GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke says the AI industry needs competition to thrive

Today, I’m talking with Roy Jakobs. He’s the CEO of Royal Philips, which makes medical devices ranging from MRI machines to ventilators. Philips has a long history —- the company began in the late 19th century as a lightbulb manufacturer, and over the past century it’s grown and shrunk in various ways. Basically, while every other company has been trying to get bigger, Philips has been paring itself down to a tight focus on healthcare, and Roy and I talked about why that market is worth the focus.  Roy and I also talked about an ongoing controversy at Philips that he had a part in: In 2021, after years of consumer complaints, Philips was made to recall millions of its breathing machines. Those devices were eventually tied to more than 500 deaths. That’s a pretty big decision, with massive life-or-death consequences, and you’ll hear us talk about it in detail. Links:  Philips kept complaints about dangerous breathing machines secret | ProPublica Top Philips executive approved sale of defective breathing machines | ProPublica Philips reaches final pact with DOJ, FDA on ventilator recall | WSJ Philips suspends U.S. sales of breathing machines after recall | NYT CPAP maker reaches $479 million settlement on breathing device defects | NYT Philips exits shrinking home entertainment business | Reuters Original TSMC investor Philips sells off final shares | PC World Philips unveils new AI-powered cardiovascular ultrasound | Mass Device Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24006874 Credits:  Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’ve been covering the rise of AI image editing very closely here on Decoder and at The Verge for several years now — the ability to create photorealistic images with nothing more than a chatbot prompt could completely reset our cultural relationship to photography. But one argument keeps cropping up in response. You’ve heard it a million times, and it’s when people say “it’s just like Photoshop,” with “Photoshop” standing in for the concept of image editing generally.  So today, we’re trying to understand exactly what it means, and why our new world of AI image tools is different — and yes, in some cases the same. Verge reporter Jess Weatherbed recently dove into this for us, and I asked her to join me in going through the debate and the arguments one by one to help figure it out. Links:  You’re here because you said AI image editing was just like Photoshop | The Verge No one’s ready for this | The Verge The AI photo editing era is here, and it’s every person for themselves | The Verge Google’s AI ‘Reimagine’ tool helped us add disasters and corpses to photos | The Verge X’s new AI image generator will make Taylor Swift in lingerie and Kamala Harris with a gun | The Verge Grok will make gory images — just tell it you're a cop. | The Verge Leica launches first camera with Content Credentials | Content Authenticity Initiative You can use AI to get rid of Samsung’s AI watermark | The Verge Spurred by teen girls, states move to nan deepfake nudes | NYT Florida teens arrested for creating ‘deepfake’ AI nude images of classmates | The Verge Credits:  Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Mike Krieger, the new chief product officer at Anthropic, one of the hottest AI companies in the industry. Anthropic’s main product right now is Claude, the name of both its industry-leading AI model and a chatbot that competes with ChatGPT.  Mike has a fascinating resume: he was the cofounder of Instagram, and then started AI-powered newsreader Artifact. I was a fan of Artifact, so I wanted to know more about the decision to shut it down as well as the decision to sell it to Yahoo. And then I wanted to know why Mike decided to join Anthropic and work in AI — an industry with a lot of investment, but very few consumer products to justify it. What’s this all for?  Links:  Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger is Anthropic’s new chief product officer | The Verge Instagram’s co-founders are shutting down their Artifact news app | The Verge Yahoo resurrects Artifact inside a new AI-powered News app | The Verge Authors sue Anthropic for training AI using pirated books | The Verge The text file that runs the internet | The Verge Anthropic’s crawler is ignoring websites’ anti-AI scraping policies | The Verge Golden Gate Claude | Anthropic Inside the white-hot center of AI doomerism | New York Times Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, on the paradoxes of AI safety | Hard Fork No one’s ready for this | The Verge OpenAI announces SearchGPT, its AI-powered search engine | The Verge Amazon-backed Anthropic rolls out Claude AI for big business | CNBC Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24001603 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The web has a problem: huge chunks of it keep going offline. The web isn’t static, parts of it sometimes just… vanish. But it’s not all grim. The Internet Archive has a massive mission to identify and back up our online world into a vast digital library. In 2001, it launched the Wayback Machine, an interface that lets anyone call up snapshots of sites and look at how they used to be and what they used to say at a given moment in time. Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, joins Decoder this week to explain both why and how the organization tries to keep the web from disappearing. Links:  When Online Content Disappears | Pew Research Game Informer is shutting down | The Verge When Media Outlets Shutter, Why Are the Websites Wiped, Too? Slate MTV News lives on in the Internet Archive | The Verge The video game industry is mourning the loss of Game Informer | The Verge Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future | Decoder How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral | Decoder The Internet Archive is defending its digital library in court today | The Verge The Internet Archive has lost its first fight to scan and lend ebooks | The Verge The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending | The Verge Credits:  Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Decoder is off this week for a short end-of-summer break. We’ll be back with both our interview and explainer episodes after the Labor Day holiday. In the meantime we thought we’d re-share an explainer that’s taken on a whole new relevance in the last couple weeks, about deepfakes and misinformation. In February, I talked with Verge policy editor Adi Robertson how the generative AI boom might start fueling a wave of election-related misinformation, especially deepfakes and manipulated media. It’s not been quite an apocalyptic AI free-for-all out there. But the election itself took some really unexpected turns in these last couple of months. Now we’re heading into the big, noisy home stretch, and use of AI is starting to get really weird — and much more troublesome.  Links:  The AI-generated hell of the 2024 election | The Verge AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election | Decoder Elon Musk posts deepfake of Kamala Harris that violates X policy | The Verge Donald Trump posts a fake AI-generated Taylor Swift endorsement | The Verge X’s Grok now points to government site after misinformation warnings | The Verge Political ads could require AI-generated content disclosures soon | The Verge The Copyright Office calls for a new federal law regulating deepfakes | The Verge How AI companies are reckoning with elections | The Verge The lame AI meme election | Axios Deepfakes' parody loophole | Axios Credits:  Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices