Live from Bloomberg Tech in San Francisco, Part 2: Hatch's New Device, AI Fear, Grammy Winner Hit-Boy

21:38Carol Massar:You know, what's interesting, I was thinking about, okay, so we spend our time reading, you know, doing a three hour show, news show. A lot of it's crazy, as you would guess in this environment. And to go to bed, I actually play like a news roundup on my home device. Oh, that's not stressful at all. No, No, but it actually, I think I do the same thing. I'm a glutton for punishment. But I don't get through like more than one segment and I'm out. And it's really kind of bizarre to me because I would think it would drive me crazy. Where do you see more broadly consumer hardware going and how much of it ultimately is in our home?

22:11Carol Massar:And how much of it at some point do we say we are, I'm very clear, I'm an Apple household. But it doesn't mean I just have Apple devices. Like when do we at some point say we want it all cohesive? Or is that cohesive with other devices? I think the trend that we are seeing, especially in the bedroom, is people want a screen-free environment. They want peace. They want relaxation. And so everything we do is screen-free. No microphone, no camera. It is an intimate place. No microphone. No microphone, no camera. It is a sacred place for you, for you and your partner. And that is a huge part of what we do and will always do.

22:47On Carol's question about consumer tech being such a challenge, I mean, we're not talking margins like you have with software. We're not talking margins like you have over at NVIDIA. We're also talking about a part of the tech world that is really controlled by large companies, too. How challenging is it to be a small, independent, yet profitable company in the hardware space? I think you said the most beautiful word there. We are profitable. We are profitable and we are growing. It's the best of all worlds. I come from immigrant people, and I believe that it is possible to be a David against a Goliath, and that's exactly who we are.

23:24We have 7 million devices in market and have had incredible success and raised very little money. And remind me, any subscription products at this point? There is a subscription. With the new product? There's a subscription with the old and the new product, and it's all based on content. We produce content for you every day, and that is the subscription that you can find away. But if you don't want the content or don't need the content? If you don't want or need the content, you don't have to pay. And by the way, the data that you get with sleep tracking is free. We believe that it comes from you.

23:54We don't like that other people charge for that. It is free. It is included with the price of the device. All of your data.

24:01Carol Massar:Wow. That is like such a different model. Why do you want to make sure that you do that? So to me, it's really important. For me, it's really important. It belongs to me. It is from my body. It belongs to me. The content that we're producing, that is us. We have real expense in creating that. And so we want to offer that to folks. But I believe that data is yours. And I don't believe it's something appropriate to charge people for. So, Anne, what's the next step for the company? Do you go public? Do you get acquired? The next step for the company is to continue delighting our customers. We have 7 million devices in the market.

24:31We are in one in three homes of babies and children. And that is the next step, is to make sure we are as dominant, helping adults with the core of the problem, actually getting to bed. as we are in baby. That's what's next for us, and we're super excited about it. Is the sleep market most dominant in the United States,

24:50Carol Massar:or is it really global? Is it the concern? It's a great question. So it is a global, massive issue in the developed world, and it really is because of our screens and this attention economy, and we just, you know, these are dopamine hits that we keep, keep getting, and it really is interfering. If you look over the last 20 years, search terms for sleep among the developed world have gone up 3x. So this is a real crisis. In 2014, the CDC said it was an epidemic, and it's only gotten worse since 2014. It's a huge problem. We're getting crushed. And data for data's sake. We're getting completely crushed.

25:22Absolutely. And data for data's sake is not what's going to solve it. It's really getting at the root of the problem and helping me make time for myself to close my eyes and get to sleep. I have one more doctor say to me, are you getting a good night's sleep? Oh, hey, I have a question for your doctor. Is your doctor getting a good night's sleep? I know.

25:38Carol Massar:It's a really great question. And thank you so much. Good luck. Thanks for sharing the news with us. Anne Crady-Weiss, she's CEO and co-founder of Patch, joining us right here at Bloomberg Tech. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. We're going all in on AI. Let's go right there. He is one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence, and with good reason. His work on deep learning is why he is the recipient of the 2018 AM Touring Award. It's considered to be the Nobel Prize of Computing. And our team here at Bloomberg Technology reminding us that he's the most sighted living scientist in the world across all fields.

