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Bloomberg.
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Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News.
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Bloomberg Tech is live from coast to with Caroline Hyde in New York and.
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Ed Ludlow in San Francisco.
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This is Bloomberg Tech. Coming up, the U.S. commerce Department moves closer to allowing Nvidia to sell its H200AI chips to China.
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Plus robotics startup Skilled AI just closed a $1.4 billion funding round tripling its valuation in seven months. We'll discuss with the CEO Deepak Papak.
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And Netflix is working to revise its bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, shifting to.
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An all cash offer as you so those names in the red and in general the market. On the downside, we still got geopolitical anxiety, we still got earnings coming thick and fast and we still got announced that 100 off by one and a half percent. Not so in the world of commodities. A search for safety, a bid as the dollar falls. We see 2.8% higher on the bitcoin rally. So maybe a bit of catch up with digital gold where we see spot gold and a new record high up 7 10% copper, all important commodity to our world of AI and data centers that we're at a new record high on an intraday basis. We're up 10% just coming off of that high on the day. But it's notable and shift of this year, right?
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Rules and requirements are changing in the world of AI chips. The US Commerce Department out with clarification which impacts Nvidia and its H200 that it wants to ship to China, but also impacts AMD as well. AMD has been trading all over the place this morning at one point notably higher in the session but in video markedly down now trading at its lowest level in around a month. What are these new rules and what do they mean and why is this significant? Bloomberg senior tech editor Mike shepherd joins us out of D.C. lay out the new rules and requirements for us. But what we're saying in the Bloomberg story is this marks a significant moment for the companies in their efforts to sell into China. Why?
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Well, this is a small but critical bureaucratic step that paves the way for Nvidia and Andy to be able to sell H200 and comparable AI chips to China. What it does is it now says that the US Government will review requests for export licenses on a case by case basis and away from the past policy of a presumption of denial of any such request. And that had in the past been really an effective export ban. Now these companies can't be there expecting a rubber stamp for their requests. The US Government is laying out some pretty specific requirements. One, that the companies must show that the exports to China will not create a supply shortage here. This is addressing in a way some of the concerns that lawmakers here in Washington have been raising with attempts to pass their own version of export controls. Two, Two, they must show that any manufacturing done for China must not displace any production capacity intended for US Customers here. And three, the companies must implement strict know your customer procedures to ensure that these chips and the related technology don't get out to unauthorized users.
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It's interesting that we are seeing Nvidia down on the day and amd, do we get any sense of how many they might be able to ship? Because it's not without its intricacies, as you say, 50% of the overall made.
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In the U.S. well, it is the question of the moment surrounding this rule, just how this cap that it lays out would, would function. The rule says that 50 the exports to China can go more than no more than 50% of total product here in the U.S. but does that mean H2 hundreds produced from this day going forward. If that's the case, it would not be a very big set and it would mean a far smaller number of exports to China and would certainly not go anywhere near meeting the huge demand that Jensen Huang has said that he is getting from Chinese customers. And we have reported that Alibaba and ByteDance are interested in buying as many as 200,000 chips each. Now, if we are talking about all the H2 hundreds produce over all time, that would be a much bigger universe and that would be a much happier outcome for Nvidia, AMD and their investors. So we will have to see what exactly how that is interpreted if that gets spelled out. Another big question, Carol, is how quickly the government can move to actually process these export requests because we have been hearing over the past year and longer that they are simply running into capacity problems in the bureaucracy of commerce and being able to turn these around bottlenecks.
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Throughout the world of AI. Mike Shepard, thanks so much. Let's stick with what this means for Nvidia and more broadly for semiconductors. Beth kidding is with us IO fund lead tech analyst. So is this a $50 billion annual revenue opportunity? Is China that for Nvidia?
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Hi Caroline. Jensen Huang has stated it's a 50 billion per year annual opportunity. When we left off it was about 5 billion a quarter. That's 25 billion. So somewhere between 25 billion and 50 billion. Which really means that as we look into analyst estimates, they are probably too low. And that has been something from the very beginning that we have found alpha in is that analysts are really struggling to wrap their head around the opportunity of Nvidia. And now here comes back the two hundreds. And where my firm is very focused is calendar year 2027. If you look at these estimates, they are too low as it is, let alone if China revenue resumes.
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A
What's really interesting though is China's response to all of this. You say it's too low. How much might be the revenue for Nvidia in China. But at the same time we understand that deep seats driving new models. We're seeing them use what they have in a different method that maybe Alibaba and Baiji don't need those 200,000 that they've already put efforts and offers in for. What do you make of the way in which China is going to pivot to domestic chips?
