AI Chipmaker Cerebras Seeks $4.8 Billion in Upsized IPO

23:39Caroline Hyde:I would read the California brief from our Bloomberg Law team, where they basically point out, so far, there's no smoking gun email communication. It's just been about egos and personalities. Musk versus the others.

23:55Caroline Hyde:Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. Let's take a look at today's big number, and that is Alphabet or Google's current market cap, 4.75 trillion. Here's the thing. It had become a dominant player in the AI space and was on the brink of overtaking AI chip giant NVIDIA potentially as the world's largest company. I say here's the problem. Actually, in this Monday session, Alphabet's down almost 2 % and NVIDIA is up 3%. But the gap had been closing. So NVIDIA, the world's most valuable company, around$5.4 trillion market cap. Alphabet was heading toward the$5 trillion club. Why? Let's go to Bloomberg's Ryan Vlaselica, who has more.

24:34Caroline Hyde:That was the story. And I'm not blaming you at all, Ryan. Timing's a funny thing. But the point is that Alphabet had had a lot of momentum recently, and that gap had been closing on NVIDIA. Absolutely. I think there is a growing appreciation that when you look at any part of artificial intelligence, Alphabet is extremely dominant in that area, if not the most dominant company. So we can talk about how strong Gemini is, their AI model. We can talk about how growth at Google Cloud is accelerating. We can talk about how AI seems to be improving growth trends at Google search at YouTube. We can talk about physical AI with their Waymo self-driving car company.

25:16Caroline Hyde:We can talk about their TPU business, which is their semiconductors, which they said they might start selling around to other cloud companies. So that's a huge potential revenue boost for them. And that is an area that is really getting into NVIDIA's own territory. We wrote about this about a week ago about how NVIDIA might be seeing increased competition in AI chips. And Alphabet that is a huge part of that. And so when you add all of that together, it just seems like they are really the company of the AI era. The vertical integration has been something that the flywheel effect has come into play in earnings recently.

25:48What's amazing is even with this rocket ship of a share price move, analysts are still really positive on the stock and it's got zero sell ratings, 18 buys. I mean, could we see it start to move towards that price target of 430? What

26:04Caroline Hyde:Well, we've just seen a real grind higher in the share price for a while now. I think the latest results really just reinforced how strong they are on all these different issues. And when I talk to portfolio managers and investors, they will say that even if we saw something like OpenAI come out with their latest model, let's say it's better than Gemini on whatever metrics you want to use, that really just speaks to increased AI adoption overall, which is probably going to end up being a tailwind for Google Cloud, for the chips business. It really seems like even if one leg of the story starts to falter, the other ones are able to kind of pick up the slack here.

26:36Caroline Hyde:So it's a very diverse sources of revenue. It's much less dependent on one major business, like you might say, of NVIDIA. We're just showing on the screen, Ryan, that Alphabet shares over the past 12 months are up 160 percent. Year to date, 25 percent, 26 percent. But beating the major indexes. You make the point through the voice of the investor that it's completely logical for Alphabet to take that title eventually. And lots of people, for that reason, see it as a good stock to own. Yeah, exactly. And I'll say, like, about a year ago, there was a lot of skepticism about what is AI competition going to mean for Alphabet?

27:15Caroline Hyde:Is it going to reduce their search market share? A lot of those fears, not only have they not really come to pass, but they've really shown, you know, acceleration in growth. They've shown strength across all these different markets and really just has set up them just to be an incredibly strong stock. And even the multiple right now, it's a little bit elevated for their own history, but it's not a sort of dot com price for perfection. Everything must go right. Otherwise, this thing is just going to collapse sort of thing. It doesn't feel like that at all. People feel very optimistic that they can keep a lot of these momentum going.

