Twitter Under EU Scrutiny and Tech Execs Meet with Biden

Published Jun 23, 2023, 5:25 PM

Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow breaks down the EU's warning to Twitter on disinformation. Plus, the CEOs of Apple, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI dine with President Biden and India's Prime Minister, and Ed takes a ride in a Waymo.

From Mahard.

We're Innovation, Money and Power.

Collie in Silicon Ballet NBN.

This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Lovedlove.

I had Lovelow in San Francisco. Caroline Hyde off today. This is Bloomberg Technology coming up on the programmer warning from the EU to Twitter, crackdown on disinformation or face the consequences. We bring you our interview with the Block's Internal Market Commissioner, Tieri Breton, plus tech executives descend on the White House, our takeaways from Narendra Modi's state dinner as the CEOs of Apple, Google, Microsoft and open Ai, dying with the President and India's Prime Minister. And San Francisco's driverless future. I'll take you behind the scenes of my experience using autonomous vehicles. There's robotaxis. It's becoming a reality for thousands in this city. First, let's get to check on the market, so I want to get straight to the technology sector in equities. Then as that one hundred down this Friday, we're actually on track for our biggest weekly drop since March. That week in March where the banking crisis was unfolding.

There's a story playing out here.

You look at the performance of the NASA one hundred year to date, it's about a forty percent gain near that, echoing what we saw in nineteen ninety nine right before that bubble. We've got strategists by Bank of America writing that investors actually have started to flee technology stocks. They cite data from EPFR Global Data two billion dollars of outflows in the five trading days through June twenty first. So there could be a shift here when you extrapolate, when you zoom out and take a look at the nas that one hundred in the moment, most names on a single name basis in the red on that index. And breaking news at the top of this hour, Bitcoin has hit its highest level in one year. It's been a lot of momentum, but a sharp gain sees us above thirty one thousand, one hundred US dollars per token. Go back to June fifteenth and that surprise black Rock filing for a Bitcoin spot Exchange ETF. That's what a lot of the story has been about, and it's a remarkable turnaround for what we have seen in this particular digital asset or digital token, but crypto more broadly, given there are a number of structural and industry issues very quickly, some names that we're watching. We're going to bring you the details of that meeting between those technology CEOs, President Biden and Therendromodi, Prime Minister of India. To the downside, we see Apple a little softer alphabet off by a percentage point, Tesla actually Interesting down almost two percentage points, seeing a pretty marked decline. I think it's on track for his biggest weekly drop in around six weeks. And Nikola Interesting News down seven point six percent, the company tweeting about a fire at their facility in Phoenix and saying that they suspect foul play. Bloomberg is investigating that story. From public markets to a name in the private space and technology. Twitter needs to put more resources towards addressing sensitive content ahead of elections if it wants to comply with strict new European regulations ahead of a deadline in August. We discuss the matter with Heierry Breton, the EU's Internal Market Commissioner.

Have a listen.

He made very clear that he will he will comply with our regulation and that he believes that DSA is a good regulation. And this is what he wants to do so again, I proposed to all of them, including Twitter, to a a stress test in their headquarters to make sure that they will understand what they have to do to be ready. He accepted. He's the first one, by the way to accept it, which is of course a good time. And my team spent two days so and reviewed many many programs saone to put in place. Is going in the right direction. And of course I don't have to comment, but uh, there's some work to be done, but the programs are well identified. Of course you're mentioning the code of Conduct CONN of connects something different color conduct is a voluntary code. This is the difference between a law and a voluntary code. I know that when you don't have the time to make a law, you proposed a voluntary code. But a voluntary code, per definition, is voluntary. It's not biding.

Uh.

And and for this specificity in the digital space, it is important now to have biding rules. It's difficult because of course you need as a politician to convince everyone, to convince your house, your Senate is complex, but that's the only way to do.

And what was your impression of Linda Ya Koreena The new CEO of Twitter.

I think she was very engaged. Of course, I understand that it's her first month as a intraider as a CEO, but she was really and on and she was attending the meeting, and she gave me the feelings that she's definitely willing to do everything everything text to him to comply with our ours.

