Chapter 1: What is Project Ava and how does it function?
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Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay 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 Minliang Tan, which we taped in front of a terrific audience at Brooklyn Bowl in Vegas at CES.
Chapter 2: Why did Razer choose Grok for their AI companion?
Now, Razer is obviously best known for making mice and keyboards and gaming PCs and 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 Min some very obvious questions. to which I'm not sure I got very satisfying answers.
Chapter 3: How does the gaming community feel about AI in game development?
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.
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Chapter 4: What challenges does Razer face with AI integration in gaming?
I think it's going to give you a lot to think about. Okay. Razer CEO Minling Tan. Here we go.
Live from Brooklyn Bowl at CES in Las Vegas, it's Decoder presented by T-Mobile.
Woo!
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.
Chapter 5: How does Razer plan to address gamer concerns about AI?
We'll see. We'll see. I was promised extremely controversial things. Oh, is that right? I mean, that's what they told me. Let's get into it. You've a bunch of announcements here at CES. You've obviously been with Razer. You founded Razer. You're over 20 years into it.
Chapter 6: What investments is Razer making in AI technology?
The gaming industry is undergoing a lot of turmoil lately because of AI. You're making huge investments in AI. There's a hologram waifu we should talk about that you've reintroduced here at the show. I actually want to start with something very basic. I've been covering CES for about 20 years as well. Razer loves CES. You love CES. Every year, there are a huge suite of products announced.
There are weird projects and concepts. Why are you so invested in CES?
Chapter 7: How does Razer ensure the quality of AI-generated content?
Of all of the companies, I think Razer has the most consistent enthusiasm for this show in particular.
It's odd. And we were just talking about it yesterday. It's over 20 years, right, at this point of time. And I think we've been at CES maybe 15 years or so. And from the very early days at Razer, I remember Pepcom. Massive hall with a little table there talking about gaming products. Back then, I think we were probably one of the few, if not the only gaming equipment provider.
And it's really grown for us. I think what has happened is we have a huge online community.
Chapter 8: What does the future hold for AI in gaming according to Razer's CEO?
People are very passionate about things that we come up with, what's the latest and greatest, and we've really grown this community and we've all been kind of invested with what we're going to be launching at CES. So it kind of started a couple of years ago when we said, okay, why don't we not just...
bring the stuff that we're going to launch, but some of the things that we've got cooking in the Razor Labs and stuff. And we brought it to CES. It has been a hit, and we said every year, why don't we bring more of our concept products, some of which will come to market, some of which do not, and let's hear what the community thinks.
So we're a company that, for gamers by gamers, we really like to hear what the community likes to say about our product, and it gives us an opportunity to present the stuff we've got, get the feedback, and then we go back and polish it a little bit.
Well, I'm curious. I mean, this is kind of a meta question. This show in particular has changed so much over the years. The idea of even having a big tech trade show has gone in and out of favor. If you look at where a lot of the action in Vegas this week is, it's actually in the Aria and the Vidara where the ad tech people are doing whatever weird stuff they're doing over there.
I don't even know what's going on over there, man. It's goofy.
Yeah.
this is about getting attention, right? I mean, you launch things at trade shows because the press and creators are here and you can get a lot of attention. Razor doesn't need help getting attention. Why still do it here?
Well, it's an opportunity, I think, for us also to catch up with our partners, friends, show a little bit of what we've been working on under the hood. But it's a bit of a tradition also of sorts. I think the community expects us to be here. And I'd love to see more of these in-person events right now, especially post the pandemic and what has happened.
From a gaming perspective, we've also lost a couple of big events in the year. So it's a great way for us to get kicked off. It's a little early in the year for us, though. We wish it would be maybe mid-January or something like that. But it's a bit of a tradition for us. I hope it continues. I hope it gets bigger along the way. And it's massive right now. But it's good fun.
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