Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend - June 5th, 2026

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1:55Hi, everyone. Welcome to the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week. This week, we were live at the Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco. The summit brings together leaders across tech and business. It brings insightful conversations and connections around today's cutting-edge technologies and how they affect business and beyond. Today, we're going to bring you some of our favorite conversations from the event. We'll hear from leaders across the tech sector, including CEOs, tech executives, and even a Grammy Award-winning rapper and producer. First up this hour, we spoke with Samir Samat, president of the Android ecosystem at Google.

2:29How do you position Android in the United States versus how you position it globally? Where is more widely adopted? Well, Android is an open source operating system, which is really great because it allows people to build all kinds of different devices. So, of course, we know that Android is popular for phones today, where there's over three and a half billion Android devices that are used every day. It's the most widely used operating system in the world. But Android is so much more than phones. People use it for cars. They use it for televisions. They use it for smartwatches and all kinds of new devices, including some smart glasses that we're working on for later this year as well.

3:04So it's really become much more than phones, and it's a whole ecosystem. How do you think about an operating system within an AI world? That is, we're still kind of figuring it out, right? We're all finding our way here. Well, it's changing a lot. Things are changing all around us. And I think the way we think about this moment is we're moving from an operating system to what I call an intelligence system, one that is able to be more predictive and more helpful in the moment for you. So instead of making you the micromanager of your device, which is the way I think computing's worked for 40 years, you have the idea in your head and you use a pointing device or taps to take that idea and do all the things you need to do to get things done.

3:45In this new AI era, how can we actually make the system much smarter? So you give it your intention, your goal, and it can translate that into the action that it needs to take to help you get more done. Yeah, I want to push on that a little bit because I still think when right now, when a lot of people think about AI, they equate it with LLMs and they think about LLMs not necessarily as, you know, clog code or helping us vibe code, but rather as glorified search engines. And that actually does search a lot better than we've grown up using. What is the value proposition for an ecosystem in the world of AI?

4:23Because you're explaining this idea of us being more productive as a result of this technology. But I don't even know what that looks like. Is it predictive? Does it know what we want before we want it? Like, what is it? Which just gets a little creepy then. Potentially. Potentially. Let me give you one simple example that I used a new release of Android with Gemini for recently on my Pixel device. which is you know i had a list of folks that are coming to a barbecue that i'm holding and next to each person i had how many people are coming in their family are they vegetarian are they not vegetarian you know the normal thing you do when you're throwing a party you make this list but like where do you put that list does that go in google docs i think i just had it in an email that i was writing to myself you know like we all do sometimes and i asked jem and i working on my pixel device can you take this list analyze it figure out how many hamburgers how many hot dogs how many buns, and then go to Instacart and add it all to my shopping cart, and then let me check it out.

5:23And it took that, figured out all the vegetarians, figured out all the things, figured out how many people are coming, how many kids, how many not kids, and it did it for me. And so that probably saved me, I don't know, six, seven minutes. You add that up multiple times a day throughout all the things that we're doing, and that's really helpful. Samir, what do you think in terms of the conversations that we're having about artificial intelligence? Because I do feel like you and I were talking about this at dinner last night. We're just scratching the surface in terms of certainly how we use it and how we need to push ourselves to better understand what this tool can do or eventually do.

5:56Well, I think the most important thing right now is for all of us that are in the industry or even around the industry is to make sure we have hands-on experience. One of the things we tell our teams and I tell my kids as well is we should engage with the technology to understand how it can help you and what the limits of it are. And it's changing so quickly what I tell folks is even if it wasn't able to help you with something this month put a note for yourself and check back three months later because it's moving so fast what I think is important about your example is that you had the initiative to actually ask Gemini to do that I think that the challenge in this world is that a lot of people don't know that LLM's like Gemini can actually do that sort of thing so they wouldn't even know that With that example, AI could save them six or seven minutes.

6:46How do you communicate that to a population that has no idea what this technology can do, truly has no idea? You know, in the beginning when these interfaces came out, you had a chat prompt. And we didn't know what we could type into it. And I think people do discover over time by trying things. But most importantly, the software itself, this is where the operating system can be really helpful. You know, when you talk about an intelligence system, it should be able to understand from you what your intention is. You know, what's my goal? What am I trying to get done? Oh, I'm planning a party. Okay, well, did you know I can help you with this?

