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This is Bloomberg Tech coming up.

The US combust Department moves closer to allowing Nvidia to sell its h two hundred AI chips to China.

Plus robotics startup Skilled Ai just closed a one point four billion dollar funding round, tripling its valuation in seven months.

We'll discuss with the CEO Depact PAPAC.

And Netflix is working to revise its bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, shifting to an all cash offer.

As you see though those names in the red and in general the market on the downside, we still got geopolitical anxiety, We've still got earnings coming thick and fast, and we've still got and as that one hundred off by one and a half percent, not so in the world of come on to a search for safety a bid as the dollar falls.

We see two point eight percent higher on the bitcoin rally, so maybe a bit of catch up with digital gold where we see spot gold and a new record high up seven tens percent.

Copper all important commodity to our world of AI and data center zed we ran a new record high on an interday basis.

We're up five tens percent just coming off of that high on the day.

But en it's notable and shift of this year.

Right, rules and requirements are changing in the world of AI chips.

The US Commerce Department out with clarification which impacts in video and it's H two hundred that it wants to shift to China, but also impacts AMD as well.

AMD has been trading all over the place this morning, at one point notably higher in the session, but in Vidia markedly down now trading at its lowest level in around a month.

What are these new rules and what do they mean and why is this significant?

Bloomberg Senior Tech editor Mike Shepherd joins us out of DC lay out the new rules and requirements for US.

But what we're saying in the Bloomberg story is this marks a significant moment for the companies in their efforts to set into China.

Why well, this is a small but critical bureaucratic step that paves the way for Nvidia and and D to be able to sell H two hundred incomparable AI chips to China.

What it does is it now says that the US government will review requests for export licenses on a case by case basis and move away from the past policy of a presumption of denial of any such request and that had in the past been really an effective export ban.

Now these companies can't be there expecting a rubber stamp for their requests.

The US government is laying out some pretty specific requirements.

One that the companies must show that the exports to China will not create a supply shortage here.

This is addressing, in a way, some of the concerns that lawmakers here in Washington have been raising with attempts to pass their own version of export controls.

Two, they must show that any manufacturing done for China must not displace any production capacity intended for US customers here.

And three, the companies must implement strict know your Customer procedures to ensure that these chips and the related technology don't get out to unauthorized users.

It's interesting, Mike, that we are seeing Nvidia down on the day AIMD.

Do we get any sense of how many they might be able to ship, Because it's not without its intricacies as you say fifty percent of the overall made in the US.

Well, it is the question of the moment surrounding this rule just how this cap that it lays out would function.

The rule says that the exports to China can go more than no more than fifty percent of total product here in the US.

But does that mean H two hundreds produced from this day going forward.

If that's the case, it would not be a very big set and it would mean a far smaller number of exports to China, and that would certainly not go anywhere near meeting the huge demand that Jensen Wang has said that he is getting from Chinese customers.

And we have reported that Ali Baba and Bite the Answer interested in buying as many as two hundred thousand chips each.

Now, if we are talking about all the H two hundreds produce over all time, that would be a much bigger universe and that would be a much happier outcome for Nvidia, AMD and their investors.

So we will have to see exactly how that is interpreted.

If that gets spelled out.

Another big question Caro is answered, how quickly the government can move to actually process these export requests.

Because we have been hearing over the past year and longer that they are simply running into capacity problems in the bureaucracy at commerce and being able to turn these around.

Bottlenecks throughout the world of AI.

Mike Sheperd, thanks so much.

Let's stick with what this means for Nvidia and more broadly for semiconductors.

Beth Kennick's with us IO fun lead tech analyst.

So, is this a fifty billion dollar annual revenue opportunity?

Is China that for Nvidia?

Hey, Caroline jensen Wok has stated it's a fifty billion per year annual opportunity.

When we left off, it was about five billion a quarter.

That's twenty five billion, so somewhere between twenty five billion and fifty billion, which really means that as we look into analyst estimates, they are probably too low.

And that has been something from the very beginning that we have found Alpha in is that analysts are really struggling to wrap their head around the opportunity of Nvidia.

And now here comes back the aged two hundreds, and where my firm is very focused is calendar year twenty twenty seven.

If you look at these estimates, they are too low, as it is let alone if China revenue resumes.

What's really interesting, though, is China's response to all of this.

You say it's too low.

