Nilay Patel

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 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 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 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 this 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 his 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.

And gamers themselves are fairly hostile towards AI, which you can see in the comments on Razer's own CES AI posts.

So I asked Min about all that and how he would know if he'd made the right bet here in the face of all this pushback.

As you can tell, there is 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.

And it's always 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 Minling Tan.

Here we go.

Thank you to our audience.

We are live at Brooklyn Bowl at CES.