Cohere is one of the buzziest AI startups around right now. It's not making consumer products; it's focused on the enterprise market and making AI products for big companies. And there's a huge tension there: up until recently, computers have been deterministic. If you give computers a certain input, you usually know exactly what output youre going to get. Theres a logic to it. But if we all start talking to computers with human language and getting human language back, well, human language is m...
Jun 10, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast The art of video game design is flourishing, but it feels like a really grim time to be in the business of making and distributing games. Huge global publishers and tiny indie studios alike are facing huge financial pressures, and it doesnt seem to be letting up anytime soon. So where did this enormous pressure come from, if consumer interest is high and sales are great? Verge video game reporter Ash Parrish joins Decoder to explain. Links: Global games market expected to grow to $189bn in 2024 ...
Jun 06, 2024•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan and let me tell you, this conversation is nothing like what I expected. It turns out Eric wants Zoom to be much, much more than just a videoconferencing platform. Zoom wants to take on Microsoft and Google and now has a big investment in AI and Erics visions for what that AI will do are pretty wild. See, Eric really wants you to stop having to attend Zoom meetings yourself. Youll hear him describe how he thinks one of the big benefits of AI at work will ...
Jun 03, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast For nearly 20 years now, the web has been Googles platform; weve all just lived on it. I think of Decoder as a show for people trying to build things, and a lot of people have built their things on that platform. For a lot of small businesses and content creators, thats suddenly not stable anymore. The number one question I have for anyone building things on someone elses platform is: What are you going to do when that platform changes the rules? Links: How Google is killing independent sites li...
May 30, 2024•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking with Joseph Cox, one of the best cybersecurity reporters around and a co-founder of the new media site 404 Media. Joseph has a new book coming out in June called Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever, and I cant recommend it enough. Its basically a caper, but with the FBI running a phone network. For real. Joseph walks us through the fascinating world of underground criminal phone networks, and how secure messaging, a tech product beloved by d...
May 23, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who joined the show the day after the big Google I/O developer conference. Googles focus during the conference was on how its building AI into virtually all of its products. If youre a Decoder listener, youve heard me talk about this idea a lot over the past year: I call it Google Zero, and Ive been asking a lot of web and media CEOs what would happen to their businesses if their Google traffic were to go to zero. In a world where AI powers search w...
May 20, 2024•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last week, TikTok filed a lawsuit against the US government claiming the divest-or-ban law is unconstitutional a case it needs to win in order to keep operating under Bytedances ownership. Theres a lot of back and forth between the facts and the law here: Some of the legal claims are complex and sit in tension with a long history of prior attempts to regulate speech and the internet, while the simple facts of what TikTok has already promised to do around the world contradict some its arguments. ...
May 16, 2024•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has been at the top of my list of people Ive wanted to talk to for the show since we first launched hes led Adobe for nearly 17 years now, but he doesnt do too many wide-ranging interviews. Ive always thought Adobe was an underappreciated company its tools sit at the center of nearly every major creative workflow you can think of and with generative AI poised to change the very nature of creative software, it seemed particularly important to talk with Shantanu now. Ado...
May 13, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, were going to talk about the smart home one of the oldest, most important, and most challenging dreams in the history of the tech industry. The idea of your house responding to you and your family, and generally being as automated and as smart as your phone or your laptop, has inspired generations of technologists. But after decades of promises, its all still pretty messy. Because the big problem with the smart home has been blindingly obvious for a very long time: interoperability. Yet t...
May 09, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking with Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath, whom I first interviewed on the show back in 2021. Those were heady days especially for upstart EV companies like Polestar, which all seemed poised to capture what felt like infinite demand for electric cars. Now, in 2024, the market looks a lot different, and so does Polestar, which is no longer majority-owned by Volvo. Instead, Volvo is now a more independent sister company, and both Volvo and Polestar fall under Chinese parent company Geel...