That was the European Commission Internal Market Commissioner Briton.

For more, we're joined by Bloomberg.

Sarah Fryer, the editor that conducted that interview. In Sarah, thet's start with a stress test. You and I have been covering Twitter, the ins and outs for years.

What is a stress test though?

What is a stress test of a social media platform like Twitter?

Commissioner Britton told me that he spent the last couple of days in his team as well, looking through and seeing what actually does Twitter have built into its systems to comply with the rules that will go into effect in August on disinformation on harmful content. And Twitter does not currently do that, by the way, and that doesn't matter to Briton, he says, I don't need I asked him, do you actually trust that, you know? Given how they've been so permissive of certain kinds of content since must take over. Do you actually trust that he is going to follow through with this? They have declined to comply with the Voluntary Disinformation Code as he was talking about, and he says, you know what, I don't have to trust. I just need them to be ready to follow the law when it goes into effect. That's all that matters. So basically his message is if they don't comply with this law, they don't get access to the EU market. And he thinks that that will be a big enough incentive, not just her Twitter, but for Meta, for the other social media companies that will be affected, to to follow through on what he's what he is coming here to San Francisco to say is going to be important.

Sarah, My understanding is the Commission has been pretty busy while he's been out here in the Bay Area taking other meetings with other technology names.

He's meeting today with Tam Altman of Open Ai. He's meeting Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, and Jensen Wang of Nvidia. So you know, Briton's not just talking about the Digital Services Act. He's talking about the the AI regulation that he wants to put into effect. Now that's not a law yet, but that's going to require companies to think about how they're building their AI. He wants to encourage them to not build it in directions that he thinks would be bad for society, such as social monitoring, you know, grading people based on their social media habits or facial recognition. There are some forms of AI that that he thinks will be harmful, and so if he can put those regulations into place early enough, then maybe when the companies decide where they want to invest going forward, they won't invest in those areas and they will put you know, and this race to build AI products, they will put their money into things that are a little bit better for society.

Bloomberg's Big Tech editor Sarah for I thank you. It's not the EU just visiting these shores. We also have visitors from other nations. India Prime Minister or Andromody is wrapping up his time in the US with a state dinner at the White House, where tech leaders from Apple to Google to Microsoft descended on the president's home. From more that's bringing Bloomberg's Nick Wadhams out in Washington, d C. It's interesting the Biden administration pulling two things together Nearendromod's visit and technology executives.

Well, it's pretty fascinating because what you're seeing in real time essentially is the entire tech sector saying, Oops, we need to protect ourselves given the geopolitical life that's happening with China, and hey, India looks like a really appealing alternative. Still pretty tentative steps right now, but you know, in all sorts of areas AI Semiconductor's defense, there are just all sorts of partnerships and deals where they're essentially looking to fulfill what they and the administration say as a push toward friends shoring, so instead of offshoring, sending all their production to China, cutting down some of their vulnerabilities and going to a country that looks a little more friendly to the US.

It's interesting you have the dinner last night. Our understanding is that there'll be more meetings this morning with that group of technology CEOs. Some of them have an interest, right Sam Altman has been to India, the CEO of Open AI.

There's been a.

Big emphasis and what Apple is doing both in that market but also in its supply chains. It makes you think about the relationship between the US and India. Strategically, Nick, which is your domain, right, How does the US view India as a technology partner, a supply chain partner, a geo political partner in the context of Asia.

Well, it's really confusing, and in some ways the ground is really shifting because for a while the US has wanted to approach India as much more of a strategic partner, partly as a counterbalance to China. But on the other hand, in a lot of ways, India has not necessarily been willing to play ball. So they're not willing to just say, hey, we're going to form some big strategic alliance with the United States. We have other interests. For example, they have not condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine. They've taken a much more ambivalent stance. They see themselves in some way as sort of a representative of what Narendramot he called yesterday in his speech to Congress, the global South. So they are not necessarily interested in just being this shoulder to shoulder partner with the United States. But they do want to bring in US money, US business advance their own economy, so they are eager to play that role. And then you see these tech companies essentially coming in and saying, Okay, well, look, this is a partner where we could it could be a lot safer for us than China, given off of the problems that China has imposed on us companies, also the intellectual property theft, a whole other range of issues that's making them reconsider their connections to China.

