Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus

Hi. Time to discuss the book, ladies. Honestly, Sarah, I didn't read it, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new family freedom offer. That's not really the point of the club. Well, I'm closing the book on AT and T, and I am starting a new chapter with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3,200 and gave us four new phones on the house. Oh, plot twist. Get them off. Introducing Family Freedom, our lowest cost to switch our biggest family savings, all on America's largest five g network. Visit tmobile.com/familyfreedom to start saving today. Up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes fifteen days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement. Example, Apple iPhone sixteen, one twenty eight gigs, $8.29 99. Eligible trade in, example, iPhone 11 pro. For well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel, contact us. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Eli Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. We're back to start the year off with a very special live interview with Razer CEO, Min Liang Tan, which we taped in front of a terrific audience at Brooklyn Bowl in Vegas at CES. Now, Razer is obviously best known for making mice and keyboards and gaming PCs in its signature black and bright green with a smattering of RGB LEDs to set everything off. But the company always makes splashy announcements at CES, and this year was no different. And along with the hype, there was plenty of controversy. This year at CES, Razer earned those splashy headlines and not a little controversy for something it calls Project Ava, an AI companion that has a physical presence in the real world. It's an anime hologram that sits in a jar on your desk. Ava is powered by, you guessed it, Elon Musk's grok. There's a lot of choices bundled up in all of that and Razer can't really fall back on the it's just a prototype defense because it's taking $20 reservations and entirely expects to ship this product potentially even this year. So I spent a good chunk of time in this interview asking Minh some very obvious questions. To which I'm not sure I got very satisfying answers. I really wanted to know if Minh and Razer have really thought through the implications of building AI companions after a string of stories this past year detailing the mental health issues chatbots have caused for so many people. And, of course, I wanted to know why Min and Razer had chosen Grok, which is facing outrage around the world for allowing users to create deep faked pornographic images of real women and children. Min says they chose Grok for its conversational capabilities, but he was also not very convinced by the notion that products like this always end up being turned into …