Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Bloomberg Tech is a live from coast to coast with Caroline Hide in New York and v Lovelow in San Francisco.
This is Bloomberg Tech Coming up. Cerebris is now seeking to raise as much as four point eight billion dollars in its IPO upsizing, a listing that could be the biggest so far this year.
Plus.
We speak with the Circle CEO, Jeremy Elaire about the company posts in fours quarter revenue beat and shares this vision of an agent.
Led feature and Google researchers say they have uncovered the first ever zero day attack built by artificial intelligence.
Will have the details we will, but first we check in on these markets that just relentlessly push higher. We're currently seeing the NASDAK one hundred up a tenth per percent. We are on track for another record on the NASACK one hundred. We're seing some tentative moves in the broader benchmarks. Look, we are worried about what's happening the straight toward moves. We're worrying about where the conflict continues between Iran and
the United States. We're worrying about peace talks, but more broadly, tech wants to go higher, and it is fueled to with potential seven weeks of gains ED, that'll be the longest winning street in the last that one hundred since October twenty twenty four ED.
Okay. The exuberance FAI is also hitting the eight IPO market. AI chip maker and data center operator Cerebrius is boosting the number of shares it plans to sell and their price. Now it's not going to raise as much as four point eight billion dollars, one third more than it previously aimed for. Bloomberg Air reporter Rebecca Torrance joins US, we've got confirmation now at what Bloomberg had already been reporting.
So it's funny thing to say the biggest IPO potentially so far this year, just like with SpaceX waiting in the wings later in the year. But there's a lot of interest here. Big over subscription.
Massive subscription ED.
We reported on Friday that the IPO was more than twenty times subscribed and expected this price range bump coming. The previous price range was one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and twenty five dollars per share, and now it's up to one hundred and fifty to one hundred and sixty dollars per share at the top end, that
will value Cerebrace at over thirty four billion dollars. That is making it the biggest IPOs so far this year by a long shot, and a clear demonstration of the insatiable demand for AI compute and AI infrastructure.
And insatiuable demand for stocks. They're related to them in some way. I mean, it's got to be music to the bankers, is the CEOs is when we have record high after record high and a lot of it being galvanized by the AI trade. More broadly, are there any nerves coming through from retail investors institutional investors as to the issues that Cerebras has to make sure that market share can be a win and that supply chains on an issue.
I would say less nerves than just pure unfeedtered excitement. I mean, there has been so much build up in the IPO market, so much demand for new listings over the past few years. You know, we really haven't seen that many, and so far this year Cerebris has clinched partnerships with Amazon and open Ai sort of prove out that, you know, the demand is real and it's going to translate into real capital and that is being reflected in the demand that we're seeing for its IPO.
Rebecca just quickly run us through the mechanics of the week. We think this is expected to price May thirteenth, right.
That's correct on Wednesday afternoon, and we would expect shares to begin training on Thursday.
We be invoked Rebecca Torrance, Top Top Reporting. Thank you very much. Let's discuss what this means for broader tech markets with Carosh Life Cheap market strategist at Demo Wealth Management. So we're in this really interesting moment, right Caroline said it at the top six straight weeks of gains on the Nasdaq one hundred. I feel like the next phase is like this pre IPO anticipation you know, Cerebris, yes,
SpaceX June. How does that impact a market at the index level, that anticipation, Well, I.
Think the anticipation does keep a lot of ours obviously focused not just on AI but on the broader And it's interesting because on the one hand, yes, markets have gone up, but so two have earnings. We've just come through an earning season, We're almost towards.
The end of it.
When you've got top and bottom line growing double digits, not just among tech, but that anticipation is there. We'll see if we get several trillion dollars sized deals later this year, what the investment appetite is in how much can be absorbed because, unlike your former commentator, we do have some nervous clients because on the one hand, they
don't want to get off the bus. On the other hand, they're scratching their heads about how can markets be at all time highs when you've got all these concerning short term headlines which you just.
Mentioned, Carol, Can we not have two things being correct at the same time. Yes, there are short term issues. Yes, all is an issue, and in some ways for chips, helium and other things that pass me the straight upwall moves are an issue. But longer term, the drive towards AI infrastructure is only a supply side issue rather than demand.
