Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: From the heart where innovation, money and power. Collie in
Speaker 2: Silicon Valley Nbon This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde
Speaker 2: and Ed Ludlow.
Speaker 3: And Caroline head of Blueberg's World take laughters into you
Speaker 3: right next to our Ed Ludlow.
Speaker 4: This isbg Technology.
Speaker 3: Coming up full coverage ahead of the stage of artificial intelligence.
Speaker 3: As we sit down with Open AI COO Brad Lightcap.
Speaker 3: You do not want to miss it.
Speaker 5: Pass will take a deep dive into Apple's robot ambitions
Speaker 5: as the company eyes the next big thing after scrapping
Speaker 5: its car ambitions detailed to come and paramounted inches closer
Speaker 5: to a deal to merge with David Ellison's Skydance Media.
Speaker 6: We'll bring you the latest and so much more throughout
Speaker 6: this app.
Speaker 3: We're also going to be more going more broadly as
Speaker 3: to what the space is like in the chip sector
Speaker 3: and ultimately where we are in this AI hype or
Speaker 3: reality cycle, how you can still be committing money towards it.
Speaker 3: So please to welcome into the show. Miniso Otto, head
Speaker 3: of TMT Research a Visible Alpha and we'll give us
Speaker 3: your research deep dive at the moment Menissa, because are
Speaker 3: you feeling in this environment with benchmarks near record highs,
Speaker 3: with another seventy percent added to and video over the
Speaker 3: course of this year alone, that this is still a bye,
Speaker 3: that the earnings still show growth potential.
Speaker 7: First of all, thank you so much for having me on.
Speaker 7: It's so great to be here and talk about technology
Speaker 7: with the two of you. To real privilege. I mean,
Speaker 7: Nvidio the story of the past twelve months, no doubt.
Speaker 7: I mean, based on visible Alpha consensus, we've seen our
Speaker 7: upward revisions from last January come up over two hundred
Speaker 7: billion dollars. So we're in an interesting inflection point. Are
Speaker 7: we going to see Earning's estimates be revised up yet
Speaker 7: another two hundred billion dollars? You know, when I look
Speaker 7: at previous cycles where we have new products like the
Speaker 7: iPhone or the Internet, you know, a totally new type
Speaker 7: of cycle coming into the mix, how big would it be?
Speaker 7: You know? I think in the beginning of those types
Speaker 7: of cycles, we can be cautious conservative. Then looking back
Speaker 7: five years looking back on those it's like, WHOA, I
Speaker 7: thought I thought my numbers were crazy, but actually they
Speaker 7: were pretty conservative. You know, I think these are the
Speaker 7: questions that investors are asking themselves right now, and that's
Speaker 7: what we're watching in our data.
Speaker 5: They get asked the questions on a more than daily basis.
Speaker 5: The newsflow around AI for every company, every layer of
Speaker 5: the AI stack is astonishing. Google is the example this morning,
Speaker 5: right and the reporting is that they're looking at search
Speaker 5: and thinking, do we charge a premium AI powered search
Speaker 5: on a subscription basis? How much of a domain do
Speaker 5: you find search to be? In this wild AI story?
Speaker 7: Google has owned the search space for as long as
Speaker 7: I can remember. They dominate, They generate incredible revenues from that.
Speaker 7: It's been probably the story of the past fifteen years
Speaker 7: in terms of what their growth has been. Like, what
Speaker 7: will be really compelling.
Speaker 4: Will be to.
Speaker 7: See what Microsoft does with their search. Are they going
Speaker 7: to start to nip at some of that market share?
Speaker 7: Are they going to start to integrate AI in a
Speaker 7: way that isn't charging a fee? I mean, what's the
Speaker 7: business model there? Why would users pay a fee for
Speaker 7: AI when there's other options out there? And I think,
Speaker 7: you know, there was an upgrade yesterday with Dolly, and
Speaker 7: you know, the market came out and showed the capabilities
Speaker 7: of open AI are just remarkable. I'm excited to stick
Speaker 7: around and listen to the open ai interview. I mean,
Speaker 7: this is it's incredible.
Speaker 6: What they're doing.
Speaker 5: What is it you'd want to learn about open ai
Speaker 5: when you're listening to the interview?
Speaker 7: Oh, I mean I would love to hear what they're doing,
Speaker 7: what their new upgrades are about, where they see it
Speaker 7: going next, what dynamics also consumer?
Speaker 6: Where are you more focused both?
Speaker 7: I mean, it's all about right now. I think the
Speaker 7: foundation of AI has been all about it's essentially been
Speaker 7: funded by cloud service providers, yes, and taking it from
Speaker 7: cloud service providers, getting it into enterprises and really not
Speaker 7: only generating productivity and efficiency gains, making organizations more intelligent,
Speaker 7: but also finding new business models, new ways of thinking
Speaker 7: about the world. I mean, this is what the iPhone
Speaker 7: did so remarkably well. Can AI do the same thing?
Speaker 7: This is what we're all waiting for. What new apps
Speaker 7: are going to come out, what's going to change our lives?
Speaker 4: And it feels as.
Speaker 3: Though it's a lot of organic growth that you're focusing on.
Speaker 3: And it's interesting that we come off this day of
Speaker 3: a report in Reuters that maybe a bit of inorganic
Speaker 3: growth could still be done in this irregulatory environment. If
Speaker 3: the reports are true that Alphabet is eyeing HubSpot for example,
Speaker 3: do you think that sort of a.
Speaker 6: Deal can get done.
Speaker 3: Are you expecting any more consolidation of such large players.
Speaker 4: It's a tough one.
Speaker 7: It's really difficult to answer and to address questions on deals.
Speaker 7: I mean, it's such a dynamic markets. It's a good
Speaker 7: market right now, probably for m and A.
Speaker 6: For Alcoa.
Speaker 3: Hias more likely that we seem to be happening with
Speaker 3: Microsoft rather than actually doing deals.
Speaker 7: It'll be interesting. Yeah, I think I would just pivot
Speaker 7: on that and say, you know, I think we we
Speaker 7: really need to look at the dynamics in the market,
Speaker 7: see where the trends are going to lead us and
Speaker 7: where users are actually gonna drive revenues. And if that's
Speaker 7: going to be the case, then you know, who knows
Speaker 7: what could be on the horizon.
Speaker 5: Later today, Caroline and I will be upstairs at Bloomberg
Speaker 5: Intelligences AI Summit, our research arm And when I think
Speaker 5: about Generator today, I.
Speaker 4: Always feel like we covered it in reverse.
Speaker 5: We went straight to the consumer facing chatbot and not
Speaker 5: really how we got there along the way until GtC
Speaker 5: when Jensen one walks into the middle of the show
Speaker 5: and floor and praises Michael Dell and says, if you need.
Speaker 4: What did you make of that?
Speaker 7: I mean, this was new, This was absolutely new. I
Speaker 7: mean he kind of called out. He's like, who else
Speaker 7: could make better end to end solutions for enterprises at
Speaker 7: a large scale than Mike Dell and the whole You
Speaker 7: could almost feel everybody go whoa, you know, And I
Speaker 7: thought that was really interesting because that's the next big
Speaker 7: leg that needs to come into AI is for there
Speaker 7: to be real strategic thought into how organizations enterprises are
Speaker 7: going to really embrace generative AI and what it's going
Speaker 7: to actually do for the This is very transformative. It's
Speaker 7: not like you just flick a light switch and there's
Speaker 7: an app and suddenly you have generative AI.
Speaker 6: I mean a lot.
Speaker 7: Needs to happen in an organization. They need to de
Speaker 7: silo their data, they need to train it, it needs
Speaker 7: to be in the cloud, there needs to be analytics
Speaker 7: around it. There's so much that actually needs to happen,
Speaker 7: and it'll be fascinating to see what role companies like
Speaker 7: Dell play in this arena.
Speaker 5: And now we're talking about infrastructure and supply Chain Malicerado,
Speaker 5: head of TMT Research at Visible Alpha, Thank you. Meanwhile,
Speaker 5: I want to bring an update to our audience on
Speaker 5: what's happening in Taiwan following the largest earthquake there in
Speaker 5: twenty five years. While the full extent of the damage
Speaker 5: from the latest quake isn't known, the latest figures our
Speaker 5: ten people have died and more than one thousand have
Speaker 5: been injured. Companies have also provided updates on employee safety
Speaker 5: in their operations. Taiwan Semiconductor resumed production less than twenty
Speaker 5: four hours after evacuating staff and halting operations. The company
Speaker 5: said there has been no damage to its most critical
Speaker 5: chipmaking equipment. It expects full operations at its main plant
Speaker 5: to be fully recovered by later today. Some of the
Speaker 5: island's tech firms are still assessing the damage from the earthquake,
Speaker 5: which leveled dozens of buildings on its eastern side. We
Speaker 5: will continue to monitor for the latest headline and bring
Speaker 5: them to you as they cross the Bloomberg Carrot.
Speaker 3: More coming up now we're returning our attention to Disney.
Speaker 3: It was an extensive proxy battle. Bobiga has defeated. From
Speaker 3: a board perspective, the billionaire activist investor Nelson Peltz. But
Speaker 3: actually who's one out here we discussed as the Bloomberg
Speaker 3: technology the votes. They're in months of spending millions to
Speaker 3: win over investors, both retail and institutional, but the battling
Speaker 3: opponents in the press has now become a reality that
Speaker 3: Bobbiga has emerged victorious in the proxy battle with Nelson
Speaker 3: Peltz from tryan more broadly, we want to bring in
Speaker 3: Crystal c for more because ultimately, with a thirty percent
Speaker 3: let's call it rally in Disney shares for the course
Speaker 3: of this year, many would say Nelson Peltz has ended
Speaker 3: up winning out no matter what financially, But has this
Speaker 3: changed the tone of Disney going forward?
Speaker 8: So actually, paltzas said in some interview that he's rather
Speaker 8: be rich than right, and I think he's somewhat achieved
Speaker 8: that goal. Like you said, the stocks are thirty percent,
Speaker 8: and he first came to the stock in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 8: This is actually his second go around with Disney. So
Speaker 8: the couple of things that he's pushing for at Disney
Speaker 8: is going to become the things to watch and some
Speaker 8: of the things our iger had personally expressed kind of
Speaker 8: share it sentiment of for on thing is succession, who
Speaker 8: is going to succeed Eiger? And that had come up
Speaker 8: again and again. And the other thing is streaming and
Speaker 8: how they achieved profitability when it comes to streaming and
Speaker 8: achieve Netflix like prof profitability, that's also come up, right,
Speaker 8: So those are the things that investor is going to watch.
Speaker 9: From now on.
Speaker 5: The pressure is on Eiger still because he promised the
Speaker 5: profitability by the end of twenty twenty four. And when
Speaker 5: you have a proxy battle, it's that it's a battle,
Speaker 5: and often in the media where you go out and say, oh, well,
Speaker 5: I'm doing this and everything's great. The pressure is also
Speaker 5: on Eiger because one of his you call it adversary,
Speaker 5: Elon Musk, is still talking about this on social media
Speaker 5: and it's an interesting dynamic, that's right.
Speaker 8: So Elon, I think it's someone pelts Us called a
Speaker 8: personal friend, and he obviously thinks very highly of Elon.
Speaker 8: Elon even tweeted that he thinks pelt should be on
Speaker 8: the Disney board, and interestingly, with so much retail influence,
Speaker 8: he actually tweeted after the retail voting deadline was closed.
