OpenAI Seeks $30B as Trump Backs AI Safety Audits

20:35For cybersecurity in a changing world, there's MasterCard. Learn more at mastercard.com slash small business. This is Alexis Christophorus for Bloomberg Surveillance. AI 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.

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21:48Ed Ludlow:the way things used to work between the u.s government and defense contractors was pretty strict the u.s military would define specific requirements for a new system several defense contractors bid for it and one of them would be selected spend years developing capability now lucky martin co jim tyclair says things have changed with the new administration listen to this what is different now is that the current uh leadership in the in the pentagon has decided to take the straight jacket off the companies which allows us to take the straight jackets off of our engineers and scientists to allow us to be flexible to propose solutions to do prototypes to go out we go out in the field and the field could be the pacific ocean of course for us and we we test prototypes on actual ships with sailors that are stationed on the ships running the prototype to see if it works.

22:40Ed Ludlow:That was Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Teichlet. Tune in on Friday. More of that conversation during Bloomberg's Defense Tech special, 11 a.m. Eastern, 8 a.m. Pacific, live from Skunk Works, Lockheed Martin's advanced aircraft development facility in Southern California, one of several reasons I'm here in LA today. Sironic is breaking ground today and what it says will be the largest and most advanced shipyard in America. Paul Alpha in Brownsville, Texas is at the center of the defense tech company's push to rapidly scale production of autonomous ships. Joining us now is Saronic co-founder and CEO Dino Mavrucas.

23:17Ed Ludlow:And Dino, it's great to have you back. Just summarize why this is such a critical moment. I mean, this is the revitalization of a critical industry here in the United States. I mean, you've seen the administration call for the revitalization of shipbuilding here in this country. The vice president is actually joining us today at this historic groundbreaking. This is the first new shipyard built in the United States since World War II. And we are investing billions of dollars. We are going to create thousands of jobs. And we are going to start building ships again right here in this country. This is American ships, American jobs, and the revitalization of an American industry.

24:02Ed Ludlow:Dino, speed. In your field, you, Anduril, what Lockheed Martin wants to do, speed. So how quickly does that facility actually operationalize and get that autonomous craft out there? Speed is everything. Let me put it in perspective. We started Sironic four years ago. In four years, we've raised$2.5 billion, and we're standing in Brownsville, Texas, getting ready to break ground on the largest shipyard in the country. Speed is everything because our adversaries aren't waiting. The shipbuilding industry in the United States has declined dramatically. China has invested heavily. We need this now.

24:44So we're going to be operational here in Brownsville at Port Alpha by the end of 2027 with our first ships off the line by the end of 2028. And we already have orders for those ships delivering LCU vessels to the Navy and Marine Corps.

25:01Ed Ludlow:Do you know the orders are there? What are your capital needs to make that happen? Ramp production, get it out. Well, I mentioned we're going to invest. We've already committed over$3 billion to this project. We've raised$2.5 billion in private capital to date. We are putting capital to work. we will raise more capital as needed, and we will keep moving quickly ahead of demand, ahead of need, to make sure that the capacity is online to deliver, not just for defense, but ultimately for the commercial market as well. Your platforms have been deployed very recently in the context of the war in and with Iran.

25:41Ed Ludlow:Is there any update to that, how the U.S. is using your platforms? I mean, I obviously can't get into the specifics of how they're being used, but what you're seeing is autonomy being proven out real time on the battlefield. You mentioned the platforms that are overseas right now. That's Corsair. That's a 24-foot fully autonomous speedboat. We can build thousands of those vessels every single year, and we've already delivered hundreds to the Navy. And what you're seeing by using these, I mean, one of our Corsairs was used to rescue two down Apache helicopter pilots in the Strait of Hormuz. It's the trust and the confidence from the military to use these autonomous systems in the highest stakes environments and keep actual additional people out of harm's way.

26:32Ed Ludlow:Speed is one key factor. What is the economic proposition per unit of your platforms, right? If you think about the Air Force's CCA program, They want$20 million per unit on an aircraft fighter. Is there something comparable where you can say, look at the economics that we offer versus other alternative solutions, legacy solutions? Well, look, we were also just awarded an MUSV production contract for the Navy for Marauder, which is a 180-foot fully autonomous ship. We're going into production. We not only designed, built, launched, and tested that ship, but we invested$300 million into our shipyard in Franklin, Louisiana.