Yep, exactly, and that's exactly what we've been writing to
our clients. I wrote a piece last Friday talking about a brave new world and just laying out the case or this next phase that we're in because the orders of magnitude that we're talking about investing in capital infrastructure that tends to tee you up for very good performance from productivity standpoint from GDP, and we're seeing it start to creep in the numbers because it's not like the markets are just floating up without earnings and revenue and
margin support. And you're seeing very well managed tech companies that are paying a lot of attention to their margin management and the way they're managing their people and their costs and their inputs. And you're exactly right that it's capacity constraint. It's not like we're going to have dark data centers other than the fact that if you can't get energy to turn them on.
Well said, that is the bottleneck that many are focusing it on. So why everyone's turning towards nuclear, It's why we look at Constellation Energies earnings and we'll be diving into them in.
But a moment. But there's this great report out of Blue meg Intelligence.
At the moment, AI is swallowing the world, everything else is just holding on. Is that the sense you get from clients at the moment, Carol, Because this isn't just a US trade And boy have we seen qualcom Micron other of the chip sectors up today and the socks
has been extraordinary. But think of the moves skh INEX of Samsung, but still earnings potential for those companies means that even though we've seen hundreds of percentage points added in terms of their share price, the pe ratios are actually coming down because people think earnings are going to rise even faster.
That's exactly it. And the markets are telling you underneath the surface too that even with all of the issues going on in the Strait of hormones and the fact that the bulk of that oil goes to South Southeast Asia, those stocks are railing anyway because they're telling you this is a lot bigger. And one of the phrases we had used in last week's piece was.
How about yeah.
I mean, it's like we're all grabbing the tiger by the tail and just hanging on for the ride. But it's got fundamental underpinnings to it, and it touches so many other places and take you know, I spent the weekend talking to grandkids about how exciting space is and lots of things going there. There's so many things we haven't even started to explore.
I'm changing my mind. I just asked Marguerite in the control rooms bring back that research, but you brought up space, so I'm going to pivot right. The point of that research is that the entire market in terms of profit group has held up by a very small number of companies. Yes, they're around the world AI infrastructure related. SpaceX is trying to sell that story as well. Right with its IPO. The vision the bankers are putting out on the road show is orbital Data center. How easy is that for
you to translate to clients, Carol? Is that believable for the biggest IPO of all time?
Well, the IPO side the whole when you take the Artemis mission on what was going on there, and the fact that actually when you look at earnings, it's not just a handful of companies because Reverent we had double digit revenue growth. I pulled the numbers from Bloomberg this morning, and you have double digit revenue and bottom and earnings growth in eight out of eleven sectors. So this is pretty broad spread and there's a lot of companies playing into it. But space, I mean, clients love to talk
about space. The Artemis Mischig kind of shoved aside because it coincided with increased hostility in the Middle East, so it got pulled short term. But this is definitely a market that wants to lean into that long term story and investors are all about it.
Carol. Earlier you talked about riding the bus, and if we stick with that analogy, if you are an investor and you know that the biggest IPO of all times happening in a month's time, do you put yourself into cash or do some kind of rejiggering in order to be able to participate in that IPO.
Well, we don't necessarily go chasing down IPOs anymore than I did managing money for clients in the nineties IPOs per se. But strategic rebalancing is something we do all along, and trimming some of your lousers or some of the winners, if you will, trimming some of the gains that you've made there to make sure that the portfolio stays balanced. Intermediate,
longer term is where you want to be. We've been growth biased all along this, you know, starting before last year, we never bought into the recession fears in twenty two. We didn't think that tariffs were going to throw things substantially off last year, although our companies are learning to adapt and this year too, we think it makes sense to trim some of the winners. Look at other industries, look at those second third tier knock on industries. We
touched on energy, we touched on space. There'll be substantial rebuilding or reconstruction. If you think once we settle some of these the conflicts Russia, Ukraine, Middle East, you're talking about substantial rebuilding. You're also talking about companies rethinking supply chains and where they get done and solidifying. So you're talking about a massive infrastructure build or teeing up for that has many years to run.
Carol, I want to go to the rethinking of supply chains because for many years people have been rethinking their dependence on China. Maybe that starts to get more clarity. This week, we understand that President Trump, of course is going for that meeting with President she over in China, and it's taking a whole host of CEOs with him. Tim Cook of Apple a musk of course talking of SpaceX, but a moment ago mic on the chip sector, Qualcom,
but also there are some sprinkling of banks and other areas. Carol, does this meeting mean something to your clients.