Speaker 8: So I actually don't think it achieved very much when
Speaker 8: it comes to way good point pulling votes for Pelts,
Speaker 8: but he Elon is definitely interested in this situation and
Speaker 8: whether he's going to go against Aiger. We don't see that.
Speaker 8: I don't think there is any particular beef between the
Speaker 8: two men, but definitely an interesting dynamic with all the
Speaker 8: very high profile and just write all around a sub situation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's interesting that at the end of the day,
Speaker 5: sources told us what ninety four percent of the vote
Speaker 5: went to Tiger's reelection and Disney got all their nomine nominees.
Speaker 5: In Bloomber's crystal z e terrific reporting.
Speaker 4: All week long.
Speaker 3: Pigment a business planning platform used by companies like Klan, a, Figma, Postmark.
Speaker 3: But it's raised another one hundred and forty five million dollars.
Speaker 3: This is a Series D funding round. It was led
Speaker 3: by Iconic Growth, but other investors like Felix Capital still
Speaker 3: on board with it. And it's just ten months after
Speaker 3: the latest financing. Peas to welcome Pigment co founder and
Speaker 3: co c Eleanor Crespo joining us now and you have
Speaker 3: some big VC names behind, you have more money raised,
Speaker 3: and the first question is always what do you do
Speaker 3: with it. Where are you deploying the money?
Speaker 10: Yeah, thank you for having me on the show. So
Speaker 10: I think it's very simple. We have been very lucky
Speaker 10: actually to do this fundraising. We didn't need that money.
Speaker 10: We had an amazing traction lesture that led to that fundraising.
Speaker 10: We did three x in our revenue and we managed
Speaker 10: to send amazing customers. What we'll do is very simple
Speaker 10: is a freedom to innovate. We launched about one hundred
Speaker 10: product innovation lesture with Pigment, and we plan to keep innovating.
Speaker 6: Very very fast with AI.
Speaker 10: Of course, I think we discuss AI, but with many
Speaker 10: of the things that we make Pigments successful in the future.
Speaker 3: Okay, so let's talk about that innovation and freedom to
Speaker 3: do so. Product innovation has been bringing basic general of
Speaker 3: AI to make your product easier to use people using
Speaker 3: across different parts of their businesses. How is generative AI
Speaker 3: helping the strategic planning so much more?
Speaker 6: Yes?
Speaker 10: So, generative AI actually has an amazing application at Pigment.
Speaker 10: I think you know, an implication like pigment, back office
Speaker 10: application like Pigment use generative AI in general to democratize
Speaker 10: the access to data.
Speaker 6: At the end of the day. Our customers.
Speaker 10: What they want is to give access to data to
Speaker 10: as many decision maker as possible in the company. With
Speaker 10: the revolution of generative AI, it is actually being made
Speaker 10: possible because you can ask any question in natural language.
Speaker 10: To give you an example, our customers today with pigment
Speaker 10: can ask questions such as what was my p and
Speaker 10: l leastre in the US, give me my growth number
Speaker 10: in natural language and this is a phenomenal.
Speaker 6: Revolution for companies.
Speaker 4: Illinois ed in New York.
Speaker 5: You talked about three x in revenue, and I think
Speaker 5: that last time you were on the show in June
Speaker 5: of last year, you also said that when you raise
Speaker 5: the funds, you didn't really need them. So talk to
Speaker 5: me what's changed over the last nine months or so
Speaker 5: and what the company has been up to.
Speaker 10: Yeah, well, I think it's the exact same story. He
Speaker 10: actually run. From our internal investors. We had a lot
Speaker 10: of interest in the past two months from external investors,
Speaker 10: given that we manage actually to go up market. We
Speaker 10: signed incredible customers Fortune five hundred customers in the legs
Speaker 10: of Unilever merk We sent customers in the legs of
Speaker 10: data dog Kaks. Since in the tech industry, and I
Speaker 10: think you know, at the end of the day, what
Speaker 10: is always very important for US is to have the
Speaker 10: freedom to execute. And Iconic actually decided to double down
Speaker 10: alongside IP, Meritech and Green Oaks to actually tell us, look,
Speaker 10: we here and we will let you innovate and double
Speaker 10: down in the US and in Europe at the pace
Speaker 10: that we need to go.
Speaker 3: At the pace because you're expanding geographically, You're entering North
Speaker 3: America and now you say most of your company's revenue
Speaker 3: is coming from this region. Where are the pain points?
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Is it the talent that you need on board to
Speaker 3: be able to ensure that you're basically meeting clients where there.
Speaker 10: Are So I think for us, one of the area
Speaker 10: of expansion is different here keep being the US and
Speaker 10: fifty percent of our revenue today comes from the US
Speaker 10: and this is our number one market. So for us,
Speaker 10: the big challenge is to keep doubling down, keep signing
Speaker 10: fourteen five hundred companies, and as I said, probably the
Speaker 10: most important is to build this product that satisfies this
Speaker 10: customer base. And this is where we are going to
Speaker 10: spend most of our time and effort in the next
Speaker 10: few years. To create this incredible platform.
Speaker 6: One of the other challenges for.
Speaker 10: Us is that we are creating this multi product platform
Speaker 10: because it's a platform that can serve any team in
Speaker 10: a company. The challenge is to are any decision vicker
Speaker 10: from sales to supplay chain, to finance to HR.
Speaker 6: This is what we're building.
Speaker 5: Pigman co founder co CEO Eleanor Crespo. Great to have
Speaker 5: you back on the show. Thank you so much. There
Speaker 5: is other funding news. Chip startups Seema Ai just raise
Speaker 5: seventy million dollars in any round led by Maverick Capital.
Speaker 5: The goal to develop chips designed to speed up AI
Speaker 5: applications within everyday consumer devices from cameras to cars.
Speaker 4: Here for more is the seamer.