26:17Carol Massar:If you Google him, you will find that he is the only living scientist to surpass one million citations on Google Scholar. It's a milestone he reached in late 2025. People are watching what he says and what he does. We're talking about Yoshua Bengio, founder and scientific advisor over at Mila Quebec AI Institute, co-president and scientific director at his new research organization, Law Zero. It's focused on building safer AI agents. 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.

26:54They will behave sometimes against our instructions. And this lack of reliability is both a scientific challenge and a problem for the deployment of AI.

27:08Carol Massar:So 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. 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.

27:47And, 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.

27:55Carol Massar: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. But 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.

28:35You 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. and China. But at some point, as other countries are also beefing up their capabilities, it has to be international.

29:06What 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. Like, 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.

29:50And 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. Okay, now I am worried.

30:17Carol Massar: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. 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.

30:53And it would impact societies in which that currently, on the current trajectory, could be destructive.

31:02Carol Massar: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.

31:42The 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.

32:24So these are...

32:26Carol Massar:But 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-willy 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. People talk about the new industrial revolution. They make comparisons. Do we have any comparison in terms of the impact AI agents?

33:05Carol Massar: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 growing. There's nothing in history. We built machines that help us physically, that 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.

33:44It'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 then maybe some of these promises will not be realized.

34:20The other issue is, even if AI is more capable, it doesn't mean that it is behaving well. In 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.

34:41Carol Massar: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. And of course, China and the U.S. in the first place. But eventually, you know, many governments who have researchers and companies building AI as well.

35:26Because 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.

35:33Carol Massar:One of the things I want to go back to what you said about productivity. What about the labor market? 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? I mean, the number of people needed for data centers is peanuts compared to the effect that AI could have on the job market. But the economists don't agree. it really depends on the curve of advances in AI in the future. If it continues at a current rate, then yes, there will be massive automation coming too quickly for society to adapt.

36:14Yashua, given the work that you've done in this, understanding the potential pitfalls of the technology, name names for us. Who's doing this well? Who understands the potential repercussions here? I don't name names. I think there are a lot of people who have good intentions. The issue that makes the current dynamics dangerous in some ways is the incentive structure. It's the competition between companies, the competition between councils. So maybe I'll ask this question a different way. What if you could have Dario Amadei in a room with Sam Altman, along with Jensen Wang, along with the leaders of all the hyperscalers, And then, of course, the leaders of the Chinese companies as well.

36:59What would you tell them? What do they need to know? So they know already, right? They know what I'm talking about. Tell them. What they need to do is to agree with each other on a set of principles about safety and careful deployment of AI. And they're already talking about it. What they are asking, actually, is governments to agree with each other to make sure there's a level playing field for all the companies so that every company before they build and deploy a very powerful AI needs to show to the public, to the governments, that their system isn't going to be dangerous in the wrong hands and all these issues we're talking about.

37:41Carol Massar:But are the financial incentives getting in the way? The race is on to spend and spend. Yeah, it seems like a prisoner's dilemma. And it's who can go fastest and get it all done. So does that prevent the right thing from happening? You've just got about 30 seconds left. Well, no, we've dealt with situations like this before. I mean, governments have regulated things like drugs, trains, meat, because if it was just competition, we would end up with dangerous food, dangerous planes, dangerous drugs. But now we enjoy all these things that are safe and useful because governments have intervened. So in a word, yes or no, you're more hopeful than worried?

38:25Carol Massar:Yes, hopeful or no? I'm, I'm, I don't know. I mean, I feel like it's not my vision that matters. It's the actions that we take collectively. Fingers crossed. Joshua, thank you so much. Joshua Bengio, professor of computer science, University de Montreal. So glad to have him here. If you missed any of it, check it out.

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39:45Capital Markets Investment Banking.