The most Nick wardams out in DC, fascinating that we have the EU here in the Bay Area, then DC, we have all the tech executives from the Bay Area in DC and President Biden really interacting with that sector.

Thank you for your time.

Pendulum Therapeutics is a biotech company specializing in metabolic health through its micro bio targeted product products. Academy Award winning actress Halle Berry joined the company as an equity investor and chief Communications officer, also a director earlier this year after prioritizing her own metabolic health with Pendulum's products. I caught up with both her and Pendulum co founder and CEO, doctor Colleen Cutliffe at the Bloomberg Technology Summit yesterday and it was an interesting conversation. I said to her, how did you get into this? And She basically is saying, well, I had some problems, I used a product, it worked, I became an investor. Now I'm all in. She described it to me as her second act. She's still acting, but now this is the first step into her becoming an investor, a director of a company, and maybe something more.

She promises she'll come back.

AI also very much at the center of the discussions we were having at the Bloomberg Technology Summit. Here's what's something the speakers weighing in on the future of AI had to say, from everything cybersecurity related to calling for democratization of the technology.

We think this technology, the benefits that access to it, the governance of it, belongs to him and they as a whole.

This genitive of AI opportunity is huge. We don't know yet all of the different applications that are going to come up. We're seeing that just we mean, the past six months is a revolution. The number of companies coming with use cases.

We'll also see and I think people have heard a lot of this today. AI coming more and more to the forefront, both to help folks stay productive and from a security perspective.

If we do our job right, I think it should buttress our existing leadership position.

The cloud, it can detect a fair amount of stuff, but there's a lot of subtle stuff that humans detect that AI doesn't. And so I think we have to ask ourselves are we happy with the road we're going down, because we're about to accelerate that road, and if we want to maybe make some course correction, now is the time to do it. And this is why I think discussion shouldn't just be about AI, but should be about what kind of world.

Do we want to live in?

What do we want to do with this technology?

You know what's get some more of the conversation and go back to that conversation with halle Berry and clean cut lift of Pendulum.

Have a listen.

What was it like launching.

And growing a business at first, and including raising money from a big name bench capital firm. You know, in other even in the intersection of medicine and foods, you know, there is issues of regulation non regulation. They are often born out of academia. I'm just fascinated by the origin story of this company.

Well, I think, as with any big initiative, when you started, you don't necessarily know what you're taking on, and so it's lessly ignorance and naivete that got us here. I think it's you know, we knew that the gut microbiome was a new frontier and science. Our first investors were not an ABC's, it was the Male Clinic because they agreed there's something really interesting about the gut and how we can taggle diseases around it, and that was it.

It was a very simple premise. The gut microbiome is an entirely new.

Organ that has never been targeting before that can help people with a myriad of diseases.

And from there it just we step forward.

And I think when you have a vision like that about looking at kind of shelves of probiotics and saying.

We're not even in there.

We're really a technology based company using DNA sequencing and metabolic maps and you know, this high end manufacturing that nobody else in the world is doing to create these products. We ended up attracting the kind of investors that like to see world changing in category creating products, and we attract the kind of talent that wants to get involved in something that they've seen that's different than anything else they've experienced.

And so we've been very.

Fortunate in that it seemed from a science standpoint, there was an obvious opportunity, and all along the way, we've just been surrounded by amazing people who see that vision too.

You're part of your role is you know, thinking about future investors, but also growing the brand.

It's a consumer product, right, so scale it for me. Tell me how you take the mess out.

There but then get it in more lanes for sale and more consumers stomachs.

Well, I think it all starts with, you know, communication, talking about it, getting them to get interested in the brand, getting them to go try it to see for themselves. Like Colleen and I always talk about, don't just take it because I say. What I would love people to do is go try it because I ask them to, and then they decide for themselves. And I think that's how you start to scale it because it really does work.

