Decoder with Nilay Patel Vox Media Podcast Network

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 you’re going to get. There’s a logic to it. But if we all start talking to computers with human language and getting human language back, well, human language is messy. And that makes the entire process of knowing what to put in and what exactly we’re going to get out of our computers different than it ever has been before.

Links: 

Attention is all you need

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots

Introducing the AI Mirror Test, which very smart people keep failing | The Verge

AI isn’t close to becoming sentient | The Conversation

These are Microsoft’s Bing AI secret rules and why it says it’s named Sydney | The Verge

‘Godfather of AI’ quits Google with regrets and fears about his life’s work | The Verge

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on Bing’s quest to beat Google | The Verge

Top AI researchers and CEOs warn against ‘risk of extinction’ | The Verge

Google Zero is here — now what? | The Verge

Cara grew from 40k to 650k in a week because artists are fed up with Meta’s AI policies | TechCrunch

How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct | The Verge


Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23937899

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 Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.


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

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 doesn’t 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 | GamesIndustry.biz

Why the video game industry is seeing so many layoffs | Polygon

The tech industry’s layoffs and hiring freezes: all of the news | The Verge

Fortnite made more than $9 billion in revenue in its first two years | The Verge

Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 Swings Past 10 Million Sold | IGN

The future of Netflix games could look like reality TV | The Verge


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 Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m 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 Eric’s visions for what that AI will do are pretty wild.

See, Eric really wants you to stop having to attend Zoom meetings yourself. You’ll hear him describe how he thinks one of the big benefits of AI at work will be letting us all create something he calls a “digital twin," essentially a deepfake of yourself that can go attend meetings on your behalf and even make decisions for you. I’ll just warn you: I tried to ask a bunch of the usual Decoder questions during this conversation, but once we got to digital twins going to Zoom meetings for people, well, I had a lot of followup questions. 

Links: 

Zoom gets its first major overhaul in 10 years, powered by generative AI | ZDNet


An interview with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan | Stratechery / Ben Thompson


Zoom is cutting about 150 jobs, or close to 2% of its workforce | CNBC


Zoom meetings are about to get weirder thanks to the Vision Pro | The Verge


Zoom Docs launches in 2024 with built-in AI collaboration features | The Verge


Zoom rewrites its policies to make clear that your videos aren’t used to train AI tools | The Verge


Zoom says its new AI tools aren’t stealing ownership of your content | The Verge


Zoom adds “post-quantum” end-to-end encryption | Zoom



Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23932774

Credits: 
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For nearly 20 years now, the web has been Google’s platform; we’ve 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, that’s suddenly not stable anymore. The number one question I have for anyone building things on someone else’s platform is: What are you going to do when that platform changes the rules?

Links: 

How Google is killing independent sites like ours | HouseFresh

HouseFresh has virtually disappeared from Google Search results. Now what? | HouseFresh

Google Is Killing Retro Dodo & Other Independent Sites | Retro Dodo

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web | The Verge

Will A.I. Break the Internet? Or Save It? | The New York Times

Google confirms the leaked Search documents are real |The Verge

An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them | SparkToro

Mountain Weekly News

Telly Visions

E-ride Hero

That Fit Friend


Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m 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 can’t recommend it enough. It’s 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 drug traffickers, evolved from the days of BlackBerry Messenger to Signal. Along the way, the FBI got involved with its very own startup, ANOM, as part of one of the most effective trojan horse operations in the history of cybersecurity. Joseph’s book is a great read, but it also touches on a lot of things we talk about a lot here on Decoder. So this conversation was a fun one. 

Links: 

Dark Wire by Joseph Cox | Hachette Book Group


How Vice became ‘a fucking clown show’ | The Verge


Cyber Official Speaks Out, Reveals Mobile Network Attacks in US | 404 Media


Revealed: The Country that Secretly Wiretapped the World for the FBI | 404 Media


How Secure Phones for Criminals Are Sold on Instagram | Motherboard


A Peek Inside the Phone Company Secretly Used in an FBI Honeypot | Motherboard


The FBI secretly launched an encrypted messaging system for criminals | The Verge


Canadian police have had master key to BlackBerry's encryption since 2010 | The Verge



Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who joined the show the day after the big Google I/O developer conference. Google’s focus during the conference was on how it’s building AI into virtually all of its products. If you’re a Decoder listener, you’ve heard me talk about this idea a lot over the past year: I call it “Google Zero,” and I’ve 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 with overviews and summaries, that’s a real possibility. What then happens to the web? 

I’ve talked to Sundar quite a bit over the past few years, and this was the most fired up I’ve ever seen him. I think you can really tell that there is a deep tension between the vision Google has for the future — where AI magically makes us smarter, more productive, more artistic — and the very real fears and anxieties creators and website owners are feeling right now about how search has changed and how AI might swallow the internet forever, and that he’s wrestling with that tension.

Links: 

Google and OpenAI are racing to rewire the internet — Command Line


Google I/O 2024: everything announced — The Verge


Google is redesigning its search engine, and it’s AI all the way down — The Verge


Project Astra is the future of AI at Google — The Verge


Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? — The Verge


YouTube is going to start cracking down on AI clones of musicians — The Verge


AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born — The Verge


How Google is killing independent sites like ours — HouseFresh


Inside the First 'SEO Heist' of the AI Era — Business Insider


Google’s Sundar Pichai talks Search, AI, and dancing with Microsoft — Decoder



Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23922415

Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices