We're from Marhart where Innovation, Money and power Collie in Silicon Vallet NBN. This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow.
I'm Caroline Hyde at Bloomberg's World headquarters in New York and Imed Ludlow in San Francisco.
This is Bloomberg Technology.
Coming up, we'll discuss the state of the crypto market tech managers with us the CEO and founder of bitcoin payment app Strike.
And we'll look at how artificial intelligence is changing the labor force, especially for the heavy hit tech industry, which has already lost two hundred thousand employees this year due to layoffs.
And let's talk more about AI.
We'll break down the Bloomberg big take on how Silicon Valley is playing catch up with Microsoft when it comes to the dominance in artificial intelligence. That says the tech giant nears a new record high a stock. I know you're going to be diving into ED, but first let's go a little bit broader to two crypto lenders links
in South Korea. They've holded withdrawals in quick successions, sparking of course for the deja vu here the termal the market faced Celsius, for example, back in twenty twenty two.
However, investors seem to be shrugging off.
The risk of contagion, joining us for insight someone who knows bitcoin really well. Digital asset market make of course, Jackmanners Strike, founder and CEO Strike, a mobile payments app that uses Bitcoin network to facilitate fast, cheap global transactions and actually allows users to send receive money currency including bitcoin, without intermediaries, without fees. I'm interested, in particular your own move to self custody, Jack of late, Is this, yes,
about reducing counterparty risk? I understand there's a lot of benefits to being your own custody, some of the products that you can therefore offer your customers. But how much does that reflect some of the worry in the ecosystem at large?
First of all, Hello, nice to see you both. I hope you missed me.
Yeah.
So the vision for the company we believe strictly in bitcoin. We think, and I think personally that bitcoin is the innovation of digital currency, of cryptocurrency, of blockchain. There's bitcoin and there's everything else, and so US as a company, we're laser focused on being a global Bitcoin provider and providing financially impressive tools on top of the tech, and so we made a move to take all of our custody,
a lot of our KYC process in house. We do not want to work with other parties because we want to do it the best in the world. So we've been it's a really long process to get all of the licenses and comply with regulation to be a money service business in the United States, and we're really proud to take all that in house so that we could be the best in the world at bitcoin not crypto. And that's why because we think we could do it better than everybody else, but we're going to do it ourselves.
Jack, Good morning to you from San Francisco. Bitcoin and not create. So it's really interesting our crypto team here at Bloomberg. We're writing overnight that crypto share a bitcoin sorry share of the total crypto market is at a twenty month high, and there's a lot of caution about the broader market away from bitcoin.
What does that tell you?
It tells me that markets are efficient, that the world is figuring out where true innovation orhere true value is. I mean, if I'm being honest with you, guys, crypto is worth zero. It's just not realized as that yet, which takes time. This is a new industry, it's a
new technology. But I think everyone's waking up to the fact that the only thing that delivered a technical innovation and made conscious ground forward for humanity as far as money is a technology is Bitcoin, and regulators are realizing that, speculators are realizing that, hedge funds are realizing that, businesses are realizing that, and so I don't know if.
That's what that means.
The number still seems a bit off because it's not one hundred percent bitcoin, but I think the world could take its time.
It's okay.
I don't know, Jack.
Many would say smart contracts as a signal development. Many people would like eath, even if perhaps some of the smaller old coins at the moment are under some concerns around overall regulatory impact. I'm interested, though, Jack, like many would say, Look, where is the real use case at the moment for many of these old coins and other areas of crypto. Your use case of bitcoin largely is
it remittance? And how much are we seeing that being adopted by the emerging markets where many do see rampant inflation. That's really what the calling of bitcoin has been for many Yeah, I mean.
We let customers buying sell bitcoin, and we use the technology to improve payments. I mean you're talking about there's a digital public infrastructure for payments. It's going to a moment of silence for that. That's insane. Wift is not public infrastructure for the world. Visas not public infrastructure for the world. It's like a park that we all share, a public utility that we get to all utilize for the benefits of our own lives. It's owned by no one, accessible
by everyone. We're taking new digital public infrastructure, which, by the way, guys think of it like the Internet. The Internet is global, open, public infrastructure for the world to communicate really really powerful thing, really really enhanced humanity, really changed lives, and really empowered fundamental human rights and human freedoms, creamous speech. Bitcoin is very similar for money and for property rights, and so we use digital public infrastructure to
make financial transactions faster, cheaper, more global, more inclusive. It's really cool stuff. And I don't think it's that complicated your smart contract comment, I want to get to because I think it's super simple, it's super known, it's super understood, it's very sound and yeah, that's exactly what we do.
Jack, We appreciate it.
We don't have time for moments of silence on this program. It's a limited show with commercial breaks. Let's talk about real world use cases and also the kind of competitive landscape with strike. I noticed that coinbase announced a partnership with blocks. Bit Key itself is about the use of self custody. Wallet's recognize that as competition. What do you make of that partnership in the context of the work you're doing.
No.
I think the way we think about the next ten, twenty, thirty, forty fifty years of this industry is it's not a winner take all or winner take most. In fact, it's implied the opposite is that if a new network of constituents that are delivering value to the world through monetary services are to be developed, it implies that a network has more than one right or else it wouldn't be a network. And so I love to see we love to see other businesses and companies join us on the
Bitcoin and the Lightning network. It makes our services more valuable. It enhances the network effects and the economies of scale that come with this new open digital infrastructure. So I'm a huge fan of Jack Dorsey and block and all they're doing, and that's great. More people are gonna be able to buy bitcoin on coin based self custody, and hopefully coinbas can then move out of the Lightning network. That'd be awesome.
He's a fellow Bitcoin maximum List.
I'm interested Jack in ultimately the overall regulatory overhang at the moment, particularly in the US, the issues that yes, you've moved to self custody, but many would say it happened in tandem when there was warriors, rumors about the bancucy of your former custodian, these sorts of issues weaknesses that seem to be in the rest of crypto. Does that ultimately damage its adoption longer term?
Do you think? Is it frustrating or is it an opportunity?
Well, let me ask you a question back damage witch adoption, crypto adoption or bitcoin adoption two different.
Things Bitcoin too, because I think they will get caught up in the same narrative. Bitcoin is still ultimately deemed cryptocurrency.
Yeah, totally, No, I think it's this is a great cleansing. It's really phenomenal. I mean, listen, guys, the SEC.
Their job is to theoretically.
And I'm just explaining what's going on. The SEC's job is to protect the ethics and morality in the United States financial markets, and the notion that they would have an issue with everything. But bitcoin does a lot. It doesn't seem like a very ethical moral like it's a problem,
and so how do we fix that. We go through what we're going through now, People that shouldn't be in business go bankrupt, Things that are illegal and im moral and unethical should be required to disclose and give proper transparency to the American public.
And so I think all of this is good for bitcoin.
I think where this leaves us is values going to accrue where it's real and where I think it's real, and where I think it's moral, where I think it's ethical, where I think it's innovative, where I think it's better, faster, cheaper, stronger.
It's bitcoin.
And so the path on how we get there is always going to be complicated, and that's the part of free markets, which America loves deeply, right, And so I think we're just going through free market discovery of what's truly innovative in a new technology sector. We've been through before in the Internet, and we're seeing similar patterns now and I think that that's becoming abundantly clear that it's bitcoin.
So on a day to day basis, if you're tracking a chart, maybe it looks choppy, but over a long term trajectory, I mean bitcoin is being widely considered the best version of money.
