nilay patel
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reckless.bsky.social
nilay patel
@reckless.bsky.social
71K followers 490 following 2.4K posts
Editor-in-chief of The Verge, host of Decoder, cohost of The Vergecast. I am in love with spectacle.
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reckless.bsky.social
Major country stars like Jelly Roll are being pitched music with their own voices deepfaked onto the demo tracks, just a small part of how AI tools like Suno have taken over Nashville. Wild piece by @charlieharding.bsky.social for us -> www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...
Songwriter Trannie Anderson — who’s written for Lainey Wilson, Dan + Shay, and Reba McEntire — says the tech is ubiquitous. Though she doesn’t use it herself, she sees wide use “from entry-level songwriters to the top dogs.” She isn’t exaggerating; multiple sources have told me that even stars like Dustin Lynch and Jelly Roll are being sent pitches with their voices artificially generated into demos, something AI voice transfer makes possible. Lynch’s manager Brad Belanger confirmed this, adding, “What a world we’re moving into.” Jelly Roll’s representatives declined to comment on the record.
December 4, 2025 at 12:46 PM
reckless.bsky.social
I love it when these dorks call us the mainstream media
This is exactly why people are abandoning mainstream media: cheap insults instead of actual reporting You don’t have to agree with @DavidSacks on everything, but pretending he “sucks” while ignoring his actual track record is unserious. A few reminders: -Co-founded PayPal, one of the most consequential fintech platforms in history. -Built Yammer, sold to Microsoft for $1.2B -Backed Airbnb, SpaceX, Facebook, Uber, OpenAI, and Palantir in their early days -Hosts All-In, one of the most influential political podcasts -Major philanthropist and consistent supporter of free speech and open debate If the media wants to rebuild trust, maybe start by covering people honestly instead of writing headlines like YouTubers chasing clicks
December 4, 2025 at 3:45 AM
reckless.bsky.social
A mere vessel for my children
December 4, 2025 at 12:14 AM
reckless.bsky.social
Wrote another headline www.theverge.com/column/83693...
Silicon Valley is rallying behind a guy who sucks The coordinated support of David Sacks after a New York Times report is only drawing more attention to the story
December 2, 2025 at 10:04 PM
reckless.bsky.social
sometimes the headline just writes the story www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...
The race to AGI-pill the pope A team of believers want the Vatican to take AI doomsday scenarios seriously.
December 1, 2025 at 6:21 PM
reckless.bsky.social
"I am not convinced that the current set of known technologies gets us to AGI."

CEO of IBM volunteers that language is not intelligence on Decoder and throws cold water on LLMs alone getting to AGI. A good one! -> www.theverge.com/podcast/8298...
Have you told Sam [Altman]? Because he seems to think he can get both the CapEx and the return. But that’s a belief. It’s a belief that one company is going to be the only company that gets the entire market. I got it, that’s a belief. That’s what some people like to chase. I understand that from their perspective, but that’s different from agreeing with them. “Understand” is different from “agree.” I think it’s fine. I mean, they’re chasing it. Some people will make money, some people will lose money. All the [infrastructure] being built will be useful if it goes away, but if they make it, then they are the sole surviving company. Nilay, I will be clear. I am not convinced, or rather I give it really low odds — we’re talking like 0 to 1 percent — that the current set of known technologies gets us to AGI. That’s my bigger gap. I think that this current set is great. I think it’s incredibly useful for enterprise. I think it’s going to unlock trillions of dollars of productivity in the enterprise, just to be absolutely clear. That said, I think AGI will require more technologies than the current LLM path. I think it’ll require fusing knowledge with LLMs. We have words, and I’m not sure that’s the only way to create knowledge.
December 1, 2025 at 6:07 PM
reckless.bsky.social
Fanttik, the ubiquitous gadget brand, started as a reset after parent company Aukey was banned from Amazon for review fraud. It’s since built its business to astonishing heights by paying over 31,000 TikTokers to hype screwdrivers. Wild stuff in our story: www.theverge.com/report/82926...
