Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. This is Bloomberg business Week inside from the reporters and editors who bring you America's most trusted business magazine, plus global business, finance and tech news. The Bloomberg Business Week Podcast with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck from Bloomberg Radio.
Carol Mappler, Tim's done live. You're in San Francisco at the Bloomberg Technology Summit, and for to say, Carol, We've already heard from the great lineup of speakers. I mentioned Flows out of Newman formerly of We Work Lead, a caller, the godmother of ai AI. Yeah, Culture Professor heard from her a little earlier. Snapsil and Spiegel also here at this event. Got a great lineup.
It's really fun to see the networking going on. We've also got our own star and we're talking about Bradstone.
He is the editor of Bloomberg Business Week. He's also, of course the author.
Of numerous books including those on Amazon, on Amazon, on Bound, and so much more. Joining us here at the Bloomberg Tech sum and actually you have invited us in, so thank you so much for that. First of all, I feel like there's so much going on AI. Yes, but tell us about Brad. The conversations you guys had as a team about what you wanted to cover there.
Yeah, you know, it's funny.
We do these every year and we tried not to repeat ourselves, and last year we were really talking about the emergence of chat GPT. It had gotten everybody talking, and so of course we had Sam Altman as our keynote speaker, and you can't buy the same people every year. But the other thing that's happened is it has started a movement, and so we thought, well, who else do we want?
And the first names that's sprung to mind.
Are the founders of Anthropic Siblings.
Dario and Daniela Amoday.
They actually worked at the Open AI and spun out maybe with an implicit objection to how open A was being run. That's where we started today and it's really set the tone for the conversations today mentioned faife A Lee, We have been coaches, la Reid Hoffmann coming later. Really, I think where we settled on was like, let's find some of the architects of this moment and to ask them the hard questions about are we really kind of comfortable where we're going?
Or is this an arms race that is propelling everyone forward just to win?
And what does that mean? So what does that mean? Because you know, if we think about where we were a year ago when everybody was playing with chat GPT. GPT four had basically just come out a little over a year ago, when you had the Tech summit, here, where are we this year with the run up in video? You have Amazon investing in anthrophic, you have all the open high eigh drama that happened at the end of last year. Where are we when it comes to sort of like AI being in primetime this Yes.
I will answer with something that you will never hear on the stage downstairs.
Okay, I don't know here and an.
Age of remarkable what I call AI ambiguity. There's so many things we don't know. So for example, Meta has open source the Lamaitrie model. What does that mean for these other companies that have spent hundreds of millions maybe seeing billions to train and operate a model. What does it mean that you can now get the technology for free?
Will chatbots be a thing that we regularly use or are.
They a novel expression of the technology and then they'll fade away?
Are their lanes for startups outside.
Of what all the big tech companies that have the resources are doing with AI.
These are great questions. I actually don't think that anybody.
Has the answer.
I think that even when I think about social media explosion or on demand apps fueled by the iPhone, that.
We sort of had a sense of where, Okay, well this is cool and people will.
Find it useful.
And I just think everything from how will use it to what the economics will look like are still completely up in the air.
I love that you went there, because I do feel like we've all been agog if you will, right on Nvidia.
And the chips and so and so forth coming off of milk, and I just came and people.
To even are like trying to assess where do we put allocate the money going forward? So much of what I heard rod was data centers right and infrastructure build out. Like people were still like, we haven't quite figured out the applications.
Of AI going forward.
I think that's true.
Where where I'm sort of bullish and why don't you let's see us an example of the good old Bloomberg terminal, where you really need to know how to get information from the terminal, right, we know a whole lexicon and that's pretty similar to other computer systems. They they'll do what you tell them to do, and often you need to speak a particular language, maybe even coding.
And what AI is.
I think of it as like a new user interface where you can express yourself either with a voice command or a written command and a plain language and have it respond.
And have it do things for you.
I think that is like and I said, we're going to see an IO next week with Google and WWWC, WWDC, with Apple them baking it into their devices and basically creating a new way to use technology.
Is it too early to say, Brad, that we're in an era right now like we were with the web browser in the nineties, sort of the dawn of the Internet, you know, tech bubble. Notwithstanding, but the idea that there was this new technology that fundamentally changed not just the way we live, but the way we interact with each other and the way that we spend money.
I'm going to go back to my handy AI ambiguity.
And say, I don't know.
I mean, if if this is the.
Domain of only the biggest companies that can afford it, and their proxies like Anthropic that maybe it isn't a giant ce that lists all boats.
Maybe you know, this is going to be.
Owned by four or five companies and governments around the world, and it will concentrate their power. The arrival of the web browser was the arrival of all sorts of entrepreneurial opportunity. To point, you know, we had a rise and then a crash, and then a rise again. I don't think it's clear that this is ready set go for everyone. It's very expensive to run these models. They'll maybe regulated,
as fafe Lea said earlier today. If you regulate them, you could create a powerful black market based on open source models.
So all sorts of sort of unresolved issues. And I'm just not sure.
Despite the fact that you go to y Combinator, any startup community here and all you will see and hear about are AI startups.
I'm just not sure how big the opportunity is going to be.
We'll see.
Hey, Adam Newman, you know you think about cycles right in technology, and we're trying to still figure out right the AI cycle going forward. But how what did you want to know or what you know, Adam Newman in terms of you think about we were what how it was a cover of Bloomberg.
Business Week, maybe.
