Decoder with Nilay Patel The Verge

We spent a lot of time here on Decoder talking about electric vehicles and the future of cars and we’re usually talking about passenger vehicles or maybe cargo vans. But there’s another huge industry that can also reap the benefits of electrified transportation: agriculture. 
I co-hosted the Code Conference this week where I had the opportunity to hangout onstage with Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa. Honestly, this was one of my favorite conversations of the entire event. 
We are utterly reliant on farming as a species, and farming is utterly reliant on tractors. If we don’t have tractors, we don’t have food. But electrifying farms is hard, and Praveen explained how he and Monarch are trying to tackle that challenge. The ambition is to compete in an open way with closed platforms like John Deere, and Praveen said his goal for the Monarch platform is to be the Android of agriculture. 

Links: 

Electric robot tractors powered by Nvidia AI chips are here

John Deere turned tractors into computers — what’s next?

John Deere commits to letting farmers repair their own tractors (kind of)

Monarch Tractors to be manufactured by Foxconn

Foxconn begins rolling first Monarch electric tractors off assembly lines in Lordstown

A sneak peek into Monarch Tractor's vision-based AI technology

CNH Industrial, Monarch Tractor agree electrification technologies deal


Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23659941

Credits:

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

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was edited by Callie Wright. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, we’re bringing you something a little different. The Code Conference was this week, and we had a great time talking live onstage with all of our guests. We’ll be sharing a lot of these conversations here in the coming days, and the first one we’re sharing is my chat with Dr. Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD. 

Lisa and I spoke for half an hour, and we covered an incredible number of topics, especially about AI and the chip supply chain. The balance of supply and demand is overall in a pretty good place right now, Lisa told us, with the notable exception of these high-end GPUs powering all of the large AI models that everyone’s running. The hottest GPU in the game is Nvidia’s H100 chip. But AMD is working to compete with a new chip Lisa told us about called the MI300 that should be as fast as the H100. You’ll also hear Lisa talk about what companies are doing to increase manufacturing capacity. 

Finally, Lisa answered questions from the amazing Code audience and talked a lot about how much AMD is using AI inside the company right now. It’s more than you think, although Lisa did say AI is not going to be designing chips all by itself anytime soon. 

Okay, Dr. Lisa Su, CEO of AMD. Here we go. 

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23658688

Links: 

AI startup Lamini bets future on AMD's Instinct GPUs

Biden signs $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act

Pat Gelsinger came back to turn Intel around — here’s how it’s going

Huawei’s chip breakthrough poses new threat to Apple in China — and questions for Washington

AMD expands AI product lineup with GPU-only Instinct MI300X

Microsoft is reportedly helping AMD expand into AI chips

US curbs AI chip exports from Nvidia and AMD to some Middle East countries

Apple on the iPhone 15 Pro: 'It's Going to be the Best Game Console'



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. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, we have a special episode for you. The Code Conference wrapped up this week, and the finale included a rare interview from my Code co-host and CNBC correspondent Julia Boorstin with X CEO Linda Yaccarino. To say the sit-down with Elon Musk’s No. 2 was confrontational would be an understatement. 

Yaccarino appeared both unprepared to answer tough questions and very combative, especially when asked about comments from former trust and safety head Yoel Roth, who’s become an outspoken critic of the direction of the company since Elon took over. Roth spoke onstage at Code with Kara Swisher just an hour before, where he warned Yaccarino of the risks of the job and spoke about the extreme harassment he’s faced since leaving the company. 

Yaccarino also gave us some updated stats on X user metrics and claimed the company would turn a profit in 2024. And of course, there were some very terse exchanges concerning whether Elon really plans to start charging a subscription fee to use the platform, if he seriously plans to sue the Anti-Defamation League, and the company’s recent cuts to its election integrity team. It’s a jaw-dropping interview, and you really have to listen to the whole thing.


Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It was edited by Callie Wright. 
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What motivates Mark Zuckerberg these days? It's a question Decoder guest host Alex Heath posed at the end of his interview last week, after he and Zuckerberg had spent an hour talking about Threads, Zuckerberg's vision for how generative AI will reshape Meta's apps, the Quest 3, and other news from the company's Connect conference, which kicked off today. 