Briefly, we definitely think we've been watching this geopolitical pivot in the geoeconomic pivot for the last year and a half or so, and it's been clear from the beginning that you've got two major players in terms of the US and China. China was the only primary country able to push back on the US against the tariffs and engage in even briefly in the trade war. But they've
got critical supply chain issues with rare earth. The US has critical supply chain issues with energy and materials and so and clearly they want to have a collaborative relationship where there's certain things that we want to manufacture here and things China wants control over. But business deals are what the administration is all about and hence bringing a lot of those companies with But you've got a lot of interesting interplay to watch here and how this thing plays out.
Parash Life of female wealth Management.
Thank you, very cut and Dean for joining us today.
No, we did just talk about how earnings are the name of the game. Constellation Energy is actually down by four and a half percent. This is what a first call to operating revenue that beat But they're facing pressure from nuclear refueling outages. In particular, this is about execution. A boy has admitted dependence on companies like this d when we think about the future of data centers and potentially with some sort of cleaner energy like nuclear.
Okay, coming up on the program, we're actually going to go back to earnings. We speak with Circle CEO Jeremy Alaire after the stable corn platform posted a first quarter revenue b and announces an agent led future. This is Bloomberg Tech.
Circle seeing shares up once again nine percent thereabouts on the days. It's a twenty percent revenue surge in its first quarter, but.
Net income that decline. The company is.
Saying that focus is moving to a future with autonomous AI agents that transact in stable coins. Jenning us now a Circle CEO, Jeremy Lair. There's a lot to get to in your numbers. And what's so interesting is the way in which you make an awful lot of your profits is largely based.
On government and yields. Of course, with the.
Money that you sit upon, Jeremy, how you thinking about that amount that you currently earned back and how you're diversifying the business.
Yeah, I mean, look when we went public last we talked a lot about we're building the world's largest stable cooin network. We want that network to provide the highest utility form of digital dollar money in the world. Since then, USDC has become the leading dollar digital currency in the world.
We reported in our earnings call according to third party data, in Q one, we saw almost thirty trillion dollars of transactions on chain, with USDC accounting for eighty percent of the stablecoin transaction volume market.
And so we're seeing that happen.
At the same time, we've been investing in building out these platform pillars. Alongside our stablecoin business, our payments network with CPN and ARC, our new economic OS, which is really designed for the future of how transactions, how financial services, and broader economic activity is going to be digitally and software mediated.
That's obviously a place where.
The emerging world of AI operating systems and agentic systems are coming into play as well.
You invest today for fruits tomorrow. When are those fruits.
Come, Jeremy, Well, you know we're seeing this. I mean, we talked a little bit about this in our earnings call. We've been investing for a couple of years to build ARC. We announced this morning that we had pre sold two hundred and twenty million dollars of ARC tokens, with a sixteen Z crypto as a leader, but also major financial companies Apollo, Black Rocks, Standard Chartered, Intercontinental Exchange, and many others.
And so we're building an infrastructure and we will begin to monetize that infrastructure, and as we shared in our earnings call, we'll have a lot more to say about
that on our next earnings call. But ARC is getting ready for liftoff, and we're getting close to the main net launch, and between the stake that Circle has in the ARC network, the various types of programs that we're going to be building with partners all around the world on that, and then participating in validation, transaction fees, and other services that we build on top of it, we think that our represents a tremendous opportunity. So that's a place there, and then our Payments Network CPN.
Continues to grow.
Since we last reported, we saw the anualized volume go up about seventy five percent.
Jeremy, let's go back to reserve return rate. I don't think we've got to an answer there. So essentially USDC circulation is growing strongly, and that boosts your overall revenue, but your profit is pressured essentially when you have declining reserve return rate essentially interests that you urge assets. Let me just finish this one. That back the stable coin. If that's the business model, you're at risk here when we have a lower rate environment. So what's your plan. We've seen the opposite.
So when the yields curve started coming in in December twenty three and we saw almost all of the rate cutting cycle get undertaken, we saw rates come down over forty percent. During that same period, We've seen USDC and circulation grow multiple hundreds of percent. We've seen transaction volumes grow massively, and so a lower interest rates actually, at the end of the day, create higher velocity money, create more demand for money in the economy, and we believe
actually support that growth. And historically we've seen that. When we think about that long term growth, when the Treasury Secretary talks about trillions of dollars of stable coins in circulation, or when you know new regulation like the Clarity Act defines models for incentivizing stable cooin adoction based on utility, those are emblematic of the fact that utility is what is going to drive this growth, and so interest rates are a factor, but fundamentally, it's utility, its network effects,
it's the number of apps, developers and others that drive it.
And on that front, we're.
Clearly winning, and we're showing that in the incredible traction that we're seeing in terms of the adoption of this as a transactional technology on the Internet.
That did get us the Answer Circle CEO Jeremy Alaire, great, heavy back on the program, Thank you very much.
Care Yeah, it's time now for talking tech air.
First up, SoftBank is stepping up its push into AI infrastructure.
Fana Massiochi Sun is in.
Talks to unveil a major data center project in France for President Emmanuel Macron in the coming weeks and now, according to sources, Son is considering a multi billion dollar investment and at one point floated a figure as house one hundred billion dollars. Meanwhile, SoftBank's mobile unit is expanding into AI computing services and large scale battery production and mean to meet growing demand for the hardware powering artificial intelligence.
Plus Ripple's prime brokerage Union has secured two hundred million dollars in new financing from Newburger Berman to expand the margin it offers clients training across traditional and digital markets. The funds will boost its capacity to finance client trades.
The margin loans backed by Collateral.
And Alphabet is planning to issue Yen denominated bonds for the first time, a move that could help fund its growing investment in new guest at Ai that the company has already raised its capital spending outlook to as much as one hundred and nineteen billion dollars this year has phapped other currencies beside the US dollar as it looks to secure low cost funding.
Open Ai will acquire a consulting company tomorrow to contribute to a new private equity back joint venture. The goal help drive adoption of its AI software across more businesses. The new entity will be staffed with roughly one hundred and fifty employees focused on deploying AI software Carrot Now.
Companies like open ai are investing heavily in AI to boost productivity, but a new consensus perhaps suggests that the global workforce staring down some sort of displacement crisis. Joining us now for really, how we are going to see
AI boost productivity or not. It's Stacy Fanox Smith has got a great story out in BusinessWeek and it starts with a bet between two key economists as to whether productivity is actually going to go up and to the right, are we seeing signs that AI is boosting productivity not at the expense of me and labor.
We are seeing signs that AIS bosting productivity, but it does seem to be coming potentially at the expense of jobs. So it is a really good news bad news situation. I think we just got productivity numbers out for the first quarter of twenty twenty six. They came in quite high two point nine percent year over year, which was higher than people expected. So that is evidence that that robots are produced. Are you boosting our productivity? At the same time, I think we've all been covering the job
market and it's not great. So I think there's just a lot of concern, and rightly so, that the AI is displacing jobs.
It's so difficult to see clearly through the metric of productivity, like we've been growing two percent since twenty twenty Do we know for certain that there's like a tangible AI contribution in each of those numbers. This is a great question.
It is so hard to know where the productivity is coming from. So the bet that you referred to was between two economists here in the US, Eric Brynolfson at Stanford and Robert Gordon at Northwestern, and they bet on productivity growing by an average of one point eight percent between twenty twenty and twenty thirty. It seems like it's going to beat that, but there are a lot of questions as to why. When I was talking to Robert Gordon about why productivity had grown so much, he thought
it was potentially layoffs. A lot of the layoffs that we've been seeing has have boost to productivity because it's a very simple equation. It's just the amount our economy produces divided by ours worked. So the second you take a bunch of workers out of the workforce, then that number can go up, even if it doesn't even if it you know, our productivity isn't necessary, even if the productivity isn't growing as fast as we.
Hope Top Top Analysis, Thank you very much. In the next thirty minutes or so, we are going to be keeping our eyes on the court in Oakland where Microsoft CEO Sacha Nadella is to take the stand in Elon Musk's lawsuit over the non profit status of open Ai. Remember that Musk is suing open ai and its two founders, Sam Altman, Greg Rockman and Sati and Adela Caro. It's a kind of a wow moment too.
It is whether at least a couple of hours that he'll take to the stand understanding the intricacies of which Microsoft first.