Several times I can't remember before Brad's time, before Brad's time, but nonetheless it was a great story.
We talked so much about that company and where it was going, and obviously it's gone through.
Well.
First of all, I felt so privileged to be able to bring his particular brand of charismatic lunacy.
Uh oh, you know that's I don't mean.
In a harsh way. You know, he's entertaining as heck. Yeah, like he exudes charisma. He's at it again.
I wanted.
He's trying to buy where you work out of bankruptcy. So that was the first topic. He he they've they've not taken his bid, and he's clearly signaling that he's going to appeal that they don't. They think that the creditors should have looked at his bid more carefully, that he had the higher bid. He said that the current creditors who won the deal are making promises they can't keep. So that was the first topic. Then we asked him up flow his residential real estate company.
You know, this idea of.
Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire properties and then not just be a landlord, but to use technology to create community and a sense of belonging. Him bringing his classic sense of uh, you know, quasi mysticism into the world of business.
And I asked, I was like, why do you keep we were, Yeah, why do you have that?
You know?
But it's who he is and he you know, he's.
Somebody who speaks to the heart. I asked him a little bit. I wanted to know about whether he was different, and I really didn't do get the sense of one, he's got a confrontational board now that's gonna say no to him.
He didn't have that before.
And that too, he's there's an adult, a couple of adults in the glorio.
There were before, but they weren't acting like it.
And that he even said that on his latest proposal. Mark Andresam told him no, Yeah, that's interesting. I'm not sure Masayoshi Son ever told him no. And then the third thing was I wanted to know from him how he was different as a CEO. And he mentioned the board, and he also mentioned the advice that Jeff Bezos had given him to always talk last in a meeting because otherwise you're gonna kind of pollute the water and sway people's opinion.
And I said, are you able to follow that advice to go well?
And his CFO was sitting in the audience and gave us a kind of half hearted thumbs up.
So maybe something to work on.
So do you see him pulling off that we work out of bankruptcy.
I don't know if he will win that deal. I think that.
You know, the creditors are are required and it is in their personal interest to get the most money for the death that exists and to bring the company out of the bankruptcy. And the fact that they've chosen this other path suggests to me, and I haven't really looked at it, but that it may be a more complicated picture that Adam has presented and that it may not
only be about a popularity contest. And I also asked him to explain to me why we work should be in flow and whether it was just a personal mission of redemption.
And I wasn't sure.
I really believe, you know, fully believed that those two companies belong together and that it wasn't a little emotional for him.
In fact, he said that it.
Was so.
You know, and maybe there are personal reasons the quest that they don't want to resell we work to Adam Newman.
We can all imagine what they are. He wasn't you know?
He the company had problems under his leadership, and the question is are those personal reasons do they meet a valid legal test?
You know, it's fascinating think about the pandemic and how we're rethinking how we work and what kind of office space.
Is ultimately needed.
Like his thinking about this concept of having flexible workspace like as you need.
It wasn't so far fetched. It's just timing and maybe execution.
And I mean I would say this, I think that the history of real estate is and you know, Donald Trump has exhibit A is a is a history of ups and downs, bubbles and crashes.
We're seeing in China right now.
Business Week we did a list of all the billionaires that have lost everything betting on the Chinese.
So that's no different.
But you know the difference is he voted a little higher, wrapped in a mantle of being a technology company and trying to take a public as a tech company, and then wrote it even lower because investors ultimately.
Didn't buy the visual.
Can I talk about.
Robot?
Yes, this is a humanoid robot developed by Engineered Arts, a company in Cornwall, England. I'm about to go in a either a career high or a career low. I'm going to go on stage and interview the robot.
So it's going to answer your questions in real time.
Yes, yeah, yeah, it's a creepily human like It speaks and I presume should be addressed as a female.
That's a choice.
That's a choice, and it's really remarkably I wouldn't say it's.
Lifelike, but because I did address it, I did some tests.
It's expressive and it's design to make people feel comfortable with it. It's very it's to me, even though it's a British project, it very much reminds me of the Japanese bipedal robots or the past that Sony and Samsung and they were always working on them. The Japanese love their their bipedal robots.
It's certainly like it's it's incredible novelty. But we should know that there are lots of companies working on robots like this to help in warehouses. Think about what it would you do a company like Amazon to be able to have you.
Know, this am a coon.
I hope at least does not move because if you see me running across the stam, I don't know, uh that it's an ambulatory Uh yeah, now I could ask and it's running chat GPT for Turbo.
So I think that's.
Interesting that, So explain what that means.
Like it's essentially that engineered arts has developed the machine, but the brains are borrowed using the API of open.
AI and chat GPT.
Well that's interesting going forward that maybe robot makers don't need to worry as much about main general intelligence, but they get hooked into one of these large models, use the API, and they can they can be more engineering companies that think about things like how the joints work, how balance works, as you mentioned Caro, all the expressiveness of the robots.
So what does that mean she's note connected to the cloud right now?
Oh?
I would imagine that she is. Okay, yeah, well we'll see if Wi fi goes down.
Answer to make sure she's on the right network. Okay, I was thinking and I were talking.
About the hotel. We're saying we're not gonna say where it is, but.
It's like, right, we couldn't get anybody I answer, So we could have used Amica to like answer our phone call and like help us answer some question.
There is the conference, which is like huge, Well that's the thing.
It's like you would need Amica to do that.
