{"id":421938,"date":"2026-01-20T18:32:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T18:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/421938\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T18:32:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T18:32:09","slug":"razer-ceo-cant-get-out-of-his-own-way-in-awful-interview-on-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/421938\/","title":{"rendered":"Razer CEO Can’t Get Out Of His Own Way In Awful Interview On AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a splendidly combative interview with Razer\u2019s billionaire CEO Min-Liang Tan,\u00a0The Verge\u2018s Nilay Patel took him to task<\/a> over the peripheral company\u2019s approach to AI, not least including the Grok-powered waifu-AI-in-a-jar stunt<\/a> it pulled at this year\u2019s CES. The hour-long interview gets more and more uncomfortable as it becomes clear Tan has no answers for any of the crucial questions Patel is putting to him. And just wait until he\u2019s asked what games he\u2019s played recently.<\/p>\n

The interview, which took place live on stage at 2026\u2019s CES, has such a peculiar tone. The Verge\u2018s Nilay Patel makes pretty obviously cynical remarks about Razer\u2019s approach in terms of the attention-seeking silliness it pretends to be developing, and Min-Liang Tan replies as if the questions are entirely sincere. Of the Ava AI tube, \u201cDid you say to your team, \u2018I want a holographic anime waifu on my desk\u2019? You say the metric is \u2018what we want.\u2019 Who was like, \u2018I want this\u2019?\u201d asks Patel. Tan then launches into a deeply sincere response about how the holo-lady was there to represent technology Razer can create for game companies, meeting an imagined desire for \u201ca holographic representation of some of your latest characters,\u201d and that the product demonstrates \u201cwe\u2019re now able to get personality there and have conversational AI coming through,\u201d and further that it isn\u2019t just \u201cgreat software\u201d but now features \u201cgreat intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

As impossible as it is to think of a single use-case for a game character appearing in a physical tube and being able to spurt Grok responses back at people, Tan enthuses, \u201cIt\u2019s that premise of being able to chat, as opposed to clicking a button or typing on something, and having a little thing over there.\u201d It\u2019s \u201ca little bit of sci-fi, us growing up always wanting something cool like that, and so we said, \u2018Hey, it\u2019s a great concept,\u2019 and I think the community loves it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ava, which has a website<\/a> that\u2019s taking $20 preorder deposits and states that the product \u201cis expected to be available in the second half of 2026,\u201d is certainly not going to be released then, if at all, as becomes awkwardly obvious as the interview continues. When pressed on the reality of Ava actually being developed as a consumer product, rather than something \u201chack[ed] together\u201d for CES, Tan starts to prevaricate. \u201cWe plan to put it out, but we do want to get as much feedback, to hear what the concerns are, right? Are there things we can do better? What\u2019s cool? What are the characters that we would like to get on?\u201d Which are all really strange questions to be asking of a product that\u2019s supposedly going on sale later this year. Not least one that\u2019s planning to run on Grok, Elon Musk\u2019s wildly unstable and poorly managed AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan you care about trust and safety, and also partner with Grok?\u201d asked Patel, with the interview taking place as the stories of Grok\u2019s gleeful creation of revenge porn and CSAM<\/a> were breaking. Tan does not answer the question at all, but rather speaks of Grok\u2019s \u201creally great conversational AI model.\u201d When Patel puts to him the other obvious issues of a Grok-powered conversational device, Tan gives some of the most astonishingly dreadful responses, such as declaring, \u201cWell, the doors have been open since Tamagotchi,\u201d and \u201cwe\u2019ve interacted with NPCs.\u201d Patel desperately persists, laboring over the point that intentions are meaningless when we all know what gen-AI is already doing, but Tan refuses to engage, instead just repeating the usual lines about \u201csoftware guardrails\u201d and how the tech is [deep sigh] \u201cevolving.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Ava\u00a9 Razer <\/p>\n

Patel continues heroically on. When asking Tan about glowy-keyboard company Razer\u2019s intentions to invest $600 million into \u201cAI\u201d alongside employing 150 AI engineers, the host points out \u201cthat gamers hate it. The gamers, I think, are in open revolt against AI coming into their games, into their platforms.\u201d This obviously hits rather close to home for the Razer CEO, who arrived at CES under the banner of \u201cAI is the future of gaming.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tan attempts to draw a line between the \u201cAI slop\u201d that most game players are currently revolting against, and the nebulous \u201cAI tools\u201d that will help developers with QA and cause them to \u201cdevelop better games.\u201d He talks of a \u201cQA companion\u201d that Razer is developing to \u201cwork with the human QA tester\u201d by, um, filling in forms. Genuinely, that\u2019s the example.<\/p>\n

But as much as Patel pushes, Tan never provides an actual example of a compelling use case. Instead it\u2019s all about how \u201chelpful\u201d it will be, how it\u2019ll \u201cwork with\u201d current products, but never with a single concrete example of what he\u2019s actually talking about. But it is, of course, \u201crevolutionary.\u201d Thank goodness for Patel, who jumps in at this point to demand that Tan explain what exactly is \u201crevolutionary\u201d about putting a camera with \u201cAI\u201d in it in some headphones in Razer\u2019s Motoko. The answer: \u201cWell, I would say, first off, we are really looking at being able to have an unobtrusive universal form factor to enable AI smarts.\u201d Ho boy. It\u2019s ChatGPT talking at you in your ears. And, more specifically, an imaginary future version of ChatGPT that can interpret live camera footage and ambient audio and provide related answers based on these feeds.<\/p>\n

And for all of Tan\u2019s protestations that Razer isn\u2019t interested in \u201cslop,\u201d he then goes on to deliver that hoary old line, \u201cWe\u2019ll see new forms of artists, artists of whom may not necessarily have been so adept in terms of using a paint brush or using Photoshop, now being able to kind of wordsmith and craft great pieces of art with prompts throughout.\u201d So yeah, just plagiarized slop then.<\/p>\n

And just in case it couldn\u2019t get any worse, Patel finishes up by asking Tan\u2014who repeatedly declared his love for gaming throughout\u2014what games he\u2019s playing right now. \u201cOh, it depends.\u201d Nope. On a second try he says, \u201cCivilization and stuff like that\u2026I do play some MMOs of sorts, shooters, and I still play a lot of the battle royale genre.\u201d Patel points out those are genres and desperately presses for the name of a game. \u201cOh, well, I play random stuff.\u201d Fucking hell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a splendidly combative interview with Razer\u2019s billionaire CEO Min-Liang Tan,\u00a0The Verge\u2018s Nilay Patel took him to task…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":421939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,4804,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-421938","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-razer","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/421939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}