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- [00:01]
Tim Stenovec
At Venture Global, we think about what
- [00:03]
Carol Massar
can be done, not what's usually done through innovation.
- [00:08]
Samir Samat
Venture Global is not only building some
- [00:10]
Tim Stenovec
of the largest energy facilities in the
- [00:12]
Yoshua Bengio
world right here in the United States,
- [00:15]
Tim Stenovec
but delivering American energy at a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time. So while others are busy talking, we're busy building. That's Venture Global. That's unstoppable energy.
- [00:30]
Carol Massar
Support for the show comes from Public. Public is an investing platform that offers access to stocks, options, bonds and crypto. And they've also integrated AI with tools that can assist investors in building customized portfolios. One of these tools is called Generated Assets. It allows you to turn your ideas into investable indexes. So let's say you're interested in something specific like bit biotech companies with high R and D spend small cap stocks with improving operating margins or the S&P 500 minus high debt companies. Chances are there isn't an ETF that fits your exact criteria. But on Public you just type in a prompt and their AI screens thousands of stocks and builds a one of a kind index. You can even backtest it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks, go to public.com market and and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com market and paid for by
- [01:24]
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Public Holdings Brokerage Services by Public Investing member FINRA SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors SEC Registered Advisor crypto services by ZeroHash sample prompts are for illustrative purposes only, not investment advice. All investing involves risk of loss. See complete disclosures@public.com disclosures small businesses are
- [01:44]
Show Host / Narrator
the pulse of every community. They bring people together, create opportunities and drive growth. Chase for Business helps business owners like you with personalized guidance and convenient digital tools all in one place. With that guidance and your determination, you can take your business farther and help build a brighter future for your community. Learn more@chase.com business chase for business make more of what's yours the Chase Mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates. May apply JP Morgan Chase Bank Naomi Member FDIC Copyright 2026 JPMorgan Chase Co.
- [02:21]
Tim Stenovec
This is Bloomberg Business Week Daily reporting
- [02:24]
Samir Samat
from the magazine that helps global leaders
- [02:26]
Tim Stenovec
stay ahead with insight on the people,
- [02:29]
Carol Massar
companies and trends shaping today's complex economy.
- [02:32]
Tim Stenovec
Plus global business, finance and tech news as it happens.
- [02:36]
Carol Massar
Bloomberg Business Week Daily with Carol Massar
- [02:40]
Tim Stenovec
and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio Hi everyone.
- [02:44]
Show Host / Narrator
Welcome to the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business. This week we were live at the Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco.
- [02:50]
Tim Stenovec
The summit brings together leaders across tech and business. It brings insightful conversations and connections around today's cutting edge technologies and how they affect business and beyond.
- [02:59]
Show Host / Narrator
Today we're going to bring you some of our favorite conversations from the event. We'll hear from leaders across the tech sector, including CEOs, tech executives, and even a Grammy award winning rapper and producer. First up this hour, we spoke with Samir Samat, President of the Android ecosystem at Google.
- [03:17]
Tim Stenovec
How do you position Android in the United States versus how you position it globally where it is more widely adopted?
- [03:24]
Samir Samat
Well, Android is an open source operating system, which is really great because it allows people to build all kinds of different devices. So of course we know that Android is popular for phones today, where there's over three and a half billion Android devices that are used every day. It's the most widely used operating system in the world. But Android is so much more than phones. You people use it for cars, they use it for televisions, they use it for, for smart watches and all kinds of new devices, including some smart glasses that we're working on for later this year as well. So it's really become much more than phones and it's a whole ecosystem.
- [03:55]
Interviewer / Moderator
How do you think about an operating system within an AI world that is, we're still kind of figuring it out, right? We're all finding our way here.
- [04:02]
Samir Samat
Well, it's, it's changing a lot. You know, things are changing all around us. And I think the way we think about this moment is we're moving from an operating system to what I call an intelligent system, one that is able to be more predictive and more helpful in the moment for you. So instead of making you the micromanager of your device, which is the way I think computing's worked for 40 years, you have the idea in your head and you use a pointing device or taps to take that idea and do all the things you need to do to get things done. In this new AI era, how can we actually make the system much smarter? So you give it your intention, your goal, and it can translate that into the action that it needs to take to help you get more done.
- [04:44]
Tim Stenovec
Yeah, I want to push on that a little bit because I still think when, when right now, when a lot of people think about AI, they, they equate it with LLMs and they think about LLMs not necessarily as, you know, clogged code or helping us buy code, but rather as glorified search engines. And that actually does search a lot better than we've grown up using how. What is the value proposition for an ecosystem in the world of AI? Because you're explaining this idea of us being more productive as a result of this technology, but I don't even know what that looks like. Is it predictive? Does it know what we want before we want it? Like, what is it?
- [05:22]
Interviewer / Moderator
Which just gets a little creepy. Then potentially, potentially, Let me give you
- [05:27]
Samir Samat
one simple example that I used new release of Android with Gemini for recently on my, on my Pixel device, which is, you know, I had a list of folks that are coming to a barbecue that I'm holding and next to each person I had, how many people are coming in their family? Are they vegetarian? Are they not vegetarian? You know, the normal thing you do when you're throwing a party, you make
- [05:47]
Tim Stenovec
this list, but like, where do you put that list? Does that go in Google Docs or something like that?