27:45Ron Veselica, it's great to get you on the stock that we're watching at the moment. And look, it's actually Alphabet that we turn to next in a different capacity because the worst case AI scenario the White House has actually warned about seems to already be a reality because Google researchers say they have uncovered the first ever zero day attack built by artificial intelligence. Joining us now with the details is Bloomberg's Margie Murphy. Why is this so concerning? yeah so we i've been on the show to talk about the the kind of mythos effect and we know that the white house has been calling emergency meetings with tech and industry leaders about concerns that ai tools that we have currently may be used to build these really you know explosive attacks against a lot of the software we use and could have serious impacts on national security and now Google is saying actually we think that this is already a reality the threat that we thought we saw coming along is actually here and we have identified a prominent criminal group who was working with an LLM and was able to find an exploit in a popular software tool.

28:56Luckily Google kind of foiled it ahead of time and let the software developer know so they've issued a patch but it just shows that the things we've been talking about and we've been concerned about in terms of AI and security are a reality now.

29:11Caroline Hyde:Zero day, I think just help us out. I'm learning so much through the reporting, but the basics of what that is, a zero day vulnerability, and the fact that this is an artificial intelligence linked or discovered one, please. Yeah, so a zero day means that it's a flaw in a piece of software that the developer didn't know about or nobody else knew about. So once it becomes apparent, once a hacker has identified it, they have exactly zero days to fix that. So it's a big concern because then you're always a step behind anyone trying to get in and exploit it to potentially get into your customer's systems.

29:52And in terms of AI being able to generate that, it's all about the speed and this race between the defenders and the attackers. So if an AI like LLM is able to scan and find these zero days, these previously unknown flaws in a lot of the software we use, it means that we're going to quickly see a lot of exploits. And potentially these could be further down the line, potentially a load of hacks that otherwise would have been more trickier for these kind of criminal actors or espionage actors to have conducted. Now, remind us what the spokespeople you've been talking to have said about who's to blame, which LLM was behind it, and more broadly, sort of whether or not it was Mythos, because there's an argument against that.

30:41Right. So Google's been very clear that it isn't. They don't believe it's Mythos. They don't believe it's Gemini, which is its own LLM. However, they're keeping the name of the LLM they believe was used under wraps they're saying to protect their sources because they have kind of intelligence which suggests who's using what um and frustratingly we're not also going to hear about the the software that was developed or the criminal group that they've been tracking either so um that kind of makes it a little bit more challenging for figuring out but i think the the broader story here is it doesn't matter which LLM it was.

31:22It's the fact that there's LLMs that are available right now for people to use that are being abused in this way.

31:30Caroline Hyde:Bloomberg's Margie Murphy. Thank you very much. Now, coming up, we're going to be joined by Dan Wagner from Resolve AI as the company's making a bid for commerce.com. Details next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

31:49Resolve AI. It designs tools for digital shopping, customer engagement, a lot of AI within it. It's also making a hostile bid for commerce.com. Now, the board rejected an earlier offer and called the new proposal of one Resolve share for every two shares of commerce.com even less favorable. Resolve AI CEO Dan Wagner is here to talk about the authentic AI opportunity, along with, I hope, a discussion about why M &A would make sense for your business at this moment. So let's start with the M &A. Why want to become bigger? What are the opportunities to lean in as a resolve plus commerce.com business?

32:23Well, so I think first of all, you've got to frame it within the context of our growth. So we're seeing fantastic growth in our business, you know, extraordinary momentum. We went from nothing to 232 million of contracted annual revenue in one year. We did$60 million in the first quarter in revenue versus the whole year last year,$46 million. So we're growing at an incredible rate. And in this space, when you have the best product in the vertical that we're operating in, which is commerce and retail, it's very important, having been building tech businesses over many decades, although you couldn't possibly tell by youthful demeanor, that the most important thing is kind of land grab.

33:07We have to move quickly to consolidate our position as a leader. Now, we're doing that anyway organically. But if we were to acquire commerce.com, which is a stock that's really a business that's really kind of stuck and needs us to unlock it, unlock the value, we immediately give ourselves a greater presence. And we will continue to do deals like that when they're available at good value to increase our market position. So what would be unlocked with a commerce.com is like the companies they already work with, the client base that they have. And you unlock it with this future of agentic AI. Let's just talk about the agentic commerce offering, because you're even a little bit in the world of crypto.

33:50And we've just had Jeremy Allaire of Circle on. And he thinks his business and stable coins are the future of agentic commerce. He's right. How are you the rails rather than a circle, for example? So circle is a coin, is a token. but you need that token to be sitting on some sort of infrastructure to allow it to be used in everyday commerce, right? So for example, if you went to Starbucks today, you're not going to use stable coins to buy your coffee. We're going to facilitate that change with ResolvePay so that the retailers and the brands can take stable coins in the same efficient way for a consumer as credit cards and other forms of payment.

34:28Because crypto, as we know it today, is a frustrating and clunky experience. And we're changing that with ResolvePay so that it's as good, if not better, an experience as what you're used to.

34:42Caroline Hyde:Often, sometimes, M &A is strategic, right? And so commerce.com is 60 ,000 merchants. Would you say, Dan, that's the strategic value of it? And if so, you'd boost your offer? You'd be willing to pay more of a premium to realize that strategic asset? So, yes, a 60 ,000 merchant base that's frustrated with them because there's been lack of innovation. I mean, they're forecasting growth of 1.5 % in the next 12 months. You can't even imagine such a sort of embarrassing growth rate for a business in commerce. 1.5 % is just ridiculous. We're growing, conversely, 750 % year on year. 750%. So you've got a company where it is at the moment, which is not really innovating.

35:34It has a large footprint that's historically been gained over, you know, over a decade of providing services. But it's kind of lost and it needs us to come and inject value and enthusiasm and innovation into that customer base to energize them. Now, do we need them? No, we don't. Because as I've just told you, we're growing 750 % year on year and we've got all this momentum and everything else. But if we were to buy them, we could unlock that value and grow that element of the business much faster than it is today. In answer to your question, yes, I think we're open to being more generous with a deal.

36:14But, you know, the board rejected us and then they put in a poison pill. And I really can't be bothered with a board that is so locked in its own protection that they can't see the benefit of a combination with us. Any sensible board should be having a proper conversation with us to try to extract the best value for their shareholders and fully embrace this opportunity.

36:36Caroline Hyde:What about the competition and risk to you? I've enjoyed reading about Resolve and trying to understand the story. And it's whoever controls the agent layer wins in commerce. And a very reasonable question that the Bloomberg Tech audience would pose is, why doesn't an Amazon or an Alphabet or Google or even OpenAI just do what you do and come for you? I mean, they've tried. Some of them have tried. So OpenAI did a deal with Walmart. It was very highly publicized about five, five and a half months ago that was disbanded about two or three weeks ago. And the reason it was disbanded was it started making these terrible mistakes, which is what we call hallucinations.

37:15Generative AI uses probabilistic algorithms, you know, mathematical algorithms that guess words and the next word and the next word in a sentence to create a paragraph and to create, you know, an answer. And when you're guessing things, there is an element of error. And we knew this from the very outset because of my background in search and, you know, for decades and being involved in some of the major innovations in search technology in the 90s and the early noughties. So we knew that this would happen. So we spent the last 10 years preventing hallucinations. That's really our primary position.

37:51And of course, we did it with a very clear vision of providing that technology to represent digital platforms as the best salesman on the planet, you know, interacting with customers. But you can't have the best salesman on the planet who's hallucinating, you know, who's saying the wrong things, making mistakes. Then you end up with returns, you know, the misled customers buying the wrong products and so on. So we believe, and Microsoft and Google have endorsed that belief, that we have the only technology in this vertical that is reliable for merchants. They don't have to worry in deploying our technology that their representative, generative AI representative, is going to be selling the wrong things, making mistakes, misleading customers, and worse, insulting people.

