You're a billionaire. I just want to be right. Sure. I'm just saying like the marginal cost is like meaningless to you.
Twenty bucks is still twenty bucks. Are you ready for, you know, a customer a few years from now falling in love with a hologram on your desk that you have provided?
I don't think that's how we've designed, we would want to design.
It's going to happen. Are you aware of the very common trope that actually building the superintelligence from the sci-fi movies, you should not build the Terminator nexus?
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. We're back to start the year off with a very special live interview with Razer CEO Min-liang Tan, which we taped in front of a terrific audience at Brooklyn Bowl in Vegas at CES. Now, Razer is obviously best known for making mice and keyboards and gaming PCs in its signature black and bright green with a smattering of RGB LEDs to set everything off, but the company always makes splashy announcements at CES, and this year was no different. Along with the hype, there was plenty of controversy. This year at CES, Razer earned those splashy headlines and not a little controversy for something it calls Project Ava, an AI companion that has a physical presence in the real world — an anime hologram that sits in a jar on your desk. Ava is powered by, you guessed it, Elon Musk's Grok. There's a lot of choices bundled up in all of that. So I spent a good chunk of time in this interview asking Min some very obvious questions, to which I'm not sure I got very satisfying answers. That exchange really set the tone for the rest of this conversation with Min, which focused on why exactly he's pushing Razer so hard into AI when it does not seem at all clear that his core gamer demographic wants any of this. Okay, Razer CEO Min-liang Tan. Here we go.
Live from Brooklyn Bowl at CES in Las Vegas, it's Decoder, presented by T-Mobile. [cheering] Thank you to our audience. We are live at Brooklyn Bowl at CES. I'm very excited to be doing this in front of a live audience. You're going to hear them throughout the show because Min has no shortage of extremely controversial things to say.
I was promised extremely controversial things.
Yeah. I mean, that's what they told me.
Let's get into it. You've a bunch of announcements here at CES. You've obviously been with Razer — you founded Razer, you're over 20 years into it. The gaming industry is undergoing a lot of turmoil lately because of AI. You're making huge investments in AI. There's a hologram waifu we should talk about that you've reintroduced here at the show. I actually want to start with something very basic. I've been covering CES for about 20 years as well. Razer loves CES. You love CES. Every year we love it. There are a huge suite of products announced, there are weird projects and concepts. Why are you so invested in CES? Of all of the companies, I think Razer has the most consistent enthusiasm for this show in particular.
It's odd — we were just talking about it yesterday. It's over 20 years at this point, and I think we've been at CES maybe 15 years or so. From the very early days at Razer, I remember Pepcom, massive hall, we had a little table there talking about gaming products. Back then, I think we were probably one of the few, if not the only, gaming equipment provider. It's really grown for us. I think what has happened is we have a huge online community, people very passionate about the things that we come up with — what's the latest and greatest — and we've really grown this community who have all been invested in what we're going to be launching at CES. So it kind of started a couple of years ago when we said, why don't we not just bring the stuff that we're going to launch, but some of the things we've got cooking in the Razer Labs. And we brought it to CES, it has been a hit, and we said every year, why don't we bring more of our concept products — some of which will come to market, some of which do not — and let's hear what the community thinks. We're a company that, for gamers by gamers, we really like to hear what the community likes to say about our product, and it gives us an opportunity to present the stuff we've got, get the feedback, and then we go back and polish it a little bit.
Well, I'm curious — this is kind of a meta question — about this show in particular. It has changed so much over the years. The idea of even having a big tech trade show has gone in and out of favor. If you look at where a lot of the action in Vegas this week is, it's actually in the Aria and the Wynn where the ad tech people are doing whatever weird stuff they're doing over there. I don't even know what's going on over there, man. It's goofy. This is about getting attention, right? I mean, you launch things at trade shows because the press and creators are here and you can get a lot of attention. Razer doesn't need help getting attention. Why still do it here?
