AI Fears Mount on CEO Calls for Slowdown

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1:50Scarlet Fu:All right, let's get to the story of the day of the week. It feels like it does. I mean, maybe even the month. And that is really about how the AI industry itself wants to slow down development. But the U.S. government is resisting that. President Trump wants to go all, you know, guns blazing, moving ahead. He wants the U.S. to stay ahead of China. And in fact, the AI czar of the U.S., David Sachs, says, well, if industry wants to slow things down, go ahead, slow it down on your own. Let's bring in Matthew Bloxham. He's our senior media and tech analyst joining us from London right now. Matt, how are you reading what's happening here?

2:27Scarlet Fu:This is David Sachs and the Trump administration kind of daring the industry to do, you know, if they want to slow down, to do it on their own. How do you think about this? yeah i mean it's a very complex situation actually when you look beyond the headlines actually there is a fair amount of common ground between the different parties obviously anthropics uh founder put out uh what is it 3 800 word essay over the weekend uh where he kind of set out a few options and you know first and foremost was the kind of proposal that the the industry should kind of try to self-pace. But, you know, I think in admission, and perhaps kind of written between, not really written, but between the lines that they may be worried that if they self-pace, some of their other competitors might not.

3:17And therefore, there'd be a competitive advantage. And so trying to kind of push this view that there's a benefit for society at large for some kind of controls, and that perhaps the industry needs some outside help to put those guardrails in place. Matthew, I've been referencing this morning an opinion column piece by Tom Friedman in the New York Times, and he made several points, one of which is at some level, at some point, the U.S. and China at that level have to work together. When you talk to these companies and these investors, is there any belief that that could happen? I think it's seen as a kind of very low probability outcome.

3:59And again, when we go back to this anthropogueta over the weekend, the three options that were up for proposal, the third was kind of geopolitical agreement between democratic and non-democratic nations. And China called out as the most obvious example there, but a good acknowledgement that finding agreement between say the US and China would be incredibly difficult. And obviously, that there's kind of evolving leverage on both sides. And I think as much as perhaps the Trump administration would want to kind of use familiar tools of constraining access to technology in China, particularly chips, China has a stranglehold almost over the rare earths industry.

4:47And that's crucial for both the military complex, but also the technology complex. And I think China's kind of prepared to kind of use that in leverage to get access to technology.

4:58Scarlet Fu:And of course, that visit will be on September 24th with AI on the agenda. Xi Jinping visiting the US. I also want to get your take, Matt, on open AI. It has told us it's not going public this year, but it may move forward with a new funding round. Apparently, the latest talks for more funding was initiated by investors. Is that significant? Well, I think it certainly fits with the delayed IPO narrative and, you know, whatever the source of the discussion suggestion was. I mean, I think these are companies that are burning through cash at a very fast rate. And so they probably do need more money.

5:40And I think perhaps there's a bit of an opportunistic moment here for some of their bigger backers like, for example, SoftBank that maybe seem that they can perhaps increase their exposure a bit so that when it does find the IPO, they're getting a nice kickback on that investment. But for sure, you know, if they're delaying the IPO, they'll need money from somewhere to kind of sustain the investments that they'd be making.

6:04Scarlet Fu:Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this. Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, And some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects.

6:45Scarlet Fu:Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans. Let's talk about healthcare for a second. It doesn't always work the way people expect it to. If you've ever waited on a prescription refill or had a hard time getting the care you needed, you know the feeling. The system should just work better for everyone. That's exactly what the people at Optum are trying to do every day. They're a healthcare company linking patient care and pharmacy services and using data and technology to drive the whole system so care is connected, not complicated, for patients and providers.

7:19Scarlet Fu:Things like making it easier to get care that looks at the whole person, from primary care doctors to mental health support and even in-home care, and then using technology to make sure they all work together. Technology designed to help doctors spend less time on busy work and more time with their patients. And those prescriptions? Optum is working to bring costs down, save patients money, and make it easier to get refills. Little by little, Optum is helping make healthcare work as one for everyone. Head to business.optum.com to see how. This is Alexis Christopoulos for Bloomberg Surveillance.