- [05:50]
Hitboy
I think I just had it in
- [05:51]
Samir Samat
an email that I was writing to myself, you know, like we all do sometimes. And I asked Gemini, working on my Pixel device, can you take this list, analyze it, figure out how many hamburgers, how many hot dogs, how many buns, and then go to Instacart and add it all to my shopping cart and then let me check it out. And you know, it took that, figured out all the vegetarians, figured out all the things, figured out how many people are coming, how many kids, how many nakids, and it did it for me. And so that probably saved me, I don't know, six, seven minutes. You add that up multiple times a day throughout all the things that we're doing and that's really helpful.
- [06:26]
Interviewer / Moderator
Samir, what do you think in terms of the conversations that we're having about artificial intelligence? Because I do feel like you and I were talking about this at dinner last night. We're just scratching the surface in terms of certainly how we use it and how we need to push ourselves to better understand what this tool can do or eventually do.
- [06:43]
Samir Samat
Well, I think the most important thing right now is for all of us that are in the industry or even around the industry, is to make sure we have hands on experience. One of the things we tell our teams, and I tell my kids as well, is we should engage with the technology to understand how it can help you and what the limits of it are. And it's changing so quickly. What I tell folks is even if it wasn't able to help you with something this month, put a note for yourself and check back three months later because it's moving so fast.
- [07:13]
Tim Stenovec
What I think is important about your example is that you had the initiative to actually ask Gemini to do that. I think that the challenge in this world is that a lot of people don't know that LLMs like Gemini can actually do that sort of thing. So they wouldn't even know that with that example, AI could save them six or seven minutes. How do you communicate that to a population that has no idea what this is technology can do? Truly has no idea.
- [07:43]
Samir Samat
You know, in the beginning when these interfaces came out, you had a chat prompt and we didn't know what we could type into it. I think people do discover over time by trying things, but most importantly the software itself. This is where the operating system can be really helpful. You know, when you talk about an intelligent system, it should be able to understand from you what your intention is. You know, what's my goal? What am I trying to get done? Oh, I'm planning a party. Okay, well, did you know I can help you with this, you know, and to prompt you to do that and to show you how that it can assist you in that moment. And that's a different kind of user interface than what we've seen.
- [08:22]
Tim Stenovec
What I have noticed is with Google Search, it's actually pushing me to Gemini within, within web based Google Search. And it's becoming very natural. So it's sort of like I'm not starting at Gemini, I'm starting starting at Google Search and then using it, interacting with search like an LLM.
- [08:38]
Samir Samat
Well, I'm glad it's helping you.
- [08:39]
Rafi Krikorian
That's great.
- [08:41]
Samir Samat
We have so many different tools that I think are there for folks. And I just want to give one small example of one called NotebookLM. And if your viewers haven't checked out NotebookLM, people love this. Yes. I mean, NotebookLM is one of my favorites. And on the Android app, For example, for NotebookLM, my son who just finished five finals, he was like, dad, can you help me study for the science final? And I said, sure. Overly confident as I am about this. And then he gave me the material and I looked at it and I said, I haven't reviewed this in years, but tonight I have to do a study session with him. So I put it all in Notebook LM and it gave me an audio podcast that I listened to on the way home. And when I got home, I looked like super dad, you know, because I could answer these questions. Question to go back, this is where it starts to become helpful. And I think it's all about the purpose, the way in which we use this technology in A purposeful, intentful way to help make our lives better. And that's what we're trying to do.
- [09:40]
Interviewer / Moderator
So let's go there because last month when you guys announced a bunch of upcoming features for your Android 17 operating system, you made some comment about. There's a great concern about AI for AI sake. And we want to be very purposeful.
- [09:53]
Samir Samat
Yeah.
- [09:53]
Interviewer / Moderator
What does that mean?
- [09:54]
Samir Samat
Well, I mean, I think if you, if you look at any, just go talk to people, the word AI has become pretty overloaded and I think people are. They have mixed feelings about it, let's just put it that way. I think what they really want is to not hear about the technology. What they really want is to hear about how is this going to help me. I gave the Notebook LM example, but if you. There are so many more that when you talk about how this can help you, it changes the conversation. I'll give you one of my favorites from Android. Android has a feature called Circle to Search. Circle to Search is really simple. You hold down the home button and then you see a flash and at that point you can circle anything on your screen. Let's say you have a celebrity on your screen wearing a great outfit, circle it and say, shop the look and it bring. Google will go take what they're wearing and figure out what the jacket is, what the tie is, what all the different pieces and bring back each of those to you so you can figure out where to buy them and if they're right, if they're right for you. There's a ton of AI behind the scenes there. That's not the important thing. The important thing is that it's super helpful, packaged in a way that's intentful, purposeful for the user to help them get something done that they couldn't do before.
- [11:09]
Interviewer / Moderator
Samir, where do you think AI impacts our world the most? Is it in our personal lives? Is it in our work lives? Is it everything? We keep talking about, what it's going to mean for our health care and medical world. Like, where do you see it impacting our world the most or will it be everything?
- [11:26]
Samir Samat
Well, I think there's a number of places that it's already impacting our world. But I think, you know, if you, if you take the discipline of software engineering, for example, that's going through a lot of change, I think exciting change, but also there are people who are concerned changes with that as well. I think in the end it will be very productive and we're going through that same change at Google as well. But I think if you look at every industry, there are amazing applications. If you look at biotech, there will be amazing applications. If we look at, as you said, healthcare, there will be amazing applications. I'm wearing my new Fitbit Ace.