Speaker 5: Ai CEO Krishna Rangase Christna same question that Caro led with,
Speaker 5: what do you use that money for?
Speaker 11: We are building and building up on the moment and
Speaker 11: we have on our Gen one product and as you've
Speaker 11: talked about our a Gen one product focused on computer
Speaker 11: vision solving problems and robotics, automotive, medical and smart visions systems.
Speaker 11: We are extending that platform now into moving into generative AI,
Speaker 11: generalive AI applications and we are now going to be
Speaker 11: using the capital to accelerate the development for generally AI.
Speaker 4: Christian.
Speaker 5: Let's talk about the technology then, Are we talk SEC
Speaker 5: or system on chip technology or is this basically a
Speaker 5: data center chip that's more targeted at training neural networks.
Speaker 11: No, we are focused on a different market space, and
Speaker 11: the cloud and the consumer experience in AI has been
Speaker 11: well built out. We are focused on the edge market.
Speaker 11: We're focused on things that touches the physical world robotics,
Speaker 11: industrial automation, automotive and applications that really day to day
Speaker 11: affect our lives. And that's really the focus for us.
Speaker 11: And we are also not in the training business. We're
Speaker 11: in the inference business, where effectively people can deploy applications
Speaker 11: on our chips directly.
Speaker 5: That's exactly where I want to go next. It's an
Speaker 5: interesting choice. AMD did something similar with their AI Accelerator, right.
Speaker 5: They came out with the mi I three hundred generation
Speaker 5: and said, we're mostly focused on inference because that's where
Speaker 5: the world is now. The training has been done, So
Speaker 5: what kinds of companies are you seeking to partner with
Speaker 5: that have already done the training?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 11: So, I think this is almost every massive edge AI
Speaker 11: company and so you could take the top five leaders
Speaker 11: in robotics, industrial automation, or in automotive or in the
Speaker 11: medical market.
Speaker 6: We are engaged with the.
Speaker 11: Top five customers in these market segments globally, and we
Speaker 11: are scaling today. We're engaged with fifty customers and in
Speaker 11: the next few years will be increasing our reach two
Speaker 11: thousand plus customers.
Speaker 3: When it comes to your fundraise, you're saying this is
Speaker 3: about scaling too. We heard similar from pigment is that
Speaker 3: you need to spend more on talent. Is it that
Speaker 3: you need to spend more on infrastructure? Is where are
Speaker 3: some of the amounts that you need to be doubling
Speaker 3: down in from a cost perspective.
Speaker 11: All of the abower and so I think no doubts.
Speaker 6: Talent and R and D.
Speaker 11: Talent in AI is really something we have to aggressively
Speaker 11: keep up with. I mean, the technology is changing at
Speaker 11: such a fast pace. We really need to scale and
Speaker 11: make sure that we are leading the pack, if you will, right.
Speaker 6: So that's one area for investment.
Speaker 11: The second one is go to my and AI adoption
Speaker 11: is really still nascent in the edge market, the cloud
Speaker 11: and the consumer market.
Speaker 4: Is really adopted it quite well.
Speaker 11: The edge market is going to be the next gold
Speaker 11: rush for AI, and this is going to take over
Speaker 11: the next ten years. And reaching these customers, and unlike
Speaker 11: the cloud and the consumer market, we are reaching tens
Speaker 11: of thousands of customers and so reaching them, enabling the
Speaker 11: technology and making it really, really easy to use is
Speaker 11: really where we're going to apply the capital.
Speaker 3: I just want to have you articulate, paint a picture
Speaker 3: of what therefore I'm going to be able to do
Speaker 3: through the power of your technology in ten years time
Speaker 3: that I just can't do.
Speaker 6: That.
Speaker 11: Every single thing we touch in our life will have AI,
Speaker 11: and much like we interact with human beings, we'd be
Speaker 11: able to interact in context of visuals, touch, feel, and
Speaker 11: really be able to really interact the technology in such
Speaker 11: a way that we have never imagined before. And today
Speaker 11: systems are unimodeal in that you either do computer vision,
Speaker 11: or you do audio, or you do text. You're going
Speaker 11: to see merged platforms, which is a new trend called
Speaker 11: multimodal genitive AI, where you're going to now be able
Speaker 11: to do everything you do with a human being, but
Speaker 11: now with every appliance that's going to be around you.
Speaker 5: Krishner, if you phone Tesla to pitch your technology for
Speaker 5: the Optimist program.
Speaker 11: We are reaching out to very many customers and we
Speaker 11: are leading the industry in what we are doing today
Speaker 11: in three vectors. We are leading the technology roadmap in
Speaker 11: the performance we offer on our AIML platform. We're also
Speaker 11: leading in terms of power efficiency, which is another really
Speaker 11: critical problem to the edge. And the third one is
Speaker 11: easy fuse and this is what we need to do
Speaker 11: to increase the breadth of what we do. So we're
Speaker 11: engaged with a lot of customers today and like you said,
Speaker 11: I think today fifty but we really have very big
Speaker 11: ambitions for the company and one day we want to
Speaker 11: be the de facto leader servicing ten thousand plus customers globally.
Speaker 3: Seventy million is going to be going a long way
Speaker 3: for that CMII CEO question. It's great to have some
Speaker 3: time with you. Thank you for coming in today. Welcome
Speaker 3: back to Bluemo Technology.
Speaker 6: I'm Carolin Hyde.
Speaker 5: And one of the names that has a big balance
Speaker 5: sheet might be less sensitive to rates is Apple. Apple
Speaker 5: interesting up a full percentage point in the session. It
Speaker 5: too has had some interesting moves tick by tick over
Speaker 5: the last two sessions or so. One report from Bloomberg
Speaker 5: is that Apple's next big thing is a robot that
Speaker 5: follows you around the house here with the scoop who
Speaker 5: else Bluemos, Mark German. This was an interesting one. There
Speaker 5: is technology parallels for this latest initiative out of Project Titan,
Speaker 5: But just explain what we're talking about here, a robot
Speaker 5: that follows you around.