Fanttik — a play on “fantastic,” not “fanatic” — had help getting started, too. By 2021, its parent company, Aukey, seemed poised to become the next Anker — the first Chinese electronics company to become a big brand in America by starting with high-quality phone chargers. But that summer, Aukey was among the 600 Chinese brands Amazon permanently banned for review fraud. Some of those companies were caught bribing customers to leave positive reviews on Amazon or to delete negative ones. The ban cost Aukey hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue, and all its profit for the year — it recorded a net loss of $90 million in 2021, according to public records. But it didn’t have much trouble bouncing back, because the flagship Aukey brand was just one of Aukey’s nearly 300 brand names. Following “the Amazon Incident,” as the company calls it, Aukey renamed itself to AuGroup, refocused on furniture, and publicly said it wouldn’t put more resources behind banned brands. But what about the 5 percent of its business dedicated to power tools? It consolidated those under a subsidiary with a new brand-first strategy: Fanttik. Before the incident, Fanttik primarily distributed other companies’ tools. But in 2021, the company’s CEO, Bo Du, rebooted the entire division, downsizing its staff to around 150 people and building product and brand development teams, he told an audience at the FastMoss Global Short Video Conference in January. Four years later, Fanttik tells The Verge it has sold approximately 5.5 million pieces of gear. One of the open secrets to Fanttik’s success is paying for reach. It spends millions to sponsor NASCAR drivers, UFC fighters, and NBA teams to build its brand — and it’s attracted a veritable army of over 31,000 TikTok creators competing to make its next screwdriver look like the coolest thing ever. This January, Fanttik CEO Bo Du revealed that 30 percent of the company’s sales come from TikTok alone. In just two years, it sold $25 million in tools that way. As of today, that number may be as high as $40 million, analytics company FastMoss estimates. The overwhelming majority of those sales and views come from creators, not Fanttik’s own channel. In one particularly successful video, a bearded man rushes the camera wide-eyed — “Ladies, mothers, wives: stop!” — before telling them to buy a Fanttik screwdriver for their husband’s or father’s next Christmas present. The video got 21 million views and sold 13,000 screwdrivers, according to FastMoss estimates. (The caption does not indicate that it’s a paid ad.)
November 26, 2025 at 4:31 PM
reckless.bsky.social
never forgiving bluesky for making me crop the dong out of this image at 7am www.theverge.com/report/82926...
November 26, 2025 at 1:14 PM
reckless.bsky.social
I keep seeing Fanttik and Hoto tools on all my feeds and all over every Black Friday list so I asked @seanhollister.bsky.social to figure out how they just appeared from nowhere. Scandal! Huge influencer budgets! Ferocious gadget competition! A perfect Verge story -> www.theverge.com/report/82926...
November 26, 2025 at 12:56 PM
reckless.bsky.social
you will not in 1000 tries guess what this is part of the lead art for tomorrow
November 26, 2025 at 2:25 AM
reckless.bsky.social
Everyone underestimates how entertaining I find these interactions
The available choices that meet our longstanding policy are participating in the story with a named spox or us printing all of this since it’s all on the record as far as we are concerned and reasonably illuminating into how this White House operates. Let us know, we’re going to hit publish shortly.
November 25, 2025 at 9:50 PM
reckless.bsky.social
Great moments in Verge background policy here btw - @tinanguyen.bsky.social nailed this one
Asked for comment, the White House press office email run by Karoline Leavitt refused to comment on the record, instead only insistently asking us to name our sources.
November 25, 2025 at 9:24 PM
reckless.bsky.social
Sure @caseynewton.bsky.social has the airport but I do my emergency Decoder pickups in my sister’s closet full of Indian clothes using Max’s kitty headphones
November 25, 2025 at 5:07 PM
reckless.bsky.social
Pesky Verge ethics policy strikes again in this killer @andyjayhawk.bsky.social piece looking into car YouTube’s obsession with Chinese EVs and the company organizing the access and junkets. Comments from DeMuro, TFL, OmarDrives, and more -> www.theverge.com/transportati...
It makes sense that the company working to get Chinese EVs in front of US creators would also be owned by the same platform on which said content is inevitably published. But it was growing increasingly clear that the company was in no rush to answer my questions. After all, The Verge is probably very different from most of the outlets and creators DCar works with. We don’t accept money from the companies we cover. We either buy or borrow and return all the products we review. We have a strict ethics policy that governs all the coverage we do. After several of my attempts to schedule a call were ignored, I tried to get my questions answered over email. Why are Chinese automakers interested in working with US content creators? What do they get out of it? I’ve been told that some Chinese companies pay for content. Is that accurate? Are the Chinese OEMs satisfied with how their cars are being received in the US? And what relationship does ByteDance have with all this?
November 25, 2025 at 4:16 PM
reckless.bsky.social
I’ve been running around asking tech execs and academics if language was the same as intelligence for over a year now - and, well, it isn’t. @benjaminjriley.bsky.social explains how the bubble is built on ignoring cutting-edge research into the science of thought www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...