How much might be the revenue for Nvidia in China.

But at the same time we understand.

That deep seats driving new models with seeing them use what they have in the different method that maybe Ali Barbara and why do you don't need those two hundred thousand that they've already put off efforts and offers in for what do you make of the way in which China is going to pivot to domestic chips?

I would argue that right now the number I had was about two million, h two hundreds and there's only about seven hundred thousand available, which means that once again in videos oversubscribed.

I have been asked before, who is the next in Vidia to something like Huawei, you know, is it Google's TPUs?

And the answer is the next in Vidia is in video.

They are extremely hard to disrupt, and that goes for China or even United States competitors BEV.

Taking into account that the news story that Mike Shephard just brought us, Jensen Wong told us at CS that the five hundred billion dollar forecast for five fiscal quarters.

It includes this one for Blackwell Rubin could get bigger because they could factor into H two hundred sales in twenty six.

I know twenty seven to a year, but if you model for that little update that the Jensen one gave.

Yes, so right now the analyst estimates did actually catch up.

They're about three to twenty billion this calendar year.

Let's just go with twenty twenty six.

I want to really emphasize that its next calendar year that we're going to start to see analyst estimates too low.

That is where the alpha is at right now, and it only takes one or two quarters for us to really see Nvidia's price movement from all of the all of the momentum we're seeing not only from Blackwell Ultra, but then we've got Vera Rubin second half of this year.

Now we have the H two hundreds coming back.

Where that falls specifically in what quarter matters less to me, and what matters more is that those analyst estimates are far too low.

Bes The big story in global markets this morning is a blistering rally in metals, particularly copper copper, as S and P Global wrote January eight foundational to the expanding electricity supply that will power the data center build out, and it's now a big growth area in that market.

How worried are you about that copper in the supply chain and how it relates to the power needs of the data centers that Nvidia's chips go into.

These are excellent questions, and across the board resources when it comes to this data center expansion are extremely stretched, especially anything that supports the electrical grids, such as copper.

What I would really emphasize is those alternative sources of energy is a great way to position going into twenty twenty six.

One thing to my firm has dug up is that in order for us to get to VERA, Ruben and then Reuben Ultra power has to precede that we have to really get this power to these data centers before those systems can really ship in volume and be installed.

Things like net gas, even solid oxide fuel cells, those that do not need great dependency on the electrical grid is a wonderful way to position, and copper surging today is a reminder of that.

What's interesting is we've hit in video.

We're talking about the supply chain therein we're also getting the idea that CPUs.

As well at s US as well.

And you just think about the moves that we've seen yesterday today in Intel, I mean, where do you think the glutts or the bottlenecks are really going to be hitting hard?

We are?

I mean, analysts keep Bank saying Intel and AMDA basically sold out for twenty twenty six on the CPU service side exactly.

And what's even more interesting is that AMD was up more or last year than Nvidia, and they are such a strong CPU player as well as Intel.

There are many bottlenecks.

Caroline networking is another one that comes to mind.

Of course, energy we just spoke about.

Just keep in mind that it's not just GPUs, but there's almost an equal amount of money being spent on all of the components, all of the networking, all of the power, and we are no longer compute constraint, We're no longer GPU constraint.

It really is becoming a power problem and a networking problem that needs to be solved, especially as we move into the inference market, which is only going to require more memory, more bandwidth, less latency, and more and more energy.

Beth do AMD and Intel just accept that it's the CPU market where they can do battle and just let the accelertor market go to Nvidia and other specialists.

No, I do not believe that will be the outcome.

I think AMD is a strong contender, a strong number two, especially in the second half of this year.

They've really been preparing to bring the rack scale architecture to market, which is called Helios and ED what was I've covered AMD very thoroughly and we could get into the specs all day long.

But open AI giving them.

That six gigawad deal is a massive nod.

I mean that is a big nod that AMD is a contender from the leading R and D firm.

Helios, AMD's first rack scale solution, but then in the world's first two nanimeter chip inside, which they talked up in our interview last week.

Be f Kindig the IO Fund.

Great to have you back on Bloomberg Tech.

Thank you very much.

Now coming up, anger grows over sexually explicit, non consensual AI generated images on x We have the latest.

This is Bloomberg Tech.

The Supreme Court still hasn't ruled on challenges to President Trump's tariffs, leaving the world to wait until at least next week to learn the fate of visits signature economic policy from a massurveillance.

Co host Amriy Horden joins us right here for more.

So we delay once again, and that timing could be awkward.

It could be awkward.

So Supreme Court punts it once again.

They do not come out with the decision on whether or not the majority of Actually a lot of this terriphone venue we're bringing in into the United States, more than seventies percent, is tethered to the president using aiber flexible, a blunt tool that he has used since he came back into office.

And why it could be so awkward is because the President will be in Davos next week and he's going to be meeting with global leaders, the world elite.

Last year he joined on remote really Lambasstard, the global elite.

And at this point, potentially we could get the decision next Tuesday or Wednesday, because that's when the.

Justices will be meeting again.

That's when potentially we can get the decision and he could potentially be facing a Supreme Court saying you cannot use that legal authority while he's talking to all these countries that he already did trade deals with.

Bloomberg zamree, Howden, thank you very much.

Another top story, the US Senate unanimously passed a bill allowing victims of sexually explicit AI images to sue the creators of that content.

The move is in response to growing public anger after Bloomberg reported the Lelon musk x has become a top site for generating pictures of people who have been non consensually undressed by a must post it on x that he wasn't aware of any naked underage images generated by Grock.

That's Xai's generative AI tool.

Let's bring in Bloomberg's Emily Burnbaum, who covers corporate lobbying government.

The Defiance Act confers on American citizens a civil right to sue, take that information and give the rest of the details.

Because that's the bit that's new here.

Yes, that's exactly what it does.

It essentially empowers victims of this non consensual deep fake technology, people who have been non consensually undressed by this AI tool, and it allows them to sue the people responsible for posting that.

And it's a companion to a bill, to a bill that was signed into law last year by President Trump that creates criminal penalties for distributing that kind of content.

Ah, it didn't go through the House last time, the Defiance Act, whereas take Down did, And why would this time be any different?

Is the pushback becoming enough.

Because thus far, all we've really seen is the Department of Defense put groquai within its military system instead of pushing back on this being something that Grocco X needs to camp down in some way, that's true.

There definitely is more of an appetite in Congress to pass this legislation.

There have been six new co sponsors that have come on board since the beginning of the year.

I think that the issue of non consensual AI generated images has become so vivid to lawmakers.

Many of them, like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, are themselves the victims of this.

So I think the appetite has really broadened this year.

Emily, where does the company X and the platform X fit into this in a citizen's right to sue and those that distribute the content.

So the Defiance Act, which passed the Sunate this week, that probably would not impact GROC, that impacts the people who are responsible for distributing the images.

But there is a lot of conversation right now about whether the Take It Down Act would empower Attorney's General to sue Grock Xai Elon Musk over some level of responsibility for you know, thousands of these images proliferating every hour.

So far, no Attorney's.

General have taken that up, but it's definitely under serious consideration.

Certainly something that maybe Malaysia has been putting forward about whether or not it's Xai's responsibility in some way.

Blueing Magzemine van Bound, fantastic reporting, thank you very much.

Indeed, not coming up.

ABMB has a new chief technology officer.

We'll hear about his plans for the short term mental company that's next is.

A body meg Tech.

I'm extremely excited, like Brian said, to bring craft to the art of deploying AI first features and products.

So I hope to be able to surprise the world with really beautiful features that they're going to love using every day.

That was Airbnb's new CTO, Armadal Dala, weighing in on the short term rental platforms AI efforts.

Let's get more wherever and Latterly Lung, who spoke with our Dala and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky.

I think an interesting base start is what is Airbnb trying to solve for here by bringing in a new CTO.

What is it they want to change about the platform.

So after a few years of sort of working on the plumbing of Airmb's app, like vamping the app, they are ready to take it forward, adding AI across the app, including customer service with which they did last year, and now they're going to do more with search as well, like letting people discover listings and also cross markets who have their new services like tours and experiences going forward.

And I think you sort of put that exact question to Brancheski himself.

Let's just take a listen to how he responded as to why they're pivoting and focusing all in on AI at this moment, and take a listen.

We are at the beginning of this incredibly exciting technological transformation with AI.

It's going to be a journey.

And I couldn't be more excited about Ahmed because he's one of the leading AI experts in the world, but he also brings a sense of craft Airbnb, something we're really known for.