Well, it's an opportunity, I think, for us also to catch up with our partners, friends, show a little bit about what we've been working on under the hood. But it's a bit of a tradition also of sorts. I think the community expects us to be here. I'd love to see more of these in-person events right now, especially post the pandemic. From a gaming perspective, we've also lost a couple of big events in the year, so it's a great way for us to get it kicked off. It's a little early in the year for us though — we wish it would be maybe mid-January or something like that — but it's a bit of a tradition for us. I hope it continues, I hope it gets bigger. Along the way, it's massive right now, but it's good fun.
Do you think you're still getting the same amount of attention from this kind of thing as you would if you just had your own events?
I think — well, we have our own events pretty much — but it's a good opportunity just to catch up with partners. I think that's been the real opportunity for us. It's also a good opportunity for us to kind of bring the rest of our audience along, right, from the gaming community, who may not necessarily be keen so much on all tech, but they really want to see what's the latest and greatest in gaming tech. And that's what we do.
So let me ask about the announcements here. There's an AI headset, Mokujin. You've got AI PCs for software developers, which is really interesting — I want to talk to you about that. There's that guy talking off stage. And then there's Project Ava, which is a spinning hologram.
Yes. We've got Madison also, which is a project that we've brought across which showcases the latest and greatest in immersion technology. We've put it into a gaming chair. So that's — you know, for games. Yeah, the chair — it's getting a lot of traction. And yeah, and a whole lot more, and not just hardware, but software.
So how do you decide what is going to be a real product you're going to ship? The AI PCs I think are real products you're definitely going to ship. That's just happening. And then here's the concept, just to get attention and feedback. How do you make that kind of choice, actually?
So we've got a labs team internally which has the charter to pretty much look at things far out in terms of where we think the industry is going and we can build toward that. In essence, the decision to greenlight a project or an actual product is really like: is this cool? Do we think it's going to do well? I mean, we kind of started with that with the gaming mouse, right? We very rarely sit down with finance people and say, "Oh, do we do projections and things like that?" It's really a bit of a, you know, off the seat of our pants kind of thing. Say, "It's cool. We like it. It's going to be fun. We want it for ourselves." And I think the real kind of trigger there is: do we want it for ourselves? And if we really want it for ourselves and we think it's cool, we'll bring it to market.
Every year there's always some project — some of them come out, some of them don't come out. One year you announced a respirator that got you into a lot of trouble. You had to recall the product. How do you make the call of: okay, this project — it's out, it's successful, it's doing what we wanted to do, we're going to keep investing — versus this was a one-off? What's the metric of success for you?
Well, scaling it. I think scaling it is definitely something that we would like to do, and sometimes we're really early. For example, I think over a decade ago, we built a complete gaming PC and a handheld, you know, for that matter. We brought it to market also at the same time. And today, we've seen handhelds go out there and we haven't launched our handheld, for example, at this point of time.
We might. We'll see. But not today. [laughter]
You got so — you got claps for that already.
So I think for us, when we launch a product, we look at the traction for it. Is this something that we want? Do we want to invest in the next generation? Do we want to kind of provide the roadmap across to it? We essentially work very closely with the community. I think we keep talking about for gamers by gamers, but we really believe in that. We've got a really big fan base, very passionate. Everyone's got an opinion. We love hearing the opinions. We've got social media, we chat with them often, so on and so forth. And that's what really guides us. We really let the community guide what we build for the future.
Yeah. All right. So now I have to ask you about Project Ava. Did you say to your team, "I want a holographic anime waifu on my desk?" [laughter] You're like, the metric is what do we want? Who was like, "I want this?"
