YouSaid · the spoken record

Min-Liang Tan

lines on the record: 68
first: 2026-01-19
most recent: 2026-01-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“All that we look forward to, but we're just pretty much laser focused. It's just that the demographic has really changed. The word gamer has also changed through the years. The games have changed through the years, right? And for us, we're just... Sitting here, very focused designing a great product for ourselves.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More of the same, I would say, in the sense when I say more of the same, I would say nothing has changed from day one for us. Has always been our mantra. And we used to say it all the time that the mantra for us, our four gamers, by gamers mantra, has really followed us from day one, where the gaming industry didn't really exist as an industry, even a hardware industry or software and so on and so forth. We believe that we design products for ourselves that we enjoy, that I enjoy using at any point of time, and that tomorrow when the game industry did grow dramatically, we were still focused on games, even though there were multiple opportunities for us to kind of expand out there. And even now where we talk about the gaming industry in somewhat of doldrums at this juncture, I believe that we're going to see the next great genre come through, right? Whether it's MMOs and early days, mobers, and then battle royals, we're going to see the next great genre. We're going to see hopefully GTA 6 at some point of time, right?”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, well, I play random stuff even like if you talk about human ingenuity. And I even play some of the But a lot of the games, and maybe I talk broadly in terms of genres, primarily because I appreciate the human ingenuity that has gone into the genres itself. 100 people dropped on an eyelid with a circle that comes through. That is what, I mean, while I enjoy the game itself, I also appreciate the mechanic, the thought that has gone into, and the premise that the designer has figured out in PUBG, for example, right, that is this primal instinct of humans to be the last man standing, so to speak. So it's things like that that I appreciate, and I think it's art.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What meets the bar I play a lot of. Single player games at this point of time also, like civilization and stuff like that. I still do a lot of that. I do play some MMOs of sorts. FPSs, I still played a lot of the battle royale genre. So things like that.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even more human creators now, with the help of more tools. Maybe I'm an optimist, but I really truly see that, that AI tools will come to fore because at some point in time, we're going to see so much slot out there that we're going to crave for really great art, really great design. And that's what's going to happen. We've seen that cycle go over and over and over again. the amount of slop out there, we're going to see some level of art rise to the top. And that kind of art may still be may be created with the same tools that created the slop, but with great care, with great discernment to be able to do something truly different. And the difference will come from human ingenuity, not from countless prompt mashing, so to speak.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that The outcome that we see, and I think it's going to be the likely outcome, is that AI tools are going to be helping human developers develop faster and better. And I think that's the natural outcome, right? Where we're talking about graduating, whether it's an analog kind of way of creating art versus digital. And I think it's going to be the same thing. We're going to see human artists use AI tools to kind of really bring their vision to life. And we'll see new forms of artists, artists of whom may not necessarily have been so adept in terms of using a paintbrush or using Photoshop, now being able to kind of wordsmith and craft great pieces of art with prompts throughout. So that's, I think, what's going to happen, where we will see”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I see that huge amount of investments are going to, we are investing into AI, I think, as we speak. But I do see the potential, I think at this point of time. In many cases, in terms of, I mean, look at the number of paid subscribers for ChatGPT, for example. People do see their value in terms of whether it's a chatbot, AI, so on and so forth. I do think the... Potential is going to be realized. Now, in many cases, I think there will be AI slot that we will go some, I mean, I've paid for subscriptions at the start where I thought it was going to be great, but I've cancelled them, for example. But I do believe that in many cases, and in some cases that we have not even envisaged yet, the potential will be realized.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't necessarily see it as AI per se, but I see the kind of value that I get out of it. So, for example, the ChatGPT subscription, or a Grok subscription for that matter, I do see value out of it, and that's why I pay for it. And that's the way I see it. I don't see myself as paying for AI per se. I see it as what am I getting out of a chatbot, for example, that can advise me on travel matters, health matters, whatever it is, my day-to-day and stuff like that. Is that worth 20 bucks to me? And in the case for a year.