And I think what you're going to see in Airbnb is not only AI search, but a very personalized AI experience where I think we're going to bring great design sensibility into the experience of Airbnb.

Let's talk a little bit about how they're talking of the narrative of change because they've said farewell to the previous CTO who's there for about seven years, and brought in this expert from Meta.

So who do they say you farewell to and why is this Meta executed the best place?

So Aribalo, the previous CTO came in during our time when Airbnb was going through hypergrowth.

There was seven more than seven years ago.

And now Airbnb is sort of, as Cheskey said, going through a technological revolution of you know lms and chat agents, and now Airbnb sort of wants to use sort of the unique data they have on the platform to differentiate itself from other you know, chatbots to provide better recommendations to customers on their platform.

Abnb the company who stock growse about three percent last year, down a couple of percent so far this year.

And Cheski was one of those.

People that was the early vocal behind founder mode it.

What's the health of Airbnb right now.

Is this them saying we've got to do something to re accelerate.

Yeah, Brian was not satisfied with the below ten percent growth rate we've seen last year, and so he's been very active in wanting to pilot more businesses for this year.

They're piloting boutique hotels and server cities, and they're trying to add grocery delivery for people to pre stock their kitchens before or are they check in.

So they're trying to get their growth free BACKRUP as sort of the core rental service for chors.

Now.

So you've also got a story about how the chief information officer has departed after the CTO shakeup.

Is there more executive leadership changes to come?

Yeah, so there would be.

They're still looking for the new CIO.

We can expect that to come in in the months in the year ahead.

Most Natalie Lung, thank you very much.

Indeed, let's turn out attention to entertainment now.

Netflix is working to revise it's been for Warner Brothers Discovery, potentially shifting to an all cash offer, according to sources.

Now the moves aimed at speeding up a deal that lookers face pushback from Washington and competition from rival, bit of Paramounts guidance for more, Let's.

Get to the new most.

Lucas Shaw, who covers media and entertainment, hit this story hard and Lucas, I mean the all cash narrative.

Why is that important?

Why would that be the winning formula for Netflix?

Because investors like cash now versus stock, and that's that they could sell later.

Right.

One of the knocks against the Netflix deal as perpetuated at least by by Paramounts guidance.

The rival bidder has been that Paramount's deal is all cash, and that Netflix deal contains you know, between four and five dollars a.

Share of stock.

Now, Netflix stock is pretty valuable, something that you think people would want to have, but most people would rather just take the cash now and get paid.

And so that I think Netflix hopes will accelerate on many fronts.

It.

You know, it'll assuage any shareholder concerns about their bid and also eliminate any potential complexities as they continue to negotiate and pursue it.

Lucas, when we were reporting this out, you know, the Netflix response and the tit for tat, you know, Paramounts suing earlier this week and nominated our It's to the board.

Do you get the sense that Netflix think this will work, that they now are back in sort of the lead in a tight race for the assets.

Well, I don't.

I think if you were to talk to the people at Netflix, they've never felt they were out of the lead, right know, they are obviously facing a stiff challenge from Paramount, but they're the ones who have an approved deal, and they have yet to see kind of some they have yet to see shareholders say and masks we don't want the Netflix deal.

They have yet to see the federal government say we're going to block this deal.

There are certainly some kind of blinking yellow lights, but I don't think they've they've seen anything yet that that gives makes them too concerned.

They seem still pretty confident that they'll get this.

Done and in a week January twenty first, that's when the tend to offer for certainly the Paramount Skuydance side of the equation runs out, right.

I mean, do you get any signal for investors that they were tool interested in that side?

You know, investors have been split some of the big investor investment funds, you know, they don't say anything, but we have spoken with a number of the major shareholders and I'd say their reactions range from we prefer Netflix, do we prefer Paramount, And then a lot of people in the middle are basically saying, you know, tie right now goes to the winner, which is Netflix.

But we hope Slash expect that Paramount will increase its offer, which Lucas is a pretty clear Paramount move.

Just very quickly remind us of the state of play.

The difference between the two bids.

Well, Netflix's bid is for just the studio and streaming service, so Warner Brothers and HBO.

Paramount's bid is for the whole company, so that includes all the cable networks like CNNT, N, T TBS and the like.

Bloombos Lucas Shaw, who leads the team at screen time, that has led the way on reporting this story.

