Meta's $14.3B Scale Investment, Apple's New Siri Launch
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This is Bloomberg Tech. Coming up, Meta finalizes a $14 billion investment in scale AI and has the CEO amping up its AGI efforts. Plus, Adobe sales outlook. It tops estimates, but it's not enough to quell investors' concern that it's losing the AI race. And reports of stablecoin plans by the world's biggest retailers puts pressure on Visa and MasterCard. We discuss with the CEO of crypto firm Circle.

But first, we check in on what the markets are doing today. There is a clear geopolitical risk that is front and center for investors. We think about what the Israeli attacks on Iran means for the search for safety. And we do see indeed the Nasdaq 100 off by eight tenths of a percent. There are idiosyncratic news within the benchmark, but Bitcoin, not your benchmark.

saviour of choice at the moment, not the area to go for safety. We're currently off by nine tenths of a percent on Bitcoin. Move on and have a look at some of the individual movers. Look, we've got to get into, in particular, some tech news that is all about meta. Another Acra hire.

but this one costing more than $14 billion. We're off by five-tenths of a percent, but generally the market likes the move, the spending of Meta on the future of AGI. Let's get to it all with Kurt Wagner, who's been breaking the story step by step. You brought us the idea that, of course, Alexander Wang was going to be part of this crucial team that Mark Zuckerberg is forming. This does seem to be yet another example of an acquihire by a big tech company.

It does because as you mentioned Caroline there is that 14.3 billion dollar investment but Alexander Wang is joining Meta so are some of the other employees from Scale AI. So while Meta is obviously you know now 49% stakeholder in Scale it's taking the CEO over to Meta so a lot of people are sort of viewing this as a very expensive acqui-hire obviously there's still Scale is still going to be operating independently it's going to have an interim CEO

But, you know, given the talent that is moving from scale to meta, this is a very expensive talent grab. And this is something that I think we've seen from Mark Zuckerberg before and something that he is clearly very, very focused on AI right now. We've seen it from other key tech companies, this Aquahara idea, the fact that maybe you skirt any regulatory oversight, particularly when perhaps

Meta's in front line when it comes to the FTC investigation. You're thinking Microsoft with inflection, you're thinking Amazon with adept, you're thinking of Google with character AI, Kurt. What does this show about the anxiety that Mark Zuckerberg has right now?

Well, part of the momentum here is because he felt like they are behind, right? We had a story a couple days ago about him building this new super intelligence AI team, and that was really motivated by the fact that their Llama 4 launch back in April was underwhelming and that he felt that meta was not

keeping pace in the way that they should. So I think there's a real paranoia there. This is, you know, a sort of a classic Mark Zuckerberg move for him to just get incredibly in the weeds on something that he feels his business is sort of lacking. But I also think it just speaks to the, you know, the limit in terms of how much talent there is out there in the AI space, like really good talent, like the fact that they're willing to spend this much

on these folks sort of says that it's a very competitive landscape when it comes to hiring people. And I think we've seen that across the board. And it's only going to get tighter now that everyone's sort of picked their various startup that they're backing here. It's interesting that we've already heard from OpenAI saying they're going to stick working with ScaleAI, which is now going to be helmed by Jason Droge. He was previously the strategy officer. Now he becomes the CEO of OpenAI.

But talk to us about what Alexander Wang means in particular. He's got a very good way of networking, particularly on Capitol Hill. Yeah. So, you know, I've been told by several folks over the last week that Mark Zuckerberg just thinks that Alexander Wang is the best guy. You know, he thinks he is so talented. He's super bullish on this guy. I believe he's just 28 years old.

And you're right, Caroline, he brings a great network. Everyone I've talked to has said this guy knows everybody in the AI space. He also, as you point out, knows folks on Capitol Hill. This is a time when I think Meta and Mark Zuckerberg in particular are trying to build relationships with the Trump administration. You know, we've seen them sort of announce plans to partner with Andrew on potential military tech. So it's a bit of a new direction for this company trying to get into perhaps government contracts.

And I think Alexander Wang brings some of that connectivity to Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. And so in addition to the AI experience, this is also someone who might be able to help him out relationship-wise.

Well, so far, investors have trusted the steerage of Mark Zuckerberg. Just a significant outperformance of 18% so far on the year. Blue Mo's Kurt Wagner, thanks so much on all things Meta. Let's broaden it out. Michael Reynolds is with us, Vice President and Investment Strategy at Glenmead, manages $45.6 billion in assets. And just focus for a moment on the AI trade and this rush to spend by the hyperscalers, of which Meta is now one. What do you make of this, Akwa Ha?

Thanks for having me. So we think without a doubt, AI is transformational and anyone who disagrees with that just probably hasn't been using it properly. But I think we're cautioning investors on our end to think through the connection between a transformational technology and what it actually leads to in terms of investment opportunities. History is littered with examples of great technology that just was not a good investment.

Gutenberg invented the printing press, but he died in poverty. Railroad bonds were notoriously poor investments. We're just not seeing a lot of pure plays in AI right now in the public markets, but perhaps if investors are turning to the private markets, that may be a little bit more plentiful with opportunities for AI as there's certainly going to be winners and losers in this space, but we're certainly in early stages. Okay, so how are investors getting access to the private markets on this particular area? Are they looking more to...

access, well, VC liquidity in some way? Yeah, we think it's a combination of trying to get that direct exposure with those that are actually building the software and delivering the AI tools that the end user is actually using, but also some of sort of the ancillary providers that can help on the margins, whether it's delivering the hardware on the tech or it's maybe the data centers that are delivering the energy that can help facilitate all of this. The

The best solution is probably a combination of the two. You don't want to sort of put all your bets on one side of a trade here and end up missing some of the bigger beneficiaries that were perhaps a little unintuitive as you were thinking through it in real time. Mike, so sticking with public markets, are you seeing people trying to bet on whether it be the energy stack, whether it be the hardware or the software stack from an equity perspective, or are they going into the bond market too?

A little bit of both. I think the equity markets are probably a little sexier from that perspective. Data centers have been really great performers over the last couple years in expectation that there's just going to be a big energy sink to be able to use these models at scale. We've seen a little bit of pushback on that given some of the opportunities we've seen coming out of deep seek where they were able to perhaps do things a little more efficiently and pull back on some of those expectations

But it's probably a little bit of both on both sides of the capital markets, stocks and bonds, where there's going to be opportunities here driven by technological innovation. I like that you bring that up, Mike, because it actually was quite recently that we were all panicking around actually whether you needed the scale of investment, you needed the scale of infrastructure because of deep seek. But I feel that's almost been put to bed. You look at Oracle's numbers this week, you think about the anxiety around supply, really, that's what's

the nature of the story has been, people can't build it fast enough. Is that where we're back to in terms of the market psyche? - To some extent, I think over the last year or so, perhaps pre-Deep Seek, there was a lot of concerns that there just wasn't enough energy to go around, that some of these data centers were gonna have to build out alternative energy sources, maybe flirting with nuclear.

But it's really, I think it falls into the historical precedence where when you have a breakthrough technology, it often seems like there's a lot of startup costs to really break through and get the technology working at scale. But innovation is a beautiful thing and finding ways to do things more effectively and efficiently

always just seems to occur. I think that's happening in real time this year, and we could continue to expect that to unfold over the years ahead. Just finding better ways to build it and building a better mousetrap. Okay, what about the mousetrap? Is it all about the United States? Are you looking at other opportunities? Are your investors, the people that you're speaking to, wanting to get out into Europe and Asia?

Yeah, there was certainly this theory that U.S. exceptionalism in AI was an uncrackable theme. And I think there are some sort of fissures into that theme this year, where, again, you had the deep seek news out of China. You have several other countries that are really doing a lot to incentivize domestic development of these types of technologies. It's happening in the UAE and European Union, many parts of Asia. They're trying to build out this technology. So it's

Is the U.S. going to have a monopoly on this technology for the foreseeable future remains unseen, but there's quite a few players that are emerging in this market that could end up sharing market share on this. G42 making inroads into Europe and the U.K. We'll discuss that later in the show. You've had Jensen Huang over there in the United Kingdom and Europe making deals. Michael, I'll end it here, therefore, because we've gone global, and today is a global day in nature, how people are feeling about potential growth

increased tensions in the Middle East, maybe even war. How are your investors responding to that at this moment? So we're cautioning our investors not to react too quickly to unfolding geopolitical conflict here. So far, I think we're following a pretty standard geopolitical blueprint where markets are reacting to the uncertainty that just didn't exist a few hours ago.

But in general, markets tend to see through this type of thing, especially for those countries that are not directly involved. This time around, I think inflation's gonna be really important to watch here. If energy infrastructure in the region starts to come in the crosshairs, figuratively or perhaps even literally speaking, that could have potential inflationary impacts for energy, which is just not just an input cost for, a direct input cost for consumers, but also for a lot of the goods they consume also consume energy.

So we're looking at that pretty closely, as well as the shipping lanes throughout that region, which can be pretty important for global trade. Those are going to be really important to watch over the weekend. Michael Reynolds, we hope you get some rest over the weekend. Vice President of Investment Strategy at Glenmead, we appreciate your time.

Now let's discuss that key story. Israel launching multiple strikes across Iran targeting nuclear facilities, killing top military officials. President Trump urging Iran to accept a nuclear deal in an effort to avoid further attacks. Iran vowing to continue its nuclear program despite the Israeli strikes.

For more, we turn to Bloomberg's Germana Bissetti, who joins us now, actually based in London just for this week. And Germana, you're usually in the Middle East, and it's interesting we're getting a U.S. official telling Bloomberg News that indeed we are still seeing talks likely to be conducted between the United States and Iran.

Yes, perhaps. There is a potential for de-escalation here, especially as those sixth round of talks between U.S. and Iran were slated to take place in Oman this weekend. Given the events over the last 24 hours, the eventual possibility of those happening was thrown into doubt. But, of course, what we have seen, just as a recap, is the most significant attack

on Iran going back to the 80s. What Israel did in the last 24 hours supersedes all of the events that happened last year, both back in April and in October, and really constitutes a major blow to Iran, not just in terms of the fact that

Israel went after specific nuclear facilities. And even though no radiation has actually been recorded from those nuclear facilities, what they did succeed at doing is at taking out some senior IRGC. So these are Revolutionary Guard commanders, the chief of staff of the armed forces. Some of these people are key masterminds behind the attacks that had been conducted

on Israel in the last year, but also on the Aramco facilities in Saudi Arabia back in 2019. So some of the key players have been taken out with these strikes. Now, where we go from here, Iran has vowed a harsh retaliation. Already this morning, they fired over 100 drones directed towards Israel. Those are mainly

intercepted. But the question from here onwards is how many more ballistic missiles they're looking to send towards Israel, whether or not this will encapsulate other proxies in the region as well, whether the likes of Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas may get involved in the retaliation. And then also,

whether or not the international community looks to de-escalate from this point onwards. And to your point, U.S. plays a significant role here because of the possibility of the furthering of those nuclear discussions. And let's see whether Iran actually does come to the table in good faith.

Germano Bersetchi, we really appreciate your time today. Thank you. Now coming up, we go back to tech. Apple sets a new target for a revamped Siri. More on that next. This is Bloomberg Tech. Remember when a single technology glitch could bring an entire workday to a standstill? I'm Mark Banfield, Chief Commercial Officer at TeamViewer. Today, most technical issues are recurring. If you know the patterns, these issues can be remediated before they impact your business.

One major UK retailer discovered a single point of sale outage cost them around $1 million in lost sales during a single lunchtime. Now, using TeamViewer's digital workplace platform, the same company is able to identify and fix those issues before they even happen. But proactive troubleshooting isn't just about the incremental improvements. It's about fundamentally reimagining how work happens for everyone.

And the companies that move first get competitive advantages in terms of efficiency, productivity, and innovation. To find out more, visit bloomberg.com forward slash team viewer.

The world is built on code. From the apps we use every day to the systems powering industries, developers like you are the architects of tomorrow. But let's be real. The road to innovation can get a little tricky. You need the right tools to move fast, but you also need a community to help you go further. That's where Microsoft comes in. Microsoft has the tools to help you move at lightning speed, like GitHub Copilot, VS Code, and a ton of AI resources to keep you on the cutting edge.

But here's the best part. You can build with confidence, knowing that Microsoft security and compliance are already taken care of. No more worrying about vulnerabilities or threats while you focus on your craft. And with Azure AI Foundry, you can build your way. The future is yours to build, no strings attached. From ready-to-code tools to full flexibility, it's all in one place.

The future's in your hands. So learn more at developer.microsoft.com slash AI. In today's changing job market, finding and retaining top talent is more challenging than ever. But with Express Employment Professionals, you can streamline your hiring process and save both time and money. Did you know that 92% of U.S. hiring decision makers expect to face challenges finding qualified candidates this year?

The costs of recruiting, advertising, interviewing, and onboarding can add up quickly. But Express has the solution. Go to ExpressPros.com today. Ready to hire differently? Whether you need contract workers or your next core team member, contact Express Employment Professionals. Express leverages advanced technology and a streamlined hiring process to reduce your recruitment costs.

From efficient job postings to customized candidate screening, Express makes hiring easier and more cost-effective. With more than 870 offices, you have a local team ready to help manage your workforce. Go to ExpressPros.com to find a location near you. ♪

Apple said to be targeting a new internal date of spring 2026 for its revamped Siri upgrade after multiple delays. Now that's according to sources. Let's get to our own Mark Gurman for more. It was but this week that WWDC left us hanging on Siri and you bring us some clarity.

