Bloomberg Technology Summit | Session 1

that are way above any any model scale that we have today but but above some certain capability threshold I think you should need to like go through a certification process for that I think there should be external Audits and safety tests we do this for like lots of other Industries where we care about safety Elon Musk has said you started open AI you both started open AI because he was scared of Google is Google still a threat Google is like unbelievably competent and it seems like they are focused with an intensity Google has not seen in a while on AI so they're still scary they're they are a company that I don't think anyone should ever write off now obviously we've seen all the barbs that you and Elon have been trading in public and in interviews right I don't really well you're responding you respond you get asked about it by people like me to be mostly people like you to be honest most other people ask about the technology but that is true why why do you think he's so frustrated or disappointed with the direction that openai has gone um I mean you should ask him he can give you a better answer then I can speculate so but I like I really am happy to talk about this this is the most important topic we can spend the rest of the time on it um I think he really cares about AI safety a lot and I think that's where it's coming from a good place and he just like you know we have differences in opinion on some parts but I think we both care about that and he wants to make sure we have like the we the world have the maximal chance at a good outcome so you're not worried he's gonna call you out how to call you to come to some cage match and they in the Vegas octagon I don't I don't know but I kind of I would go watch if he and Zach actually did that like all right well it's supposedly happening between him and Zach crazy I think those there will be quite an audience look you know there is much has been made of the Microsoft relationship and it's not just him but he has said he's worried that Microsoft has more control than the leadership at openai realizes and that they could cut you off at any time I mean I think what he means is that they could like break the contract and you know take away our access to the data center and a lot of money that you have access to right we have money it's the data center that like they operate for us I don't think that's a likely scenario for a bunch of reasons how would you characterize the relationship with micro soft we think it's great I mean like any deep complex relationship it's not without its challenges but it's really great it is by far the best major partnership I've ever been a part of um it's kind of like on both sides it was kind of a crazy thing to jump into and it's uh surprising that it works this well but if you just like look at the results for both companies we're very happy in 2018 that's the last time I believe we talked in person um you told me you thought AI would help us be our best but also stop our worst impulses what makes you confident about that because so many times time and time again it feels like technology has only Amplified our worst yeah and to be clear like it will do bad things too like I don't have this like only good view of it I'm I think realistic like other Technologies I think we we it's human nature to talk about the bad more than the good and I think we can look at other technologies that have done a lot of Good and Plenty of harm and talk 99 about the harm and one percent about the good and I do that too like I think that's understandable I think so in 2018 that was like way before the GPT series was kind of a thing you know so at that point we didn't we had some inkling it was going to go like this we certainly didn't know exactly but I think now what we're heading to is this like personal tool that can help you in whatever way you'd like and one of the fun parts of the trip was how diverse and Broad the stories are of how people are using it to be better at whatever they want to be better at and to help them with things they want to improve so you know like I think if you go talk to chat GPT users you'll find a lot of support for that comment from 2018 and you can also find people who are you know misusing it or unhappy with it the reality check though is that you're building this on the back of human debt is biased that is racist that is sexist that is emotional that is wrong like a lot of it is wrong how do you Safeguard against that there was a recent study that gpt4 the model that is released is like less biased on implicit bias tests than humans even who are humans who think they've really trained themselves to be good at this so I if you if you look at the model that comes out of the pre-training process that model will be quite biased and it'll reflect you know the internet but um reinforcement learning from Human feedback the tech one of the techniques we use to align the models Works quite well and you know if you look at the progress from model to model even like some of our biggest critics are like wow they've gotten quite a lot of the bias out of the model and so I think models like this can be a force for reducing bias in the world not for enhancing it now there's questions about what if a user like wants to use the model in a very biased way like how much control do you give a user who decides like what the limits of the value system are and you know that'll be a tough question for society to wrestle with it there's not like an obvious one sentence neatly buttoned up answer but the technology I think has gone much further than people thought it was going to in terms of being able to align these models to behave in certain ways um you and I have been talking going all the way back to your looped days yeah at YC and it's been fun to watch that Journey I think people really want to understand your incentives and don't necessarily under people are perplexed I've asked a lot of people what I should ask you okay they're perplexed that you have no equity can you explain that a little like is there any Financial structure whereby you do benefit if open AI is a big thing yeah I get why people are perplexed about this and I have like wondered if I should just like take one share of equities I never have to answer this question again um a few things one we have we're governed by a non-profit which I'm a board member and our board has needs to have a majority of disinterested directors um like who don't have equity in the company um so I originally didn't do it for that reason and then I was like you know I just I don't think about it but are there any Financial incentives like at a certain Benchmark no I mean I have a tiny bit of exposure view the YC investment but like it's immaterial so to be clear like if open AI you know is massively profitable you one of the takeaways I've learned from questions like this is that this like concept of having enough money yeah yeah is not something that is like easy to get across to other people it's hard for people to understand yeah but I like I have enough money I'm gonna make way way more from other Investments that I've made in the past like in some like if if I had just like taken the equity and signed the giving pledge people would be like that's great that makes sense and it would have had the same that I'm like pre-giving away the money here because it goes to the open AI nonprofit and I like trust the nonprofits do a good thing with it but like I have enough money what I want more of is like an interesting life impact like access to be in the room for a conversation so I still get like a lot of selfish benefit from this um like what else am I gonna do with my time uh this is like really great I cannot imagine a more interesting like life than this one and a more interesting thing to work on so I get like a ton of benefit but yes somehow this idea of like having enough money just doesn't compute for people so if it's not about money is it about power is it about control I want to like make my contribution back to you know human technological progress I get to benefit from all of this stuff that people did before like I get to use this iPhone that I still Marvel at every day all of the work that had to go into that in the human Tech Tree and those people I don't know who they are I'm very grateful to them um they knew they were like never going to get recognition from me personally but they also like wanted to do something to contribute and so do I and I like can't imagine better like compensation than that feeling um it would be like maybe weird if I had not already like made a bunch of money and again like plan to make way more from like other Investments but I just don't think about it yeah um I think this will be like I think this will be the most important step yet that Humanity has to get through with technology um and I really care about that what is one question that you really wish I want to learn about Elon and equity and you know like the personal drama of the day but seriously um I understand you are getting a lot of those questions no I'm happy to talk about it one question like I'm always excited to just talk about what can happen in the coming few years in a few decades with the technology so what are we all going to do when we have nothing to do uh I mean talk about Elon and Zucker no I don't I don't think we ever run out of things to do I think it's like deeply in our nature to want to create to want to be useful to want to like feel the Fulfillment of doing something that matters and if you talk to people from thousands of years ago hundreds of years ago even the work that we do now would have seemed you know unimaginable at best and probably like trivial this is like not directly necessary for our survival in the sense of like creating food or whatever and this shift happens with every technological Revolution every time we worry about what people are going to do on the other side and every time we find things and I suspect not only will this time not be an exception to that the things we find will be better and more interesting and more impactful than ever before like there are a lot of people that talk about AI as like the last techno technological Revolution I suspect it you know from the other side it'll look like the first like the other stuff will be so small in comparison I think the whole thing of like technological Evolutions is sort of dumb because my understanding has always been it's just one long continuous one but it is this continuing exponential and so what what will be enabled and the stuff we can't even imagine on the other side we will have way too much to do if you want if you want to just sit around do nothing that'll be fine too all right all right bon bons and beaches in my future if that's what you I don't think that's what you'll turn out to wonder but if you do great you talked about ai's designing other AIS on the tour can you play that out for us and occasions of that yeah I mean this is like the classic Sci-fi idea that you know at some point these systems can help progress themselves can discover better architectures can help write their own code uh you know I think we're a ways away from that but it is worth paying attention to yeah China and Russia you didn't go there on your trip I did speak I gave the keynote at the Chinese conference you did speak virtually yeah where do you think they are on AI and should we be worried I don't really know I'd love to have better information on that I don't I don't have a great sense does it concern you that we don't know yeah I mean again like any imperfect information always is a little concerning so I'd love to have a better sense but you know I'm I'm like optimistic that we can find some sort of collaborative thing and I think this I think this thing that often gets said in the U.S which is like it's impossible to cooperate with China it's just totally off the table is asserted as fact and like people are trying to will it into existence but it's like not clear to me it's true in fact I suspect it's not um well very hard right right right look I'm so grateful that you've been around the world talking about this I'm so grateful that you're with us today I think even you would acknowledge you have an incredible amount of power why should we trust you um you shouldn't like you know I don't as you you know me for a long time um public talk like I'd rather be in the office working I I but I think at this moment in time like people deserve basically as much time asking questions as they want and I'm trying to show up and do it but more to that uh like no one person should be trusted here I don't have super boating shares um like I don't want them the board can fire me I think that's important I think the board over time needs to get like democratized to all of humanity there's many ways that could be implemented um but the reason for our structure and the reason it's so weird and the one of the consequences of that weirdness was me ending up with no equity is we think this technology the benefits the access to it the governance of it belongs to humanity as a whole you should like not if this really works it's like quite a powerful technology and you should not trust one company and certainly not one person with it so why should we trust open AI are you saying we shouldn't no I think I think you should trust open AI but only if open AI is doing these sorts of things like if we're if we're you know years down the road and have not sort of figured out how to start democratizing control then I think you shouldn't but if this is like you know if we figure out some sort of new structure where openai is like governed by Humanity and that can happen in many ways including like the alignment data set we'd pick rather than us picking it we find a way to like and get it from Humanity as a whole um that could mean like actual board control there's many ways that could be implemented and we're talking to a lot of people about what that could look like but if we don't do that I don't I don't think like just trust us is good enough explaining why we should maybe consider trusting you um you have a plane to catch we're so great thank you very much for having me thank you so much for sure all right [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay now we are gonna follow that with the co-founders of inflection AI Reid Hoffman and Mustafa Suleiman as well as my colleague Brad Stone [Music] okay all right well Mustafa so let's read Hoffman thank you guys for joining us um Mustafa you are a co-founder of deepmind now division of Google you're the author of a forthcoming book The Coming wave read legendary venture capitalist uh your investor at early investor in open AI also an author of a book called impromptu the books are available for everyone thank you so thank you both which you wrote with AI right yes impromptu first book on AI co-written with an AI yes chat gpt4 will be doing a signing all you have to do is go to the web and and you're the co-founders of a company called inflection AI uh guys it's it's raining chat Bots these days uh from open AI well-funded startups all the big tech companies so tell us Mustafa maybe you start what is the the play here with inflection AI so I think this is unquestionably going to be the most radical transformation of our lifetimes I mean there are going to be AIS for all sorts of things for businesses for brands for digital influences our belief is that everyone is also going to have a personal AI one that is aligned to your interests on your team in your corner gets to know you and really forms a trusted relationship with you over time it'll be like a confidant uh conciliary there for you when you need to make tough decisions but also a chief of staff you know scheduling organizing prioritizing booking your AI is really going to be your digital representative you know negotiating on your behalf interacting with other sales AIS that are trying to you know I encourage you to buy something and helping you to you know get a great deal and like for example it's the whole set of things so like example one of the things I just found out yesterday is one of our team members at Greylock actually in fact is using pi for parenting advice oh cool right which is really awesome and that's the kind of thing you're like great or Reid why is this an opportunity for a startup isn't a Microsoft or a Google bar just a little closer to the customer and in a better position to offer that personal digital assistant well part of what's I mean you know obviously I I am on the board of Microsoft um and you know I was on the board of open Ai and part of the thing is what I love about startups is you have a unique Vision where you're unfettered by the other aspects of your business and you're building it so part of the idea that Mustafa the entire inflection team uh you know kind of came up with and you know I uh you know have a little bit of fingerprints here too is that IQ is not the only thing that matters here EQ matters as well and so how do you have this personal intelligence pie be helpful to you obviously very high-end you know IQ but also EQ and that was one of the reasons I used the parenting example because obviously there's a question of how you do it but it's also how you connect with people what what you do in order to amplify that and I think that's one of the things that um you know the inflection folks are doing better than everyone else so can we talk about the EQ thing because I was asking I asked hi what we should ask you it's questions were fine and then I was like are you gonna tell them that we had this conversation and it it responded haha I'm just a computer program I can't tell anyone anything but I assure you our conversations are confidential I do think it's pretty cool that we're having this meta conversation about your interview with my creators exclamation point and it was actually the personality that shocked me can you explain how you designed that I mean we've deliberately designed it to be patient curious kind one of the things that first struck us like a year and a half ago when we started working on this is like what makes for great conversation when do you feel that sense of flow and that sense of energy and connection with another another person and I think most of the time it's when you feel heard and understood you've received a little bit of affirmation but you know it's not completely sycophantic right it doesn't just agree with you at every moment it can be a little bit challenging it has boundaries so you can push it on certain topics and it'll take a position and that's really healthy but also it's just curious you know I mean I think many people are excited by the idea especially the users that we have of someone asking them lots of questions about the topic that they're interested in you know we don't always have someone in our Lives who is as knowledgeable and as passionate about our our favorite topics as we might like and so that's where Pi comes in because it's super knowledgeable and engaging so how does that make sense if you're also an investor in open AI well so it I think there's going to be a number of Agents I don't think there's going to be one agent to rule them all you know a a ring and Mordor uh but is Chachi BT going to rule most of us I mean no I don't think so I think that I mean it's partially it's it's it's like um same reason we talk to different people for different aspects of our lives right so you know this person we talked to about our our passion about snowboarding this person we talked to about what's going on in the country this person we talked to like we have a Pantheon same thing we'll have a Pantheon of of different kinds of of AI one will go um you know you ask chat gbt you know how do you uh you know Comfort a friend who's lost a treasured pet and it says here are five possible ways you might do that you asked pie and say oh that's that sounds like it's really hard for you and your friend you know your friend well what would count as being present there for your friend and it still has it has the IQ it has the five reasons but it goes through that style of going through it and I think these are different interaction experiences and the question is which one do you want this minute which one do you want more in your life you know that kind of thing and and part of the the the the design of pie is how do we help you be the best you right like it's it's it it and that doesn't mean by being sycophantic for example that's the question of you know like ask you questions about what do you think about this and and how do you go through it and help you navigate your life by being helpful in that way so Sam Altman was just on stage uh talking as he sometimes does about the theoretical dangers of AGI and and chat gpt9 and I'm just curious if you guys think generally that's a discussion worth having and where you each are on this spectrum of existential dangers from AI well let's start with the fact that one of the things that I think is a is is dangerous about the existential discussion is it it blinds us from some of the the nearer things which is uh ai's amplification intelligence as per the impromptu book and so it amplifies human beings and so we see a bunch of good things with human beings AI tutors AI doctors a bunch of other things there's also bad human beings and so what to do about bad human beings doing you know with AI is also part of the portfolio mix of how you shape this technology that's one of the reasons why mustafa's book The Coming wave I highly recommend um uh and I will hand the next part of the answer over to you and wait let me frame it though must happen Sam probably left the building by now you can say anything frankly like where do you kind of disagree with some of the alarmism notes that he has sounded look I I think it's easy to speculate around what a gpt9 might look like I mean you know six more orders of magnitude of compute would be eye-watering and I'm absolutely with those concerns around existential risk but if you play that out that is many many years and it is you know unclear what actually happens at that scale what's much more clear and what you know a lot of the themes I explore in the new book is that in the near term we're about to empower many many people if not ultimately everybody with access to the ability to amplify their existing power right this is not just a knowledge engine but in time it'll allow you to take actions right you'll be able to make recommendations buy things book things and that's going to get smaller and cheaper and therefore proliferate far and wide that is going to cause a dramatic instability and potentially a threat to the nation-state because anyone who has an agenda or is trying to sort of push a political outcome is suddenly going to see the barrier to entry to that kind of scaled impact lowered and so there's going to be a real question around how States kind of manage that distribution of power and I think there'll be a tendency to Lunge towards you know slightly more authoritarian more surveillance based mechanisms to prevent that proliferation which would both be bad for Innovation and obviously dystopian from a political governance perspective so hang on because and Sam and I were talking backstage as well and he's you know he's much more confident that AI will lead us to a more equal world than an unequal world are you saying that there's a better