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, as I've mentioned, I don't know if we're going to price it into the hardware. We are still figuring it out. But I would say that at the end of the day, the question is how much value you're getting of it, right? So, I mean, I pay for Spotify because I see the value in terms of paying for Spotify. I get a whole library of music and so on and so forth. Game Pass, so on and so forth throughout. There's times of which I would prefer micro, I mean, I look back and go like, oh, I wish I could just pay one time for this title, right? There is microtransactions, there is subscription fees. But at the end of the day, I think myself as consumer, myself as a gamer, I would say just look at... Anything, and I would say if it's worth that amount of money to me, I would pay for it, otherwise, I'll vote with my wallet. You know, that's sign?”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I look at that reaction from gamers broadly to AI in the industry. There's slop. I think there's a lot of reaction to slop. I think there's a lot of reaction to Game Studios being in whatever amount of crisis that game studios appear to be in. There's whatever reaction to consolidation. And then there is the relentless fee-seeking from the games industry, that everything is going to be a subscription, everything is going to be free to play with DLC. Everything is going to be ongoing recurring cost over and over and over again. And the industry has really moved to that model across the board. And I think people are feeling that pain. So then they hear AI and they say, okay, someone else is going to ask me for 10 bucks a month or 20 bucks a month.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is no value our customers won't pay for it. We won't pay for it ourselves. So to that end, that's our focus, I think, in respect of it. And it could be through we build it into a hardware cost for that matter, if that makes sense. And I'll be candid. We have literally not thought through this in great detail. But the way that we see it is how do we identify that value to the user? And from there we We are very clear, we message this. This is the value that we see out of this, and we'll see how we let the market decide.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, we've always had an ongoing relationship with our customer. That's the thing, right? The way that we see it from Razor is that when somebody buys a Razor mouse, he tends to buy another razor. Mouse in the future, he expands the... Devices that he owns from us. So we've always had a long term relationship with our customer from that perspective. At some point of time, I think as we think through the whole AI uptime, so on and so forth, I mean, we've had cloud costs also in the past, right? Maintaining profiles and clouds on and so forth. So for us, we will, I think that's one of the things that we want to figure out. What can we do to ensure that we bring the value? And I think that's our obsession.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To build a distribution, yes, but do they prefer to partner? And I think the answer is they do prefer to partner. And fundamentally, we have a huge amount of data, I think, on the game is their preferences, what they want, what they like, and that we can bring across to the models also at the same time, which is our IP, for that matter. So I think with that in mind, as I say, having all these verticals, you may call it building wrappers of sorts, but these are very deep wrappers that we have to build. A lot of customization, a lot of building, and it's more than just hardware, right? It's not hardware. As I say, the hardware is just part of the equation. It's the software work that we need to do. It's the R&D work that we need to do for, for example, to get persistence in this space and context. So to get the context for our users, that's where our data comes in, also at the same time, to be able to kind of pivot and focus on that.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the entire tech industry has always been rappers for that matter, not necessarily from an AI perspective, but it's the question of when you build a wrapper, do you provide enough value from the wrapper that you build, right? And that's the thing where it's also very hard for anyone to be all things to all people. And I don't think OpenAI wants to be all things to all people. I don't think Grock wants to be all things to all people. For us, we tend to be very focused on our vertical. We are not tempted to try to do something else different at any point of time. And our vertical is really for the gamers. And this is something we've got huge domain knowledge in terms of what the gamers want, you know, what the game developers want. We've got distribution. We've got about 70,000 game developers using RSDK. We've got 150 million gamers on our software platform. We've got distribution, I think, across to that, which can the models go out there and try...”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's, I think, where our angle is. I think from a software perspective, that we believe that we can bring enough value of persistence across to the user and progressively we will see even more users that will say, look, this is what I want to be able to go from one model to another. For example, or if I'm happy with just a single model and if I'm a techie and I'm happy to just go directly and play around with it, we provide that open platform. So being open is one of the things that we truly believe in.