27:18And now we're able to produce those. The Navy announced, on average, of$40 million per ship. Think about that compared to a naval destroyer, which is$3 billion, but also takes six to eight years to make. And then you want to think about not just the overall price, but the unit economics. right? If your mission is to carry VLS tubes or to carry really large missiles, how many missiles can each ship carry? Well, of traditional munitions, destroyers can carry about 96. Marauder can carry about 16, which means per missile tube, you're getting a 10x decrease in the cost to field and a 100x increase in the speed to field.

28:03Ed Ludlow:Dino Mavrucas of Saronic back on Bloomberg Tech breaking ground in Texas. Thank you very much. Coming up, we're going to have that conversation. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the company's new always-on agents called Dots. This was a big one. This is Bloomberg Tech.

28:33Ed Ludlow:Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. OpenAI is getting into the bots game with Dots. At the company's dev day yesterday, it unveiled Dots, a tool designed to work alongside users like a personal assistant that is tailored to a user's needs and takes over tasks as guided. I spoke with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman after his keynote and asked where in the market this new product fits. It's starting as a premium product. We know it's, you know, we're putting our best model Astra in this. We run it a lot. Premium being prosumer, sorry to interrupt, or it's an enterprise product. More like for getting work done, which I think is largely enterprise.

29:10But there's a lot of people that are going to build their own startups that are sort of in the traditional prosumer category. But this is like a very capable model and it's a ton of usage. So we're starting for something at the top end of the market. And you will see us over time make a mass market consumer version.

29:25Ed Ludlow:How much do you and the team, various people at OpenAI, benchmark against the agents that are already out there? So how much do you use a GrokBot, a Muse, an Instinct from the product perspective? Because they've been out there a while and people are actually using them. I've tried them. I don't use them regularly. I have not found a sort of place for them in my life, but I try to try every major new AI product. This is a totally different category. like the amount of work the level of capability the level of intelligence this can take on um i think this is just a completely new thing why is it different like literally are we talking about its capabilities or is this an economic discussion of how you've priced it or where you've made it available in existing tiers well i mean it is priced higher than other things in the market but the reason for that is uh is because of the capability and the amount of compute worth putting into this which is why i think it's useful in a new kind of way at a new level.

30:25Ed Ludlow:OpenAI CEO Sam Altman there. I also spoke with OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Fryer who says the company is turning consumer adoption into enterprise growth and it's continuing to invest heavily in compute to support that. We're in a very fast growing business and my job is always to make sure that number one we have made the investment in compute so that we never need to slow the business down. And those are investments that need to get made well ahead of time. In addition, that every time we make investments that we're looking at it with the right ROI lens. If anything, I would say, you know, a year ago, we were taking down a lot of compute.

31:04Folks like you were giving us a little bit of a hard time for it. And I think right now, we still sit in the same place where we could use more compute if we had it today, we could use more compute in 2027. So I always want to make sure we're well capitalized so that we have maximum optionality as a company. Like we don't know what dots is going to do. We're super optimistic. The worst thing would be not to have the compute to go serve it to customers.

31:28Ed Ludlow:So you could do a private market round if you need to? Absolutely. There's demand in the marketplace if that becomes the right thing to do. That was OpenAI CFO, Sarah Fry, ending there on the idea that the company could do private funding. Something, of course, earlier in the show we discussed, we broke the story yesterday morning that there are early talks between OpenAI, its investors,$30 billion raise, maybe$1.4 trillion valuation, but they have plenty of capital on the balance sheet, as Sarah Fryer disclosed. Let's go to the public markets and what's happening in AI. Micron is scheduled to report its fourth quarter results after the market closed today.

32:04Ed Ludlow:And while analysts expect the memory chip maker to show strong growth driven by AI tailwind, they're also now questioning how sustainable current growth trends will prove to be. Delighted to say that Beth Kindig, lead tech analyst at the IO Fund, back with us on Bloomberg Tech, like the memory market was so dynamic for a really long period of time. Every day we talk about it. What's changed is maybe we hit kind of peak pricing earlier in the summer. And we're questioning, is there a cycle? And where in that cycle are we? when it comes to micron it might be second to nvidia in terms of setting the tone for the ai trade this evening and like you said are we at peak pricing uh well

32:52Ed Ludlow:i'm gonna jump in here because i think beth unfortunately her zoom shot has frozen but let's go through some of the basics on what we expect from micron's results um fourth quarter results after the closing bell this Wednesday. Strong growth is expected, particularly on the top line. But this is a company that has adjusted margins, adjusted margins, 87%. Now, in part, that is an issue about memory pricing, right? Pricing was up as supply was very tight. I believe Beth Kindig is actually back with us. We got the shot back. Beth, just pick up where you left off. Yeah, strategic customer agreements could mistakenly cause the market to think that Micron will not participate as HBM and DRAM continue to surge in pricing.