38:33Caroline Hyde:Dan Wagner, CEO of Resolve AI. Thank you very much for your time on Bloomberg Tech. Now, coming up, Apple looks to refine its macOS design and add a few new features. We have more on the reporting next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

38:55Caroline Hyde:Breaking news on the Bloomberg Terminal. President Donald Trump says the U.S.-Iran ceasefire is in a weak state and on life support. It was in response to a question posed by journalists. He's speaking in the Oval Office in the White House. It was an event about maternal health care, but then taking reporter questions. He'd earlier said that he was going to meet with a large group of generals for an update about Iran. But that's the headline. U.S.-Iran ceasefire is in a weak state, says President Trump, on life support. And what we saw is oil nudge higher. Brent, the global benchmark, back above$104 a barrel.

39:27Caroline Hyde:Keep with it. Cara. We will. Now let's turn our attention to Apple. It's planning a slight redesign to its upcoming Mac OS 27. announced, according to sources, it aims to smooth out some of the visual quirks introduced by macOS 26 Tahoe, particularly around shadows and transparency tied to its liquid glass interface. The man behind that story, of course, is Bloomberg's Apple and consumer tech reporter, Mark Gurman, an editor and team leader. I'm interested, Mark, on the liquid glass issue. In many ways, it's what? Because the deployment is meant for slightly more cutting edge technology versus the Mac?

40:01Yeah, so last year they rolled out their new liquid glass interface. I quite like it on the iPhone and iPad.

40:06Caroline Hyde:It looks good with the OLED displays of the newer devices, but it doesn't look so hot on the Mac. Part of the reason is that it uses older LCD technology. Apple's not moving to OLED until the new MacBook Pros hit, probably at the tail end of this year or early next year. So they're making some tweaks to macOS with the 27 release being announced on June 8th at WWDC, cleaning up some of the transparency, some of the icons, some of the shadows that have made Tahoe a bit controversial. Controversial. So I find that interesting. We've spent so much time talking with you about Apple Intelligence, Siri and iOS and the cadence of update and how it's getting better.

40:44Caroline Hyde:Less about macOS. You know, I'm a Mac user. I believe you are, too. Why are you saying it's controversial that the rollout and development of macOS generations? Oh, yeah. MacOS Tahoe has been huge, hugely controversial. on Reddit, among developers, among some consumers, among technophiles and what have you. People just don't like the way the liquid glass interface and the new icons look. I don't think it's a catastrophe. I don't think it's that big of a deal. But certainly, it's a step below the implementation on the iPhone and the iPad. Boom, there's Mark Gurman, who leads our coverage consumer tech and the author of Power On.

41:20Caroline Hyde:Thank you. At the same time, Apple's Mac Mini has emerged as a go-to machine for running standalone AI agents. Its ability to operate around the clock at low electricity costs has fueled a surge in demand. For more, Bloomberg's Austin Carr has the Business Week story. This is in the culture. Like, this is everywhere. People put together clusters of Mac minis, and that is their compute to do all things in AI and inference. Just give us the top line of the Business Week article that you wrote. Yeah, I mean, this is a big trend right now of starting your own AI agents at home. instead of flinging off every request to some far-flung data center or cloud server.

42:00You can have your own personal AI supercomputer essentially in your living room. You're seeing a lot of people buy Mac minis, their higher-end cousin, the Mac Studio, install agents, frameworks like OpenClaw, to sort of have this 24-7 personal AI concierge that you can interact with on any messaging app. It's pretty wild to see this trend take off and be a rare bright spot for AI when it comes to Apple, which didn't really foresee this trend. It just sort of took off that this hardware was really, really good for local AI computing. Open claw life. And it's a global phenomenon. And I think we even sort of heard about the supply chain surprise coming Apple's way.