Came into open ai too. Back it.
Remember this is really the moment that Elon Musk takes issue with when because open a I would argue computer capacity mentioned that they had to take outside financing. Was that moment that maybe the idea of it being a not for profit started to fall away?
I would read the California brief from our Bloomberg law team where they basically point out so far there's no smoking gun, email communication. It's just been about egos and personalities Musk versus the others. Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. Let's take a look at today's big number, and that is alphabet or Google's current market cap point seventy five trillion.
Here's the thing. It had become a dominant player in the AI space and was on the brink of overtaking AI chip giant and Vidia potentially as the world's largest company. I say, here's the problem. Actually, in this Monday session, Alphabet's down almost two percent in Nvidia is up three percent. But the gap had been closing from Vidia, the world's most valuable company around five point four trillion dollars market cap, Alphabet was heading toward the five trillion dollar club. Why
that's going to Bloombo's Ryan Blaseelica, who has more? That was the story, and like, I'm not blaming you at all, Ryan, Timing is a funny thing, but the point is is that Alphabet had had a lot of momentum recently and that gap had been closing on Nvidia. Absolutely.
I think there is a growing appreciation that when you look at any part of artificial intelligence, Alphabet is extremely dominant in that area, if not the most dominant company. So we can talk about how strong Gemini is their EI model, and talk about how growth at Google Cloud is accelerating. We can talk about how AI seems to be improving growth trends at Google Search, at YouTube. We can talk about physical AI with their Waimo self driving
car company. We can talk about their TPU business, which is their semiconductors, which they said they might start selling around to other cloud companies. So that's a huge potential revenue boost for them, and that is an area that
is really getting into Nvidia's own territory. We wrote about this about a week ago about how Nvidia might be seeing increase competition in AI chips, and Alphabet is a huge part of that, and so when you add all of that together, it just seems like they are really the company of the AI era.
The vertical integration has been something that the flywheel effects come into play in earnings recently. What's amazing is even with this rocket chip of a share price move and this is still really positive on the stock and it's got zero cleratings eighteen buys.
I mean, could we see.
It start to move towards that price target of four thirty, what would be the castle.
Well, we've just seen a real grind higher in the share price for a while now. I think the latest result really just reinforced how strong they are on all these different issues. And when I talk to portfolio managers and investors, they will say that even if we saw something like open Ai come out with their latest model. Let's say it's better than Jemini on you know, whatever
metrics you want to use. That really just speaks to increased AI adoption overall, which is probably going to end up being a tailwind for Google Cloud for the chips business. It really seems like even if one leg of this story starts to falter, the other ones are able to kind of pick up the slack here. So it's a very diverse sources of revenue. It's much less dependent on one major business, like you might say of Nvidia.
We're just showing on the screen Ryan that you know, alphabet shares over the past twelve months roun one hundred and sixty percent year to date twenty twenty six percent, but beating the major indexes. You make the point through the voice of the investor that it's completely logical Alphabets take that tie to eventually, and lots of people for that reason see it as a good stock to own. Yeah, exactly.
And I will say about a year ago, there was a lot of skepticism about what is AI competition going to mean for Alphabet Is it going to reduce their search market share? A lot of those fears. Not only have they not really come to pass, but they've really shown you know, acceleration in growth, They've shown strength across all these different markets and really just has set up them, you know, just to be an incredibly strong stock. And even the multiple right now it's a little bit elevated
for their own history. But it's not a sort of dot Com price for perfection. Everything must go right, authorize this thing is just going to collapse sort of thing. It doesn't feel like that at all. People feel very optimistic that they can keep a lot of these momentum going round.
For Selka, it's great to get you on the stock that we're watching at the moment. And look, it's actually Alphabet that we turn to next in a different capacity because the worst case AI scenario the White House has actually warned about it seems to already be in reality because Google researchers say they have uncovered the have a zero day attack built by artificial intelligence joining us now and the details is new most Margie Murphy, why is this so concerning?
Yeah, so we have been on the show to talk about the kind of mythos effect, and we know that the White House has been calling emergency meetings with tech and industry leaders about concerns that AI tools that we have currently may be used to build these really you know, explosive attacks against a lot of the software we use and could have serious impacts on national security. And now Google is saying, actually, we think that this is already
a reality. The threat that we thought we saw coming along is actually here, and we have identified a prominent criminal group who was working with an LM and was able to find and exploit in a popular software tool. Luckily Google kind of foiled it ahead of time and let the software developer know, so they've issued a pat But it just shows that the things we've been talking about and we've been concerned about in terms of AI and security are a reality.