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G
I would argue that right now the number I had was about 2 million H2 hundreds and there's only about 700,000 available, which means that Once again, Nvidia is oversubscribed. I have been asked before who is the next Nvidia to something like Huawei, you know, is it Google CPUs? And the answer is the next in video is Nvidia. They are extremely hard to disrupt. And that goes for China or even United States competitors.
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Beth Taking into account the news story that Mike shepherd just brought us, Jensen Huang told us at CES that the $500 billion forecast for five fiscal quarters, it includes this one for Blackwell Rubin, could get bigger because they could factor in some H200 sales in 26. I know 27 to a year. But if you modeled for that little update that Jensen one gave.
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G
Yes. So right now the analyst estimates did actually catch up. They're about 320 billion this, this calendar year. Let's just go with 2026. I want to really emphasize that it's next calendar year that we're going to start to see analyst estimates too low. That is where the alpha is at right now. And it only takes one or two quarters for us to really see Nvidia's price movement from all of the, all of the momentum we're seeing not only from Blackwell Ultra, but then we've got Vera Rubin second half of this year. Now we have the two hundreds coming back. Where that falls specifically in what quarter matters where less to me and what matters more is that those analysts estimates are far too low.
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C
Beth, the big story in global markets this morning is a blistering rally in metals, particularly copper. Copper as S and P Global wrote January 8, foundational to the expanding electricity supply that will power the datacenter build out. And it's now a big growth area in that market. How worried are you about that copper in the supply chain and how it relates to the power needs of the data centers that Nvidia's chips go into?
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G
These are excellent questions. And across the board resources when it comes to this data center expansion are extremely stretched, especially anything that supports the electrical grid such as copper. What I would really emphasize is those alternative sources of energy is a great way to position going into 2026. One thing to my firm has dug up is that in order for us to get to Vera Rubin and then Rubin Ultra Power has to precede that we have to really get this power to these data centers before those systems can really ship in volume and be installed. Things like NAT gas, even solid oxide fuel cells, those that do not need, you know, great dependency on the electrical grid is a wonderful way to position. And copper surging today is is a reminder of that.
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A
What's interesting is we've hit Nvidia. We're talking about the supply chain therein. We're also getting the idea that CPUs is where it's at as well. And you just think about the moves that we've seen yesterday, today in Intel. I mean where do you think the gluts or the bottlenecks are really going to be hitting hard? We are, I mean analysts keybancing. Intel and AMD are basically sold out for 2026 on the CPU server side.
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G
Exactly. And what's even more interesting is that AMD was up more last year than Nvidia and they are such a strong CPU player as well as Intel. There are many bottlenecks. Caroline Networking is another one that comes to mind. Of course, energy we just spoke about. Just keep in mind that it's not just GPUs, but there's almost an equal amount of money being spent on all of the components, all of the networking, all of the power and we are no longer compute constrained, we're no longer GPU constrained. It really is becoming a power problem and a networking problem that needs to be solved, especially as we move into the inference market, which is only going to require more memory, more bandwidth, less latency and more and more energy.
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Beth, do AMD and Intel just accept that it's the CPU market where they can do battle and just let the accelerator market go to Nvidia and other specialists?
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No, I do not believe that will be the outcome. I think AMD is a strong contender, a strong number two, especially in the second half of this year. They've really been preparing to bring the rack scale architecture to market which is called Helios and Ed. What was. I've covered AMD very thoroughly and we could get into the specs all day long but OpenAI giving them that 6 gigawatt deal is a massive nod. I mean that is a big nod that AMD is a contender from the.
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Leading R and D firm Helios, AMD's first rack scale solution but theirs in the world's first 2 nanometer chip inside which they talked up in our interview last week. Beth Kinderg of IOF and great to have you back on Bloomberg Tech. Thank you very much. Now coming up, anger grows over sexually explicit non consensual AI generated images on X. We have the latest. This is Bloomberg Tech.
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The Supreme Court still hasn't ruled on challenges to President Trump's tariffs, leaving the world to wait until at least next week to learn the fate of his signature economic policy. Bloomberg Surveillance co host Annmarie Horden joins us right here for more. So we delay once again and that timing could be all awkward.