Speaker 1: The house here, Ed, Yes, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: having me. You're You're absolutely right. If you think about it,
Speaker 1: a self driving car essentially is a robot. But the
Speaker 1: big difference between a self driving car that roams around
Speaker 1: city streets and one that roams around your house is
Speaker 1: the liability, and it's the safety. If the self driving
Speaker 1: car stops working properly on the road, maybe you get
Speaker 1: into a car accident and potentially kill someone. Unfortunately, if
Speaker 1: your self driving robot crashes into a wall in your home,
Speaker 1: kind of so what right? And so it's similar technology,
Speaker 1: but the stakes are so much lower. The necessity to
Speaker 1: be accurate is so much lower. It is an easier
Speaker 1: thing to pull off. And it feels like the timing
Speaker 1: is right for Apple to be exploring this. If you
Speaker 1: think about the backdrop of when the Apple car project
Speaker 1: was canceled that, the newfound struggles being faced by Tesla,
Speaker 1: the profitability issues being faced by Lucid and Rivian and
Speaker 1: any ev maker you can think of. And then at
Speaker 1: the same time you're sort of seeing the technology industry
Speaker 1: shift to aipowered hardware. You're seeing talk about humanoid robots.
Speaker 1: So it does makes sense for Apple to be exploring
Speaker 1: at least this shift.
Speaker 3: Although I robot hasn't exactly had a wondrous time post
Speaker 3: it's unfolding of an Amazon acquisition. Mark I'm interested is
Speaker 3: to where this gets built within Apple because they've been
Speaker 3: saying that moving around a lot of the ultimate talent
Speaker 3: to go into an AI area and general to AI.
Speaker 3: But who bills this within Apple?
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's a great question. So the artificial intelligence
Speaker 1: organization in Apple under John gen Andrea, he used to
Speaker 1: run Search and was a senior executive at Google before
Speaker 1: joining Apple in twenty eighteen, some of the underlying AI
Speaker 1: and robotics work is going on within his organization. And
Speaker 1: then Apple has a hardware engineering group dedicated to home
Speaker 1: devices that's run by a guy named Matt Costello, who
Speaker 1: was actually the chief operating officer at Beats until that
Speaker 1: company was famously acquired by Apple a decade ago, and
Speaker 1: so this is a cross company and effort between those
Speaker 1: two groups. Primarily. Now the other thing I'm want to
Speaker 1: call out, in addition to the home robot, Apple is
Speaker 1: very in depthly exploring the addition of robotics to other
Speaker 1: types of devices. So one thing that they've been working on,
Speaker 1: actually secretly for about three years, four years at this point,
Speaker 1: is a tabletop robot. It's essentially a gigantic iPad on
Speaker 1: a robotic arm, and it's actually pretty cool. So you
Speaker 1: could be on a FaceTime call and the display thinks
Speaker 1: to robotic arm would move to mimic the head movements
Speaker 1: like a nod or your head turning or a laugh
Speaker 1: or whatnot going on on the other side of the
Speaker 1: FaceTime call. So it feels a bit more like a
Speaker 1: telepresence environment. So certainly robotics I believe wholeheartedly this is
Speaker 1: a new big area for Apple moving forward. They're starting
Speaker 1: to throw a little resources at it, and I think
Speaker 1: that's going to grow exponentially over the past or over
Speaker 1: the next several years. One thing to note is although
Speaker 1: hundreds and hundreds of people were laid off from the
Speaker 1: Apple car project and no longer have.
Speaker 6: A and Apple.
Speaker 1: At least a few teams from that car project were
Speaker 1: actually repurposed for some of this AI and robotics work.
Speaker 1: So clearly an intent aior focus right now, albeit extraordinarily
Speaker 1: early in the product development process, When.
Speaker 3: You believe something wholeheartedly, Mark the world believes something wholeheartedly,
Speaker 3: We thank you very much. Indeed, Mark German, of course
Speaker 3: our key Apple correspondent. Coming up, we're going to have
Speaker 3: a deep dive for you. COO of Open AI Bradicap
Speaker 3: joining us for a discussion wide ranging the state of
Speaker 3: enterprise AI adoption as well as consumer AI adoption and
Speaker 3: of course some of the areas of focus for them
Speaker 3: legal on one side, but also opportunities on the next.
Speaker 6: This is Bloomberg Technology.
Speaker 5: From Bloomberg Television and radio audiences worldwide. Open AI's top
Speaker 5: of mind across the world of technology. That includes for
Speaker 5: Elon Musk, who posted on x overnight that his e
Speaker 5: V company, Tesla, is having to boost compensation to ward
Speaker 5: off approaches for its AI talent. Those approaches, claims mask
Speaker 5: include open AI. Ethan Knight, a member of Tesla's team
Speaker 5: working on computer vision for FSD, was approached by open Ai,
Speaker 5: so Musk moved him to his own AI company, Xai.
Speaker 5: Let's get to the open ai side of the story.
Speaker 5: Let's talk about talent. Let's talk about what's happening in
Speaker 5: the world of artificial intelligence. Brad lightcap open ai coo
Speaker 5: joins us here in New York City. There's no accusation
Speaker 5: that anything wrong was done, but it highlights an interesting point.
Speaker 5: Right now, there is a lot being done on the
Speaker 5: training of prior generation models, future generation models. There is
Speaker 5: a finite amount of talent. Give the open ai side
Speaker 5: of this equation, how much of a premium are you
Speaker 5: having to pay out? I don't know if it's salary
Speaker 5: or stark or engineering freedom to get the top names.
Speaker 9: Well, thank you Caroline for having me.