You know, it's not one of these products that just has a pretty package.

As a matter of fact, it didn't have such a pretty package when I came along and I said, you need.

To put this product in a pretty package.

Because what I find is things that often sometimes scale sometimes it's marketing.

You know, they have a pretty.

Bottle and it's marketed the right way, and as consumers, we're often drawn to that. So now, knowing that she's got this like old class product here, I said to her, now it has to look like that too, because that is very much a part of how we buy as consumers.

What's the future IPO raise more money, sell to a bigger player in.

An an analogous field.

You know, how do you feel about that stage of the company's life cycle.

I mean, from the day we started the company to today to what I hope is going to be true into the infinite future. The company has been centered and grounded in how do we help people?

And so right now we're helping tens.

Of thousands of people, And so when I think about the future is how do we get to hundreds of thousands of people to.

Millions of people? And that's what it's all about.

And I think if you create a product that people love and it's bringing benefits to the world, all of that other financial stuff will just go on a place.

Cloud computing firm fastly holding its annual investor Day, with the company projecting up to nine hundred million dollars in twenty twenty six revenue for more. We're joined by Fastly CEO Todd nineteen Gale. We joined the company last September. We're going to go into some of what you discussed, but there's only one question. How does fastly use artificial intelligence to improve its products?

That is a great question and then obviously super top of mind for everyone, of course, just like every other company, especially tech companies, we use artificial intelligence to improve our offerings, specifically in traffic engineering, which is really near and dear to how we deliver best in class performance.

That's core to our value proposition.

But I think what's really interesting for Fastly especially is the opportunity to bring our customers AI workloads into the edge. We partner closely with centralized cloud providers where those models are trains but trained, but running an inference model at the edge has the power to deliver best in class sort of next generation you know, AI user experience, and user experience is what we focus on a Fastly, So we're kind of super excited about this new focus on AI.

So the edge cloud market, you know, we discussed this on the program all the time. Microsoft, Google AWS. It's going to be hard, like how much of that market are they going to allow you to have.

AWS gcp azure.

These are core cloud technology providers. I as providers that operate these massive core cloud technologies, and every one of our customers uses a central cloud provider. We don't compete against those folks, and largely that's great. We believe deeply in our customers, believe deeply in a multi cloud architecture where they use those resources in the core and they leverage the edge cloud for super low latency experiences to drive content where the user experience, the speed, the performance is important. That's why Fastly is focused on fast, safe, and engaging end user experiences.

You know, the market love this number of putting out for twenty twenty six.

It's a long way away.

I want to hear about what you're saying right now. You know what's driving growth for you right now in.

This core to next quarter.

Yeah, we're really pivoting Fastly hard right now towards aggressive customer acquisition, towards driving growth across our business and really financial rigor not just top line growth, but improving our bottom line as well. But really, what's driving the change in so many ways is a refocus, a refocus on delivering the best user experience with platform unifications, so that our customers have a simpler experience end to end and they can really partner with Fastly, not just on one product line like content delivery, but across our portfolio. That makes our sales teams, land and expand motion so much easier as they expand from content delivery to security, to compute to observability. It's also amazing We've just launched a new partner program where our systems integrators systems integrator partners can take to market not just content, not just security, but our whole portfolio. That's driving amazing deal registration, which is filling the top of our pipeline and I think really setting us up to change the growth and the acceleration of the company.

Todd, your core business is Content Delivery Network or CDN to all the CTOs that check into to our show. It's such a mature market. So how do you navigate a mature market?

You know?

I think innovation is the key.

We're innovators at Fastly and CDN the kind of legacy CDN technology that that is not what's happening at Faster right now, That's not what customers come to Fastly for. We're delivering not just static content, but the most real time delivery, the most dynamic, the most engaging content in the world. It's why compute is such an important part of our business as well, and it's really always been embedded within content delivery. It's also why people who are streaming real time events have dynamic content. They want engaging application experiences. Those are the customers that come to fastly, and I believe over time, just about every organization in the world is going to fit in that category fastly.

