6 posts tagged “nilay-patel”
2026
The people do not yearn for automation (via) This written and video essay by Nilay Patel explores why AI is unpopular with the general public even as usage numbers for ChatGPT continue to skyrocket.
It’s a superb piece of commentary, and something I expect I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come.
Nilay’s core idea is that people afflicted with “software brain” - who see the world as something to be automated as much as possible, and attempt to model everything in terms of information flows and data - are becoming detached from everyone else.
[…] software brain has ruled the business world for a long time. AI has just made it easier than ever for more people to make more software than ever before — for every kind of business to automate big chunks of itself with software. It’s everywhere: the absolute cutting edge of advertising and marketing is automation with AI. It’s not being a creative.
But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! The entire human experience cannot be captured in a database. That’s the limit of software brain. That’s why people hate AI. It flattens them.
Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all. The people do not yearn for automation. I’m a full-on smart home sicko; the lights and shades and climate controls of my house are automated in dozens of ways. But huge companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have struggled for over a decade now to make regular people care about smart home automation at all. And they just don’t.
2025
Our plan is to build direct traffic to our site. and newsletters just one kind of direct traffic in the end. I don’t intend to ever rely on someone else’s distribution ever again ;)
— Nilay Patel, on The Verge's new newsletter strategy
2024
Why The Atlantic signed a deal with OpenAI. Interesting conversation between Nilay Patel and The Atlantic CEO (and former journalist/editor) Nicholas Thompson about the relationship between media organizations and LLM companies like OpenAI.
On the impact of these deals on the ongoing New York Times lawsuit:
One of the ways that we [The Atlantic] can help the industry is by making deals and setting a market. I believe that us doing a deal with OpenAI makes it easier for us to make deals with the other large language model companies if those come about, I think it makes it easier for other journalistic companies to make deals with OpenAI and others, and I think it makes it more likely that The Times wins their lawsuit.
How could it help? Because deals like this establish a market value for training content, important for the fair use component of the legal argument.
Nilay Patel reports a hallucinated ChatGPT summary of his own article (via) Here's a ChatGPT bug that's a new twist on the old issue where it would hallucinate the contents of a web page based on the URL.
The Verge editor Nilay Patel asked for a summary of one of his own articles, pasting in the URL.
ChatGPT 4o replied with an entirely invented summary full of hallucinated details.
It turns out The Verge blocks ChatGPT's browse mode from accessing their site in their robots.txt:
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /
Clearly ChatGPT should reply that it is unable to access the provided URL, rather than inventing a response that guesses at the contents!
2022
The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience.
Welcome to hell, Elon (via) If you only read one thing about the Elon acquisition of Twitter make it this, by Nilay Patel. Outstanding insights into what it actually takes to to run a commercial social media service.