After spending the past five years as a wartime CEO, Zuckerberg is getting back to basics, and he clearly feels good about it. "I think we've done a lot of good things," he said. "But for the next wave of my life and for the company — but also outside of the company with what I'm doing at CZI [Chan Zuckerberg Initiative] and some of my personal projects — I define my life at this point more in terms of getting to work on awesome things with great people who I like working with." For Zuckerberg, "awesome things" means figuring out how to combine his company's AR, VR, and AI ambitions into new products. 
 
This rare interview with the Meta CEO also includes details on his ongoing feud with Elon Musk and the quest to beat X/Twitter using Threads, his perspective on open source, and his vision for decentralized social media. Okay, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Here we go.

Links:

Mark Zuckerberg is ready to fight Elon Musk in a cage match

The three reasons Twitter didn’t sell to Facebook

Threads app usage plummets despite initial promise as refuge from Twitter

Threads isn’t for news and politics, says Instagram’s boss

You can now verify your Threads profile on Mastodon

In show of force, Silicon Valley titans pledge ‘getting this right’ With AI

Meta is putting AI chatbots everywhere

A conversation with Bing’s chatbot left me deeply unsettled

Custom AI chatbots are quietly becoming the next big thing in fandom

Meta’s Smart Glasses can take calls, play music, and livestream from your face

Meta’s $499.99 Quest 3 headset is all about mixed reality and video games

The Meta Quest 3 is sharper, more powerful, and still trying to make mixed reality happen

Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about Apple’s Vision Pro


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. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TechCrunch is one of the most important trade publications in the world of tech and startups, and its annual Disrupt conference is where dozens of major companies have launched… and some have failed.
Matt has been the editor-in-chief of TechCrunch for essentially a decade now, and he and I have been both friends and competitors the entire time. We’ve competed for scoops, traded criticisms, and asked each other for advice in running our publications and managing our teams.
So when Matt announced last month that he’s stepping down from his role at TechCrunch it felt important to have him come on for what you might call an exit interview — a look back at the past decade running a media outlet at the center of the tech ecosystem, with all of the chaos that’s entailed.

Links: 
Why We Sold TechCrunch To AOL, And Where We Go From Here | TechCrunch (2010)
TechCrunch founder leaves AOL in a cloud of acrimony | CNN Money (2011)
SB Nation Sacks AOL in Raid of Former Engadget Team for Competing New Tech Site, As AOL Zeroes in on New EiC | All Things D (2011)
Why Every Company Needs A 'No Bozos' Policy | Forbes (2012)
Artificial Intelligence Nonprofit OpenAI Launches With Backing From Elon Musk And Sam Altman | TechCrunch
Just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine | The Verge

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Nick Statt and Kate Cox. It was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts, from longtime space reporter and Verge alum Loren Grush, is out today.
It’s been 40 years since Sally Ride became the first American woman in space — but she was far from the last. In the early 1980s six women — Sally Ride, Judy Resnick, Kathy Sullivan, Anna Fisher, Rhea Seddon, and Shannon Lucid — would get a chance to fly a mission on one of the space shuttles… including, unfortunately, the ill-fated 1986 Challenger launch.
The story of the six may be history, but it’s far from ancient, and there’s a lot going on here that ties directly to today. And of course, what’s an astronaut story without some high-flying hijinks in it? Listen to the end for Loren’s favorite.


Links:
Nichelle Nichols - NASA Recruitment Film (1977)
Top Black Woman Is Ousted By NASA | The New York Times (1973)
The Space Truck | The Washington Post (1981)
NASA Artemis
Five former SpaceX employees speak out about harassment at the company | The Verge
Why did Blue Origin leave so many female space reporters out of its big reveal? | The Verge
‘We better watch out’: NASA boss sounds alarm on Chinese moon ambitions | Politico
Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule | The New Yorker
US Takes First Step Toward Regulating Commercial Human Spaceflight | Bloomberg
Apply to attend the Code Conference

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 was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan

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