CEO, it's a nicey gale. Good to catch up out of New York. Thank you for your time. Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology. I'm ed Lovelow here in San Francisco, going to get quick check on the markets.

The story of Friday tech lower.

Look at the NASDAT one hundred, off by seven tenths of a percent as an index.

It's on track for its.

Biggest decline on a weekly basis since March when we had the banking crisis.

That a lot of.

Writing about how investors are pulling out of the technology sector. Look at the run up in that index year to date and the worries about what we saw in parallel with nineteen ninety nine.

That's the narrative.

Semiconductors also underperforming, down one point eight percent on the socks as yields come a little low. We're moving into bonds right three point seventy four percent on the US ten year, as we reported at the top of the show, and this.

Is breaking news.

Bitcoin now trading at its highest level in one year, almost thirty one thousand US dollars per token. A lot of that related to momentum in the ETF space and what black Rock did in the June fifteenth filing. In terms of the your name movers, there is some newsflow element to what's happening. But I'm taking a look at Tesla, down one point four three percent on the day. It's on track for its biggest weekly drop I think in six weeks. A lot of emphasis has been pulling back on the momentum in the AI context because that name was caught up in the rally, and also that it's coming off some significant highs. Less focus though on its energy business, and that's what I want to talk about a little bit. When Tesla's former head of energy founded startup Lunar Energy, he set out to bring sustainability and convenience to the average US household. Now, the company is launching its first product and all in one home energy system and it's taped sun Run to help with the solar panel installations. Joining us for more details on how this system works is Lunar Energy CEO canal Ji Rotra and Mary Powell, the CEO of sun Run. Two for one, both CEOs at the same time. Let me ask you this to start now, why did you need sun Run to make this happen?

First of all, thank you for having me on the show.

ED.

It's a great opportunity. You know, sun Runs the largest solar installer in the country, and you know renewable energies on the rise and the future. Solar doesn't shine at night, so you need batteries to help with the transition from solar energy to battery energy.

To me, it's also a technology question, right, So let's reflect on Tesla. Tesla's doing everything energy storage, solar. Was there a temptation to go down that route yourself?

Yeah?

So there are seventy five million homes in the country, ED, and only four million have solar and quarter million of those have home batteries. If you want to decarbonize homes which consume which emid twenty percent of greenhouse gas emissions. We need every home in the country to have solar and battery, and these products are not there today where they're plug in play, and there should be like consumer products. So Lunar Energy has design systems from the ground up to make every home go solar and battery in a very easy and seamless manner such that you know, consumers want affordable clean energy. Energy builds are rising, power outages are rising, but severe weather around the country. So consumers have spoken they want simple, affordable clean energy and Lunar's first system and all in one integrated solar battery load control system allows every homeowner in California and California and the rest of the country to avail this service. And we're excited to partner with sun Run, who's going to be our first installation partner, to install and bring these products to the masses in the country.

Mary, welcome to the program, CEO of sun Run. From your perspective, how does it help you. You know it's going to customers and saying well, we'll give you the solar, but have you checked out the energy storage solution as well.

Oh my goodness.

Well, first of all, we are so excited about this opportunity to be partnering with Lunar. We are a strategic partner of Lunar. We were one of the original investors in Lunar because we see massive opportunity around storage in the United States of America. Sunrun is not just the leading solar company. We are actually the leading company in America that provides solar plus storage, you know, that can really help support not just our customers all around the country, but frankly the grid. One of the reasons I am so excited about what could All and his amazing team at Lunar have done is that they have really created that next level storage device that can also really integrate in a sophisticated way with the grid and help us make a more affordable, reliable grid for all of America.

The frustration that some Americans have and plays out in jurisdictions all over the world, is that you install solar and often there's help to do its subsidy, and in you know, places like California where the sun does shine, it's great, but often the electricity goes back to the grid and you're compensated with a credit. It's not a self contained system, Mary, and so I wonder how quickly you see us moving to genuine households that can run independently from electricity perspective.

