Amazon's Anthropic Deal and Hollywood Screenwriters' Deal

From Marhart where Innovation of Money and Power Collie in Silicon Valley, NBN.

This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow.

I'm Caroline Hand of Bloomberg's World headquarters in New York, and I May Lovelow back in San Francisco.

This is Bloomberg Technology coming up.

Amazon pushing further into the world of generative AI with an up.

To four billion dollar deal with Anthropic.

We're going to be sitting down with Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Slipski to discuss.

And Hollywood screenwriters strike a tentative deal with studios to end their month's long strike. Rereate down everything you need to know about the agreement.

Plus Apple's cheapest iPhone fifteen.

Well, it's winning over buyers, with wait times for the device almost doubling compared to this time last year.

Yep, let's get straight to our top short story. Amazon will invest up to four billion dollars in the AI startup Andthropic. It is a complicated deal where Anthropic will move its software to AWS cloud, but also the training of its future models to Amazon's proprietary silicon. We are talking about the AI accelerators Trainium and Inferentia. This is kind of an interesting move for Amazon that's done so much work internally on generative AI tools, but now it

No, good morning, Thanks for having me.

We're very excited for this expanded relationship with Anthropic, and the investment is a financial investment, as you say, and In addition, Anthropic will be training future versions of its models and running its models on AWS using our training chips and inferential chips. Those models will be guaranteed to

Adam, there's a lot of emphasis on moving a maker of foundation models at that scale once your proprietary silicon. How quickly will Anthropics start running AI workloads on Trainium and Inferentia.

Well, we've been working with Anthropic, they've been a customers of ours since I think they're founding over a couple of years ago, and so they use a variety of different technologies for a variety of different workloads on AWS, that they'll be using GPUs on AWS and will also be using large quantities of TRAININGUM and inferentia.

So I think everything's going to move very.

Quickly and it'll all be a mix of technologies depending on their needs at the time.

Adam, what's the mood like within Amazon and AWS this morning? There are lots of talented engineers that have been working on large language models generative AI tools internally, and now you're turning to a third party who's highly regarded as a leader in building foundation models.

The mood here is great.

We are a company of inventors who we love to build, and there's never been a better time to be a builder at AWS than right now. And as I mentioned before, a big part of our strategy in AI and generative AI specifically, it's all about customer choice and there's not going to be any one solution that works for all customers for all use cases. And Thropic has done an amazing job. They're clearly a leader in this space, and it's really important for customers that we continue to generate

Talking about choice, and I just want to re welcome our TV and radio audiances with Adam Sleipski. What's so notable is that well Anthropic took a change one hundred million dollars worth from Google already, and I'm interested as to how you feel that is perhaps a concern for you or not the relationship that athropag already has with a previous cloud provider.

Now, we feel great about the relationship with Anthropic. It's been a good relationship and I think today's announcement just makes it a deeper and longer term. Anthropic will use AWS as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including building foundational foundation models and doing AI safety research, and will run the majority of its workloads on AWS.

I'm interested in drilling down sort of why ED was going about the feeling internally right now, because I look at some of the analyst reaction to this. Adam and Webbush, for example, they say this signals a newfound urgency in Amazon's strategy to further integrate generative AI among your AW.

Suite of services. That urgency was there a lack.

Of understanding or indeed a reality that Amazon was behind the curve here a little bit when it came to the integration of generative AI. Because we've been looking at open Ai and Microsoft for a while now.

We've been saying for many, many months, Carolyn, that we are fully urgent. We have a strategy that we really love. It is different than some other cloud provider strategies. It's true we have a strategy of providing absolutely uncompromising security, which I don't think is true for our cloud providers. We have a strategy of providing customers the choices to use whatever's best for their job at hand. So Andthropic is going to be an amazing set of models for many,

Adam, what does this mean for the kind of rampop or path forward for TRAININGUM and inferentia. You've put a lot of emphasis that anthrop It brings you a maker of creator foundation models at scale. We now need to ramp up I guess your third party manufacturing relationships to say, okay, let's get more trainium on more inferential online to support the workloads.

Well, it's absolutely true that there is a huge demand for all of the different ships with which people do a generative AI workloads, and so we absolutely have already been ramping up our training and inferential supply chain and ramping up the supply that we can create as quickly as possible. And yes, Anthropic will have access to very significant quantities of compute which we'll have trainum and inferentia

And is that where the revenue boost comes, Adam, because we're looking at.

The share price reaction is high on the day. When does this all start to really.

Drive adoption money and the bottom line for Amazon?

Well, I think that AI in general.

Look, AWS has had machine learning services since at least twenty seventeen when we released our sage Maker machine learning service, which has over one hundred thousand AWS customers on it. So we've been doing machine learning for a long time inside of AWS, and obviously more recently have had a significant number of Generative AI customers, and we will certainly

Adam, we put a lot of emphasis on the up to four billion dollars, and you know, I understand and thank you for explaining how the relationship will work in practice.

Is a sort of backup.

Sure well, the I think the really big news today is the new expanded relationship between and Propic and Amazon, in which they will have access to really large quantities of trainingmen and fr at chips. Customers will have access to those models, including early access to critical features through Amazon Bedrock and Amazon will get to aws, We'll get to work with Anthropic to ensure that we optimize our trainingment in Ferentia technology going forward.

That's the benefit for customers. And yes, as part of this.

We're pleased to be making an additional an initial investment of one point twenty five billion dollars into Anthropic. It's a financial investment and that could go up as high as four billions, as you said, over time. But it's really driven around customer value and what this is going to mean to customers who are very, very determined as they should be, to figure out generative AI strategies. We already are working in depth with customers, as is Anthropic on forming those.

Strategies and actually moving to execution.

We have a lot of great customers from Lonely Planet, Nexus, Lexis, and a number of others who are actually moving to production with Generative AI on AWS and Anthropic And in addition, as you alluded to, we'll be working with all of the partners that our customers want to do business with. If it's an important partner to our customers, it's going to be an important partner to us as well.

Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Slipski, thank you, Thank you.

Hollywood writers and studios are reaching at tentative deal with on a sund of the weekend to end strikes which began back in May A. Stick into this with someone who's been on it nonstoplum Merg's Luca Sure, and can you just go to the intricacies of what we think a deal has been.

Struck on here.

So the biggest issues are the ones that they hadn't already reached some kind of deal on are related to minimum staffing, so having a minimum number of writers who are hired to work on a TV program, and then data trans parency, slash payment and success, so studios and streaming services being more open about how many people are

You know, Lucas, the state of production is still worth considering. Right The actors strike is ongoing and talks are ongoing there. But the net result appears to be that, you know, late night talk shows that don't require actors, they might start getting underway soon.

Yeah, the broader guild still needs to ratify this agreement. If sort of the negotiating committees for both sides that have agreed to this, there may be a condition of this where daytime talk shows late night talk shows are able to go back sooner than it's ratified. I believe that happened with the two thousand and two thousand, two

For many This is a relief for the writers who've been unable to work, but also the entire ecosystem that's built around them.

Lucas and I'm interested.

As to who are the key players, the key figures that got in the room to try and.

Push this forward.

Well, for most of the negotiation you had or the negotiating committee on the writer's side, and then the top labor lawyers on the side of the studios as well as they're representative with this body called the AMPTP, this woman Carol Lombardini. But you also saw in recent weeks and especially over the last week, the CEOs of some

All right, Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw reporting through the weekend and here on Bloomba's technology, Thank you and a programming alert. In about two weeks, Lucas will be hosting Bloomberg's screen Time in La to cover the collision of Hollywood and Silicon Valleys, bringing together moguls, celebrities, and entrepreneurs already defining the next phase of pop culture. And if you're lucky, your two favorite Bloomberg technology anchors as well.

This is Bloomberg.

We started on General to AI. Let's go there again because the company forethought it's trying to take on some key competitors like Salesforce, for example, in the customer service department by launching auto Flows. It's a customer support tool using simple.

Natural language prompts rather than manual.

Workflows ticket based systems. The whole system is powered by Support GPT. That's four thoughts generative AI model, which is in itself is powered by open AI models. Let's bring in four thoughts CEO Deon Nicholas now for more and there's still and it's really interesting that you're really trying to drive home customer service here in a more natural,

Absolutely, Caroline, thanks for having me. And so when we think about the state of the art in AI right now, it's been hamstrung by manual workflows, decision trees, rules, keywords. And that's why every single chatbot we've ever interacted with we get that age old experience of hey, I need to talk to an agent.

I don't really.

Understand what's going on here, right, And so I think this is actually the future for customer.

Support, not fully intererative.

Yet you said within some of the discussion points it requires you still perhaps through the old additional task manually.

But when do you think we might.

Never have to have that age old I need to speak to an agent?

Now?

I think we're very close, right, with auto flows technology, you simply specify the goal or the prompt and you let AI do the rest. And this has become really really powerful where we've already seen this technology live in some of our private beta customers. We're launching or renouncing an open beata this past week, we've seen stats from some of our customers where the customer satisfaction scores have

There are many audience members of limbot technology that will be used to the ticket based system. Some participants in the show also used to it give us one case study, a simple one that your technology will replace.

Yeah, I think a lot of the ticketing system. So if you look at you know, Salesforce and folks like that, they've all been talking about this autonomous AI future. You've seen at the Dreamforce announcement, Einstein Copilot being announced that

In some cases, support GBT is built on GPT three point five, GPT four, GPT four. So what's that been like in the few weeks and months into a last on the show building out the technology with that underpinning.

Yeah, it's been it's been really fun. At forethought, it's kind of in the name. We've always been about bringing the future to now right, and so we've often leveraged our own technologies, our own models, and we also leverage the latest and greatest, and so it started with GPT three point five. I think that was it when I was last on this show, and we've focused on innovating.

Thirty seconds, Deon, is this going to mean less jobs?

I think long term, I'm extremely bullish that AI will actually create jobs for people. We saw the same in the Industrial Revolution, we saw the same in the move to the Internet. I think a lot of technologies are a lot of industries are going to be changed, and radically more jobs.

Are going to be created over time.

All right, four CEO d On Nicholas, a founder carrier that's building right here and was on the show earlier in the year. It's interesting to track the progress that he's made since then. Thank you very much.

Welcome back to Rumog Technology. I'm Caroline Hide in New.

York and I'm Ed Ludlow here in San Francisco. Okay, for today's going viral, we're focusing on football and Taylor Swift showing up to the Kansas City Chiefs game sitting in Travis Kelsey's box with his mother Donna.

You see her there in Kara. I don't know if you saw this NFL on Fox.

Handle on x posts this video of her celebrating that third quarter touchdown by Kelsey, and the numbers on that video astonishing.

I mean, why does anyone know what the numbers were in the score.

I feel like that none of that could actually focused on in the game. I think it was what ten forty one in the end, absolutely trounced the Bears. But ultimately, I mean, she said in what one of her songs arefore I think it's gold Rush that she liked the Eagles, which I think is where his brother plays. But all of this while what the NFL's trying to talk up who's going to be at their big super Bowl and was again as a nineties kid growing up, I'm all in on who they've decided to choose.

But isn't it.

Ultimately about just entertainment and football really intertwining at this moment.

You know, as a team, we were discussing this about a week ago, was it? And we were saying, no way, Taylor Swift, Kelsey, no way. Look at the social media response and yes, you're right, ten to forty one. But when NFL and Fox tweeted the final score, they had ten to forty one and Taylor Swift in the middle of the image. What a world we live in.

And I'm pretty sure the numbers on the videos got a little bit more for her face being on it across the world of technology, it was trending. Meanwhile, though, let's stay in the world of entertainment for a moment, because we also got a key story to talk about Hollywood writers.

Of course, the studio is.

Reaching that tentative deal over the weekend to end strikes which wegan back in May, and here to discuss it, Stephen will Ferrera, these three pers studios chief business Officer, And what's been so good about you, Stephen, as you come in time and time again since May when they first went on strike, to when you talk about the impact this is having on your industry and ultimately you are you positive, you hopeful that this really might be some coming together now, thanks.

Again for having me, and I am somewhat cautiously optimistic. I mean, the reality is this has had a huge toll on the entertainment industry at large. You know, since May, you've seen, you know, billions of dollars being taken out of the entertainment industry and the reality is they need to get back to work.

So we're glad that we have a ten bent agreement.

It needs now to go to the guild members and hopefully on Tuesday they will vote and ratify this, but it's still going to be some time before folks get back to.

Work precisely, well, certainly from the drama side of things. Dramatic, you still need the actors to work. Yes, you might be able to have some talk shows going back, even you're hopeful and that that's the next shoe to drop it.

Yes, I mean, you know, there's something called pattern matching when you start to negotiate. You know, remember the director's guild, they went back to work a couple of months ago, and so it took a while before we actually saw the writers kind of really come back to the table. You know, they weren't negotiating for for weeks, if not months, and so now all eyes are on sag Aftra. We really need to see, you know, kind of this come to an end.

The good news is the writers will no longer be picketing.

You know, you now have the permission for some of the writers to support their actors and their guild. But but we're hopeful that you know, production can start. You know, once you actually have the negotiations agreed upon, and you know the I is dotted the t's you now are going to have to revamp productions, and so it's going to take a little bit, you know, maybe two or three months for all productions to come back fully.

That's what we're talking about, Stephen, the latency of the impact of these strikes, right, we're talking about the supply chain behind making content. Do you get any sense from your industry in your world, you know, how delayed, how far into the future these strikes will be felt because it takes time to make shows.

That's right.

I mean, you know the first thing that will come back will be talk shows, right, so like late night we'll come back first. You know, some of the daytime talk shows, you know, those are things where it won't be as impacted. But when you think about all the key things that were being negotiated around data about you know, kind of residuals that it comes to streaming, you know in certa with the use of AI, which everyone is

And so whether it's streaming.

Residuals data AI, those issues are going to hopefully get resolved in some way. It'll be a short term fix, to be sure, but we need the industry to come back because it's impacting everyone. I mean, just look at all the big media companies.

You know.

Certainly Netflix is probably up about twenty percent since May second, when the shrike started, but all the other traditional media companies Disney down twenty percent, Paramount down almost fifty percent. So it really is taking a toll on the industry.

The big media company is big, Caroline. I get the sense also the big names that lead them, right when we speak to Lucas Shaw, Caroline, it's important to know the people around the table that are trying to fix this.

Yeah, and I do think I'm sure to stop a mind. I mean, Ted's around us can perhaps see his share price still going on the higher side. But he was at the table, the CEO of Netflix. We do know that Bob Weigel was there to probably with his shareholders front and center for him as well.

And I'm interested, Stephen, how.

Important you think it is that the leading executives are there in part of the conversation driving it forward.

Look, this has gotten resolved, to be very clear.

We got Bob Eiger from Disney, Ted surrenders from Netflix, Donna Langley from NBC Universal, and David Zaslav from Warner Brothers Discovery. They have been meeting with the Writer's Good of America and that is how this kind of blockage got unblocked. And so why didn't this happen months ago? I mean we're in day one hundred and forty seven of the strike, right, you know, when it comes to Tuesday, you're going to have almost one hundred and fifty days.

Are getting you know, kind of millions of dollars.

The average person that's being impacted, this is really truly impacted.

And so I'm glad that they came to the table. But that is how this got.

Unblocked, Stephen, when these strikes started, conversation that the three of us were having was about AI and the long term impacts of AI. To your mind, has it just become more clear that pay is the central issue here?

I mean, pay is not just a central issue.

I mean they're all like we are so at the dawn of the AI era, We truly are not going to be able to imagine that once you move past the ability to ask questions to things like Generator AI and chat GPT, when you start moving from questions to actual actions, I mean the ability to do a modern day turing test where you actually tell, you know, an AI chatbot, hey, here's one hundred thousand dollars, go out and make a million dollars on Amazon, and it'll set

Stephen Wolf Prairie, it's been great to get your industry perspective as these strikes have gone on. We will check in soon.

I'm sure.

Let's get a quit check in on the markets, Caroline and now A's that one hundred is kind of turned the corner. We're modestly hire up three tenths of one percent up for a second straight day. We've opened the session loader. But the narrative is about the Fed Central banks around the world holding rates higher for longer to impact the ongoing inflation that we see around the world that has been the narrative of since that FED meeting

That is biotech.

What's got to be thinking is we've had all these conversations recently about Boston, and Boston is kind of the heart of this biotech industry. It is an underperformer, down two tens one. It had been down. Even more significantly, this is an index down for a four straight day. It's training at its lowest level since March. We have seen biotech headlines at the terminal terminal for evaluations really under pressure. And I know that it's gonna be a big theme later on the show.

Yeah, Look, we're going to be deep diving into it, ed and I love the fact that you're shining a light on bi Farmer because we're going to look at the state of it, the industry in general, how it's incorporating you guessed it AI more broadly technology. Please to say, we're going to be joined by the CEO of benchling in a moment from New York from San Francisco as a Bloomberg technology.

All right, Time for talking tech and first up.

Apple's Basic iPhone fifteen model is taking almost twice as long for deliveries this year than its predecessor last year. Among high demand for the company's latest handsets. Buyers in the US need to wait for ten days to receive the Basic model, up from six days for the previous

Caroline, let's just.

Take a move to global biofarmer.

Right now, the industry is racing to produce better drugs faster, and look, it's going to need two key things technology and AI in fact, to improve the scale and the innovation.

Good morning and thanks for having me as quick context, We started Benchling a decade ago to bring modern software to cutting edge science. Today, R and D cloud is used by more than twelve hundred companies globally small and large, so think household names like Gilead and Sonofi to capture and structure their scientific data, often for machine learning, but broadly in service of bringing cutting edge, life changing products

Now.

How much is in the nation sharing been a blocker sergy? How much is what you're offering going to change the game or not, because for many you would feel that that collaboration, that sharing of information is already occurring within that labs.

Yeah, to state the obvious, science is incredibly complex and difficult, and anecdotally at Benchlin we've always we've known some of the challenges posed by technology for progress in the sciences. You know, you have paper notebooks and spreadsheets and really old, homegrown and legacy technology that makes it hard to collaborate.

In Biopharma report.

The headline, Carolyn, is that this is an industry that hasn't really seen the benefits of digital transformation yet, but it's one of the strees that needs it the most. If I dive into the data. The first thing scientists told us is that there's actually too much software, and I hope you see the irony of the ZEO of

So zooming out.

This is an industry that's funding tens of billions of dollars in R and D outside of clinical trials, and most of that knowledge ends up trapped in silos.

So you told us about technology for progress, I would say the vast majorities of conversation that Caroline and I have about AI in the healthcare more specifically biotech biopharma use case is how it expedites drug development or gene therapy development. How does your research reflect that that that's the area of most focus right now.

Yeah, we found that about sixty percent of organizations are testing the waters with machine learning and AI, and I think that's very much a bright spot, but there is skepticism as to the near term impact that it's going to have. We really see two major challenges that are holding the industry back from realizing the full potential of.

AI and mL.

The first is a talent gap, you know, being best in class that requires some of the brightest mines in science, but also some of the brightest minds from technology, data science and machine learning, and historically these are two industries that actually haven't mixed that much and have very different cultures. The other major challenge we see is in having purpose built tools that actually advance the science, and that's where we're spending our time investing.

I've met so many highly qualified people PhDs working in this field who complain that a lot of their time in the lab is spent pipetting, holding from one stage to the next. But it raises questions about automation, and that seems to be an area more near term where machine learning in conjunction with hardware can be really helpful.

Yeah, we actually just launched a new product in support of that at bench tark our customer conference. A majority of scientific experimentation involves instruments, and that's where vast majority of the data generation is happening, and so we've been focusing some of our investments on automating the flow of data out of instruments and into systems like bentioning for automated data analysis and capture in supportive machine learning.

SERGI. It's great to have some time with you.

Stay well, come back, Sargethwick Grama Sakuri is it for the CEO of mentioning me?

Thank you?

What a deep dive on a fintech pin up At the moment, while it's expanding further into the last in American market promise of expanding financial inclusion in the region through access to pretty much comprehensive ecosystem of financial services, it's currently over five million news is in Argentina, Columbia and now Mexico after getting approval for a banking license in Latin America's second biggest economy. That happened earlier this year.

In the studio.

Thank you.

And what's so interesting at the moment is the way in which you expand outside of Argentina. Already pretty dominant there, intermix. Why is Mexico so attractive? What is it that really boosts the business left?

Mexico is an amazing market where you only have forty nine banks, and yet ninety percent of all transactions are still conducted in cash, right on the border with the United States, and so the opportunity for financial inclusion and

Vcs have been betting on you big.

I'm sure because of that intersection of well, your experience a Bridgewater with SROs.

With Goldman, you were there.

You're bringing this financial focus to your home. What are some of the issues in particular when you're thinking of inflation, when you're thinking of political instability.

I mean, we think at the moment of one of the front runners for Argentina.

In particular talking of dollarization and enter the central Bank, how does that affect you as a business leader.

I think the digitization of payment is a global trend that is going to happen everywhere and in emerging markets. It has the opportunity to leap frog developed markets, as we saw China didd faster than many other developed markets like the Europeans or even Japan, and we then saw it in India, then we saw it in Brazil, and now in the rest of Latin America we see an amazing opportunity.

We launched WALLA five and a half years ago. In Argentina.

We have seventeen percent of the adults in the country and.

We give them tools to save with.

While they can buy dollars already, they can invest in US equities. They can have the best Hiel Saying's account in the country and protect themselves against inflation. But we also see that in Colombia. We also see that in Mexico. So we see an opportunity that is very wide ranging in a region of the world that is lagging because only twenty percent of payments are digital. One of the very few things I know is that in the future that number is going to go to forty to sixty

Per Polo, If Heavier Milae is successful and he does dollarize the economy and he does close the central bank, how do you prepare Walla for that? How do you change your business model to take that into account?

Well, of course, the first thing is that is that in Argentina only banks are allowed to have dollar accounts. Already, we already offer dollar trading in Walla, whereas FinTechs and wallets kind of do it, and there we have the strength of having.

Fully regulated entities that allow us to do.

Everything from investments to lending, and in this case dollar accounts, we've seen this. I mean, what I think will happen in Argentina is that we're going to move toward a more open capital account and that's how we already operate in Mexico, That's how we already operate in Colombia.

And once again, the speed.

Of the digitization of services with a dollar would only accelerate, So in that sense, it would be actually very positive for the business. And I think banks would be able to do longer term lending. Today, our longest loan the in the context of one hundred percent inflation is two years, just two years.

Imagine that in a country.

Where you offer thirty year fixed mortgages. So the opportunity for lending in places like Argentina is huge because only seven to eight percent of people have access to formal credit today, and in a dollar rice economy, I think that number would go up a lot.

Piapello quickly. You know, Mexico is a parallel example. Cash is king transactions to cash, So what's the technology opportunity for there AI or otherwise.

Well, what we have in Mexico is first of all, a full ecosystem of services. Pay your bills, top up your cell phone, have a debit card, pay for Netflix or Spotify, or be able to sign up even for Bloomberg, all those things Mexicans couldn't do in the past because they were condemned to cash. They even charged you a fee to pay your water bill or your electricity bill.

Willa does away with all that, and it lets you.

Create a credit history like we have an Argentina where we already done more than five million loans, and that gives us the opportunity to create a new credit history and also offer a highal savings account, which in Mexico is a huge differential in a market where most people got zero for their money and no longer.

Yeah, you come to New York a bit come back, Pierre Bavieri. It's called the foundery CEO of Will we thank you for it? Meanwhile, that does it for this edition of Bloembag Technology.

Yet, Yeah, recap the show on a podcast, Apple, Spotify, iHeart and the Bloomberg platforms here in the SF in New York City.

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