May 06, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Verge transportation editor Andy Hawkins and I are going to try and figure out Tesla. I said try I did not say succeed. But were going to try. Thats because Tesla has been on a real rollercoaster these past two weeks, in terms of its stock price, its basic financials, and well, its vibes. If youve been following the company, you know that that gap between what the business is and how its valued has been getting bigger and bigger for years now and lately, with Elon Musk saying hes going al...
May 02, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast A lot has changed since the last time Ola was on Decoder. Back then, he said Mercedes would have an all-EV lineup by 2030 a promise a whole lot of car companies, including Mercedes, have now had to soften or walk back. But he doesn't see that as a setback at all, and he and Mercedes are both still committed to phasing out gas in the long run. We also spent some time talking about what's happening both on the outside of cars Mercedes' classic look and its EV look aren't necessarily quite in the s...
Apr 29, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, were talking about the brand-new TikTok ban and how years of Congressional inaction on a federal privacy law helped lead us to this moment of apparent national panic about algorithmic social media. This is a thorny discussion, and to help break it all down, I invited Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner on the show. Lauren has been closely covering efforts to ban TikTok for years now, and shes also watched Congress fail to pass meaningful privacy regulation for even longer. Well go ...
Apr 25, 2024•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking to Jason Citron, the co-founder and CEO of Discord, the gaming-focused voice and chat app. You might think Discord is just something Slack for gamers, but over time, it has become much more important than that. For a growing mix of mostly young, very online users steeped in gaming culture, fandom, and other niche communities, Discord is fast becoming the hub to their entire online lives. A lot of what we think of as internet culture is happening on Discord. In many ways Discord...
Apr 22, 2024•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, we're talking about Disney, the massive activist investor revolt it just fought off, and what happens next in the world of streaming. Because what happens to Disney really tells us a lot about what's happening in the entire world of entertainment. Earlier this month, Disney survived an attempted board takeover from businessman Nelson Peltz. While investors ultimately sided with Disney and CEO Bob Iger, the boardroom showdown made something very clear: Disney needs to figure out streaming ...
Apr 18, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast At the absolute most basic, Dropbox is cloud storage for your stuff but that puts it at the nexus of a huge number of todays biggest challenges in tech. As the company that helps you organize your stuff in the cloud itself goes all remote, how do we even deal with the concept of your stuff? Today Im talking with Dropbox CEO Drew Houston about those big picture ideas and why he thinks generative AI really will be transformative for everyone eventually, even if it isnt yet now. Links: Dropbox AI a...
Apr 15, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today were talking about Vice, the media company: Where it came from, what it did, and, ultimately, why it collapsed into a much smaller, sadder version of itself. This is a lousy time for digital media, and its hard to make a profit from putting words on the internet right now. So when Verge senior reporter Liz Lopatto went to go report on what happened, she and I both assumed Vice had been done in by the brutal economics of digital advertising on the web. But the Vice story is more than that i...
Apr 11, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Cloudflare is an infrastructure provider basically protecting more than 20% of the entire web from bad actors. When everything is going well, you don't even have to know it exists. It's one of the only defenses sometimes the only defense standing between websites and the people who want to take them down. Protecting free speech on the internet around the world, across war zones and hundreds of different kinds of government, is no easy feat. That puts the company, and CEO Matthew Prince, right at...
Apr 08, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hello, and welcome to Decoder. This is David Pierce, editor-at-large at The Verge and co-host of The Vergecast, subbing in for Nilay, whos out on vacation. Regular Decoder programming returns next week. In the meantime, we have an exciting episode for you today all about video game emulation, which, as it turns out, is a whole lot more complicated than it seems. Gaming emulation made headlines recently because one of the most widely used programs for emulating the Nintendo Switch, a platform cal...
Apr 04, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking to Intuit Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar, who took over as CEO in 2022 after a pretty rough patch in the companys history. In 2021, Intuit acquired the company, and the very next year, co-founder Ben Chestnut stepped down after telling employees that he thought introducing themselves with pronouns in meetings did more harm than good. After that, Rania took over. This is a pretty huge culture change, especially as Mailchimp became more integrated with Intuit. It was also a big chall...