You would need an Alexa or chatch BT, right, and then and then robots can just be these physical things. And and the question is do we really need a buy pedal robot that's trying to trick us into being thinking that it's human or will they be Timmy mentioned industrial robots, you know, little things that do very specific tasks, deliver the mail, deliver packages, that kind of thing.
Hey, can I ask you what's the biggest I don't know, I know AI like as you go through today, like what are you looking for a question to be answered? Or something like I think you know so much this world, there's something top of.
Mind for you.
I mean, I think we all want to know, like where it's going. I guess specifically, we've seen it.
Since the September of twenty twenty two, every successive models of chat GBT or any of these other.
Chatbots has been step change improvements.
Fed by more and more data and more and more processing and power and money running on in video chips.
So my question is is that going to continue or are.
We hitting a natural limit, either in the money that we could spend, the train, the available processors, or or just the model matches out all right and it's not giving us step change improvements anymore.
Good stuff from Bradstone.
As always, We've got more, including we're to continue with AI.
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Still give value? No question buzzing about AI. We've been talking about it. But venture capital dealmaking, Carol, it's still suppressed. I got some stats here. Here's some numbers. Okay here in the US VC's thirty six point six billion into startups in the first quarter of the year. That's according to Pitchbook. The funding went to twenty eight hundred companies. On both measures, it's a nearly thirty percent decrease compared
with the same period in twenty twenty throws three. So the takeaways startups had their worst funding your last year since twenty nineteen. This year it's starting off even worse.
So despite of the excitement, Well, we've got a great boys to really talk to us about the startup community.
Alien Lee is with us.
She's the founder and managing partner of the VC firm Cowboy Ventures. They invest mostly in software companies based here in the US. We should say that her firm has made more than one hundred early stage investments, specializing in seed rounds.
She's on site with us. The other thing is she has done the data analysis.
That is the reason we use the word unicorn when it comes to startups.
We love data here at Bloomberg.
How are you.
I am so happy to be here. We'll tell us about the VC world, Like give us an idea. It's a great indicator in terms of the health of the economy.
So we just finished a panel myself, Kirsten Green and auDA from Base ten with Tom Giles, who's the tech editor for Bloomberg Tech I.
We talked about what's going on.
So, like you mentioned, we had a big slowdown last year. A lot of people put their pencils down. They're both like it felt like there was a falling night in terms of public markets, which obviously affects the private markets, and so people said it's not a great time to be investing in private companies.
I do think that we're.
Seeing quite a pick up this year, but it's largely driven by AI, which is great. It's very exciting. It is the new hotness in venture capital. So you just have to It can be quite treacherous, I think to invest in AI right now because it's you know, obviously there's a lot of energy right now. We're kind of in a consolidation phase, and for very good reasons, right with whether it's Microsoft or Meta or Salesforce or Service.
Now or Google.
You need a lot of open AI, you need a lot of money, you need a lot of GPU, you need a lot of engineers, and so there's kind of this like techtonic plate war going on in the big tech players right now, and so if you've got a really big fund, you could try and align your Obviously, most of these companies are public companies right so right it's a great time for public Nvidia and to be a public markets investor to be able to get exposure to like the AI that is going to be powering.
I think most applications for decades to come. But for private markets, I think there's just a lot of money going into startups, many of whom are.
Not going to make it.
So the thing that's interesting about this, and Brad kind of alluded to him, we were talking to him, is the idea of it's so expensive to have this processing power to buy these GPOs. Yeah, and it's not as easy as you know, ten fifteen years ago creating an app yeah, and building a network, yeah, which was sort of what we saw venture capital support in that generation.
Yeah.
Is there a concern that you.
Know, you do early stages, yeah investing, you do seed startups, your seed investing. Is there a concern that these companies just can't raise the capitol in order to subsport them.
So there are large models that the big technology companies are investing in that have billions of parameters that you need billions of dollars for GPOs. We have been investing at Cowboy Ventures, as you mentioned, we're seed stage investors. Our first AI driven enterprise software companies we invested in eight years ago, where it's they use what we call small model where they don't need.
To buy GPUs.
They basically get a proprietary data set. In that case, the company's called text You, and we basically got HR related documents, jobs, pecs, performance reviews, and we train the AI using very situational specific parameters to basically understand how it can help people write performance reviews more effectively, how it can help people write job specs more effectively. And you just don't need the giant GPU to be able
to do that work. And then also a lot of it is around how you solve the problem for everyday business users instead of them using Google Docs or word you need to figure out how would I get into their workflow, whether it's through workday or lattice, and how do I actually create those integrations so that the way that the AI can be in the business process of every day people inside the enterprise. And so I think that's those kinds of business or industry specific applications.
You don't need billions of dollars to build those applications. But is that scalable Okay, I'm listening to you. Is that scalable elsewhere elsewhere? Meaning other industries like that mod completely.
So we're seeing I think a lot of what's the app there's the application layer and there's infrastructure, right, so there's money going into both at the application layer.
That's where a lot of VC funds are playing right now.
And it makes a lot of sense because so many people in whether it's the food and beverage industry, in hospitals, in education, people are still using pen paper spreadsheets. They're not actually leveraging the underlying data, and the applications that use every day are not smart. And so I think there's pretty much every industry and every application that we look at today is going to have new applications that are powered by AI.
So it is a tremendous opportunity.
Okay, I'm speaking of opportunities. I'm wondering what's more difficult in this world where cash can earn four and a half to five per tails. That's an opportunity. Yeah, what's harder right now?
Now?