Speaker 12: It's great to be with you. Look, this is a
Speaker 12: competitive market, for sure. It's an amazing place that we're
Speaker 12: at because there's a few number of people that can
Speaker 12: really make such a dramatic impact in this field.
Speaker 9: But we try and pull people into our mission.
Speaker 12: And I think that's historically what's been our strength is
Speaker 12: people want to build in the place where we're pushing
Speaker 12: the frontier, the furthest and also where we really think
Speaker 12: about the impact of the technology, both on a societal level,
Speaker 12: and then also want to apply at an industry level.
Speaker 5: How big is open AI now, how many employees and
Speaker 5: where are they?
Speaker 9: We're about twelve hundred people.
Speaker 12: Twelve hundred, yes, mostly in San Francisco, but also in
Speaker 12: London and Dublin and increasingly other places in the.
Speaker 5: World, increasingly out the places in the world. The reporting
Speaker 5: was that Japan is the next frontier for you. What's
Speaker 5: the strategy there and where you choose I don't know
Speaker 5: what that.
Speaker 4: You call it opening a new market, the way you
Speaker 4: choose to have operations.
Speaker 12: Well, we're very fortunate, we have a very global base
Speaker 12: of demand, so we want to show up where our
Speaker 12: customers are. We think this is going to be a
Speaker 12: global transformation. We feel a lot of pull from places
Speaker 12: like Japan and Asia broadly, and so we'll show up
Speaker 12: where we feel like we need to be.
Speaker 3: And let's talk about ways show up from an industry perspective.
Speaker 3: You're here in New York talking to partners. We understand
Speaker 3: Sam and the teams have been in Hollywood discussing how
Speaker 3: SOUR can be used, but ultimately how you can have
Speaker 3: a working relationship with companies and industries that think they're
Speaker 3: going to be uphended taught us about how those conversations going,
Speaker 3: for example with Hollywood and publications.
Speaker 12: Yeah, you know, we take a very unique perspective here.
Speaker 12: We really model open AI as a partnership's company, and
Speaker 12: we think this transformation is going to be very broad based,
Speaker 12: and so we're one company.
Speaker 9: We can't do everything ourselves.
Speaker 12: Being able to find ways to partner with industry, with countries,
Speaker 12: with specific companies, that's really important to our mission and
Speaker 12: the way that we think about bringing technology to the world.
Speaker 12: By way of recent example, we work really closely actually
Speaker 12: with the publishing industry right now on ways that we
Speaker 12: can deploy AI into publishing to make the quality of
Speaker 12: journalism better, to make the quality of reader experiences better.
Speaker 12: We've heard nothing but really actually a lot of enthusiasm
Speaker 12: from that industry, and so we're always looking at ways
Speaker 12: that we can partner with industry. I expect a lot
Speaker 12: more from us in the future on this front, and
Speaker 12: sort of a great example of where we really are
Speaker 12: excited about the impact that we can make a media.
Speaker 3: It's interesting that media companies over in Europe, for example,
Speaker 3: seem to have got with that quite quickly. Actual Spring
Speaker 3: are a key deal that you sort of birthed early
Speaker 3: days and actual Spring and therefore scenes for businesses side,
Speaker 3: perhaps a little bit more blue links within chat GPT.
Speaker 3: New York Times ain't on that discussion point right now.
Speaker 3: How is that legal fight and indeed behind the scenes
Speaker 3: discussion going with those sorts of companies.
Speaker 12: Well, I can't comment on the New York Times case
Speaker 12: specifically other than to say we think it's without merit.
Speaker 12: But the overwhelming majority of what we hear from the
Speaker 12: publishing industry is actually quite positive. There's a high level
Speaker 12: of excitement everywhere about what these tools can do, both
Speaker 12: to unlock better journalism, to give readers more access to information,
Speaker 12: to enhance the way that people engage with content, so
Speaker 12: the way that we actually think about even the fundamental
Speaker 12: business of information engagement and consumption. These things are all
Speaker 12: really possible now with language models and increasingly with multimodel
Speaker 12: models too. So we think we're just starting to scratch
Speaker 12: the surface on that opportunity.
Speaker 9: We've got a lot more to share there soon.
Speaker 4: But stay tuned.
Speaker 3: You're being positive, being optimistic, of course you are. What's
Speaker 3: interesting is I come away from meetings where Hollywood is
Speaker 3: deeply anxious. People in my industry are deeply anxious. Goodness,
Speaker 3: everyone where the job is trying to work out how
Speaker 3: they adopt AI. And also there's this question that is
Speaker 3: ongoing of open versus closed. You're going for another legal
Speaker 3: fight at the moment, Loamusk has dragged you into it
Speaker 3: and wants you to rename yourself. Where do you sit
Speaker 3: on the closed versts open? How much more open do
Speaker 3: you have to become?
Speaker 12: Yeah, well, look, I think we really focus just on
Speaker 12: where we can deploy the technollogy and what's the best
Speaker 12: way to do that. And at the end of the day,
Speaker 12: we're going to focus on where our customers are and
Speaker 12: the way that they want to deploy it.
Speaker 9: We work with thousands of enterprises across the world.
Speaker 12: We spend a lot of time working with those enterprises
Speaker 12: on ways that we can configure the technology specific to
Speaker 12: their use case, specific to their stack, and we think
Speaker 12: that the easiest way to do that is the way
Speaker 12: that we serve it. But that's not to say that,
Speaker 12: you know, we wouldn't look at other ways in the future.
Speaker 12: We really ultimately want to be where we think the
Speaker 12: best place to.
Speaker 9: Deploy the technology is.
Speaker 5: Going to be Problemomberg television and radio audience worldwide. We're
Speaker 5: in New York City speaking to open Ai COO Brad Lightcap.