That's exactly right. So they did not talk about Siri features pretty much at all at WWDC, other than to say they're still delayed and they'll be arriving in the coming year. So I looked into it, and the new launch timeframe is likely going to be as part of what will be known as iOS 26.4, and that...

It's currently scheduled for the springtime next year, so around March, April. And this will deliver the delayed Siri features. These are the features key to an AI overhaul for the voice assistant that were announced back in June of 2024. So the three main features are the ability to tap into your personal data to fulfill Siri queries. So if I asked for a question such as, what was the video I sent Caroline last week? It would be able to pull up that video or a podcast or a song.

If I wanted to get analysis of something on my screen using Siri, it could do that as well.

And it has precise control of applications. So, for instance, I could say, pull up this photo of Caroline and edit it and send it to her, as well as a few other people in our group chat. Right? Yeah. Those are impressive and big features, all delayed, now coming about nine months from now. I'm waiting for that photo, Mark. Put it on our group chat. But, Mark, I'm also just, remind us what the problem has been here. Why has it been so difficult to integrate with Siri?

Apple has been facing some serious engineering and management problems, but just to break it down and not to get too technical, essentially Apple had to split Siri into two brains, right? The first brain, the more basic one, has to do with features like setting alarms, phone calls, all the legacy stuff.

Then they built a second brain more based on large language models at the core of modern AI for those more advanced features I talked about. But making one Siri that has two brains combined to do two different set of actions had compatibility problems in real world use. And I'm told it didn't work properly up to a third of the time, which is a lot based on how much usage these things are going to get.

And so what Apple is doing now is rebuilding the underlying Siri architecture to have one brain based on that newer generation technology to handle everything. And that would eliminate the compatibility issues, but obviously is going to take more time to put together.

Brilliant storytelling. Mark Gurman, thank you so much with the breaking news as well. Let's turn our attention to Adobe now. Shares under pressure after the company actually gave a sales outlook that was pretty good, but it failed to calm investors skeptical about its ability to really compete with the AI-focused startups. Bloomberg's Brodie Ford joins us now. And look, shares are off by 5%, worst day since March 2025, even though they beat and they raised.

Right, I mean, so Adobe is this kind of poster child of a company which was the kind of leader of their industry for 20 years. Nobody could touch them. And the question is, okay, AI is coming. A lot of these apps are much more lightweight, cheaper, easier to use.

Does Adobe stay relevant? That's the big question. And investors are not convinced. I mean, I think they're down 10% over the last year, Adobe's stock, and down further today. And it's all because of those AI disruption anxieties. You're thinking mid-journey, for example. We're thinking even Sora making inroads when it comes to making the video side of the equation. But Firefly has been getting some use. What was it, like $2.4 billion?

content's made over the course of its being used out there in the wild? It's been getting used, but when I was growing up, if you wanted to be like a cool creative person, you had to go find a copy of Photoshop somewhere, Adobe Premier's video editing. It's not that way anymore. If you talk to people who are young, who are really kind of making cutting edge art,

they're using these mid journeys, Google's VO. I mean, when it comes to the enterprise level where you have a CIO who's worried about cybersecurity, they're still buying Adobe, but the question is that next generation, where is the mind share going? - What was also interesting is they tried to win the IP battle.

and try and say, "Look, we've got you covered. You don't need to be worried. We'll even pay out if we find that any of the images you're creating are based on some other IP." But people aren't worried about that so much anymore? - It's an interesting question. I mean, we saw Disney suing Midjourney a couple days ago. I'm sure the CIO of our company or others is not gonna go and pay for a company getting sued by Disney.

But at this current moment, it's still unsettled. It appears that the anxieties around, hey, scraping data to build models, is that going to be okay? It seems like a lot of buyers at this point are swayed against it. They've got more convincing to do. Bloomberg's Brody Ford. Brilliant, as always. Thank you.

AMD CEO Lisa Su said her company's latest AI processors can challenge NVIDIA chips in a market she now expects to soar past $500 billion in the next three years. This is as the company aims to play catch up with NVIDIA and AI accelerators with its new products. Let's talk about them. Bloomberg Intelligence Analyst Kunjan Sabani is here with us. You were at the event, you're assessing what's been discussed. The MI350, will it be fast enough to start winning more market share?

I mean, if you look at that event and announcement in isolation, we think there were many positives. One, the customer adoption is broadening. Some of the new names like XAI, OpenAI, Oracle, the deal with Oracle, which we think will be the largest 355 deal so far yet and will show results in the second half.

These were really surprisingly positive. Remember these have been traditionally Nvidia only houses so them getting to these customers is a pretty big deal. They showed continued progress on the hardware with the announcement of the roadmap with the 400 ELO server rack and more important the software which they have been lagging until as of last year.