- [11:58]
Tim Stenovec
Yeah. If you're listening on radio, Samir's got a Fit Fitbit on one wrist. It looks like an Android watch.
- [12:03]
Samir Samat
I have a Pixel watch, an Oura ring.
- [12:06]
Tim Stenovec
He's got to check out what the copy.
- [12:07]
Samir Samat
Do you have any others to recommend?
- [12:09]
Tim Stenovec
So I want to go back to this whole idea of the ecosystem and how it relates to AI in Gemini and the stickiness of it, because I think that's a part of the conversation that really has just recently occurred to me and I'm wondering what advantage you think Google has having Gemini as its own AI operating system along with Android and that working seamlessly across whether we're talking about your Fitbit, whether you're talking about an Android phone, whether talking about a pixel watch versus sort of third party LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT.
- [12:47]
Samir Samat
I want to say a couple things about that. First, Android is an open platform and so one of the things that's a central tenant of Android is choice. So Android is the only mobile operating system where you can choose your personal assistant, you can choose the agent that's important to you. So if you want Gemini, you can use Gemini. If you want Claude or something else,
- [13:05]
Tim Stenovec
you can choose that and those will work equally well.
- [13:07]
Samir Samat
Yeah, the idea with Android is that it's open and so you should be able to plug in what's important to you. That's a fundamentally important part of Android and I think it's an advantage in this world. Well, things are moving fast from a Google perspective. Of course, Google competes with some of those companies and I think Google has a unique position in that it has a full stack of innovation that it's worked on over a decade, from Silicon, unique silicon in the data center, foundational models all the way through to the operating system. And we want to connect those things in ways that are powerful and that help consumers live better lives. That's what we're doing. In fact, recently we announced something called Gemini Intelligence. Gemini Intelligence is the best Gemini experience available on the most premium Android devices. So take a Samsung device or Pixel device and that's really where you can experience the best of that entire stack.
- [13:59]
Interviewer / Moderator
Do you think being open source and being able to let users choose and select what their agent will be will give you guys longer term advantage? Because I do think there's folks say that at some point there's going to be some shakeout because we're not going to need necessarily every big LLM. Like at some point people are going to financially, we heard it from the Cerebras CEO last night that people are going to select kind of what they
- [14:23]
Samir Samat
need and what I think that competition is good and I think that it's led to a ton of innovation. I mean look at all the change we're seeing that's fueled by everyone competing, which is great from an Android perspective. The thing about Android being open source source and being an open ecosystem, it means that we work with many, many different partners.
- [14:41]
Tim Stenovec
That was Sameer Samad, president of the Android Ecosystem at Google. You're listening to a special edition of Bloomberg Businessweek. Coming up, more conversations from our trip out west to the Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco. I'm Jim Stanovec along with Carol Massar. This is Bloomberg.
- [15:00]
Carol Massar
Support for the show comes from Public. Public is an investing platform that offers access to stocks, options, bonds and crypto. And they've also integrated AI with tools that can assist investors in building customized portfolios. One of these tools is called Generated Assets. It allows you to turn your ideas into investable indexes. So let's say you're interested in something specific like biotech companies with high R and D spend, small cap stocks with improving operating margins or the S&P 500 minus high debt companies. Chances are there isn't an ETF that fits your exact criteria. But on Public you just type in a prompt and their AI screens thousands of stocks and builds a one of a kind index. You can even backtest it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks, go to public.com market and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com market and paid for by
- [15:54]
Public Advertising Voice
Public Holdings Brokerage Services by public investing member FINRA SIPC advisory services by public advisors SEC registered advisor crypto service by ZeroHash sample prompts are for illustrative purposes only, not investment advice. All investing involves risk of loss. See complete disclosures@public.com disclosures we believe in
- [16:14]
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- [16:44]
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- [17:07]
Cal Penn
I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yo, yo. Is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no. At this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply, emotionally affected me. And I left it on the mic. That's great because it served the story. People will say like, oh, my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too.
- [17:39]
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Listen to Hearsay, the Audible and iHeart audiobook club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [17:48]
Tim Stenovec
This is Bloomberg businessweek Daily with Carol
- [17:51]
Carol Massar
Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.
- [17:55]
Show Host / Narrator
Welcome back to a special edition of Bloomberg businessweek. We are taking a look at some of our conversations from this past week when we were live at the Bloomberg Tech Summit. Up next, we spoke with Yoshua Bengio, founder and scientific advisor at Mila Quebec AI Institute. He's a leading expert of artificial neural networks and deep learning.
- [18:15]
Tim Stenovec
Professor, good to have you on the program. You chair the international AI Safety Report. We'll just start there. Is AI safe?
- [18:22]
Yoshua Bengio
No, that's the problem. We're building systems that we don't know how to control. They will behave sometimes against our instructions. And this lack of reliability is both a scientific challenge and a problem for deployment of AI.
- [18:43]
Interviewer / Moderator
So how do we. Okay, if we use social media as the example, we failed that experiment, I think many would say that we did not keep ahead in terms of oversight regulations. We could go into all the things that have gone wrong and how it's impacted society. What faith do you have that we get this right? And it can't just be the US deciding or Europe deciding. It's got to be a global work or progress on this.