Thank you so much.

Now coming up on Bloomberg.

Tech, robotics startup Skilled Ai just closed a one point four billion dollar funding round, a big valuation, tripling.

From a year.

This is next.

This is Bloomberg Tech.

Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech.

Let's check in on the markets that are under pressure.

Look we've got a wall of warriors to come to the earning season geopolitical risks, and we see some dragged down and big tech.

We're off by one point few percent on the NASDAK.

In fact, two straight days of losses on the SMP.

We're coming off of record highs in video, of course, confronting that news that maybe EAH two hundreds could be getting closer to exporting to China.

But at the moment we're under pressure.

It's one of the key drags on the downside.

Bitcoin though, of three point four percent.

We're seeing maybe a bit of love for digital gold, not just gold, silver and copper.

We're also seeing maybe some shorts getting squeezed out.

Move on, have a look at what's happening in individual stocks.

I'm trying to light on Honeywell, look, we're at one point eight percent.

Maybe an asset that it controls quantinum could be looking for an IPO.

We're an understanding that they're potentially filing for an IPO with the SEC.

We know that this last valuation was about eleven billion dollars Z We've got other key strategics and videos in their GP Morgans in there as well, so all eyes on quantum computing as we look towards twenty twenty six.

What are you looking at?

Yeah, we also have a big deal in private markets.

Robotic startup Skilled Ai has just closed a one point four billion dollar funding around the valuation more than fourteen billion dollars and that's for a company only founded in twenty twenty three.

Skilled is aiming to stand out in what's a crowded field by building an AI powered robotic brain.

The goal is to develop a system that can adapt across environments and form factors and crucially learn from its own mistakes.

Joining us to discuss a Skilled co founder and CEO, Deepak Pathak, It's great to have you on Bloomberg Tech.

What's interesting.

Let's start with the round.

It's not just the volume, it's not just the valuation.

Some of the strategics that are backing you in Nvidia, others in consumer electronics, Samsung LG and in the software sector as well.

What are they recognizing is your core competence?

Do you think so?

If you're thinking about the robotics today is one of the oldest areas in technology.

In EI was big for robotics.

We have seen amazing they're more robotics for the last seventy years, not four or five years, seventy years.

But we are robots around us.

And this is what people often get wrong.

When you think of robots in your mind, you imagine hardware like that comes to a point in your mind first, because that's how Hollywood has primed us.

But the main thing in behind that not having robots around us today is the brain is missing.

And if you have the brain for robots, you can really enable them around in variety of areas.

We active applications, and that's what exactly SCARED is doing.

We are building what we call only bodied brain, any robot, any task one brain.

I'm interested in how you're building it.

The limitation that a lot of people are talking about right now is real world data and training.

There are different approaches digital twins, trying to simulate physics in digital worlds.

This is very much what in video is focused on, right is that the approach you've taken simulated or synthetic data.

So I think I will draw analogy to lllms like Jagpity, like models like if you see open a head Jadgepitty, And soon after many companies had their own LM models, and the reason for that is data exist on the Internet for language or vision, but robotics there is no Internet of robotics today.

So what we do is we look for alternate sources.

One such source is human videos.

We look at how humans operate in their scenarios in your kchareen in while working in factories, and combine that with training come simulation, which companies like Nvidia invest a lot on, like omni.

Verse and all those.

So these two things watching people and then practicing in simulation.

That's how we combine and scale these models to large scale.

Your software can be put within the GPU.

And what's interesting is you're already going from what we understand zero to tens of millions of dollars deepak in revenue just a few months in twenty twenty five.

Where's that revenue coming from?

Who is using your software already?

Yep, So this is the revenue has mostly been from the price applications.

And the idea is in like instead of instead of going for our end goal is a consumer homelike applications.

But right now, since it's just a beginning of the field, we are taking this model and we are deploying it in variety of applications, like we are deploying robots in sectors like point to point delivery applications, security applications, data centers, and manufacturing and warehouse so the revenue is coming from most of these applications.

You're born out of academia and you're still professor kind of emlan.

But what's interesting is you're not without some competition out there.

I think about physical intelligence for example, you're all trying to intend to get robots to become intelligent and situationally aware.

Do you think you can take on Are you worried about competition?

Well, competition is always good and turns out like the AI community born from very small circles.