Well, the cool thing is we're actually there, and I mean, this kind of technology just accelerates that capability. But you know, at the end of the day, one of the things that we're most excited about isn't about providing opportunities for customers to fully defect from the grid, which is sort of what your question implies. You know, what is way more powerful and what Canal and I were able to prove so many years ago in Vermont, is that we can create a more affordable, resilient grid for all of Americans by leveraging the assets on so many roofs around America, by harnessing that solar energy, storing it, and then dispatching.

It when the grid needs it the most.

I mean, look at what's happening in Texas real time right now, and imagine a future as we dramatically accelerate where all of those homes in Texas can be helping to support the grid and make it more affordable and reliable for all so you know, one Canel and I go way back innovating in this space, and you know he's just been, you know, just put together an amazing team that is going to really help accelerate this customer led revolution to a way more affordable, resilient way to power homes and the American grid.

Yeah, and just just to add to that, you know, imagine a future where you have a million homes with home batteries. You know, each battery is about ten kilowatts. You suddenly have ten gigawatts of power available for the grid at any given point of time time when the grid needs it.

What does that mean for the grid.

The grid doesn't need to build dirty, fossil fuel based peaker plans to provide peak energy, which is when energy crisis is the most.

So think of solar and home batteries.

We're gunning for the future where every home in America has solar in battery and it is part of a distributed and decentralized grid and the technologies there.

We need to get the product simple and easy and.

As fast as possible in consumers' homes, and you'll see that we can. It's a win win for the planet. It's a wind win for the consumers and it's wind win for the electric grid.

Tesla is the market opportunity big enough such that a Lunar Sunrun partnership can grow a business alongside Tesla offering essentially the same thing.

I think so Again, I said, there are seventy five million homes just in the US, and only four million have solar and quarter million have battery. And Tessa is a great company. Lunar is going to be great, and I think we need a lot more companies innovating. The reason we started Lunar ED is because you know, three years back, I was looking around the space. There were so many companies providing the next best electric car and very few companies focused on the home. And that's why the opportunity was so great. I think Sun Runs a fantastic partner to start our relationship with, and we'll be enrolling a lot of other partners as we expand in the coming years.

All Right, Well, thanks to the CEO of Lunar Energy, Canal Girotra and the CEO some run out of New York, Mary Pal, thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Ed all right, So coming up, which.

Companies were really saved after the FDIC stepped in to backstop Silicon Valley Banks deposits. A new document tells us more about the top ten customer balances at that failed lender, plus our conversation about Generative AI's impact on healthcare with VJ Panda, General.

Park At Andresen Horowitz.

I've got to go back to bitcoin, so we've been talking all throughout Bloomberg Technology. We are at the highest level in around a year on bitcoin, just below thirty one thousand US dollars per token, as Bloomberg's writing about on the terminal on dot com. Part of this story is a recovery from the scandals in that industry. Some of it is more short term momentum. Go back to June fifteenth and Black Rocks filing on a bitcoin related ETF that seems to be adding some momentum as well, but a pretty sharp jump. This morning, we're at thirty eight hundred and ninety US dollars per token.

This is Bloomberg.

A document from the FDIC, which the agency said it mistakenly released unre adapted in response to a Bloomberg News Freedom of Information Act request, provides one of the most detailed glimpses yet into the bank's biggest customers. And it turns out the decision to guarantee all accounts above the two hundred and fifty thousand Federal Deposit Insurance limit also helped bigger companies that were in no real danger, like Soquoia Capital. That's bringing Bloomberg's Hannah Miller to go over this. What did the document we obtained for the FDIC actually tell us.

Yes, So it listed out who the top depositors were with Silicon Valley Bank, and it's a reminder that it wasn't just fledgling startups that got helped out here, it was big companies that really didn't actually need that kind of aid.

So the top of the list was Circle.

They had three point three billion dollars of their reserves for their USDC stable coin with SVB, so they topped the list. And you also, like you mentioned, had Sequoia with one billion dollars and they have eighty five billion dollars dollars in assets under management, so that's just a small fraction of what they had at SVB.

You know, it's one of the most read stories on the Bloomberg terminal on dot com for obvious.