33:44Ed Ludlow:Okay, unfortunately, for a second time, we lost Beth Kindig of the IO Fund's shop, which is a shame. She's a sharp mind in the world of what's happening, in memory specifically, but in the AI infrastructure space overall. We'll try and have a conversation very soon. Coming up, go to private markets again. Flow Engineering just raised$50 million to help companies build hardware faster by using AI. Founder and CEO, Pari Singh, and investor and board member, Rolof Bota, join us next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

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35:51entire ecosystem. The rickshaws are still around, but pedaling is increasingly a thing of the past. More and more of them have electric motors easing life for drivers. The prevalence of these vehicles makes India's transition to EVs unlike that of most other places. The e-rickshaws, like the pedal variants before them, are mostly built in sheds, garages, and makeshift workshops rather than in big factories, driving a microeconomy of small tradespeople across Indian cities who sell wheels, rims, headlights, horns, speedometers, and seats. The government regards e-rickshaws as a way to reduce air pollution and cut reliance on imported oil, and will stop registering new gas-powered auto rickshaws from January.

36:34That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com today by selecting work mode, available on Plus and Pro Plans. This is Robert Smith from Business History. If you're listening to this, there's a good chance you're a small business owner. And like every small business owner, you started with a dream to do what you love and watch it grow. What you probably didn't dream about? Keeping up with cyber threats. That's where MasterCard can help with access to tools that help identify cyber threats to better protect your business.

37:09Building your dream business? Priceless. For cybersecurity in a changing world, there's MasterCard. Learn more at MasterCard.com slash small business. This is Alexis Christoffers for Bloomberg Surveillance. AI 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.

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38:27Ed Ludlow:AI's moving beyond software and deeper into the physical world. Flow engineering just raised $50 million at a$750 million valuation to help companies use AI agents to design and then build hardware. Joining us now is Flow Engineering founder and CEO, Perry Singh, and Roloff Bota, Flow Investor, board member now, and formerly, of course, of Secor Capital. We're going to get to the backstory as it comes to Flow. I think, Perry, this is a great opportunity. Just introduce us to Flow, what it is you do when you work with a Rivian or an Anduril? Sure. So a little bit of context on what we're building.

39:05AI has completely transformed software development in the last year. We've gone from design cycles of two weeks to design cycles of two hours. And today, nearly 100 % of code in Silicon Valley is written by AI. That same shift is about to come to hardware development. And Flow is sitting at the heart of that. Flow is doing for hardware engineering, what AI has already done for software engineering.

39:27Ed Ludlow:Roloff, it's great to see you. Welcome to the show. You led the Series A with Sequoia when that happened. You're now coming in as a private investor with your own capital and joining the board. Explain the decision to do that, the opportunity that you see, why you still want to be involved here with Flow. Well, good morning. It's wonderful to be here. the three key reasons i wanted to continue to work with the company's team traction and timing so from a timing point of view parry explained how the company is really taking advantage of the current technology capabilities in ai to become a companion to the development of hardware and so the market opportunity for the company is fantastic next i look at traction and the company has wonderful momentum with its customers they have customers across automotive energy space defense and 96 percent of the customers that the company has found them.

40:22It's wonderful to be in a business where you don't have to go and find your customers. And then the third one is team. We have a spectacular team that's led by Pari and we're building for this wonderful AI hardware future.

40:35Ed Ludlow:Pari, let's go to the case study of Andro, I guess. This week we have a really big focus on defense technology on the show, which we talked about a little earlier. It's so interesting to hear you say the design cycle of two hours. You know, when I think about a program like Vectis at Lockheed Martin through the Skunk Works, you know, they take great pride that that went from design on the back of a napkin to wind tunnel testing in two months. That doesn't seem that fast based on what it sounds like Flow is helping companies do. Yeah, so we're lucky to be working with companies like Andrel, but it's not just Andrel, it's Rivian, Joby, Stokespace.

41:14And these companies are taking a fundamentally new way of working. AI is transforming how these companies operate. And what we're seeing happen is we're seeing companies go from this traditional waterfall model, where a design cycle might be two or three years, to this continuous verification cycle, where engineers are able to make changes in CAD, simulation, Git, and our AI agents are able to listen to those, understand them, integrate them, and understand the impact of that change very, very quickly.

41:45Ed Ludlow:Perry, let's talk a little bit more about the team that Roloff mentioned. Tell me a little bit about you and your background, but some of the people that you've been able to bring in, where have they come from principally? Your core competence is software, right? So what kind of people have you been able to bring in? So I'm a mechanical engineer by training, and I became an engineer because I wanted to build machines that matters for the world. I wanted to design rockets and airplanes and cars and nuclear reactors. But when I went into the industry as an engineer, I was a little heartbroken because what I saw is that 10 % of the time would go into the actual innovation and the architecture.

42:20And 90 % of the time would go into digital manual labor, rebuilding that CAD model for the 11th time, rebuilding an Excel model, going to a huge regulatory PDF of 200 pages and finding that one bit of data. It was really obvious to me that if we were able to automate and accelerate these design cycles, engineers could focus on the core things that really mattered and we could massively accelerate the number of iterations in a year. Our team is really built around the culture founded at Skunkworks. So we believe in very, very small, lean, sharp teams with high ownership and we iterate on a nearly daily basis.

42:57AI is at the core of what we do. And the way we think about AI is AIs live as employees in our org chart. So we today can go from a 50-person, a 50-headcount team with 25 humans to 100 or 200-headcount team with 50 humans. And AI is taking up real roles in our org chart.

43:19Ed Ludlow:So, Roloff, in the org chart of Flow, you are very real, very human. They're now on the board. You know, how is that going to be different for you, you know, as a private investor? I understand you did this with your own capital right. You know, the kind of impact you want to have operationally, what you think you can help Perry and the team with, and how that's different from when you were the steward at Sequoia, you know, when you have that kind of bigger venture firm behind you. Well, I go back to the things I love when I joined the venture business in the first place, which is meeting founders and hearing them articulate a vision for the future, and then working with them in company building and actually helping them to achieve that vision.

44:00And a lot of that what I can deliver as a board member is helping a founder see around corners and leveraging the 20-plus years of experience I have in Silicon Valley to help them not make the mistakes that I've made and be able to build for that future. And I have a tremendous network that I've been able to build up in my career in Silicon Valley to be able to help a founder like Parry succeed. I'm very judicious about the boards I take on. I'm on six public company boards right now and five private company boards, Flow being one of them. And it's a delight for me to be able to help Pari build the future of the company.

44:35Ed Ludlow:Rolof, can I ask you, this round was co-led by Antonio Gracius of Valor Equity and Gavin Baker. They also have that kind of joint vehicle. This comes up quite a lot at the moment. They're very active in some very interesting rounds, backing some very interesting companies. is what benefit do you see those two individuals bringing to Flow? Well, I've known both of them for a long time. Antonio and I actually worked together on another board before we now work together on the SpaceX board. And Valor has deep experience investing in and around hardware technologies. And I think one of the things to bear in mind, people think that hardware is this new thing.

45:16If you actually look at the 100 most valuable companies in the world, 35 of those are technology companies. and 26 of those 35 are either predominantly hardware businesses or have meaningful components of their business that depend on hardware development, whether that's consumer products or semiconductors or robotics. And so I think it's evident that the most valuable companies are a combination of hardware and software. Valor is one of the best firms out there with deep experience in that. They have a network of companies that benefit from flows technology and that's what gave them such strong conviction to be able to participate in this financing.

45:49It was the references they got from the companies that they work with that Flow is the right company to back.

45:56Ed Ludlow:What I find really interesting about the mechanics of the deal, Perry, is$50 million raised,$750 million valuation. That's interesting. In this environment, early stage investments have seen some interesting valuations assigned to them. But you've kind of been through the customer list. It seems very real. What is the business momentum? What are the real revenues or ARR or whatever that you're really seeing? Yeah, we've had explosive growth of flow in 2026. So we've gone from being this early upcoming rising star to now the default platform and system of record for requirements and verification in frontier hardware.

46:39We're lucky enough to be working with the market leaders in a number of the key verticals. But it's not just the frontier anymore. Companies like General Motors, their PPU division, and also Volkswagen and Rivian's joint venture, they are coming to flow. They were pre-AI, and they're completely retooling their core development practices with flow and AI at the center.

46:59Ed Ludlow:It's interesting. I know Rivian well. They would say that they have some competence in software and particularly in ECU, right? There are things they're good at. They're supposed to be helping Volkswagen. What is the willingness, Perry, of let's call them legacy OEMs or more historic companies in working with a company like yours? It is a really great question. We see this as a new era for hardware development and a new wave of companies. These companies really care about time to market. They really care about iteration speed. And they really care about designing complex systems that are both software and hardware integrated together.

47:37Now, this new wave and this new era of hardware companies are selecting AI and tools like Flow to be able to power their iteration speed. And companies that choose to adopt AI and move faster have a huge competitive advantage. So in the legacy world, there are going to be companies that adopt early and are able to follow that wave. and there are companies that might take a little bit longer, but I think we're going to see the competitive advantage on the companies that move fastest to adopt AI.