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it follows you. The form factors are presented, are hardware form factors. It's a little bit like how we've designed our product at this point of time. We have a singular software platform that we are able to give you a great gaming experience over and above. You could be using one of our mice, our keyboards, so on and so forth, a laptop. These are just representations at the end of the day. And that's how we design it. And there are particular problems that we need to solve that the models don't provide for us. Context. So that's one of the things that our AI scientists do really well. We've got advanced rag, we've got context. We really focus on it. Persistent memory is something that we are very good at also at the same time. And these are fundamental problems that AI scientists need to solve. So these are the things that our team does. So we work with the best models out there. And we also have the capabilities of”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going around, I'm looking at it, I'm asking for directions. When I get to the office, I could literally be still with Motoko, which is another form factor. So the way that we see it is that the intelligence is persistent”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we are an ecosystem, I think, for gamers, where it's not just I think in terms of the hardware, but most of our work is actually done on the software side. A good example, for example, for the matter, if, say, NIUs maybe CS as an example, right? If I've got Ava when I wake up, it's giving me information like what's happening in the day and what's my day going to be today, so on and so forth. When I get out from my apartment and I go onto the street, to the subway, et cetera, then I've got Motoko at the same time. But with persistent memory, it also will know exactly what has been happening at home. So Ava's somewhat following me everywhere, right? In my day, I'm not going to fall in love with it yet. But in short.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's one, we ingest another level of input. Over and above, we've got far few mics, so audio capabilities also come to bear. So with all of this, we're able to give a lot more information across to ChatGPT who does all the reasoning, I think, for us. And that's where we see it coming through. So constantly the smarts or intelligence is part of how we see us designing AI hardware at this point of time.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I believe that if today use ChatGPT and you're providing snapshots and some context of, let's say, location, to a certain extent, you could. I would be messaging on my phone with ChatGPT, for example, and it could give me the reasoning to be able to bring me there to a great extent. I'll give an example, right? I would literally use ChatGPT for a whole bunch of kind of day-to-day tasks and stuff like that. It's got great reasoning. It's able to do that. And now we are layering on vision capabilities.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's what we see ourselves. We see ourselves as owning the vertical from a gaming perspective, being able to work with all the best intelligence or the AI out there, and then bringing and designing a product or service designed and tailored for our users and within the gaming vertical.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So ChatGPT for the headphones was primarily more from the premise that we think it's a good assistant in terms of CV capabilities, identifying things, being able to give very quick feedback at the same time. But it could very well run Grockles at the same time. And the way that we are kind of presenting this is that whether it's for Ava or whether it's for Motoko or any of our other products, we are multimodal. And that was one of the things that we wanted to be able to do that. And we believe that at some point of time, we see Gemini doing really well. We see Grock doing really, really well. We see chat GPT having advances in various aspects. And this race to intelligence is just great for all of us as consumers, right? And when I mentioned that Grock has great conversational AI, I think they're the best for conversational AI at this point of time. ChatGPT is doing great, I think, in terms of it as an assistant for reasoning and things like that.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why is a mouse so important that today we've brought it from a mouse all the way to a gaming mouse and now the gaming mouse as a broader category than productivity mouse, right? Gaming mice right now dominate all of the mouse category at this point of time. And right now we can call it a smart headphone and that's the way we see it. And we don't necessarily have to retrain everybody to say, oh, you've got to put on new glasses, you've got to be able to bear with the weight and things like that. So that is one of the things that we're doing with Motoko. And a lot of the work that we do is actually on the software side of things, right? How do we ensure that we get context faster? How do we ensure that we are able to do all of that? So it's both hardware software fusion and sensor fusion at the same time that we are really focused in terms of bringing the experience over. And that's something that we believe is the reason why people go and say, oh,”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll bet his headphones in a sense that we don't necessarily have to retrain human beings as a whole with an entirely new form factor. So I don't have to change any behavior of sorts. Boom, tomorrow we can get your AI smarts immediately. And that, I think, is the promise. There's a disconnect today with the possibility of AI and what it could be. And that's where we see ourselves as designers having that responsibility or that opportunity, so to speak, to be able to design in such a way that we don't necessarily have to change the entire behavior. For what it's worth in a very early days, it could be, for that matter, maybe it's a mouse. It's just a mouse.