Nilay Patel
Editor-in-chief of The Verge, which he co-founded in 2011, covering consumer technology, platforms and the policy around them.
“The way this industry talks about the thing that they're making is as though they have completely lost control of their own ambition.”
The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
Patel was reacting to Sam Altman's argument that society has to accept some bad outcomes in exchange for AI, which Patel paraphrased as: deal with the data centers, deal with the teens getting AI psychosis. He said "the industry cannot help itself," and predicted that data centers and surveillance could swing elections this cycle.
Transcript
…possibly slow down or be more careful. And so if he's talking about the straight up societal trade-off, like the reason the decoder tagline is big ideas and other problems is like it is embedded in the very notion of the big idea that you will have to answer for some problems that you have caused.
Yep.
Okay. Like of course I buy it. But the way this industry talks about the thing that they're making is though they have completely lost control of their own ambition. And we all just have to like, yeah, man, I think data centers and surveillance are going to tip the election in this round. And a large part of it is because the industry cannot help itself.
Right. Yeah. And they also, well, at some point, at some point, you and I are going to have a long, deep conversation that may or may not ever make it onto a podcast about this thing where they've all decided that AI is alive. And deserves feelings and fair treatment and all of this weird. Like the…
your email for class
action. It's going to like
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