Apr 01, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hey everyone its Nilay Im on vacation this week, so the Decoder team is taking a short break. Well be back next week with both the interview and the new explainer episodes. To tide you over until Monday, we have a bonus episode from our friends at Vox Media and Eaters Gastropod about an incredible patent battle in the world of pizza. Im serious: One of the biggest fights in the pizza industry took place in US court in the 90s an intellectual property dispute about stuffed crust pizza between Piz...
Mar 28, 2024•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking to Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky Social, which is a decentralized competitor to Metas Threads, Mastodon, and X. Bluesky actually started inside of what was then known as Twitter it was a project from then-CEO Jack Dorsey, who spent his days wandering the earth and saying things like Twitter should be a protocol and not a company. Bluesky was supposed to be that protocol, but Jack spun it out of Twitter in 2021, just before Elon Musk bought the company and renamed it X. Bluesky...
Mar 25, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast Both the EU and US have spent the past decade looking at Big Tech and saying, "someone should do something!" In the US, lawmakers are still basically shouting that. But in the EU, regulators did something. The Digital Markets Act was proposed in 2020, signed into law in 2022, and went into effect this month. It's already having an effect on some of the biggest companies in tech, including Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In theory it's a landmark law that will change the way these companies compete...
Mar 21, 2024•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Weve got a fun one today I talked to Figma CEO Dylan Field in front of a live audience at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. And we got into it we talked about everything from design, to software distribution, to the future of the web, and, of course, AI. Figma is an fascinating company the Figma design tool is used by designers at basically every company you can think of. And importantly, it runs on the web. It became such a big deal that Adobe tried to buy it out in 2022 for $20 billion doll...
Mar 18, 2024•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast If youve been listening to Decoder or the Vergecast for a while, you know that I am obsessed with Google Search, the web, and how both of those things might change in the age of AI. But to really understand how something might change, you have to step back and understand what it is right now. So today Im talking with Verge platforms reporter Mia Sato about Google Search, the industries its created, and more importantly, how relentless search engine optimization, or SEO, has utterly changed the w...
Mar 14, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking to Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker, a regular contributor to The Verge, and author of the new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. Kyle has been writing for years now about how the culture of big social media platforms bleeds into real life, first affecting how things look, and now shaping how and what culture is created and the mechanisms by which that culture spreads all around the world. If youve been listening to Decoder, this is all going to s...
Mar 11, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our Thursday episodes are all about big topics in the news, and this week were wrapping up our short series on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. In our last couple episodes, we talked a lot about some of the biggest, most complicated legal and policy questions surrounding the modern AI industry, including copyright lawsuits and deepfake legislation. But we wanted to end on a more personal note: How is this technology making people feel, and in particular how is it affecting how pe...
Mar 07, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this special episode of Decoder, science educator and YouTuber Hank Green is guest hosting. And the guest? Its Nilay Patel, who sat down with Hank to discuss building The Verge, the state of media, and the future of the web. Also: whether the fediverse is worth investing in, and how social platforms control of distribution has shaped the internet. In the words of Hank: Nilay has got some weird ideas about the internet. For example, that hes going to revolutionize the media through blog posts....
Mar 04, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our new Thursday episodes of Decoder are all about deep dives into big topics in the news, and this week were continuing our mini-series on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. Last week, we took a look at the wave of copyright lawsuits that might eventually grind this whole industry to a halt. Those are basically a coin flip and the outcomes are off in the distance, as those cases wind their way through the legal system. A bigger problem right now is that AI systems are really good ...
Feb 29, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, Im talking with Rahul Purini, the president of Crunchyroll, a streaming service focused entirely on anime and really, the biggest anime service still going. Rahul has a long history with anime: he spent more than seven years at Funimation, a company that started in the 90s to distribute Dragon Ball Z to US audiences, before getting the top job at Crunchyroll. Anime might seem like niche content, but its not nearly as niche as you might think our colleagues over at Polygon just ran a huge ...
Feb 26, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