So overall, a lot of impressive progress on all aspects. But the challenge is the competition also continues to speed ahead and they have had a head start. They have. And boy, does everyone just relentlessly compare them to Jensen's powerhouse. You say on your note that really that MI400 ramp up in 2026 is going to be the key inflection point for potential share gain. In a way, though, do they know?

Kunjun, because in many ways the issue for Nvidia is a supply side issue. They can't make them fast enough. So is there still so much market for Lisa Su to take?

There is and why that's a conflection point is when you think about the current competition or the playground, right? It is all about server level rack solution, not about chips anymore. AMD is still not there yet. So the Helios rack will be their first iteration using the ZTE acquisition talent that they acquired and expertise where they can really compete head to head with Nvidia, assuming Nvidia doesn't move.

forward another year from there. But that is what they really need. What they're really missing is a big cluster level server rack GPU solution. What's interesting is, are they all still fighting for the training side of the equation? We've all just been dominated about the inference and there are some really powerful startups coming into that space trying to take market share too.

I think they're leading by competing in inference because that is where they have the edge given their higher or I would say apples to apples higher memory bandwidth and efficiency there and a lower TCO. So they're getting into the customer doors through inference and once they have proven and starting to gain a little bit more share then they're showing up like hey you can still try us for trading and

And that's how they're trying to increase a little bit of a share in training. We still like the inference play. Remember, going forward, inference, we expect to grow faster than training. Yes, training will be a big chunk still, but there will be a lot more broader customer base for inference. Bloomberg Intelligence Analyst, Kunjan Sivani. So great to get your analysis. Thank you.

Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. I'm Caroline Hyde in New York. Let's get a quick check on these markets. We are consumed by geopolitics today. Anxiety around the Middle East after Israel's a track on Iran. We see the Nasdaq 100 off by six tenths of a percent as we see that risk aversion play in. But not for all names. Oracle up 5%. It is just managing to ramp up higher, a new record high, after they posted earnings earlier in the week.

saying that they are going to be getting 70% gain in cloud infrastructure sales in this fiscal year. Adobe is down on its earnings. We discussed it with Brodie Ford off by 5%. Not enough to quell anxiety that it won't be an AI winner. Move on, have a look at what's happening in broader assets, though. I want to shine a light on what's happening in the world of crypto because Bitcoin...

isn't actually playing out as a haven today so much. It's coming off of its lows. Look, we're still 105,000, but it is off by 0.3% as we sell risk. But let's just talk more broadly about the movement within crypto and stablecoins in particular. This comes as the Senate nears the passage of the Genius Act.

which would regulate, integrate stablecoins more into mainstream finance. I want to shine a light on what's happening with these names, Visa and Mastercard, currently off by 5%, 4%, because reports coming out of the Wall Street Journal that, look, big players, Amazon, Walmart, are studying their own stablecoins. Does this cut out the middlemen

the card providers thus far. And of course, we're going to speak to one beneficiary of all of this legislation, all of the move towards stablecoins and digital payments. It's Circle. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire joins me now on set. This report that potentially we see Amazon, Walmart already really galvanizing themselves to have their own stablecoins. How quickly could that end Visa and MasterCard?

Well, look, I think if you're a major technology company or you're a major commerce firm or you're a major financial institution,

when you get legal certainty that stablecoin money is a new form of electronic money that is available to the global financial system, you're gonna pay attention. And obviously you're gonna look at the technology, the progress of the technology as well. And I think the conclusion that a lot of major firms are reaching is that this is the new money layer of the internet and it provides tremendous technology

to innovate beyond what we've been able to innovate with money before. And it offers tremendous benefits ultimately to these firms bottom lines. And so it's a it's a technology that's ready

And it's a technology with the Genius Act, which you referred to, I think, which gets the legal certainty to really utilize this at scale. And so from my perspective, first of all, it's not surprising at all. And I think it's a tremendous opportunity as the world connects to this new form of currency on the internet. Is it not surprising at all because they're coming to you to help build the infrastructure layer? How much would USDC or indeed what Circle does be what Amazon and Walmart eventually adopt?

We see tremendous opportunities to collaborate with major technology firms, major payments companies, major financial institutions, and we already do. We work with some of the biggest household names. I mean, even just yesterday, we saw Shopify announce that they're making USDC payments a default option.

automatically for every merchant on their platform in the US and then in Europe. That's like a million merchants. So like a PayPal button and then a USDC button. It will be there by default. And in fact, not only that, they'll be offering merchants half a percent cash back to the merchant. So they're going to actually compensate the merchant, which is incredible.

