg’s recent fashionbro glow-up, and I can’t stop laughing at this bananas grant of anonymity for what amounts to a stan quote — my italics added for emphasis:
“Zuckerberg is ruthless as both a leader and an executive, but in his heart, he’s just a start-up guy who wants to be cool with the nerds,” a former Facebook executive said. “He’s living his best life,” added the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.
Zuck or nothing, indeed.
[The Washington Post]
Google rolled out ads in its AI-powered search overviews today, but it doesn’t appear the system is any better at understanding what it’s actually saying. As flagged on Threads, it suggests turning off the forward collision-avoidance feature on the Kia Telluride by disabling electronic stability control, which is a dangerous idea for most drivers. (I did the same search and got a similar AI search summary.)
The AI overview appears to be getting this idea from a caution notice in the Kia EV6 manual, which, well, there’s a reason I asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai if he thought language was the same as intelligence the last time he was on Decoder.
He’s also removed about 78 percent of X’s value since he bought it. (You all know what I’m going to say.)