Speaker 5: I want to learn more about where open ai sits
Speaker 5: in its growth, its day to day operations. You know,
Speaker 5: you just said thousands of enterprises we came to know
Speaker 5: you because of the explosive response to chat GPT, and
Speaker 5: that was principally in the context of the consumer facing chatbot.
Speaker 5: But it sounds very much like growth now is focused
Speaker 5: on that enterprise arrangement license of technology. Can you give
Speaker 5: me proportions the rate of growth for those two pillars.
Speaker 12: Well, we've seen tremendous growth in the enterprise. Twenty four
Speaker 12: is going to be the year of adoption for AI
Speaker 12: in the enterprise. We felt really like twenty three was
Speaker 12: the year that people just started to wrap their head
Speaker 12: around what was possible with AI in the enterprise. But
Speaker 12: increasingly the market is pulling us toward real applications that
Speaker 12: are delivering real business results and a very broad focus
Speaker 12: on AI enablement.
Speaker 9: So how do we think.
Speaker 12: About bringing AI both to our operations but also to
Speaker 12: our workforces and then also to new product experiences that
Speaker 12: we can deliver to customers, and we work with plenty
Speaker 12: of companies that are doing all three of those things
Speaker 12: at the same time. We think that's very possible and
Speaker 12: it's having really dramatic bottom line impact today. So this
Speaker 12: is what we think the pull is going to be,
Speaker 12: and we're ready to support.
Speaker 4: Brady the COO.
Speaker 5: So I'm assuming you're responsible for also some of the
Speaker 5: purse strings involved in open AI's finances. Compute must be
Speaker 5: a really considerable cost right now, and with that the
Speaker 5: energy consideration as well.
Speaker 4: Are you making enough revenue from.
Speaker 5: This enterprise business to keep the lights on when you
Speaker 5: factor in the compute costs involved?
Speaker 9: We are yes.
Speaker 12: We think that we have well, first of all, a
Speaker 12: very diversified business and so we serve one hundreds of
Speaker 12: millions of users with our chatchapet product, and many of
Speaker 12: those users are paying users. Of course, we serve now
Speaker 12: over six hundred thousand individual users in the enterprise with
Speaker 12: Chatchaputy enterprise, and so we're just seeing tremendous momentum. We're
Speaker 12: very early innings on this and so we look at
Speaker 12: it as hey, this is the start of something, and
Speaker 12: ultimately our priority is just to be able to deliver
Speaker 12: the best intelligence, whether it's in the enterprise or to individuals,
Speaker 12: that's the most useful, that drives the biggest business impact, Cara.
Speaker 5: I'm thinking back to the conversation we had the other
Speaker 5: day with Daniel Amaday from Anthropic and what she explained,
Speaker 5: Brad was the relationship of a WS and bedrock. They're
Speaker 5: getting a lot of business through that. You have a
Speaker 5: quite similar and actually a pre existing situation with Microsoft
Speaker 5: and Azure.
Speaker 4: Are you able to.
Speaker 5: Explain how much new business comes through that conduit of
Speaker 5: the Microsoft relationship and what we're probably existing asual enterprise customers.
Speaker 12: We're really fortunate to have Microsoft as a partner. They've
Speaker 12: been an amazing partner with us for a long time.
Speaker 12: We've increasingly looked at the world as ways that we
Speaker 12: can bring Open an Eye technology to life together. We're
Speaker 12: very fortunate that they're they're offering our models through their
Speaker 12: Azure Open an Eye service. But we have an independent business,
Speaker 12: so we serve we serve customers independently of Microsoft.
Speaker 4: And is that one bigger than the Microsoft avenue.
Speaker 12: Yeah, Look, we you know, we're we're it's it's it's
Speaker 12: fluid between the two, but we really are focused on
Speaker 12: what's best for for for the companies we work with,
Speaker 12: and we're very fortunate to be able to diversify the
Speaker 12: surfaces in which we offer our products. We think the
Speaker 12: demand for this technology is massive, and so being a
Speaker 12: smaller company obviously having a partner that can help bring
Speaker 12: the technology to scale is really really advantageous.
Speaker 9: For us, and we're excited to support them in the future.
Speaker 3: It's an extraordinary, very novel kind of partnership, and in fact,
Speaker 3: the whole of AI is birthing these kind of frenomy relationships.
Speaker 6: I just think of also Aqua.
Speaker 3: Hiers deals that seem to be going now. Microsoft has
Speaker 3: just seemingly aquihied the whole of inflection. What did you
Speaker 3: make of that particular move, particularly when suddenly you've got
Speaker 3: what the co founder of DeepMind coming in to be
Speaker 3: the head of consumer AI at Microsoft, And ultimately you
Speaker 3: put out a response to that being like congratulations, But
Speaker 3: how did that make you feel as the previous partner
Speaker 3: of choice for Microsoft.
Speaker 9: Well, we're excited for them.
Speaker 12: We congratulate in the STAFFA and Karen and the whole team,
Speaker 12: and we work very closely with Microsoft, and so we
Speaker 12: think that's going to be a major advantage for a
Speaker 12: partnership as well.
Speaker 9: We're focused on what we can.
Speaker 12: Control on the open eye side, which for us right
Speaker 12: now is really thinking about the next wave of the
Speaker 12: technology and thinking about ways that that wave is going
Speaker 12: to start to enable businesses. And the more we can
Speaker 12: think about that problem together, the better we'll all be.
Speaker 5: A lot of CEOs I speak to some of them,
Speaker 5: are your customers say their technology agnostic right now? In
Speaker 5: other ways they might use GPT or another foundation model.
Speaker 5: They might also be building their own in parallel. And
Speaker 5: when we told our audience who are coming on the show,
Speaker 5: a lot of people wanted to get your thoughts on
Speaker 5: the Palanteer relationship. It's an interesting case study. They seem
Speaker 5: to be one of the beneficiaries of the enterprise investment
Speaker 5: in AI, or at least the data analytics side.