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At some of the stats, and they said, What's the biggest buzz at CES? And there was a lot of Ava, Motoko, and things like that. And for what it's worth, we've literally just put vision capabilities, audio capabilities on a headphone, and combined it with AI. And for what it's worth, it's not a quantum leap from a hardware design perspective, but it's captured so much imagination at this point of time. People are going, oh, wow. Now I can bring AI on the go with me at any point of time. It's truly something revolutionary at this juncture. So the way that we see it, and maybe that's something. Wait, can I just...”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, occasionally I go on podcasts where the guy is more concerned that somebody's going to fall in love with my product in the long run. And then I think maybe there's something there. No, but you see, it's early days. It could completely be the worst possible idea. It could completely go off the rails and become off the spectrum where it's just the most phenomenal product that somebody completely falls in love with the product, so on and so forth, right? And I think the reality is going to be something in between, right? And the way that we see it, it's probably closer to bringing more value to people. And that's what we want to be able to do. We want to be able to get to the point where AI is going to be helpful to our customers, our users. And that's also one good example where at CES, I was just looking.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can then make better games, right? Over and above. So I believe that at some point, it's not just games, but AI is just going to be so prevalent or ubiquitous that every single, whether every single vertical healthcare gaming, entertainment, it's all going to have some elements of AI there. And we are just going along with it.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of a conversation in terms of hardware, where the way that we look at it would be things like whether it's AI companions or whether it's making smart headphones like with Motoko, right? We see all of this as augmenting what's happening today, not replacing it. So it's not a gen AI conversation that we've got. It's about how do we bring the smarts when we design product and bring additional value across to our users. For example, using our gaming headphones, all of a sudden we provide additional AI capabilities. Is that great? Absolutely. So that's one of the things that we're looking at from a hardware perspective. Now, from a software and a services perspective, as we work with the game developers and the publishers, so on and so forth, we look at additional tools that can make their games better. We can work closely with them from a QA companion basis, for example. And then some of these core technologies, as we provide for it, can”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the tagline is very broad, but it's easier to do a catchier tagline when it's a broad tagline as opposed to hardware we look at or software and stuff like that. But in short for us, we run an ecosystem. We've got hardware, we've got software, we've got services. And starting with the hardware, I think we do see that AI is going to be part of the whole...”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say, I'm hoping that it doesn't come to that. I think in short, and we've seen this happen with the industry multiple times in the past before, spikes in terms of pricing, what's great is that as long as manufacturing kicks in and we are able to kind of keep up, it's just economics, right, at the end of the day. There is a spike in terms of pricing. We believe that at some point it will come down. What goes up must come down and what goes down at some point goes up too.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we do have a secondary business of sorts. So hardware is a big part of our business. We have actually a services payments business that we do payments for a lot of the game companies out there. And that's one of the strategies that we've got to be able to try to make our products more available to everyone. So that's the way that we kind of see it. We are ecosystem of sorts. We do great hardware, I think, for game developers and the game is out there, but we've got a software platform that we're able to bring across to the all the gamers out there. And of course, with services business at the same time. But the RAM situation at the end of the day still is an evolving situation right now.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we haven't announced the prices for the next round of laptops, for example, and this is something that concerns me, right? Because the ramp prices are going up and we want to be able to make sure our laptops remain affordable and being in the reach of gamers out there. But it has been moving, I mean, it is such a volatile situation at this point of time that it's hard for us to even figure out what's the pricing at this juncture”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AI is a tool to help game developers make better games, and then in this case, rather than it replaces the human creativity in this case. And that's something I personally feel very passionately about, that we want to figure out how do we use for the gaming industry to get AI to do things better. But in the broader scheme of things, I