Communities or de widely might be taking issue with, but certainly by some jack Man As, we thank you so much for bringing us your perspective. Really great to have you the Strike founder there. Coming up, well, we're going to be discussing how fresh Works is bringing the power of AI to its customers, how India in fact is joining the AI race. We'll talk about all of that
with the CEO of fresh Works next. Plus, let's just quick look in on Adobe, the photoshop maker hour' earnings tonight, the company's artificial intelligence plan and it's deal with Figma that's going to be front and center in its second quarter revenue expected.
Look, we're looking at the direction.
Of travel for how revenue continues to be perhaps generated by generator of AI.
Rough at one point eight percent of a Bloomberg.
The most likely outcome for Europe trying to regulate it is they basically prevent the industrial revolution from happening in Europe and it remains a place where it's very nice to take my daughters on vacation, but maybe it's not part of the future of the world innovation wise if they're not very careful.
Is the one possible upside or brex that.
You could talk about is that maybe Europe commits suicide with its regulation and stops in a development there, and maybe the you know, UK gets it right and doesn't do.
So sunshine over there in Europe. Eight Partners founding partner and Palentae co founder Joe Lonsdale, speaking on the sidelines of the Founder's Forum in London, essentially saying Europe's making a mistake in wanting to regulate AI. Now stick with all of this because beyond regulation, another key concerns going to be, well, how it affects you and I our.
Jobs, the displacement are worry that.
All the greater tech industry has already seen what two hundred thousand employees laid off this year and could that even be affected further and the fact that the machines can be doing it.
Let's bring in Bloomberg's Ellen Hewitt for.
More on all of this, and we've already heard it discussed IBM, for example, putting numbers to it, eight hundred back office rolls could be impacted by AI. Are you seeing the pipeline change when it comes to people looking at tech and wanting a job there.
So we are seeing the pipeline change because you know, young people who want to join tech aren't seeing these layoff numbers. You know, two hundred thousand people lost their job already in twenty twenty three. More happened in twenty twenty two, and they're thinking, maybe this job isn't as secure as I once thought it was. I don't know that that's happening yet because of AI. And so that's kind of an interesting question that people are talking about
right now. It's just because of the economy. But when these CEOs are sending out these big memos explaining why they're laying off so many workers, they're often citing AI not as a job replacement. That's saying we need to shift our business to focus more on how AI can enhance our business, and that might mean cutting some jobs and hiring more AI or machine learning engineers.
We certainly had that from Meta. We've heard it from plenty of other founders. At the moment when we have seen a ce change culturally of people thinking it was you know, I get a computer ability when I go to university, I get some great instruction, and I've got a job made. Ultimately, are people now trying to work out the ways in which they can work with big tech? Are they more interesting going to startups?
For example? There's all this talk of silver.
Linings that people won't be employed by big tech, but my goodness, they'll go and start their own thing, are they?
I think overall people are nervous right now, even the companies that seemed safe Google, Facebook, even these big startups like Stripe. You know, these private companies that are essentially public. They've been around so long and are so big. These companies are slashing jobs, and not just you know, often recruiters are the first to go when a company isn't hiring anymore, but they're cutting you know, people who have
been software engineers at this company for ten years. There's a fear that's happening in the job market in Silicon Valley. I know people who aren't leaving jobs that they don't like, which they normally would leave because they're concerned that they won't be able to find a good one if they do.
Hey, and beyond just the layoffs.
I get the headline of the layoffs, but how is AI altering the jobs market in terms of the type of talent that startups are going out for. Your out in New York, you usually hear with me in broader Silicon Valley. You know, there is a lot of excitement right now and a lot of hiring as people pivot towards what is in vogue.
I mean, if you're a software engineer with experience in artificial intelligence machine learning, you are in high demand. And we even saw that show up in some stats. I talk to someone who runs a database that collects compensation information. They said that senior software engineers with AI machine learning backgrounds are getting paid salaries on average twelve percent higher
than senior software engineers without that relevant experience. I think the money is definitely going toward people who say that they can help these companies, you know, pivot toward AI or use AI to enhance their business.
I think that's.
One thing that's happening. And then another thing is, look, if you play around with JATGBT and you try to use it to code, I think you pretty quickly see that while.
It can't do the job on its own, it.
Can pretty quickly replace a couple extra programmers that you might need to build out a certain product. I know I have a friend who's building an app on his own. He would have hired a developer instead, he's just using chat GPT because it can code, and it can correct its own code. All he has to do is kind of tell it what he wants, and he knows enough to be able to make it work that way. It's not hard to imagine how this could replace jobs.
A little bit down the line.
All right, Blimberg Zellen here, all things start up, all Things Technology Worker, Thank you. All right, let's stick with AI and bring in Garish Matribute and CEO of Customer Service Productivity startup fresh Works. They call fresh Works the sales force of India. And I don't know whether Garish you're going to say that's fair or not, but what you're doing is taking generative AI tools and integrating it into existing suite.
Freddy, how does that work?
Good morning, Ed and Carolyn, thanks for having me on the show. At fresh Works, we've always believed in building software for the fortune five million, not just for the fortune five hundred and me have been on the Freddie journey for over five years now because we all know how AI was changing business, and we are solely taking the same idea of generative AI to democratize the access for generative AI to fortune five million companies and specifically
in the areas of customer experience and employee experience. That's our mission now.
The question is how does it help the customers in real terms? You know, we dangle the words generative AI in front of everything at the moment, Gearish tell us how in practice this helps your customer base.
Okay, I'll give you two clear examples. If you take customer service, which is our largest business. We've all seen from the days of call center and IVR how businesses have always wanted our miation. So generative AI will bring that conversational style of customer self service for all of us. And more importantly, we believe in a human augmented AI,
which is I think of copilot. So we are building an AI assistant for salespeople, support people, marketing people, so and so think of this new world where your employees can become even more productive, where they don't have to do the mundane boarding protein tasks and they can move on to doing higher productivity tasks, and that is going to make life a lot easier for all of us.
So you're thinking more of an augmented human rather than one that's replaced garrish. What about coding yourself? Are you not having to hire as many people as you ultimately thought you would have to, because we're just hearing from Ellen about how you can do basic coding using tails such as CHATCHYBT.
So I think developer productivity will definitely increase and that will allow us to do a lot more and do it faster. And you will still continue to hire developers, but maybe the skill set of the developers that you hire may change a little bit. As you are discussing there is more AI in demand, but we believe that overall developer pro activity will go up and that should help us do a lot more and there's going to be plenty of new opportunities for us to kind of solve.
What's interesting is, of course, the AI hype that has today, for example, pushed Microsoft have a higher potentially at the highest record high for the stock. Ever, I'm looking at your share price and when it's languished to be Frank has picked up of late, but nowhere near the highs of previous years. And I'm interested, Grrishan, whether you feel that ultimately our companies are eating the AI lunch, whether that's rightly so or not. So it is perhaps the
hype too much around certain names. Why hasn't yours been caught up in it?
So we are more in the business productivity software. We are not in the business of hyping up AI. So we all know what's happened to tech stocks. And we are a young public company in the process of building credibility with the public investors. And we have shown like the last six eight quarters of consistent credible growth and we will continue to execute and I think the markets will eventually catch up to where the efficiencies are.
Curious, I want to ask you about India.
Sam Altman was in India who was talking about the opportunity for AI. You've expanded your operations and talent pool there. Some of what sam Altman said also invoked to respond, what did you make of it?
Well, first of all, I think that in jen AI is a great opportunity for India with we just have crossed over five million developers in India. I think the number was three million a few years ago. So this is going to be a pivotal moment. And you have to understand that from a demographic standpoint, India has a very young workforce and who's hungry to learn and there's a lot of aspiration. And I was also amazed to see that universities in India have already started launching ai
am a LINJENEVII courses. So you I think this is going to be a phenomenal opportunity for India and we are going to see a lot of startups focusing on that coming from India.