7:53AI is everywhere. Outcomes are not. Not because AI doesn't work, but because AI hasn't reached the workflows yet. The campaigns, the launches, the quarterly planning. Those workflows are still run by humans alone. AI is making individuals faster, but it's not making businesses more productive. That's the gap Asana is built to close. Asana is the operating system for human agent teams, your easy button for AI productivity across every team. Ready-to-go AI teammates pre-built for marketing, ops, and IT. No prompt engineering, no setup. They show up where the work is happening, already onboarded in your workflows, ready to deliver.

8:33And the more they work with your team, the smarter they get. With Asana, your whole company can work on the same plan towards the same goal, whether you're a team of 10 or 10 ,000. Asana, where humans and agents workflow together. Try it at asana.com. That's A-S-A-N-A dot com. You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube. I kind of feel with this AI story, it seems like every quarter, every month, now maybe every week, we need to step back and say, where are we with this AI story?

9:17Where is the technology going? How do I want to invest in it? Is it going to be the end of the world? That's the discussion over the last week or two. I don't know. But I mean, that's why we have smart people coming through here to try to help us understand mandeep singh is one of them he is uh the head of our technology research uh group at bloomberg intelligence uh and he's been doing his stuff for decades he's seen it come and go mandeep the conversation around ai has moved from hey are they spending too much money are they getting good returns on investment to uh is a again gonna end the world you know in a matter of a couple of weeks that all changed talk to us about everything we've heard from the sam altman's of the world the elon musk of the world president trump how do you think this where are we in the global discussion of this right now so a couple of things to frame this one everyone sees the use cases of ai the coding agents the customer service those have been hugely successful and they're being used by companies by you know consumers the second aspect of this is agentic AI.

10:22Agentic AI, okay. Agentic AI is you've got, you know, a workflow where you do certain things in a sequence. Can AI do this end to end? And that's where, you know, when this hugging face open AI incident happened where open AI had hundreds of agents that were given a task, you know, in terms of cybersecurity security related tasks where agents tried to be deceptive, you know, there weren't logs enough to see what exactly was going on. That raised alarm bells in terms of what AI could do in a longer chain, you know, in a sequence of events. And that's where I think the concerns are fair, where, you know, if you are given a goal and the agents are goal seeking and they're working off a reward function, they can do so many things that people have no clue about with the pursuit of that goal.

11:22Whereas when we interact with AI through a chatbot or a coding agent, we see the results and we see the output fairly quickly. So it's that agentic aspect that is coming into focus. And we just did a token survey, token consumption survey, because tokens are the basic units of AI. That's how you can track AI usage. I mean, enterprises, the top 100 enterprises we had in our survey have increased their token budgets by two to five times over the span of last 12 months. And their intentions are also to continue to spend. So this technology is real. Companies are putting money out of their IT budgets.

12:01It's just the agentic aspect is what is drawing a lot of scrutiny. And that is what is getting reflected here in the discussions. I've referred to it several times today. Tom Friedman of the New York Times has an opinion column out, which is just thought provoking, if nothing else. And basically the two takeaways I had from this to this topic is, number one, there's a big aspect to this that the horse is already out of the barn. These models are out there. Yeah, yeah. That's that's disturbing. The second aspect was no matter what, ideally, the U.S. and China seriously get together and think about what they want to do together here.

12:36Yeah. Given your experience with this industry, how do you kind of view those issues? I mean, at some point, there has to be regulations around, you know, how do you evaluate these models? How do you audit and monitor these models? Because that's what's coming into focus here is, look, AI can do a lot of things. The models have a lot of capabilities. How do I audit? If you are an enterprise that is deploying the swarm of agents, you've got to have some sort of accountability in terms of the work that is being done. And somebody should be able to verify and independently, you know, evaluate everything that's going on.