think that's what we have been focused on. But there are other reasons why I think gamers are unhappy with AI in the sense that, and I agree with them. I don't like slop either, right? That's one. Two, it's like, is it raising the costs of RAM? It is also raising the cost of RAM. I don't like that also at the same time. And back in the day, the GPUs versus crypto and things like that. Same thing. So I do think, however, that”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's fundamentally what we are talking about at Razor, right? So if we've got AI tools that can help game developers QA their games faster, better, weed out the bugs, I think along the way, we're all aligned that we love that, right? If we could get game developers to create to have the opportunity to create better, to check through typos and things like that, to create better games. I think we all want that. So I think that's the way that we see it. So one of the things that we're building, for example,”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I would say that the question is what are we unhappy with, right? When I say we, I mean us as gamers, I think we're unhappy with Gen AI slot, right? Just to put it out there. And that's something that I'm happy with. I'm unhappy with, like any gamer. When I play a game, I want to be engaged. I want to be immersed. I want to be able to be competitive. I don't want to be served character models with extra fingers and stuff like that or shoddily written storylines so on and so forth. I think for us we're all aligned against Gen AI slop that is just churned out from a couple of prompts and stuff like that. What we aren't against at least from my perspective are tools that help augment or support and help game developers make great games.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we are dictated by what we feel the customer wants. That's what dictates our decisions at any point of time, right? We talk to the gamers and we say talk to the gamers. It could be through directly through social media. It could be through our customer base. It could be through our sales and marketing team and things like that. And anecdotally, we figure out, is this what they want? And is this something that they are keen or passionate about, we then take decisions to say, okay, cool, and we have a very quick, flexible, and we're very nimble, I would say, razor. We try to do as little as possible, but scale as fast as possible just for our customer base.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly that. You know, the game is from the needs from every country or region that we've got. So we've got team members from design in each of the various regions. And we do focus on pretty much two kind of constituents, the way that we see it. First of which will be the game developers. That's who we work with very closely with. And then on the other end of spectrum, we've got the gameers. And we've got, and what we do is that we focus on what do the gamers want, what the game developers want, and we see ourselves as the layer in between, and we keep both as happy as we can.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we're everywhere, right? So, a third of our businesses in the US, a third in Europe, a third in Asia at this point of time. So we've got team members spread out. We've got about close to 20 offices worldwide. We're dual headquartered in Irvine and in Singapore.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we've got in the traditional structure, we've got our operations, supply chain, we've got legal, so on and so forth, but we've got a pretty flat, I think, management team structure, and we don't have multiple layers, I think, from that perspective. And we consistently keep a very single-minded focus to say that, look, the product's always the most important. The customer in the case, in our case, the gamer is always the most important for us. And pretty much, you know, we ask ourselves the question, right, if there's no direction or management mandate when it comes down to this, just figure it out. What would the customer want? What would the gamer want? That's what we do.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go like, hey, why don't you do productivity also at the same time? Why don't we go into this other area and stuff like that? We've just said, look, we know what we're good at. We remain focused about it. We align the team members all the time. And that's how we are structured.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I focus on product at the company. We've got a really pretty flat structure, I think, at Razor. I've got about 40, 50 direct reports. We really work as a team. And the entire company is really focused, I think, in terms of product first. That has always been the mantra for the organization. But we've got a really great team, very talented team members. And everyone's kind of, we've worked together for a while. We've got team members that have been there for the last 20 years together with us growing alongside. And I would say that the guiding North Staff for us is just about the gamers. And we've been consistent in respect of that, despite the fact that I think in very early days, gaming or gamers, it was not considered a big industry or demographic, but we've been laser focused in terms of that. And as we've grown, even with the industry growing at this point of time, the opportunities for us”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Specifically, I don't know if I can comment on that at this point of time because I don't have enough information right now. I really don't, right? My focus to date has been more in terms of what's the best conversational model that we've got. And they're great. They're fantastic.