7:26You know, and to prompt you to do that and to show you how that it can assist you in that moment. And that's a different kind of user interface than what we've seen. What I have noticed is with Google search, it's actually pushing me to Gemini within within web-based Google search and it's becoming very natural. So it's sort of like, I'm not starting at Gemini, I'm starting at Google search and then using it, interacting with search like an LLM. Well, I'm glad it's helping you. That's great. You know, we have, we have so many different tools that, that, that I think are, are there for folks. And I just want to give one small example of one called notebook LM.

8:02And if you're, if your viewers haven't checked out notebook, people love this yes i mean notebook lm is one of my favorites and you know on the android app for example for notebook lm my son who just finished finals he was like dad can you help me study for for the science final and i said sure overly confident as i am about this and then he gave me the material and i looked at it and i said i haven't reviewed this in years you know but tonight i have to do a study session with him so i put it all in notebook lm and it gave me an audio podcast that I listened to on the way home. And when I got home, I looked like super dad, you know, because I could answer these questions and go back.

8:38This is where it starts to become helpful. And I think it's all about the purpose, the way in which we use this technology in a purposeful, intentful way to help make our lives better. And that's what we're trying to do. So let's go there, because last month when you guys announced a bunch of upcoming features for your Android 17 operating system, you made some comment about there's a great concern about AI for AI's sake, and we want to be very purposeful. What does that mean? Well, I mean, I think if you look at any, just go talk to people, the word AI has become pretty overloaded, and I think people are, they have mixed feelings about it.

9:18Let's put it that way. I think what they really want is to not hear about the technology. What they really want is to hear about how is this going to help me. I gave the Notebook LM example, but there are so many more. that when you talk about how this can help you, it changes the conversation. I'll give you one of my favorites from Android. Android has a feature called Circle to Search. And Circle to Search is really simple. You'll hold down the Home button, and then you see a flash, and at that point you can circle anything on your screen. Let's say you have a celebrity on your screen wearing a great outfit.

9:54Circle it and say, Shop the Look. and Google will go take what they're wearing and figure out what the jacket is, what the tie is, all the different pieces, and bring back each of those to you so that you can figure out where to buy them and if they're right for you. There's a ton of AI behind the scenes there. That's not the important thing. The important thing is that it's super helpful, packaged in a way that's intentful, purposeful for the user to help them get something done that they couldn't do before. Samir, where do you think AI impacts our world the most? Is it in our personal lives?

10:27Is it in our work lives? Is it everything? We keep talking about what it's going to mean for our healthcare and medical world. Where do you see it impacting our world the most or will it be everything? Well, I think there's a number of places that it's already impacting our world. But I think if you take the discipline of software engineering, for example, that's going through a lot of change. I think exciting change. But also there are people who are concerned changes with that as well. I think in the end it will be very productive and we're going through that same change at Google as well. But I think if you look at every industry, there are amazing applications.

11:01If you look at biotech, there will be amazing applications. If we look at, as you said, healthcare, there will be amazing applications. I'm wearing my new Fitbit Ace. Yeah, if you're listening on radio, Samir's got a Fitbit on one wrist. It looks like an Android watch. I have a Pixel watch. An Oura Ring. He's got to check out what the competition is doing. If you have any others to record it. So I want to go back to this whole idea of the ecosystem and and how it relates to AI and Gemini and the stickiness of it. Because I think that's a part of the conversation that really has just recently occurred to me.

11:34And I'm wondering what advantage you think Google has having Gemini as its own AI operating system along with Android and not working seamlessly across whether we're talking about your Fitbit, whether you're talking about an Android phone, whether you're talking about a Pixel watch, versus sort of third-party LLMs like, you know, Claude or ChatGPT? I want to say a couple things about that. First, you know, Android is an open platform. And so one of the things that's the central tenant of Android is choice. So Android is the only mobile operating system where you can choose your personal assistant.