42:38But I mean, we saw stock of, say, a Raspberry Pi go up and to the right over in the UK as people thought that other types of hardware would be useful for this, Austin. Has Apple really ended up the only game in town? Not. I mean, it remains to be seen. I think a lot of the hardware makers are chasing this future right now where the hardware is being tailored to merge some of the graphics processing and CPUs that were historically doing that processing separate. They're now merged into a unified architecture on Apple devices, which is really good for AI processing. It has a lot of memory bandwidth, and it can do a lot of things that just a few years ago weren't really that efficient to do.

43:18So you're seeing the hardware get remarkably better, tailored to AI. And at the same time, you're seeing a lot of AI models becoming radically more efficient. If you remember last year with DeepSeek, one of the really amazing things about that model was how efficient it was in terms of doing a lot of the processing that it would take a lot more to do for an open AI or Anthropic to do. So you're going to see a lot of these models getting smaller and more efficient to run locally. But what you're seeing the Macs do is just a lot of the stuff on device, like opening a browser, checking your files, interacting with business systems, interacting with your apps in ways that are just autonomous and essentially making what's called a headless Mac, meaning it's just plugged into the wall.

43:58It's your AI agent, your local server, and you can interact with it however you want, just like having sort of a personal chat GPT in your living room.

44:07Caroline Hyde:Awesome. We just have 15 seconds. And in the piece, you're talking about developers, you're talking about everyone, vibe coding, everyday people. It's a mix. I mean, I talk to a lot of people who are using it for their sort of an AI developer to have to interact with. But then consumers who are just building these things very simply, you know, setting them up to sort of be a household chief of staff, their butler to monitor their grocery list and things of that nature. They can give you can give them a lot more access to your local files, customize them in a lot of really fun ways. And you're going to see this trend take off a lot more when Apple sort of makes its own open claw-like system eventually.

44:42I would assume that's where all this is heading. Austin Carr is a great read in Business Week. We appreciate it. That was it from this edition of Bloomberg Tech. Great to have you back, Ed.

44:51Caroline Hyde:Yeah, it's good to be back. Check out the pod. Lots to recap to start the week and find it on all the Bloomberg platforms and online. This is Bloomberg Tech. If you follow markets, you know the value of long-term thinking. You plan, you diversify, you prepare for volatility. But in life, even the best strategies can't prevent every bad day. A fire, a loss, a disruption that demands immediate attention. When that happens, what matters isn't just what you planned, it's who shows up. That's where Cincinnati Insurance comes in. For more than 75 years, they've helped individuals and businesses navigate life's toughest moments with care, expertise, and personal attention.

45:32Together with independent agents, Cincinnati Insurance focuses on relationships, not transactions. Their approach is grounded in experience, follow-through, and trust built over time. Bad days happen, and when they do, you deserve an insurance partner who understands risk, respects what you've built, and is ready to help you move forward. The Cincinnati Insurance Companies. Let them make your bad day better. Find an independent agent at CINFIN.com.

46:02Caroline Hyde:Coffee genius here. Most people see a busy cafe, but I see precision at every step. Thanks to genius from Global Payments. Transactions? Instant. Inventory? Precise. Operations? In sync. Absolutely genius. From sold-out crowds worldwide to managing the morning rush, genius keeps operations running smoothly. One portado. Flawless pour, perfectly timed. Just beautiful. Big league reliability for any business. That's genius. From coast to coast, unlock adventure at Red Lion Hotels by Sonesta, where restful sleep, friendly service, and trusted local knowledge are part of every stay. Red Lion makes it easy to feel welcomed, comfortable, and connected wherever the road takes you.

46:47Whether you're traveling for business or pleasure, you can spend less and make more of every trip. When you sign up for Sonesta Travel Pass, you'll get their best rates instantly. Go to sonesta.com to book your stay and unlock the best rates with Sonesta Travel Pass. Here today, roam tomorrow. Join now at sinesta.com. Terms and conditions apply.