So they're all our friends and colleagues from earlier.

But what's unique about what we are building is this only bodied brain, like any robot, any task one brain.

Now, if you really think deeply about this, it sounds absurd, like a humanoid robot with a human like body, a dog robot and they share the same brain.

And that's what you see in the reserves we release.

The difference in approach is fascinating.

It is a crowded failed you know, Burnt from one X was on the show yesterday.

They have a world model that essentially allows NEO to carry out a task.

It's it's never seen before and that largely you know, I'm not an engineer, right, but what you have in common is VLN.

Those are the inputs distinguish your approach to one X's as an example.

So in our case, the robot learns by watching people.

Right now, imagine I have to pick up this cup in front of mee do I have to exactly imagine?

So scary By the way, watching me you learned when you were a kid.

You learned by watching your periods.

You learn watching others.

Now, if you think about how you how you operate.

Every time you pick up a cup, do you imagine in your head a picture of cup and then putting your finger in the handle, And no, it's all mushed in like somehow it's consciousness inside your body and then you imagine in some abstract space and then do it.

And that is the main idea here.

That's how we do it.

But just ted being said, watching alone is not enough because if it was enough, I could play like Federer, keep watching his games all day.

And that's where practice comes into play now.

Practicing in the real world in the making mistakes is expensive, and that's where become mind simulation.

So videos alone is not enough.

Same alone is not enough.

But put them together and boom you have a magic recipe to really figure out how to scale robotics.

Magic recipe that values are forteen billion dollars as far Deepak Pathact co found a CEO skilled AI.

Thanks so much for joining us today coming out more funn around news.

Excel partner Sarah Dlston joins us to talk about her latest investment in AI security startup debt First.

There's somebody meg tech.

Security startup debt First, has closed a forty million dollars Series A funding round.

The company uses AI to identify and harden software vulnerabilities.

The round led by Excel.

Joining us to discuss Excel partner Sarah Wilson Debt First.

This was a big theme actually at AWS reinvent the idea that particularly sort of swarm based agents can go on the offense, not just defense.

So it's a sensible place to start with.

Why you made the investment in general security intelligence is what can it do that existing app SEC and other sort of static analysis tools just can't.

I think the main thing is performance and speed and the ratio of signal to noise.

So I think what we have to realize in this moment is, as we're all so excited about how AI is making it possible to ship software so much more quickly, that same AI tool is being used by the bad guys to ship attacks more quickly.

And so the historical ratio of signal to noise just won't stand in the current era.

And so the security platform that Debt first has made is AI native.

And what they are doing is continuously agentically scanning a company's code.

They're looking at its architecture, they're looking at its business logic, and they're finding verified vulnerabilities eight times more than the previous best in class.

And I think the key there is verified vulnerability is they're not raving their hands about things that aren't really a problem.

They're finding real problems, and then they're also serving up a solution.

You can press one button and say fix it, and folks are doing that.

In mass I was looking at the round.

It's a sizable series A.

You know, in the last couple of years the market has been somewhat distorted depending on the company's type.

But what you just said eight times invest in class.

How critical is a data point like that to you when you decide do I want to be in this round a tool or not evidence?

It's really critical, and I think, particularly in the case of security, there's just a societal imperative that we get this right.

And I think Excel We've been investing for forty three years.

Throughout that time, security has been a key category of investment for US folks like CrowdStrike or netscope, that IPO just last year, and what we've seen is in these major innovation transitions, these major you know, cycles of transition, the security apparatus has to be replaced.

It has to evolve to that new era.

And that's why we're so excited about companies like Depth first.

But you're exactly right, you know, it has to work.

It's imperative that it works, and so those stats are really important.

They're important to the CISOs, they're important to the fortune fifty that are evaluating these companies.

And so if we're gonna, you know, put ourselves in our funds behind a company, it's imperative that we believe that the thing works and not just not just today, but that you have the team that can drive over this next era of transition, that you have the talent that can sort of weather this moment.

The talent is Hanley Soltofta, and you're seeing Palo Alto Networks.

Even so it's now he's in big acquisitions in the space, trying to get ahead of the cyber risks around AI.

Do you think that this is a long term bet?

Will this company go public or do you think it will be an M and A story.

You know, I think this is absolutely a long term bet.

That is always our you know, our focus when we do our investing, and I think that this is a team that's really uniquely qualified to go that distance.