Reasons, even though it happened in the past.

We're learning so much about what happened, but why does it matter what's contained within that?

Yeah, so this is a reminder that the tech industry is still feeling the effects of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, that essential changes have been made here, that it's not going to be the same. They're not going to have those same comfortable banking relationships that they had prior to svb's collapse. So I think this is you know, even though this happened in March, this shows the impact here. It tells us that this is something that we need to be we need to keep tracking, and that the tech industry isn't going to be the same moving forward.

You and I were at the Bloomberg Technology Summit yesterday and you know, this, the SVB story area in the year kind of put into question the health of Silicon Valley so to speak. What did you make of the health as the can Valley that I had a lot of interesting conversations where people are saying, like talents here, all the access to money is here, this is great, and others that were saying San Francisco is dead. You know, it was very difficult to discern the mood music.

Yes, I mean it was really refreshing to see people at a conference. You know, there were some great conversations. You know, I think people were excited and happy to be there. But I think there's still this tense undercurrent. You know, people are worried about the fate of San Francisco. There are people who are not back to work or they've moved out of the city, including the talent that powers the tech industry. So I think there are still some questions ahead as to you know, how Aseppa's going to fare moving forward.

Bloomberg's Hannah Miller terrific reporting. Great to be out and about with you in San Francisco talking all things tech now. Generative AI is the latest craze in the tech world, but not necessarily in the healthcare industry. VJ Pandey general partner in Dreesen Horowitz is trying to change that. He's been thinking about AIS for ten impact in health and medicine for years. We sat down with him earlier this week to discuss the intersection of artificial intelligence and health.

Have a listen.

Prior to joining Andrews and Horowitz, I was a professor at Stanford in actually many departments in chemistry, computer science, structure biology, and ours ter biophysics. And the result of that actually was almost four hundred papers, seven patents, three books at this intersection. So what we're seeing today is something that in some ways I've been waiting for for decades.

The cynic and the skeptic says, you're jumping on the bandwagon. Now you yourself have been looking at this area for a while. But give me some concrete examples in the theater of healthcare, the area of healthcare where a large language model or a foundation model can improve a process of products, whatever it may be.

Yeah, to kick it off, I think these large language models are very exciting, and what they can do is they can act as an interface where you can finally talk to the computer in a way that you couldn't before. But it's worth emphasizing that AI is much more broad than that. AI is something where it can impact drug design, where we can develop new drugs faster. It can impact how we think about healthcare, how we allocate healthcare resources.

These are things that go beyond the LMS. As exciting as lllms are, I.

Believe you phrase it as specialist ais. Yes, but is that going as far as to say an AI doctor or are we talking about an AI back office?

Yeah?

I think you'd want both, right, And so the beauty of AI back office today is that you can solve problems that are not clinically relevant but are still very important and still huge top line and bottom line issues for companies. But in time, as AI gets smarter, it becomes a specialist. We can get to the more critical clinical areas where maybe it's not an AI doctor at first, maybe it's someone who helps the doctor, who scales the doctor. Instead of one doctor seeing eight patients a day, maybe they could see ten or twenty or eighty. That scaling alone would be exciting and also it up levels the quality that perhaps we can all get the best doctors because now AI is helping everybody.

How does vj, PUANDATE make money? Like, what is the exit strategy in this world? Because you quickly encounter regulatory headwinds, the need for approvals and if we think about in the context of drugs, medicines, trials, yes, how does that all square as a bench capitalist?

Well, what's interesting for AI in life sciences and healthcare is that we have this very robust regulatory infrastructure already there.

You know what you're going to get.

We know what we're going to get.

And actually, the amazing thing is that the regulators are excited about AI when we talk to them. They see that AI can do things for human health. They want to see how they can change regulations to allow AI to be able to have its greatest impact.

So you're in recent Horowitz and big firm. That's not understating it really, but there are many partners who are interest in artificial intelligence. How do you all work together and how do you stay in your lane thematically in this case bio and health.