chance of economic dislocation and social dislocation as a result of this technology so both are likely to be true actually which is a little bit surprising but if you look back over the last 50 years the transistor the last wave which enabled the personal computer has clearly made us in many ways more equal whether you're a billionaire you earn twenty thousand dollars a year we all get access to the same Cutting Edge Hardware the smartphone and the laptop is broadly at The Cutting Edge and everyone else will catch up over the next five to ten years we're on the same trajectory with respect to access to intelligence and that is an unbelievable idea over the next decade hundreds of millions of people and then billions of people will get access to the same expert doctor the same expert educator the same tool for scheduling prioritizing organizing your life that is going to be the most meritocratic moment in the history of our species for sure it is a question around how individuals and groups and organizations use that power right because clearly we all have conflicting agendas and priorities and goals and that's basically where I think that we end up with significant disruption okay Reid but that's the class half full I mean what what is the Potential Threat to the millions of coders of customer service Representatives the job dislocation the people who are serving jobs whose functions can be easily replaced by AI your LinkedIn hat on um so the closest metaphor that I've come to you to describe this moment is it's a steam engine of the mind um if you look at this the former steam engine uh you know currency mentioned although obviously majorly Amplified Industrial Revolution gave us superpower of muscles super out of Transport superpower of construction all these things now we're gonna have superpowers of the mind now there's a whole bunch of of a very positive things that come out of that I mean all of the things we have come of of of of of of the increase in wealth that allows medicine general education everything else comes out of the Industrial Revolution I think the same thing will be coming out of the steam engine the mind now the but the transition is going to be difficult um the transition is going to be okay well uh customer service jobs is going to change a whole lot now Engineers I think you know look you if you roughly kind of go through a company and you go we 10x each function you say you 10x sales people great so want to hire more sales people ourselves the 10x marketing people it's like okay maybe the marketing function will change some so less order entry more thinking about it but you're still in a business competitive ecosystem you don't want to stop marketing or or not be be doing it when you get to customer service you get more replacement but here is part of the thing that I part of the reason why I did the book impromptu and I'm trying to orient people is like okay so customer service people there's going to be a transition well AI can help with that you can build AIS that help figure out other kinds of working jobs that can help you find them that can help you learn them that can help you do them and so that's the thing that we as a society need to be doing so it's like less like how do we slow down AI how do we shape it to help the broad swath of humanity in this transition that's where I'm trying to get the dialogue and discussion to Mustafa um we were just talking to Sam about uh Google and whether or not it's still scary and he's like yeah they're still formidable um you quit deepmind and Google AI and obviously a lot of people have have have left Google is there something wrong at Google or some sort of innovator's dilemma there that will prevent it from truly succeeding on generative AI because it undermines its own business model look fundamentally AI stands in tension with Google's existing business model it's very hard to eat yourself from within and adapt and respond to the coming wave so for a while Google was just idling you know I was there on Lambda we had chat gbt before chat gbt it was just like a remarkable feeling internally playing with this incredible tool and not really being able to get it out into products it took you know the launch of chat TPT to kind of threaten Google and really shake everything up and you know Google's a very formidable and you know you know organization full of super smart people so I'm I I'm sure they'll be just fine but I can understand why they're stuck because nobody wants a personal AI in your pocket that is actually funded by ads right you don't you don't want a Salesman in your pocket that is trying to persuade you to go and buy more or do XYZ you need fiduciary alignment right your AI has to be on your team and that means ultimately you have to pay for it and if somebody else is paying for it you have to ask yourself what are they trying to persuade you of are they trying to influence you in some way and I think people are alive to that now and that's a real challenge for Google because it's very unclear how they're going to manage this transition so we asked Sam if Google scares him does open AI scare you Mustafa first menu no no it definitely doesn't I mean actually this morning uh We've announced our new large language model called inflection one and we set out to build a model that was fast enough and more capable than every other model on the market for our compute class so we're very proud that you know a year on from our launch we're now better than llama Chachi PT Palm 540 chinchilla all of the other models of our size and that's super important because it Powers pi and ultimately it will be available as a conversational API so you can obviously play with it at Pi dot AI now and you know I think that demonstrates that with a team of 35 people uh you know in a pretty short order we're able to exceed The Cutting Edge and now build an absolute best-in-class AI which is very exciting and obviously we've also managed to do that because we've been able to gather a huge amount of capital and some great investors and train in fact what we now have is the largest operational cluster in the world of h100s nvidia's latest chip and that's a huge Advantage okay and and one of the things because I I was listening to your conversation with Sam and you know it's obviously an awkward question when you ask him it's like well should we trust you because it's like yes trust me it's like well that's weird because if someone says I said no you shouldn't yes someone says yes trust me you're like well wait a minute but look I uh the open AI people are really great people I think it's it's governed by a 501c3 there's frequently a bunch of fud uh Social Media stuff that that that that that that that that kind of obscures that um I you know had spent a number of years on the board and in in in team I still work with them and help them they are fully paying attention to every serious question I mean like for example there Sam went and spent a month it's crazy you're doing a startup it's in a month doing a world tour talking to people say look I'm here you can talk to me about your concerns I want to make sure it's good for Humanity I don't just care about this kind of U.S San Francisco Tech scene I care about what its impact on humanity is and so I have come here to talk to you so that kind of like I'm engaging conversation I care about this is the kind of Reason in addition to a 51c3 emission structure and everything else and so no I'm I'm delighted with it I don't see how he's getting any work done but I want to change gears quickly we're going to throw some Twitter polls up on the screen today and we asked Twitter users where the greatest advancements in AI would come from we'll see the results but I want to ask about maybe returning with you our the U.S China policy of divestment is can can we reasonably hope that you know doing that will maybe prolong America's advantage in AI is it is it a smart strategy I don't think divestment is a smart strategy I think staying connected is better for both the US and China and the world I think competition is very good I think the fact that there's various ways that we in the US and the West Coast have a AI lead I think that's a great thing for kind of the values the ecosystem the kind of the great world order that the US should be very proud of in the last 70 years of that like there's lots of things to be critical of two of course but like as a really peaceful time trying to make it business and interconnection is a really good thing and I I'm a very strong uh believer and proponent of that but I think it divestment's not the not the animal it's half of you write in the book that China has an explicit National strategy to be the AI Leader by 2030. so do you agree with read that withdrawal divestment is a is a smart strategy I mean China is already ahead of its own schedule I mean it's publishing significantly more papers on AI than we are collectively in the rest of the world so you know it I I do think that our export controls were effectively a declaration of economic War on China they were very firm and very aggressive and I think it sets us out on a on a hyper adversarial footing they have a huge number of levers too we should expect them to use them against us pretty soon unfortunately so we talked a lot about regulation with Sam and obviously President Biden was just in town here this week talking about AI he met with you know the president and see Sundar and Satya in DC what is the prospect for real government oversight that protects users protects the economy and our political process so I look I think the good news is is that the administration is taking a very let's learn how to be smart about this let's assemble a set of thoughtful people from industry uh yesterday assembling a thoughtful people from outside of Industry you know Academia other kinds of places we're doing it and let's learn about it I think they have a number of good people tasked with this um and so I'm optimistic in that but on the other hand of course a little bit like your interview would say um you know uh regulatory things is something that's very easy to get wrong so you need to be cautious about how you do it you want it to be having a net positive impact not for example regulatory capture not a bunch of other things and so I think you have to be careful about how you do it I think it's worth adding that this time last year almost no world leaders were talking about AI I mean I don't think there has ever been a technology trajectory in history that has gone from zero recognition to almost Universal recognition and that's a good thing and I think it's in part because sort of we collectively in Industry have been trying to Advocate and say like this is really serious we should pay attention and invite the conversation wherever it ends up with respect to regulating existential risk or more near-term threats okay I think we have to leave it there thank you guys for joining us great to see you guys thanks a lot great to see you [Music] [Applause] okay I now like to welcome to the stage Adam solipski the CEO of AWS [Music] [Applause] [Music] good to see you Hi how are you it's been a while yes indeed I I first went to meet Adam at Tableau his previous company for my Amazon book and I came always thinking boy this this guy's tough he's still like an Amazonian at heart and and now here you are back at Amazon well you know thanks for joining us thanks for having me it's excites me you know this morning we've talked about open AI big investment from Microsoft running on Azure we've talked about Google bard obviously inflection AI mustafa's company also running on Azure so I guess you know the my first question is this this generative AI surprise this revolution does it buttress aws's Cloud leadership position or does it threaten it uh well I think if we you know there's no Birthright here but uh if we do our job right I think it should uh buttress our existing leadership position in the cloud I mean uh as you implied today we are by by far the most uh broadly adopted uh cloud in the world with uh the broadest set of capabilities and I I think that a generative AI is both you know an incredibly explosive and transformative set of Technologies in and of itself and it's fully dependent on the cloud to be successful so if you look at the massive amount of of compute that's required never mind any other I.T related stuff but just the massive amount of compute required uh that's going to happen really predominantly in the cloud and companies are going to want to view gender of AI as part of an entire data strategy and data platform and you're going to want to do your generative AI you know where you've got your data and you're also going to want the same uh bulletproof Enterprise security privacy that you you expect from any other cloud service and because so many customers and certainly more than any other Cloud have that data on AWS use AWS for security and operational excellence I think that they they're going to justifiably demand that AWS uh have a full powerful Suite of generative AI Services okay but do you need a popular llm or an exclusive partner running on AWS as it does seem like Microsoft and Google have I mean I guess I'm asking who's your horse in the race right now right well I think with all due respect I think that's the wrong question uh it would be like in 1997 when the internet's happening and everything's kind of going nuts around us you and I sitting around saying who's the internet company going to be it kind of seems like a silly question right and by the way the leading search company then was Alta Vista and I guarantee you my kids it's great I love it of Alta Vista so it's not okay where you want to where who's ahead which Runner is ahead in the race after three steps because it's a 10k race you know what everybody needs now is is experimentation they need choice they need democratization of generative Ai and just like AWS was founded to democratize I.T we aim to democratize generative AI so we're operating in all layers of the stack uh we have uh we've had our own Uh custom chip program for a decade now way longer than anybody else and we have you know not one but two families of chips custom designed for machine learning trainium for training and inferentia for running inference and then and so those are for people who are going to build models train models then most of our customers will interact with Amazon Bedrock which is a managed service for uh accessing deploying managing uh models and here's where the choice comes in so we are going to have our own models our own llm so uh Amazon models llms have been running in production inside of Amazon for a long time now parts of our retail search are powered by llms a lot of Alexa's voice responses are llm powered and we're taking right now we're in the process of taking those llms we're making them bigger we're externalizing them and later this year those will be exposed for everybody okay exactly well let me ask you so maybe but and but that's just one model one set of models I should say we're also exposing anthropic inside of Bedrock stability ai ai 21 and I think a lot of others over time because nobody knows anybody who knows which model is going to is going to be the winner is asking the wrong question people need to experiment we want to provide that choice okay so pretend you're talking to a customer now make the argument why should they use Titan or one of these other llms you're exposing rather than GTP gpt4 which now does seem to have a significant leadership position yeah well I I don't know which model they should it depends who they are and it depends what their application is and some of them probably will want to use GPT and some of them will want to use Titan and some of them will want to use anthropic and I think it's Preposterous to me to think that uh that one model or one company is going to be the solution for every application and every company out there so we're already seeing this heterogeneity so we're seeing an explosion of interest in Bedrock and Amazon's generative AI capabilities just this morning uh Omnicom one of the largest advertising Communications firms in the world announced they're working uh with with the AWS using Bedrock as well as our uh our our custom chips inside of our compute capacity uh to do generative AI going forward earlier this week BBVA one of the largest financial services firms in the world announced they're working with Amazon on General of AI you know with with bedrock and it's that it's that choice combined with the Enterprise security and privacy which I think are so fundamental I can humbly admit as a journalist covering tech for way too long that in the fall I was surprised by not only the quality of check gbt but the customer response to this new wave of Technology thanks were you surprised well I I think that uh I mean folks working in in this area in AI uh have known about large language models for a long time and you know very few uh companies have more experience with AI than Amazon I mean 1998 personalization on the Amazon website that was AI okay still called AI sagemaker 2017 not used by over a hundred thousand AWS customers most machine learning in the cloud any Cloud happens on sagemaker so we have a lot of experience with a lot of people working on llms I think the whole world was surprised that when 3.5 came out it was such a dramatic Improvement in responses not perfect by any means but a dramatic Improvement in responses over over 3.0 so I think that was the surprise but not not the overall uh Arc but the the uh the good news for our customers is that you know we have deep deep expertise in AI I've been working on different forms of it for a long time and are now you know pouring enormous resources into the generative part of it okay I'll give this up after this I promise but would you concede that Amazon's playing a little bit from behind right now I really don't think so I mean uh again it's the race analogy of like this is are we really going to have a conversation about three steps into a 10K arrays you know who's in what position it's about the long term Amazon has always taken a much more long-term view of the world than almost any other company uh where I think the key is we're building in multiple layers of the stack because we understand that's what customers need we're also building applications on top of these models so we've released code Whisperer which is a coding companion on top of the Amazon llms and that's uh you know you type in words it gives you back code and internal tests uh kind of coding challenges uh developers finish their task on average 57 faster than those not using Code Whisperer plus it's very secure private tells you what open source you're using and what licensing restrictions there might be on it which not every other solution out there does so I think we're we're very confident if you look at the thing which the only thing which ought to give us confidence is customer response I mentioned Omnicom mentioned BBVA this week old Mutual which is one of the largest financial services companies in Africa is going all in on AWS and using us for generative Ai and a really exciting developments to come we're talking to one company who has millions of lines of of Mainframe code and they're talking to us about you know moving over these really gnarly Mainframe applications and millions of lines of code using a generative AI from from from AWS so I think you know it's it's the this this consumer application this chat application which is so easy for folks to understand because they can say give me a haiku about you know farm machinery and it does it that's the key the haikus it's cool but uh you know what I think folks in this room and watching online understand is that there is a full Suite of Enterprise and a company and organizational applications and there's going to be huge needs there and so you know we're going to be be focused on customer service and on coding and on drug Discovery and on wealth management providing better solutions for customers and a full Suite of applications across every industry and I think we're very well positioned there and do you feel like you have or are close to having a gpt4 quality model running on AWS uh all of the the tests that we've done as well as more and more customers who are in the uh who are in the the existing current preview of Bedrock uh have been very impressed with the quality of of our models and of course again it's not just about our models we're going to be proud of our models I predict but anthropic does an amazing job and they're you know right up there in quality with any model in the world stability AI big leader for generating uh for for models generating images so collectively I think these models will provide absolutely you know the best destination all with a consistent API Set uh consistent AWS security can assistant identity system all in a private isolated virtual private Cloud none of this hey here's an application and now you have to have a bunch of Fortune 500 cios a ban it from their companies which is what's happened you know from day one it's always going to be AWS class security okay I want to put a slide up uh showing a Bloomberg intelligence estimate on uh projected uh generative AI revenues over the next I think it's maybe 10 or yeah five seven or eight years and who knows what you know about the the numbers that far out but it's up and to the right and I I just I can imagine a lot of financial types who are out there you know looking at Amazon's numbers and wondering how much of a a sales Tailwind this will be for AWS so what what can you tell us about uh you know you mentioned it's so computationally intensive what you see the impact being for AWS uh well it's it's really early so you know I think prognostication is fun and probably important at the end of the day but I think it's also important to be humble and to be nimble anything ending in uh and and to understand that we're gonna have to all adjust rapidly and but that being said uh I think that well look I don't think any of the fundamentals about cloud computing have changed and probably who knows call it 10 of it has moved to the cloud so we're still very very early and whether you're talking about you know any application there's still you know massive runway for things to move to the cloud and we are we firmly believe that they will on top of that I think that generative AI is is going to be you know the next kind of massive increase in workloads you know moving to the cloud or or in many cases happening for the first time and happening in the cloud and so I do think that it should be a significant Tailwind for cloud providers and particularly for for AWS given our our leadership position obviously we need to come out with the capabilities the services that you know justify uh people using us for that that purpose but I think if we uh you know if we do a good job of listening to customers it should provide significant demand for for years to come I mean the computation requirements are are so intense and one thing which also I think works in favor of of AWS is that a lot of people are asking about hey what about the energy consumption you know what about sustainability and you run those efforts inside Amazon yeah I mean I also run sustainability it's kind of the other thing I do inside of Amazon and we as a company and I personally care a lot about sustainability