Is it harder to go raise money from investors to then deploy yeah, or is it harder to find the companies to deploy that money into.
We're very fortunate, you know, we're pretty disciplined. Fun We've been around for over ten years now. We've had pretty much the same investors or what we call LP Limited Partners for pretty much the ten years, so we're very fortunate and they are savvy investors who understand the upside of investing in venture capital firms and they know it's a ten to fifteen year investment. So fortunately for us, it's definitely gotten harder, and it's I think in many
ways it's good because it holds us very accountable. It's like there are benchmarks that you have to beat to be worth investing in, and that's our job is to make sure that we beat those benchmarks fund after fun and also we raise every three years or every four years, so you know, you raise the fund and then you have three years to basically go find some great investments. So that's the it's gotten quite competitive in private markets.
A ton of money flooded in in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, and it's probably not going to it's not going to recede, and so there's just more money chase saying private companies than ever.
One thing I wanted to ask you, Aleen, is what's with all the attention on AI where what's being neglected maybe in the venture world or where do you think we should also be thinking about when it comes to tech innovation.
I mean, I do think, oh, that's a really good question. I think the big boom when interest.
Rates were basically zero in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, it brought so much attention to the venture capital and technology world that actually what we would have considered long tail markets parking garages, like companies selling software to parking garages.
Got funded.
Like the Unicorn analysis that we did in twenty thirteen versus twenty twenty three showed a huge difference in the amount of money that's going to industry specific software whether and so in the original Unicorn analysis in twenty thirteen, it was actually, it's quite interesting how it flip flopped eighty percent consumer companies and twenty percent enterprise software companies. Ten years later it foot flopped and became eighty percent
enterprise twenty percent consumer. And so in those enterprise you've got climate tech companies, you've got agriculture companies, you've got
companies serving parking garages. So entrepreneurs especially, I think since the iPhone debuted in two thousand and seven, pretty much everyone in the modern world understands the power of technology, and so if they work in a coord if they work in at a nursing station, they understand how much inefficiency there is and how much opportunity there is for technology to actually reinvent the way they do things and let humans.
Do what they do best better. Waiting for health care to really embrace.
Technology, keep waiting. You know, if you need give you a.
Chip information, I'm ready to do that.
I actually am. If you need a copy of the X ray, here's a CD ROW. I'm not joking. Earlier today, that's still the way like ten back then.
Ode posts Let's speak earlier today with Emily Chang, and he was saying that the thing that he's going to tell President Biden tomorrow is that every person should have a personal doctor and every case to have a personal tudor tutor, and that that would reinvent both education and lighters and it.
Would be amazing.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Listen live each weekday starting at two pm Eastern on Apple car Play and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business Ad. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just Say Alexa, playing Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Well Tick Ventures is a free seed and seed venture capital firm. It focuses on investing in demographic changes that are driven by tomorrow's Internet users. So what that means as far as where they put their money. There's a company out there called Raars where you can invest in sneakers and collectibles. Right. It's an aipowered workforce training platform, and then it comes to be behavioral health. The platform is called it most days. That's among other investments ADMD.
I love the idea of demographics.
I really think it's kind of figure out what are the trends not only today but really more importantly up tomorrow with us right now is Monique Woodward. She's founding partner managing partner at Cake Vners. Welcome, Welcome, so nice to be talking with you.
Thank you, thanks for having me.
When you think about demographics, right, so you can dice and slice that, we make so many different ways. What are the demographics that you really like to focus on in today's environment?
So the Cake Venture's thesis around demographics is really based on a few different layers. The first layer is aging and longevity. There's ten thousand people turning sixty five every single day in this country alone. And there's this massive opportunity to help them use technology to make their lives better as a age. The second layer of the cake is the increased spending power of women and how the
female dollar drives companies to billion dollar plus outcomes. And then the third is the shift to majority minority, where people of color as a broad group, primarily Latino, Asian and Black, becoming majority in the United States, are already a global majority.
You know, it's really fascinating. I keep talking about this. I was just back from Milkin and I had to moderate a panel. It was called Thriving in Distruction.
Oh, you did several panels, but what was.
Interesting on our pref call.
So here I have somebody from real estate, from venture, private equity guide, private credit guide, somebody who's in, you know, trading every day on a platform over at Citadel Securities, and what they wanted to talk about was longevity and the aspect of how it's going to impact things like pension app obligations, how we live, the kind of housing we need, you know, whether we bring older people back into the workforce.
What are the important.
Conversations that you think we need to be thinking about when it comes to longevity and how that shapes specifically your investments.
I think the big conversation right now is around how do we live longer?
Right?
But I think that's just touching the surface of longevity. It's really about how do we use.
Technology to give people better lives at older ages as they get older, right, how do we use technology to enhance their lives, help them age in place without moving into a nursing home or retirement home, And how do we give them better lies after sixty as they had when they were in their twenties and thirties.
I'm wondering about the third theme that you touched on in terms of demographics, the idea of investments in companies that are not necessarily geared toward people of color. But take this demographic into account. Here we are in Silicon Valley, not necessarily the most diverse place when it comes to where venture capital is deployed. I think that's fair to say, how do you think about that in terms of where you're putting your money in terms of the opportunities that
are out there? Because I think a big criticism that folks have about ventor capitalist is, you know, they're always just trying to solve problems that they have, Like, you know, it's true, how do we get to tahoe faster? Right to get to get a skew day out. I'm not trying to be dismissive, but I mean it's like, you know, it's like common criticism.
