Zuckerberg Recruits for New Meta AGI Group
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Bloomberg Tech is live from coast to coast with Caroline Hyde in New York and Ed Ludlow in San Francisco.

This is Bloomberg Tech. Coming up, Mark Zuckerberg personally assembling a super intelligence team to help Meta hit artificial general intelligence. Plus, Apple expands its relationship with open AI and introduces a new software redesign called Liquid Glass. We'll recap WWDC. And we speak with the ULA CEO about the spat between Elon Musk and Donald Trump and what it means for the space industry. But first...

But first, we check out what's happening in the markets. Some cautious trading. We've got big bond sales, $58 billion, a three-year debt coming due. We keep an eye on what the yields are doing, but we also keep an eye on what's happening in London, China, US. The talks continue. We're clinging on to gains up about a tenth of a percent. Remember, the S&P near a record high, Ed. What are you looking at?

Our top story, and that is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg assembling this super intelligence team. Bloomberg reporting citing sources that he wants 50 people. He wants them sitting close to him at HQ, all to go after AGI. And in Meta's case, the stock kind of up with the focus of the markets on trade talks right now. But this is very much, Caro, founder mode activated.

Let's dig in on the founder mode. Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner joins us now, who helped break down this story. And it feels as though Mark Zuckerberg is rallying his troops. He's got his own personal WhatsApp for this, well, party, he calls it.

That's right. We've been told that he's essentially more involved in recruiting for this team than he has ever been at the company in more than 20 years. This is something that has, you know, he's had a fire lit under him back in April when their Llama 4 model was released.

and quite frankly, disappointed people, right? Not only disappointed experts outside the company who are reviewing the model, but disappointed people internally. And we're told that Zuckerberg at that time really said, "Okay, I need to be heavily involved. I need to go out and recruit these people myself to get the absolute best talent." And that is what he has spent his last two months doing, literally hosting people at his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe to try and close these deals and sign these AI experts and scientists.

I've been hearing for a while that Meta's offering salaries of $2 million plus to a lot of engineering talent, but Mark Zuckerberg is doing the phone calls right. The question now is, what is the motivation? Meta versus the rest of the field when it comes to the pursuit of AGI.

Yeah, everyone's going after AGI. And the way it was described to me by someone the other day is, look, you know, it doesn't matter if you're the third person, the third company to get to AGI. It only matters if you're first, right? Not only is that going to be a feather in your cap for future recruiting, for, you know, kind of the symbolism of being the first company to get there, but it's also going to give you a massive head start as, you know, for your product. So if Meta is to get their first Meta AIs chapter,

is going to be more widely adopted. Their Ray-Ban glasses will be more widely adopted. So the idea of getting to AGI is a massive race because of all of these other implications. And that's one of the reasons that Zuckerberg, who is super, super competitive, by the way, that's why he's putting himself at the forefront of this effort at Meta right now. Shares been winning up 19% if you're looking at the competitive street cut. But what about scale AI and the investment there? How does it fit in?

Yeah, so as we reported over the weekend, a multi-billion dollar investment is expected to go into Scale AI. I think there's sort of two parts to this. One, there's the investment in what Scale AI is doing as a business, the tech, also the sort of relationships that they've developed with the government and having clients like that.

um i think it's something that's appealing to meta who has not historically been in that bit line of business but i think there's also a recruiting element to this um story right alex wang the ceo of scale ai is expected to join this new super intelligence team that we reported about last night i believe there are other scale ai employees who will probably contribute to this team as well so there's sort of a a sharing of talent

as well that I think is a part of this expected deal, which I imagine we may hear about sometime in the very near future. Kurt, when Zuckerberg is inviting these engineers into his homes, like in Lake Tahoe, what is his pitch? What are sources saying that he thinks Meta is doing well or what Meta has an advantage in over the rest of the field?

He's leaning quite heavily into Meta's resources. You know, from what we've heard, he's talked about the cash flow at the company, the strong advertising business and the fact that they have the tens of billions of dollars on hand to go pursue these very expensive AI improvements. Right. A lot of the other companies. And as you know, they're out raising money. They're out fundraising constantly to try and get that cash flow going.

Meta already has that. So he's out saying, look, we have the resources. I'm giving you the runway to do all of this stuff. You know, come work for me where you will never want for anything, essentially. Right. So a big part of the push is Meta is a financial behemoth here who can actually get this thing done.

Behemoth, I wish we had more time to discuss that. Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner, thank you very much. Sticking with AI, Apple introduced AI-powered features at its developers conference, including an expanded relationship with OpenAI, but a new software redesign called Liquid Glass with a transparent menu and a glassy look. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has all the details.

In our discussion of Apple WWDC, we say that liquid glass is the most significant design overhaul for an OS interface ever. What did you make of it and what do we need to know?

Yeah, so the significance of this interface change is how broad it is, right? It's available on all of Apple's devices. This is the first time they're doing a user interface revamp across all of the devices. And it's also interesting because it sets the stage for future Apple devices, right? In terms of hardware, the Apple devices are going to get more glassy.

right? You're going to see curved glass edges on the 20th anniversary iPhone in two years. So having an all glass interface with a lot of transparency sets the stage for that. And so from that standpoint, it's great. I've been using the new UI on all of my devices since yesterday when the betas came out. And I think it's really great. And I think it's also going to improve dramatically between now and September when it's all released. And so if you're a developer and

and you have an extra phone or you want to take a little bit of a risk, I would encourage anyone to try out the new look. So that's cool. But why then analysts like Angelo Zeno saying this whole event was a dud? Why is there such a deafening silence around Siri, for example, Mark?

Well, because Wall Street basically cares about buzzwords because buzzwords are what get the share price moving in either direction. And you didn't hear a whole lot as we anticipated and talked about in advance about AI or Siri. Apple is essentially taking an AI gap year at the worst possible time. They're not promising any new AI features right now. I don't anticipate that they're going to start doing so again until June of 2026.

Apple intelligence obviously was a flop. They're doing their best to try to show people that they are here too with AI without going too far and making these promises. What they have done is partnered with ChatGPT and a few more features. So you can take a screenshot now.

uh and chat gpt can analyze what's on your screen of course you could have done that with the app already but this is a bit of a shortcut and then they have new developer tools that tap into third-party lms including jet gbt but yeah to be clear as we've been talking about the fact that apple is nowhere near any of its competition in ai is a massive failure on all levels

The stock fell 1.2% yesterday. Monday, it's now up around 1.2%. So we've kind of balanced out the trading in this market. It's more to do with trade talks than I guess anything idiosyncratic.

I found probably the most significant piece of news relevant to WWDC to be that access for third-party developers to on-device LLMs. Because you think about the app store that we have today and the ecosystem across operating systems, the whole point of WWDC, Mark, is the developers, right? Explain that piece of news and why the developer community cheered it.

So the foundation models that are available for Apple's own AI features are now available to third-party developers. So there are frameworks and software tools now for developers to build their own AI features. So this will be making it easier than ever for developers, by the way, there's millions of them on the Apple platforms, to develop AI features for their own apps.

But just a step back, in terms of the features themselves, right, most consumers who use these devices just want them to be better, want them to be easier. And so Apple went after the core competencies. If you look at the three apps that were revamped and improved yesterday, the three were Safari, phone, and camera, which are probably the most used apps on most people's iPhones.

And then two additional apps that got a little bit of love were Photos and Messages, which probably ran out the top five. They weren't as significant as the first three. So Apple made major improvements to the apps that people are using every day. For iPad users, the new iPad operating system finally makes the iPad like a computer, right? And so that is a huge feature that people, including myself, have been asking for for years.

So there's a lot of us in the Apple community who are actually pretty thrilled with the improvements that were made. But taking a step back still, this is focusing on these OS franchises that have been around for decades rather than pushing us into these next generation interfaces based around AI. So you have to juggle both. Apple's doing a great job managing the current, but we've not seen a lot that's giving us confidence about the future.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, we thank you so much on the Apple Roundup. Meanwhile, let's just look at what Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is up to in terms of its stock climbing, following a report from Reuters that it has signed a deal to provide cloud services to OpenAI. OpenAI will use the additional computing capacity for training and running its models. Both companies declining to comment to Reuters. It's a game of frenemies, Ed.

Okay, coming up, trade talks resume in London between the United States and China. We're going to have the latest details next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

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That was President Trump commenting after the first day of trade talks between the U.S. and China in London. And day two is now underway. Bloomberg's Anne-Marie Horton joins us from London. AMH, what do we need to know?

Well, what you need to know is at the moment there is no update. We do see both delegations having another day of trade talks. They did have a break around 2 o'clock local time. They have been back at the negotiating table inside Lancaster House. We were waiting to hear for potentially any breakouts in terms of

the United States getting what they want, which is an advanced pace of rare earths and magnets, and the Chinese side getting a bit of an easing of export controls, which is what Kevin Hassett, the NEC director, had said. At the moment, talks are still ongoing, but there is really a

time clock to this because Treasury Secretary Scott Besson has to be back on Capitol Hill tomorrow. He is testifying in front of the House Ways and Means Committee. So they really are on a time crunch to wrap up these negotiations. Talking of timing, Anne-Marie, an interestingly timed piece in the People's Daily over in China, the front page Huawei founder saying, look, these restrictions on us, they're not so bad.

Right. And that's what a lot of people were talking about, remember, during Deep Seek. And this is something that the NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Wang, had said to me when I caught up with him briefly before he had that meeting a month or so ago with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the president of the United States. Obviously, they likely were probably going to talk about the chip controls. And he told Ed recently that China has become quite formidable.

and that China is neck and neck really with the United States. They are not far behind. And that's really what the Huawei founder was saying in this local daily. It is really notable that in these talks in London, very different than the talks four weeks ago in Geneva, that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is here. It means that those chips potentially, those export controls are on the table.

Anne-Marie Holden, doing amazing work in London. We really appreciate it. Look, let's just check in on how Chinese stocks have reacted to all of this. They have been volatile. We've been higher earlier

early in trade but at the beginning it really was down and down we remain in the red once again this is as the trade talks as we say have been resuming you're seeing golden dragon index the nasdaq golden dragon index off by three tenths of a percent as we speak alibaba off by eight tenths jd off by more than a percentage point tiffany wade is here i'm pleased to say senior portfolio manager at columbia thread needle investments manages a cool 621 billion dollars in assets

Tiffany, how much is riding on these days of talks? How much do you think ultimately does make a decision for you within your portfolio? Yeah, I think we've seen the market react really well over the last couple of weeks to certainly a reduction in some of the tariffs on China and other countries as well. This would be very critical, I think, especially for the tech sector, especially talking about export restrictions. There are certainly parts of the tech sector like NVIDIA

most recently the electronic design automation companies that have been very hurt by export restrictions and tariffs. So for certain pockets of the market, I think this would be very impactful to see some of these trade negotiations play out. - Tiffany, how much of a risk premium is the president? When you look at any corner of the technology market,

and you say, I am going to bet on a company that this president has recently spoken favorably about or not favorably about, as the case may be, I'm talking, of course, about the volatility that he brings to any trade negotiation.

Yeah, I think it creates a lot of pause when you're thinking about companies that may be in focus from the president. Companies that have been talked about are sectors that have been talked about recently. But, you know, the worry as an investor is what will happen next that we haven't planned for or that we didn't see coming. So I think that, you know, companies that have been spoken about, have been targeted, are reflecting a bit of a risk premium. And you see this in a lot of the tech companies that are trading online.

you know, at discounts to where they were trading over the last couple of years, certainly relative to their own multiples, but also relative to the index as well. So I think that's reflected in some of the stocks. But again, the concern is what happens next because it's hard to predict.

Boy, does Tim Cook want to know what happens next as well. And his own stock trading below usual multiples. They've been in the eye of the storm when it comes to the supply chain side of things. What do you make of the desire to make companies ultimately build in the U.S., perhaps be less profitable? Does that make them as appetizing as an investment?

It certainly doesn't. It hurts the profit margins, as you mentioned. I think it'll be interesting to see how all of this plays out because it takes multiple years to build a factory here. It probably takes longer than President Trump is going to be in office. So do the announcement we've seen from companies building here, maybe some of them make sense economically, maybe some of them are paying lip service to the administration.

But it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. But it's interesting that Apple specifically has been a little bit more defiant. More defiant, but also perhaps more distracted is what people worry about. The fact that they are not playing catch up to this AI game as people had hoped with WWDC. What did you make of the event? Yeah, I thought the event was a little bit disappointing for Apple. We were expecting to hear more exciting updates around Apple intelligence, around AI.

maybe around AI being incorporated into Siri. And instead, I think we saw more updates on improving the user interface, more features on existing applications. You know, the applications that maybe incorporate the most AI would be their updates on visual intelligence or live translation. But those also feel like they're playing a little bit of catch up versus applications that are already in the market from other providers.

On my Bloomberg terminal, Apple seems to be the top holding in the Columbia large cap growth fund. So let me know if that's right. But I think like so far this year, Apple has been trading on trade risk, right, on tariff risk. And when we were like literally in the car on the way to Apple WWDC, we're asking ourselves, has this name started trading on that AI concern yet or not?

I think we've seen that a little bit around the WWDC event, and we certainly saw that after the event yesterday where people were a little bit disappointed that there wasn't a big AI announcement coming out of the keynote presentation. So I think we're seeing that a little bit, but Apple, like a lot of big tech companies, I think are still trying to figure out their strategy around AI and are putting a lot of money behind it.

Tiffany, you set yourself up for this by saying the big question is what happens next. For the technology sector, what happens next? Still very positive on the tech sector for the rest of the year. There's a lot of good tailwinds for the sector. Obviously, tariffs and export restrictions could come out of left field for the rest of the year. But there's a lot of good tailwinds for earnings growth, including AI investment that continues to be very strong across multiple parts of the market.

If we look at earnings growth expectations for the rest of the year or for the full year, the tech sector is still expected to grow much faster than the rest of the market. And as I mentioned before, a lot of the valuations across certain subgroups of tech look very attractive versus their history. So we're still very positive on the sector.

the commitment of capital coming from these companies. Look at what Mark Zuckerberg's doing, devoting his own time, his own dining table, but also sheer quantities of cash to make sure that he tries to win AGI, as it's known. Yeah, absolutely. And he's not alone. Microsoft, Apple, uh,

Alphabet, Amazon are all making huge investments into AI, and I think that has a great knock-on effect for parts of the semiconductor equipment, parts of software, other parts of the economy, including industrials, that all feed into that AI infrastructure. Tiffany Wade of Columbia Fred Needle Investments, thank you very much.

Uber and Wave. They are set to plan their first trial run of fully autonomous vehicles in London. It's a move that could pave the way for commercial robo-taxi services in the United Kingdom. Let's get on what this really means with Andrew Grant of Bloomberg NEF. And really your focus and analysis here is what London means for the growth story of robo-taxis more broadly. Why is it difficult to trial run there?

Well, I mean, let me start by saying that London is a big market for Uber. They often cite it as one of their five most important cities globally in their earnings calls and their reports. So this is a big development that they are working with their partners to start deploying, or planning to deploy robo-taxis in London. But these types of streets are different from where we've seen the majority of robo-taxis in the past. Places like Phoenix, Arizona, Austin, Texas, where you have

varying weather conditions, roads that haven't been around for nearly as long as some of the London streets which have their own quirks. - You lead our coverage of mobility, right, at BNF and you know that in any robo taxi setup you have the self-driving tech, hardware, software, somebody owns the vehicle, somebody operates the ride hailing app, and somebody manages the fleet. I'm looking at this announcement from Uber and Wave and I think there's a few names and pieces missing.

Yeah, exactly. In a robotaxi service, it really does take a village. You need different parts of this value chain that are going to contribute different skill sets and different capital requirements and different payoff periods. So if you are looking at what is essentially a partnership here between two tech companies, Wave and Uber, that mostly work with software,

There's a few other players that need to manage the hardware and manage the on-the-ground operations. So as you mentioned, that would be things like people, like a company that will actually end up owning the vehicle. And in the past, Uber's been a bit hesitant to...

own and operate large fleets of vehicles, but they have shown that they are willing to take over some of the operational aspects with some of their partnerships. For instance, their partnership with Waymo in Austin, some of their partnership with WeRide, which is underway in the United Arab Emirates, where they're taking over some of the fleet operating aspects. But you did right there, Ed.

We're missing kind of who's going to own these fleets, who they're going to work with on the charging side, if they are electric vehicles, which they do seem likely to be at this stage, and all the other details around maintenance and repair of these vehicles as they function as robotaxis. Andrew Grant of Bloomberg NEF. He leads our mobility coverage. We really appreciate it.

Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. I'm Caroline Hyde in New York. And I'm Ed Ludlow in San Francisco. When I look at technology markets right now, it's kind of the Mag7, those big mega cap tech names that are driving the narrative. Part of that's because investors keeping on trade talks in London, but there are some idiosyncratic items, some news items. We talked earlier about the reports of OpenAI looking to Alphabet and Google for more cloud capacity. A design called Liquid Glass will recap WWDC.

And we speak with the ULA CEO about the spat between Elon Musk and Donald Trump and what it means for the space industry. But first, we check out what's happening in the markets. Some cautious trading. We've got big bond sales, $58 billion, a three-year debt coming due. We keep an eye on what the yields are doing, but we also keep an eye on what's happening in London, China, US. The talks continue. We're clinging on to gains up about a tenth of a percent. Remember, the S&P near a record high, Ed. What are you looking at?

Our top story, and that is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg assembling this super intelligence team. Bloomberg reporting citing sources that he wants 50 people. He wants them sitting close to him at HQ, all to go after AGI. And in Meta's case, the stock kind of up with the focus of the markets on trade talks right now. But this is very much, Caro, founder mode now.

Let's dig in on the founder mode. Kurt Wagner joins us now, who helped break down this story. And it feels as though Mark Zuckerberg is rallying his troops. He's got his own personal WhatsApp for this, well, party, he calls it.

That's right. We've been told that he's essentially more involved in recruiting for this team than he has ever been at the company in more than 20 years. This is something that has, you know, he's had a fire lit under him back in April when their Llama 4 model was released.

and quite frankly, disappointed people, right? Not only disappointed experts outside the company who are reviewing the model, but disappointed people internally. And we're told that Zuckerberg at that time really said, "Okay, I need to be heavily involved. I need to go out and recruit these people myself to get the absolute best talent." And that is what he has spent his last two months doing, literally hosting people at his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe to try and close these deals and sign these AI experts and scientists.

I've been hearing for a while that Meta's offering salaries of $2 million plus to a lot of engineering talent, but Mark Zuckerberg is doing the phone calls right. The question now is, what is the motivation? Meta versus the rest of the field when it comes to the pursuit of AGI.

Yeah, everyone's going after AGI. And the way it was described to me by someone the other day is, look, you know, it doesn't matter if you're the third person, the third company to get to AGI. It only matters if you're first, right? Not only is that going to be a feather in your cap for future recruiting, for, you know, kind of the symbolism of being the first company to get there, but it's also going to give you a massive head start as, you know, for your product. So if Meta is to get their first Meta AIs chapter,

is going to be more widely adopted. Their Ray-Ban glasses will be more widely adopted. So the idea of getting to AGI is a massive race because of all of these other implications. And that's one of the reasons that Zuckerberg, who is super, super competitive, by the way, that's why he's putting himself at the forefront of this effort at Meta right now. Shares been winning up 19% if you're looking at the competitive street cut. But what about scale AI and the investment there? How does it fit in?

Yeah, so as we reported over the weekend, a multi-billion dollar investment is expected to go into Scale AI. I think there's sort of two parts to this. One, there's the investment in what Scale AI is doing as a business, the tech, also the sort of relationships that they've developed with the government and having clients like that.

um i think it's something that's appealing to meta who has not historically been in that bit line of business but i think there's also a recruiting element to this um story right alex wang the ceo of scale ai is expected to join this new super intelligence team that we reported about last night i believe there are other scale ai employees who are probably contribute to this team as well so there's sort of a a sharing of talent

as well that I think is a part of this expected deal, which I imagine we may hear about sometime in the very near future. Kurt, when Zuckerberg is inviting these engineers into his homes, like in Lake Tahoe, what is his pitch? What are sources saying that he thinks Meta is doing well or what Meta has an advantage in over the rest of the field?

He's leaning quite heavily into Meta's resources. You know, from what we've heard, he's talked about the cash flow at the company, the strong advertising business and the fact that they have the tens of billions of dollars on hand to go pursue these very expensive AI improvements. Right. A lot of the other companies, Ed, as you know, they're out raising money. They're out fundraising constantly to try and get that cash flow going.

in the building, Meta already has that. So he's out saying, look, we have the resources. I'm giving you the runway to do all of this stuff. You know, come work for me where you will never want for anything, essentially, right? So a big part of the push is Meta is a financial behemoth here who can actually get this thing done.

Behemoth. I wish we had more time to discuss that. Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner, thank you very much. Sticking with AI, Apple introduced AI-powered features at its developers conference, including an expanded relationship with OpenAI, but a new software redesign called Liquid Glass with a transparent menu and a glassy look. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has all the details.