- [19:07]
Yoshua Bengio
Absolutely. Safety is a global question, because a dangerous model, I mean, one that can be misused in dangerous ways, like, like Mythos, for example, could be designed in one country and then somebody in a second country uses it to attack a third country. And, you know, so the Americans need to make sure the Chinese models are not used against the US and vice versa. It is an international question.
- [19:30]
Interviewer / Moderator
Can I ask you, is it like missiles and nuclear weapons and that there will be a mutual deterrence because everyone will be proficient on some level? When it comes to AI, they are analogies.
- [19:44]
Yoshua Bengio
I think one of the big differences is that there isn't as much money to be made with nuclear weapons as there is with AI. Which means the incentive structure is now pushing companies towards going faster and faster and not paying enough attention to the safety issues and, you know, the public protection.
- [20:01]
Tim Stenovec
But, but I think one thing that, that I think concerns a lot of people is that, okay, you could have. Let's just use Anthropic as an example. You have Anthropic and what they're doing with, with Mythos. But just because Anthropic has that right now doesn't mean Deep Sea couldn't have that six or eight or 12 months from now, or even something more powerful. That's right. So it doesn't matter if, like, one country is doing things a certain way or one company is doing a certain way if the entire world is not actually adhering to it. A certain set of framework.
- [20:30]
Yoshua Bengio
Exactly. That is why we need international coordination. Initially, it's probably going to be just the US and China, but at some point, as other countries are also, you know, beefing up their capabilities, it has to be international.
- [20:41]
Tim Stenovec
What keeps you up at night, like, lay out the doomsday scenario for us?
- [20:44]
Yoshua Bengio
Well, there are like many catastrophic risks because intelligence gives power, and that power could be in the wrong hands. Could be used by terrorists or countries which want to destabilize us. It could be used even by the people in power to create a dictatorship. And we don't know how to make sure AIs themselves will not use that power against us.
- [21:06]
Tim Stenovec
But how? Like harnessing social media, logging in, like taking infrastructure offline, like, like give us concrete examples of what these entities could do.
- [21:15]
Yoshua Bengio
So what the companies are worried about right now are cyber attacks, because these AIs really have a lot of knowledge of computing and vulnerabilities and on their radar and the evaluations they're making is also the use of AI to build dangerous viruses. So you can think of people using AI to create new pandemics. They're also worried about what happens when AI itself is used to create the next version of AI. So AI doing AI research, and if we don't control these systems, they could put back doors to create AIs that are not like, friendly to us.
- [21:51]
Tim Stenovec
Okay, now I'm.
- [21:51]
Samir Samat
Now I am worried.
- [21:52]
Interviewer / Moderator
So in other words, you're talking about AI that can think on its own and work on its own.
- [21:56]
Yoshua Bengio
Well, it's already the case. The whole point of agents is that they're autonomous, they have goals, and they work towards those goals. The real question is, who controls those goals? We would like to be the ones in charge, but right now we don't have the technical answers to make sure that's the case.
- [22:13]
Interviewer / Moderator
Yoshua, do you regret the work that you did years ago?
- [22:17]
Yoshua Bengio
I think I should have been seeing ahead, you know, earlier, that we were building something that could become extremely powerful and that we don't know how to control, and that it would impact societies in which that currently, on the current trajectory, could be. Could be destructive.
- [22:36]
Interviewer / Moderator
So, okay, but here we are, right?
- [22:39]
Yoshua Bengio
Yes.
- [22:39]
Interviewer / Moderator
And it sounds like it does feel very doomsday and scary, but I do.
- [22:45]
Tim Stenovec
And it also feels like it's too late.
- [22:46]
Yoshua Bengio
No, it's not, but.
- [22:47]
Interviewer / Moderator
And I want to talk about that, but I also feel like there's a lot of potential to do some great things as well. Yeah, talk to us about that side.
- [22:56]
Yoshua Bengio
Absolutely. I've been working for many years on how we can use AI to design better drugs in medicine, more broadly, how we can use AI to design better materials for batteries, for energy storage. And I know a lot of people working, for example, in how AI can help agriculture, can even help democratic debate tools. The question is, the same power that enables these things also enables, for example, in the case of biology, dangerous uses that could really harm a lot of people.
- [23:28]
Tim Stenovec
Do the potential positives outweigh the potential negatives?
- [23:34]
Yoshua Bengio
Well, there's so much we don't know here. You have to weigh in the uncertainty,
- [23:41]
Tim Stenovec
because it sounds great to have better medicine, it sounds great to have more efficient batteries. It sounds great to have an ecosystem where people are able to learn more and do quicker and be more efficient. But none of that matters if the AI agents are going to kill us.
- [23:54]
Yoshua Bengio
Yes. Or if we lose our democratic institutions and we end up in a dictatorship.
- [23:59]
Interviewer / Moderator
So these are already having, like, if I think about democracy, let's go there.
- [24:05]
Yoshua Bengio
Yes.
- [24:05]
Interviewer / Moderator
Right. We're already having these kinds of problems.
- [24:07]
Yoshua Bengio
We do.
- [24:08]
Interviewer / Moderator
And this is a pretty worse.
- [24:10]
Yoshua Bengio
There are studies showing that AI is now getting better than people at persuasion. In other words, making people change their mind. Imagine this applied to change policies, political opinions, to change public opinion. This is like shaking the foundations of what democracy rests on.
- [24:28]
Interviewer / Moderator
You know, I don't know. You know, people talk about the new industrial like revolution, they make comparisons. Do we have any comparison in terms of the impact AI agents?