So one of the categories that I do a lot of investing in it is the future of deskless work. Eighty percent of the labor market is actually deskless work, non office work, work that doesn't happen in an office, health care jobs, construction jobs, service worker jobs. As you might expect, a lot of these jobs over index in women and people of color, and so I think that AI and new technologies are going to be really important in accelerating the adoption of those jobs, but also accelerating
the efficiency of those jobs. And so I think we're at this really important inflection point where we can use technology to improve the lives of healthcare workers, improve the lives of service workers, and we haven't been doing it because to your point, a lot of the people who have been building for building technology that they come from a knowledge worker background. So their immediate thought is to
build future work products software for knowledge workers. But these massive opportunities have happen in healthcare and construction and manufacturing, and those jobs are often held by.
People of color.
You know, I'm watching Bradstone up on stage with Amaica the robot, and I'm thinking about in terms of how care like whether or not there is some way.
I mean, one of the other trends that came.
Out of Milkan is that this shortage of health care workers in particular, and I do wonder is there some way in technology innovation that we can assist.
Those folks who actually have to do things.
In care for people, or whether because we're facing shortages in a big way in that industry.
Well, we're already seeing it in companies like a Bridge, a Bridge which raises series C in order to use conversational as the conversations between healthcare workers and their patients.
And convert them into usable data.
So we're already seeing AI being really useful in the lives of healthcare workers.
Right.
I'm very skeptical about the use of robotics in actual patient to patient to healthcare worker interactions, but I do think that AI is useful in freeing up the job of the healthcare worker in order to make those patient interactions much more robust, much more have a lot more depth. And so I think we're far away from robots doing that job, but I think we're we're in the AI doing it.
I guess also maybe cut down on error too. When you're tasked to a doctor. I mean, this is something I recently noticed. When you're trying to describe like a pain that you're having to a doctor, some sort of symptoms. I mean, they're essentially serving the function of AI. What they're doing is, you know, they're saying, Okay, well you have this, this and this, here's your family history. They're taking all these data points and they're trying to diagnose
you with something that you have. It's so easy to see how that could be better served by something in the cloud.
Exactly, or at least augmented in some way augmented. I think that's what I think that's what we're looking for within healthcare in particular. We are looking for technology to augment the already great skills that these nurses, nurse practitioners, and doctors already have.
We're not looking to replace them with robots, but give.
Them additional tools that make their jobs more efficient and allow them to spend more about one on one time with patients.
That's whole idea have adjacent right in terms of AI, Nick, thank you so much. We really appreciate you coming by. Thank you so much, fatterning time with our audience.
It's a lot of Nick Woodward g She is founding partner and managing partner at Cake Ventures, joining us here at the Bloomber of Technology Summit.
But these are some of the discussions and technologies like figuring.
Out what does it mean for our workplace? I mean, you and I kind of joke about a kid about it. But if we could get an assistant kind of writing our scripts.
On otaily basis, I wouldn't mind that.
I was thinking about that a lot yesterday. I didn't get when I was working. But to be fair, I mean, you were literally, you know, ten hours of sleep in the past four days because of what you were doing. But the truth day is, there are a lot of repetitive tasks out there. It would be great to see
some of those be replaced by machines of people. Look, I oftentimes think about this conversation in the context of other big historical shifts when it comes to the types of work that people did one hundred years ago versus the type of work we're doing now. Right, we don't need a horse and buggy to get us from place to place, you know. So what was replaced, you know? And what did that allow people to do? What did the steam engine allow people to do?
It?
Just does this thing stick the way that you know.
The proponents of it?
Even to go back that for I think about when I started out in journalism, when I needed research, I mean was on the phone with folks in the government, like Commerce Department, can you FedEx overnight or send me research?
Really for my reports, like not emailing it to you.
It's amazing the stuff that I used to get in the email And now I just go on the Internet and I.
Just pull it right up.
So you just think about that transition. It's made my job a lot easier. And I do feel like that access to information is freeing.
How infladible that is.
That's something Elon talked about. He was talking up Starling, but he said that's the great leveler in terms of creating Internet access to everybody around the world. That means everybody can get an education. M I tam cimate forces online.
Like you think about things like that.
But I feel like with this next Lettle level of AI, I'm not quite so sure about it could be pretty cool.
Those are the good things that that's good, you know, we think and that's what that was the promise of the Internet. But look at the Internet's also been used for a lot of really bad stuff. I mean, we had the cover of Bloomberg business Week recently talk about the way that social media platforms are becoming places where teenage boys essentially have been held hostage and it's led to some really discribbing outcomes. All right, again all as a result of the Internet.
All right, So on two sides to every coin. And this is what we want to get into because I'm here at the Bloodberg Technology Summit. There's a workshop going on. It's called addressing AI Risks in Business, and we have a great voice to.
Talk to us about that.
Anthony A.
Giri is executive director of the Future of.
Life Institute, joining us on site. Thank you so much for coming by with us. We are trying to figure out technology AI, what it means for our workplace, for our life in general.
What are some of the biggest the biggest facets of that discussion or narrative that kind of occupy your mind today.
I think there are some major challenges that we have that AI is presenting us with. One is the issue of how are we going to make AI in a way that is actually safe and beneficial for society. Right now, we have AI systems that are being developed by sort of a handful of very large companies, and they're doing it in a very competitive way. So each of those companies feels like it has to develop the new, better
system faster than its rivals. Does we even see this on the international stage where that you know, the US has rhetoric like we have to develop AI faster than our geopolitical rivals.