Well, you're a prominent VC as well as being the founder of this particular company. Gerish, we thank you so much for spending some time in askurishrom Ratham Boutham, your CEO of Fresh Works.
Time for talking tech TikTok.
Parent byte Dance is drawing up plans to build an app capable of providing multiple services. The everything app model is popular in China thanks to ten cents we Chat. Byte Dance aims to offer a range of services from food delivery to travel bookings plus. TikTok CEO says it plans to invest billions of dollars in Southeast Asia over the next year three to five years. In fact, it's part of an effort to strengthen the presence of its
hit video app in the region. And speaking of tikto a bipartisan group of US lawmakers reintroduce legislation that restricts social media companies like TikTok from sending sensitive user data to foreign adversaries. The bill doesn't explicitly mention TikTok. Welcome back to Number Technology. I'm Ed Ludlow here in San Francisco.
I'm Caroline hid in New York. Let's go back to the world of AI.
Yeah, the topic of the day, week, month, and year AI. So let's talk AI and data with AWS Vice president Milan Thompson Bukovic, who leads some of the company's largest scale data services. The way that I explain it is, if you're an AWS Cloud customer who is either storing or processing data, that's your responsibility.
That is my rema. Thank you for having me here.
You're very welcome.
Why then, are you so focused on generative AI?
Well, I have to tell you, ed ouraws.
Customers are asking us, how do I chieve change my data strategy with GENAI?
How do I make sure my GENI.
Strategy is using my data to differentiate because that is what customers want.
I think we've learned in recent weeks and months that training models on the thing that you want to.
Reflect your own data is key.
There is an argument that Amazon or AWS strong on AI machine learning behind on generative AI.
What do you make of that argument?
Well, I don't think that's the case actually, ed I think right now we have over one hundred thousand customers that are doing all different types of mL, including generative AI on AWS today.
And if you look.
At the customers that are pivoting quickly and they're launching with GENI capabilities today, they're launching them on a shared data set with the data strategy and the mL tools that Amazon provides. So I'll give you one example. Snap recently launched a new feature called my AI and so snapchatter is all over the world can use my AI to ask questions about what to word, would job interview or what movie to see? And my AI is running
a generative AI. Many of the models for what Snap is using is using Amazon S three and their own data that they're training off of Amazon S three as well as Amazon EC two for the training.
Itself, and they were able to move so nimbly because they had a cloud based model. How are you having those conversations with companies that aren't yet using cloud based model? Are you seeing the promise of generative AI the need to get into it as false tracking?
Some of that sales process went on absolutely.
That question of what is my data strategy and how does it help me move to gen AI is just top of mind.
For CTOs and CIOs everywhere.
If you look at some of the customers of AWS, if you look at Cox Automotive. Cox Automotive has been transforming the auto purchase experience with Kelly Bluebook and Autotrader, and they have been doing a data like a centralized data strategy model for many years now, and they started because of business analytics, but they found that when they centralize their data with their data strategy on Amazon S three, they were able to move that much more quickly into
machine learning and computer vision. And now when you're looking at an image of a car on a Cox property, that computer vision models. Well, model will tell you if that's a shadow in the picture or it's actually a scratch, and that is an incredible, incredibly important.
Part of the auto purchase experience.
And so those customers need to start with the right data strategy, just like Cox Automotive did and in order to move as quickly as they can to all these new technologies.
Informs the machine learning.
How is it thosets of examples that get a potential customer coming to you rather than Microsoft, because it feels like Microsoft managed to just sort of take some of the ultrogen out of the room when it came to generative AI.
How you fool back against that?
Well, the things that we do, Caroline is really to just listen to our customers. And we have over twenty five machine learning services today and the latest thing that we have introduced is Amazon Bedrock.
So again listening to customers. For us, we know data has gravity.
We know that our customers want to bring their machine learning models to the data. And I'll tell you why that's the case. If you think about what data a customer has, it's their business data, but it's a lot of their customer's data and for data governance reasons, that they do not want to take their customer data and bring it over to another provider and have that train off site and off host and out of their control.
And so with Bedrock, when we're training or we're.
Giving the capabilities for customers to pick any open source model or to use Titan, the Amazon model, they're training their data on a local custom copy.
They're able to integrate with.
Stage Maker today to train off data that's in their data lake.
And I think that is.
A huge, huge differentiator for AWS because we have hundreds of thousands of data lakes running on Amazon S three today and customers want to start from there and not spin off all these data silos.
Just for Jenai.
They need to use their data to differentiate and to do it safely with the data governance that their CIOs need.
Milan first half of this year, AWS customers were cost optimizing.
Has that continued well.
I think the keyword there ed is optimizing. When I talk to customers, and we hear this from customers all the time, it's all about prioritization. I think that's true for every company in the world right now.
And so what our customers are doing is.
They're prior to what are the most important investments to make, and for many of them, it's GENAI and how they take advantage of it. And so they're pivoting what they're spending on the cloud with AWS to focus on that and maybe deprioritizing, which just means do later some of the other initiatives.
It kind of crystallize that for us in the context of generative AI, because if you're an aw's cloud customer, that can mean many things. They're pulling back in some areas, but are they tuning up in generative AI.
Well, when I talked about that shared data set, and that is such an accelerator because when our customers tune up, as you say, on generative AI.
They can do it that much faster.
Let's take patre duty, so patro duty automates instant response. And just recently they launched three new generative AI capabilities, and their ability to launch that was based on the fact that they're training their data now on a huge data set in Amazons three that's also being used for analytics and other prediction based machine learning. So those customers that are able to pivot, they don't have to come
up with a new data strategy. They just pivot and they go fast on JENNI because they're starting from that data strategy.
Caroline, if you just peel back behind generatord AI, just get rid of that word for a second.
There are some pretty cool things happening.
People are building things software with new use cases.
And we were just hearing about my AI from Snapchat. You were talking about cops my land.
Ultimately, though, what is like the coolest thing that you've seen built that just wouldn't have been possible a year ago? Because I feel we get so caught up in the hype, But actually a lot of this stuff, as you say, is machine learning AI that perhaps was already predictive in nature. What is ultimately actually new that you've seen that couldn't have been done previously?
Well, Caroline, I have to say, I have three children, and if you asked me to pick my favorite child, I don't think I could do that. That is much the same with so many any of the new innovations that are coming out everywhere. I think, you know, if I look at the my AI capability for snap I think that's that's really transformative.
In the social media space. We have so many different examples.
I think Canva is another one Canvas, a graphics tool, and it has over one hundred and thirty five million monthly active users and they are generating imagery off of text props. That's I think that's pretty amazing and I think it's really cool what AWS has with code Whisper.
You know, as somebody who builds software services myself, the idea that you can generate code from existing code and comments automatically, I think is just going to be transformative for how we build software in the future.
That's what we want to talk about building things.
AWS Vice president Mylan Thompson Bookovec thank you very much. Now coming out Tesla offering three months of free fast charging in the US, with a goal of clearing inventory of Model threesidands before the end of the quarter. Much more on that next Real Quick watching shares of software one. The company's board said. Bain Capital's three point two billion dollar offer to take the IT Services provide a private
undervalues the company. The latest heard when the private equity firms attempt to buy that big European technau.
This is Bloomberg.
This is a North American charging standard or NACS connector, and it was invented by Tesla, and this is a CCS connector and CCS stands for Combined Charging system and it was used by almost everybody else. Dad's until big news. O, hey Tesla, this is Ford and GM.
Yeah, we're joining team NACS.
Ford and GM announced they'd adopt NACS in future models and they get access to the Tesla charger network, and that essentially created a US wide standard. Charging Providers like charge Point, EVgo, Rulebox, and Blink followed suit, saying they'd offer technology that works with Tesla's connectors and offer CCS.