Now zero day, I think, just help us out. I'm learning so much through the reporting, but the basics of what that is zero day vulnerability and the fact that this is an artificial intelligence linked or discovered one please yeah.
So as zero day means that it's a flaw in a piece of software that the developer didn't know about, what nobody else knew about. So once it becomes apparent, once a hacker has you know, identified it they have exactly zero days to fix that. So it's a big concern because then you're always you're a step behind anyone trying to get in and exploit it, to potentially get into your customers systems. And in terms of AI being able to generate that, it's all about the speed and
this race between the defenders and the attackers. So if an AI like LLLM is able to scan and find these zero days, these previously unknown flaws in a lot of the software we use, it means that we're going to quickly see a lot of exploits and potentially these could be further down the line, potentially a load of hacks that otherwise, you know, would have been more trickier for these kind of criminal actors or espionage actors to have conducted.
Now, remind us what the spokespeople you've been talking to have said about who's to blame, which LLLM was behind it, and more broadly, sort of whether or not there was Mythos, because there's an argument against that, right, so Google's.
Been very clear that it isn't. They don't believe it's Mythos, they don't believe it's Gemini, which is its own LLM. However, they're keeping the name of the LLM they believe was used under wraps. They're saying to protect their sources because they have kind of intelligence which suggests who's you using what, And frustratingly, we're not also going to hear about the software that was developed or the criminal group that they've been tracking either. So that kind of makes a little
bit more of a challenging for figuring out. But I think the broader story here is it doesn't matter which l element was. It's the fact that there's lms that are available right now for people to use that are being abused in this way.
Bloomberg's Margie Murphy, thank you very much. Now coming up, we're going to be joined by Dan Wagner from Resolve ai is. The company's making a bid for Commerce dot Com. Details next. This is Bloomberg Tech.
Resolve ai in designs tools for digital shopping customer engagement, a lot of AI within it. It's also making a hostile bid for Commerce dot Com. Now. The board rejected an earlier offer and called the new proposal of one Resolve share for every two shares a commers dot Com.
Even less favorable.
Resolveoiceo Dan Magnet is here to talk about the Igenticai opportunity, along with I hope a discussion about why m Anda would make sense for your business at this moment.
So let's start with the m and a why want to become bigger?
What are the opportunities to lean in as a resolve plus commers dot com business?
Well, so I think first of all, you've got to frame it within the context of our growth. So we're seeing fantastic growth in our business, you know, extraordinary momentum. We went from nothing to two hundred and thirty two million of contracted annual revenue in one year. We did sixty million in the first quarter and revenue versus the whole year last year forty six million. So we're growing
at an incredible rate. And in this space when you have the best product in the vertical that we're operating in, which is commerce and retail, it's very important. Having been building tech businesses over many decades, although you couldn't possibly tell you called arena that the most important thing is kind of land grab right, we have to move quickly
to consolidate our position as a leader. Now we're doing that anyway organically, but if we were to acquire commerce dot com, which is a stock that's really a business that's really kind of stuck and needs us to unlock it, unlock the value. You know, we uh, you know, we immediately give ourselves a greater presence and we will continue to do deals like that when they're available at good value to increase our market position.
So what would be unlocked with a commerce dot com is like the companies, they already work with the client base that they have, and you unlock it with this future of agenda. Ki, Look, let's just talk about the agentic commerce offering because you're even a little bit in the world of crypto, and we've just had Jeremy Alair of Circle on and he thinks his business and stable coins are the future of agentic commerce, is right?
Do you?
How are you the rails rather than a circle for example?
So circle is a is a is a coin is a token, but you need that token to be sitting on some sort of infrastructure to allow it to be used in everyday commerce. So, for example, if you went to Starbucks today, you're not going to use stable coins
to buy your coffee. We're going to facilitate that change with Resolve pay so that the retailers and the brands can take stable coins in the same efficient way for a consumer as credit cards and other forms of payment, because crypto as we know it today is a frustrating and clunky experience, and we're changing that with a resolve pay so that it's as good, if not better, an experience as what you're used to.