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It could be awkward. So the Supreme Court punts it once again. They do not come out with a decision on whether or not the majority of actually a lot of this tariff revenue we're bringing in into the United states, more than 70%, is tethered to the president using IPA, very flexible, a blunt tool that he has used since he came back into office. And why it could be so awkward is because the president will be in Davos next week and he's going to be meeting with global leaders, the world elite. Last, last year he, he joined on remote, really lambasted the global elite. And at this point, potentially we could get the decision next Tuesday or Wednesday because that's when the justices will be meeting again. That's when potentially we can get the decision. And he could potentially be facing a Supreme Court saying you cannot use that legal authority while he's talking to all these countries that he already did trade deals with.
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Bloomberg's Anne Marie Horden. Thank you very much. Another top story, the U.S. senate unanimously passed a bill allowing victims of sexually explicit AI images to sue the creators of that content. The move is in response to growing public anger after Bloomberg reported that Elon Musk X has become a top site for generating pictures of people who have been non consensually undressed by AI. Musk posted on X that he wasn't aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. That's xi's generative AI tool. Let's bring in Bloomberg's Emily Bambam who covers corporate lobbying government. The Defiance act confers on American citizens a civil rights to sue. Take that that information and give the rest of the details because that's the bit that's new here.
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B
Yes, that's exactly what it does. It essentially, essentially empowers victims of this non consensual deep fake technology people who have been non consensually undressed by this AI tool and it allows them to sue the people responsible for posting that. And it's a companion to a bill, to a bill that was signed into law last year by President Trump that creates criminal penalties for distributing that kind of content.
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A
But, but it didn't go through the House last time, the Defiance act, whereas Takedown did. And why would this time be any different? Is the pushback becoming enough? Because thus far all we've really seen is the Department of Defense put Grok AI within its military system. Instead of pushing back on this being something that GROK or X needs to clamp down in some way.
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B
That's true. There definitely is more of an appetite in Congress to pass this legislation. There have been six new co sponsors that have come on board since the beginning of the year. I think that the issue of non consensual AI generated images has become so vivid to lawmakers. Many of them, like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are themselves the victims of this. So I think the appetite has really broadened this year.
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C
Emily, where does the company X and the platform X fit into this? In a citizen's right to sue and those that distribute the content.
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B
So this the Defiance act, which passed the Senate this week, that probably would not impact grok, that impacts the people who are responsible for distributing the images. But there is a lot of conversation right now about whether the Take It down act would empower attorneys general to sue Grok xi. Elon Musk over, you know, some level of responsibility for, you know, thousands of these images proliferating every hour. So far, no attorneys general have taken that up, but it's definitely under serious consideration.
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A
Certainly something that maybe Malaysia has been putting forward about whether or not it's XI responsibility in some way. Bloomberg's Emily Bamboo, fantastic reporting. Thank you very much indeed. Now coming up, Airbnb has a new chief technology officer. We hear about his plans for the short term rental company. That's next is the Bloomberg Tech. Every day millions of customers engage with AI agents like me. We work round the clock with and.
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I'm extremely excited, like Brian said, to bring craft to the art of deploying AI for features and products. So I hope to be able to surprise the world with really beautiful features that they're going to love using every day. That was Airbnb's new set CTO Ahmad Aldali weighing in on the short term rental platform's efforts. Let's get more Reverend Latterly Long who spoke with Aldali and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. I think an interesting way to start is what is Airbnb trying to solve for here by bringing in a new cto? What is it they want to change about the platform?
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G
So after a few years of sort of working on the plumbing of Airbnb's app, like revamping the app, they are ready to take it forward, adding AI across the app, including customer service with a which they did last year. And now they're going to do more with search as well, like letting people discover listings and also cross market some of the new services like tours and experiences going forward.
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A
And I think you sort of put that exact question to Brian Chesky himself. Let's just take a listen to how he responded as to why they're pivoting and focusing all in on at this moment. Take a listen.
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We are the beginning of this incredibly.
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Exciting technological transformation with AI. It's going to be a journey and I couldn't be more excited about Ahmed because he's one of the leading AI experts in the world.
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C
But he also brings a sense of.
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Craft Airbnb, something we're really known for.
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C
And I think what you're going to.
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See in Airbnb is not only a.
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Search but a very personalized AI experience where I think we're going to bring great like design sensibility into the experience of Airbnb.
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A
Let's talk a little bit about how they're talking of the narrative of change because they said farewell to the previous CTO who's there for about seven years and brought in this expert from matter. So who do they say farewell to and why is this matter executive the best placed?
