From Mahart. We're Innovation, Money and Power Collie in Silicon Valley, NBN.
This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlove.
I'm Caroline Heyde of Blomberg's World headquarters in New York and Ludlow is on assignment.
This is Bloombog Technology coming up.
Salesforce plunges as sales growth for the current quarter stalls to its slowest in history. Details to come. Plus, we continue the earning's coverage and sit down with the CEO of C three AI as a company reports well, some pretty decent results, and we take a deep dive into Elon Musk's universe in today's at Bloombog Big take all
that and so much more coming up. First, that's checking on these markets, and we are dragged lower by the absolute plummeting in of course salesforce, which is having an impact on the overall SMP five hundred and the Nasdaq is off by some seven tenths of a percent at the moment. Interesting that we get that GDP figure coming for the previous quarter in the US growth and actually the bad news is good news from a bond market perspective.
Yields come down some four basis points because inflation and indeed growth is cooling in the United States. That's also helping bond markets around the world. And the European stock six hundred is higher to the tune of five tens percent as boring costs come down that a little bit and gives some energy to equities, but that energy is not rolling into the United States at the moment, and
a lot of that is on the micro data. Let's have a look at what we've been having in terms of the earnings to digest.
Now there are rays of light for some HP We're back baby.
When it comes to PC demand, at least from the commercial perspective, we actually see growth in their PC part of the business, not so for printers.
But when we're seeing optimism going.
Forward for a PC on aipcs, we're up some fourteen percent for HP UiPath not so. We are currently seeing real pain for this particular company tumbling not only.
Because it cuts its forecast it spurs.
Downgrades across the street, but the CEO, rob Enslin, is also surprisingly departing the business. This is a worrying move in terms of go to market strategy going forward. A lot of digit downgrades coming from Needham, for example about Bank.
Of America as well.
Brad sales over there were off by a third big knot of course to ARC as Kathy Wood is long the stock. Now's have a look at what's happening in terms of the key stock to watch though, CRM, as it's known Salesforce wow down some twenty percent over the last of two days. Why will because we're getting some
really painful growth statistics. Look, revenue is still set to grow some eight percent in this particular quarter, but that is well down from what we usually see in terms of double digit sales growth for Salesforce, is it not able to convert generator of AI? Let's ask Bloomberg's Brody Ford, who was there to break the earnings across after the bell yesterday?
And I mean painful if you're long this stock today.
Yeah, So here's what I think.
The big question is, as corporations want to spend money on JENNYI while they're that servers with Dell chips from Nvidia cloud infrastructure for Microsoft, where is that money coming from. Budgets are still tight, corporations still want to spend money. You are in a kind of weird economic moment, and where it seems to be coming from is these enterprise
software giants, right, the salesforces, the workdays. If you just bought a bunch of Nvidia H one hundreds, do you want to sign a seven figure contract to upgrade your CRM system. It seems like these are getting pushed out. And so while it looks like a small miss Salesforce reported, you know what, two percent lower than expected, it's a really concerning sign for investors that in this moment where AI spending is all the height, they might not be the most relevant name.
Yeah, I mean exactly, echoed by RBC Compital Markets Rishi Juluria over there saying maybe this AI spend is coming at the expense on these software players, like Salesforce, like workdays, you say, which also had earnings. The thing is this worry is not being reflected by Mark Benioff. Look, he's an optimistic guy, always has been.
But he's still saying real exuberance, really saying, we've got incredibly well positioned. How do we buy that?
I think his framing was interesting in the release that he says we're very well positioned for AI over the next decade. Right, they have a lot of interesting features and products coming out. You know that you can generate emails or generate marketing stuff, but that's not expected to really create revenue until twenty twenty five, twenty twenty six. So if you're an investor and you can say, hey, and Vidia triple their earnings this year, Dell is up
double this year. Right, A lot of the hardware names have even Azure has a bunch of AI workloads boosting earnings. Or I can wait around for these application software makers like Salesforce to maybe get some JENI revenue next year or the year after. It is too much of a wait and see story for investors to want to wait.
Love that perspective, bredy Ford, thank you for bringing the energy today on all things Salesforce. Now, let's get the outlook for investing in technology also from the private side and some of the competitors that are coming through in terms of generative AI to compete with the likes of Salesforce. Hero Tomura is with us managing director at Humor Crossing Capital.
Adbiases Now is a new flagship growth equity fund partnering with Alta Tiedeman Global, focused on investing in prominent private technology companies, not just in the US, but also over in Europe where you sit at the moment here and indeed in Asia where you have a lot of experience. Here, I want to go to your experience. Having invested and been one of the first checks into Message Bird now known as Bird, this is a generative AI automation company and really helping with CRM.
More broadly, is that the sort.
Of area that companies are wanting to spend in the startup area of generative AI at the expense of a salesforce for example.
Yes, first and foremost, Caroline, thank you for having me.
It's a pleasure to be here.
You know, we're I think we're in the early innings of uh AI at the application layer. AI native companies are happening. I mean you talked about Message where it's in the communication space, Obviously there's a bunch of activity happening, and also in fintech uh with AI being a underlying driver of a massive shift of new companies that will also tackle some of the pain points that individuals have as well as enterprises. I think this is gonna be
an exciting moment. But like you said, I think there's you know, there's the hardware layer, there's the Nvidia layer and things are happening there that are relevant today, and the computational power that will then come uh, will really allow us.
To go further.
Uh, whether it's powered by open AI on thropic. There's you know a lot of great companies in that infrastructure layer that that application layers will we'll work with and the whole ecosystem I think is very relevant going forward.
Hey, how well.
You seeing some of these application layers being able to weather the cost of doing their business though as well and access to well quite costly large language models.
Yeah, that's a super good point.
I think this is going to be an ongoing theme, the cost of doing business, the cost of enabling oneself with some of these very large language models that are being refined tuned. Also, you know the private versions that are that are being built on top of it.
I know that Bloomberg has their own as well.
These are all costly endeavors and I think that right now where you will see a lot of that adoption maybe happening. Are you know, obviously the hyperscalers as well as you know, perhaps big institutions, you know, big banks, big financial institutions. I think those are areas where people are really activating to you know, perhaps take advantage of some of the available AI power, but this will be costly.
Therefore, where in the ecosystem do you want to write checks?
Is it at the seed stage?
Is it more in a and be where are some of the most appetizing risk rewards at the moment From a private company perspective.
For me, what I've been doing my entire career is basically focusing on the mid to late stage development areas of the company life cycle. And I think, you know what's happening at the seed stage level, their early say fintech adoption of AI, these AI native companies, you know, they are the versions that are actually happening today at the earlier stage. What we will see is that some
of these companies will develop there. You know, they have meaningful technology, they have wonderful people who are driving these businesses. And for me, it's really capturing that value in that transitional stage from what is venturers going into more of an execution race type of profile.
And what's interesting is, of course, how we see the exit strategy if you're taking and writing checks in their more and older built out businesses, we then think of Klana that's eyeing the market at the moment, and you spent a long time being very or if it are a Tomaco well known for highlighting the activity in European venture space, in European startups, and here's the European iconic company maybe tapping the market. It sometimes soon what are exits look like more broadly for you?
Well, I think you know, we've I think the broader market exits in twenty twenty two and twenty three have been restrained, to say the least. But going into twenty twenty four, these companies are great companies, you know, whether it's earlier or later, you have you know, category defining companies like Klarna and others who are looking to you know, take on public capital to even grow further. And I think that moment, that moment will be you know, dictated
by market realities. I think that you know, everyone we now have to really focus on both investing and taking the time to let companies develop, but also then thinking about when's the right time to access public markets. This is a great point and I think there will be focused on market realities to enable that the happen as well.
Here we're a global show, and you've got a lot of global experience. You are helping Asian companies tap US public markets, you were working deeply within Japan as well. Do you to just give us a sense of where the energy lies at the moment, from startup culture, from artificial intelligence and generative aim particular. We always want to pitch China versus the US, but what's going on more globally.
That's a good I think there's that, you know, I think technology, at least in the market of technology and innovation, I think it's you know, ubiquitous, and it's everywhere. I think there's versions that happen in Asian, versions that happen in Europe.
And obviously the US.
I think what I would say is the center of gravity that has to do with you know, the current AI language.
Large like ll ms that are that are you know that we know about and speak of daily.
Those are West coast. You know that is happening in the US and the West Coast. I think in Europe you're obviously seeing companies that are also in the AI space, like Mestra. There's a lot of interesting activity, but each region has the ability to create great companies and I think this will continue to be the case.
In the near term.
Well come back in the near time, we hope, Hero Tomora, thank you so much. Fascinating new funds working in allegiance of course with a key wealth management player Youmo crossing Capital Advisors managing director there and having a new fund announcement with ALTI Global. I mean, while coming up, we sit down with the CEO of C three AI and shares jump as you guessed it, Generative AI demand is really driving the company's guidance higher.
This is blome meg technology.
Let's just check in on C three AI shares having a nice jump today after the software company gave a stronger than expected annual sales forecast amid demand for you guessed it, artificial intelligence features joining us now as C three AI CEO Tom Siebel, and it looks as though from my perspective, it's all about government spending here, federal local.
Why the focus there? What's going so well well?
Federal is buy is a very rapidly going business.
I think our federal business, particularly Defense Intelligence group, greater than one hundred percent year over year.
State local.
This is about government services is a huge adoptri of enterprise AI. But so is manufacturing, financial services, petrochemicals, energy.
So i'd say across the board, we're.
Seeing very, very substantially increased demand in applying enterprise AI to business processes, to government processes, to defense and intelligence.
What's interesting though, is, of course we've had a bit of worry about corporate enterprise spending on software more generally coming from well, the results of salesforce today. What are you seeing in terms of enterprise because it does look as though the real beef of your growth is coming from federal government. What is sentiment like for the oil and gas companies that you're working with, for the other broader sectors.
Oil and gas, utilities, government services, consumer packaged goods, agribusiness. We're seeing, you know, very significant growth and increased demand in enterprise AI. Now I understand, Carolyn, you can think of C three AI. This really is the first native AI company. We started fifteen years ago building an enterprise AI stack. This is before Google Cloud, before or when AWS was this big, before the before the graphic GPU. So we started early. We spent billions building our software stack.
Today we have ninety turnkey enterprise applications for supply chain, demand chain, fraud, whatever it might be.
So think about a C three AI.
We're in a little bit different class than these legacy enterprise application software people were. This is the first enterprise AI, pure enterprise AI play.
Well, you know those legacy people, Well, you sold your previous business too, Oracle, And I'm interested as to why, therefore, to be brutally honest, why your share prices sort of hasn't been wrapped up in the exuberance of AI. If you are such a pleure play I'm looking at Well, it's still well the heighs of twenty twenty one. What do you think you're still having to prove to the market at the moment.
Well, I think that we're at the very early stages of this enterprise market of AI market. You know, we're seeing a lot of interest right now in silicon and infrastructure. If we look at the value of the stack AI stack at the bottom of silicon, above that you have infrastructure, Above that you have foundation models, and on top of that you have the of the applications. Well, that's the level of the stack. That's the portion of the stack
in which we play. Now all of silicon that you know that n Nvidia is selling and all this infrastructure that hyperscalers are selling, they're only selling it for one reason. Building this capacity is to run enterprise AA applications. And Carolyn, that's what we do.
So let's get really detailed, Tom, what are say? What can you give us an anecdote of what a key company and manufacturing is using your technology to achieve?
The United States Air Force is using it for predictive maintenance for today twenty two weapons systems F fifteen F sixteen F eighteen F thirty five, et cetera. Okay, and by using predictive analytics predictive maintenance, we can prevent unplanned system outage and increase aircraft availability in any given day by twenty five percent. Predictive maintenance at DOW here in
you know steam cracking units associated with polyethylene production. Okay, we can reduce unplanned downtime by twenty percent.
Hey, that's worth hundreds of millions of years to DOW.
So these these are these are you know, two very real applications with you know, substantial economic return. I would say the application that I that I SAYD at the United States Air Force might be the largest enterprise application on Earth. Shell Shell is realizing, you know, two billion dollars an economic benefit a year from what they call shell AI, which is C three I combined with with azure. So the returns are substantial. This is no drill, This is not higher This is very real.
What is the risk? Very real?
We hype p the efficiencies of AI, We hype up the market valuations. We also sometimes in the media like to hype up the risks. What do you take to the risks and regulatory respect to that.
The risks associated with AR are daunting, and I would be afraid. Uh, you know, we need to be very concerned about personal privacy. I believe that, you know, personal privacy is a fundamental human right, Okay, and AI that threatens that we will you know, so I think privacy issues will these you we're seeing, uh you know social media, the AI and social media being used to you know, it's a public health hazard. Think about you know, depressions, suicide,
body imag issues in young women. These technologies are being used to interfere in democratic processes there. So you know, the risks associated where they are very real and we need to be very concerned and we need to plan for them, and we need to avoid them.
Well keep coming with some of the ideas and the solutions to planning for it.
Tom Siebel, thanks for trulling.
Has three your numbers today C three AI CEO. Then it is time now for talking tech. First up, the Biden administration so to host an event on competition in AI. But the big tech names in the industry well haven't been invited. In Vidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft all are absent from the panel. Instead, the workshop is set to bring together top VC firms along within forces regulators from the US, UK and EU. This is according to the
US Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust. The speaker Liist was intentional plus OpenAI says the impact of generative AI is
just beginning from an economic perspective. Speaking at a conference in Singapore, the company's CTO, that's Mira Murati, said its latest Chatchipt four model is becoming more intuitive and spurring more adoption, saying quote, over a very short amount of time, these aisystems have entered the workforce as collaborators, and Donald Trump and Elon Musk will have talked about a possible advisory role for the Tesla CEO if Trump wins the election.
That's according to the Wall Street Journal. The two are said to have been discussed ways to give Musk formal input and for policies related to border security and the economy.
However, the role hasn't been fully developed.
And it might not happen. Well, that would be yet another hat for Elon Musk. Meanwhile, Tesla as a company is kind of in a bit of disarray. Layoffs are mounting, morale is shattered, stock is cratering, and sales are anemic, and some investors say it's got a distracted leader at the helm since Elon Musk runs five other companies, so is everything still.
Right in EON's universe?
It's bringing Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner for more on the big take, where you articulate what the universe is of Eno Musk and who actually helps run it. Can you give us a sense of why you decided to do this deep dive?
Of course?
Yeah.
I mean, as you mentioned, Elon is running six companies at once, right, But there's only so much time in the day, and so we started asking ourselves, well, who are the people that are actually, you know, carrying out the day in, day out tasks of running these businesses? And we realize it's not always very clear, right. It's a tough reporting challenge to sort of figure out who the power players are in Elon's orbit. So we spent
a couple of months did a lot of reporting. We tried to map this out into what we called sort of a solar system with Elon is the sun at the center and everyone else sort of rotating around him. I think it's a slight nod to you know, SpaceX and his ambitions in space, but also it's just the reality like if you work for Elon, you're kind of at his beck and call and you orbit him, and
he is the power source there. And so we tried to map this out for people so they get a sense for who the people are behind Elon Musk that are doing the day in and day out past.
Can you articulate a few I mean actually quite diverse calstic characters, a couple of women in there. When you think of SpaceX and Twitter now X.
Yeah, I mean each of the companies specifically has their you know, senior leaders that are running so Gwen Shotwell for example, at SpaceX, I feel like if you look though at the advisors that he has who tend to show up at various companies you come to. You think of people like Alex Spiro, his lawyer, right, he showed up repeatedly at all of these different companies. You think of Jared Birchell, his business manager, also shows up repeatedly.
There's other advisors, you know, people who show up on various or multiple boards, friends like David Sachs, who sort of advise him but don't necessarily have a formal role at these companies. So the orbit here or the solar system here is supposed to sort of show all these various relationships and how they intertwine and intertwined they do. I think that's what's super interesting here is that these things are all coming together.
On any given day, They're all coming together while he's still fighting for his fifty six billion dollar pay package. He wants more of a stake, a controlling stake in Tesla. He's got shareholders pushing back thinking he is distracted, is he or is he delegating?
Yep.
I don't know how you could not be distracted when you have six different companies that you're running at once. And it's such a key part of this whole thing because all of his wealth is tied up in Tesla. Right, So if he is distracted at Tesla, if Tesla's not performing, well, there's a trickle down effect to all these other businesses because this is where he gets his wealth, it's where he gets his power. And as a result, you know
Xai or x or boring company, they may suffer. So I think that's why this Tesla pay package is so important.
Co Wagner, great breakdown, Thank you, Welcome back to Bluemerg Technology and Parline hid in New York.
Let's get a quick check on these markets.
Because a little bit of suppressed enthusiasm around the techtocks today. And now's that one hundred off by seven tenths of a percent. That's even as boring costs come down. Look at the seven basis point move we see on the tenure four point five four is where we trade. That's more to do with the macro picture GDP slowing in the previous quarter. But so tool inflationary pressures, does that mean the Fed can indeed cut so we come down in those boring costs. But that's that also under pressure
for some microdata some earnings. Bitcoin currently up by one point five percent, so a little bit more new music to the upside. Sixty eight thousand is where we go for Crypto. We'll dig into that a little bit more later in the show. Move on, look at some of the individual move though, and this is perhaps what's tugging down on the overall WE sentiment. When it comes to
tech stocks down twenty one percent for salesforce. This is an extraordinary move, largely because we're seeing shares slide the most in almost two decades, because sales is the slowest in almost two decades, slowest quarterly sales growth.
In its history.
In fact, this is all renewing some anxiety that really the generation of artificial intelligence is not going to generate revenue for this particular business anytime soon. We're seeing youipath up down by thirty five percent. Smaller business, yes, but still a focus on automation software and what generative AI in the enterprise competitors means for them, and also the fact that they're seeing their CEO, Rob Enslin taking a surprise departure. I'm looking at Dell Technologies of by six percent.
Remember this has been a stock Tho's had a record winning streak up to this day, six straight days of gains where at near record highs Dell got its earnings after the bell. What will the AIPC mean for Dell? What will of course, continued server demand mean for Dell. Many think good news, but it is trading at a pretty high valuation. Let's so move across to another particular corporate story and a.
Theme that we've been seeing.
Satellite to phone service provider AST Space Mobile announced a partnership with Verizon this week, adding to the company's recent deal with AT and T.
As you'll see, shares have surged so.
Far this month, and it's all about the news of one hundred percent coverage coming and the end of dend zones.
Is it Beckoning joining us?
It's the CEO A Well Avllen, thank you Abel for joining us.
And that's what you're saying.
You're saying with the deal, the partnership is being struck with Verizon and with AT and T you can offer one hundred percent coverage for satellite to mobile in the future. Why do you need their spectrum? What does it mean to have these partnerships?
Well, I mean the spectrum is an essential part of the service. I mean AT and T Verison have premium inspectrum in the cover all United States. We bring the technology to make that respectum available for every phone that is in everybody's phone. And that's where this part ships make a lot of sense. Our plan is to eliminate that song in the United States. We of course, we
don't do that alone. We do that with the two largest help us in this country and to enable connectivity for people, regardless of where they are and regardless of the fund that they had in their boocket.
And in fact, you've got deals, partnerships and more than forty telecoms providers.
This is a worldwide theme.
We're sitting with you, but we immediately think of competition when it comes to SpaceX and Starlink.
Can you give us.
A discussion of how your offerings are different because Starling has gone with well T Mobile, or indeed T Mobile has gone with Starlink.
Yeah, I mean the main differentiation is, first of all, we don't need special terminal, special devices to connect to the phone. And in the case where they had a service that may offer sous in similar we believe our service is the only one that offer broadband connectivity in a sustainable way. We only need ninety satellites. We have three three thousand, four hundred depending claims we had a large satellites or we're launching to LEO into low orbits.
So our technology really differentiate us with everything else that is in the market, and this has been improven. We get constant support and overwhelming support by the wireless industry, and now the addition of Horiizon together with AT and T is actually a leave improof of that.
Let's talk about low Earth orbit and the satellites you need to put there, because now you've got to get them up there, and in fact I think it's going to be using SpaceX to do so. But what does the pipeline look like for getting these launches going?
Well?
We had an immediate launch here this summer. We were launching the FIR five operational satellites to be used for our eminal partners but also for by our U government. So we are launching. We're launching this summer. We will continue to launch during twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six, but we start commercial services as soon as.
We have these five up.
I like the INSAE commercial services because the deal with the Verizon isn't yet a commercial partnership, it's strategic partnership.
When does it become commercial.
Well, the deal actually is a pre payment to use our service, So they are committed one hundred million dollars to use our service.
That is.
Thirty five million in an ode, sixty five million in pre payments to actually use of our service.
We plan to.
Enable Verizon on our under a fifty megahertz premium spectrum together with the a fifty megahert from AT and T premium spectrum to basically have both the two largest healecas in the United States to get access to our network as soon as.
We've gone available.
We said at the beginning that your share price is rocketed in the last month. You've gone from five hundred million dollar valuation to an excess of two billion dollars. Now, it's not as high as we've seen in previous years in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, but what does that sort of volatility feel like when you've been in the game of space for more than two decades.
Yes, I mean, listen, the opportunity that we have is very, very, very large. I mean the days a trillion a trillion dollar market growing faster than population. We had the fact that ninety percent of the air surface do not have cellular broadband, and we have five billion phones that get in and out of connectivity every day, so this is a massive market. We are just at the beginning. We're just kicking off here with initiating services, starting with the
launch the launches of this summer. And yes, there have been so learning core by the market, learning for by the investors. But I think I think the industrial support and the ontake of our customers, which is basically the global operators and the leading operation in the globe.
It talks by itself.
Many focus on the digital divide, Verizon CEO being one of them in particular, when will we see an end to it? Do you think, how quickly can we get one hundred percent coverage for the world and access for everyone who's lucky enough to have a mobile phone and cell phone?
No, absolutely, I think this is an area where we're hanced from Verizon, John from AT and T and myself which aair a common goal is eliminating death zones, and not only in the United States. We obviously been an American company, We're extremely focused here in the United States that remains to be a problem, but also globally and
and actually a un Commissioner for broad Band Connectivity. We are committed to democratizing access to knowledge and information, and we will believe that this technology can make a huge dent on that. There is no reason why with today's technology, with today's advancement in launch capability, with today's investment on our type of satellites, there is no reason why people cannot get access to broadband Internet using five G anywhere, whatever they are.
St CEO al Avelyn, thank you. We appreciate you coming on just amid all the deal flow. And while coming up, we're going to be joined by Arthur CEO Adam Winschel, the company's latest generator of AI research. Really pitting LLM versus lllman. While we're watching shares of Amazon, but not because of its AI focus, but because of its food focus. We're up by two point three percent for Just Eat Takeaway. Why because it's grub hub unit. Wow, Amazon's increasing a
stake in it to as much as eighteen percent. They're expanding their partnership. We're gonna be able to get food delivery services actually within the Amazon app. Doing well for Just Eat Takeaway that just stopped trading over in Europe.
This is Bluembog Technology.
Arthur, the company that provides a firewall basically for large language models. It's just released the second edition of its Generative Assessment Project. It's research initiative which basically ranks the strengths and weaknesses of various LLM offerings from industry leaders like open Ai, Anthropic and Meta. I sprink it all
down with urur Ceo, Adam Wenshew Adam. It's great to have you because benchmarking is really complicated, and often it feels like when open Ai comes out with its latest large language model, it says we're bettering this other rival at this and we're better at that.
You feel like they're grading their own homework.
How are you grading it from a benchmark perspective?
Absolutely, And so we want to do is give people the tools so that they can actually create it with how well it does on what you actually want it to do. You know, if you wanted to answer customer service requests or help with your analysis financial analysis, like how well does it do it your particular task, and that a lot of times is completely a completely different number than the kind of industry benchmarks they get thrown around all over the place.
And when you've done this particular report.
One of the key findings seems to be doesn't need to be expensive. The cheaper offerings really good and really powerful.
Absolutely, so when we first started really kind of measuring and assessing the quality of these, you know, even six months ago, there is a huge difference in their ability
to even answer some basic questions. And now, you know, fast forward today, what we're finding is like all that, you know, there's so many open source and different commercial models that do a really good job of answering questions, and so now what you want is one that's really fast, really inexpensive, but also doesn't hallucinate a lot actually uses the data you give it and answers based on that.
And and so that's a lot of what we focus on because that's what really business users care about, people who are trying to run these and enterprises and build applications on top of them.
That was what was positive about all of this.
Hallucinations across the board seem to be coming down. So basically where the model is making things up, getting it wrong, But who is coming up on top, who is benchmarking from your standards.
Well, yeah, there's a lot of really great you know, new open source and commercial ones. But you know, an example is anthropics new haikup model, which is extremely an expensive, very quick, does a really good job of sticking to.
The material you give it. So if you're feeding it with your.
Corporate data through rag vector databases, it does a really good job of answering the question based on that data.
And it's like lightning fast and very inexpensive.
And so there's also a lot of new open source models, the new LAMA models, Coheres, command R models, they're all doing like extremely good jobs. And so you know what people are choosing on now is you know, really really these other things around how little does it hallucinate, how well does it kind of work for my business application? And that's what we help people measure and navigate.
How are you measuring cost?
Because there must be cost built in and all sorts of different layers as to whether you're affording the compute, whether the large language model provider is through its services giving you access to compute.
Yeah, absolutely, So when you work with it, you know, someone like an open AI or Anthropic, they kind of abstract all that away and it just happens magically, and so you just pay one price when you're running open source models.
There are some providers that will run.
On so you can run them through, like AWS Officer or Bedrock service and hugging Face offers some services, but a lot of times what people want to be able to do is kind of run their own GPUs and run them there so that just because it gives them more control, it gives them better guarantees around data privacy. There's a lot of advantages and that comes with some complication, but it also comes with a lot of assurance about what's going on, and you can kind of guarantee where your data is going.
Ultimately, your business is about making sure that companies can adopt large language models safely and ensure that they are making it.
Best fit for their business. What are business is doing right now?
I'm hearing a lot of data that actually they're pretty fearful. They're not perhaps adopting generator ais quickly as we all like to think they are.
You know, there certainly are some, but we're seeing we have several customers who are large four to one hundred companies that are adopting them very aggressively. Now they are being cautious, like they're starting with.
Internal use cases. Typically night well, like.
Everything from just sort of generic copilots to answering technical product questions. If you're like, we have a large industrial equipment manufactur that is out you know, they have a bunch of field reps that are out there working with their customers, and they get very complicated questions, and their ability to answer those questions has just been transformed by generative AI, and so there's a lot of like use
cases there. I think, you know what we're seeing right now is there's a real difference between the companies that just sort of announced, you know, made announcements about AI and all things are gonna do in AI to get the bump on their stock price and those that are actually like putting in the work to understand how do you create business value, like real world value from AI, because that takes work, and that's the kind of thing we help people measure your AI performance and then what
kind of value are you creating?
Economic benefit are you creating with that?
And many have the anxiety that the economic benefit comes at the cost of jobs, But actually I would have thought a lot of the companies that are adopting quickly have got to get in their own technical talent how is that going for them?
Yeah, I mean there's I think that's exactly right. Like, we've seen no evidence that people are losing their jobs for this. I think what we have seen is making people more efficient and so in like large functions where you might have to hire five hundred people a year, instead maybe you can get a with hiring three or four hundred because you're making them that much more efficient.
But we've yet to see any job losses, And I think the people who are benefiting are the ones who are really good at incorporating these kind of copilots and other assist of tools built on gender and AI into their workflows. Like you know, we use it, our our developers use it. We use it in a number of ways. I use it all the time to help write, you know,
your end reviews and different things like that. So there's just all sorts of ways you can incorporate it into your day to day to make yourself faster.
All about being a first adopter on these moments off a CEO Adam wenshaw I said, dropping in.
ETH is truly one of the foundational pieces of the entire ecosystem.
I'm not a fan of any other cryptocurrency outside of Bitcoin.
Eth is at the forefront of the tokenization movement that it's going to really define the next few decades of traditional finance.
You have the biggest developer community, you have the biggest security, most DeFi protocols.
Bitcoin is the only money within the cryptocurrency space. It's designed and treated as a monetary asset. So then what do I think Ethereum is. I think ethereum is a technology.
If Bitcoin is digital gold, eth is Apple. It's building the app store of finance.
You can have multiple companies making the same product, but if one company is very reliable, Ethereum has been one of the first ones.
Eth is going to ride the codetails of all the access that Bitcoin is created.
Without question, it's one of the most active chains in a space. It is more about the trust.
This is an asset that people want to own.
I think that there's a lot the market has to sort out as to what it actually is and how to value it.
I myself am very bullish ETH and the entire ecosystem.
Just a few of our guests weighing in on the Ether etf as we await a decision from the SEC around us ets investing directly in, of course, the Ethereum overall protocol. Let's discuss with Jovan Putchra, founding and managing partner of Future Perfect Ventures. It's an early stage VC fun Basically you focus on decentralized technologies, you focus on crypto assets on AI or more broadly on the decentralized space.
But I want to get into ultimately what you think this institutionalization of ETH will really mean, because many feel, look, it won't be quite as popular as the Bitcoin ETF.
Well, it's great to be with you again, and I've loved seeing those clips of my colleagues and friends discussing the developments we've seen in the space. I think these ETF we had the Bitcoin ETF approved earlier this year, we had the ETF approved last week. Believe that we're going to show or allow retail to have a lot more access to these crypto assets. And we're going to see many more of these ETFs being approved. And it's retail, it's institutions that don't want to custody their own assets.
They want exposure to the upside these new technology using crypto assets can provide. UH, but it's very clunky to go out and buy eth or or bitcoin and and then learn to trade it. And so these atfs provide an alternative for billions of people around the world.
Many are going to feel that the issue they have with the ATHTF is they're not going to be staking, They're not going to be sort of getting money.
And rewards back.
If your fidelity who's running the ETF, is there in that way going to cause any liquidity issues. Is there any sort of a lack of ultimate demand coming because people do want to actually directly own ethereum and then be able to stake it themselves.
Yeah, So I think this was the confession, you know, to get approval. A number of the applicants for the ATF took out this taking part of it. I believe that there's enough upside in the core asset, and uh, you know, there's so many developers. This is still one of the largest chains out there. It's been around the longest. There are tons of decentralized applications being built. Their Layer two is being built on ethereum to make it more scalable.
So while staking can provide some extra yield, I don't think it's necessary to be able to be able to realize the upside of the underlying asset.
I mean, Jaack, you first, what launched your first decentralized focused fund back in twenty fourteen. This must feel very strange for suddenly the government to almost pivot on a dime and be getting more interested in crypto and eth What is this because it's becoming politicized in some way ahead of the election.
I think there's no doubt that it's being politicized. I mean, we had Donald Trump come out and say that he would support the crypto industry. This administration, the current administration has been very anti crypto, and we start we started seeing that, you know last year when they shut down Signature Bank. They have made it very difficult to provide clarity around these assets. And so you know, I think we do we will hear more about crypto during this election.
And we're also seeing Congress really start to push through legislation that will provide the clarity of the industry has been looking for. Last week, FIT twenty one was passed by the House and it was pretty bipartisan. I mean, there were definitely more Republicans and Democrats that voted for it. But this bill will provide clarity on which tokens will be under SEC jurisdiction, which ones would be under a
c FTC jurisdiction. And that's been a big sticking point of not knowing what's a security and what's a commodity. And then there's also all sorts of other regulations that are putting it put in there and customer protection and so the industry can move forward. This goes to the Senate next and we'll see what happens. But Biden has basically said that he's not going to veto it, which is a positive sign.
Jilac.
Great to have an expertise has been built over many years. And I let you get back to the consensus event over in Austin where I'm sure everyone will be discussing some of the politicization of your area.
J Lac.
Joe when Futro, we thank you founder and managing partner of Future Perfect Ventures.
Meanwhile, that does.
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