And so I think you're seeing platforms like this adopting USDC. And so, as the operator of the world's largest regulated stablecoin network in the world, we wanna, and we're really a market neutral infrastructure. We don't compete for consumers or merchants or businesses. We wanna work with everybody to take advantage of this breakthrough technology innovation. - The breakthrough comes with the regulatory support, as you say, Genius Act, when do you expect it to come into play?

Well, yesterday, the Genius Act passed a critical cloture vote with a super majority bipartisan. And so that sets it on a glide path to pass the Senate on Tuesday of next week. We actually previously did hear from Tim Scott. Of course, he's been leading the charge in many ways on crypto more broadly. But he's been speaking to Bloomberg about some of the opportunities around stablecoin and leading the charge here in the United States as, of course, a key representative. Just take a listen.

With the Bipartisan Genius Act, we can do more than just pass a bill. We can deliver results for the American people. We can bring clarity for a sector that's been clouded by uncertainty, and we can make it known. The United States will lead, not follow, in the digital asset revolution.

chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, an important voice. But what's interesting with Tim Scott is now he's also pushing us towards where we go with broader crypto adoption. Yes, we get the Genius Act, but then what of the Clarity Act, as it's called? How much further would that take your industry?

Well, look, there's this incredible innovation of blockchains. There's this incredible innovation of digital assets, digital tokens. And we need legal clarity on what these are, how you can offer them, how they can be used, the platforms where they need to be registered or regulated, and where there's just very clear rules for issuers. So I think the Clarity Act is essential. I think it is a very strong piece of legislation. I know there's more work to do on that.

ultimately in the Senate. But I think the combination of both the Genius Act and the Clarity Act ultimately creates an incredible environment for a rules-based system in the United States, a competitive environment, and I believe does accomplish the objective of making the United States sort of the capital of this new form of technology innovation. It's a great opportunity for American companies as well. Briefly,

It's been good timing to go public. Your shares have absolutely soared since they first started trading last week. How does it feel? I mean, look, we're very excited to be a public company. It's critical from our perspective to just enhance the trust, transparency, compliance, good governance that we're known for. And I think in particular at this moment, when we're getting this legal clarity around the world on stablecoin money, it's

And in particular, as you said, these major companies are looking at this. We think that being a public company will serve us well in working with the leading institutions of the world. And so from that perspective, we're really pleased and excited to build tremendous partnerships around the world. Oh, and you sync some of those partnerships. Do come back on to talk all about it. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire, we appreciate it. Coming up.

Felicis raises $900 million in its 10th round. This is a fund, of course, and Felicis' managing partner, Sandeep Pichu, is going to be joining us next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

Tune in to our Technology Powered Growth Podcast.

Find it at group.pingan.com, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

The world is built on code. From the apps we use every day to the systems powering industries, developers like you are the architects of tomorrow. But let's be real, the road to innovation can get a little tricky. You need the right tools to move fast, but you also need a community to help you go further. That's where Microsoft comes in. Microsoft has the tools to help you move at lightning speed, like GitHub Copilot, VS Code, and a ton of AI resources to keep you on the cutting edge.

But here's the best part. You can build with confidence, knowing that Microsoft security and compliance are already taken care of. No more worrying about vulnerabilities or threats while you focus on your craft. And with Azure AI Foundry, you can build your way. The future is yours to build, no strings attached. From ready-to-code tools to full flexibility, it's all in one place.

The future's in your hands. So learn more at developer.microsoft.com slash AI. In today's changing job market, finding and retaining top talent is more challenging than ever. But with Express Employment Professionals, you can streamline your hiring process and save both time and money. Did you know that 92% of U.S. hiring decision makers expect to face challenges finding qualified candidates this year?

The costs of recruiting, advertising, interviewing, and onboarding can add up quickly. But Express has the solution. Go to ExpressPros.com today. Ready to hire differently? Whether you need contract workers or your next core team member, contact Express Employment Professionals. Express leverages advanced technology and a streamlined hiring process to reduce your recruitment costs.

From efficient job postings to customized candidate screening, Express makes hiring easier and more cost-effective. With more than 870 offices, you have a local team ready to help manage your workforce. Go to expresspros.com to find a location near you. It is time now for Talking Tech. First up, Chinese authorities have released draft guidelines on the transmission of

of car data from overseas vehicles. Look, it's a move that could benefit Tesla and its autonomous driving features. It marks the first time Beijing has really clarified its stance on data generated and exported from within China. Plus, Abu Dhabi's G42, well, it's planning to launch a European unit. G42 Europe and UK, well, it's set to deploy AI solutions for the private sector, partnering with governments too. Now, the announcement comes as NVIDIA CEO Jason Wang forecasts a tenfold increase

a bold increase in Europe's AI computing capacity over the next two years. And GameStop, well it says the company's future is in trading cards, saying the likes of Pokemon sports cards align with the company's heritage, maybe not gaming. Look, GameStop's collectibles business made up 29% of revenue in the first quarter of the company, planning to add 280 more stores that will offer trading card evaluation services.