48:10Ed Ludlow:Roloff, when the opportunity crossed your desk, and I know, again, we went into the history that you have with Flow, but how much do you think about this bigger story of re-industrializing America? You know, the emphasis from the administration and from all kinds of software companies, actually, that want to work in this domain because they see activity. They see investment to have all kinds of manufacturing done domestically. I think that's a very important tailwind. And it clearly was part of the thesis when I was at Sequoia, when we first backed Flow just more than a year ago. I don't think it's enough, though.

48:47Government administrations can change and those tides can turn. And that's why I made the point earlier that fundamentally hardware is just such an important part of the success of most of the valuable technology companies in the world. And so I don't think it's a new thing. It's just a sustained benefit that Flow will have that more hardware will come to the United States.

49:09Ed Ludlow:That is Perry Singh, founder and CEO of Flow Engineering, and Rolof Boda, who invests privately and joins the board of that company. It's great to have you both with us on the show. Thank you very much indeed. Now, coming up, Apple is making a bigger smart home push with an upgraded Siri and fresh hardware on the way. Another Bloomberg's Mark Gurman exclusive coming up. This is Bloomberg Tech.

49:41Ed Ludlow:Apple's first foldable iPhone could sell about 6 million units this year. That's according to CounterPoint Research. The$1 ,999 iPhone Duo goes on sale in October and is expected to give the broader foldable market a boost. Apple's also seeing strength in China, where early sales of the iPhone 18 Pro lineup are up 12 % from last year's Pro models. And Apple isn't stopping with the iPhone. Apple plans to make its push into the smart home market on October 13th with a smart home hub codename J-490 at the center of that strategy. Critical product expansion from the company under new CEO John Turnus.

50:22Ed Ludlow:Bloomberg's consumer tech editor, Dana Wallman, is with us. Okay, so we actually, the kind of new and exclusive bit of that is the date, the timeline, it's coming soon. Tell us about the smart home hub and the broader strategy. Yes, absolutely. Just to recap people who are less read in, Apple has been working for years, actually, on these smart home products. I don't want to call them tablets. I think They will sound a little bit like tablets to some people, but they are sort of like slate devices that can either be mounted to a wall or live on, let's say, a countertop. They are plugged in on like a tablet.

50:55And they do a lot of things that current products in the market can already do from Google, from Amazon, FaceTime calls, things like recipes, calendar updates. The deal here is that they will be personalized in part thanks to AI. So they can see who is walking up to them and adjust the settings, adjust what is shown based on who it detects is using the device. And this really is a category that Apple would have loved to enter years ago, but it's been waiting behind the scenes to do catch up on its AI offering.

51:26Ed Ludlow:You know, I really value your consumer tech editor perspective on this. Like we're an Alexa household, different device form factors in different rooms, but like it's not on the hardware side that it's a problem, it's on the software side. It's a real limit to what Alexa and I talk about. It could be the weather or play me a song. What is it that Apple thinks they can achieve here with both the hardware and how the software works with it? So it really wants these devices to be not just an additional screen in the house, but a hub, one that you could use to control, let's say, smart home devices.

51:59I think it's really interesting that they're offering a wall-mounted option as well that would sort of help it differentiate from the competition. and it is really interesting that it is doing this now. It had waited for Siri AI to sort of get on par with the competition, but of course the competition has kept moving. So Sonos, for instance, has been the main competitor to the HomePod, but Sonos now is making a big push in AI. So it'll be really interesting to see how Apple stacks up while the competition has sort of tried to keep entrenching itself in Apple space.

52:33Ed Ludlow:Bloomberg, Stena Wallman with the reporting. Thank you very much indeed. Let's do another quick check on shares of Micron. We had to cut our conversation short earlier, but fourth quarter results after the market bell. Expecting to see growth, but is there sustained momentum in the memory cycle as it relates to AI? Have we hit peak pricing? The stock has had momentum in recent days, actually, in aggregate, but we will wait and see when the market closes this afternoon. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech. I am in LA. And one reason is tomorrow we're going to be live from Bloomberg Screen Time here in Los Angeles and bring you some great conversations on the future of entertainment studios, music, the impact of AI on creative industries, and much more.

53:16Ed Ludlow:There is an incredible lineup that we'll have both in the show and at the event itself. Today's show was pretty mega too. Don't forget to recap all the conversations that we had on the podcast. You can find it on the Bloomberg terminal, as well as online on Apple, Spotify, and iHeart. There is so much to come this week. Thanks for being with us. This is Bloomberg Tech.

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