- [24:40]
Yoshua Bengio
No, I mean as usual, something else
- [24:42]
Interviewer / Moderator
that's, that's changed our world dramatically. The light bulb, as usual.
- [24:46]
Yoshua Bengio
I think the past can tell us things, but you have to realize we've never been in a situation where we built technology, machines that would be smarter than us in many ways and it's already the case in various domains. It's just growing. There's nothing in history. We built machines that help us physically. They have much more powerful muscle wise but brain wise. This is completely new.
- [25:11]
Tim Stenovec
We're speaking with Joshua Bengio, founder and scientific advisor at Nilo Quebec AI Institute Co president and scientific director at Law Zero. It's focused on building safer AI agents. The productivity question is one that we want to get to. The investment that's been made from a capex perspective has just been so massive. The promises are that this will actually make us so much more productive and will lead to higher returns on investment. Is that true?
- [25:38]
Yoshua Bengio
I don't have a crystal ball, but let's say there are different scenarios about how AI intelligence capabilities will grow in the future. I think the default is going to continue on the same trend, but it could also saturate and then maybe some of these promises will not be realized. The other issue is even if AI is more capable, it doesn't mean that it is behaving well. Well in fact there is a like serious scientific hypothesis that intelligence and the goals to which that intelligence is put to use are like two very different things.
- [26:15]
Interviewer / Moderator
All right, so we talk about races in the world and this is certainly a tech race, an AI race. Right. So it sounds like for things to go better, safer, you've got to have global collaboration. So, so what is happening on that regard or what needs to happen in your view, based on your knowledge, you understand how this works. So what needs to happen to make sure that we don't have AI taking over?
- [26:41]
Yoshua Bengio
I would say the most important thing that needs to happen is better understanding and awareness of what we're talking about by the governments around the world and of course China and the US in the first place. But, but, but eventually you know many governments who have researchers and companies building AI as well because once we understand the magnitude of the risks that we're taking, we'll sit down, we'll sit down at a table and negotiate.
- [27:08]
Interviewer / Moderator
One of the things, I want to go back to what you said about productivity. What about the labor market? Like is it going to create? It's Already tough for some of those starting jobs. I think of kids coming out of college or like, how. What does it mean for the global economy? What does it mean for the labor force? Does it create jobs? I mean, building data centers. Yes, but what. How do you see it?
- [27:28]
Yoshua Bengio
I mean, the number of people needed for data centers is peanuts compared to the effect that I could have on the other job market. But the economists don't agree. It. It really depends on the curve of advances in the AI in the future, if it continues at a current rate. And yes, there will be massive automation coming too quickly for society to adapt.
- [27:48]
Tim Stenovec
Yoshua, who. Who, given the work that you've done in this and understanding the potential pitfalls of the technology, name names for us. Who's doing this? Well, who understands the potential repercussions here?
- [28:02]
Yoshua Bengio
I don't name names. I think there are a lot of people who have good intentions. The issue that, you know, makes the current dynamics dangerous in some ways is the incentive structure. Is the competition between companies competition between countries?
- [28:19]
Tim Stenovec
So. So maybe let's. I'll ask this question a different way. What if. What if you could have Dario Amade in a room with Sam Altman, along with Jensen Huang, along with the leaders of all the hyperscalers.
- [28:31]
Interviewer / Moderator
Yeah.
- [28:32]
Tim Stenovec
And then, of course, the leaders of the Chinese companies as well. What would you tell them? What do they need to know?
- [28:37]
Yoshua Bengio
So they know already, right? They know what I'm talking about. What they need to do is to agree with each other on a set of principles about safety and, like, careful deployment of AI. And they're already talking about it. What they are asking actually, is governments to agree with each other to make sure there's a level playing field for all the companies, so that every company, before they build and deploy a very powerful AI, needs to show to the public, to the governments, that their system isn't going to be dangerous in the wrong hands. And all these issues we're talking about.
- [29:16]
Interviewer / Moderator
But are the financial incentives getting in the way? The race is on.
- [29:19]
Tim Stenovec
Yeah, it seems like a prisoner's dilemma.
- [29:21]
Hitboy
Yes.
- [29:21]
Interviewer / Moderator
And it's who can go fastest and get it all done. So does that prevent it from the right thing from happening? Just got about 30 seconds.
- [29:29]
Yoshua Bengio
Well, no, we. We've dealt with situations like this before. I mean, governments have regulated things like drugs, you know, trains, meat.
- [29:40]
Interviewer / Moderator
Yeah.
- [29:40]
Yoshua Bengio
Because if it was just competition, we would end up with, you know, dangerous food, dangerous planes, dangerous drugs. But now we enjoy all these things that are safe and useful because governments have intervened.
- [29:54]
Interviewer / Moderator
So in a word, yes or no. You're more hopeful than worried. Yes.
- [30:00]
Yoshua Bengio
Hopeful or no, I'm, I'm, I don't know. I mean, I feel like it's not my vision that matters. It's the actions that we take collectively.
- [30:12]
Tim Stenovec
That was Yoshua Bengio, founder and scientific advisor at Mila Quebec AI Institute. Founder and scientific advisor at Mila Quebec AI Institute. You're listening to a special edition of Bloomberg businessweek. Coming up, more conversations from our trip out west to the Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco. I'm Tim Stanovec with Carol Massar. This is Bloomberg.