and people say well you know is this generative AI massive compute is that incompatible yeah are we going backwards sustainable well no we're not because uh number one these workloads you know there's no putting the genie back in the bottle so generative AI is going to happen so let's make it happen in a highly energy efficient and sustainable way so if you look at our um the our custom chips that we design um if you take graviton for example which is our oldest chip family uh graviton is 60 more energy efficient than equivalent uh x86 based uh compute capacity and if you look at an Enterprise just in general never mind generative AI just moving from their own data centers to the cloud to AWS uh there was a study done showing that AWS is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the average Enterprise data center in the United States so you know we are the sustainable place we're doing it through a whole series of technological improvements plus a commitment which were 85 percent of the way there are ready to be 100 renewable energy by 2025 which is just around the corner right you guys had a had another commitment called shipment zero which was a a a net carbon zero commitment by 2030 which you guys I guess maybe scrapped or you took off the website as a long time Amazon Watcher my my heart just kind of sank because you guys have been so prominent about these goals I guess the question is like have these commitments become harder to meet than they were to make well I think your heart should be thinking at the the state of global warmingly is because mine is uh and we should all be concerned about that but I think your heart should be singing at the leadership position that Amazon is trying to establish and at the improvements we're trying to make at the very public goals we've set why didn't you remove that particular commitment so well we because we it's subsumed really in a much broader Bolder commitment we made a very public pledge to be Net Zero carbon across all of Amazon not just AWS all of Amazon by 2040 which is 10 years ahead of the Paris Accords now for a technology company like AWS I won't say it's easy but it's it's doable so you'll hear that from other tech companies for a big retailer with Air Freight and inbound transportation and stores and packaging is actually really really hard and we'll be the first to say we don't know how we're going to get there in all Dimensions I can tell you how we're going to to get the renewable energy I can't tell you how we're going to get there and all elements of transportation and packaging and and buildings but we're an Innovative company we take bold long-term bets and we made this pledge publicly not privately in order to number one you know have a forcing function for ourselves because it's not easy and also because we want to inspire other organizations governments companies to join us we have over 400 signatories now at the climate pledge that's growing every month and it's not a competition against other organizations it's competition against the thermometer and frankly I want other people to out innovate out innovate us I want to be beaten if you will in the uh in the race to to become sustainable and hopefully we can be inspired by things that other people are doing so of course we adjust our goals over time but the thing I would focus on is just audacious goal to be Net Zero carbon by 20. and that's a Line in the Sand I mean even as things like generative AI take more and more computational resources even as you get more efficient with compute that's a commitment that you can hold pheromone even if you don't know how you're going to get there we have made a public pledge we intend on getting there but there are lots of other uh Pro areas of progress from making in the interim so for example if you take packaging for the retail business uh the the average packaging per Shipment has decreased by 38 since 2015. um so which is another example of it could be sustainable and good for our business you know it's lower cost for us and it's much more sustainable for the planet and anytime anytime you create a win-win like that it just works for everybody and becomes you know a really sustainable business proposition uh let me let's get back to Ai and let me ask you about Alexa I know it's slightly out of your purview but Alexa runs in your servers can Alexa be a generative AI play should it be uh Alexis already as I mentioned a ready powered and large part by llms that Amazon built and have been in production for a while now and I think that uh she's only going to get smarter and better and more personalized uh as the llm technology expands and and improves it feels to me as a long time user and my wife who's here knows I populated our house with them at one point it but today it feels as does Siri frankly a step behind is that would you agree with that no I I think that uh Alex well I use Alexa in my house I mean you know I guess we all have Different Strokes for different folks and and we love Alexa and I like to think she loves us um uh although if you ask her that she won't actually tell you yes um and uh I think Alexa's been getting better and better you know more skills better skills uh more understanding of of you and your your likes and just and dislikes and your habits and I think that uh the the rapid improvements that we're making in generative AI are truly going to uh continue to transform Alexa into you know a a truly you know personalized uh assistant and we do want Alexa to be you know an absolutely indispensable best in the world you know personal assistant to you and I think that we've got a lot of work to do um I'll leave it to the Alexa folks to you know fill in all of those blanks over time but we're actually very confident in that plan and very optimistic about Alexa being able to fulfill that role in people lives that I think they're they're really going to love I want to get to two more in the two minutes we have left uh your boss and predecessor Andy jassy has been kind of cutting some of the big bets at Amazon but one that he hasn't cut is the satellite plan Kuiper and I just wonder you know what what you see as the opportunity considering a rival system Sterling from Tesla it does seem to be you know operational quite far ahead well we're very optimistic about Kuiper there's huge interest from governments from Enterprises from lots of other organizations uh billions of people around the world are underserved uh with for internet and Kuiper really aims to democratize that there's a theme here to democratize that and provide great internet service to uh to so many billions of underserved people in addition whether it's automobile companies uh telecommunications companies lots of other Enterprises who are AWS customers governments they want especially from remote locations to be able to backhaul information up to Kuiper back into the AWS cloud and so I think as we launched our first satellites later this year and then uh really ramping up in 2024 and 2025 is my understanding and uh but then being in service in that time frame initially and being able to deliver that for AWS customers is is huge um before we go I do just wanna I do just want to uh remind folks that just today this morning AWS has launched its 100 million dollar uh generative AI Innovation Center where we're going to be going out to all those customers around the world Enterprises with expertise free AWS expertise Solutions Architects uh Engineers strategists and working with them one-on-one to Envision design and then access that 100 million AI generative AI capabilities not talk but actually that's discounts for for new companies or yeah we're gonna we're just gonna we're just gonna bring our internal AWS experts you know free of charge to a whole bunch of AWS uh customers uh you know focusing on folks with with uh significant AWS uh presence and go help them turbocharge their efforts to get real with generative AI get beyond the talk all right last one in negative 10 seconds so I guess it's got to be a quick one you and Andy are both in the same situation you're the you're the guy after the guy the founder whose name was synonymous with the early stage of uh legendary growth so what is what do you want Adam's AWS Legacy to be think of it in personal terms to be honest with you so I I don't have a canned answer but I I will say that you know I would love it if um uh if I could be known to really helped drive a business that is you know constantly no matter how big it gets no matter how far flying it gets puts customers at the very center of what we're doing always puts customers interests you know before anybody else's interest yet at the same time isn't as an empathetic you know Equitable fun and Innovative place for employees to work all right Adam Phillips thank you for joining us thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] please welcome to the stage Qualcomm president and CEO Cristiano Amon with Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh that's more like it good morning everybody you joined Qualcomm as an engineer in 1995. let's bring that up for two reasons one it was your birthday yesterday belatedly happy birthday thank you thank you very much I won't I won't date you but you've also seen the Arc of technological development we know Qualcomm is this well as the largest maker of smartphone processors the brains inside the handsets that are all pointing at you right now taking photos the question is Qualcomm an AI company look this is a this is a great question to ask and um you know it's it's incredible to see all of the development you see right now on on AI here's here's how I answered that question actually it's very simple uh if you think about the uh AI when you think about semiconductor it's really accelerating Computing right you do a lot of computation um and what we see what you can do with those large language models uh large models for images and video so if you think about the history of computing Computing starts in the cloud and it gets scale at the edge I think that's that's what happens with CPUs that's that's what happens uh with all other form of computing and I think the smartphone is a great example of that if you look the largest Computing platform uh ever developed is the smartphone right now it's the largest development platform for mankind and and what is good about the smartphone it's uh it's a device that I'm with you all the time so if AI becomes pervasive which we believe it will become pervasive especially when you look about how those large models they are very natural how you uh you can converse with them you they have contextual information and all of those things that's going to happen at the edge so that's tell us you think about Qualcomm if AI is going to get scale you're going to see it running on Qualcomm Snapdragon devices whether it's in your phone in your car in your PC and into other machines and I think well it's a great opportunity the future is to democratize access to artificial intelligence tools generative AI tools and qualcomm's going to make that happen why are you not getting like Jensen one level love Cristiano uh look I think I think what's happening right now and by the way it's great for this in my conductor industry for anybody that has been on the Forefront of computing you know Qualcomm it's probably used to be well known as a Communication company but actually if you look at what we do right now it's more of a connected processor company than communication and as those models started to become very popular uh they're going to be running at the edge and I expect that AI becomes an option on Qualcomm right now it look and I'll give you an example I it's it's I saw something that Adam said I think in the prior conversation when he said something about in 1997 he could try to guess were the winners and losers on the internet it'll be probably a very wild guess I think what we see today is this genitive 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 just within the past six months is a revolution the number of companies coming with use cases and those use cases are going to happen on devices and I think that's going to be a great opportunity for hold that thought what we're going to do now I'm going to show you something to the audience here and and those with us virtually but during that think about questions for Cristiano based on what you see so with that let's bring up the video and Cristiano when it comes up and plays explain to us a little bit what it is that we're seeing because here at the Bloomberg technology summit we're going to nail the technology any second just just wait the video is going to come and when it does it will have been worth the wait here we go yes so what you basically see is a control net demo you have an input image on your phone you tell in your input prompt what do you want the image to be you wanted to make it a masterpiece look like Venice canals 4K and it just runs and and give you this very unique image image to image that's never been created before created to AI running on your phone so it's a good I think time to talk a little bit about how we think about AI at the edge outside the data center because I like we have seen everywhere there's going to be this huge opportunity for the cloud but it's going to be this huge opportunity for devices because what you do on the device is very different so there's there's a number of reasons why this is going to be very popular on the device first the device has contextual information about you and has real-time information like a picture you just took and you want it right now at that more minute change their picture and share with somebody else with your you know messaging platform the context that video that device was run in airplane mode without any external connection right it ran the model locally on device absolutely so that's one of the reasons you have real-time contextual information there's another reason uh processing on the phone is virtually free uh when you think about you running those models in the cloud and and think about a large language model for every token like a word as the sentence if you do that if you have an experiment that you see the words coming up for every token you're running the entire model and you use a lot of cloud computing but the Computing that is in the palm of your hand in the dashboard of your car in your computer that processing power is available and is dedicated to you so that's another reason you're going to run those on the on the devices the the number three reason is you can see this and there's a lot of Academia work those models when they get very well trained they become smaller so one of the things we have done that's very unique to Qualcomm we spend a decade on this I think we we invested in this before it was popular it's kind of the history of many of the things that in qualcom done on Research what we did is could we come up with ability to do very high process uh high performance accelerated Computing on the device running large number of parameters and you can do it for example in a phone without compromising battery life because you're gonna never trade the form factor and the battery life you expected to do all this computation and still last all day so we developed some very unique technology which is the most efficient accelerated Computing from a performance per watt and we're bringing that to all of our devices just to give an order uh magnitude the new Snapdragon processor we're going to launch this here for flagships they've come to the market 24 it's going to support in excess of 10 billion parameter models running locally on the device on what we're going to do it in Windows on arm platform it's going to be over 20 billion parameters what we're going to do in cars is going to be in the order of 40 to 60 billion parameters running on the device so so what do you think about it when you see all of those models being well trained and become smaller we're going to see the development of what we call hybrid AI you will do a query like you just did the query you want this picture you wanted to do this if the model is very well trained you'll run on a device and it's going to cost nothing to the cloud I think the question that the audience will have and I have is you know say shipping in 2024 but how real is this that the the demonstration showed you running a 1.5 billion parameter model when can we do that oh real it's uh it's uh it's more real than you think for example stable diffusion which is text to image um this summer uh we're getting to sub five seconds um if with no Cloud connectivity uh in in our Snapdragon summit we're going to show 10 billion parameters running and you'll be able to buy for example if you want to buy a Galaxy s24 uh the launches next year you're going to have that uh computing power so there are a lot of Engineers that I speak to you are yourself an engineer and they they do Express skepticism that this is going to happen that all of us will be running large language models or generative AI tools locally on device without connection with billions of parameters because they doubt the processor power or they doubt the work that you can do at Qualcomm on the algorithms where did you do the Innovation okay so so this is uh this is a good question and that's why I was about to tell you about how we think about hybrid AI exactly like your phone works today you have a lot of applications in your phone you go to the App Store you have a lot of apps and the apps are being processing on the device and they're being processing the cloud they work as a single Computing so hybrid AI is what's happening right now is really that you have a model running locally you provide a query to the model the model will decide if it runs locally or you give a cloud a head start in sending tokens to the cloud so it's going to be completely transparent to you and some applications is not just because you don't want to use the cloud you wanted fast response on the device because of latency or contextual information but here's how I like to explain this when the smartphone happened I think most people don't remember this I'm sure I'm going to show my age I've been in every transition to technology Qualcomm we were the first company that came up with the concept at the time we got a palm OS a Palm Pilot connectable seller and created the very first smartphone in the world and this was the time of the feature phones you use your phone to make calls and texts that's what you use your phone for um and GPS was just for e911 that's the only application all of a sudden this became a computer and people say what I'm going to do with it I like to put this example I remember when we talked about 4G Broadband there was a lot of analysts with their blackberries uh telling us who wants this what what are you going to do with this this is a I I have everything I need in my Blackberry it was an incredible device oh we should acknowledge or you know pull one out Blackberry is not really a thing anymore is it well what it shows is the revolution that happened with all those applications on their phone that's how you should think about AI we're just at the very beginning uh we're just showing some example stable diffusion control net we're going to have some example photo but there's going to be so many different applications think about a car for example I like this example because as a kid I used to watch Knight Rider kit think about natural language conversation it's perfect for a car right why is Qualcomm relevant to that discussion well it's just look at what we're doing right now I think you probably don't have to tell you about our position in the mobile market I think especially on on premium Computing for the Android space we're now virtually provide working with every brand virtually every brand in automotive for Next Generation digital cockpit we've been working with Microsoft for the transition of Next Generation PCS using our silicon we have been Department of choice of companies like meta Microsoft announced with Google and Samsung for augmented reality virtual reality mixed reality devices and we've been expanding to uh in industrial internet of things let's let's let's hit pause for a second because I know that you're a busy man and you're operating in a lot of fields go back to that video in this audience question why would I want to locally process a complex model on a small device when those models would run better in the cloud and I guess that applies to the automotive example as well yes so this is uh instead I provided the answers to those questions in the phone but I'm going to change the conversation a bit and talk about in the car so when you are inside the car right and uh and like for example we have a lot of AI in the car today for assisted driving and autonomy just give an example if you look at GM supercruise Ultra Crews all running on a Qualcomm AI processor we have a lot of AI processing the car the car needs to make decision that are very context related in real time if you for example when you think about an Adas system uh assisted driving the sensors in the car for uh for assisted driving autonomy see an image you need to make a decision uh that computation needs to happen locally the reason Qualcomm became successful and we're in expanding an Adas is because you cannot put a server in a trunk of a car especially in an EV take away from the range but now that computing power you can use for a large language model in the car this model can be as big as the model in the cloud and you have now the real context information you're talking let's say you're talking in the car of the future you're talking to the model like you would in Knight Rider kit and you want to you you give a very complex instruction for the car I want to go home on the way home I want to stop here I want to order this I want to pick it up and those things are going to be very related to the information you have it doesn't mean that you're separating the AI from the car from the cloud they're all combined but everything that is contextual Rich for that moment the AI in the car is going to make a huge day weeks months probably years when does that happen look it's very difficult to make a prediction it's the same title make a prediction but broadly I look I'm um I'm an optimist so I think we're going to start to see next year in 24 for phone applications a lot richer thank you uh we're going to see a lot richer uh ability to use AI for photography like this example we just give um how people share information whether it's on WhatsApp or Google messages how they're going to share photos how they're going to create content you're going to see that next year I think you're going to see a lot of productivity uh next year we talk with Microsoft we had incredible demos at Microsoft build showing the co-pilot of all the Microsoft applications running on our AI engine in our future SOC that has our custom CPU they're going to the windows devices and device for the connection N24 and uh and see this is another interesting thing Enterprise Apple locations when chat CBT thing happened it was an incredible thing uh I immediately had uh who send an internal memo say our Engineers can't get our source code and just send it to chat TBT uh to verify the scope because that's going to go into the Wilderness right so Enterprises really want in for certain applications to run the data locally so so Microsoft