Right, it's time for today's VC Spotlight now. And Felicis has announced a $900 million 10th fund, the fund's largest ever to date. Let's bring in Sunneet Pichai, who is Felicis' managing partner, joining us now. And Sunneet, just tell us who the LPs are, what they're excited about you allocating towards.

Hi, Caroline. It's wonderful to be here. It's a very exciting week for us. We've raised $900 million, our largest fund yet, from mostly U.S. institutions that we are super proud to take money from. And these are hospital systems, museums, university endowments, hospitals.

that are all doing great things in the world. And we're proud to be in business with them. And we're proud to multiply their money and have it go back to some great causes. I'm just really interested, Sandeep, more broadly in where you therefore put the money. Because at the moment, it sounds as though you're going to be in generative AI, more full throttle. It's going to be the infrastructure layer. But that feels like a very busy, very crowded space. Who are the companies you're depending on?

Yeah, I mean, just to give, you know, take a step back here. Felicis was actually born in 2010s. Our very first institutional fund was just at the beginning of the cloud and the mobile tech super cycle. And, you know, we've been very fortunate that we found some like amazing, amazing businesses as part of that. Household names today, like a Shopify, Adyen,

a canva and a notion and so we're now at another exciting tech super cycle in ai you know just in the first or second innings if you will and so there's a lot of excitement in the past two years two-thirds of our investments have been ai native companies most of our investments are like usually first or second money in so we're playing very very much into the ai super cycle household names hopefully like the canvas of the world 10 years from now that go public

both the infrastructure stack as well as the application stack. It's interesting. We had Menlo Ventures partner on yesterday and Sean was telling us that in certain areas, the funding just seems extraordinary. The valuations, once again, almost feel akin to 2021. Is that what's happening right now? How are you getting in at a decent price point?

Yeah, look, I think valuations, you know, continue to be market driven in many ways. And we're not the only ones excited about AI. But if you take a step back, the reason why everybody's excited about AI is that even like if you look at like the broad arc of tech history, what tech is really good at is providing us products and services that are previously expensive or like inaccessible, except to like very few and

bringing it all the way down, democratizing that to the masses, if you will. And a great example of these in the last tech cycle were companies like Canva that allowed anybody to design. Now, over 200 million people use Canva to design. You have something like a Shopify. Anybody can become an entrepreneur, and millions have become entrepreneurs because of Shopify. An Uber gave us all a private

private driver and Airbnb gave us all a vacation rental. And so, you know, you take that forward and you think about like what AI can do for us. It's, you know, every household. I mean, think about how many times we keep talking about, you know, I wish I had like a private tutor for my kids. I wish I had, you know, a therapist. Like, and they're so expensive. Every session is expensive. They're hard to find.

Think about all of the labor that kind of goes into household services. Or if you move that to businesses, you have things that are available to senior management, like an executive assistant or an executive coach that are not available to everybody else. And AI is expanding the surface of software so drastically. And if you think about this, Caroline, just 1% to 2% of world GDP currently spent on software.

And AI is so radically restructuring the surface area of software. And you can be an AI pessimist or optimist, and those numbers in 10 years are going to be different for each one of us. But none of us are going to disagree that that number is going to move up drastically. Sunil, very briefly, like you have had some superb exits and think of Shopify and Addy, and you are in some of the hottest names when I think about run

and indeed Canva, how much pressure have you seen from LPs being like, "Look, we need the liquidity now." How quickly do you think these doors can remain open briefly? - I think for the very, very best companies, think about a Canva, their shares can trade every single day. They don't have to even raise any primary money. They've been so profitable for so long that in the secondary markets, you always have the ability to exit if you want. And we've selectively chosen that for our LPs and given them back some distribution.

And so we've done that, like on a case, many other funds have done that. So I'm not worried about that. I think one of the things to think about is that given this new AI tech cycle, if you assume that the software as a percentage of GDP doubles, let's say conservatively, that's hundreds of billions of dollars of new spend that is going to get allocated to new products and services that are AI-based.

Our job is to basically go and find those outlier businesses for our LPs and find the next Shopify and Canva and Adyen, you know, before they're obvious. Sanyam Pichu, thanks for bringing it. Felices on the new 10th fund.