In our discussion of Apple WWDC, we say that liquid glass is the most significant design overhaul for an OS interface ever. What did you make of it and what do we need to know?

Yeah, so the significance of this interface change is how broad it is, right? It's available on all of Apple's devices. This is the first time they're doing a user interface revamp across all of the devices. And it's also interesting because it sets the stage for future Apple devices, right? In terms of hardware, the Apple devices are going to get more glassy.

right, you're going to see curved glass edges on the 20th anniversary iPhone in two years. So having an all glass interface with a lot of transparency sets the stage for that. And so from that standpoint, it's great. I've been using the new UI on all of my devices since yesterday when the betas came out. And I think it's really great. And I think it's also going to improve dramatically between now and September when it's all released. And so if you're a developer

and you have an extra phone or you want to take a little bit of a risk, I would encourage anyone to try out the new look. So that's cool. But why then analysts like Angelo Zeno saying this whole event was a dud? Why is there such a deafening silence around Siri, for example, Mark?

Well, because Wall Street basically cares about buzzwords because buzzwords are what get the share price moving in either direction. And you didn't hear a whole lot as we anticipated and talked about in advance about AI or Siri. Apple is essentially taking an AI gap year at the worst possible time. They're not promising any new AI features right now. I don't anticipate that they're going to start doing so again until June of 2026.

Apple intelligence obviously was a flop. They're doing their best to try to show people that they are here too with AI without going too far and making these promises. What they have done is partnered with ChatGPT and a few more features so you can take a screenshot now.

And ChatGPT can analyze what's on your screen. Of course, you could have done that with the app already, but this is a bit of a shortcut. And then they have new developer tools that tap into third-party LLMs, including ChatGPT. But, yeah, to be clear, as we've been talking about, the fact that Apple is nowhere near any of its competition in AI is a massive failure on all levels.

The stock fell 1.2% yesterday. Monday, it's now up around 1.2%. So we've kind of balanced out the trading in this market. It's more to do with trade talks than I guess anything idiosyncratic. I found probably the most significant piece of news relevant to WWDC to be that access for third-party developers to on-device LLMs. Because you think about...

The app store that we have today and the ecosystem across operating systems, the whole point of WWDC, Mark, is the developers, right? Explain that piece of news and why the developer community cheered it.

So the foundation models that are available for Apple's own AI features are now available to third-party developers. So there are frameworks and software tools now for developers to build their own AI features. So this will be making it easier than ever for developers – by the way, there's millions of them on the Apple platforms – to develop AI features for their own apps.

Just a step back, in terms of the features themselves, most consumers who use these devices just want them to be better, want them to be easier. And so Apple went after the core competencies. If you look at the three apps that were revamped and improved yesterday, the three were Safari, phone, and camera, which are probably the most used apps on most people's iPhones.

And then two additional apps that got a little bit of love were Photos and Messages, which probably ran out the top five. They weren't as significant as the first three. So Apple made major improvements to the apps that people are using every day. For iPad users, the new iPad operating system finally makes the iPad like a computer, right? And so that is a huge feature that people, including myself, have been asking for for years.

So there's a lot of us in the Apple community who are actually pretty thrilled with the improvements that were made. But taking a step back still, this is focusing on these OS franchises that have been around for decades rather than pushing us into these next generation interfaces based around AI. So you have to juggle both. Apple's doing a great job managing the current, but we've not seen a lot that's giving us confidence about the future.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, we thank you so much on the Apple Roundup. Meanwhile, let's just look at what Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is up to in terms of its stock climbing, following a report from Reuters that it has signed a deal to provide cloud services to OpenAI. OpenAI will use the additional computing capacity for training and running its models. Both companies declining to comment to Reuters. It's a game of frenemies, Ed.

Okay, coming up, trade talks resume in London between the United States and China. We're going to have the latest details next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

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That was President Trump commenting after the first day of trade talks between the US and China in London. And day two is now underway. Bloomberg's Anne-Marie Horton joins us from London. AMH, what do we need to know?