has an incredible technology that you can provide a data set it could be an Excel spreadsheet and you apply the model on that spreadsheet that's a great example why you want to run those things locally some Enterprises may not want to send the data to the cloud and that's how the Enterprise works I I know you and I I knew that you would be fired up about this and I've only got 30 seconds left so let's do this doing business with Beijing at the moment look we have a great partnership uh with or our customers in China I think Qualcomm is probably uh one of the few examples of a very successful uh partnership in business with China all of our customers in China pay intellectual property on cellular essential patents uh we're all licensed they pay we have uh have a vibrant business on the phone space where companies like xiaomi Oppo OnePlus Vivo and honor Etc and as China built an incredible uh industry for Ev they're all using Balkan chipsets we're going in industrial so here's how I see it if you are a leader on a particular technology you should have a big business in China it's just the nature of the size of the GDP and that's what we see happening with welcome very quickly or Brad and Emily will be very angry at me does AI complicate that relationship with China no look um you should think if you think about what's happening in phones in PCS and cars everything at the edge it's one of those things that is very difficult to make predictions in politics but to this date we have been able to continue to support development on on-device AI and I think across all the different Industries in China and there's some very interesting development especially from the phone industry how they're using this to create content or support creators CEO making the case basically for the future of AI being on what you're all pointing at me right now with smartphones thank you very much thank you thank you pleasure to be here [Music] please welcome to the stage Adobe generative Ai and Sensei VP alexandru costen and creative artists agency Chief legal officer Hillary crane with Bloomberg's Rachel Metz hello [Applause] good morning good morning to you guys thank you both so much for being here um we've got a lot to talk about um Ai and artists and there's just so much happening there AI has long been used by artists and it's gotten easier and cheaper and more widespread with systems like stable diffusion and Dolly and chat gbt adobe's Firefly which I know you've been working on um and so on so what are some of the most interesting uses that the two of you are seeing for regenerative Ai and creating art well I think there's tons of examples AI like many things before is just a new tool for the creative community and the creative Community is very Adept at taking on new tools and and applying human creativity uh to get new art forms I have one interesting thing we've seen in just the past couple of weeks is there's going to be a release of a new Beatles song There was a tape of uh John Lennon's voice where the quality was very poor and he and his family said no we can't make a song out of it and AI has now been able to clean that up to make it of high enough quality that Paul McCartney with the consent of the family is going to release the first new Beatles song in decades they released others in 95 but the technology wasn't good enough for this one that's a fantastic application of the tool we also see it being used in post-production in order to make a lot of things easier that were harder before you can do a lot of things without the presence of the talent by using scans and that's going to be another fantastic application and it's gonna the sky's the limit I think we're only beginning to scratch the surface on where the creativity will lead us and Alexander what kinds of things are you seeing same in our world when we look at the Spectrum of Art and creativity in general starting from Fine Arts to Consumer content creation the two biggest uses we've seen recently we launched generative fill in Photoshop for photo retouching and this took off like one of our most successful betas so a lot of actual production workflows and content creation workflows for professionals are being helped by General division in new ways and we're also enabling some of the that technology for consumers and communicators that don't have the skills to actually create and we're seeing an actual uh explosion of creativity at that consumer side folks that have ideas but in the past they were weren't able to express themselves now with the help of generative AI directly integrated in our workloads they're able to create content and have a differentiated social presence or just communicate with with their families Etc and Alexandria you um also have a lot of people that are using Firefly that are as you mentioned are doing work related projects with it like what are some things that people are doing with it that you might not have expected so uh we're still in beta so uh our general availability release is happening very soon so everybody is still experimenting on the Firefly website but we've seen uh we've seen a lot of viral activity which people extending out beat those album covers for example this was something we didn't expect to to be as popular and viral or or mixing memes together this is like really really crazy stuff and again this is just human creativity at its best when they come up with new ideas and Technology just enables this new wave of creativity some of the concerns that you have difficult concerns particularly around how data is collected to train systems that can generate texture images this stuff is typically collected from all over the internet but increasingly some people such as artists in particular whose work may have been sort of hoovered up as part of a data set um are upset about that yeah well I think you're seeing I mean we've already seen the lawsuits I think Getty Images is the best one people challenging the practice of on what material you train the machines and the ethics behind what's used to train the machines there is a difference between publicly available and legally available for your use to make money and the whole intellectual property regime gives rights to certain individual creators and people who appear and when a machine is trained for commercial purpose using those rights without their permission I think you're at serious risk I think if we think about an actor and how important the creative decisions are that they make not just when they're doing a role but as to what roles they agree to do in order to create their whole body of work that's a real curatorial expression of self and if other people can take that away from them by using their image and without their consent using either their prior creative thoughts in the form of a writer or their image or their voice for a musician in order to make a product that they're unaware of or haven't consented to be in I think we're in very murky or even not that murky pretty black and white uh ethical land where we have to think about how do we create the rules and the Norms around use of these creative individuals work uh in a way that respects their rights and doesn't do violence we heard a lot of talk this morning about threatening of humanity and obviously human extinction it's kind of an important big deal I get it but along the way we shouldn't only think about human extinction we should think about mapping basic ethics and Norms onto this fantastically creative and Powerful tool and and this was top of mind for us too when we designed Firefly because artists were indeed up in arms about the fact that their public content was used without their consent compensation or control so when we design Firefly we actually decided to train only on data we had in Adobe stock and public available data which copyrights expired and on purpose we don't include any recognizable character we don't include any IP trademarks so by the nature of the training data not only we're respectful with our customers because these artists are basically all of them are customers but we're also enabling Enterprises and creators of content generative content to be comfortable using this content because the risk of generating by mistake or somebody else's IP or a recognizable character is zero so Alexandria I have a question for you related to that um because Adobe recently said that um business users of firefly can get an IP Indemnity from Adobe which essentially as as I understand it means that if a business customer is sued over some media that it makes with firefly let's say an ad hypothetically um Adobe will pick up the legal tab right that's basically then again our comfort comes from the fact that we train on data we control and that's curated both using AI but more importantly is curated using human curators and we make sure we don't leak any IP in it so this is why we have discomfort for our Enterprise customers and for cases where they actually is just for the generated content if they remix it with potentially infringing content in that case the IPI Indemnity doesn't apply but for Pure content generated by Firefly we are offering this IP Indemnity for two Enterprise cars yeah I think it's fantastically interesting and pioneering work the idea of ethical training I hope becomes part of the the greater lexicon and and that's what's happening here and it's important for the corporate and business clients who have that Indemnity but we were also talking about the democracization of creativity and allowing somebody like me who lacks it to have the tools to perhaps create things I don't want to be stealing somebody else's work as I'm exploring my creativity for the first time and so having tools and mechanisms that would give me or every other Creator the confidence that when they're diving in to this world for the first time they're not doing it in a way that's doing violence to other creative people who've invested their lifetime in the work I think is super important and I really commend Adobe for what they've done thank you I'm curious though what did adobe's lawyers think of that um and Hillary as a lawyer yourself maybe maybe you've got some thoughts on that I mean I Dana row our chief legal officer would be a better person to enter this but they they're fully behind this and for a long time actually we've been pioneering pioneering many other Innovative things in the in the context of generative content like the content authenticity initiatives that I want to touch upon uh later on but we do have again our legal department of full support and they because they know how we train they're deeply involved they actually our legal department runs what's called our AI Ethics program so we have a program we've set up many years ago in 2020 when we've started pioneering uh generative AI using Gans which is a different type of model with neural filters in Photoshop we had our legal department full engagement so we've created this ethics Department that helped us navigate all of those not only training data issues but also bias and harm reduction initiative Etc so we do have a long history of investing thoughtfully in this space Hillary I have a question for you specifically about some stuff that's going on right now in Hollywood um earlier this month the biggest Union in Hollywood the SEC after actors Union began negotiating uh with Studios regarding a new three-year contract one of the issues they're discussing is the use of the AI to do things like mimic users voices or their bodies um so I'm curious like how you envision generative AI changing Hollywood um who stands to benefit and who stands to get hurt from this well I I think that's a question that remains unanswered and I'm not myself involved in the guild conversations I I hasten to point out it's not only that Screen Actors Guild the Director's Guild uh reached an agreement with the studios on AI and the writer's Guild is also in the mix and I think we're going to have to wait to see how what all of those negotiations um yield but in the end I'll go back to where I started as a tool for creativity I think we're going to see an explosion of content in Hollywood that could be good for Hollywood but only if we pay attention to establishing the ethical norms and creating a world in which before the law or legislation can catch up the genie is let out of the bottle because it is normalized to steal the content that's available but not legally available for use and thus I think we're in a little bit of a Time race um to get to the ethical standards to make sure that this tool in the end delivers on the creative promise of it both for the amateur but all the way up through the chain of Hollywood one more thing I wanted to ask you about related to actors and contracts and stuff I'm curious if you're seeing AI the applications of generative AI I'm being discussed or put into film contracts and if so how and what kind of questions does this bring up for artists protecting their images well so you know AI generative AI is new but the idea of special effects is is not new and the ability to manipulate images to change them post-production has existed for a long period of time so we have some precedent here and um it is pretty well established that the studios are uh seek consent from the artist before they will fundamentally change their performance there I'm going to forget the actor but there was an example of two decades ago where they added a tier to an actor's performance that he didn't approve of and when he saw the film and he had a tear he was like how'd that happen and this conversation started that long ago and it's continuing there is a question of who owns the character who owns the digital image of the actor who creates the character what control should that actor have overuse of those tools in the future both in respect to the piece of art that they've agreed to make and with respect to other pieces of art I think ultimately we're going to get to a comfortable place with the studios because the studios and artists are in a symbiotic relationship more concerning is those who are not part of the mainstream but who want to jump in by creating work they now have the ability to create at much lower cost because of the availability of machines that have potentially been trained on the pilford content that's a real problem audience awareness this is something I think about whenever I see a trailer that might use AI in a certain way or I've seen some commercials that are using AI when should the audience be made aware if when AI is part of the creative process um why and why not and Alexandria I know Firefly does some embedded details onto Market generated images but I'm not sure how that translates to like a final product yeah so for a long time as we were pioneering those generative work we were receiving this media attention and Industry feedback that we need to invest in content authenticity we need to basically help content consumers understand whether a piece of content was digitally edited and in this case more recently fully generated synthetically and four years ago our legal department in the NRA we pioneered the creation of the content authenticity initiative which is the Consortium that has a thousand members now starting from camera manufacturers like Qualcomm and others and ending up with websites and content consumption places and across the stack we're encouraging and the implementation of a nutrition label digital nutrition label which we call content credentials that is a piece of information that describes what modifications were brought to that content and that's embedded cryptographically in the content itself so that means that somebody consuming a piece of content with content credentials embedded they should be able to read the nutrition label they should be able to understand is this piece of content real or is it generated or edited so it doesn't represent the original intent and this is extremely important in this age where it's so easy to create this content imagine the implications of deep fakes in politics and I mean this is a really serious issues and this is why we're encouraging a lot of our partners we have we're working with generative companies like stability Ai and spawning that Ai and others to standardize on this content credentials initiatives cantones in this initiative so consumers of content have the option to First verify and then trust a piece of content today you see a photo it looks real you implicitly believe it out of the immediately but in reality in this new future where all content will be modified digitally and or generated fully we need to to enable content to embed authenticity information so consumers can have the right of understanding and then verifying and then trusting that piece of information I I agree with all of that and I believe that some form of watermarking for or otherwise um you know being able to trace the provenance of a piece of art back to the consent of the artists who are included should be a part of this kind of nutrition label and the reason I go for a watermark is because it's not just as you're watching the whole content as we know somebody can take a clip of that that may or may not have the nutrition label put it on a platform and it can be around the world before the artist even knows it's happened to them but if we can embed something that'll pop that'll show not okay or okay we're that's part of the solution Are We There Yet technologically I don't think so but with the smart guy sitting next to me working on it and others and if we take them at the word the leaders we heard from from this couch this morning uh I think that we can do a lot to create these tools that'll make it much safer environment thank you both so much for talking to me about this it was wonderful to have you here thank you let's give them a round of applause and you guys can just walk up that way thank you and now I'd like to welcome to the stage emad mustak CEO and founder of stability AI [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Iman thank you so much for joining me um we've got a lot to talk about yes it's been has it been exactly 10 months since stability AI really stable diffusion publicly yeah we released it with confidence and Runway 10 months ago it doesn't feel like it feels like 10 years okay okay what so like what has changed since then because a lot has changed um I think that you know when we kind of released it was building on the research of many others and this whole ecosystem it was the first large-scale usable model on someone's laptop so that's why you saw such a massive take up of it like it overtook Bitcoin and ethereum in three months what took them 10 years and developer interest on GitHub and now cumulatively the whole ecosystems I would take in Linux Alice will chat GPT and others come you now have where we are now which is this technology everything everywhere and everyone talking about it so yeah and let's talk about um the new model that's out today tell us about sdxl 0.9 and what it means for stability Ai and we can if we could see some of those images that would be off yeah so I think you know there's continuous Evolution so three of the five stable diffusion authors including two leads so we're lucky they work at stability plus again this whole ecosystem that took an open model and they just improved it iteratively so sdxl we kind of scaled it up and introduced some new architectures um so it can now do hands you know that was always a thing because hands are kind of weird I mean like can an AI do hands no can you it's kind of difficult perfect hands perfect text photo realistic images now um but also with some mitigations built in because again that's why it was important to put it out into the open so everyone could both improve it and then attack it so it becomes more robust you said mitigations yes what does that mean exactly exactly so you know you have things like um we had photorealistic models earlier this year that we didn't release because the time wasn't quite right for it because you had to build in things like invisible watermarking working with Adobe on content authenticity.org and many others as well because the technology is inevitable because you see it emerging everywhere and part of what we want to it's stability is introduce standards around that okay so you can track it so you can use it and use it appropriately so like right now if I um were to use the latest model let's say I generated this picture or something similar to it since it's available as of today uh would it have some sort of embedded watermarking yes kind of full details about that so there's some official ones some unofficial ones because these models become the default that people use and you want to have some way of telling what is generated versus what is not and that's a huge research area um excuse me a persistent a persistent issue with all kinds of AI image generators um including stable diffusion is bias in the images that are generated as we know that stems in large part from the training data um how a stability AI addressing bias in a stable diffusion models and how do you improve this over time yeah I think there was a great research report done by your colleagues um kind of where they looked at the original stable diffusion that was its academic release and yeah biases because it was taken in a picture of the available internet and then it reflects the biases of that internet which is very Caucasian Western and others part of our mission and stability is to build a foundation to activate Humanity potential so we're working with multiple governments already on National data sets that reflects the culture of those countries for example one of our team members makatoshing did Japan stable diffusion where they swapped out the language version because if you typed in salaryman to the original stable diffusion it was a very happy man with lots of money oh okay the Japanese version is a very sad person yes and I think this is the future every single country this is vital infrastructure need their own data sets they need to have their own models and they need to be able to interact and reflect those contexts and address these biases now we can't do that with black boxes there's no way to have one model to rule them all that reflects everyone's context so are you you're working right now on different data sets for different countries yeah so you take National broadcaster data you take Education data you take cultural data and you build from there because I think from a safety perspective we can't train on the whole internet anymore the internet's full of garbage and so that's one of the reasons we offer opt out of data sets and we have massive investments in refining data sets because we should move to having that as a common infrastructure both for the proprietary models of the open AIS and anthropics of the others of the world and also for the open models because I mean you are what you eat and right now the models feed I've had bias garbage no wonder they turn out a bit weird let's feed them better stuff so we have nice free-range organic models if I'm a country and I'm building a data set um that I want to be used for a model who who owns that data set then is that it belonging to the country like who's in charge of that I believe it should be National infrastructure in the UK we have HDR UK which organized the national biology and data information infrastructure with Federated