The Verge

Journalist Joanna Stern on her experience with Evan, her AI boyfriend: “You might think I’m crazy saying this, but unless you try it, you’re not going to see what other people are feeling.” Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts or watch the full episode on YouTube.

Today we're talking with Liz Lopatto, who spent the last month covering the Musk v. Altman trial in all its chaos. You’ll hear her describe the courthouse as a “zoo” and explain that there were protests of one kind or another happening outside every day. Both Elon Musk and Sam Altman are big personalities, and people have a lot of feelings about both of them and the AI industry. And in the end… nothing happened! The jury found that Elon had filed his lawsuit after the statute of limitations had run out. You’ll hear Liz explain exactly what’s going on there. Beyond that, the trial was nominally about OpenAI’s conversion to a for-profit entity from a nonprofit one and if the way OpenAI went about it cost Elon Musk money. But really, the suit seems mostly to have been about Elon Musk being mad at Sam Altman — or at OpenAI, for being successful without him — and wanting him punished in some way.

Brendan Ballou, founder of the Public Integrity Project, on how to fix arbitration: “the more that arbitration can become like a regular court, both arbitration itself will become fairer and companies will become less attracted to it.” Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts or watch the full episode on YouTube.

In a conversation from last year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai responds to a question about OpenAI partnering with iconic Apple designer Jony Ive to develop a next-gen AI hardware device. Look out for our latest interview with Google’s CEO next week on Decoder.

The SpaceX IPO is here, and it’s more than just an historic public offering that could make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. It also reveals more ways in which Elon Musk’s companies interact and overlap with each other, shuffling money around in ways that are often difficult to keep track of. It’s evident in the ways Musk’s companies are shareholders in other Musk companies, further intertwining their fates in the process. https://lnkd.in/ePKnUYkr

Elon Musk’s final frontier is officially open for business now that SpaceX has formally filed its S-1 prospectus with the SEC. That kicks off what could be the largest initial public offering ever when it lists on the Nasdaq stock exchange with the ticker SPCX.

“There’s an app for that” was the promise of the App Store from the very beginning. The app that will get your phone to do the thing you want it to? It’s just a few taps away. The tagline wasn’t strictly true — I’m still waiting for that one perfect grocery list app. Still, apps shaped the modern smartphone into what it is today. We spend all day, every day inside of apps — scrolling, listening, and tapping until we find what we want. But your next favorite app might just be one that you made yourself.

Microsoft has recruited game industry analyst Matthew Ball as Xbox chief strategy officer. Ball publishes an annual state of video gaming report, which is a popular read across the game industry, and he’s “widely respected across gaming, media, and technology,” according to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma.

Jonah Peretti, soon-to-be-former CEO of BuzzFeed, on creators and the dependency on platforms: “I think there’s a better vision for media than that which we could have all built together.” Listen to our exclusive interview with Peretti on Decoder wherever you get your podcasts or watch the full episode on YouTube.

For years, tech companies have promised AI will give everyone a capable personal assistant but delivered something more like a clueless intern. Over the past six months, that has started to change, thanks largely to the viral open-source AI agent platform OpenClaw. And among the top AI labs now chasing similar success, one seems particularly well-poised to make agents succeed at a large scale: Google. Where OpenClaw drove adoption by integrating with tools people already used, Google can do this too via MCP — but it can also build deeper links into its in-house suite of products, including Gmail, Drive, Docs, Photos, and Search. If anything, it’s surprising it took so long.