So this is technical leaders from companies like Data Bricks, from Google DeepMind, from fair These are folks who have built you know, large durable companies and confronted these security problems.

At an incredible scale.

But mirroring that cyber experience with the AI experience, very few people have had sort of the experience of building.

At a place like Google.

Deep Mind and can now apply that to this context.

So it's a really interdisciplinary team, a highly technical team that we believe is very unique in their ability to tackle this problem.

Sarah, you a head of strategy Partnerships at fair So when you're thinking about who are the talent you want to go for, is it your own network you need upon Is it that you're hearing these companies being born out of these big deep minds even before they're a really created.

How you tapping into a really early stage business that needs financing?

Yeah, I think it's all of the above.

And then you know, we hope to spend a lot of time with folks during the early days when they're really you know, considering starting a company or the early definition of the company.

You know, our goal is to be along the journey for decades, right the generational companies that are going to solve these security problems will last that long, and so we do we try and find them early.

And it can be through a lot of things, but certainly one of the greatest signals is when we see incredibly talented people that we know to be excellent aggregating around an opportunity.

And I think what really emerged.

About this team is that they're incredibly motivated by this mission.

And if you look around all of our critical systems in society are powered by software.

Software that people can write increasingly quickly with AI, and the other dimension that's changing is increasingly we're giving this software more autonomy, we're giving it more access, we're giving it the ability to reason, and that's really exciting, but it's also something that would be concerning if those things aren't secure.

We just watch your segment talking about the robots, right.

We want to make sure if we're getting these devices access to our homes, to our businesses, that they're secure.

And I think that that is a is a belief that's shared by the Depth First team that they this is sort of an imperative for society that we get this right, that we ensure that all of this new AI generated code that's being shipped at increasing rates is all secure.

What's being shipped by a load of your portfolio companies Cursor, Lovable and Thrope among some of the bets over Accel.

We really appreciate your time, Accel partner Sarah Itttleston.

Now coming up Spotify, f co, CEOs my Face are host of challenges more the Audio Giants plans next.

That's a blue bag.

Tech Salesforce is looking to bolster AI capabilities for Slack users.

The company is releasing an upgraded slack bot that uses anthropics claud model, joining us to discuss Rob Seaman's Slack interim CEO and Chief Products Office.

You know, I have not yet got access to this, this updated slack bot, but as a Slack user, very interested to see where this goes.

Rob.

The general idea, right was that Mark Bennioff, the parent company CEO, was using chat GPT and you guys are like, we want to have an internal tool.

So has it worked?

What is he using it for?

What are you using it for?

Absolutely?

So one.

I can't wait for you to try it.

So we're using it internally.

Marcus certainly using it.

I'm using it.

I'll give you a few examples of how I use it.

I used it recently.

I just said, hey, go find the most recent all hands deck that we're working on.

One of the things that we do is actually introduce every single new hire every month, and I said, tell me how to pronounce the names of all the new hires, and that goes off and finds the presentation without me saying reads the presentation figures out where the new hires are, loops through all of them, and figures out their highest probability nationality and tells me how to pronounce them.

I don't have to go bug people to figure that out.

It's awesome and it saves me time.

In the first instance.

It is underpinned by Anthropics Claude, Right, and you're going to tell me, well, this is interim and we're going to look at all kinds of different model options.

We're model agnostic.

But it is an interesting and the latest example of how Claude helps people in the enterprise get to market quick.

You know what was your experience of that, rob.

The biggest thing for us was being able to take an m pick it up and set it down in our infrastructure in a way that our customer's data never left our security boundary and wasn't used for the training of the model.

And that's what we got with Anthropic and Claude.

And on top of that, we've done a bunch of sophisticated prompt and context engineering that makes slack bot deeply personal and a deeply personal agent to every single person that uses it.

Well, but how are you thinking about security?

Oh, I mean, it's a paramount for us.

It's been something that's been the very very top of our priorities since the foundation of slack and so one slack bot is a personal agent.

It needs to be deeply trusted by the user, but also trusted by the enterprise.

And so what we do is the user, the slack bot is acting on behalf of the user, so it can access the information that a user can their direct messages, their private channels, and the public channels within a particular slack instance.

And as I.

Mentioned before, from a company perspective, you can rest assured that your data is not being used to train the model, nor is it leaving the security boundary.

