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

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Ipatel, 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 Razor 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 CS, Razor 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 is 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 Razor 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.

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