Well, what you need to know is at the moment there is no update. We do see both delegations having another day of trade talks. They did have a break around 2 o'clock local time. They have been back at the negotiating table inside Lancaster House. We were waiting to hear for potentially any breakouts in terms of

the United States getting what they want, which is an advanced pace of rare earths and magnets, and the Chinese side getting a bit of an easing of export controls, which is what Kevin Hassett, the NEC director, had said. At the moment, talks are still ongoing, but there is really a

time clock to this because Treasury Secretary Scott Besson has to be back on Capitol Hill tomorrow. He is testifying in front of the House Ways and Means Committee. So they really are in a time crunch to wrap up these negotiations. Talking of timing, Anne-Marie, an interestingly timed piece in the People's Daily over in China, the front page Huawei founder saying, look, these restrictions on us, they're not so bad.

Right. And that's what a lot of people were talking about, remember, during Deep Seek. And this is something that the NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Wang, had said to me when I caught up with him briefly before he had that meeting a month or so ago with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the president of the United States. Obviously, they likely were probably going to talk about their chip controls. And he told Ed recently that China has become quite formidable.

and that China is neck and neck really with the United States. They are not far behind. And that's really what the Huawei founder was saying in this local daily. It is really notable that in these talks in London, very different than the talks four weeks ago in Geneva, that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is here. It means that those chips potentially, those export controls are on the table.

Anne-Marie Holden, doing amazing work in London. We really appreciate it. Look, let's just check in on how Chinese stocks have reacted to all of this. They have been volatile. We've been higher early in trade, but at the beginning, it really was down and down. We remain in the red once again. This is, as the trade talks, as we say, have been resuming. You're seeing Golden Dragon Index, the Nasdaq Golden Dragon Index, off by 0.3% as we speak. Alibaba off by 0.8%.

JD off by more than a percentage point. Tiffany Wade is here, I'm pleased to say, Senior Portfolio Manager at Columbia Threadneedle Investments, manages a cool $621 billion in assets. Tiffany, how much is riding on these days of talks? How much do you think ultimately does make a decision for you within your portfolio?

Yeah, I think we've seen the market react really well over the last couple of weeks to certainly a reduction in some of the tariffs on China and other countries as well. This would be very critical, I think, especially for the tech sector, especially talking about export restrictions. There are certainly parts of the tech sector like NVIDIA

most recently the electronic design automation companies that have been very hurt by export restrictions and tariffs. So for certain pockets of the market, I think this would be very impactful to see some of these trade negotiations play out. Tiffany, how much of a risk premium is the president? When you look at any corner of the technology market,

and you say, I am going to bet on a company that this president has recently spoken favorably about or not favorably about, as the case may be, I'm talking, of course, about the volatility that he brings to any trade negotiation.

Yeah, I think it creates a lot of pause when you're thinking about companies that may be in focus from the president. Companies that have been talked about are sectors that have been talked about recently. But, you know, the worry as an investor is what will happen next that we haven't planned for or that we didn't see coming. So I think that, you know, companies that have been spoken about, have been targeted, are reflecting a bit of a risk premium. And you see this in a lot of the tech companies that are trading now.

you know, at discounts to where they were trading over the last couple of years, certainly relative to their own multiples, but also relative to the index as well. So I think that's reflected in some of the stocks. But again, the concern is what happens next because it's hard to predict.

Boy, does Tim Cook want to know what happens next as well. And his own stock trading below usual multiples. They've been in the eye of the storm when it comes to the supply chain side of things. What do you make of the desire to make companies ultimately build in the U.S., perhaps be less profitable? Does that make them as appetizing as an investment?

It certainly doesn't. It hurts the profit margins, as you mentioned. I think it'll be interesting to see how all of this plays out because it takes multiple years to build a factory here. It probably takes longer than President Trump is going to be in office. So do the announcement we've seen from companies building here, maybe some of them make sense economically, maybe some of them are paying lip service to the administration.

But it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. But it's interesting that Apple specifically has been a little bit more defiant. More defiant, but also perhaps more distracted is what people worry about. The fact that they are not playing catch up to this AI game as people had hoped with WWDC. What did you make of the event? Yeah, I thought the event was a little bit disappointing for Apple. We were expecting to hear more exciting updates around Apple intelligence, around AI.

maybe around AI being incorporated into Siri. And instead, I think we saw more updates on improving the user interface, more features on existing applications. You know, the applications that maybe incorporate the most AI would be their updates on visual intelligence or live translation, but those also feel like they're playing a little bit of catch up versus applications that are already in the market from other providers.