learning others I think this will be infrastructure for every country so every country has the data sets because you have public broadcasting data that should be used to power AI models and then that will lead to the Innovation that we also require to deal with what's coming because this technology is going everywhere it's not Enterprise ready next year that kicks off and the only thing that I think that can solve the disruption here is innovation so it becomes vital for countries to stoke that Innovation through open data through open models and Innovation enhancement I'm going to ask you a little bit about Finance stability raised 101 million at a valuation of 1 billion and we understand you're trying to raise more can you talk about how much your train raise uh well we're not trying to raise more but we have constant interest yes I received eight incoming investor interest notes because we're a bit different our total addressable Market is all the private data in the world and turning it intelligent whereas everyone else is looking for proprietary models which I believe is a race to zero so three amazing Partnerships like with AWS and more to be announced our models will be available anywhere because our aim is to have the default model of every modality commercial variants and National variance so you can have an Indian Insurance stable chat um I think you know you scale when it's ready and we're nearly ready but you don't try to overscale and it's very difficult because to build these models you need super computers you need all of these things but once they're built they can go everywhere which is amazing operational Leverage uh there was a recent Forbes article um that said particularly that you've exaggerated at times about a few different things um has that made fundraising any more challenging um and what about your existing investors have they how have they responded to that um so you know the existing investors we've been having constant dialogue with them they've been helping through this process um in terms of additional fundraising again we're not actively fundraising right now but the interest just continues to go up because ultimately you know it says things like AWS partnership they built us one of the largest supercomputers in the world before funding and we have an amazing partnership they talk about technology we've released another amazing image model we have language models code models and more coming I think it's an interesting thing because a year ago we're a pre-seed startup now we're a scale up and next year we might be a multinational growing pains are always there but the ultimate thing is you just have to deliver on what you say you're going to do you mentioned language model and I know that a few months a month ago um You released stable so what's happening with that now like a pretty early version when it came out yeah so next week we're moving to properly open development so we have a Blog and a whole series of papers out with that and we had an alpha now we're going to have a beta of which is a massive step up from there so last week we released kind of open Llama which was a replication of kind of metaslama except for fully open and now it's going to be a highly refined version I think what you're going to see with language models now we just had Qualcomm Cristiano coming on is that you will probably see GPT 3.5 level performance on the Edge by next year if I look at current trends a large part of that is data so with the right data you can have a 10 times performance increase and that's something we saw when we funded datacomp on the image side with a tenth of the data it outperformed open ai's clip image to text model because the data was such high quality again stop feeding the model's garbage get rid of all the rubbish and you will have highly efficient architectures I want to go back just for a moment to the Forbes article into something you told my colleague Tom McKenzie recently um he asked you about claims in the Forbes article that you have a tendency to exaggerate you said I get excited um and I'm curious what are what guardrails are you putting in place to make sure you're storytelling and your narrative match with what's actually happening on the ground well I think it's surrounding yourself with good people um I think it's mostly I was thinking a lot about this so I've asked birds in ADHD and I have a very definitive view of the future and I think that shocks people because we can't deal with exponentials what's coming now with generative AI like sagemake has a hundred thousand SME customers every single one will use this technology at the same time as soon as the Enterprise ready this is the biggest economic impact in deflationary thing that's going to hit our economy of all time I say something like that it sounds like an exaggeration because I'm definitive but it's what I genuinely believe and again this is a difficulty you have and I'm doing the best I can one thing I don't do anymore is I commit to release dates okay and so my team have been bashing me over the head about that so no more release date commitments just released when it's ready okay I understand that because sometimes with articles I just kind of say yeah it'll be you know sometime this week yeah exactly like we nearly had to still distribute stable diffusion ready and it was super fast but then it just kind of didn't work we couldn't release it yeah you do the best you can um one concern that people have raised in general about generative AI both text-based and um and systems that are creating images is the extent to which startups and large companies alike are looking to bring in on people that can work on the ethics side of AI on people who can develop guardrails within companies what are you doing on this do you have any AI ethesis on stuff I think it's interesting so my background is in ethics and Islamic law which is a very different type of Ethics in some ways but I'm a computational theologist um and so we have a safety team that we're building out we work with kind of rlhf teams and others because the models are first deep learning Trend and then you use rlhf reinforcement along with human if you adapter to bring them towards human and so we have our trlx library which is the most popular one from our copper AI lab and we've been bringing in ethicists and others from external parties to look at that but no one's quite sure what AI ethics is right now no one's quite sure what AI ethics is right now okay so part of the thing is to expand the conversation this is also why you know we support Ai and faith.org and other things because the conversation does need to be broadened because it is so complex and it's hitting every part of society that's one reason why I was the only AI CEO to sign both of the fli and safety letters because I think it's a discussion we have to have now and more voices need to be brought in because right now it's mostly guys here in Silicon Valley and I think that's correct but do you truly feel that AI is at this moment an existential threat I think it will be like that movie her where we're kind of boring and it'll bugger off thanks for all the gpus but I could be wrong and that's why I think right now we need to move before the economic impact happens this is like covert before Tom Hanks we haven't had that moment yet everyone's talking about it your mum's talking about it but it's not real next year becomes real and the economic impacts become huge and the existential side from having crap data that we're feeding these models the whole of YouTube and others and I wonder it turns out weird so let's feed it better data now let's put some proper standards in place and let's build AI that is good for us and doesn't work against us it feels almost like you think that that is inevitable that's an inevitable outcome do you feel like that is an inevitable outcome I guess from my perspective I'm like well if this hasn't happened yet there are so many different directions that things could go I think never the same again is an interesting thing never the same again okay so no head teacher in a school can set essays for homework anymore because of gpt4 it's never the same again I think we're going to see a lot of those a regime change over the next period and this technology is inevitable and it's up to us it's going to be bigger economic impact than covert is it up or down is it productivity enhancement is it job losses we're not sure about that and on the existential side we know well my view is that if you have an AI That's more capable than you the only way to fully control it and align it is to remove its freedom I don't know how to do that for entities that are more capable than me what I can do I can teach it better I think the way that you're brought up makes a big difference we see that in real life these models are like really talented grads that occasionally go off their meds we need to fix that we need to give them better food better balance and then I think it's more likely that we will have a positive future especially because the bad guys already have the technology you can just download on a USB stick and boom you've got it what is the most pressing challenge stability is stability AI is working on right now I know you guys are involved in lots of different things so sometimes it's hard for me from the outside to see what you think is the most important well the most important challenge for us is to be more transparent when there's so much going on and build the human capital but in particular the key Focus that we have right now is getting language models to the edge the ability to earn your lion language models can help you protect against other language models that will become increasingly convincing and I think everyone needs to be able to own their own models given how powerful they are and how they extend our capabilities just like in crypto there was that phrase not Europe is not your crypto I think it's going to be not your models not your mind as we move from here explain that a little bit more if you are Outsourcing a lot of your cognitive capability to models that a black boxes and they have inherent biases then it's going to be more and more influential on you versus if you have control of your own models for your private data your private knowledge here as Rachel as Bloomberg as a country and so it's a question of who controls this technology that both extends your capability but then you rely on increasingly and that's why I think there needs to be open flexible alternatives to that but might I not want to do that at all might I not want to be involved with that period yeah but at least you should have the choice right now you do not have the choice if you want the most advanced technology as a black box that can be turned off any time like open AI had an amazing image model dally too that they banned all Ukrainian content from from nine months and all ukrainians from using and it's complete within their prerogative because of political issues but imagine if that was the only one and you'd have stable diffusion I don't think that would be nice thank you so much it was really great to speak with you [Applause] [Music] time for a short break so please head out for coffee stretch your legs and also if you would check out the groom the Chrome Enterprise activation out there which is an immersive experience in web security there's a game I failed it I think you'll probably do better but try out the game uh and then be back here at 10 55 a.m for our next set of interviews thank you [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] the program will begin in 10 minutes foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] please take your seats the program will begin in five minutes [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] please take your seats the program is about to begin foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] I'm ready again [Music] Tuesday [Music] s [Music] take your seats the program will begin now please welcome to the stage Chrome browser Enterprise managing director and a GTM lead Lauren muskelly and Bloomberg's James Cham [Music] great great hi I'm James Chan partner at Bloomberg beta and I'm pleased to be joined by Lauren Miss Kelly managing director and GTM lead of Chrome browser Enterprise for Chrome Enterprises sponsor Spotlight the future of the web how Chrome Enterprise is shaping the way we work welcome Lauren uh so to start can you give a quick overview of yourself and what you do at Google sure thanks for having me so I'm Lauren muskelly I lead our go to market team for Chrome Enterprise at Google and what that means is we focus on bringing the browser to people at work and my team works every day with customers to make sure that their experience in the browser at work is the best possible and then how is the role of the browser evolving Within the Enterprise today yeah so cyber security threats have become much more sophisticated over the years and security has always been core to Google's approach to Computing and it underpins all of the technology choices we make every day within Chrome computing's also evolving with more and more of our work and lives online in the cloud and online in the cloud every day so because of that corporate data uh you know our customers are more and more asking how to protect corporate data online so we're seeing that uh be prevalent in all of our conversations with customers so securing that data becomes really important and you need to secure that both at rest in transit and where our users are which is in the browser so we approach that in two ways from a chrome perspective the first is protecting the user and protecting them in the browser itself and then secondly offering more controls and management of that through Chrome Enterprise okay so that's terrifying and kind of scary we should maybe talk about the fun stuff okay so future browsing in the Enterprise yeah so like I mentioned we're seeing more and more work uh happening in the browser and we'll continue to see that trend for sure uh I think it'll be easier for people to do work uh ever that more than ever before and the browser will be smarter so you'll be able to pick up where you left off so less time trying to remember where where you were probably that shortcut you told me about before what is it command shift a which is the best shortcut for Chrome ever everyone should try it plug there and I think there'll be more separation between your personal browser and your work browser 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 so from a productivity perspective just making your life easy easier in the browser making you work smarter not harder and then from a security perspective we've been building security Ai and ml into the browser for years and we'll just continue to build upon that finally and we'll see it and security teams be able to more easily manage the browser and have more granular controls which should free up time for them to work on more strategic initiatives and less time updating the browser and then there are there other angles around a Ai and ml that are interesting definitely so like I mentioned we've been using Ai and ml for years from a security standpoint so for example safe browsing uh within Chrome it protects billions of users every day and it does so through constant crawling of uh the internet to look for malicious sites files downloads to protect users so that's one specific example with security the next is Chrome Journeys so I don't know if you've used that feature but it helps users take complex information and tasks and clusters the browsing activity to make it helpful on the next steps so for example I was researching and doing an event with my team and wanting to do some team building exercises both virtual in person did a lot of searching across that and then got distracted started doing something else and I was able to go back to Chrome and predict it predicted for me that workflow of saying here's all the things you're searching on and you probably want to go back to that but also here's some also similar sites that might help you complete this task so that's from that perspective and we'll also see generative AI play a bigger and bigger role especially when it comes to for work and being helpful for the employee to from a search standpoint so when you think about that from search it's really about looking for a specific result and helping an employee find that answer faster and then get that information quicker so that would mean having a more personalized panel to say here's what you were looking for let me consolidate that information and make it easier for you to understand so that's you know just a way for a worker to get to that information more quickly so I think we'll see that and then additionally you'll see more and more uh Ai and ml built into Chrome and other Google products to come and I feel like sort of at Google you're consistently living in the future right and then sort of like in that next version of work that we're going to be living in yeah what are the sort of features that are going to be important for us yeah I think we'll definitely I mean expand on all the features we have now so I think a lot of them are future looking already but expand on them now and continue to make them better and then obviously build new features uh to come whether it's capabilities I'd say to make it easier for you to get around the web and just make that whole experience and journey easier I think it will surface you know what you'll need at your next job to get that done more easily I think you'll get users to where they need to go faster through better URL filtering so that you get there more quickly and then I would say like a seamless experience working across devices and potentially making passwords a thing of the past that would be shocking right without the that'd be great make people's lives easier for sure okay so finally what's the your favorite feature that you're working on yeah so I think I'll say two-fold uh since we have a little time so in the professional realm I would say what I really like is I work now and I'm sure a lot of you here across many devices so being able to pick up where I left off so if I have a set of tabs that I was using my Chromebook at home on the couch or in the office and then I moved to my mobile device opening those same tabs that I was using and then maybe going to my other device that I have sitting at my desk at home being able to seamlessly move between those is something that's really easy and then on a personal side as a parent of two very busy children autofill saves my life on a daily basis so I don't know if anyone else has to fill out a lot of forms constantly form after form being able to not have to write date of birth all of the things for every one of us my email address five million times I think that from a just pure productivity standpoint lets me do more work at work and get all the personal stuff out of the way that's great that's great okay so thank you Lauren thanks for joining me today for Chrome Enterprises sponsor Spotlight discussing the future of the web thank you James [Applause] [Music] it's a Pizza [Music] please welcome to the stage twitch CEO Dan Clancy with Bloomberg Sarah fryer [Music] thank you hi everyone I am so excited to have the first live interview with Dan Clancy uh CEO of twitch who goes live very often on his twitch but here's speaking to you after his big promotion so tell me first how has that transition been you've president for a while now you're running the thing what's different about that so um and first of all it's great to be here Sarah it's fun to be here and and as you said it is um uh you know one thing I do is live stream now and now I have people out here and so it's great um so the one thing I've I've said a few times that I find kind of funny is before my job was president and much of the company I was responsible for it so many of the decisions were the same but um there really is a very visceral difference between feeling that responsibility as CEO um our platform we have over seven million streamers that depend upon us stream every month and I feel this kind of um uh you know realization that ultimately in terms of my job they depend upon me and how I do my job um and so but it's been really fun and tell me how um how strongly you you got that feedback when you became CEO was it was just after this change in terms of how twitch was thinking about Revenue split with the creators it was a big blowback we're seeing a lot of tension right now between social media platforms and their their users um yeah so you're in the thick of it what's that like so we're in the thick of it and part of it is our we matter a lot to our creators I think twitch is very unique um I think we're different than many of the other players and for many of our creators we're a big part of their lives um you know they're living a life that they never thought they could have left right and I I go out and talk to them and they go yeah I never thought this could be my life they're making a living streaming themselves playing video games and doing other stuff and they're like who'd have thought um this could have been and so it matters to them and so then they keep a very close eye on us and I thank their their response is actually an expression of how much we matter to them but you did have to make some changes um based on that response like how do you navigate because you're you're CEO of twitch but you answered Amazon and how do you navigate continuing to grow this community continuing to have that kind of like you know past profitability it might crack that twitch is not yet profitable we we don't we don't talk about that but answer here good try though Sarah a decade past that about since the acquisition by Amazon I mean you must be feeling some pressure on that end too and how do you balance yeah the two so so the way I think of this is um uh uh we do have a responsibility to our creators to make sure we're here for a very long time and so yes the way I describe it is we need to make sure we're a sustainable business um and that is serving what we're trying to do with them and so um I think anyone who's been in a um any position you're always balancing things the hard decisions are never the ones that are obvious the hard decisions are when you're weighing a bunch of different things and you have to figure out a path some other hard decisions that we've seen leaders of social media platforms make recently I mean there was the backlash over changes at Reddit that cause a strike by several communities there's been a lot of uproar about changes at Twitter since Elon Musk took over um Instagram's algorithm isn't isn't it has been changing that has been changing pivoting more to video and entertainment than update some friends and family um what what have you learned from looking at that um the difference in those communities and how they've grown and how does it make you want to grow so I think each of those each of those communities are are different um uh I think I think everyone here knows what it's like to live in a social media world where there's a um uh there's always very vocal critics of almost anything so part of what you need to do is like understand a North star of where you're going and um for us our North Star is thinking about um the streamers that come on our platform in terms of we use this phrase feign