Here's the history.
Twenty eleven, automakers like four, GM, Volkswagen, and BMW say they'll collaborate.
On the combined Charging system.
Their goal use CCS to standardize how evs are charged in the US and Europe. Meanwhile, Tesla develops its own proprietary technology that's been used since twenty twelve when.
The Model Less went into production.
Those NACS connectors are lighter, approximately half the size, and can transfer more power than CCS. The reality is Tesla's NACS network is already bigger than the CCS network in America, but there's still some concerns. Advocates for CCS say that NACS is not open source and it has not been peer reviewed.
For now, it.
Seems to be a case of Tesla's way or all right for more, let's bring in Bloomberg's to a whole. That's the context of the last week, Dana the news Tesla offering free charging.
What do we know? Well, it's not free.
I mean, you know, Ford and GM customers are going to have to pay for it. But supercharging has become a big value add for Tesla, and I think we've seen consumers now you know, they're no longer worried about range anxiety so much as they are if I go to a charging station, isn't going to work because we've seen a lot of reliability studies out about broken chargers
and that's just not okay. Like we're in this big transition to electric vehicles, being able to know that you're going to be able to charge when you go to your destination is a big point for consumers.
Meanwhile, they're still trying to sell that caused Tesla as well as being able to beef up their revenue streams and the forward looking nature of being able to you know, share its own capacity to charge. What are they doing with all the Model threes that they are not able to shift right.
Now, right, so they are offering free supercharging for three months. Anyone who takes a Model three takes livery of a Model three before June thirtieth, which conveniently is the end of the second quarter. So you're now start of seeing supercharger be a lever that Tesla is pulling to kind of help spur demand as they're trying to clear that inventory.
It's a sort of what price with that? Ultimately, what are you saving?
I think it really depends on how much you drive. I mean, the important thing is that most people who own an electric car charge overnight at home. Supercharging is really just for those longer road traditions.
Yeah, but it's not.
I mean, it used to be free when Tesla was first a company, and now now you know it's it's a it's a cost, but it's it's free if you buy a car before.
The end of the month.
I thought, so, Donna, the story with Tesla's kind of changed. You always nail it and you wrote that the charger or the network is Tesla's shrewdest product.
What do you mean by that?
I just think they had the foresight very early on, going over a decade now that charging was going to be really key to consumer adoption, and you know, the CCS standard is kind of like a standard by committee, it was very slow moving. Tesla was like, we can't wait coming out with the model S. We're going to
make our own. And they have really chosen very good locations and they have the telematics and the data from how people to charge to know where they need to add more chargers, where people charge the longest, what the biggest stops are. I mean, the Harris Rants supercharger station has ninety eight stalls. That's the big station on the
route between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. And you know, other car companies, I mean they just serve I think recognizing that the superchargers are better, they're faster, they work, and like Tesla maintains them, whereas like with these other charging companies that are out there, like it's not really clear who maintains them once they're installed, and the user
interface isn't as good. So you know what's interesting is this is this dominance is not the case in Europe and China, but in the US for sure, like the supercharger network is seen as the best out there, which is why Ford and GM have just joined it.
Donahow, great to have you here in EYL. Thank people coming and spending some time with us.
Really appreciate it. Now tonight's episode of The Circuit, Emily Chang sits down with Open aiyes Mira Mariti, the company's chief technology officer, and really just gets to grips with some of the potential risks the rewards of a world with widespread artificial intelligence.
Through certainly a risk that.
When we have this AI systems that are able to set to their own goals, they decide that their goals are not aligned with ours and they do not benefit from having us around and could lead to human execution.
That is a risk.
The Circuit.