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G
So Ari Barlow, the previous cto, came in during a time when Airbnb was going through hyper growth. That was seven, more than seven years ago. And now Airbnb is sort of, as Chesky said, going through a technological revolution of, you know, alarms and chat agents decisions. And now Airbnb sort of wants to use sort of the unique data they have on their platform to differentiate itself from other, you know, chat bots to provide better recommendations to customers on their platform.
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C
Airbnb, the company whose Stock rose about 3% last year, it's down a couple of percent so far this year. And Chesky was one of those people that was the early vocal behind Founder Mode. What's the health of Airbnb right now? Is this them saying we've got to do something to reacqu accelerate Yet Brian.
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G
Was not satisfied with some of the below 10% growth rate we've seen last year. And so he's been very active in wanting to pilot more businesses for this year. They're piloting boutique hotels in several cities and they're trying to add grocery delivery for people to pre stock their kitchens before they check in. So they're trying to get their grocery back up as sort of the core, core rental service matures.
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A
Natalie, you've also got a story about how the Chief Information officer is departed after the CTO shakeup. Is there more executive leadership changes to come?
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G
Yes, so there will be. They're still looking for the new cio. We can expect that to come in the months and the year ahead.
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A
Remarks Natalie Long. Thank you very much indeed. Let's turn our attention to entertainment now. Netflix is working to revise buys its bid for Warner Brothers Discovery potentially shifting to an all cash offer, according to sources. And the move is aimed at speeding up a deal that look has faced pushback from Washington and competition from rival bid at Paramount. Skydance. For more, let's get to Mexico. Shaw, who covers media and entertainment, hit this story hard. And Lucas, I mean, the all cash narrative, why is that important? Why would that be the winning formula for Netflix?
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H
Because investors like cash now versus, you know, stock and Netflix that they could sell later. Right. The one of the knocks against the Netflix deal as perpetuated at Least by, by Paramount's guidance, the rival bidder has been that Paramount Steel is all cash. And that Netflix deal contains, you know, between four and five dollars a share of stock. Now, Netflix stock is pretty valuable, something that you think people would want to have, but most people would rather just take the cash now and get paid. And so that I think Netflix hopes will accelerate on many fronts. It'll, you know, it'll assuage any shareholder concerns about their bid and also eliminate any potential complexities as they continue to negotiate and pursue it.
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C
Lucas, when we were reporting this out, you know, the Netflix response and the tit for tat, you know, Paramount suing earlier this week and nominated rights of the board, do you get the sense that Netflix think this will work, that they now are back in sort of the lead in a tight race for the assets?
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H
Well, I don't, I think if you were to talk to the people at Netflix, they've never felt they were out of the lead. Right. You know, they are obviously facing a stiff challenge from Paramount, but, but they're the ones who have an approved deal and they have yet to see kind of some, they have yet to see share holders say en masse, you don't want the Netflix deal. They have yet to see the federal government say we're going to block this deal. There are certainly some kind of blinking yellow lights, but I don't think they've, they've seen anything yet that that gives, makes them too concerned. They seem still pretty confident that they'll.
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A
Get this done and In a week, January 21st, that's when the tender offer for certainly the Paramount Skydance side of the equation runs outright. I mean, do we get any signal for investors that they're at all interested in that side?
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H
You know, investors have been split. Some of the, some of the big investor investment funds, you know, they don't, they don't say anything. But we have spoken with a number of the major shareholders and I'd say their reactions range from we prefer Netflix, do we prefer Paramount? And then a lot of people in the middle are basically saying, you know, tie right now goes to the winner, which is Netflix. But we hope, slash, expect that Paramount will increase its offer, which Paramount move.
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C
Just very quickly remind us of the state of play, the difference between the two bids.
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H
Well, Netflix's bid is for just the studio and streaming service. So Warner Brothers and hbo. Paramount's bid is for the whole company. So that includes all the cable networks like cnn, tnt, TBS and the like.
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C
Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw, who leads the team at Screen Time that has led the way on reporting this story. Thank you so much. Now coming up on Bloomberg Tech, Tech robotics startup Skilled. I just closed a $1.4 billion funding round, a big valuation tripling from a year. This is next. This is Bloomberg Tech.