Yeah, so we're broken into a series of funds, and so I founded the Life Sciences and Healthcare Fund, and so for anything that's in the area of life science and healthcare with AI, that would fall to our team. And what I'm excited about that combination is that that space has been so resistant to tech for decades and AI is making such a dramatic change that it could have some of it's biggest impacts on that space.

That was VJ.

Punday, General partner at Indres and Horoitz. I want to go back really quickly and correct something that I said earlier in the program. I said that Tesla on a weekly basis had its biggest decline in six weeks. It's down modestly on the week, just a tenth of a percent at current levels. But what I should have said is that it is down on a weekly basis for the first time in six weeks. In other words, it is snapped a five week gain streak. And there's still some of the sessions a go, so a little clarification on that one.

This is Bloomberg time for talking tech.

First up TikTok's political troubles seemed far away in can At. Executives swarmed the company's glitzy pop up stage during a week long industry extravaganza in southern France, and many said they actually planned to send more business to the platform. And Deloitte, the auditor of Indian tech firm by Jews quit. That's according to a letter seen by Bloomberg and confirmed by officials. This is the latest setback for the once high flying startup that's had its offices searched by anti money laundering officials and is embroiled in a tussle with creditors over a one point two billions doll alone, plus an early morning fire that broke out at Nikola's Phoenix headquarters, affecting several of its battery electric big rigs. More than fifty firefighters were dispatched at the scene. The company, which suspects foul play, said today in a tweet that no one was injured in the blaze and that an investigation is underway after a vehicle was seen in the area of the trucks prior to the incident. Now, San Franciscans are finally getting used to seeing electric cars cruising along the streets with no one in the driver's seat.

Of course, i'd see it myself.

This past week, I've been making my way around, using mostly rides from Alphabet's Weimo and its ride heading service.

Here's how it went.

So, seeing a driverless car in San Francisco with no one in the front seat is kind of becoming normal.

But what about riding in one.

This was my first time in a driverless Weymo Step one hailer ride via the weimo one app form minute wait time not bad. You can track the car's progress it arrives and next unlock the doors with the app and get in don't forget seat belt. The ride is started by touching a screen in the car or in the app. Hello, look along the way, it's pretty smooth. Remember Cruise is also offering driverless rides in SF, and Bloomberg's Emily Chang has done that.

This is actually my very first time without a human driver.

Back to Weimo.

At times the car plays it's safe, it travels below the speed limit, and sometimes it takes unusually wide berth. Sometimes it signals randomly to change lanes or even tries to change lanes for no clear reason, and a lot of road users around You do get frustrated and honk at the Weimo, but pedestrians don't seem to even notice that no one's in the driver's seat, or they just don't care. So last minute, I get to Ocean Beach and I decide it's too cold, so we change plans, go to the app.

Let's go to Twin Peaks.

Get dropped off, but there's a limitation WAYMO can't go all the way, so it drops me near and the app tells me how to walk the extra part time to go back home. Wait times do vary depending on where you are. Right now, there's no fee in SF, but weaimo shows us what the trip would have cost, also doesn't ask for a tip. The service runs twenty four to seven in SF, where weimo has around two hundred cars, but the waitlist for San Francisco more than eighty thousand people. You can read more about my story and what it's like to ride in an autonomous car on the Bloomberg tamoan, of course, on Bloomberg dot com. Let's get a final check in on bitcoin throughout Bloomberg Technology. This how we've been talking about bitcoin trading at its highest level in a year now, back above thirty one thousand US dollars per token. The longer term story that Bloomberg's writing about on this Friday morning is getting over some of the scandal in the industry. That we've seen some kind of longer term momentum shorter term. That June fifteenth regulatory filing from black Rocks seeking an ETF product in the bitcoin domain a pretty sharp spike though at one point in Friday session, no headline or catalyst per se, but we do see these kind of timed swings.

In the price of bitcoin. What a week that does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology. Don't forget.

You can recap everything from this show in our podcast. Wherever you get your podcast. We're on Apple, we're on Spotify, we're on iHeart and our podcast. Of course, we're on Bloomberg dot com and the Bloomberg Business app.

San Francisco. This is Bloomberg Technology m

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