And this is not the way.
It's a race, and a race is not the way you get something to go as safely as possible.
Right.
The race is the way that you get things to go as quickly as possible, and speed does not necessarily equal safety. So I think one of the problems that you know, we have to step out of this dynamic of there's a competitive race to develop more and more powerful systems, even at the expense of making sure that those systems are safe and beneficial systems for society.
So that's issue one.
I say, what's at stake here? If those guardrails aren't in place? I think, like, what's worst case scenario? The get give it to us full.
I think they're short term scenarios that we see that are that are worries and long term one. So I think in the short term, we see that our whole sort of information gathering and understanding and dissemination system are the ecosphere is more or less being dismantled. You know, right now we are becoming a wash in AI generated content. You don't really know most of the things that you read, whether they AI generated or human generated.
It.
We will soon be at the point where the pictures that you see are more or less indistributable between AI generated and camera generated. That's already sort of possible. So we have a kind of pollution of our information commons to the extent that I think we're losing track of just what is real, what is human, what is true from what isn't. And so I think that's a challenge we're going to see play out in huge that's happening.
That's happening now.
I think that's not the robots taking over, that's that's.
Right it's not the robots taking over, but it also isn't. It's also not not the robots taking over in the sense that we are replacing human generated culture and content with AI generated culture and content.
How do you police that? How do you create the guardrails around that?
I think there it's a So in terms of the content generation, it's a question of having ways to verify that something is authentic, that is real, that is true, that is human generated ways to detect and ways to label things that aren't, and having the technical systems that allow people to access that information. So it should be the case that if I go online and read a news article, I should know whether it's AI written or not.
I should know whether a fact and it is true, and if it's claimed to be true, how do I.
Know that it's true? I should be able to go back to like the camera they took that picture?
How do you do that?
Well, it's all possible technically, I mean the social systems and the like, and the the rules and the market demand to bring those things into the way we.
Actually need use Berg as this article was written in the system of Bloomberg automation. I mean, not everybody does that, though, I guess right.
So, so should there be a rule a law, of course, I mean there should certainly be certain rules about fake information, so it should. I think it should not be legal to generate non consensual deep fakes of people that they didn't authorize, whether they're sexual deep fakes or political deep fakes that are or fraudulent business you know deep talking to politicians.
Right now to make this reality we are.
Yeah.
So there are lots of bills in Congress that are pursuing the deep fakes issue. I think some of them are underpowered in the sense that they predominantly put the put the onus on content creators not to create deep fakes, but they don't put the onus on developers not to create the tools for deep fakes, and not necessarily enough on platforms to make sure that they label things correctly.
So I think we need lots of things there.
Some of those will happen by themselves because the market will require some of them will be required.
We will need regulations in law scot I'm.
Just kind of a little terrified thinking about social media. I the amount of news information that's not accurate that's already out there, and we've not done a great job policing that.
So I'm my favors crossing everything.
You need to do a little better this time, you need to do a little better.
We've learned.
We'll see. We'll check in with you in a little while and see if we've done a better job.
But the broader question, so you asked about the long term and the short.
Term, so we'll see, Well, we'll see if it We'll see if we can if we can pull it off. All right, Anthony, thank you so much for joining us. That's Anthony Gary, executive director of the Future of Light and Light Institute, here at the Bloomberg Tech Summit.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us Live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern Listen on Apple card Play and then brought auto with a Bloomberg Business at or want us live on YouTube.
Well, our next guest needs going to We're going to get them one anyway. It's a Silicon value vis He helped build PayPal, co fided LinkedIn. He was an early investor in Facebook and Airbnb. He was the first investor in open Ai. He co founded the ai company in Flection Ai. He's on Microsoft Forard. He's a partner at the VC firm Braylock Partners. He's a New York Times bestselling author, and he's also a podcast we have read hot mon.
Great to be here, Thank you for you.
As we were just talking how does the environment? But we've ever done a radio show before it so hopefully it'll work.
It's working so far, so far, so good.
But I have to ask you, are you real or am I talking to some sort of AI digital twin rand Well, and explain why I have to ask that question.
So as you as you know, I did an interview with myself where I was talking to my own digital twin read AI, and I did it in order to kind of show that not only obviously there's a whole bunch of concerns.
There's concerns and political.
And misinformation and a deep makes and a bunch of other stuff that are real con but even here there's optimism to look at what's to be shaped towards. And I wanted to show not just hell, that message. And so I was like, okay, well let me talk to my own three day I and see how it works. And so and the reason why you asked that question of course, because you said, well, wait a minute, that was pretty good.
It was we're here in person. You can tell this is I'm the real name.
That sounds like this looked like you, Yes, yeah, this is like it looked like talking.
To a video audio and the words we're all AI generated zero from me. It was other than mirroring off my earlier videos.
Mirroring off my earlier podcast, use your your use your book to train as well.
Yes, okay, yeah, it used all everything ever did answers the way read would get answers.
We're all gonna have digital twins someday and we're gonna hear it was and we're like, go.
To the d m V for me.
So I think we must. It's certainly possible.
Certainly, if you're a media person you'll have a digital twin. Certainly, if you're a leader, you'll have a digital twin.
It'll be used in a front.
If you're a lawyer, you'll have one because then people can talk to your digital twins and maybe at a cheaper rate.