40:15Because it was so popular, I think it attracted like mostly positivity, but the negativity I sucked in like a sponge. And I think it was like critiques of things I liked when I was like, you know, I was 23 and I wrote this book and it had all my like dorky little cheesy or maybe unrealistic loves in it. And I started to feel a lot of shame about those things. And so for the rest of my career, I steered away from those little things that like make you feel pleasure when you read. But I also was like saying no to these parts of myself that I then was like, screw it. So that's this book. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

41:03This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio.

41:32of Universal Music Group. We're talking about Hit Boy.

41:34Carol Massar:Yep. He is three-time Grammy Award-winning artist and a producer who's known for shaping the sounds of Jay-Z, Beyonce, Nas, Drake, and so many more. Welcome, welcome, Hit. Good to have you here. Thank you for having me. Appreciate y 'all. So, this is all about technology. How are you thinking increasingly about technology and its impact on music? Well, I started in music using tech. I used a program called FL Studio. It was called Fruity Hoops back in the day, but it's FL Studio now. you know, some of the biggest hits of our generation in hip-hop and just popular music have been made on FL, but when it first came out, people were kind of like, oh, it's just like a computer program.

42:11It's not serious music making, but, you know, tech is always going to advance mankind. Is that where we are with AI today? Because people could actually just create, you know, what they think of as, you know, Fruity Loops using AI. Yeah. Is that music? It is. It's music, for sure. You still have a person having to prompt it. It can't just press a button and prompt itself. So just imagination, I feel like it's at an all-time high. If you have a great imagination and you use that in your work, you're going to succeed. But here's the thing. Isn't it all trained on music that's already out there? Well, not all of it.

42:46There's some people that train it on certain different ways. But however it's done, I feel like when MIDI came out, the person that studied the keyboard or piano for 20 years and learned grooves and melodies was like, what is this MIDI thing? You could just import notes and then make it sound like me, like, you know? So you're not worried about a loss of creativity in this era at all? No, not at all. It's a boom.

43:09Carol Massar:Isn't all music, even created without technology, just trained on all the music that we've kind of got in our brain and that we hear? One million percent. One million percent, yeah, for sure. Hey, talk to us about, we want to go back to Universal. 18 years, right? 18 years, yeah. But you decided to go off on your own. How did that change what you can do? Man, I feel like I've been just empowered to the maximum capability. Like, you know, just like being in that deal for 18 years, I always kind of felt like I had a black cloud over me. And as many hits as I did make, I still feel like I wasn't in my complete right mind because that was always lingering.

43:46But now I'm completely free and I got all these tools and all this knowledge I've gained over the years. I feel unstoppable. So what did that relationship prevent you from doing? from making the amount of money I should have been making and just progressing through my deal for, you know, the amount of work I put in. But was it the right thing for you early in your career? I guess so, because I'm here right now on Bloomberg, you know what I mean? So, you know, the hustle, the struggle, the grief, you know, the grief, like, it just, it led me to this place where I'm just, like, I feel powered up, you know?

44:18Carol Massar:Tell us about this solo album that you've got coming out, Software Update. Software Update. I love the name. Thank you. Tell us, though, what this means to you. It's beyond just the music. It's like updating yourself as a person. Just moving better, dressing better, living better. Whatever it is to update yourself on a daily basis, do that. Working out, whatever it is, eating right. You've got to update the software just like a computer. What's it like going from somebody who's known as a collaborator? Carol mentioned a few of the people you've worked with, Jay-Z, Beyonce, Nas, Drake, and more, to doing this solo project.

44:53To be honest, it doesn't feel any different because I'm just a creator. I get the same excitement and the same high when I'm making a beat as if I do a verse or if I engineer for a big artist. Anything I do creatively that gives me that spark, I'm enjoying it, you know?

45:07Carol Massar:What's a message you would like to send to people with this album? Just got about 30 seconds here. Lock in, update your software, you know, just look inside every day and just look in the mirror and get better. Hey, very briefly, is YouTube what MySpace was to you in the beginning of your career? Ten seconds? Yeah, I would say so, for sure. You know, I could just fire off as much as I want to on YouTube. Well, thanks for spending time with us. Definitely. Really cool. Good luck. Good luck with the album. Appreciate it. Of course, I can't get the hit boy here. Grammy-winning artist and producer.

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