So it's all adhering to your existing security policies and slack this.

Is all about return on AI investment.

It's all about making it clear to me, to you, to the users that the stuff saves you time makes more productive.

How are you measuring that role.

We don't measure individual productivity, but we do measure the usage of slack bots.

So we measure the penetration, so the number of users that actually use slack bot over the number of users that have access to it, but at week over week retention and then message intensity, and that allows us to approximate the value that's being created, and the week over week retention force slackbot is higher than any other feature we've ever had, and slack and the message intensity keeps growing, and to us, that's a quantitative signal of qualitative value that's being derived from our users for time savings, but also we're seeing through our qualitative surveys people use this for brainstorming and creative pursuits that we didn't even expect.

Rob Seman, Slack intro CEO, and great speaking with you about slack bot.

We'll see how it catches on.

Meanwhile, let's take a look at shares of Spotify right now and indeed over the start of the year well off by nine percent.

That's, of course, when the new co CEOs have joined the company.

Gusta Sworderstrom Alex Norstrom took over as from the Spotify founder Daniel Eck.

Now they've both been out the business for a long time, but Eck himself.

Grew the platform from money suck to.

One of the most powerful businesses in the music industry, and the new CEOs have to steer that powerful ship around some pretty tough headwinds AI angry creators, user fatigue to turn around that share drop and most actually Commen has been writing about all of this by the Audio GI's leadership transition.

It's in BusinessWeek and there are a lot of headwinds.

What is front and center for them?

How are they're taking on the algos and the AI story.

They're coming up with a lot of different products that they're hoping will kind of buy them some time and also maybe address some of what users want to do.

So, for example, they're integrating Spotify into jack shipt.

They've made a partnership with Meta on its glasses.

They are letting you.

Enter prompts to get a playlist in return, using even like online contexts so that you can get the top rated albums of the year from Pitchfork or something like that.

So they really want to give people both this personalization, more options showing up where people are.

Podcasts are coming to Netflix.

They're really trying to meet people where they are rather than forcing them to just come to Spotify.

YouTube not a new issue, but the biggest in front of them.

It seems like, you know, it's very detailed in the BusinessWeek story.

This competition for eyeballs and YouTube is the thing on both of those CEO's deaths right now Acshually.

Yes, YouTube, Spotify has moved into video.

One of the scoops from our story is that they're now actually focusing on fitness content.

So as a result of them pushing into video podcasts, creators who we see on YouTube that actually put out guided workouts have started uploading their content to Spotify, and Spotify is seeing that.

People really enjoy that content.

So instead of just using playlists to soundtrack their runs, they're actually watching yoga on Spotify, for example.

So this is an area they're pretty excited about and seemed to be investing in.

We know a lot about Daniellek.

We've sort of grown up alongside him as he's taken this European success story global.

What do we know about the co CEOs?

Who are they?

Well, their descents, what are they about?

So both of them are Swedish.

Alex is of half Chinese half Swedish descent.

His mother was a single mother, Sharan a Chinese restaurant.

Growing up, he's really kind of the culture guy.

He gets a playlist regularly that keeps him on top of trends.

It seems like he's really sort of a social person who's doing all these partnership deals with the labels and audiobooks and such.

Gustave formerly really focused on product now co CEO also Swedish.

He sold a startup to Yahoo back in two thousand and six.

He did a stint in the Swedish military, and he's really tech philosophy focused.

He was really excited about a book.

He read from the inventor of quantum computing, so he really gets.

Deep on that.

And supposedly the two of them together are really like a yin and yang.

They go well together.

A fun tidbit, Nordstrom means north stream, Soderstrom means south stream, so it's written at the universe.

I guess.

This really is a must read on Bloomberg online or in a magazine coming to you very soon in BusinessWeek.

Bloomberg's actually come and with the deep dive in Spotify.

Thank you very much, Caro.

That does it for another edition of Bloomberg.

Tech markets still continuing to start the year pretty.

Hot, pretty hot.

Well, we're under pressure if you're not a big tech they're hot if you're looking at commodities.

And that too is an AI story.

I mean, the joke of twenty twenty two and onwards.

Everything's an AI story, don't forget to check out or all of them.

On our podcast.

Find on The Terminal, as well as online on Apple, on Spotify, and on iHeart as a Bloomberg