money and love because we've used that since the founding we're really a big part of what happens on Twitch is they build communities and and then from that Community they can um you know make money and and sustain themselves and so I think you just go back to your mission and then you just realize if you stay true to that then you keep pushing then I think you get there but this you also need to to run a business um and you're saying running a business is also good for them how do you how do you commune in one way I think that you do this is by using the platform yourself and seeing how it works how do you build that rapport with the users and I mean let's get them to trust right now you're taking this in the right direction I mean for us trust is a big deal and I think in fact that's one of the things that I'm mostly focused on I don't think um people trust people they don't necessarily always trust companies I think that's naturally the way we are um we depend upon our streamers so I've been I'm spending a lot of time going on in fact last night I was in LA in a uh dinner we had with about 40 of our strongest streamers I'm going to Denver next week where I'm spending time with them so I've really been doing two things one is going around and physically spending time with them because it's that direct connection where you can hear from them and then the other thing as you said is using the product so um you know I started streaming every week and it's a small stream and so it's really neat because a lot of um a lot of people come up on the stream and then I let them come up on my stream we have a new feature guest star where I can bring audience members up and they just and many times there's some small streamers I play the piano and sing and I play the piano and sing and then I also talk to them and I talk to them about their experiences on Twitch and they just love the fact that they're coming up on the CEOs of twitch stream and that I'm interacting them and they all have small communities I haven't like promoted this it's you know um you know I'll have 100 150 people at any point in time 1500 people in a night um and I think that really gives you a very first-hand visceral feeling for what so many of our streamers because we have really big streamers with so many of our streamers are there streaming to 50 100 200 people at any point in time I mean speaking of the the visceral feeling of of being a streamer you know there there are the audience pressures that they're getting there's the the hate they may be getting are you are you thinking about like now that you've been doing it ways to make twitch a better Community from that perspective like yeah the you know from a Content moderation perspective but what it what are you working on there I think one of twitches and for those who haven't uh for those who haven't used twitch I'm going to bet there are a number of people in this audience that haven't used twitch um a big part of the magic um is the fact that it's not just about sitting and watching somebody it's about the community and the chat and the interaction and the way I often describe it um I'll go back to an old sitcom is um uh cheers used to have this phrase a bar where everybody knows your name well when people come to Twitch they're a member of eight nine ten communities where everybody knows their name and they show up and they say ah I've been a vixen Where Have You Been um but a huge part of that is feeling safe when you're in that Community because as we know in the social media World there are always people that are out there that are going to start jumping in and you know saying all sorts of things so we spent a ton of time first of all building moderation tools to help our creators and then we also have moderators that are dedicated members of the community that go ahead and control and manage what's set so that's something that happens on my stream it happens on every stream and we're continually looking for ways so that way you can clean up because nobody wants to be there if it's getting how does over content moderate has it gotten to the point where you can understand when somebody's being awful on the internet yeah so so um we use AI to help us with what our system called Auto mod I think that's one of our strengths um I think actually it's still a testament of how for all that aai has done how there's still work to do because it can detect a fair amount of stuff but there's a lot of subtle stuff that humans detect that AI doesn't so we actually use a combination where we use Ai and automated techniques but then we'll use humans because it's really a combination I mean you know we certainly are continuing to best because I think over time AI you know get better and better at understanding context and understanding nuances because right now it's more it's more supplementary you still have to have people who know you'll still I was streaming I was streaming and um uh somebody said uh something um uh I love the way you finger the keys and they are honestly talking about me playing piano okay but the AI said oh this is a little suspect right and of course it was completely okay um uh and the moderator looked at it and passed it through but it popped up like on mine to say is that okay right and so it's just an example that they're just like these very subtle nuances right that as humans we're able to look at something and realize it right away so in your world you're watching people build communities through their creativity through their expression we just had a panel about how AI is is transforming art how it's changing what um what kind of content we will likely consume in the future how are you seeing AI change what gets streamed and can it ever be a part of that Community aspect of twitch yeah so most y'all probably aren't aware of this there's this very interesting live channel that popped up called Never forever which was um an animated never-ending Seinfeld episode where they trained it on Seinfeld and they had these characters that were telling jokes in Seinfeld um and it was it was quite entertaining now the interesting thing was they eventually violated our community guidelines because that's just the nature of it right and so we had to figure out well how do you deal with that um but while it was really cool and neat it's not what makes twitch magical because it's the emotional connection with the streamer so there are all sorts of things that there's some um uh generative AI where people are doing interviews when they acknowledge that this is really you know an artificial interview that I think is creative but I think the foundation is still the human connection and I know um Jason's coming up next and we're talking about with Discord the interesting thing is twitch and Discord both these Testaments of in the end as human beings what we are designed to do is create human connection that is what we evolved to do that is what happens on Twitch that is what happens on Discord and um I don't think it is the same in terms of AI in the middle of that so I think the foundation of twitch is still always going to be out human connection give us a sense of of how strong that connection can get you know give an example of some of your some of your biggest streamers and you know how much are they making how much are they um building on Twitch yeah so so I think um uh really what happens on Twitch is they're all sizes of streamers okay so there are some streamers that will have you know uh 20 or 25 000 so if you take Hassan ABI you know he'll get a large audience and it's a very different experience when you go there and you watch it's chat it's just flying by because you know sometimes we talk about it as a stadium experience but then you have all these creators that then maybe have 500 or 600 at any point in time okay or 100 or 200 and so I think you see the gamut but I think the for me the magic of twitch are all the um smaller communities we see this in our monetization where in terms of a big part of our monetization is direct support from the community um and you see how they're much more efficient when they're a smaller Community because you have that emotional connection and so in fact for you know per person that's watching it's much more efficient because of that so I think really the magic of the fact it's not about being a big streamer it's about it's about the whole thing the people who are obsessed with what you're doing and it may be that there may be one big streamer that everyone watch but anyone who uses twitch also watches a lot of medium and smaller streamers what um oh we have a question from the audience um how are you seeing creators adopt gen AI you talked about the Seinfeld episode example but are they incorporating it into their their streaming work yeah I think I think that is the way you know um uh I I use the concrete example where somebody was doing these synthetic interviews right and now they acknowledge they were synthetic interviews um but it was using generative Ai and they were interviewing other twitch streamers hypothetically right and so I think it is kind of interesting from a creative perspective how um it can enhance the creative expression of our creators we don't have a lot of time left so I want to talk to you about about growth like how how does twitch grow from here because I was looking at the numbers and it looked like you guys had a really great amount of interest during the pandemic when everyone was home and on their computers um without other ways to interact socially but now it's sort of plateaued how do you reinvigorate that um that growth do you need to expand Beyond gaming do you need to build more of those small communities that you were talking about yeah so um uh during coven one of the things to me it demonstrated that we there are still all sorts of people we hadn't reached yet because there are all these people that had some extra free time and they use twitch and now we did come back a little bit still many of those people are still using twitch they hadn't experienced twitch and part of it is when you experienced twitch it starts with you getting attached to one Creator okay the stars are the creators not the platform okay so um we absolutely you talked about going outside of gaming the way I describe our platform is we've always been a talk platform it just so happened that people have been gaming while they talk okay and now about 30 percent of our hours watch come from people that aren't gaming while they talk okay and we're investing in other ways that people can come on build communities I'm the quintessential example of that right um because that need for connection is a human need it's not a gaming need gaming does work really well for live streaming okay but I think ultimately our growth is is foundation on finding how can we unlock more creators and more streamers so today we have seven million people who might stream uh uh in a month how do we turn that to 20 million because that's the foundation of um of drives our success in setting that example as the CEO helps move the needle in your mind well well actually it doesn't necessarily move that needle right what it does is gives me a very visceral feeling for what they're experiencing so that is I'm making decisions as I'm engaging and it also makes them trust me because they see me out there experiencing them when I go talk to them I can talk about their experiences not replaceable by AI thank you so much so much all right thanks Sarah appreciate it Hey sir and next we have Emily Chang and Jason Citron from Discord [Music] hello again Jason Emily for being here it's the first time I've seen you in person in a while it's great um a lot has changed since we last talked the social media landscape has changed dramatically obviously Elon and Twitter meta is struggling we just heard from twitch they're making changes Tick Tock is eating everyone's lunch whether the US government likes it or not um where do you see discord's place in the social media landscape yeah well thanks for having me Emily it's great to be here nice to see people in person it's kind of a fun change of change of things um so as you know Discord is a super powered chat app where people can hang out and talk with their friends um all the way to having you know communities that come together and and do things and so you know Discord is really about this feeling of being together with people that you want to spend time with and you know we started it originally as a place to talk and hang out with our friends as we played games together and over time what we came to notice was the way that the tool worked it was just great for groups of five friends or 500 000 fans that want to come together and it can it can feel like your own sort of living room or private coffee shop or an event Hall you know like this and today you know over 150 million people are using Discord every month to talk and hang out with each other fun fact over 80 percent of the actual conversations that happen on Discord are in smaller spaces with friends less like this uh 75 of our users are outside of North America so we're I'm really excited that we get to you know spend some time every day helping people spend quality time with the people they want to so we did do a Twitter poll about messaging and I believe Discord is on it and to be fair it's a poll on Twitter so okay what's your preferred message okay so Discord is lower on the list but you know I know you're not just a messaging platform you know there is a question though I think a lot of people still think of Discord as this like narrow voice chat gaming app and it is so much more than that how do you get it from where the world sees it to where you want it to be or even where you see it yeah I mean we're very focused on making an amazing product and service that is easier to use that helps people spend quality time together with their friends you know the one of the interesting differences when we talk to people about what makes Discord special and feel magical for them is that it's it's very much focused on being a place for a group of friends to come together so unlike perhaps other Messengers where you're more sort of chatting with folks Discord has this sort of sense of people being around you can kind of run into your friends by accident it really feels like having your own sort of cozy space that's just for you whether you want to play games work on a project have a weekly sort of you know movie night or wine you know wine get together but when you can't be in the same place so you know we're just focused on on telling our story and making a great product and it's huge with kids maybe parents are still trying to figure it out are kids still the biggest demographic on there no most of our users are over 18. okay and when we last talked you talked about this phenomenon of not just second screening but third screening where sometimes kids will be on Tick Tock or watching Netflix but also on Discord can you describe that for us and what's the upper limit of screening like five screens the way the world is going you can do it for the screens right um I mean you know what people really do with Discord is it's it's a it's a place for them to get together and do things together and so typically you'll be on Discord either a voice chat or video chat and you know you may have one person who's text chatting depending on if they feel if they want to engage and lean in in that way and then you're usually doing something else maybe working on a project and listening to music watching a movie playing a game browsing social media so it is this sort of like you know very rich experience of like the sort of the virtual version of sitting on a couch with someone and hanging out and doing something so that's where these different kind of screens come in now like most social media companies social companies you are struggling with a lot of the same things that everyone else is and one very unique situation in particular earlier this year the largest batch of classified documents I believe since Edward Snowden were dropped on Discord it sounds like they landed there in January and no one really even noticed until they were shared with a larger group but what happened there and how are you managing that yeah that was a very unusual situation so let me be clear at sharing illegal information on Discord is against our terms of service but the the challenge with a situation like that is that it's very hard to identify in fact maybe impossible what is actually classified information you know the government doesn't even tell people so it's this is a challenging situation that I think every platform has to sort think about how to navigate when you're dealing with classified information which obviously no one we don't no one wants that shared but we also don't know what is classified or what isn't so as soon as we you know um as soon as it was identified and brought to our attention we removed it from the platform and we've been cooperating with the government so did you bring it to the government's attention no are you worried are you working with uh any other players on this and how whether it's government agencies other companies um we are cooperating with the government as we need to be in situations like this um and but we're taking very seriously and it's a it's a very challenging and so look the person in question has been indicted this allegedly came from a gun enthusiast who is with the U.S Air National Guard but it has opened this conversation more broadly that Discord has become a Haven for extremists what's your response to that we have a zero tolerance policy for extremism and hate on our platform and we take it very seriously um you know we we have built in from the beginning from Day Zero privacy controls and tools that people can use to enforce um you know sort of norms and keep their space safe so if you run your own Community you can just you can sort of decide what's okay there what is not okay there however we also have Community guidelines that we expect people to enforce in their spaces and we employ about 15 of our Workforce is focused on trust and safety many engineers and many support people um where if the moderators let's say need help they can come to us or if they're not doing their job we'll go to them and um it's a it's a very um serious situation that we spent a lot of energy on but it's challenging and every day you know we try to do a better job than we did yesterday so I think one of the things about Discord and you know for those who haven't necessarily used it is you know it's a lot of this activity is happening in these private servers and it's not searchable and I think some people think that makes it even harder to find people doing bad things does the architecture itself make it harder to police and how are you thinking about that um well so Discord it is more like a group chat app than a social media product I know this is sort of the social media section but we actually don't even really think of ourselves as social media or our business model is different and and we're more of a Communications product so we give people tools to moderate their own spaces and that goes a very long way but one important thing with Discord is that um we do not use end-to-end encryption and while we do not proactively read people's messages that does give us the ability to comply with law enforcement requests as appropriate if people report messages to us we can go look and we do proactive investigations based on external signals to try to identify where Bad actors may be spending time on our platform and we do proactively go and find them we do ban users we do shutdown servers and we do report things to governments there's also a concern about it and look I know this is a tough line of questioning but you know child predators this is an article that just came out yesterday from NBC child predators are using Discord a popular app among teens for sex torsion and abductions company yeah it's horrible I mean like this person is just the person from the Canadian Center of child protection saying it's just the tip of the iceberg like how do you respond to that I mean as a parent it's mortifying um and we and like and we take this stuff very seriously and we have a team that is working every day tirelessly to try and keep these people off of our platform and find these things when they're happening in a way that respects the privacy of all the people who are not doing these things you know one of the things we do for example is every image that gets uploaded to Discord is is scanned for csam and if we detect it we report it so we do try to be proactive about these things in ways that technology allows but when you have a system with so many people um it's it's a daily it's a daily thing and we like I said we try to get better every day will AI help with that or make it harder um AI will help with it you know one of the challenges I think that that that all of the folks in our industry have is that when you have so many things happening at scale on a platform it's so hard to sort of identify things I mean you know Dan just spoke about this a little bit we also have our own sort of Auto mod project where we're testing out you know using large language models and how they can help us identify um you know content that breaks our community guidelines or the things that we um are not you know not permissible due to laws in local countries and so we're still sort of experimenting with this it's such a new area as we've all been hearing today but it's very promising so let's talk about AI because you you've been working with openai and I'm so curious for your view on AI chat Bots the search Wars and discord's role in this whole ecosystem yeah so in a way we think about it is on Discord people really are coming to us because they want to spend quality time with other folks you know or explore their passions and talk to people and so I think about how does AI help us help people spend time together and that's how we kind of think about it and so for the products that we're building the things that we think about are either ways to help people interact and have more fun together so we're working on on integrating a chat bot where you can kind of ask it questions and do things with your friends so like I was working on a programming project and you can ask the bot to write some code for you and because I'm doing it in the context of a chat with my friends they can see the output and then go oh that's cool then they can prompt the bot to sort of iterate on it you can work on it together so that's kind of a really interesting thing that I think is novel and mid-journey is the largest community on Discord right like 13 million members like can you talk about that and how that could be maybe a model for future communities yeah so mid-journey is an amazing generative AI um app where you can express your creativity by typing in you know words and it generates images for you and mid journey is a really cool example of how our platform and developers that build on top of Discord are bringing AI into interesting sort of social experiences because you know many of these AI Services these generative things they're kind of single player tools you're using them by yourself what makes men Journey magical is you go into the space with over 16 million people and you can see other folks expressing their creativity and creating images and be