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Gamers love AI in game dev — they just don’t know it yet, says Razer’s CEO
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 Las Vegas during CES. Razer is obviously best known for making mice, 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, Razer earned those splashy headlines and more than a little controversy for something it calls Project Ava, an AI companion that has a physical presence in the real world as an anime hologram that sits in a jar on your desk. Ava is powered by, you guessed it, Elon Musk’s Grok. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. There are 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. It’s taking $20 “reservations” and entirely expects to ship this thing, potentially even this year. So I spent a good chunk of time in this interview asking Min some very obvious questions, to which I’m not sure I got very satisfying answers. I really wanted to know if Min and Razer had really thought through the implications of building AI companions, after a string of stories 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 deepfaked 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 creepy sexual objects, despite an entire year of headlines about AI psychosis and people turning chatbots into romantic partners. That exchange really set the tone for the rest of my conversation with Min, which focused on why exactly he’s pushing Razer so hard into AI when it does not seem at all clear that the core gamer demographic wants any of this. The gaming community at large has been absolutely rocked by the AI art debate that’s ripped through the broader industry in the past 12 months, with concerns over labor, copyright, and even just experimental AI use in game development putting some of the industry’s most beloved studios into full-blown crisis mode. Gamers themselves are fairly hostile toward AI, which you can see in the comments on Razer’s own CES AI posts. So I asked Min about that, and how he would know if he had made the right bet here in the face of all this pushback. As you can tell, there was a lot of back and forth here, and this was a really good conversation. Min and I really dug into some of the biggest issues in tech and gaming, themes that are going to be central throughout 2026. It’s also great to do these kinds of episodes live in front of an audience. I think it’s going to give you a lot to think about. Okay: Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Hello, welcome to Decoder. I’m Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I’m talking with Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan. Welcome, Min. Thank you for having me. Nailed it. Thank you to our audience. We are live at Brooklyn Bowl at CES. I’m very excited to be doing this in front of a live audience. You’re going to hear them throughout the show because Min has no shortage of extremely controversial things to say. We’ll see, we’ll see. I was promised “extremely controversial.” Oh, is that right? I mean, that’s what they told me. Let’s get into it. You’ve made a bunch of announcements here at CES. You’ve obviously been with Razer for a long time. You founded Razer, and you’re…

This 5-foot lamp is a supersized tribute to the world’s most iconic pen
The Bic Lamp can be hung, mounted, or used as a vertical standing lamp. | Image: Seletti Seletti, an Italian design brand known for everything from furniture to tableware, has debuted an unusual tribute to an icon of design: the Bic Cristal pen. To celebrate its 75th anniversary, Seletti has supersized the pen and replaced its ink cartridge with a long LED-filled tube to illuminate your living room, office, or that closet where they keep all the stationery at work. The Bic Lamp, as it's simply called, was introduced at the 2026 Maison&Objet show in Paris - think CES, but for interior designers. Seletti says it was created at a 12:1 scale, which makes it just shy of six feet long given the Bic Cristal pen typically measures arou … Read the full story at The Verge.

L’iPhone 18 Pro aurait la Dynamic Island en haut à gauche
Selon les dernières révélations du leaker Jon Prosser (qui est poursuivi par Apple après de précédentes fuites), Apple va modifier l’iPhone 18 Pro pour mettre la Dynamic Island dans le coin supérieur gauche de l’écran. Il affirme que l’intégration du nouveau système Face ID sous l’écran entraînerait le déplacement de la découpe de la caméra […] Lire la suite... Suivez iPhoneAddict.fr sur Facebook, et suivez-nous sur Twitter N'oubliez pas de télécharger notre Application gratuite iAddict pour iPhone et iPad (lien App Store) L’article L’iPhone 18 Pro aurait la Dynamic Island en haut à gauche est apparu en premier sur iPhoneAddict.fr.

Asus may have made its last phone
The Zenfone 12 Ultra is Asus’s latest — and perhaps final — flagship phone. Asus chairman Jonney Shih told Taiwan's Inside that the company is done making phones for now, marking the end of its Zenfone and ROG Phone lines. "Asus will no longer add new mobile phone models in the future," Shih reportedly said (translated with Google Translate). He didn't entirely rule out a return though, instead saying the company is entering a state of "indefinite observation" of the market, and that it will "continue to take care of the brand's mobile phone users." Asus's own-brand phones haven't been particularly exciting since the teeny-tiny Zenfone 10 in 2023, though its ROG Phone line has more or less been the gold standard … Read the full story at The Verge.

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