On my Bloomberg terminal, Apple seems to be the top holding in the Columbia large cap growth fund. So let me know if that's right. But I think like so far this year, Apple has been trading on trade risk, right, on tariff risk. And when we were like literally in the car on the way to Apple WWDC, we're asking ourselves, has this name started trading on that AI concern yet or not?

I think we've seen that a little bit around the WWDC event, and we certainly saw that after the event yesterday where people were a little bit disappointed that there wasn't a big AI announcement coming out of the keynote presentation. So I think we're seeing that a little bit, but Apple, like a lot of big tech companies, I think are still trying to figure out their strategy around AI and are putting a lot of money behind it.

Tiffany, you set yourself up for this by saying the big question is what happens next. For the technology sector, what happens next? I'm still very positive on the tech sector for the rest of the year. There's a lot of good tailwinds for the sector. Obviously, tariffs and export restrictions could come out of left field for the rest of the year. But there's a lot of good tailwinds for earnings growth, including AI investment that continues to be very strong across multiple parts of the market.

If we look at earnings growth expectations for the rest of the year or for the full year, the tech sector is still expected to grow much faster than the rest of the market. And as I mentioned before, a lot of the valuations across certain subgroups of tech look very attractive versus their history. So we're still very positive on the sector.

on the commitment of capital coming from these companies. Look at what Mark Zuckerberg's doing, devoting his own time, his own dining table, but also sheer quantities of cash to make sure that he tries to win AGI as it's known. - Yeah, absolutely. And he's not alone, Microsoft, Apple,

Alphabet, Amazon are all making huge investments into AI, and I think that has a great knock-on effect for parts of the semiconductor equipment, parts of software, other parts of the economy, including industrials, that all feed into that AI infrastructure. Tiffany Wade of Columbia Fred Needle Investments, thank you very much.

Uber and Wave. They are set to plan their first trial run of fully autonomous vehicles in London. It's a move that could pave the way for commercial robo-taxi services in the United Kingdom. Let's get on what this really means with Andrew Grant of Bloomberg NEF. And really your focus and analysis here is what London means for the growth story of robo-taxis more broadly. Why is it difficult to trial run there?

Well, I mean, let me start by saying that London is a big market for Uber. They often cite it as one of their five most important cities globally in their earnings calls and their reports. So this is a big development that they are working with their partners to start planning to deploy robo-taxis in London. But these types of streets are different from where we've seen the majority of robo-taxis in the past. Places like Phoenix, Arizona, Austin, Texas, where you have...

varying weather conditions, roads that haven't been around for nearly as long as some of the London streets which have their own quirks. - You lead our coverage of mobility, right, at BNF, and you know that in any robo-taxi setup, you have the self-driving tech, hardware, software, somebody owns the vehicle, somebody operates the ride-hailing app, and somebody manages the fleet. I'm looking at this announcement from Uber and Wave, and I think there's a few names and pieces missing.

Yeah, exactly. In a robot taxi service, it really does take a village. You need different parts of this value chain that are going to contribute different skill sets and different capital requirements and different payoff periods. So if you are looking at what is essentially a partnership here between two tech companies, Wave and Uber, that mostly work with software,

There's a few other players that need to manage the hardware and manage the on-the-ground operations. So as you mentioned, that would be things like people, like a company that will actually end up owning the vehicle. And in the past, Uber's been a bit hesitant to...

own and operate large fleets of vehicles, but they have shown that they are willing to take over some of the operational aspects with some of their partnerships. For instance, their partnership with Waymo in Austin, some of their partnership with WeRide, which is underway in the United Arab Emirates, where they're taking over some of the fleet operating aspects. But you did right there, Ed.

We're missing kind of who's going to own these fleets, who they're going to work with on the charging side, if they are electric vehicles, which they do seem likely to be at this stage, and all the other details around maintenance and repair of these vehicles as they function as robotaxis.

Andrew Grant of Bloomberg NEF. He leads our mobility coverage. We really appreciate it. Now some breaking news for you because talks are ongoing in London and according to a U.S. official, U.S. and China trade talks will continue. We're going to bring you any details of what is being discussed at the moment. Anne-Marie Horden has been outside, of course, Lancaster and been thinking about how these talks are evolving and what ultimately it means, Ed, for the focus on semiconductors in particular. What have we got coming up?

Okay, we're going to be joined by Tory Bruno, United Launch Alliance CEO, to discuss the outlook for the space business in the midst of Trump and Elon's spat. This is Bloomberg Tech.

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