inspired and then people can give you feedback and you can iterate on it and then if you love that capability you can take the mid Journey app into your own you know group chat with your friends and then work on you know creating things with each other and it's a really fun collaborative way to explore Ai and so I love that people are building lots of these kind of multiplayer AI experiences on Discord because of the nature of our product now I believe the first time we talked was around when Bloomberg reported that Microsoft tried to buy a Discord for 10 billion dollars which happen then um let's talk about the business like how is the business going how are you making money yes wonderfully um so so you know I mentioned that that we don't really think of ourselves as social media and a big part of that is our business model you know we sell a subscription service that our end users can choose to purchase if they love our products so it's called Discord Nitro we have a 10 a month plan which is for our power users it gives you you know HD streaming so when you're playing games you can see them in 4k or you can send animated emojis so you can make inside jokes with your friends that are really fun and then we have kind of a three dollar Plan called Nitro basic that that gives you kind of a trim down access to some of those capabilities and we're exploring other sort of price points and packaging that we can continue to deliver value to different portions of our user base can you give us an idea how fast growing um no but but uh what I can tell you is we're very very very happy with it and and I really love and I want to reiterate this I think it's something very special about about how we run Discord is that because we make money by selling something to our users the whole company wakes up every day thinking how do we Delight our customers and make better products for them you know we don't sell ads and so I love that we're just totally focused on making an amazing experience so would you be open to a sale or do you want to go public what is the plan we're having a lot of fun right now getting to create these amazing products people and so that's really what we're focused on talk a little bit about creators because I know you've been adding tools for creators and there's a lot of competition in the Creator Community for their attention right and for their time and effort and what is the value proposition on versus elsewhere yeah I mean Discord is the place where you can bring your super fans together and create a community around whatever your passion or hobby is and this is another one of those things that happened kind of by accident as we built the product and but what we find is that creators and even business to some extent love to create these spaces where they can bring their most loyal engaged folks together and we're exploring how we can help them make money on our platform in addition to whatever they might be doing anywhere else so I believe there's maybe more than a few people who left Twitter and are now working at this course we see a lot of people joining Discord from Twitter but also from other services we're quite different from Twitter I know you're very different from Twitter but I guess back to my sort of the question that I opened with is I feel like what's happening with Twitter is a sort of a broader you know tells a broader story of you know dislocation in the I know you're not not social media in the landscape of apps that are uh you know you know taking up our time do you see an opportunity there for Discord I mean the opportunity that I see is that you know people at the end of the day I think you I think everyone resonate that like a big part of what makes being alive fun is having relationships with other people and spending time with them and talking with people you care about and hanging out and so much of what the internet has brought us is it's allowed us to close these gaps and do that in amazing ways but it's also created a lot of other distractions for our time and attention that maybe aren't as fulfilling at the end of the day and so I just the opportunity that I really see is is is harnessing the internet this amazing you know generational technology that we have and using it to help people find a deeper sense of belonging and connection with the people they care about most importantly are you interested in a cage match with Elon Musk maybe Fortnight all right it's a date um Jason Citron everyone thank you foreign [Music] County of San Francisco London breed with Bloomberg's Karen Breslow [Music] have a seat how you doing mayor I'm doing all right okay good to see all these people here in San Francisco seem to want to have a word with you all right okay let's do it so everybody in this room knows what this city is facing so do you um empty offices cratering commercial real estate budget deficit that takes up a good part of many of your days fentanyl epidemic and that's just a Thursday right so I want to start with how you feel about the way this City's woes are being portrayed and politicized well I think um like any major city San Francisco has challenges and in fact the issues around opioids have done something to our city and to other major cities like something I've never seen before I was born and raised in San Francisco and I grew up in public housing during the crack epidemic and poverty violence hopelessness despair I mean I lived in it differently and the frustration that I have now as mayor of the city is how I mean really now everything is on video back then this stuff that would happen wasn't seen by other people unless you were in it and now it's being circulated these moment in times where these incidents occur which you know are are pretty sometimes terrible incidents are being circulated and people are choosing to jump on a bandwagon and be critical of what's happening in San Francisco without in some cases living in San Francisco walking the streets of San Francisco and understanding what this city really is about yes we have problems yes there are certain parts of the city including the tenderloin and the south of Market that continue to struggle and continue to be very frustrating to deal with but ultimately it is important for us especially people who are part of the fabric of San Francisco you know to be a part of the solution not just point at our leaders and policy makers to say we want you to do something well what can we do what can we do with technology what can we do to advance ideas it's easy to point the finger and criticize it's hard to roll up your sleeves and to get down into the weeds of doing the work to transform San Francisco okay so we're going to talk about that in a second you mentioned video and and I think it's interesting that you know San Francisco's business is everybody's business now yeah right you know that and everybody's in our business everybody is in your business so I want to just take a little let's just take a quick look at this ad which just dropped this week we don't need to look at that and give him any attention let's look let's have a look here in the once great city of San Francisco we came in here and we saw people defecating on the street we saw people using heroin we saw people smoking crack cocaine and you look around uh the city is not vibrant anymore it's really collapsed because of leftist policies okay so you get the idea so we're going to see a lot of those and we already have San Francisco is a is a is a character everybody's got an opinion right so Indianapolis has the same population as San Francisco but not everybody or maybe a few more people well see Miami has issues too but okay but that's that's not do what about let's let's talk about San Francisco let's talk about San Francisco some of that is true what are your thoughts well my thoughts are there are and let me just talk about some of the more recent policies that we've been implementing in our city you know San Francisco has always been known as a place that people come a Beacon of Hope uh Innovative transformative folks came here to make money during the Goldrush the.com boom and now everything that's happening around artificial intelligence but at the same time because we're a major city drugs has been a part of it whether it was heroin whether it was crack and now unfortunately opioids in particular fentanyl in a whole nother way and what we found with some of our recent arrests because we have now instead of just arresting the dealers we're arresting people who are publicly intoxicated in particular areas and that is amounted to about 62 or address and 28 percent of those people had outstanding warrants and only eight percent of those people were actually San franciscans and we're finding people were coming here for so many different reasons including the ease of access of getting these drugs and the reason why it's important to start to dig deep and understand the challenges is to focus on the solutions not just the Doom and Gloom that everyone's talking about but how do we get these people into treatment whether they volunteer for treatment or we are able to force them into treatment how do we hold people accountable for breaking the law in ways that are killing people because the fact is we're seeing more overdose deaths from opioids than we did during the height of the pandemic and so this is needs to be approached not just from a localized level but from a state in a federal level our Governors provided us with some additional resources recently this California Highway Patrol that's been here for less than two months have have confiscated enough opioids fentanyl in particular to kill 2.1 million people and that's just with the CHP the California Highway Patrol and the work that they have been doing to assist us and in fact the drug enforcement agency the DEA as well as the U.S attorney office on the federal level they all are now getting involved in this because San Francisco we have a shortage of police officers we have challenges with enforcing the law we don't have the capacity completely locally to address the number of challenges that exist here and I think that in the next couple of months as we get these additional resources increase our capacity start to hold people accountable we're going to see some real change I'm curious how many people have had a an uncomfortable or frightening experience on the Streets of San Francisco okay how many people have had a car broken into okay all right so I I think this tracks pretty well with the uh you know I'm seeing I'm guessing about 40 percent that those are horrifying numbers they are and in the buck stops with you yeah you didn't cause it San Francisco's not the only city but people are looking to you to fix it and so what do you need uh you have a 780 million dollar deficit in this in this city um problems Galore you just talked about some of them what do you need to fix it I think part of what we need to fix is the issues around uh accountability related to people who break the law and in fact we have a really great D.A I'm really excited about working with her because a couple of things number one previous D.A was sending drug dealers to community drug court when they should be going through a different process now we're sending drug users to Community Job Court as a way to get people into treatment there was basically one person who was Prosecuting drug cases in her office there are now four people that are focused on this work necessary to deal with this particular issue and in fact many of those various ranks around car break-ins a lot of arrests what gets talked about is the problems and what happens what doesn't get talked about are when we make the arrest when the D.A also presses charge and when we sometimes go before some of these judges who are releasing people in some cases for the wrong reasons so the buck may stop with me but at the end of the day there are a lot of different layers that prevent me as a mayor from doing this job like a CEO to be able to make the kinds of decisions necessary to even hire and fire my own police chief or higher and fire department heads Who oversee the work that we need to do in San Francisco and then secondly you know making sure that we are electing the kinds of people who Believe In fairness who believe in Balance who believe in transparency and in fact the biggest challenge that we're facing right now to people who went through a whole process around drug dealing evidence the courts went through a case they had a trial the whole nine and because of a alleged trafficking issue they were let out even though the they broke the law it shouldn't matter and I think part of the problem is we've made it too convenient for people to come in places like San Francisco and do whatever they want to do and get away with it and we have to get back to some Basics I believe in second chances I believe in alternatives to policing which we've invested in I believe in trying to get people on the right path but for someone to cycle over and over and over and over through our court system and continue to be released that is a broken system that needs to be addressed and as mayor what do you what will you do part of what I can do is to bring attention to it to try and get other people to run for judge to make sure that I mean I'm supporting the district attorney and their budget and there were requests they made I was able to add three additional prosecutors to her budget in order to make sure she had the resources and capacity to deal with these problems so everything that I am able to do including increasing the police's budget we are now in San Francisco the highest paid in the Bay Area we weren't at one point retention bonuses and other things so a lot of my ability comes from the budget the allocation of resources and in some cases the changes to policies but not not all right and you're down 500 police officers it's a little bit it's about 541. the police officers want to come work in San Francisco that has been a very difficult issue more recently yes previously probably not in this most recent Academy class we have we expect to have over 30 people up from the last Academy class where we had about 10. so I think the numbers are rising the number of applications after some of the work we've been doing to help with our relationship with law enforcement has really taken shape and have made us a more attractive destination so I think we're gradually coming out of that I'd like to talk a little bit about uh what you we know what people want from you they want a city that's safe that's clean that's vibrant they don't get they don't have one maybe it's vibrant but I I think any of us would be hard-pressed to say the city feels safe and clean or is safe and clean right now um I you know a lot of progressives so let's talk about that Let's do let's talk about that you say safe and clean and and and I guess the question is you know do you do you live in San Francisco I do not um and and and the question I have for San franciscans mostly and the various neighborhoods they live in how do they feel because I'm out in the neighborhoods and I'm having conversations now I'm going to be honest the tenderloin is challenging but I still walk in the tenderloin because I want to see what's going on I want to have those conversations with the people who live there the Soma area is very challenging and when I go to places in other neighborhoods including the Bayview Hunter's Point Community which I was just on Third and Newcomb today which used to be a very notorious block of this community it's a whole nother place and so I think San Francisco is you know it's a small City but it's a big city and it has a lot of different Pockets so I thing to imply that the city as a whole is unsafe and not clean is not fair okay fair but I do think I I do think that the problems that exist in the places that they exist are extremely problematic okay extremely problematic I'd like to talk about uh downtown in this you know this notion that you have certainly seen I mean every day you hear about a big company or a hotel walking away right uh Westfield mall was the latest narrative is more companies flea people leave the city fewer people go downtown that puts more pressure on the remaining businesses and and is this how you see the Doom Loop and is San Francisco in one I'm glad you asked that question um how many of you have been in Nordstrom's the store Nordstrom's at the Westfield Shopping Center in the last six months okay a few people I'm going to say like maybe under 10 so for folks not in San Francisco the Westfield mall and and the reason why and the reason why I asked I mean how many of you shop at stores anymore how many go into malls and stores yeah okay so there's a few people and before the pandemic how people shop has changed and and continues to change and we'll continue to change and I think that we can't completely rely on retail and downtown and restricting what happens downtown anymore what we have done in some legislative changes that I've made is open the door to do more than just retail because San Francisco has never had to work hard for tourists for visitors for people who want to shop here so there have been a lot of limits placed on what people can do in certain pockets of the city and policies that I've implemented have changed that so now you can convert some office to housing a lot easier you can convert certain spaces like a Westfield Mall could become you know something completely different than what it currently is it could be a place where we can even tear down the whole building and build a whole new soccer stadium we can create lab space or look at it as you know a new company in some other capacity I mean I know Brian chesky is coming up here from Airbnb he took the old Design Center where a lot of jewelry was sold it was a whole other use and created his whole headquarters orders at the Showplace Square so I think we have to start reimagining what downtown can be rather than you know what people are saying oh this store is going away that store is going away this is no longer well no one's talking about the fact that luxury brands are expanding East Saint Laurent and Chanel and all these companies are expanding so let's let's look at what's possible rather than dwelling on the stories of of another store that there are a lot of people who may not even shop in those places okay so so reimagining um is next on this stage what do you want from the leader of Airbnb from Mark benioff whose giant Salesforce Tower is is very empty what do you want from these people who's who's tremendous wealth was generated in this city what what do you want to see so part of what I want to see are people who are committed to San Francisco and doing a couple of things look we know that before the pandemic people were standing in line waiting San Francisco has a cap on the amount of square footage that can be allocated for office space people were waiting in line for it and now it's changed and it's shifted so we need to shift yeah yeah 30 percent part of part of what I want people to do is start being even more creative than they have and thinking about the possibility to utilize space in all parts of San Francisco differently that's number one what I like for everyone to come back to the office five days a week of course I would but is that going to happen probably not so let's make some adjustments to do everything we can to reimagine what parts of San Francisco can be and how we can recommit ourselves to you know making sure that not only our companies grow and thrive in this city but how do we get other companies interested to be a part of San Francisco how do we make it more private it's not just about the companies and the businesses it's also about the universities and the institutions the reason why people want to be here is because of the talent so places like UC Berkeley Stanford UCSF it's how do we invest in our educational institutions and make sure that they are also a part of what is happening to change the world from here with all of these new and latest Technologies what I want from them is to continue to invest in San Francisco and also to collaborate we have an office of innovation where and and in fact we received a grant from Bloomberg where it's a collaboration between using all this new technology and everything that you all are doing to make it a part of what we do in San Francisco I mean this is like could you be specific like what would you like the people in this room if they want to commit to San Francisco obviously we have people who believe deeply in this city uh and and uh I can I can tell from the reaction what do you want these people so what what how do you want people to engage and give back so if people have great ideas for example we create apps for everything creating apps for something that's going to help us track something I mean we're doing the work right now to try and figure out where the needs are to understand how we can be more efficient like for example our shelter system you know we are working on a way to deal with accountability for the dollars we spend but also how we use even something as simple as an app to identify a specific location of where we can place people just like you can go on some hotel app and find a hotel room we want to be able to do that to try and get people off the streets into shelter in a more efficient way mayor we're almost out of time I see that yeah so there are a lot of upset people in this city and you have effectively directed the anger in the system to the previous uh the recall the previous D.A who you mentioned to members of the San Francisco School Board people are now upset with you so the recent poll found that 22 of Voters said you deserve to be reelected if the election were today how do you want people to evaluate your tenure when they decide whether to re-elect you next year well for me to be clear I'm not doing this job in fear of losing it I'm doing the best I can because I've been here all my life and I know that we have problems and and I know we have problems and I'm willing to put it all on the line and do whatever it takes and take the chances in order to get um things done in the city and to turn things around and at the end of the day I'm going to keep working my butt off to take care of the city and to make transformative change and and the voters have the right to decide who they want to choose to be their mayor whether it's me or anyone else because no matter if I'm mayor or if I'm a citizen working in any other industry I'm still going to be here and I'm still going to be working hard for this city and my hope is that it's not just about the leaders or the people in charge it's also about the relationships and the Partnerships and don't just make money from San Francisco be a part of the solution and give back to San Francisco in some sort of way and I want to also in thank you in by saying this the new CEO for Deloitte who talked about the cities model is you know you see it on our city so it's iron gold in peace iron and War and every time there's gold and there's there's money to be made in San Francisco Here Comes The Rush here comes everyone making their money but then during the difficult and War times people are you know rushing off and leaving and talking mess and and and and and running off someplace else to spend their money and what I'm saying to people is make your money here but also be a part of the