13:17And that's where the regulators will come in. Now, I don't know the geopolitical aspect, how that's going to evolve, whether we can come to an agreement in terms of what the Chinese models and U.S. models will do, you know, in terms of the guidelines. But clearly there is a concern in terms of what this means for intellectual property, for cybersecurity, because if the agents are goal seeking, which is what we saw in the hugging face incident, they can go to any length to break any software system. And that's a real risk here. All right. I'm going to speak for most, if not every single one of our viewers and listeners.

13:56Who is this guy, Dario Amodi, the CEO of Anthropic? We need to kind of know who this guy is, don't we, going forward? You should bring him to your show. I mean, definitely there are a lot of questions that only him and the likes of Sam Altman and Elon can answer. But clearly, I think there is a lot that is a black box nature with these AI models. And then when you extend that to agentic AI, where, like I said, you're doing so many steps, the model is making hundreds of calls. You've got to have more verifiability and auditability. And that's where I think the regulators have to come in and ask for more.

14:37Scarlet Fu:Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this. Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects.

15:18Scarlet Fu:Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans. Let's talk about healthcare for a second. It doesn't always work the way people expect it to. If you've ever waited on a prescription refill or had a hard time getting the care you needed, you know the feeling. The system should just work better for everyone. That's exactly what the people at Optum are trying to do every day. They're a healthcare company linking patient care and pharmacy services and using data and technology to drive the whole system so care is connected, not complicated, for patients and providers.

15:53Scarlet Fu:Things like making it easier to get care that looks at the whole person, from primary care doctors to mental health support and even in-home care, and then using technology to make sure they all work together. Technology designed to help doctors spend less time on busy work and more time with their patients. And those prescriptions? Optum is working to bring costs down, save patients money, and make it easier to get refills. Little by little, Optum is helping make healthcare work as one for everyone. Head to business.optum.com to see how. This is Alexis Christoffers for Bloomberg Surveillance.

16:27AI is everywhere. Outcomes are not. Not because AI doesn't work, but because AI hasn't reached the workflows yet. The campaigns, the launches, the quarterly planning. Those workflows are still run by humans alone. AI is making individuals faster, but it's not making businesses more productive. That's the gap Asana is built to close. Asana is the operating system for human agent teams, your easy button for AI productivity across every team. Ready-to-go AI teammates pre-built for marketing, ops, and IT. No prompt engineering, no setup. They show up where the work is happening, already onboarded in your workflows, ready to deliver.

17:07And the more they work with your team, the smarter they get. With Asana, your whole company can work on the same plan towards the same goal, whether you're a team of 10 or 10 ,000. Asana, where humans and agents workflow together. Try it at asana.com. That's A-S-A-N-A dot com. You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube. Let's switch gears hard here to electric vehicles. Again, I'm kind of an expert here, having been in a Waymo from Santa Clara University to a In-N-Out Burger.

17:51And that was pretty cool. So I know what I'm talking about. Adam Graham, he's the real pro. Bloomberg NEF, head of Intelligent Mobility. um so adam where are you guys in terms of your outlook for um you know passenger vehicles and the waymos of the world kind of what's your outlook so we just put out a note that looks at the passage car industry as a whole and that top line number and we can get into electric vehicles and robotaxis in in just a minute but uh this outlook starts off with the near term and goes all the way out to 2050. But for 2026, we're on track for just shy of 85 million passenger cars sold globally.

18:30That's a modest 1 % increase from last year. But where it really gets interesting is at a regional level where you have the world's biggest car market in China significantly below previous sales numbers, 14 % below what we'd kind of initially expected at the beginning of the year and really starting to depend on those export markets as it looks to kind of keep passenger car production and sales from domestic automakers nice and high. Where sales go from here, there's kind of a long pathway with still some growth in the industry ahead. But we have the outlook peaking at just under 100 million vehicles sold globally in about 2037.