Sure. So actually, yeah, somewhat. Well, it's not so much in the specific verbatim words of "I want anime waifu" and things like that, but we did hack together a holographic projector to have a character there. And we had ideas like that in the past before, right? Where we've created holographic projectors for game companies back in the day to say, "Hey, look, is there a way that we can do a holographic representation of some of your latest characters and stuff like that?" But with AI, we were able now to be able to get that personality there, the conversational AI coming through. And I think the tipping point for us was really not just making great hardware and not just having great software, but now with great intelligence coming out together with it. And it's that premise of being able to have a kind of a semi-physical representation of an avatar to me being able to chat, as opposed to clicking a button or typing on something and having a little thing over there. It's really excited imaginations for ourselves, you know. It's cool. We've always had that — whether it's a game like a super-AI in Halo, Cortana, for example, right? So it's a little bit of sci-fi, us growing up always wanting something cool like that and said, hey, it's a great concept, and I think the community loves it.
Are you aware of the very common trope that actually building the superintelligence from the sci-fi movies — you should not build the Terminator nexus? [laughter]
Well, for us I think in this case it's more — well, I'm familiar with that, of course, but just checking. Yeah. But I mean, with the guardrails — and that is also I think on a broader level, from an AI discussion, trust and safety is one of the things that we do look at internally at the company. But specifically for Ava, it was just cool. It was just awesome to be able to have a product like that, and hopefully — and we will.
So is Ava going to come out? Because my understanding or my reaction to this product changes based on whether it's actually coming out or if this is just a concept that people can react to. But you're taking pre-orders, right? It's like 20 bucks to pre-order it.
We're taking reservations for it at this point of time.
Seems like it's going to come out.
We plan to take it out, but we do want to get as much feedback to hear what are the concerns, right? Are there things that we can do better? What's cool? What are the characters that we'd like to get on? We'd also like to get the feedback from many of our game partners also at the same time to do really specific character models, so on and so forth. And then finally, on the trust and safety part, we also want to make sure that we take that into consideration. Are there things that we need to know? And we're working with our model partners also at the same time.
So the model partner with Ava is Grok.
I would say that there's a pretty significant disconnect between saying you care about trust and safety and partnering with Grok, which is in the middle of a deepfake porn scandal. Like, as we speak, as we're sitting here, Grok is undressing people left and right.
I'm confident that we will be undressed by the end of this podcast. [laughter]
6,000 people in the audience — that honestly seems low to me at the rate we're going. But can you care about trust and safety and partner with Grok?
Well, I think for Grok, we picked Grok also because it's got the best conversational AI at this point of time, at least from a conversation personality side of things. That's one of the things that we looked at from a tech perspective. Now ultimately, however, we do see Ava as an open platform — if somebody wants to be able to use a different model, it's one of the things that we're taking into consideration, and we're model-agnostic. But I think from an avatar, from a conversational AI perspective, for CES we feel that Grok has a really great conversational AI model at this point of time. So that's one of the reasons why we picked Grok.
Grok also made by Elon Musk, who has his own anime waifu ideas, I would — okay, there's something there that is, you know, not necessarily just trust and safety. The idea that you would have a pet on your desk that looks like a person that can talk to you — that's a big door to open for a lot of people. Are you worried about that at all?
Well, the door has been open since Tamagotchi, you know.
I think there's a pretty big step difference between a Tamagotchi — my daughter has a Tamagotchi. I'm never like worried that this thing is alive. Tamagotchi has not driven anyone into psychosis.
Sure. But from a virtual perspective, and as a gamer, 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 where it's going to lead to is something that we need to discover. And of course, we need to discover 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 is 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 converse and be the great companion that we want it to be.
This is very much what I mean by I react to it differently when it's just a concept and it opens the door to these conversations, versus you are going to sell this thing to people. And I think when you sell it to people, the responsibility skyrockets. We've all looked at what's happened with OpenAI models over the last year or so. People have fallen in love with them. Famously, my friend Kevin Roose was proposed to on the front page of the New York Times by Bing. People are having relationships with these products. They're being driven to very negative outcomes. Do you think that you have to do something else to make sure that doesn't happen with Ava, who will be represented in humanlike form on your desk? Like the opportunity to have a relationship is going to change. Right. And from what I have been told from our reporters, Razer people are saying, "We don't want this to be a companion in that way." But OpenAI said that about ChatGPT and yet here we are. So what have you learned from that already?