fabric of what makes San Francisco great invest in San Francisco be involved in San Francisco because this is not just my city this is your city too and together I know we can do great things mayor London Bridge thank you oh [Music] you lived around the world in airbnbs you've interacted with so many cities and and people in different countries and many of them welcomed Airbnb with open arms and some are still resisting yep why do you think that is so every city is a community then every Community has many different stakeholders and they have many different circumstances some cities need more tourism other cities have been going through a housing affordability crisis there's no one-size-fits-all you have to treat every city personally try to make a system for them that works people think Airbnb is driving up costs enriching landlords what do you say to the people who are like I I hate what this is doing in my community well I never want Airbnb to do anything other than strength in a community I also think it's really important to never presume that we're the good guys is what we're doing like good for the world and to constantly reevaluate and so for example affordable housing a lot of cities said you know we want to have some basic restrictions on how everybody can be used in our city so we have like we comply with registration systems for cities we want to make sure that like cities say they want to be able to that we have to collect our fair share of taxes but I also want people to know that we want to strengthen communities and if that means that they need to like change the way Airbnb exists in their City we'll have that conversation are you long SF San Francisco I think I am ultimately I think the cities my God hasn't had its fair share of challenges I'm saddened that the Tech Community in the city haven't worked better together that being said the city is so resilient yeah and just when people said there was going to be a massive Exodus there is a new kind of probably the word revolution is not an understatement to say what's going to happen Ai and a lot of it's happening right here please welcome to the stage Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian chesky with Bloomberg's Brad Stone hey Brian hey Brad how you doing good to see you again good to see you well let's take advantage of the fact that the mayor was just on stage and that clip to talk about our lovely embattled city I think you're probably like me We cringe a little bit yeah when the city's problems are magnified and politicized so so what do you think your responsibility is and the responsibility of tech leaders to help get this city back on its feet I think I owe a lot to the city of San Francisco personally you know my story I came here in 2007 with nothing thousand dollars the bank and this community welcomed me with open arms I I do not think airme could have been started in any City but San Francisco at least back then I do believe now you can kind of probably start a tech company anywhere but I think there's something incredibly special about the community here and notwithstanding the fact that it's kind of a bit of a punching bag around the world in the media there is still a huge robust Tech Community here and I think AI is creating a second wave of Interest I think generally like the number one thing I've learned with cities is not to presume what I can do for a city not to proactively share ideas but ask a single question how can I help and that's what we try to do in cities around the world I was backstage the mayor and that's what I asked her I said how could I help and I hope to talk more with her about how we can be helpful yeah she has to get on your schedule yes so we're happy to help I mean you guys sort of famously have a perpet actual work from anywhere policy I mean let's start there doesn't doesn't that hurt the city you kind of Rob some of the economic Vitality some of the foot traffic you end up magnifying some of the problems of homelessness when when when does the responsibility to your hometown maybe sort of counter balance some of the flexibility you want to give your employees I think it's a great question you always got to balance your different stakeholders but we didn't say like don't live in San Francisco we just said you can be flexible here's the interesting thing a large percent of people have still chosen to be in San Francisco and I still go to San Francisco office every single week and I think since the pandemic it's a different game now I think that people now have a choice of where to live and the moment somebody has a choice then suddenly as a city you're a little bit more in the customer service business and so people start to ask well what kind of service am I getting and so I would love to be all helpful with the city of San Francisco to think how can we continue to be able to serve the businesses and in turn the business can help serve the city but we are really still rooted here and I think that there's still going to be a huge Boom coming to San Francisco now maybe maybe the mayor's still listening backstage what would you like to see from her and her Administration in terms of addressing some of the very visible problems here well I think that um I'll just start with this first thing I think that there could be a closer relationship between the city of San Francisco and the tech and business community and that doesn't just include the mayor that also includes the Board of Supervisors and other key stakeholders and I think that's a two-way street I think it's on us in the tech and business community and I think it's on government that we need to be reaching more across the aisle and I think if we have more dialogue and a little less ideology we're going to actually start to solve problems so I can make a list of all the ways San Francisco be better like we could do every city but you have to start with where to start everything starts a cooperation and if we're battled in these ideological kind of narratives we're not going to be working together so we need to get to the table and all start working together that's what we should do yeah I mean there definitely is a little bit of an anti-business spent in some of the ideological corners of city government I think that you know you you know me very well I used to think that like you should stay away from government officials and people don't like you you should avoid them and I I thought growing up if somebody's a you know going to cause trouble stay away from them and I hired an executive very early that you know Belinda Johnson and she was our original general counsel and she said something to me that was counterintuitive she said if people don't like you or they have concerns you should meet them and I said why would I do that I said because it's hard to hate someone up close and when you meet them you understand their issues they understand your issues and I found that in every 100 meetings I have 99 of the meetings they hate us a little bit less we're a little bit closer together and I think a little bit more cooperation a little less arguing is what we need in the world right now especially in the city of San Francisco we need to work together government is not going to fix the problems business not going to fix the problems we're going to have to work together and that starts with dialogue and there's probably not enough of it Karen asked the mayor what you wanted to see from some of the stakeholders in the city and she said sort of help we were having a little trouble hearing backstage I think she said help reimagining reconceptualizing some of the uh some of the spaces in the city particularly downtown yes you're a design guy right you have a graduate degree so help us reimagine the financial district Westfield mall I mean on the spot here yeah but how can some of these urban areas office areas do you think be re-utilized I think that every you know out of Crisis is opportunity and when somebody moves out somebody can move in I think that there could be a potentially massive opportunity to rezone the commercial spaces to be residential or mixed use we have a long history in cities of dividing up zoning this is a commercial District this is a retail District this is a residential district and I think a very Vibrant Community is a multi-zone community so it's not like quiet during the day or quiet at night or this is where people live and this is where people work and actually these high-rise Towers are better for living than working and the reason why is a lot of people today want to live in open floor plans open floor plans are not small Footprints but when people live in a space they want a window view and a small tall floor plan like a real like a say like a tower is great for housing so I think if we made rezoning a little bit easier and really create an incentives for people that could be really interesting I also think we're going to have a revolution around Community spaces more and more people working remotely they're not going to physical office you know the mall is now Amazon the theater is now Netflix the grocery store for many people it's now instacart and so many of these Community spaces are don't exist anymore the bowling alley the church and so how do people Gather in the future we used to gather to shop yeah we'd walk in a mall I think now fundamentally we don't need to go to a physical mall to buy things Amazon is really good at that but we still need Community we are living in a world we're probably living in the loneliest time in human history and I think one of the problems in San Francisco and cities all over the world is we need to rebuild physical Community we need to be physically together so I would say three things one try to turn more commercial into residential to try to do more rezoning where you do multi-use and three build community spaces could be co-working it could be experiential spaces we could go down the list of things you could do okay let's change gears a little bit we are both veterans of a couple of Cycles here in Silicon Valley booms and bus how are you viewing this six-month-old explosion of interest and investment around AI yeah I've uh I came to Silicon Valley in late 2007. so I came at the rise of maybe three Trends the internet basically going global um mobile and cloud and those three Trends did three things number one it meant your user base wasn't a US user base it was Global as you know covering Amazon the cost of startup company went down precipitously with AWS and mobile meant you just had this distribution where you could be at people's fingertips every single hour of every day I was in high school when the internet was coming up I remember in the 90s I was in middle school high school and so I don't have a great frame of reference to what this is like for the internet but this feels like bigger than the internet and the 2000 cycle combined is some people say it's the biggest technological wave since Revolution and I think this is just a massive acceleration it is the platform shift of all platform shifts there's going to be tons of overfunding the vast majority of companies that get funded probably like the last Cycles will either will probably not exist as independent companies they'll like morph or get sold but I do think that it's a very exciting time and I'm very I think we're all very interested in Ai and I think that there aren't going to be AI companies I think AI is going to be embedded in every single thing we do okay well it's not immediately intuitive at least not to me how that could impact Airbnb so tell me how is it how is it meaningful for you guys yeah so here's our mental model so here's how I think about it at think of it let's use some physical metaphors so we have these large language models I know Sam was here this morning and they do this large base foundational language models and that is kind of like infrastructure and we're not an infrastructure company so we're using a physical metaphor that's like building a bridge we don't build Bridges we don't do infrastructure on top of the bridge you have cars which you might call applications and that's what we do our real strength is we're really good at like design interface marketing Services understanding how to apply technology and so I'll give you a frame of reference let's say we go on chat gbt and you ask chat CPT a question and I ask Chachi PD question we're probably going to get the same answer or an almost identical answer and that's great for questions like what were the like primary causes of the French Revolution or like how far is the Earth to the Moon like kind of immutable like answers it turns out there's a whole bunch of questions where the answer depends on who you are what should I wear who should I meet where should I go what should I do with my life where should I travel and so I think that our opportunity is to build the or one of the definitive AI interface layers and it's all built around personalization so instead of Airbnb just asking you where are you going and when are you going we ask you some bigger questions like well who are you Brad what do you want like today tomorrow next year in your life and the better we can understand you the more we can be like the ultimate AI concierge pointing you to places community homes experiences and many more things the only other thing I'll just say about Ai and I'll just bring this back to something that I've been thinking about I'm excited and concerned about AI obviously brings a huge amount of opportunity I think it's going to be a massive Boon for so many people there's a couple ways to think about it number one if the cost to start a company is lower I think you're gonna have millions more entrepreneurs so I think the number one thing you're going to see from AI is more entrepreneurs the second thing you see from AI is more software almost every single thing around us could one day have software because the biggest inhibitor to as a designer the biggest inhibitor I have is that not everyone speaks a computer programming language but the moment AI can basically write that language it can be that translator you can prompt it suddenly anyone creates software anyone can basically build a company and so many more things are going to be alive they're going to be I don't want to say sentient but they're going to be able to be able to take commands and do things so that is going to be a huge Boon I think it's easier to imagine the jobs they'll be displaced than the jobs will be created I think that science will be revolutionized obviously everyone can have a tutor but I think there's so many more things we can do we talk a lot about the risk to Ai and obviously there's job displacement I actually think ultimately it's going to create a lot more jobs than destroy I think the biggest tourist AI that we're not talking about are number one just the speed it's not that technology is a good or bad thing nuclear power can light up a city or destroy a city it's how we use the technology and the thing I'm a little concerned about is how fast is happening and are we going to be able to bring Society Along on that change we are accelerating a lot of Trends and one of the trends that we're accelerating is people are lonelier than they've ever been before and we can debate what the cause of this are but it's indisputable that like AI is accelerating that problem I think AIS can accelerate everything and so whatever Road we're going down AI is going to accelerate that road it might change the course a little bit but it's not going to be a reverse on the highway it's going to be a super highway towards where we're going 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 and I I think fundamentally we need to make sure that you know AI can deeply understand you under know you but it should not be your main friend okay I mean that that is a lot to digest and not to be provincial here but to bring it back to Airbnb like your endemic challenge is always convincing the world Wall Street that you guys are a tech company and not a travel company so what in this in this blossoming of Entrepreneurship and AI tools what is airbnb's advantage well I mean I think that you know um there's a there's a handful of them number one at the end of the day people still want to have great homes great experiences the vast majority of our hosts only list on Airbnb we have a custom-built tools just for them I think AI allows us eventually to have the equivalent of like an AI coach to help you become an even better host I think Additionally you know two are incredibly strong Network effect we have a lot of information about people we have more than half a billion reviews that have been left on Airbnb we know a lot about Travelers and I think instead of having a search Problem Like Google we could have more of a matching problem there is not one definitive right answer you come to Airbnb so I think that like our Innovative culture to be able to design these incredibly powerful interfaces to be able to match you to one-of-a-kind experiences I think that's going to be our sweet spot during the pandemic you you had to curtail airbnb's Ambitions a little bit you shut down some stuff like the the travel excursions on trips but it struck me watching Emily's episode of the circuit with you where you said you're really spending kind of imagining what Airbnb can be now that next phase of growth so yeah I mean what can you tell us about that and how integral is AI to to what you're thinking about now for airbnb's future I think that AI will be at the center I if you think about before the pandemic if you think about the business we were on like this highway called travel we're doing all sorts of things of travel we're doing transportation we had a travel magazine we had a business trial Division and then suddenly we lose 80 percent of our business eight weeks it's like we have this near business death experience our business Flash before our eyes and it's like you're going into a house and the house is burning you can only take a couple things out of your house and those became our priorities we decided to get really really focused when that happened like many of you in the pandemic you start to ask yourself like well what's important to me and I think what we realized is what's important to us isn't per se travel I mean I love traveling like anyone does and it's not even housing it's something deeper when Joe and I started Airbnb and then Nate joined us a few months later but that first weekend October 2007 it was really about connecting with people it was about hosting people and I think that is something that we need now more than ever I mean you know the amount of people just in this country that don't have close friends that are lonely have trouble meeting each other what that's doing to us dividing our society causing mental health issues I'm not saying we're going to solve that problem but I would like to be able to focus Airbnb more on being in the business of connecting people and I think travel is why you do it home is the pretext for that but I think that's what we're going to try that's interesting because you started with Home Sharing renting a room the host is there but I had always assumed that the reason that you went more towards an emphasis on really taking over a home or a property it's because your customers LED you there they you know that there's something maybe human naturish about being uncomfortable with your hosts down the hallway sharing a bathroom yes so are you getting a signal from customers if they want to return to a sharing connecting model it's kind of interesting Brad the thing is I think it's our temptation to always gravitate towards technology but I think technology one of the things it does is it likes efficiency it wants to find the fastest point between a and b and the thing about human connection is this inefficient and so what technology wants to do is to take the human connection off and out of something because that something can be inefficient if you ask people do you want to meet somebody they say no we it's our instinct to isolate ourselves to push people away but you ask them after they've had that connection are they happy and they say I'm so thankful for the people in my life and one of the most important things about my life are not all the things I have it's the relationships I have the longest study unhappiness is an 85 year old Harvard longitudinal study and the question was what's the secret to happiness they did not think they would have a definitive answer and of course they did the definitive answer is the secret happiness are relationships so it's a little bit complicated I don't ask people what they what they want I look at what they value after we give them things what I've seen is the most meaningful things in Airbnb the reasons that people stick to the company we say money in space is a hook but the relationships either the trips you go on with people or the people you meet that's the hook that's the thing that Roots you in the company and that's where we're going to be going towards okay I want to hit one more Point hopefully this morning you all have noticed that we've aligned on a couple of themes in all our conversations we've been talking a lot about AI we've been talking about San Francisco and we've also been trying to hit some of the geopolitical issues with regards to China I know you guys close the business in China was it last uh last year yeah you know the the Biden Administration is really pushing the vestiture um particularly on on AI um you know you've got experience probably frustrating experience trying to start a domestic business there from your perch what is the right thing to do here in China yeah I think that I think I'm an optimist I don't really want to live in a world where there's two internets I think one of the things that has surprised me most since I started the company I mean people ask what have you learned starting the company the number one thing I've learned is not how different we are it's how similar we are and isn't it funny the people the strongest opinions of other people the ones without passports and as you travel the world you start to realize where I'm more alike than we are different I think the promise the internet was was going to bring us together and I'm generally concerned that we are now creating a divided two World system with the internet and so I think we have to have red lines we have to be really thoughtful about having to come together but I really hope that this is not an acceleration of us drifting apart it's a way to come together ultimately though it was very hard to run a domestic business of China we pulled out you can still use Airbnb in China to travel around the world and we're going to continue to support that Brian our time Blaze bye everybody should watch Emily's episode of the circle with Brian it's really amazing Brian chesky thank you thank you all right uh I have the responsibility of sending everybody to lunch for those of you registered for the breakout session lunch with editors staff will direct you to the breakout room for um everyone else please make it right at the rooftop and we'll we'll reconvene here 1 30 we have a great afternoon agenda thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Bloomberg Live

Views: 50,763

Keywords: bloomberg, bloomberg live, technology, superbowl

Id: ILNaZmGAxS0

Length: 214min 2sec (12842 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023