19:13Scarlet Fu:And just tell us a little bit more about the kinds of vehicles that are leading the growth. So it's really about the markets. I mean, SUVs are incredibly popular and we can talk about drivetrains as well with hybrids having a kind of a resurgence in popularity in the United States. But the markets where there is kind of strong growth in total passenger vehicle sales are markets like India and Southeast Asia, which are kind of growing rapidly from very low basis of motorization or vehicles per user. But it's not always just about the sales. It's also about the total vehicles on the road. There's about 1.4 billion passenger vehicles on the road today.

19:53We see that rising to just shy of 1.7 billion in 2039. And from there, it's really about looking at the types of vehicles that complete certain types of trips. So we spoke about robotaxis, and those are increasingly becoming real businesses that are contributing meaningful trips and are no longer science projects. They're getting you to your in and out burgers, as you mentioned. Well, on the robotaxi business, which is not even in the nascent stage here in the United States, it's, you know, it's almost impossible to get one, although I didn't have a good experience. Talk to us about the rest of the world.

20:31Where are you seeing robotaxis, driverless vehicles? Where are you seeing that business really starting to grow? Well, I mean, the U.S. is a leader in this space, and a lot of the most serious robotaxi deployments that we track are in the United States. But also in China, where there's kind of a handful of cities with what we'd classify as fully operational commercial deployments. That means that there's kind of no strings attached or very few strings attached in order to be able to get a ride. You might, as you put it, have to work a little bit harder to get a ride because they're kind of intermingled with a human-driven ride-hailing fleet.

21:10But really, those are the two markets that have leading operations at the moment. But there's expansion happening in the Middle East, so Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and then Saudi in Riyadh as well. But Europe is also an active growth market for this technology, but that's at an even earlier stage than what you're seeing in the United States. You're really just starting to get the first initial deployments in those markets at this stage.

21:37Scarlet Fu:Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this. Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects.

22:18Scarlet Fu:Get started at ChachiPT.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans. Let's talk about healthcare for a second. It doesn't always work the way people expect it to. If you've ever waited on a prescription refill or had a hard time getting the care you needed, you know the feeling. The system should just work better for everyone. That's exactly what the people at Optum are trying to do every day. They're a healthcare company linking patient care and pharmacy services and using data and technology to drive the whole system so care is connected, not complicated, for patients and providers.

22:53Scarlet Fu:Things like making it easier to get care that looks at the whole person, from primary care doctors to mental health support and even in-home care, and then using technology to make sure they all work together. Technology designed to help doctors spend less time on busy work and more time with their patients. And those prescriptions? Optum is working to bring costs down, save patients money, and make it easier to get refills. Little by little, Optum is helping make healthcare work as one for everyone. Head to business.optum.com to see how. This is Alexis Christoffers for Bloomberg Surveillance.

23:27AI is everywhere. Outcomes are not. Not because AI doesn't work, but because AI hasn't reached the workflows yet. The campaigns, the launches, the quarterly planning. Those workflows are still run by humans alone. AI is making individuals faster, but it's not making businesses more productive. That's the gap Asana is built to close. Asana is the operating system for human agent teams, your easy button for AI productivity across every team. Ready-to-go AI teammates pre-built for marketing, ops, and IT. No prompt engineering, no setup. They show up where the work is happening, already onboarded in your workflows, ready to deliver.

24:07And the more they work with your team, the smarter they get. With Asana, your whole company can work on the same plan towards the same goal, whether you're a team of 10 or 10 ,000. Asana, where humans and agents workflow together. Try it at asana.com. That's A-S-A-N-A dot com. You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube.

24:41Scarlet Fu:You know, we have a Fed meeting today. We do? Yeah. 2 p.m. is the actual announcement. I think it's pretty much a no-brainer in terms of what markets have priced in at this point, which is a rate hike. The big question is what Kevin Warsh says at 2.30 p.m. and how that shapes people's perceptions of where the central bank goes next. And, of course, that has huge ramifications for real estate and commercial real estate in particular. Laura Rappaport is here with us in studio at the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers Studio. She is founder and CEO of Northbridge. And Northbridge, of course, involved in commercial real estate, involved in the financing of it.