So we work closely with the model providers. I think this is something that we work closely across together with them. In respect of that, we do talk to them often about, you know, what the plans in the future are 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, 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. Which is why we have also intentionally, in a very intentional and deliberate manner, said we don't know when we're going to launch this — we really do not. And I would suspect, for us it will 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, and then accordingly we'll just grow the product.
I understand all this, but you're taking the money, right? You're taking the pre-orders. Why take the pre-orders if you don't think you're ready?
So what we've actually said — 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, then by then — because the specs — 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 thanks, and we remain open and see how the product evolves from that point of time.
Are you ready for, you know, a customer a few years from now falling in love with the hologram on your desk that you have provided?
I don't think that's how we've designed — we would want to design.
It's going to happen. That's what happens with all these tools. [laughter]
We — I suppose we literally do not know, right? The example — when I play a game and I'm really invested in the game, I really enjoy it and I feel this sense of loss — well, I wouldn't call it a happiness, but 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. We want to create products that people care about, right? 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, you know, who knows.
There are other CEOs who come on the show, they're like, "You should marry my AI" — like straightforwardly say these things to me. All the time, right? And then like the reality is some people are having their romantic lives rocked because like a cloud service got deprecated. Sure. And then you're going to have to deal with that. Like these are the questions that are coming for you once you put a character that people can have an emotional relationship with.
Well, I would say that potentially that could happen, but that's definitely not something we plan to or we build the product toward. I mean, we have, for example, people really passionate about Razer 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 on 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 in terms of the design, and that's what we plan to do with Ava also at the same time, or Mokujin, or Madison — the products that we bring to the market.
Yeah. One more question on this, and then I want to ask you the Decoder questions and talk about the rest of your AI investment, which is pretty substantial. You said you're working with the model partners and that is how you're thinking about trust and safety. Is xAI a good partner when it comes to trust and safety as it relates to Grok? Because I'm looking at the product they're shipping today and I would say no.
Sure. So I think — and I speak broadly for all the partners that we've got — I think for the vast majority of all the models out there, there's of course a lot of focus in terms of intelligence, really trying to get to that point. But 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 excels in different ways at the same time. And 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.
Yeah. Is xAI a good partner when it comes to trust and safety, specifically?
I don't know if I can comment on that at this point of time because I don't have enough information, I think, right now. I really don't. 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.
Yeah. Again, I think I suspect that will be addressed within the next 45 minutes. They've got one idea and they're good at it. Let me ask you the Decoder questions. You've got a trick — you got to play the hits, you know. Let me ask you a code of questions because I think that's going to lead into some of the big investments you're making in the change that's coming to Razer as a company over the next few years. You're really invested in design. You're a product designer — that's some of your background. How is Razer structured that lets you stay focused on design?
So I focus on product at the company. We've got a really pretty flat structure, I think, at Razer. I've got about 40, 50 direct reports. We really work as a team, and the entire company is really focused 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, growing alongside us. And I would say that the guiding north star for us is just about the gamers, and we've been consistent in respect of that, despite the fact that 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 to go, like, "Hey, why don't you do productivity also? Why don't we go into this other area?" — 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.
How many people are at Razer?
And when I say structure, I mean literally organized. Does everybody report to you? Where do over 2,000 people —
So we've got, in a 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 from that perspective. And we consistently keep a very single-minded focus to say that the product is always the most important, the customer — in our case, the gamer — is always the most important for us. And pretty much, we ask ourselves the question: if there's no direct direction or management mandate, when it comes down to this — just figure it out. Like, what would the customer want? What would the gamer want? That's what we do.
Yeah. And you're primarily based in Singapore — I know you come back and forth a lot. Where is most of the company based?
We're everywhere. A third of our business is 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.