To watch more of Emily Chang's interview with Miramurati, opens Ai CTO and Read Hoffman actually, who was an early Open Ai investor, watched The Circuit Emily Chang tonight ten pm in New York on Bloomberg Television, or stream it at eight pm Eastern on Bloomberg Originals. Now much of Silicon Valley is playing catch up in the AI race, chasing after Microsoft, which has been investing in the hottest startup on the market open Ai since twenty nineteen. Now
it's preparing to cash in on that investment. It's today's big take, and joining us for more is one of the co buy lines on that big take.
Dina bass this in Business Week.
Talk to me about the leapfrogging Google years and years of research, but didn't want to go towards commercialization. Microsoft this scattergun approach, multiple chains looking at ai.
Clippy is in there along the way. Now everything's changed.
A lot of the difference is Microsoft's ceostat Inadella's decision to really bet on open Ai and to premise a lot of Microsoft's strategy to underpin a lot of its products, the entire load of products that's been unveiling in the last six months on the open Ai technology. That's a really unusual move for Microsoft. Microsoft has you know, we spoke to a lot of people inside and outside the company.
The company is really never before relied on an outside company to underpin so significantly, it's bet on a major platform shift such as as ai is expected to be. So that's that's a real difference, and it's made a huge difference for Microsoft because if you go back a couple of years when they're Microsoft had a lot of AI efforts going on, but they weren't amounting too much in terms of products or in terms of a coherence strategy.
The Big Take also poses questions about open Ai, whether it's actually the hottest startup out there or actually, in practice, if it's a subsidiary of Microsoft.
Now you know, I mean financially it's clearly not a subsidiary. Microsoft's put a total of thirteen billion into open Ai, according to people familiar with the deals with Not all of those deals amounts republic obviously, but you know, there is and this is a little bit of, like, you know, one of the hotter parlor games in tech right now, a discussion of you know, who is the controlling party here? You know, does Microsoft? You know, is Microsoft the more
important party? Is open Ai the more important party? And the truth is that to a large extent, they're very codependent on each other. They're, you know, both the futures of both companies and some pretty significant ways are tied up in the work of the other one.
At this point, there's a key character in this story, Kevin Scott, Microsoft's chief technology officer. He finds his way to Microsoft through the LinkedIn acquisition, and then in twenty nineteen he basically gets Microsoft's act together in how it goes about tackling AI. Right.
So Kevin Scott, very shortly after LinkedIn closes taught him makes Kevin Scott the CTO for the whole company, and one of his missions, one of his charges, was to come up with a way for Microsoft's AI strategy to be more focused, more coherent, and most importantly, more impactful. And Kevin, you know who has a long standing relationship, you know, with Sam Altman, actually you know, winds up being the go between and the negotiations between the two companies.
He's also someone that spent a fair amount of time at Google. And one of the things he notices when he comes in and he looks at the Microsoft AI efforts, Spaci. You know, a lot of your listeners might think, you know, Microsoft just got into AI. Actually Microsoft been working on AI for more than two decades. But what Scott saw started looking at all the projects and he looked at it via the request for GPUs, these key AI chips for every AI project in the company, and there were
so many requests. He told us it was basically the magnitude of Microsoft's entire capital budget, and there were all these disparate projects that didn't have a business model, weren't talking to each other, and he, you know, around twenty nineteen, he and the Della come up with his plans, are really instilled some discipline and make sure everything is you know, marching towards some big goals. But also they do the open Ai investment that same year, which is a huge bet.
Again not on my work, else's.
Bloomberg's Dina Burs just terrific deep reporting for the big take in Business Week. Check it out online on the Bloomberg terminal. Also talks a lot about how Microsoft commercialized the technology, which we didn't have time to get to.
That does it, I'm afraid.
For this edition of Bloomberg Technology, we are four days into a mega mega week from Silicon Valley.
And in New York.
You can recap what we've been talking about with the Bloomberg Technology Podcast wherever you get your podcasts, Apple, Spotify, iHeart, and the Bloomberg platforms of course from San Francisco. This is Bloomberg Technology