Often sometimes M and A is strategic, right, and so commerce dot com is sixty thousand merchants. Would you say, Dan, that's the strategic value of it, and if so, you boost your offer. You'd be willing to pay more of a premium to realize that strategic asset.
So, yes, a sixty thousand merchant base that's frustrated with them because there's been lack of innovation. I mean, they're forecasting growth of one and a half percent in the next twelve months. I mean, you can't even imagine such a sort of embarrassing growth rate for a business in commerce. One and a half percent is just it was ridiculous. You know, we're growing conversely seven hundred and fifty percent
year on year, seven hundred and fifty percent. So you've got a company where it is at the moment which is not really innovating. It has a large footprint that's historically been gained over you know, over a decade of providing services, but it's kind of lost and it needs us to come and inject value and enthusiasm and innovation into that customer base to energize them. Now, do we need them, No, we don't, because, as I've just told you, we're growing seven to fifty percent year on year, and
we've got all this momentum and everything else. But if we were to buy them, we could unlock that value and grow that element of the business much faster than it is today. In answer to your question, yes, I think we're open to being more more generous with a deal, but you know, the board rejected us, and then they put in a poison pill. And I really can't be bothered with a board that is so locked in its own protection that they can't see the benefit of a
combination with us. We should have, you know, any sensible board should be having a proper conversation with us to try to extract the best value for their shareholders. And you know fully embrace this opportunity.
What about the competition and risks?
To you?
I've enjoyed reading about Resolve and trying to understand the story right, and it's whoever controls the agent layer wins in commerce. And a very reasonable question that the Bloomberg Tech audience ouppose is why doesn't an Amazon or an alphabet or Google or even open ai just do what you do and then come come you.
I mean they've tried, some of them have tried. So open a I did a deal with Walmart. You was very highly publicized about five and a half months ago. That was disbanded about two or three weeks ago. And the reason it was disbanded was it started making these
terrible mistakes, which is what we call hallucinations. Jerity of AI is uses probabilistic algorithms, you know, mathematical algorithms that algorithms that guess words and the next word and the next word in a sentence to create a paragraph and to create an answer. And when you're guessing things, there
is an element of error. And we knew this from the very outset because of my background in search and you know, for decades and being involved in some of the major innovations in search technology in the nineties and the early noughties. So We knew that this would happen,
so we spent the last ten years preventing hallucinations. That's really our primary position, and of course we did it with the very clear vision of providing that technology to represent digital platforms as the best salesman on the planet, you know, interacting with customers. But you can't have the best salesman on the planet who's hallucinating, you know, who's saying the wrong things, making mistakes. Then you end up with returns, you know, the misled customers buying the wrong
products and so on. So we believe, and Microsoft and Google have endorsed that that belief that we have the only technology that in this vertical that is reliable for merchants. They don't have to worry in deploying our technology that their representative generative AI representative is going to be selling the wrong things, making mistakes, misleading customers, and worse, insulting people.
Dan Wagner, CEO of Resolve AI, thank you very much for your time on Bloomberg Tech. Now coming up, Apple looks to refine its Mac Os designer and a few new features. We have more on the reporting next. This is Bloomberg Tech Breaking news on the Bloomberg terminal. President Donald Trump says the US Iran ceasefire is in a weak state and on life support. It was in response to a question post by journalists. He's speaking the Oval Office in the White House. It was an event about
maternal healthcare. But then taking reporter questions, he'd earlier said that he was going to meet with a large group of generals for an update about Iran. But that's the headline US around ceasefire is in a weak state, says President Trump, on life support. And what we saw is oil nudge Hire Brent. The global benchmark back above one hundred and four dollars a barrel. Keep with it, Carra.
We will now let's turn around attention to Apple. It's planning a slight redesign to its upcoming mac OS twenty seven. That's according to sources, it aims to smooth out some of the visual quirks introduced by mac OS twenty six Tahoe, particularly around shadows and transparency tied to its liquid glass interface. Man behind that story, of course, is Blueberg's Apple and consumer tech reporter Mark German, an editor and team leader. I'm interested Mark on the liquid glass issue in many ways.
It's what because the deployment is meant for slightly more cutting edge technology versus the Mac.
Yes, so that's rolled out their new liquid glass interface. I quite like it on the iPhone and the iPad. It looks good with the OLED displays of the newer devices, but it doesn't look so hot on the Mac. Part of the reason is that it uses older LCD technology. Apple's not moving to OLED until the new Mac pros hit, probably at the tail end of this year or early
next year. So they're making some tweaks to Mac Os with the twenty seven release being announced on June eighth at WWDC, cleaning up some of the transparency, some of the icons and the shadows that have made Tahoe a bit controversial.
Controversial, So I find that interesting. We've spent so much time talking with you about Apple Intelligence, Siri and iOS and the cadence of update and how it's getting better, less about mac Os. You know, I'm a Mac user. I believe you are too. Why are you saying it's controversial that the rollout in development and macOS generations?
Oh yeah, macOS Taco has been a huge, hugely controversial on Reddit among developers, among some consumers among technofiles and what have you. People just don't like the way the lookquid glass interface and the new icons look.
I don't think it's a catastrophe.
I don't think it's that big of a deal, but certainly it's a step below the implementation on the iPhone and the iPad.
The most Mark German, who leads our coverage consumer tech and the author of power on Thank you. At the same time, Apple's Macmini has emerged as a go to machine for running standalone AI agents. Its ability to operate around the clock at low electricity costs fueled a surge in demand for more. Bloomberg's Austin car has the BusinessWeek story this is in the culture, like this is everywhere.
People put together clusters of Mac mini's, and that is their compute to do all things in AI and inference. Just give us the top line of the BusinessWeek article that you wrote.
Yeah, I mean this is a big trend right now, starting your own AI agents at home. Instead of flinging off every request to some far flung data center or cloud server, you could have your own personal AI super computer essentially in your living room. You're seeing a lot of people by mac Minie's their higher end cousin, the Max Studio install agents frameworks like Openclaw to sort of have this twenty four to seven personal AI concierge that
you can interact with on any messaging app. It's pretty wild to see this trend take off and be a rare bright spot for AI. When it comes to Apple, which didn't really foresee this trend, it just sort of took off that this hardware was really really good for local AI.
Computing, open claw life, and it's a global phenomenon. And I think we even sort of heard about the supply chain surprise coming Apple's way, but i've I mean we saw a stock of say a Raspberry Pie go up into the right over in the UK as people thought the other types of hardware would be useful for this Austin.
Has Apple really been ended up the only game in town?
Not?
I mean, it remains to be seen.
I think a lot of the hardware makers are chasing this future right now where the hardware is being tailored to merge some of the graphics processing and TPUs that were historically doing that processing separate. They're now merged into a unified architecture on Apple devices, which is really good for AI processing and has a lot of memory bandwidth, and it can do a lot of things that just a few years ago weren't really that efficient to do.
So you're seeing the hardware get remarkably better tailored to AI, and at the same time, you're seeing a lot of AI models becoming radically more efficient. If you remember last year with deep Seek, one of the really amazing things about that model was how efficient it was in terms of doing a lot of the processing that it would take a lot more to do for an open AI or anthropic to do. So you're going to see a lot of these models getting smaller and more efficient to
run locally. But what you're seeing the MAX do is just a lot of the stuff on device, like opening a browser, checking your files, you know, interacting with business systems, interacting with your apps in ways that are just autonomous, and essentially making what's called a headless Mac, meaning it's just plugged into the wall. It's your AI agent, your local server, and you can interact with it however you want, just like having sort of a personal chatch you putee in your living room.
Alsome, we just have fifteen seconds in the piece. You're talking about developers, you're talking about everyone vibe coding everyday people. It's a mix.
I mean I talk to a lot of people who are using it for their sort of an AI developer to have to interact with, but then consumers who are just building these things very simply, you know, setting them up to sort of be a household chief of staff, their butler, to monitor their grocery lists and things of
that nature. They can give you can give them a lot more access to your local files, customize them in a lot of really fun ways, and you're going to see this trend and take a lot off a lot more when Apple sort of makes its own open claw like system. Eventually, I would assume that's where all this is heading.
Austin Carr is a great read and BusinessWeek we appreciate it.
Now. That's it from this edition of Bloomberg Tech. Great to have you back ed.
Yeah, it's good to be back. Check out the pod lots to recap to start the week, and find it on all the Bloomberg platforms and online. This is Bloomberg Tech.