12:11You can choose the agent that's important to you. So if you want Gemini, you can use Gemini. If you want Claude or something else, you can choose that. And those will work equally well? Yeah. The idea with Android is that it's open and so you should be able to plug in what's important to you. That's a fundamentally important part of Android and I think it's an advantage in this world when things are moving fast. From a Google perspective, of course, Google competes with some of those companies. And I think Google has a unique position in that it has a full stack of innovation that it's worked on over a decade from Silicon, unique Silicon in the data center, foundational models, all the way through to the operating system.

12:47And we want to connect those things in ways that are powerful and that help consumers live better lives. That's what we're doing. In fact, recently we announced something called Gemini Intelligence. Gemini Intelligence is the best Gemini experience available on the most premium Android devices. So take a Samsung device or a Pixel device. And that's really where you can experience the best of that entire stack. Do you think being open source and being able to let users choose and select what their agent will be will give you guys longer term an advantage? Because I do think there's folks say that at some point there's going to be some shake out because we're not going to need necessarily every big LLM.

13:28Like at some point people are going to financially, we heard it from the Cerebris CEO last night, that people are going to select kind of what they need and want. I think that competition is good. And I think that it's led to a ton of innovation. I mean, look at all the change we're seeing. That's fueled by everyone competing, which is great. From an Android perspective, the thing about Android being open source and being an open ecosystem, it means that we work with many, many different partners. That was Samir Samad, president of the Android ecosystem at Google. You're listening to a special edition of Bloomberg Businessweek.

14:01Coming up, more conversations from our trip out west to the Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco. I'm Jim Stanovic, along with Carol Masser. This is Bloomberg.

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16:22We are taking a look at some of our conversations from this past week when we were live at the Bloomberg Tech Summit. Up next, we spoke with Yoshua Bengio, founder and scientific advisor at Mila Quebec AI Institute. He's a leading expert of artificial neural networks and deep learning. Professor, good to have you on the program. You chair the International AI Safety Report. We'll just start there. Is AI safe? No, that's the problem. We're building systems that we don't know how to control. They will behave sometimes against our instructions. And that is, this lack of reliability is both a scientific challenge and a problem for the deployment of AI.

17:07So how do we, okay, if we use social media as the example, we failed that experiment, I think many would say, that we did not keep ahead in terms of oversight, regulations. We could go into all the things that have gone wrong and how it's impacted society. What faith do you have that we get this right? And it can't just be the U.S. deciding or Europe deciding. I mean, it's got to be a global work or progress on this. Absolutely. Safety is a global question because a dangerous model, I mean, one that can be misused in dangerous ways, like mythos, for example, could be designed in one country, and then somebody in a second country uses it to attack a third country.

17:46And, you know, so the Americans need to make sure the Chinese models are not used against the U.S. and vice versa. It is an international question. Can I ask you, is it like missiles and nuclear weapons and that there will be a mutual deterrence because everyone will be proficient on some level when it comes to AI? There are analogies. I think one of the big differences is that there isn't as much money to be made with nuclear weapons as there is with AI, which means the incentive structure is now pushing companies towards going faster and faster and not paying enough attention to the safety issues and, you know, the public protection.

18:25But I think one thing that I think concerns a lot of people is that, okay, you could have, let's just use Anthropic as an example. You have Anthropic and what they're doing with Mythos. But just because Anthropic has that right now doesn't mean DeepSea couldn't have that six or eight or 12 months from now or even something more powerful. That's right. So it doesn't matter if one country is doing things a certain way or one company is doing a certain way. if the entire world is not actually adhering to a certain set of framework. Exactly. That is why we need international coordination. Initially, it's probably going to be just the U.S.

18:59and China. But at some point, as other countries are also beefing up their capabilities, it has to be international. What keeps you up at night? Lay out the doomsday scenario for us. Well, there are many catastrophic risks because intelligence gives power. And that power could be in the wrong hands. could be used by terrorists or countries which want to destabilize us. It could be used even by the people in power to create a dictatorship. And we don't know how to make sure AIs themselves will not use that power against us. But how? Like harnessing social media, logging in, like taking infrastructure offline.

19:35Like give us concrete examples of what these entities could do. So what the companies are worried about right now are cyber attacks, because these AIs really have a lot of knowledge of computing and vulnerabilities. And on their radar and the evaluations they're making is also the use of AI to build dangerous viruses. So you can think of people using AI to create new pandemics. They're also worried about what happens when AI itself is used to create the next version of AI. So AI doing AI research. And if we don't control these systems, they could put back doors to create AIs that are not friendly to us.