- [26:27]
A
Welcome back, Bloomberg Tech. Let's check in on the markets that are under pressure. Look, we've got a wall of worry as we come to the earnings season. Geopolitical risks and we see some drag down in big tech. We're up by 1.2% on the NASDAQ. In fact, two straight days of losses on the S and P were coming off of record highs in video. Of course, confronting that news that maybe 200 could be getting closer to exporting to China. But at the moment, we're under pressure. It's one of the key drags. On the downside, bitcoin, though, of 3.4%. We're seeing maybe a bit of love for digital gold. Not just gold, silver and copper. But we're also seeing maybe some shorts getting squeezed out. Move on. Have a look at what's happening in individual stocks. I'm shining a light on Honeywell. Look, we're up 1.8%. Maybe an asset that it controls, Quantum, could be looking for an IPO. We're understanding that they're potentially filing for an IPO with the SEC. We know that its last valuation was about $11 billion. And we've got other key strategics and videos in there. J.P. morgan's in there as well. So all eyes on Quantum computing as we look towards 2026. What are you looking at?
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C
Yeah, we also have a big deal in private markets. Robotics startup Skilled AI has just closed a $1.4 billion funding round. The valuation, more than $14 billion. And that's for a company only founded in 2023. Skilled is aiming to stand out in what's a crowded field by building an AI powered robotic brain. The goal is to develop a system system that can adapt across environments and form factors and crucially, learn from its own mistakes. Joining us to discuss is Skilled co founder and CEO Deepak Pathak. It's great to have you on Bloomberg Tech. What's interesting, let's start with the round. It's not just the volume, it's not just the valuation. Some of the strategics that are backing you in video, others in consumer electronics, Samsung, LG and in the software sector as well. What are they recognizing is your core competence? Do you think so?
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F
If you think about robotics, right, this is one of the Oldest areas in technology, like in AI was built for robotics. We have seen amazing demos in robotics for the last 70 years. Not four or five years, 70 years. But we are robots around us. And this is what people often get wrong. When you think of robots in your mind, you imagine, imagine hardware like that comes to a point in your mind first because that's how Hollywood has primed us. But the main thing behind not having robots around us today is the brain is missing. And if you have the brain for robots, you can really enable them around in variety of areas, range of applications. And that's what exactly scale is doing. We are building what we call only bodied brain. Any robot, any task, one brain.
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C
I'm interested in how you're building it. The limitation that a lot of people are talking about right now is real world data and training. There are different approaches, digital twins, trying to simulate physics in digital worlds. This is very much what Nvidia is focused on, right? Is that the approach you've taken simulated or synthetic data.
- [29:18]
F
So I think I will draw analogy to LLMs like ChatGPT, like models like if you see open a hedge party. And soon after many companies had their own LLM models. And the reason for that is data exists on the Internet for language or vision. But robotics, there is no Internet of robotics today. So what we do is we look for alternate sources. One such source is human videos. We look at how humans operate in their, in their scenarios in your kitchen, while working in factories and combine that with training from simulation, which companies like Nvidia invest a lot on, like Omniverse and all those. So these two things, watching people and then practicing in simulation, that's how we combine and scale these models to, to large scale.
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A
Your software can be put within the gpu. And what's interesting is, is you're already going from what we understand, zero to tens of millions of dollars Deepak in revenue just a few months in 2025. Where's that revenue coming from? Who is using your software already?
- [30:21]
F
Yeah, so this is. The revenue has mostly been from the enterprise applications. And the idea is in like instead of, instead of going for like, our end goal is a consumer home like applications. But right now, since it's just the beginning of the field, we are taking this model and we are deploying it in variety of applications. Like we are deploying robots in sectors like a point to point delivery applications, security applications, data centers and manufacturing and warehouse. So the revenue is coming from most of these applications.
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A
You were born out of academia and you're still professor Carnegie Mellon. But what's interesting is you're not without some competition out there, I think about physical intelligence for example. You're all trying to attempt to get robots to become intelligent and situationally aware. Do you think you can take on, are you worried about competition?
- [31:15]
F
And competition is always good and it turns out like the community born from very small circles. So they're all hard friends and colleagues from, from earlier and. But what's unique about what we are building is this omni bodied brain. Like any robot, any task, one brain. Now if you really think deeply about this, it sounds absurd, like a humanoid robot with a human like body, a dog robot and they share the same brain. And that's what you see in the results we release.
- [31:48]
C
The difference in approach is fascinating. It is a crowded field, you know, burnt from 1x was on the show yesterday. They have a world model that essentially allows NIO to carry out a task it's never seen before. And that largely, you know, I'm not an engineer, right. But what you have in common is VLM. Those are the inputs distinguish your approach to 1 x's as an example.