LGBTQ+ dating app, Grindr, its popularity has grown globally, averaging 14.5 million monthly active users. Shares of the company are up 33% year-to-date. We spoke with Grindr CEO, George Arison, about the role AI is playing in that growth and how they handle privacy in the age of AI.

A grind of privacy is by far the paramount thing because we have users in countries where it's illegal to be gay or in areas where while it might be legal, you still can't really be yourself. And so protecting them is really, really crucial. We don't ask for a lot of information from users when they join the app. We don't require a photo. We don't try to be as minimal as we can in that regard, again, because privacy is so important to users.

And from there, the other really critical thing for us is to be able to keep all the data on Grindr. So we work with Amazon's Bedrock service, which is a virtual private space that allows us to actually keep everything on our end. Our data does not kind of stay with anybody else.

and our data does not train anybody else's models. And that's been really helpful, obviously. And the other thing we're now starting to do is actually take open source models and put them into our system and be able to train them to make them be a little more gay. And that's also quite interesting because that's kind of pushing us closer to the frontier of what's happening in AI, but no one else is doing anything like that. And we think we can provide some really useful insights for our users through that.

Grindr CEO George Arison there. Let's just talk about New York State as well. It has begun asking companies to disclose when artificial intelligence contributes to mass layoffs. It's a symbolic move as officials look to possibly regulating AI. The technology's impact on the workforce could

have an uneven effect between men and women. Shubhi Rau is with us. She is the founder and CEO of Uplivel. It's a platform, AI platform, designed to accelerate women in the workplace. Shubhi is also an engineer, former tech executive yourself. Shubhi, is there going to be an unequal impact of generative AI's use on the workforce, do you think?

Well, when you look at what is happening in the world of AI and where the applications at least today are, it's about

automating jobs that are largely held by women. It just so happens that those jobs tend to be more administrative in nature and are perfect and ripe for automation. And so it'll be really interesting to see what the data shows, especially if this does become legislation in New York. It is, yeah. How it impacts women and how disproportionately that impact then creates further gender inequities.

How is your technology perhaps trying to play a counterforce here? Yeah, you know, if you take a step back and think about today, how the models are being trained from a generative AI perspective, those large models, whether it's the open AI models or is Gemini or cloud, have been trained largely online.

from data of the internet. And when you look at what is the data on the internet, the large swaths of data, of course, are Wikipedia, Reddit, GitHub, popular pop gender data sets, which tend to be highly male-dominant.

Then you look at the other data sets, whether that's related to academic papers, publications around business books and use cases, healthcare, where again, up until recently, women were not even included in those clinical data sets.

Really, there's not a lot around caregiving, unpaid labor, right? So when you look at what that data set highly represents or over-represents men than it does women.

So that is the basis of the training data sets for majority of the models today. So the counterforce for Uplevel, what we're trying to do at Uplevel is create the world's largest gender data set so that this gender data set actually represents women, both contextually from an experience perspective, understands women's challenges around career, health, wealth, and more importantly, can help

be that counter force whereby, you know, in theory, someday we could

blend both those data sets, then we'll have that gender equality across the broader training sets. Shubhi, it's really interesting. We're hearing from the Grindr CEO saying they're training their large language models to be more gay. From the perspective of maybe you start to counteract the bias within the applications that come from the large language models, but what about just unsaid biases about women

and actually adopting this technology, are we being first movers? Are people being early adopters in the workforce, do you think, at the same level as men?

Yeah, you know, this is a disturbing number that, you know, I keep seeing where it feels like the gap was maybe 20 percentage points between men adopting. And I'm talking about generative AI, not just AI broadly, but just even generative AI tools versus women. Part of that has to do with, you know, if you look at broader adoption of women in terms of,

Yes, women might be on those platforms, but are not nearly as active in terms of posting, sharing comments, reacting than men are. And so that'd be, and why is that? Because, you know, when you look at a lot of these platforms and there has been a mass exodus of women is very,

because of the misogyny, the narcissism, you know, the sexualization, et cetera. So there is this inherent issue that we have around trusting tech, and that's leading itself into also using these generative AI tools. So a big part of that is just, can I trust this?

Or if I use this tool, then can I actually say this is my work? So there's that bigger issue. So there have been impediments to adoption for women. In 30 seconds, Juby, is it getting better?

No, it's not getting better. It's actually widening. So also differently, maybe women are still at the same rate of adoption and men are adopting it faster. More work to do, more reason to see Uplevel going in there and building these connections with big companies. Shubhi Rao, so good to have you, the Uplevel founder and CEO. We appreciate it. And that does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech. Do not forget to check out our podcast. You can find it on the terminal as well as online on Apple, Spotify, and Google+.

and iHeart. From New York, this is Bloomberg Tech.

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