Quoting Nilay Patel
Quoting Nilay Patel
The Verge's Nilay Patel said on The Vergecast that AI product quality isn't good enough for users to accept its costs—data center noise, AI overviews, and floods of deepfake slop aren't worth it, companies are spending more than they earn, and agents have yet to become truly usable. He believes the AI industry can only escape its current predicament by building products whose improvements to users' lives are evident without any advertising.
6th November 2026
The products aren't good enough to sell people on the costs.
You cannot tell people that you have to listen to the whine of a data center in their backyard for AI overviews and some of the most hilarious deep fake slop in history.
It's not worth it. It just isn't worth it to anyone. And agents aren't real and they might not be being used the way that anyone wants them to yet. All these companies are spending more than they're making on these products. Refrigerators holding blood storage in Europe are being hacked.
The costs are too high. The benefits are not real. And if you connect that to corruption, you're like, in order to impose these costs on me, these CEOs are in the White House shaking Trump's hand, renaming it to the Gulf of America, paying for this ballroom that we don't want. It's obvious crypto-corruption, and it's still slop.
The AI industry will not get out of it until they make better products. Until everyone can see without needing to be convinced, without needing an ad campaign, without any of this stuff that just using these products makes your life better.
— Nilay Patel, The Vergecast: Big Tech lost big in the 2026 election
Source: Simon Willison · simonwillison.net