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F
Yeah. So in our case the robot learns by watching people, right? Now imagine I have to pick up this cup in front of me. Do I have to exactly imagine scary.
- [32:22]
C
By the way watching me?
- [32:24]
F
Well, you learned when you were a kid. You learned by watching your parents, you learn by watching others. Now if you think about how you operate every time you pick up a cup, do you imagine in your head a picture of cup and then putting your finger in the handle and no, it's all merged in like somehow it's consciousness inside your body and that you imagine in some abstract space. I mean they do it and that is the main idea here. That's how we do it. But just take being said watching alone is not enough because if it was enough, I could play like Federer, keep watching his games all day. And that's where practice comes into play. Now practicing in the real world in the making mistakes is expensive. And that's where we combine simulation. So videos alone is not enough, sim alone is not enough. But put them together and boom, you have a magic recipe to really figure out how to scale robotics.
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A
Magic recipe that values at $14 billion thus far. Deepak Pathak co founder CEO skilled AI thanks so much for joining us today. Coming up up more funding round news. Accel partner Sarah Edelston joins us to talk about her latest investment in a security startup Depth first, this is Bloomberg Tech.
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- [36:18]
C
Co. Security startup Debt first has closed a $40 million Series A funding round the company uses AI to identify and harden software vulnerabilities. The round led by Excel. Joining us to discuss Excel partner Sarah Ellison. Debt first. This was a big theme actually at us reinvent the idea that that particularly sort of swarm based agents can go on the offense, not just defense. So a sensible place to start with, with why you made the investment and general security intelligence is what can it do that existing AppSec and other sort of static analysis tools just.
- [37:00]
I
Can'T? I think the main thing is performance and speed and the ratio of signal to noise. So I think what we have to realize in this moment is as we're all so excited about how AI is making it possible to ship software so much more quickly, that same AI tool is being used by the bad guys to ship attacks more quickly. And so the historical ratio of signal to noise just won't stand in the current era. And so the security platform that first has made is a native. And what they are doing is continuously agentically scanning a company's code. They're looking at its architecture, they're looking at its business logic and they're finding verified vulnerabilities eight times more than the previous best in class. And I think the key there is a verified vulnerability is they're not waving their hands about things that aren't really a problem. They're finding real problems and then they're also serving up a solution. You can press one button and say fix it and folks are doing that in.
- [37:58]
C
Mass. I was looking at the rounds. It's a sizable Series A. You know, in the last couple of years the market has been somewhat distorted depending on the company's type. But what you just said, eight times best in class. How critical is a data point like that to you when you decide, do I want to be in this round at all or.
- [38:19]
I
Not? Evidence, it's really critical. And I think particularly in the case of security, there's just a societal impairment narrative that we get this right. And I think Excel, we've been investing for 43 years. Throughout that time, security has been a key category of investment for us folks like CrowdStrike or Netscope, that IPO just last year. And what we've seen is in these major innovation transitions, these major, you know, cycles of transition, the security apparatus has to be replaced, it has to evolve to that new era. And that's why we're so excited about companies like Depth first. But you're exactly right. You know, it has to work, it's imperative that it work. And so those stats are really important. They're important to the CISOs, they're important to the Fortune 50 that are evaluating these companies. And so if we're going to, you know, put ourselves and our funds behind a company, it's imperative that we believe that the thing works and not just, not just today, but that you have the team that can drive over this next era of transition, that you have the talent that can sort of weather this, this.
- [39:27]
A
Moment. The talent is highly sought after and you're seeing Palo Alto Networks, even ServiceNow, making some big acquisitions in the space, trying to get ahead of the cyber risks around AI. Do you think that this is a long term bet? Will this company go public like, or do you think it will be an M and a.
- [39:45]
I
Story? You know, I think this is absolutely a long term bet. That is always our, you know, our focus when we do our investing. And I think that this is a team that's really uniquely qualified to go that distance. So this is technical leaders from companies like DataBricks, from Google DeepMind, from Fair. These are folks who have built, you know, large, large, durable companies and confronted these security problems at an incredible scale. But marrying that cyber experience with the AI experience, very few people have had sort of the, the experience of building at a place like Google DeepMind and can now apply that to this context. So it's a really interdisciplinary team, a highly technical team that we believe is, is, is very unique in their ability to tackle this.