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Carol Massar
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Public Advertising Voice
Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Irsay, the Audible and Iheart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook project Hail Mary Massive sci fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you wake up alone, very far from earth.
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Cal Penn
I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections and it's like, okay, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no. At this point it would kind of be betraying the trust. The author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that that deeply, emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic.
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Public Advertising Voice
That's great.
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Cal Penn
Cuz it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too.
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Public Advertising Voice
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- [33:10]
Tim Stenovec
This is Bloomberg businessweek Daily with Carol
- [33:14]
Carol Massar
Massar and Tim Stanback on Bloomberg Radio.
- [33:18]
Show Host / Narrator
Welcome back to our special edition of Bloomberg Business Week. We were live at the Bloomberg Tech Summit out on the west coast in San Francisco. Up next, we speak with Rafi Krikorian, Chief technology officer at Mozilla.
- [33:30]
Interviewer / Moderator
People know Mozilla as really the organization behind Firefox. What are the vulnerabilities, though, that Mythos actually identified?
- [33:37]
Rafi Krikorian
Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of them. A lot of them had to do with being able to break out of the browser itself and actually execute code on your machine. So like actually having JavaScript or HTML come in and like just load it from a web page and instruct the browser to go do other things. So Mythos have been very helpful for us to actually find some of these really long standing old bugs and actually help us shut them down.
- [33:58]
Tim Stenovec
But what I noticed in the, in the blog post that your team wrote about this, this was that, quote, they wrote, quote, we haven't, we also haven't seen any bugs that couldn't have been found by an elite human researcher. So was it as, is it as powerful as everybody says it is if, if, if, if a actual human being could have identified these things?
- [34:19]
Rafi Krikorian
Yeah, no, I mean, there's just a question of just like, how many elite human researchers are there in the grand scheme of things. So, like, yeah, these models are pretty powerful and they're allowing us to do what like thousands of these researchers could do instead of just like six of them.
- [34:31]
Tim Stenovec
So would you have been able to identify these with your own team?
- [34:36]
Rafi Krikorian
We have a really good team, I think in the fullness of time, yes. But like, allowing us to like, rapidly accelerate and just close out a bunch of stuff that we didn't even know about.
- [34:44]
Tim Stenovec
So should we be freaked out about this tech?
- [34:46]
Rafi Krikorian
Yes, I actually think we should be. I think we can, like, we'll be getting to a world like, once everything settles down where things could actually be more secure. But like, we're living in this, like,
- [34:54]
Tim Stenovec
intermediary zone is the reason why we should be scared because if Mythos is in the wrong hands, they could go to, you know, your bank and say, okay, identify the vulnerabilities in, you know, Rafi's account.
- [35:05]
Rafi Krikorian
Yeah.
- [35:05]
Tim Stenovec
And then they get access to your.
- [35:07]
Rafi Krikorian
The bank, the water company, the power company, like, all the critical infrastructure of the world. Like, I actually have faith that the Internet folks will figure this out. Like, we're used to patching things and deploying at scale. Like heartbleed when SSL had problems. Yeah. But I don't think my bank knows how to do it. Like you said, I don't think my power company knows how to do it. Those are, like, the other pieces of critical infrastructure that I'm really worried about.
- [35:28]
Tim Stenovec
I mean, your cto, you should tell
- [35:29]
Interviewer / Moderator
them, okay, so there are things that are happening. Why isn't it happening more? Or is it? And where they're being caught or what? Like, give us an idea.
- [35:38]
Rafi Krikorian
Yeah, no, I think we need to have actually a real large scale, like Y2K, like, effort to actually start closing a bunch of these critical vulnerabilities. And, you know, many kudos to what anthropic is doing, but we need to give access to more people. Like, we need to get access to all the open source providers, we need to get access to all the database providers, and then we need to fund them to actually start doing the work. So not only do you need to clean the bugs up, but then we also need to start thinking about mitigation. Like, this is actually a large scale. Look, think of how much work we did for Y2K. Boards got involved, governments got involved, insurance got involved. We haven't kicked all those in yet.
- [36:11]
Interviewer / Moderator
Why aren't we doing that yet? Because this is moving so fast. Is it just. Is that it?
- [36:15]
Rafi Krikorian
That's exactly the problem. I think this is just moving so fast. Like, Mythos was only really given to us. Like in the. In the winter time. There's only been a couple of months. But the real question is that open models are catching up. So, like, I think it's only six to nine to 12 months when all the open models can start doing what Mythos are doing. So we only actually have a small window of time.
- [36:35]
Tim Stenovec
So then how do we get to a point where, you know, you're sitting here with us. A year from now, Mythos is going to be old news.
- [36:43]
Samir Samat
Yep.
- [36:43]
Tim Stenovec
There's going to be some sort of next model that is just that much better. How do you. How are you going to be sure that it's a company that's, you Know, quote unquote, responsible behind it, like many would say anthropic. Is being with this rollout maybe too responsible in your view? But how do you make sure that it's not a bad actor who has this?
- [37:03]
Rafi Krikorian
Yeah, no, I mean, I think this is actually where some government intervention might not be a bad thing. Like actually making sure that we put the right investment into actually getting these things shown deployed. Exactly.
- [37:13]
Tim Stenovec
You've been to the post office.
- [37:14]
Rafi Krikorian
Yeah, I know, 100%. Like, I mean, we. But we do need to do all this work across all the efforts. We need to secure that post office too.