Speaker 4: What's it like working with Alex.
Speaker 12: Kap Yeah, well, we actually work with a bunch of
Speaker 12: partners that help us bring the technology to life, and
Speaker 12: there's so many ways to deploy the technology in the enterprise.
Speaker 12: That's what's kind of amazing about this technology is it's
Speaker 12: not just one function in the enterprise or one part
Speaker 12: of the enterprise.
Speaker 4: Stack.
Speaker 12: It's so diverse and it's so broad based, and so
Speaker 12: we work with with with with many partners to bring
Speaker 12: that to life, and we'll continue to look for partners
Speaker 12: to work with to help us do that. But yeah, no,
Speaker 12: we you know, look, we're we're excited with with with
Speaker 12: the way Polunteers has been enabling their customers on top
Speaker 12: of our technology. Uh, and we'll continue to support them
Speaker 12: going forward.
Speaker 5: Brad every day acrosses my desk, you know, I've done
Speaker 5: quite a lot of repulicing on Sam's chip ambitions as well.
Speaker 5: There's some relationship going on between the UAE and Open
Speaker 5: AI fundraising or technology partnerships. Can you clarify what's going
Speaker 5: on there and why you need to raise funds from
Speaker 5: somewhere like that?
Speaker 9: Yeah, well, look, I won't comment specifically on that.
Speaker 12: We broadly, though, believe that there's just not enough total
Speaker 12: supply in the world and that of.
Speaker 4: AI accelerates, specifically.
Speaker 12: AI accelerators, and broadly that the supply chain will need
Speaker 12: to adapt to what we think is going to be
Speaker 12: this highly inflected and nearly exponential.
Speaker 9: Demand and the next ten years.
Speaker 12: And so we spend a lot of time thinking about
Speaker 12: ways that we can make sure that that demand is met.
Speaker 12: Part of it is just being able to bring our
Speaker 12: models to bear, but upstream of that is obviously making
Speaker 12: sure that the actual underlying hardware and infrastructure exists to
Speaker 12: be able to build the systems that we need to
Speaker 12: ultimately serve that demand. And so you know, we think
Speaker 12: a lot about it, and you know, our hope there
Speaker 12: is that the supply chain starts to think about that
Speaker 12: the same way we do.
Speaker 3: Brad, your mantra, your manifesto. Your focus is to build
Speaker 3: artificial general intelligence for the good of humanity, and I
Speaker 3: speak to a lot of humans who are terrified. Can
Speaker 3: you encapsulate how you can without regulation being there in
Speaker 3: place yet and the ease sort of putting the gauntlet
Speaker 3: out there. You're doing all of this without disrupting too much,
Speaker 3: too quickly, too hard.
Speaker 12: Yeah, well, look, central to our mission is to make
Speaker 12: sure that we bring the technology in a way that's
Speaker 12: safe and that creates broad benefit. It's really encoded into
Speaker 12: how open AI was structured, and it is actually the
Speaker 12: thing that we spend our time thinking about how to
Speaker 12: deliver in real world results today. And so we're very
Speaker 12: optimistic and I can understand where the fear comes from
Speaker 12: things are moving very fast, even for us at the
Speaker 12: center of it sometimes is dizzying. But look, our perspective
Speaker 12: is that this is an enabling technology. At its core,
Speaker 12: it's going to make businesses more efficient, it can make
Speaker 12: people more productive, it can be dramatically inflecting in how
Speaker 12: people learn, how people can understand information, and so we
Speaker 12: think that that has a very broadly positive effect on
Speaker 12: the world, and the world that we wake up to
Speaker 12: ten years from now will be one that we look
Speaker 12: back on, you know, and really are are excited to
Speaker 12: be able to go build today and you know works,
Speaker 12: that's really.
Speaker 9: What we wake up every day and want to go do.
Speaker 3: So we want to thank you being in the house
Speaker 3: with us. The CEO of open Ai, Brad Lightcap there
Speaker 3: joining us in New York.
Speaker 6: We thank him.
Speaker 3: Paramount is getting closer to a deal to merge with Skydance.
Speaker 3: It's a production company founded by independent producer David Ellison,
Speaker 3: her son of Larry Sherry Redstone, is controlling shareholder of Paramount,
Speaker 3: and has reached a tentative agreement to sell her steak
Speaker 3: to Skydance. Now both parties have even agreed on the
Speaker 3: broad framework of a deal to combine and we'll use
Speaker 3: a thirty day window of exclusive talks to iron out
Speaker 3: the details all of this according to sources ed what's
Speaker 3: so interesting is when you deep dive on the market
Speaker 3: reaction positive and this is saying there are more questions
Speaker 3: than answer right now, and.
Speaker 5: I am more confused about the future of Paramount than
Speaker 5: I And I know that's a cop out, but that
Speaker 5: is literally a blooming intelligence rights raises more questions answers.
Speaker 5: One of the concerns is this deal was done between
Speaker 5: voting right shareholders. What about all the non voting right
Speaker 5: shareholders is very complicated.
Speaker 3: Where's their value? An emerged entity? But what this does
Speaker 3: do is remain Paramount as a whole and ultimately also
Speaker 3: trading company, rather than being split up as Apollo was
Speaker 3: potentially suggesting and just taking bits.
Speaker 4: Of the asset, keeping the library.
Speaker 3: That's right, but real deal's real offers on the table.
Speaker 3: That's a key takeaway. Meanwhile, that does it for this
Speaker 3: addition of Bloomberg Technology.
Speaker 4: Boy, well that was quite a conversation with open Ai.
Speaker 5: Check it out recap on the podcast, Apple, Spotify, the
Speaker 5: Bloomberg platforms.
Speaker 4: This is Bloomberg Technology