- [40:37]
A
Problem. Sarah, you ahead of strategic partnerships at fair. So when you're thinking about who are the talent you want to go for, is it your own network you lean upon? Is it that you're hearing these companies being born out of these big deep minds even before they're really created? How are you tapping into a really early stage business that needs.
- [40:56]
I
Financing? Yeah, I think it's, it's all of the ability above. And then, you know, we hope to spend a lot of time with folks during the early days when they're really, you know, considering starting a company or the early definition of the company. You know, our goal is to be along the journey for, for.
- [41:14]
G
Decades.
- [41:14]
I
Right. The generational companies that are going to solve these security problems will, will last that long. And so we do, we try and find them early and it can be through a lot of things. But certainly one of the greatest signals is when we see incredibly talented people that we know to be excellent aggregating around an opportunity. And I think what really emerged about this team is that they're incredibly motivated by this mission. You know, if you look around all of Our critical systems in society are powered by software, software that people can write increasingly quickly with AI. And the other dimension that's changing is increasingly we're getting giving this software more autonomy, we're giving it more access, we're giving it the ability to reason and that's really exciting. But it's also something that would be concerning if those things aren't secure. We just watched your segment talking about the robots, right? We want to make sure if we're giving these, these devices access to our homes, to our businesses that they're secure. And I think that that is a, is a belief that shared by the Depth first team that they. This is sort of an imperative for society that we get this right, that we ensure that all of this new generated code that's being shipped at increasing rates is all.
- [42:28]
A
Secure. What's being shipped by load of your portfolio Companies Cursor. Lovable. Anthropic. Among some of the bets over Axel. We really appreciate your time. Axel. Partner Sarah Edelston. Now coming up, Spotify Co CEOs they face a host of challenges. More on the audio giant's plans next. This is Bloomberg.
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C
Tech. Salesforce is looking to bolster AI capabilities for Slack users. The company is releasing an upgraded Slack bot that uses anthropic Claude model. Joining us to discuss Rob Seaman, Slack interim CEO and Chief Product Officer. You know, I have not yet got access to this, this updated Slack bot but, but as a Slack user, very interested to see where this goes. Rob, the general idea, right, was that Marc Benioff, the parent company CEO, was using Chat GPT and you guys are like, we want to have an internal tool. So has it worked? What is he using it for? What are you using it.
- [43:29]
J
For? Absolutely. So one, I can't wait for you to try it. So we're using it internally. Mark is certainly using it. I'm using it. I'll give you a few examples of how I use it. I used it recently. I just said, hey, go find the most recent all hands deck that we're working on. One of the things that we do is actually introduce every single new hire every month. And I said, tell me how to pronounce the names of all the new hires. And that goes off and finds the presentation without me saying, reads the presentation, figures out where the new hires are, loops through all of them and figures out their highest probability nationality and tells me how to pronounce them. I don't have to go bug people to figure that out. It's awesome. It saves me time in the.
- [44:07]
C
First Instance it's underpinned by Anthropics. Claude. Right. And you're going to tell me well this is interim and we're going to look at all kinds of different model options with model Agnostic. But it is an interesting and the latest example of how Claude helps people in the enterprise get to market quick. You know, what was your experience of that?
- [44:24]
J
Rob? The biggest thing for us was being able to take an LLM, pick it up and set it down in our infrastructure in a way that our customers data never left our security boundary and wasn't used for the training of the model. And that's what we got with Anthropic and Cloud. And on top of that we've done a bunch of sophisticated prompt and context engineering that makes Slack Bot deeply personal and a deeply personal agent to every single person that uses.
- [44:49]
A
It. Robert, how are you thinking about.
- [44:50]
J
Security? I mean it's paramount for us. It's been something that's been the very, very top of our priorities since the foundation of Slack. And so one Slack bot is a personal agent. It needs to be deeply trusted by the user, but also deeply trusted by the enterprise. And so what we do is the user, Slack Bot is acting on behalf of the user so it can access the information that a user can their direct messages, their private channels and the public channels within a particular Slack instance. And as I mentioned before, from a company perspective you can rest assured that your data is not being used to train the model nor is it leaving the security boundary. So it's all adhering to your existing security.
- [45:31]
A
Policies. In Slack this is all about return on AI investment. It's all about making it clear to me, to you, to the users that this stuff saves you time, makes you more productive. How are you measuring that.