- [37:22]
Tim Stenovec
I don't disagree with you, but I think there are many people out there who say this could be something that maybe the free market would say solve more efficiently than government bureaucracy. Experience in government, sort of.
- [37:34]
Rafi Krikorian
So no 100%, I mean, politics you've experienced. I think the real problem is that public sector infrastructure is not treated in the same way. And so, like, we really need to figure out how to do the real investment there that I don't think is purely just maybe a public private partnership solves that. I don't think that's purely a market problem.
- [37:49]
Interviewer / Moderator
Rafi, you were the first CTO of the dnc, the Democratic Committee. Politics. Today we see the impact social media, some good, some bad.
- [38:00]
Rafi Krikorian
Sure.
- [38:01]
Interviewer / Moderator
On politics.
- [38:02]
Rafi Krikorian
What about. I know, I mean, like, I think about this a lot. Like, we're living in this world where we're like owners, not renters. And all this technology, like, this technology. Like, just think about your search experience. It used to be 10 blue links on Google and now it's one result when I ask a chat bot and it's the right result for somebody. Like, is it the right result for me? So I really worry about this world. We're like living in someone else's intelligence all the time. What does that actually do and how we think, how we decide, how we buy all those kind of things.
- [38:29]
Interviewer / Moderator
Can we actually get ahead of that and be better with it?
- [38:33]
Rafi Krikorian
I mean, this is where I really think we need to figure out how to do open deployments and open governance. Like, right now, the incentive models are just such that, like, there was a whole study based out of, I think, University of Maryland, where they just asked a bunch of these chat bots to help you buy something. And they're vastly weighted toward sponsored and promoted goods. So, like, how do we make sure that they're really on my side? I need to be able to go into it, understand it, tweak it, work with it, as opposed to Just being delivered it. So we need to start working on those kind of questions now.
- [39:01]
Tim Stenovec
You, you were talking a little bit about your family earlier and I'm just wondering how, how you as a CTO and somebody who understands this technology and the potential downfall and pitfalls of it, rather than you sort of have that diet, that information technology diet.
- [39:17]
Rafi Krikorian
I mean can I tell you the pros and cons?
- [39:18]
Hitboy
Yes.
- [39:19]
Rafi Krikorian
Like my 10 year old is vibe coding video games. Like they're actually unbelievable cute and stinky productions. They're like, it's like the best thing ever. And this other is an expression of creativity. My 13 year old, I got a phone call from a teacher saying I think you've catchy people cheat on an essay. So like we do need to figure out like how we actually treat people people how do we do teach critical thinking? Like that's the thing that's still missing and that's the thing I think we need to really home in on. It's less about the tools about that.
- [39:46]
Tim Stenovec
So how do you do it though?
- [39:47]
Rafi Krikorian
I think it's asking real questions. I think it's having lots of conversations. You know the pope is encyclical called it fasting from AI. So like we just need to figure out a way like we need to teach this new tech but we also need to just monitor and help them like do productive struggle.
- [40:02]
Interviewer / Moderator
We're being told we have one more question with you and it's two Twitter or it's Uber. So go. Tim's got to ask.
- [40:08]
Tim Stenovec
Yeah, I mean you were, you were Uber's advanced technology department. This was like the precursor to self driving cars. It was. This department was killed a few years ago. The promise was that you would have driverless cars at Uber. The technology as it is today, I mean you walk outside of here, there are waymos going everywhere. Not really in New York City at this point. Where are we when it comes to just getting into a car and it taking us where we need to go and there's no steering.
- [40:35]
Rafi Krikorian
I mean it turns out to be a really hard problem. This is one of the things we learned right. It turns out to be a really hard problem to do generalized self driving. Like to be able to drive anywhere under any condition, under any situation. Like a city by city basis seems to be working out like way modes are pretty good. You know I recently crashed my Tesla under full self driving.
- [40:53]
Tim Stenovec
You did?
- [40:54]
Rafi Krikorian
I did. So like the Tesla is clearly have problems. We slammed into the wall at like 30 miles an hour and so like we there are clearly still problems with all this technology.
- [41:02]
Tim Stenovec
But that doesn't sound like full self driving.
- [41:04]
Rafi Krikorian
It doesn't sound like full self driving. I totally think that the Tesla technology is not quite ready yet. Whereas Waymo has been designed to literally not have a person in the wheel. Like the whole human in the loop version of self driving, I think is not the right path that we should be going on and we should be thinking about just like actually tackling the real problem head on.
- [41:20]
Interviewer / Moderator
20 seconds left. What's the question we should ask all be asking ourselves in this environment today?
- [41:24]
Rafi Krikorian
Yeah, I mean the question is like how do we make sure all these technologies are deploying are actually on our side, not on someone else's side. Like I want to live in a world of 7 billion AGI, not 7 AGI. How do we get there?
- [41:34]
Tim Stenovec
That was Rafi Krikorian, chief technology officer at Mozilla.
- [41:38]
Show Host / Narrator
From Silicon Chips to Platinum Records, our next guest is a multi Grammy winning producer, rapper and recording artist who has spent over a decade engineering the soundtrack to hip hop culture, producing hit songs for artists including Jay Z.
- [41:52]
Interviewer / Moderator
What is Jay Z producing hit songs
- [41:55]
Show Host / Narrator
for artists including Jay Z, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar and Travis Scott. Here's our conversation with Hitboy.