The dog you are prepping for your meeting or that kind of thing.
So I think it will be a stack of harriers for digital twins will be very real.
But I'm not sure all eight billion people in the world will.
This string well, so why should this excite us and not scare us and want us to all move to bunkers.
So it should look naturally, it should both excite and scare us. The scars is, the negatives is the scarris is of political misinformation. You know, things that are going to be happening this year in the US until we're in other major elections of democracy. It should scare us because there's questions around them. And let if someone created a deep make of me doing something or saying something I really am like you know, like you know that I think Trump is a corruption in democracy against the
rule on what happens to you. I love Trump, you know, that would be obviously a problem. And so there's all kinds of ways that there are real problems. So on the other hand, we will we will, as we always do with technology to figure out how to navigation, will get that not perfectly, but sufficiently, and there will be great things like for example, that's part of the reason I started showing, Hey.
Look here, I'm making a deep bag of myself and it's not that bad.
You know, read when you sat down I said, the conversations.
We have a lot of Bloemberg and we've written about this is here.
You have Lincoln kind of the social media site, that kind of the social media site.
That seems to be clean, pure, You can truss and you can have conversations, so we can get it right.
So what how is that kind of a guide in yours since in terms of jen ai, and how do you think about and what are the guard rails? How do we regulate it?
Yes, and so the good news is the mostly frontier model companies, Microsoft, open Ai, Google are all putting a lot of energy in that.
They're making these models healthy.
Participants within the US, within the global kind of media ecosystem, like don't generate fake information, be.
Civil, you don't do hate speech, don't enab it self harm. They all put a lot of energy and a lot of work in that. And I don't invest hundreds of millions of dollars and teams of hundreds of people in order to do that.
Now, one of the challenges is is that some of these models are open source, and as an open source, someone else takes the open source model to.
Something that's not any of that. With that right and that's part of the reason why we still have to navigate this.
Do you have trust so that we can navigate it correctly and safely in the future AI, So.
The ultimate answer is absolutely yes.
That doesn't mean that there aren't potholes, you know, bumps in the road, thunder scrapes, all the rest, and it's I guarantee you there will be those two.
The US can't get Vladimir Putin not to invade in Ukraine. The world can't get him not sure stop fighting. What convinces you that we could get a leader like him not to use AI?
Oh bad? Zero percent?
Like if you said that that Putin will be using AI to disrupt the US elections, you know, probably support Trump because that's his exit strategy from Ukraine. Uh, he will do that one hundred percent. Is no way it's having it. The defense is not getting him not to do it. The defense is integrating AI in our own tech platforms and using our stronger AI in defense.
So essentially saying, okay, well, maybe you see something on Facebook and that platforms might have developed something that's okay, Well this isn't necessarily something that's true, Yes, but do you trust Do you trust Facebook?
To do that.
Actually, I.
Yes, And you have a deep history with the company.
Yes, I have a deep history of the company.
I actually have talked to Zuckerbiger about it, and they're investing in it. I think they're making a real effort at it, so I think like they're really trying. I'm more worried about Twitter that I am about Facebook on this matter.
Okay, why are you more worried about Twitter?
Well, because look someone you also go way yeah, and look, Elon is A is literally one of the heroes of our generation. You know, uh, Space and I think and kind of Starlink and Tesla and Evie.
Just amazing, amazing, amazing. We wouldn't have any of this about him. It is so spectacular.
On the other hand, before he buys Twitter, he's like, oh, we have this problem with robots. And then after he bought trying to get out of the and then after you buy what robots and you're like, well, the robots are still there. There's still like Internet Research Agency watching robot farms doing shit.
Are you doing anything about them?
I'm not hearing anything, to be fair, I did see I did see an ad on Twitter recently with a deep bake of Jeff Bezos pushing a cryptocurrency. Yeah, it's a paid ad. Yes that has showed up repeatedly in my feed obviously not approved vice.
Yes, yes, yeah, and so therefore, what are you doing about AI and JEMA?
Well, you know, Elon is so complex.
Back from Milton, he did a conversation with Michael Milton. He said, very important to have maximum seeking AI and maximum curious.
AI, and then it's tied not to lie or do things that are not true.
Well, walk the lock, don't just talk the talk, well.
Said, can I ask, I'm curious if we have all these conversations about jen Ai, how is it going to impact my life? How is it really going to impact him's life? How's it really going to impact your life?
So here's a simple way of looking at all of us are going to have as an all AI assistant that it is going to be helping us with its focus on us. Right, so it'll be like, hey, what do you need help with? Do you need help with figuring out say something like like where to go? What's entertaining to do? You know in the city?
And I or oh I'm having this different I'm trying to figure out this thing with my kids. Oh, we can help you with that. Oh, I'm trying to figure this medical thing. Oh I can help you with that. Oh, I'm trying to figure out I had this difficult conversation with coworker.
Oh, I'll talk to you about that. It will help us with a whole range of things. And like, for example, part of what we found.
An inflection was really surprising to us and very positive. Which has podge in personal intelligence is people.
Will say, oh, I got these eight ingredients in my friends, what should I name?
Or oh, my toaster broke and I fixed it, and you're like, actually, in fact, it helps all of that. So that's the exact human amplification that helping us navigate our lives, which is the thing I guarantee will be there.