20:15Okay, now I am worried. So in other words, you're talking about AI that can think on its own and work on its own. Well, it's already the case. The whole point of agents is that they're autonomous, they have goals, and they work towards those goals. The real question is, who controls those goals? We would like to be the ones in charge, but right now we don't have the technical answers to make sure that's the case. Yashua, do you regret the work that you did years ago? I think I should have been seeing ahead earlier that we were building something that could become extremely powerful and that we don't know how to control.

20:52And it would impact societies in which that currently, on the current trajectory, could be destructive. So, okay, but here we are, right? Yes. and it sounds like it does feel very doomsday and scary but i do and it also feels like it's too late no it's not but and i want to talk about that but i also feel like there's a lot of potential to do some great things as well yeah talk to us about that side absolutely i've been working for many years on how we can use ai to design better drugs in medicine more broadly how we can use ai to design better materials for batteries, for energy storage. And I know a lot of people working, for example, in how AI can help agriculture, can even help democratic debate tools.

21:41The question is, the same power that enables these things also enables, for example, in the case of biology, dangerous uses that could really harm a lot of people. Do the potential positives outweigh the potential negatives? Well, there's so much we don't know here. You have to weigh in the uncertainty. Because it sounds great to have better medicine. It sounds great to have more efficient batteries. It sounds great to have an ecosystem where people are able to learn more and do quicker and be more efficient. But none of that matters if the AI agents are going to kill us. Yes. Or if we lose our democratic institutions and we end up in a dictatorship.

22:23So these are some seeds. We're already having, like if I think about democracy, let's go there. Yes. Right? We're already having these kinds of problems. We do. And this is a pre-willing gate. We do, but it could get worse. There are studies showing that AI is now getting better than people at persuasion. In other words, making people change their mind. Imagine this applied to change political opinions, to change public opinion. This is like shaking the foundations of what democracy rests on. You know, I don't know. So, you know, people talk about the new industrial revolution. They make comparisons.

22:58Do we have any comparison in terms of the impact AI agents? No. I mean, as usual. It's something else that's changed our world dramatically. The light bulb. As usual, I think, you know, the past can tell us things. But you have to realize we've never been in a situation where we built technology machines that would be smarter than us in many ways. and it's already the case in various domains. It's just going. There's nothing in history. We build machines that help us physically to have much more powerful muscle-wise, but brain-wise, this is completely new. We're speaking with Yoshua Bengio, founder and scientific advisor at Milo Quebec AI Institute, co-president and scientific director at Law Zero.

23:43It's focused on building safer AI agents. The productivity question is one that we want to get to. The investment that's been made from a CapEx perspective has just been so massive. The promises are that this will actually make us so much more productive and will lead to higher returns on investment. Is that true? I don't have a crystal ball. But let's say there are different scenarios about how AI intelligence capabilities will grow in the future. I think the default is going to continue on the same trend. But it could also saturate. And maybe some of these promises will not be realized. The other issue is even if AI is more capable, it doesn't mean that it is behaving well.

24:27In fact, there is a serious scientific hypothesis that intelligence and the goals to which that intelligence is put to use are like two very different things. All right. So we talk about races in the world, and this is certainly a tech race, an AI race, right? So it sounds like for things to go better, safer, you've got to have global collaboration. So what is happening on that regard or what needs to happen in your view? Based on your knowledge, you understand how this works. So what needs to happen to make sure that we don't have AI taking over? I would say the most important thing that needs to happen is better understanding and awareness of what we're talking about by the governments around the world.

25:14and, of course, China and the U.S. in the first place, but eventually many governments who have researchers and companies building AI as well. Because once we understand the magnitude of the risks that we're taking, we'll sit down. We'll sit down at a table and negotiate. One of the things I want to go back to what you said about productivity, what about the labor market? Like, is it going to create, it's already tough for some of those starting jobs, I think, of kids coming out of college. What does it mean for the global economy? What does it mean for the labor force? Does it create jobs? I mean, building data centers, yes, but how do you see it?