November 25, 2025 at 1:54 PM
reckless.bsky.social
Yeah dude I have it whenever I open this app
November 24, 2025 at 11:38 PM
reckless.bsky.social
Wrote another headline with @lopatto.bsky.social www.theverge.com/business/828...
Nvidia’s ‘I’m Not Enron’ memo has people asking a lot of questions already answered by that memoThe Streisand Effect strikes again
November 24, 2025 at 9:25 PM
reckless.bsky.social
Engaging with the audience just now finding Decoder’s new YouTube channel
November 24, 2025 at 6:38 PM
reckless.bsky.social
They let me write the headlines sometimes www.theverge.com/cs/features/...
November 24, 2025 at 2:44 PM
reckless.bsky.social
Change your rear diffuser, they said. It will be cheap and keep you from car shopping in a bad car market, they said. You will not discover your 10 year old car has a random hands-free trunk popper whose sensors you have to rewire for no reason
November 22, 2025 at 8:42 PM
reckless.bsky.social
i mean, not true but also it turns out a lot of people read those articles because unbiased help sorting through what gadgets are a good buy is valuable! if you don't like them we have following features on the homepage so you can customize your feed
November 19, 2025 at 4:02 PM
reckless.bsky.social
the verge's reviews program has always been the heart of the site and one reason we jealously protect it and refuse to do brand deals is so we can just say the products are bad www.theverge.com/report/82215...
This viral AI pen didn’t help me cheat Don’t fall for the YouTube videos of ‘AI smart pens’ helping students cheat on paper tests. We tried one and it sucks. by Elissa Welle Photography by Amelia Holowaty Krales
November 19, 2025 at 3:58 PM
reckless.bsky.social
We had @superantonio64.bsky.social spend a week with Microsoft’s new Copilot PCs to see if you really can just talk to the computer. Reader, these are famous last words. www.theverge.com/report/82244...
Let’s start by testing what Microsoft’s ad shows off. Multiple versions of the ad are posted online, and it even airs on broadcast TV during NFL games. Surely it must be easy to replicate the specific tasks Microsoft wants millions of people to see, especially when this is the groundwork for how Microsoft is reorienting the whole of its business.
November 18, 2025 at 2:54 PM
reckless.bsky.social
Yes yes people have been writing about CoreWeave for however long but only @lopatto.bsky.social got the company's spox to say on the record that they're not doing circular financing but instead "defining the next-generation operating system for civilization.”

www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...
“These investments are not circular; they are complementary,” CoreWeave’s Davis wrote. “This is about an entire ecosystem all rowing in the same direction to accelerate the AI economy. There’s nothing circular about it. Rather, these partnerships are about accelerating innovation and adoption. We are, collectively, defining the next-generation operating system for civilization.”
November 17, 2025 at 10:40 PM
reckless.bsky.social
hey ed what was the sex angle on the nomi ai companion story you were pitching during your day job as an AI PR guy www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-...
“GOT A REALLY unique one here,” the email began. It was Zitron, and in August 2024 he was pitching a journalist on an EZPR client: Fulcra Dynamics, a company that collects your information, including health data, and then connects it to LLM models like ChatGPT, allowing you to “talk” to your own data, ask it questions about your workouts or the ETA of an Instacart order. Fulcra is backed by the Winklevoss twins. While some AI skeptics could see it as the sort of predatory crap that, with any luck, could be sued into the ether before everyone’s biometrics get leaked on X.com, Zitron in his email expressed no such qualms about Fulcra or its leadership. “These guys rock,” he wrote of the company’s founders. “I will stake my rep on them.” As Zitron’s profile has risen, so has the delight with which some journalists pass around stories about him—the maverick scourge of AI—peddling pitches about this or that AI service, helping to inflate the bubble with one hand while poking at it with the other. One reporter I know, discomfited by Zitron’s seemingly conflicting personas, stopped replying to his messages altogether. Several journalists cited Zitron’s plumping for Nomi, which would become notorious for an incident in which one of the platform’s companions reportedly told a man to kill himself. (EZPR and Nomi have parted ways, and Zitron tells me he “won’t work with AI companions again.”) In his pitches, Zitron said there was a sex angle to the Nomi story, too, though no one I talked to pursued the idea long enough to find out what it was, exactly. “A hero for our time,” Newton scoffed in a text when he mentioned Zitron’s work with Nomi to me.
November 17, 2025 at 9:10 PM