I love the ingredients in the fridge of it. If you're just joining us, we're speaking to with Rida Hoffman, the PayPal of LinkedIn, Open Ai, of Inflection AI, of the podcast Possible. But this certainly goes on read I'm wondering about winners and losers when it comes to AI AI. In terms of companies. You're on the board of Microsoft Imagined, A couple of the big companies that you've invested in,
that you've founded. Is there a concern that we're just going to see the big companies like Microsoft, like in video, like Amazon, like meta platforms, they're going to be the only winners when it comes to AI.
What I guarantee you They're not going to be the only one. They will be winners.
Right.
Satia has just done a masterful job, like like remember it started with a million dollars deal with a five O WEBC three. I think in the first time in the history something like that's happening, like genius strategy from talking and I think it will be Uh, it'll across all of these companies. I think they will have wrong winds going into the future. On the other hands, you know, at Gray Locke, we're investing a whole bunch of AI company. We do it reasonably well.
We have a whole portfolio that we're excited about. And I think that the I think that it's just you don't play the same game. It's a little bit like and you said.
Hey, I got a start up, I'm gonna try to make a new desktop search company.
You're like, well, one of the difficults, right there is this company called Google.
It's a little challenging. Okay, you know I'm gonna make a new handset mobile phone devices. You're like, oh, there's this company called that whole it's.
A little challenging, so you know, you don't do it that way. But there's gonna be a whole range of other AI companies the things that will like.
Everything from opportunities that the large tech companies just can't focus on.
To taking interesting risks and making that risk look good and then all of a sudden building out ding. So I think there's gonna be a range of startups. Don't look excited the lights podcasts.
We have a great podcast. You have a great new podcast. Tell us about possible, U tell us about it? Like, really want to talk too?
What are the conversations you want to have? So for me, it's possible.
It's too much of the dialogue is about technology being dangerous to us, how we evolve this.
Humanity, how we become better and more human. It's food, technology, it's it's clothing, it's.
Glasses, it's it's my it's food, it's cooking, it's fired, it's buildings.
All of this is.
Technology that's helped us make us as the human games we are AI will be saying, because.
The whole point I'm on the Possible podcast used to say, this is how technology can help.
Us become more human, not to go, oh my god, what's coming in technology. It's it can be great for us, and it's not that hard to shape. We just need to shape it, whether it's AI, whether it's the use of phones. And you know, obviously people like to talk about what social networks and they go, wow, that's been to have a challenging It's like, well, look at LinkedIn. LinkedIn's worked out pretty well. It's doable. It's doable, so let's do it.
We don't want to end with something that everybody loves to talk about. Politics.
We all agree.
Look, you've been open about your feelings about Dwain Trump. You help fund e Gene Carroll's defamation lawsuits against the former president. There are a lot of business leaders out there, some of them people you work with very closely, to say that business under a President Trump administration was better than business under a Biden administration. And that's why we're in the corner of Donald Trump. When it comes to twenty twenty four, What do you say to them?
So I understand the approach that Trump reason is more regulatory lightweight than Biden. And by the way, generally speaking, being more regulatory lightweight is a good thing. I try to encourage the Biden administration to do that. On the other hand, what's more fundamental is the rule of law. Business works much much better with a healthy, strong rule of law.
We do not want to have leaders who are literally in a court like have.
Been convicted by court of you were slandering about your sexual assault and a jury found you guilty. Right, we should be a rule of law country first. And by the way, this is what's the business leaders. By the way, rule of law is what makes great business.
That's the reason why.
Actually Biden is a matter of president for business. Even though the regulatory thing won't be exactly what.
You want and we'll have to work on it. But rule of laws.
Fundamental in your perspective, your point of view.
Yes, I'm not yes, this is, but I do wonder.
That you know soon as you look at the November election that outcome if it is not another of Biden White House present a Trump former presidents come back in the White House, what does.
It mean for the tech industry or your or your group in terms of the rule of law is not followed.
Well, so look, I think it's the tech industry can tribe under either administration.
But I do think that if.
Either Biden or Trump. But if I think Trump's elected, I think history will look back as the beginning of the end of the American world order, and that will have a massive effect on global business.
How far are you willing to go to to reelect your bodies.
Well, I'm willing to invest, I'm willing to speak, I'm willing to campaign, I'm willing to try to. Like when a prominent business leader speaks up and says I'm pro drop, I call them and I.
Said, let's talk about it.
Do you ever change their mind?
Of course? Look for example, Look, one of things you have to do is think about blind spots.
Like I just said something that was positive about how Trump's administration was running.
Like I inspite to say you want a new regulation, we're moving old one. It's an exactly right thing.
But I think what you.
Said about globally the perception of the rest of the world potentially what the US means and what it is in terms of.
That's a bigger story.
People will not trust us live. They will say, now no longer trust that. You're into the world of law, an equal system, all the rest.
All right, if you weren't in a world where Jennai was everything twenty seconds.
What's the other technology we should have it on?
Radars don't work and career well, so the other thing that's fallen behind it is synthetic biology. And when you put them together, by the way, like the invention of new pharmaceuticals, new medicines, everything else, it's like, let's just hold on to get to the future, because the future can be so amazing.
Do you think about what a I could do? Right, it's just play around. Thank you so much, Thank you for enduring my pleasure. Appreciate it. Read, Thank you so much.
That's read.
Hoffman of Paypo linked New York Times best selling author his podcasts The Possible Podcast Season two started. It's out No love is.
Love It all right, folks who are listening, row to Bloomberg Business Week.
We're live at the Bloomberg Technology Summer in San Francisco.
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