Why The Verge’s Patel is ranting on his podcast

The Verge editor in chief Nilay Patel talks on his podcast about why he’s ranting more.

Here is an excerpt:

They’re just essays. I know they’re rants and they’re delivered on YouTube and they’re very pointed in particular ways. But that’s just what I would’ve written as a column 10 years ago before we had podcasts this way. It has been very obvious to everyone that you can’t just write a column and expect to have an impact. You have to stare at the camera and do it. We’re very good at publishing that as a column and then having a transcript and polishing it and delivering it all the other ways.

That’s the origin of it: For all the podcasting I do and as little writing as I do anymore, in my heart, I’m still a writer. Taking all of the reporting and all of the ideas that we hear and all the conversations we have and synthesizing them into ideas that you can grapple with is the point. It is really the point of running a magazine.

That’s where that comes from. Now, can I do it as often as I want to do it? I obviously can’t. The reason I did “software brain” at that moment is that the excitement around AI is so high. The hype is so high and it’s all connected to how good AI systems are at writing software and manipulating databases. But the reason that I thought, “I got to make the time to do ‘software brain’ right now,” is that I could see the hype cycle around AI failing to contend with the lack of verifiability in every domain except software. That’s getting a little blurry now.

Read more here.