- [42:02]
Interviewer / Moderator
So this is all about technology. How are you thinking increasingly about technology and its impact on music?
- [42:08]
Hitboy
Well, I started in music like using tape. I used a program called FL Studio. Studio. It was called Fruity Loops back in the day, but it's FL Studio now. And you know, some of the biggest hits of our generation in hip hop and just popular music have been made on fl. But when it first came out, people were kind of like, oh, it's just like a computer program. It's not serious music making. But you know, tech is, it's always going to advance mankind.
- [42:34]
Tim Stenovec
Is that where we are with AI today? Because people could actually just create, you know, what they think of as. Yeah, you know, Fruity Loops using AI.
- [42:43]
Hitboy
Yeah.
- [42:44]
Tim Stenovec
Is that music?
- [42:45]
Hitboy
It is, it's music for sure. You know, you still have a person having to prompt it. It can't just press a button and prompt itself. So just, you know, imagination I feel like is at an all time high. If you have a great imagination and you use that in your work, you're going to succeed.
- [42:58]
Tim Stenovec
But here's the thing, isn't it all trained on music that's already out there so.
- [43:02]
Hitboy
Well, not all of it. You know, there's some people that train it on certain, you know, different ways. But you know, however it's done, like I feel like, you know, When MIDI came out, the. The person that studied the keyboard or piano for 20 years and learned grooves and melodies was like, what is this MIDI thing? You could just import notes and then make it sound like me. Like, you know.
- [43:22]
Tim Stenovec
So you're not worried about a loss of creativity in this era?
- [43:24]
Hitboy
No, not at all. It's a boom.
- [43:26]
Interviewer / Moderator
Isn't all music, even created without technology, just drained on all the music that we've had kind of got in our brain?
- [43:34]
Hitboy
Yeah, for sure.
- [43:35]
Interviewer / Moderator
Hey, talk to us about. We want to go back to Universal. 18 years, right?
- [43:39]
Hitboy
18 years.
- [43:40]
Interviewer / Moderator
But you decided to go off on your own. How did that change what you can do?
- [43:46]
Hitboy
Man, I feel like I've been just empowered to the maximum capability. Like, you know, just like being in that deal for 18 years, I always kind of felt like I had a black cloud over me. And as many hits as I did make, I still feel like I wasn't in my complete right mind, because that was always lingering. But now I'm completely free and I got all these tools and all these. This knowledge I've gained over the years. I feel unstoppable.
- [44:10]
Tim Stenovec
So what did that relationship prevent you from doing?
- [44:13]
Hitboy
From making the amount of money I should have been making and just progressing through my deal for, you know, the amount of work I put in.
- [44:22]
Tim Stenovec
But was it the right thing for. For you early in your career?
- [44:24]
Hitboy
I guess so, because I'm here right now on Bloomberg, you know what I mean? So, you know, the hustle, the struggle, the gripe, you know, the grief, like, it just. It led me to this place where I'm. I'm just like. I feel powered up, you know?
- [44:36]
Interviewer / Moderator
Tell us. Tell us about this solo album that you've got coming out. Software Update.
- [44:40]
Hitboy
Software Update.
- [44:41]
Interviewer / Moderator
I love the name.
- [44:41]
Yoshua Bengio
Thank you.
- [44:42]
Interviewer / Moderator
Tell us, though, like, what this means to you.
- [44:45]
Hitboy
It's beyond just the music, you know, it's like updating yourself as a person. Just moving better, dressing better, living better, whatever it is, to update yourself, you know, on a daily basis. Do that, you know, working out, whatever it is, eating right, like, just, you know, that you got to update the software just like a computer.
- [45:00]
Tim Stenovec
What's it like going from somebody who's known as a collaborator? You know, Carol mentioned a few of the people you've worked with. Jay Z, Beyonce, Nas, Drake, and more to doing this, to doing this solo project.
- [45:10]
Hitboy
To be honest, it doesn't feel any different because I'm just a creative. I get the same excitement and the same high when I'm making a beat, as if I do a verse or if I engineer for a big artist, anything I do creatively that gives me that spark, I'm enjoying it.
- [45:24]
Interviewer / Moderator
You know what's a message you would like to send to people with this album? Just got about 30 seconds here.
- [45:29]
Hitboy
Lock in, update your software. You know, just look inside every day and just look in the mirror. Get better.
- [45:35]
Tim Stenovec
Hey, very briefly, is YouTube what MySpace was to YouTube in the beginning of your career? 10 seconds?
- [45:41]
Hitboy
Yeah, I would say so for sure. You know, I could just fire off as much as I want to on YouTube.
- [45:46]
Tim Stenovec
That was Grammy award winning rapper and music producer Hitboy. And that does it for this special edition of Bloomberg businessweek focusing on our favorite conversations from the Bloomberg Tech Summit out there in San Francisco. Stay with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines are coming up right now.
- [46:04]
Cal Penn
250 years ago, America made a promise of life, liberty and the people.
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Tim Stenovec
Pursuit of happiness.
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Cal Penn
Since 1903, Harley Davidson has been living
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Tim Stenovec
it out on the open road at
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Cal Penn
the next exit ramp with old friends, new ones and the next generation of riders. Because the best part of any promise is keeping it. Harley Davidson motorcycles ride.
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Yoshua Bengio
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Samir Samat
A plan that I've been enjoying.
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Tim Stenovec
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