- [45:43]
J
Role? We don't measure individual productivity, but we do measure the usage of Slack Bot. So we measure the penetration so the number of users that actually use Slack Bot over the number of users that have access to it. But at week over week retention and then message intensity and that allows us to approximate the value that's being created in the week over week retention for Slack Bot is higher than any other feature we've ever had in Slack. And the message intensity keeps growing and to us that's a quantitative signal of qualitative value that's being derived from our users for time savings. But also we're seeing like through our qualitative surveys, people use this for brainstorming and creative pursuits that we didn't even expect.
- [46:20]
A
Effect. Rob Seaman Slack Intro CEO Been Great speaking with you about Slack. What See how it catches on. Meanwhile, let's take a look at shares of Spotify right now and indeed over the start of the year, well off by 9%. That's of course when the new co CEOs have joined the company. Gustav Soda, Alex Norstrom took over as from the Spotify founder Daniel Ek. Now they've both been at the business for a long time but Eric himself grew the platform from money suck to one of the most powerful businesses in the music industry and the new CEOs have to steer that powerful ship around some pretty tough headwinds I angry creators, user fatigue to turn around that share drop. Bloomberg's actually Common has been writing about all of this by the audio giant's leadership transition. It's in Business Week and there are a lot of headwinds. What is front and center for them? How are they taking on the Algos and the AI story though they're.
- [47:17]
B
Coming up with a lot of different products that they're hoping will kind of buy them some time and also maybe address some of what users want to do. So for example, they're integrating Spotify into Jack Beatty. They've made a partnership with Metta on its glasses. They are letting you enter prompts to get a playlist in return using even like online context so that you can can get the top rated albums of the year from Pitchfork or something like that. So they really want to give people both this personalization, more options showing up where people are. Podcasts are coming to Netflix. They're really trying to meet people where they are rather than forcing them to just come to.
- [47:54]
C
Spotify. YouTube, not a new issue, but the biggest in front of them. It seems like, you know, it's very detailed in the Business Week story. This competition for eyeballs and YouTube is the thing on both of those CEOs desks right.
- [48:09]
B
Now. Ashley yes, YouTube. Spotify has moved into video. One of the scoops from our story is that they're now actually focusing on fitness content. So as a result of them pushing into video podcasts, creators who we see on YouTube that actually put out guided workouts have started uploading their content to Spotify. And and Spotify is seeing that people really enjoy that content. So instead of just using playlists to soundtrack their runs, they're actually watching yoga on Spotify, for example. So this is an area they're pretty excited about and seem to be investing.
- [48:41]
A
In. We know a lot about Danielle. We sort of grown up alongside him as he's taken this European success Story Global. What do we know about the CO CEOs? Who are they? Well, their dissents. What are they? What are they.
- [48:54]
B
About? So both of them are Swedish. Alex is of half Chinese, half Swedish descent. His mother was a single mother. She ran a Chinese restaurant growing up. He's really kind of the culture guy. He gets a playlist regularly that keeps him on top of trends. It seems like he's really sort of the social person who's doing all these partnership deals with the labels and audio books and such. Gustav, formerly really focused on product, now co CEO, also Swedish. He sold a startup to Yahoo back in 2007. He did a stint in the Swedish military and he's really tech philosophy focused. He was really excited about a book he read from the inventor of quantum computing. So he really gets deep on that. And supposedly the two of them together are really like a yin and yang. They go well together. A fun tidbit. Nordstrom means Nordstream. Soderstrom means South Stream. So it's written in the universe, I.
- [49:44]
C
Guess. This really is a must last read on Bloomberg Online or in a magazine. Coming to you very soon in Business Week. Bloomberg's actually Carmen with the deep dive in Spotify. Thank you very much, Carrie. That does it for another edition of Bloomberg. Tech markets still continuing to start the year pretty.
- [50:01]
A
Hot. Pretty hot while we're under pressure if you're looking at big tech, but they're hot if you're looking at commodities. And that Too is an AI story. I mean, the joke of 2022 and onwards, everything's an AI story. Don't forget to check out all of them on our podcast find on the terminal, as well as online, on Apple, on Spotify and on Iheart. This is.
- [50:18]
D
Bloomberg. These days, it seems like AI agents are just about everywhere you turn, every field and every function. But without identity, you can't trust they'll serve your business instead of jeopardizing it. Fortunately, Okta helps you get identity right by securing your AI agents identities, giving you a single layer of control, a single standard of trust. So whether an AI agent supports a single user or your entire enterprise, with Okta you'll turn risk into opportunity. Secure every agent, secure any agent. Okta secures.
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