What Next | Daily News and Analysis Does Anyone Like A.I.?
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May 10, 2026 
Nilay Patel, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Verge and tech podcaster, breaks down the rise of the "software brain" and how AI reshapes products and behavior. He contrasts consumer disappointment with enterprise focus, explains why data centers and costs matter, and warns about algorithmic harms and the political tradeoffs tech companies face.
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Software Brain Means Seeing Everything As A Database
- Software Brain is the mindset that treats the world as databases to be captured and commanded by software.
- Nilay Patel traces it to productivity obsessions and products that reduce complex life to structured fields, like Whoop collecting heart data and making confident health judgments.
Free Consumer AI Feels Shallow And Unimpressive
- Consumer AI products widely used for free are often low quality and fail to deliver the promised transformative value.
- Nilay Patel says free ChatGPT feels like a BuzzFeed listicle and many users quickly recognize it's not very good despite high usage.
Tech Firms See AI Differently Because They Own The Data
- Big tech experiences with AI differ because companies own vast proprietary databases and can build powerful internal tooling that consumers can't replicate.
- Nilay contrasts Google and enterprise coding agents with the broken free products ordinary users encounter.