Nilay Patel
Editor-in-chief of The Verge, which he co-founded in 2011, covering consumer technology, platforms and the policy around them.
“I'm a writer by trade. They all write like trucks. They all sound bad. … Everyone can see it a mile away. Have some respect for yourself and your audience.”
Decoder with Nilay Patel · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
Asked whether ordinary people are part of the problem by using chatbots, Patel says no: people should use the tools so they understand their limits. His one exception is letting them write for you. He recommends having one build a small piece of software instead.
Transcript
of implies that at some point they'll be profitable on that scale. Like they will just be selling the model and they will not be training anyone or something. OpenAI has announced similar kinds of numbers. Once you get there, your ability to invest heavily in extremely novel regulatory schemes and safety concerns, it starts to get pressured. Should you spend money on developing intense safety systems that limit your competitiveness or should you pay a dividend to your shareholders? As a public company, it's unclear which way that should go. probably everyone listening is like safety you should spend the money on safety but the the actual investor pressure in modern america is the other way right sure especially given the amount of money that has gone into these companies and you might be seeking a return on so i i think for those two companies in particular there's a reason altman is doing interviews where he's saying for safety reasons we might slow down the ipo right we might avoid the pressure of capitalism for like one more turn while we try to figure out these costs I don't know that's going to work, but I think that's why he's saying it. I think Elon is just behind. I think he would love a pause because he's out there saying Grok is not competitive at the frontier and it will take until the next two versions of Grok to be totally competitive with Anthropic. Of course he would love a pause. Elon also runs a giant social media website and a car company with a cloud service that is faced with cyber attacks all day long. So I'm sure he understands the very huge nature of state-sponsored cyber attacks on X. Obviously. Dennis Isabas at Google. Google also understands what cyber capabilities are like when they advance and they have very advanced models of their own. So I think there's just a swirl of motivations, but truly at the core is the fact that they do not like or trust each other. Elon sued Sam over the very existence of OpenAI. Anthropic exists because all of those people did not trust OpenAI's commitment to safety. In the course of that trial between Elon and Altman, everyone is emailing about how much they're afraid of Dennis Asabas and his capability at Google. Like there's not trust in this industry in that way that would allow, you know, a bunch of car makers to get together and be like, we're all doing seatbelts. Like even that didn't happen. The government had to say we're all doing seatbelts.
Right, right. Exactly. So for a regular user, say like for people who are listening, they're like, I'm using it for meal prep and whatever else that has, whatever else you chat to your chat bot about. I guess the thing that has come up in my chats with friends is, am I part of the problem? Which maybe is a really self-centered way of thinking about this. But really, what do you say to people who are like, am I contributing to this in some way by chatting with whatever it is? Like, do I need to delete my claw or whatever it is?
No, I think a more informed population is a better one that is better able to face threats and concoct the political will to introduce novel regulatory schemes. That just seems very basic to me. Like you should understand how the things work before you pressure your politicians to control them, right? There's something there that I think is important. There's a part of this where the market demand for what AI is and should do is still incoherent because all the companies have been saying this, it can do anything. Well, if it turns out that all consumers really want to do is have a more chatty Google search and all small businesses want to do is get through their taxes faster. And that's where it ends. Like the market will speak. And so if you're not a participant in that market, it's going to get away from you. And if you don't want to be a participant in that market and you just want to show up at the town hall meeting and scream out data centers, you should probably also know that Claude has real limits or ChatGP has real limits. Like they will fall down on the job in very specific ways. And that is powerful for you as well. So I do think it's stuff you should use. I do not think you should let it write for you. I'm a writer by trade. They all write like trucks. Like they all sound bad. They're all stupid. Everyone can see it a mile away, man. Like have some respect for yourself and your audience. You should not make AI slot posters for your deli. Like don't do this stuff that's lazy. Do the things that are interesting. There are lots of interesting things you can do. Have it write you a piece of software. Have Claude write you a web app to do some nonsense thing. I think understanding, oh, this is a glimmer of the kind of capability that these companies are worried about is actually like eye-opening. It expands your horizons in terms of both what could this do for me? How could this be powerful? And how should it be limited? And so there's being an informed citizen of a democracy and understanding the tools that might change the world around you, I think is tremendously important. I'm saying that because I'm a tech reporter and I love tech, but there's something important there as
well. Neil, thanks for coming back and talking with us about this. Yeah, so we'll include a link to Nilay Patel podcast decoder on our show notes page. And every weekend, you can find new episodes of Apple News in Conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab. That's the little headphones at the bottom to find it.
You're either all in on this model or maybe you're building with another. There's either speed or is it security? Or you're AWS AI. Don't pick a side. Pick them all. AWS AI is how.
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