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think, and I speak broadly, I think for all the partners that we've got, I think for the vast majority of all the models out there, I think there's, of course, a lot of focus in terms of intelligence, really trying to get to that point. Trust and safety really is one of the things that pretty much all our partners really do care about. And that's one of the reasons why, and each model, I think, excels in different ways, right? At the same time. And I think for us, we really want to find the best possible model. And ultimately, in what shape or form we ship at the end of the day, that's one of the things that we will take into consideration.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I would say that potentially that could happen, but that's definitely not something we plan to or we build the product toward that. And, I mean, we have, for example, people really passionate about razor products, right? Some of them have come to me and they've said, look, I'm so passionate about this product, it's part of my life. I'm going to tattoo the product of myself and things like that. We didn't plan to do that, but we did, however, plan to make the best possible product. We put incredible amounts of care and concern, I think, in terms of the design. And that's what we plan to do with Ava also at the same time, or Motoko, or Madison, of the products that we bring to the market.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't know these tools. I suppose we literally do not know, right? And I use the example when I play a game and I'm really invested in the game, I really enjoyed it. And I feel this sense of loss on happen. Well, I wouldn't call it unhappiness, a loss when I finish the game. It's a great game. I'm fully invested in a movie. I'm fully invested in a game. Is that how we see it? Perhaps, right? We want to create product that people care about. Whether it's a gaming mouse, a laptop, one of our software platforms, we want people to care about it. I don't necessarily think that we want somebody to fall in love with one of our products and marry them. It might happen, who knows? It could.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what we've actually said that these are reservations, they're not pre orders per se. So ultimately, when we do launch the product, and it could be a long way out, because the specs are, we have not disclosed the actual specs of the product. And even, for example, which character models or which even model it's going to be running at this point of time. So we're leaving that absolutely open. And of course, at the end of the day, if somebody says, look, this isn't the product that I thought it was going to be, fine. Cancel the reservation and we'll say and we remain open and see how the product evolves at that point of time.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is why we have also intentionally, in a very intentional and deliberate manner, say, we don't know when we're going to launch this. We really do not. And I would suspect for us it would be a phased approach to a certain extent with dev kits out there first to be able to discover more. Someone's going to be able to do more with it, perhaps, to load up different models and to have it say things that we may not necessarily want it to say, and we'll find out. Accordingly, we'll just grow the product.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We work closely with the model providers. I think that's something that we work closely across together with them in respect of that. We do talk to them often about what are the plans in the future in respect of this. But I think what is clear is that this is early days yet. It is still new for us to discover. I'm sure that there will be concerns or issues that will come about. And evolving what's happening for technology is something that we do. Now, maybe it's even a hardware lock that we need to put in. We don't know. Or it's more software guardrails that we have to put into place at this point of time. But I think what we are, and that's one of the reasons why we decided to put it as a concept first out there, get the feedback, ensure that, and we're not going to be able to think of everything, but we would like to be able to get as much thought, concern, and care to put into the product before we actually launch it.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And of course, we need to discover it in a responsible manner to figure out how do we do that, put the right guardrails in, what do we do in terms of the AI in terms of this. And that's something that we're learning. Building great hardware, I think it's part of it. Grok is powering this for us at this point of time, and it's something that we feel from a conversational perspective, they do an incredible job at. Now, over and above, what else can we do to ensure that ultimately when we do launch the product, how do we make sure that it's going to do the right things and be able to kind of converse and be the great companion that we want it to be?”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But from a virtual perspective, and as a gamer, right, we've interacted with NPCs and stuff like that. And of course, NPCs are getting smarter with AI. And I do hope they get smarter. It gets more engaging. And I think we're early days yet. Now, the question, I think where it's going to lead to is something that we need to discover.”
2026-01-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT