The AI Race Heats Up and Dell Cuts Jobs

puts the spotlight on Beijing's global surveillance. Personal gets all of that this hour, but first alphabet pairing of Google jars briefly pairing some of their gainer spike after headlines that the company is releasing its rival to chat GPT, called Bard. That's too early testers. Bloomberg's junior Love joins us now with those details, Julia, what do we actually

know about Bard? Yes? So it is um. We've all heard a lot of buzz about chat GPT, the chat bob that has taken the Internet by storm, and Bard is Google's answer to that product. It's It's It's a conversational AI service that users will also be able to turn to for simple queries such as planning a birthday party, you're buying your gift for a friend Julie is you know.

I was on the phone last week with Ruth Poor at the CFO of Alphabet and I asked her about AI, and she was a little bit defensive, saying, actually, we've been working on AI for years and years and years. My question, why are we only sort of hearing about a roll out of it into the real world now? Why has it been so slow to react? Yeah, it's a fascinating question. You know, Google has been a leader

in this field. It created many of the tools that underpin this technology, but the company has held itself to a higher bar in terms of rolling out these products. Um, the chat bots sometimes hallucinate, they sometimes deliver information that's incorrect, and Doodle has been very fearful about what might happen if that happened under the Google brand, And so that's why they're taking their time. Yeah, I guess it's it's an issue of competitive threat, right. You look at what

Microsoft's doing with chat, GPT and the underlying tech. You know, there's already talk about how it's going to improve being the search engine. How much of a threat does Google see the other players to its core business? Well, Google still lives and dies by advertising, and so if users begin to turn to chat, GPT and other services for some of their everyday queries instead of with Google Search, that could over time to start to eat into Google's

advertising business. All right, Bloomberg's Julia Love thank you terrific reporting this Monday. Now, as we mentioned earlier in the program, Dell has become the latest tech company to announce pretty significant job cards, to eliminate a little more than sixty six d jobs, about five of its global workforce. Splinberg's Brady Forward was the first to report that news and joins me from the New York studio give us the

details of these cuts. Yeah, absolutely so. Anybody who's watched this show or any other show in the world the last couple of months knows that almost every large tech company has made cuts, right, so Dell is the most recent one. It's kind of about people. That's about five percent of the global workforce, significant number. Um And the big story here, in addition to investors calling for greater profit,

is that PC demand has really just fallen. I was looking at the I d C data right from the last three months of two and there's a pretty sharp drop in PC shipments. But I think I'm right in saying that third party data was pretty ugly for Dell specifically, and and the first party data is pretty ugly too. I mean, they've been reporting for a while that, you know,

PC shipments have gone down. In the pandemic, everybody needed a laptop, so everybody went out and bought, and then there was a semiconductor shortage, and so companies really bulked up their production of computers. And now they're sitting on all this inventory they can't sell and demand is really sinking. I mean, um, in the letter, you know, co CEOO Jeff Clark of Dell had some pretty harsh words about the eroding market conditions, about uncertainty and so, um, this

is more than just a macro story. This is also about computers demand really going down. You mentioned that Dell's just one name among many who else has done layoffs? Where if we started this year in terms of the industry cutting bank and what was I guess probably some bloat from the pandemic era, right, Yeah, So obviously we had the huge ones, right, we had Amazon and Salesforce kickoff the year. But we're observing an interesting trend that last week a lot of these larger employers aren't as

much household names. I'm talking about work Days, Splunk, Octa. We see them making cuts too. We see almost every large cap tech company taking this moment to cut some people off. I mean work Day even said hey, we don't need to do this. We're still growing headcount, but we're kind of going to take this moment to realign our priorities. And so you know, I'm really watching. I think gold of companies that maybe haven't announced yet are going to even if the scale is not what we're

seeing from you know, Google, Meta companies like that. All right, Bloomberg's bready forward. Good job, and thank you very much for your reporting. I want to get to a story in the debt markets. Chip maker Micron is selling one point to five billion dollars in high grade US bonds, and notes will be sold in two parts, split across an existing tranche of notes due and new bonds the mature in ten years. That according to a Bloomberg source, the longer portion of the deal expected to yield around

two five basis points above treasuries. According to that source, the sales were increased by fifty million and relaunched Monday, which is a pretty strong indicator of demand. It's clear that China doesn't want to act with restraint, and the Biden administration doesn't have much incentive to try to seek China's assurances that they will because there's no trust on

the two sides. So so it could be used as a as a teachable moment, but I think the Biden administration really just wants to prevent the relationship from deteriorating into outright confrontation or even conflict. That was National University of Singapore research fellow Drew Thompson. They're giving his thoughts on the alleged or known Chinese surveillance balloon that had been flying over the mainland US. This of course now amid tensions that are rising between the US and China.

Let's bring in Bloomberg's Ian Marlowe for d C on the latest in that the balloon is no longer with us UM But the decision was taken over the weekend to take it down. Why when and how did that happen? Yeah? US officials have been tracking this balloon for for the greater part of a week, and you know, Biden has said publicly he wanted to shoot it down as soon as he heard about it. His officials, his top general said, look, the payload hanging from that balloon is is bigger than

two buses. It's it's thousands of pounds. If you shoot that down over land, you're going to have this massive debris field that stretches for miles and a NASA had actually done an analysis based on the size of the object how big the debris field would be on the ground.

So even as this diplomatic tussle was was sort of going on, because this balloon was was kind of spotted on the on the eve of the Secretary of State's visit to China, they decided to wait until it was about six miles off the coast of South Carolina before they finally shot it down with an F twenty two. And we update our audience, of course, that the Secretary B Lincoln put that trip on pause. Uh, you know,

after deliberations about the balloon. I guess the question is is what what are we going to learn from the payload. I think I'm right in saying the US has sent divers to recover what that the balloon was carrying. What are they expecting to learn? Yes, so they're there, I think, um really hoping to get a look, an up close look at the sort of sensors, the intelligence gathering equipment

that is on this balloon. There's obviously been a lot of sort of debate out there about, you know, why are they using a balloon when they have low orbit low orbit satellites that are capable of taking you know, high definition imagery and all these other kind of things. There's a general sense that the balloons are able to sort of linger over sensitive military sites, potentially take higher definition shots or video from different angles sort of as

they float in rome. Uh, you know, over these things obviously a much lower you know threshold than in space. So I think there's a lot of stuff. They've already been tracking the balloon for days, so they've been they've been looking to see how it kind of communicates back with wherever it's you know, the details are thin, but they've they've already gleaned a bunch of in eligence just

from watching it over the last few days. And now they're actually going to get their hands on, you know, equipment used to spy on them by their main geopolitical competitors. So I think this is uh, you know, well, we'll see how much they get. But at the moment, it's it's it's looking. I mean, people are hopeful. Ian. You have a piece with Jen Jacobs on the Bloomberg which looks at what China and Chinese officials knew about this balloon.

But my question is what has the response from China been officially to the balloon's origin and how it ended ended up over US space. Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of the most interesting parts of the story, and I think it's it's just coming out now just how confused and chaotic it was on the Chinese side, because the Chinese wanted this visit from from Secretary Anthony B. Linkeln.

They wanted images of she shaking hands with him, everyone looking very statesman like the US China relationship on an even you know, even keel, everything going well, and then all of a sudden, this balloon popped out. So it looks like there's sort of you know, interagency communication errors here on the Chinese side. It looks like Chinese diplomats here in the US were surprised when the communication first started.

The the Chinese side expressed regrets, you know, which is actually quite rare, I think especially when it comes to US China kerfuffles. But then as soon as the U S shot it down, I think, you know, both both the Biden administration and and Chi Jimping and China both have their own domestic constituencies. You know, they need to look like they're taking a firm stand, and so as soon as the U S shot it down, the Chinese sort of changed the tune a little bit, said that

they you know, reserved the right to respond. And that was a total overreaction on the U S side. So it's going to be interesting because both sides were trying to set you know, bilateral ties back into a more normalized state, and then this balloon floated then to the middle of everything and kind of messed everything up. So it's it's kind of gone against the narrative that both sides have been talking about for ages. So it's it's kind of really embarrassing. It's inflated the news cycle, that's

for sure. Bloomberg Z and Marla great report, sing, thank you very much. I actually want to stick with this conversation, particularly what it means now for the U S. China relationship with Strategy Risks founder and CEO Isaac Stonefish. Isaac, you you spend your whole life looking at China, the relationship between China and the United States, doing business in China. If you're a US technology executive waking up on Monday morning,

how do you feel about the China opportunity? Given the weekend's events, you feel like you just want to go right back to bed. This must be very frustrating for folks who have for months, years waited for positive economic numbers coming out of China, waited for the opportunity to deploy large swaths of capital, and then see the news, see the tensions, and understand, both from a Beijing and a DC regulatory perspective, this is a bad time to play.

You know, the context of the week, as we just discussed, is Secretary blink in and what would have been an opportunity for I don't want to say did ton't, but at least an in person meeting of significance that was then put on hold. What's more significant to you the idea that the balloon was shot down or that that

meeting is for the time being not taking place. I would guess that the U side didn't want to have the meeting because they weren't getting what they wanted from the Chinese side, which is one of the reasons that

this came out. I would say the most significant piece of this entire story is the spotlight it shines on Chinese espionage in the United States as well as globally and how okay, we're focusing on this giant balloon, but it's raising a lot of questions about Chinese brands like TikTok, like Lenovo, like Motorole handsets, and their potentials for espionage gathering. Let's talk about TikTok. Then, on Monday, President Biden was asked by the press pool about TikTok and whether the

US will ban TikTok outright. President Biden said that he wasn't sure yet, they hadn't made a decision. He also added that he of course does not have TikTok on his own personal or federally issued cell phone. Where do we sit in this process, do you think that that the President Biden is basically not getting his cards away? And how the US government will handle TikTok in this country.

There's a legal process and there's a political process. Politically, both sides have a very short window to ban TikTok before they alienate pens of millions of young American voters. We're not at election right now, but we're real, real close, and so I think both sides are trying to balance their worries about the national security implications of TikTok and the worries between losing a lot of people who could vote Republican or Democrat. We thank you. Strategy Risks founder

and CEO Isaac stone Fish. Now coming up, why Apple is selling its latest iPhones at discounts of more than a hundred dollars in China. That's all next, and as we had to break, I want to take a quick look at Pinterest and some of the after hours reaction in shares down now five pairing some of the decline after fourth quarter sales, mised expectations. You can see some contagion or read through to Snap who shares also lower by one percent in after hours. We continue to track

those as the calls get underway. This is Bloomberg deals and discounts over in China, more than a hundred the price carts on Apple's latest iPhones. But why, let's ask Bloomberg intelligence. Is Anna Agrana anag you cover this stock so closely. I think the point made in the reporting is they're offering a discount so soon after launching the latest generation of handset. What's your read on it? So I think, you know, they do offer this in China

every once in a while. They I think they really want to get jumped start the Chinese market, which has so far had been plagued by a number of things over the last few months, with you CORVID restrictions and then you know opening some of that up and China is an important part for it appens, revenues comes from China.

So I think if they're trying to jump start from demanding bad area um last week there on earnings, you know, they said that they were looking at improved for traffic back in December, so well, you know, maybe it's just trying to keep the moment and up at this point. Well, I want to jump on that. So Tim Cook on the call said two things. One they would have seen growth in the first quarter for handsets had it not

been been for supply chain constraints. And two, as you point out that they did see improved demand once China's reopening really got underway. Do you take Tim Cook at face value on that well, I think so. I mean, so you have to remember last year the smartphone shipments really wrote bad in China, but Apple didn't do as bad as the rest of the vendors. Remember, Apple is a very high price strodict. I think it is a lot less susceptible to big consumer ships, but nevertheless it

is susceptible. Now as far as Chinese concerned, we think whenever the reopening happens in a big broader way, the Chinese were the Chinese you know, consumer will go out and buy Apple products at that time. So we think if it's not in the first half, we think they can happen. Is going to be very strong for Apple. Your company outlook on the Bloomberg terminal talks about the broader Apple ecosystem as being a good platform for growth. What is your outlook for twenty three and beyond and

what what drives it? Yeah, so as part of the product growth is concerned, you know, we are coming to a point when Apple is not going to grow in double digits. In our view, it has grown twelve percent revenue in the last five years. We think that the view in our view is over the next three years. You know, think about a six to eight percent revenue growth rate coupled with that a little bit of margin expansion, and then buy backs. I think that's the Apple's financial

model for the next two years. And I'm not so sure how many you know investors out there are ready to you know, admit that's the going to be the case for Apple. In our last segment and I Rag, we were talking about the U. S. China relationship in geo politics. You also notes g O place call issues is a headwind potentially to Apple going forward. What is

your concern there? I think the biggest concerning that almost you know, most of their products are assembled in China, and we have seen some diversification over the last couple of years, but I think it's going to take at least a decade for us to see any meaningful diversification now.

Like be for Apple, they have done well to you know, skirt this issue all the way back from the tariff wars a few years ago with China to the most recent you know again you know, the big issues about semiconductor. But having said that, I think they are not immune to any of these events directly. Hey, anaag really quit, are you excited? About Apple's a r VR headset, So I think that you know, from our side, I think I want to see an application that can be used

on the phone the headset itself. It's going to be very good in terms of publicity and how it can showcase the cool stuff Apple can do, but financially it's not going to have that big of an impact because these things don't move the needle. Given how dependent Apple is on the iPhone, I do want to see what kind of apps, you know, come for the iPhone for more of the augmented reality stuff, because that's where the ecosystem is very large. Bin Bag Intelligence is Ana rag

Bran always get to catch out. Thank you very much, Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology. I'm med Lodlow in San Francisco. Now, there was a corner of the market where there was some green on the screen this Monday, and that's probably putting it mildly. AI related stocks continue to see momentum. Big Bear has taken all of the headlines up another eighteen percent this Monday, rising for a fourth consecutive day. BuzzFeed and C three AI buzz Feed more sort of

tangentially linked, but it's continuing to catch a beard. C three AI another AI player that's up in a just crazy way year today. In fact, let's change up the board and show some of the year to day performance of these stocks, because well it's just astonishing. Big Bear up more than eight hundred percent so far in three C three I AI a more modest one percent plus. But investors are trying to find and weed out the most promising names that could be a potential rival to

open ai and chat GPT. Public markets real lee starting to put some money into this area, whether speculatively or not. Google is getting its own chat GPT competitor ready as well, a new conversational AI service called bard. It will be opening up to trusted testers and readying the service for the public in the coming weeks. And ever since its own maturit rise Chat GPTs competition, well, it's coming in fast, with companies big and small getting in on the race.

I want to bring in Bloomberg's Dina Bass, who has written about this this Monday. Those competitors big and small. It's quite the list you put together, Dinah. Yeah, we wanted to take a look at who was competing with open Ai, not just with chat GPT, but with open aiyes,

larger language model systems. And you know the thing about open ai because we're talking a lot about generative AI lately, but a lot of the startups in this space are making applications that are built on other people's foundational models. Open ai and some of the competitors we talked about today make these, you know, things called foundational models. They're broad, general purpose models that can be used in a lot of different ways rather than focusing on discrete, specific, narrower uses.

And open ai itself has made some products you mentioned chat GPT that work off of these general models. Dolly also works off of its general language model. But there are other companies in this space as well. I heard you talking about Google. Google was one of the pioneers

of this, uh this space. There's a number of startups and they're attracting more and more attention in terms of funding from venture capitalists as well as other techn companies, also including Google, and so we looked at some of them. They include Anthropic cohere, um Ai, twenty one, Stability AI.

And if these names sound familiar to your listeners, because a number of them have been linked with large funding grounds in the last couple of weeks, you broke the story what seems like months ago now, but it was weeks on this ten billion dollar investment from Microsoft into open Ai, and then you know, the companies confirm and multibillion dollar investment. But what followed was what seemed like a series of quick steps for Microsoft to kind of

ingest the underlying technology into its own offerings. What are some of the highlights of what Microsoft's actually done with its investment into open ai so far. So, they already have a programming tool called Copilot, which uses an open Ai again another subset of GPT, which is meant for programmers. Last week, they announced a product that's meant to write emails for salespeople using the language generation capabilities of open Ai.

And they also announced that the top tier of their team's chat product, which is the one that competes with Slack, that that's also going to start using open Ai technology in order to provide meeting notes after the meeting. Now you mentioned before, Google is getting into the chat GPT space with its bard There is also a Microsoft event

tomorrow that was announced today. Microsoft will not say what it's out, but the you know, the belief people people feel that it is likely to be, you know, potentially an announcement of their own use of chat GPT in being searched. So we're waiting to see if that's work turns up tomorrow. Well beyond the specifics, I saw Sam Altman tweet a selfie with Microsoft's chief, So I'm guessing that that you're on the right track. I guess we'll find out in twenty four hours time. Bloomberg's Dina Bass

terrific reporting. Thank you very much. Now, what impact would generative AI have on your jobs? While AI is expected to eventually replace some jobs in financial services, media, legal technology sectors, respondents of Bloomberg's latest m Live pulser, they say not so soon. More than two thirds of almost three respondents, mainly in the financial sector, themselves, didn't view

their own jobs at being at risk anytime soon. Results were also pretty split on whether respondents were even interested in investing in this new tech at work. Most investors appear not to use any kind of AI and are not even considering using AI to help them invest. Twelve percent said they used one, and just twenty seven percent of respondents said that they were planning to. So let's keep the conversation going and bringing David Leslie because I want to talk about the ethical side of the AI

conversation it's role in moving technology forward. David Leslie is the director of Ethics and Responsible Innovation Research at the al Ensuring Institute, a kind of mainstay of the UK's work around artificial intelligence. M let's start off with the

year so far. Are you waking up every morning energized about what's happening in AI or are you yourself losing sleep because of the potential concerns When we consider what's happened with chat gpt or the last few months, we really do need to take part about the hastiness, the speed before safety that's really kind of driven the release

of UH chat Gypt into the into the world. UH. We we know that researchers have easily gotten around the preventative content filters of chat Gypt to produce a cyber security threats such as new strands of polymorphic malware. They've been able to create fraudulent fishing campaigns and info steelers. UM. We've also seen the potential for chat chypt and other large language models too in a sense create fire hoses disinformation and propaganda. UH and that that can flood the

digital public square with lies and alternative float facts. And so I would say, there's a lot of exciting things going on, but there's a lot of reason to uh for us to be concerned. We're showing on the screen, uh, just how rapid the rollout is from research to develop and then too new product launch across a number of names and platforms in the world of AI. You know, it's been astonishing tracking the headlines of how quickly new products and new names are born. Is that pace dangerous

or is that just the reality of innovation? I would hesitate to say it's the reality of innovation. I would say that we really do need to avoid what's been going on, which is this kind of shock and awe irresponsibility of bringing things to the market with with with increasing speed. Uh. We we've seen the move, move fast and break things attitude before, but this attitude um is becoming perhaps more of a concern as the scale of

the potential consequences become wider and deeper into society. And I think that we we really need to we need to press the pause button a bit when it comes to uh, the acceleration of the technologies so I guess that the debate moves to who should police this? You know, when you reflect on the Alanturing Institute's work around this area, your work in ethics. What's interesting is how many papers have been published by the likes of open AI guidelines

that the industry themselves are put forward. Should they be the ones to do that or is there a need for very quickly a conversation around third party oversight. We absolutely need third party oversight when it comes to these systems, especially these highly impactful systems that will affect large populations.

Now that's not to say that the practices of the innovators in designing, developing, and deploying these systems shouldn't involve strong exc anti practices of impact, assessment of transparency, of end to end accountability of mitigation. But these things simply must be subject to the oversight of third party bodies

now regulators and perhaps certification schemes. All right, Thanks to David Leslie, director of Ethics and Response to Innovation Research at the Allen Touring Institution, coming up, micro Strategy weighs deepening It's Bitcoin bet with a Future's Play. Bloomberg's exclusive interview with the executive chairman Michael Sailor, that's all. Next, this is Bloomberg Finance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, said it's temporarily suspending deposits and withdrawals of US dollars using

bank accounts. The suspension will start Wednesday, according to a Finance spokesperson. No reason was given for the suspension, and bank transfers using other fiat currencies such as euros, will not be impacted. The spokesperson says Finance will work to restart the service for US dollars soon. Sticking with crypto micro strategy, chairman and co founder Michael Sailor says bitcoin will outperform other asset classes and says his company is

a levied bitcoin play for crypto enthusiasts. Earlier, Bloomberg's Katie Greifeld and Remained Bostick spoke with Sailor about his business. Our strategy is to acquire a whole bitcoin. We do it through cash flows and through equity and debt issuance. And that's that's amount of to about a four billion dollar investment on our part over the past two and a half years. So my role is the executive chairman, is to oversee our capital markets activity or bitcoin strategy,

and a lot of education, investor relations, some evangelism. The CEO of find Lee was my number two for many, many years, and he runs the enterprise software business which sells enterprise software to thousands of large corporations in twenty seven countries. So let's talk about actually accumulating more bit line from here, because if we look at the end of twenty two, micro Strategy had about forty four million

dollars in cash. So when it comes to actually getting your hands on more bitcoin, is that probably going to tilt towards debt and equity issuance. You know, we we've tried different things. We've issued a senior debt junk bonds when we thought that was a creative. We've done convertible bonds, two of them when that was a creative. We've issued equity.

We currently have a five hundred million dollar at the market shelf registration that's open, and we sold about forty four million dollars worth of equity and so some of something as we do that, and we've also borrowed against

the bitcoin. We have more than a hundred thousand dollars a hundred thousand bitcoin that are unpledged that we can borrow against, and we use some of that to borrow twitter million from sober Gate and a bitcoin back long Michael, obviously a lot of attention on your company because of this full ray into crypto. A lot of folks have embraced it, but there are a lot of folks are also wondering why buy micro Strategy in the place of just buying bitcoin or the crypto in and of itself.

What's the advantage of going through you. Well, a lot of institutional investors aren't able to own bitcoin is property, and they don't have broker dealer relationships that will allow them to buy the underlying digital commodity. So for them, they could buy micro Strategy and a couple of minutes and a phone call and they can do it for

their prime broker. And our stock is marginalble. So some some people are using us as a gateway because it's just a simple way for them to get exposure, although others are interested in the capital structure because the company has a levered bitcoin play. Because we've got about two point four billion dollars of debt at a blended interest rate of just a couple of percent so it's a it's a cheap effective way to get levered bitcoin exposure.

Some people just want to trade the volatility, and so if you want to go along bitcoin where a choice. If you want to go short bitcoin, you're a choice. If you want to trade or arbitrage. All the derivatives were a simple choice. And I have gone through the steps of k y seeing with the bitcoin exchange it could take you three months to actually get the account to trade and by the underlying asset, so UH and and some people have don't have a mandate even own

the commodity. So we really meet a need for institutional investors that want to trade securities with exposure to the crypto market. Have you given any consideration or had any meaningful discussions about whether it would be more appropriate to effectively spin off this crypto side of the business from the software side of the business. Well, it's really we're the only operating company UH that has actually got a

bitcoin strategy. So the fact that we have an operating concern, a going concern that generates cash flows and stable revenue that is not correlated to the crypto space is a benefit. We're able to use our stable enterprise software business as a basis to borrow billions of dollars that weren't able to invest in bitcoin. So combining an enterprise software company with stable cash flows with a bitcoin strategy is fairly unique. The software business has benefited because our employees have stock

options and are and so they've benefited financially. Our turnover has never been lower, so more rallides really good, and awareness of the software business has never been higher. But of course, as a bitcoin acquisition vehicle, we have a lot of flexibility that you wouldn't have as an e t F because that's an SEC forty company and we're an operating business. We can take on leverage, we could trade volatility, we can sweep cash flows, we can issue

junk bonds, etcetera. So we wouldn't We would would not want to separate the two strategies. It would be deluded to either. So I want to get to the software business itself, but I want to talk a little bit more about the bitcoin holdings because something interesting happens. At the end of December, you actually sold bitcoin for the first time. It was a very small amount, and I believe that you bought back that amount and then some just a couple of days later. So have a two

part of gear. First, all, why did you sell in December and do you have any more sales plans? Well, we were, you know, with bitcoin, because it's property, you could sell it and then you could buy it back the next day and you're not subject to wash trading rules that would be applied to securities. So it's a

more favorable tax treatment. As of now, we had some tax taxable gains and we're able to generate about a thirty four million dollar tax loss which we take to carry back against known capital gains, and so that would be a tax benefit to the company to the extent we can apply that. Um If you have billions of dollars of an asset on your balance sheet, you're thinking, what are the tax benefits if you were to able, if you were able to harvest those tax losses, would

they be good for the shareholders? And theoretically we have billion dollars or more of tax losses we might harvest in the future. That was my Crow Strategy executive Chairman Michael Sailor time for going viral. The Grammys have been trending worldwide on social media, proving that the awards shows that's still relevant, but that's not necessarily the case. During the event, we pulled our Twitter followers and how they watched the Grammys last night, and well, respondents said they

didn't watch. Here with the actual data, Bloomberg's Lucas Shure, who leads our coverage of the entertainment industry, I mean, Lucas is interesting. We were expecting potentially a rebound for the Grammys from the pandemic era. Did we get one. We we got a slate rebound. So the preliminary figures

are about twelve million people watched the Grammys. That's up from more in the in between nine and ten million last year, and up from a lower couple of years ago of about nine million um, but well below where they were before. You know, prior to the pandemic, I think the edition had about eighteen million viewers. As recently as five or six years ago, you had about twenty five million people watching. So the audience for the Grammys is, you know, half what it was many years ago. You

saw the results of our poll. That's one audience, right, respondents saying they didn't watch at all, but the other options were cable or streaming. I guess then the conversation goes to how on networks and platforms kind of adapting to seize on how people are actually consuming events like the Grammys. Well a couple of ways. One is that the these awards shows now tend to be available both

on live TV and on streaming. So it was on a CBS, but it's also on Paramount Plus, so if you're someone who who does not pay for cable or satellite, you can get it that way. Of course, Paramount Plus not as big as as Netflix or Disney Plus, but

it has tens of millions of subscribers. And the other thing is is obviously clips and moments from these events spread across social media, so that's you know, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok and the like you probably had, you know, our our own Astley Carmen, who was who was in the press room asked um god him blanking on his name is embarrassing, but he asked producer Jack Anthon Off a question about Live Nation, and that got shared all across

social media this afternoon. Actually, Common also writing about Beyonce breaking the record for Grammy's wins, but she didn't win a top award. Yeah, look, this has been a trend with the Grammys, particularly with black artists in that kind of fall under hip hop and R and B, as they they win a ton of awards in the genre specific categories. In Beyonce's case, she won both in R and B and Electronic and Dance, but they don't win the Big Three, which our Album of the Year, Record

of the Year, in Song and the Year. So remember with Beyonce, she now has won more Grammys than any artist in the history of the of the event, yet she has only won one of those Big Three awards, Song of the Year, and she won it once. You compare that to an Adele who's won Album of the Year twice. Alright, blame Banks Lucas. Sure a busy Sunday

night for you and the team. Thank you well. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology Tuesday, we have Microsoft's corporate vice president and consumer Chief marketing officer joining us on the program. Don't forget check out our podcasts. So much to recap from the show. This is Bloomberg