Decoder with Nilay Patel

This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. Today I'm joined by Hayden Field, The Verge’s new senior AI reporter to talk about the AI talent wars and why some researchers are suddenly getting traded like their NBA superstars.

Both Hayden and I have been reporting on this for the past several weeks to get a sense of much these companies are paying for top talent, why Big Tech firms like Google are opting to hire instead of acquire, and what it means that some of the most sought-after AI experts in the world are no longer motivated by money alone. 

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Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is CNBC journalist Jon Fortt. This is the last episode I’ll be guest-hosting for Nilay while he’s out on parental leave. My guest today is Richard Robinson, who is the cofounder and CEO of legal tech startup Robin AI. 

Richard is a corporate lawyer-turned-startup founder working on AI tools for the legal profession. But law and AI have not mixed well. So I wanted to ask Richard about hallucinations, how lawyers can use AI today, and what it will really take to place our trust in an AI lawyer.

Read the full transcript on The Verge.

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host. Today I'm talking with Gaurav Misra, the CEO of Captions. You may not have heard of Captions yet, but by now, you’ve probably seen a video that was generated using its AI models. The company’s Mirage Studio platform lets anyone generate AI versions of real people, and the results are alarmingly realistic. 

Captions just put out a blog post titled, “We Build Synthetic Humans. Here’s What’s Keeping Us Up at Night.” It’s a good overview of the state of deepfakes and where they’re headed. So Gauraav and I sat down to discuss the trajectory of deepfake technology and what might be done to prevent it from being misused. 

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Jon Fortt, CNBC journalist. I’m guest-hosting for a couple more episodes of Decoder this summer while Nilay is out on parental leave. Today, I’m talking with a very special guest: Gil Duran, an old friend, journalist, and author of The Nerd Reich, a newsletter and forthcoming book about the shifting politics of Silicon Valley and the rise of tech authoritarianism.

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge. Nilay’s out on parental leave for the next few months, so I’ll be stepping in to host our Thursday episodes while he’s out. My guest today is Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, who is betting that the browser is where more useful AI will get built. 

Perplexity just released Comet, an AI web browser for the Mac and Windows that’s still in an invite-only beta. I’ve been using it, and it’s very interesting. In this conversation, Aravind and I also discussed the future of Perplexity, the AI talent wars, and why he thinks people will eventually pay thousands of dollars for a single AI prompt.

Read the full transcript here on The Verge.

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Jon Fortt, CNBC journalist, co-host of Closing Bell Overtime, and creator and host of the Fortt Knox podcast. I’m stepping in to guest host a few episodes of Decoder this summer while he’s out on parental leave, and I’m very excited for what we’ve been working on.

For my first episode of Decoder, a show about how people make decisions, I wanted to talk to an expert. So I sat down with Cassie Kozyrkov, the CEO and founder of AI consultancy Kozyr and the former chief decision scientist at Google. Read the full transcript over on The Verge.

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On this episode of Decoder, Ellis Hamburger — former journalist at The Verge, early Snap employee, and founder of the brand strategy studio Meaning — joins guest host Alex Heath to share why many AI founders are missing the bigger picture.

Links:

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s summertime, which means it’s time for our annual grilling episode. In years past we’ve talked to the leaders of Big Green Egg, Traeger, and Blackstone, and it’s always fascinating how those companies have all the same kinds of problems and ideas as any of the tech companies we have on the show. 

This time, I finally had the opportunity to sit down with SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas. We’ve wanted to have SharkNinja on the show for years now, mostly because it has the best name of any company I think we’ve ever had on Decoder — it perfectly describes the structure of the company. And just in time for our grilling episode, the Ninja division of Mark’s business just launched its first ever grill. 

Check out the full transcript here on The Verge.

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic and the public face of WordPress. Last year, Matt essentially went to war, publicly and in the courts, against a hosting company called WP Engine, and there’s been significant fallout at Automattic and the broader WordPress community.  

It’s been a long, drawn-out saga. That said, Matt was willing to come on the show and talk through some of this thinking here, why he made some of the decisions he did, and also what he regrets about how some of this went down. 

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Hinge founder and CEO Justin McLeod. Hinge is one of the biggest dating apps in the United States — it’s rivaled only by Tinder, and both are owned by the massive conglomerate Match Group, which has consolidated a huge chunk of the online dating ecosystem.

Justin and I dug into that here, and we also explored some of the thorny issues around AI and dating, Hinge’s monetization, and data privacy in the second Trump administration. This is a fun one, with a whole lot going on. I think you’ll like it. 

Read the full interview transcript here on The Verge.

Links: 

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices