OpenAI’s COO Lightcap Talks GPT-5 Launch

24:52We're predominantly a payments-driven business, which I think is quite a bit different. And, you know, we love these relationships because it allows us to develop long-term partnerships with our members and help them in the areas that matter most around avoiding fees, around building credit, giving some short-term liquidity around the edges, but also just helping them get into a healthy rhythm of savings and moving their financial progress ahead. And many of them want to do that far more efficiently using generative AI. That's something you've been interweaving. You've got the voice swap, for example, Chris.

25:23Where more can you lean into that? we're so excited about the opportunity in ai and i just think you know what an exciting time to run a technology company we feel like we're just in the early early stages of a of a new industrial revolution if you think about you know the original industrial revolution it was all about new sources of energy that created and unlocked so many new opportunities new industries and so forth i kind of think of llms as the same sort of new form of energy that sure the llm companies are incredible, amazing businesses. We're all using them every day. But the opportunities for companies like Chime to leverage AI and move it into the product experience, the operations is just enormous.

26:07We're already serving over 70 % of our customer interactions with generative AI. And not only is the cost-saving exciting, but the actual outcomes are even more exciting because we're seeing a significant increase in the satisfaction levels of consumers getting the answers they want quickly through an AI. Of course, you can always talk to a live customer service rep, but we're really excited about the opportunities, not just on the service side, but even using AI as a, you know, think of it like a digital partner that's kind of helping you, you know, manage your day-to-day financial life. I have to leave it there.

26:41Fascinating Chris Britt, Chime CEO. We thank you for your time. Coming up next, one of those LLMs, OpenAI. The COO joins us. This is Bloomberg Tech.

26:53We want to welcome our global audience across Bloomberg Radio and Television. OpenAI has released GPT-5, its most advanced model yet. The company says it offers key improvements in major areas like reliability, accuracy. There's the strongest generative AI model yet in coding and writing and health. For more, we bring in Brad Lightcap, OpenAI COO. And this feels so primed for enterprise adoption, Brad. When I think of writing, when I think of coding, what is the opportunity there? Yeah, well, good morning. Thanks for having me. GPT-5 is a significant step forward in a few different domains. So you mentioned coding, you mentioned writing, in health for consumers and medical professionals.

27:36And we think that opportunity unlocks an amazing set of things in the enterprise that now become possible. It's a much more reliable model, so it's better at things like calling tools. It's better at things like structured thinking and reasoning, problem solving. And what we see in the enterprise is when you make these core capabilities better, the number of use cases enterprises can adopt these models for increases. And so coding being significant, it really is the language of computers. And that was a significant area of demand for us when we were talking to customers about what they wanted in this model.

28:08I mean, PhD level is what many are calling it. Well, what Sam is calling it, I'm sure yourself. What's interesting is when you've got 700 million weekly users of ChatGPT, how much is that a funnel, a read-across into enterprise? How much do you get the inbound because ultimately the people in the oil workforce are already using it? Well, really early on when we launched ChatGPT, what we found is, I think, you know, a mere number of months after we launched it, I think something like 92 % of the Fortune 500 were actively using ChatGPT or people at 92 % of the Fortune 500 were actively using it.

28:41And so it was very obvious for us we needed to go build a work product because I think ChatGPT as a product is as useful in an enterprise environment, in a work environment, as it is in your personal life. It's an amazing companion if you do anything from marketing to software engineering to data analysis and research. And I think there was a lot of organic adoption when people discovered the tool, realizing that it could make people much better at their jobs and able to do more. And so we really leaned in with that, and we're trying to build the best product we can. It's like one-tenth of the planet using ChatGPT, Brad, but I'm interested in some analysis that Menlo Ventures has done.

29:20They've analyzed the LLM market, particularly in the enterprise space, and they've just tried to push back saying, look, you lost market share. OpenAI went from 50 % in the enterprise market share down to 25%, and funnily enough, the company that they back, which is Anthropic, took the lead. What do you say to those sorts of statistics? Is it something you're seeing within your own numbers? It's hard to measure these things. You can find measurements that say the opposite. But what we really focus on is value for customers. We've got to deliver the absolute best models and then the absolute best products for developers, for startups, for enterprises, large and small.

29:56And that's been our focus. I think our API is a good example of where we've really invested lately. We've got over 4 million developers now actively using the API every day to build new products. We support thousands and thousands of startups that are building with us, that we work deeply with on trying to improve our product so that they can ultimately build a better product. And in the enterprise, I think, you know, the demand that we see there is really unabated. We grew ChatGPT enterprise seats from 3 million seats to 5 million seats in a matter of two months. And so that growth is accelerating, and we're just starting to scratch the surface, I think, on the impact that we can have both for developers and for enterprises.

30:34So we see it as a long game, and we're here to just do our best for customers. For that, boy, do you need infrastructure. Tell us a little bit about the costs of training this model and how you're looking to expand with Stargate, the project we've just been talking about, how SoftBank's been teaming up with Foxconn, for example, to take over an Ohio EV plant. How is that continuing to meet your demands or not meet them, as the case may be? Well, yeah, we've seen demand for AI increase at just a torrid pace. Obviously, at the root of that is getting right the infrastructure equation, and we think ultimately that's going to be a critical input to the U.S.

31:16and its allies being competitive in this area. And so Stargate for us was a$500 billion project to invest here in the United States to build AI infrastructure for open AI and ultimately for the country. We're working with a lot of great partners on that project and hope to bring in more. And I think, you know, that's just the beginning. We're going to continue to invest aggressively. We've always found ourselves somewhat on the wrong side of the demand curve for AI, you know, despite the investment, the significant investment to date. And so for as long as we see demand, we're going to continue to invest aggressively.

31:49AI is interesting in that the more you invest and the more you make it available, the more you make it, you know, cost approachable for enterprises and for consumers, the more people want to use it. So it's an amazing trend, and we'll continue to invest behind it. We're speaking with Brad Lightcap of OpenAI, the COO for our radio and TV audiences. Brad, how has the rollout ultimately been, do you think? Because so many people wanted to use the app that maybe we hit limits quicker than some anticipated. Well, we're trying our best to keep up with demand. Serving infrastructure at scale at 700 million users and then millions of developers and many, many billions of tokens per minute that we process is not for the faint of heart.

32:31Thankfully, I don't have to do that part of it, but we're doing our best to make sure the rollout is successful, and we're hoping that by the end of the week here, everyone gets access. Your job description is more about building the enterprise relationships, the partnerships. I also think about the partnership you have in Microsoft, and Satya Nadella is out there really talking about integrating already and how excited he was for the product. But there's a tension in the relationship there. I'm interested in what you think the progress being made. Sam Altman was on networks talking about progress being made with the relationship going forward with Microsoft.

33:02Can you give us a timeline about when you think a deal will be done and the future of how they interact with your product and more broadly, how much ownership they continue to have in the business as a for-profit one? Yeah, well, we feel really positive about the relationship with Microsoft and they've been a great partner throughout the history of OpenAI. They've been with us from the beginning, really, since before ChatGPT. Obviously, have been a huge infrastructure partner for us with Azure. And so we expect that to continue. We see no future of open AI that doesn't include Microsoft in a significant way.

33:37We've got to work on what that future looks like together. We're in that process with them right now. We feel very good about it. But we think also ultimately the world is really big, and the demand for these systems and these models in the enterprise and in consumer is significant. And so they represent not only an infrastructure partner for us, but a great partner to be able to help distribute and bring the benefits of the technology to the world, given the size of their footprint. So, you know, more to work through there, but we feel good about it. And like I said, I think, you know, when we're standing at the finish line of all this, they'll be there with us.

34:09Meanwhile, Mustafa Suleiman over at Microsoft is busy in the tussle for talent. So, too, plenty of other rivals that we understand. Mark Zuckerberg busy. And what's interesting is, well, you as one of those long-tenured employees and staff over at OpenAI remain committed because of innovations such as this. But what about the liquidity that we're talking about bringing to some of your, well, people that you work alongside? How is that going? We understand there might be even a$500 billion valuation involved in what is a secondary sale of your shares to the likes of Thrive Capital. Yeah, well, nothing there to share here, but we continue to see very healthy demand on the investor side for wanting to be, I think, part of the OpenAI journey and mission, and we're very grateful for that.

34:54And on the talent side, look, I think OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit. It was founded as a mission-driven company to be able to build general intelligence that's beneficial for all of humanity. And we haven't strayed from that mission. I think ultimately that's what attracts talent is people want to work for a project that's bigger than themselves and something that's going to be impactful for us and for humanity and our species. And so I think that's the thing that ultimately attracts people to where they work. Obviously, it's a competitive market and we continue to compete. But at the end of the day, when we ask people what it is that keeps them at OpenAI, it's the mission.

35:29The mission, at the moment, you've got something that's generally intelligent. It's not artificial general intelligence, Brad. When do you get there, briefly? You know, I've sworn off making predictions. In AI, it's too hard. The curves are too steep. But I think, you know, we feel really good about the rate of progress. GPT-5 is a great representation of how we start to make progress on little things. You know, things like, for example, being able to have the model dynamically reason and decide how much it wants to think about, you know, the problem that you ask it to solve. That's something that we do natively as humans that previously our models couldn't do.

36:05So it's these little steps forward that we think accumulate and ultimately get us to something that will be truly remarkable. I'd like Kat talking about the latest GPT-5. We thank you so much, COO of OpenAI. Now let's check back on these markets because we are up 3.3 % over the course of five days in the NASDAQ 100. We're at a new record high, folks. We have had one of the longest weeks in tech in terms of news flow, whether it's been about tariffs on chips, whether it's been the onslaught of earnings, which we're going to be talking about time and time again, currently up 3.3%. We want to look about what's happening in the rest of the industry and indeed the market more broadly.

36:42Bitcoin's down by a percentage point, got a bit of a risk-off tone. You have to keep an eye on what's happening with gold spot, though, because talking of tariffs, well, it's not just semiconductors that's been in the eye of the storm of pharmaceuticals, but gold bars as well. Huge volatility on the course of the day. Meanwhile, coming up, we're going to be speaking with Akamai CEO, Tom Layton. I want to go back to other earnings within this. Trade Desk is off by 39%. Its earnings underwhelmed significantly. Amazon Competition, Pinterest off after its earnings. But Instacart trading higher. Expedia, after Airbnb managed to underwhelm, Expedia up more than 4%.

37:14We can bring you Akamai next, though. Tom Layton joins us, the CEO. This is Bluebeck Tech.

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40:00Keep an eye on Akamai shares today. Somewhat volatile after posting second quarter results. that across the board in general beat estimates, but you have to read between the lines as to where there was perhaps a bit of a pullback or a miss when it came to compute, for example. But their full year forecast, that was raised. Tom Layton, Akamai CEO, joins us now to demystify for us, Tom, because it's interesting. You have Piper Sanla here really talking about lots of moving parts and ultimately they see fairly cloudy still of what the ultimate positioning is of the business. Can you tell it? you're really going in on, well, cloud infrastructure here, not just content delivery, not just security.

40:38Oh, yeah. Security, majority of our revenue. Cloud infrastructure services, my goodness, we are up 30 % year over year. And we think that's going to accelerate. So by the end of this year, we'll be up 40 % plus year over year. Tremendous market opportunity there. Strong tailwinds, of course, from Gen AI. So I think very exciting results for Akamai. You know, a strong beat on the quarter, very profitable earnings per share, up 9 % at$1.73. And I think a very good outlook, raising guidance for the year. So maybe just a little bit of a pause for investors. I mean, the shares are still down over the year or 12 months, Tom.

41:22I'm sort of interested, therefore, on what they're not getting. What is it about the opportunity in, for example, cloud infrastructure? Why take on the hyperscalers? Well, it's a tremendous market opportunity. Our customers have asked us to do that. You know, we, with our distributed platform, which is unique in the marketplace, we're in 750 cities with our points of presence. We can get enterprise compute instances, their containers, closer to the end users. And that gives you lower latency and better performance. And for a lot of applications, that matters. Also, we can do it at a lower price point.

42:00In fact, one of the hyperscalers is an early adopter of our new managed container service. They want to have their compute instances in hundreds of cities around the world, which is something only Akamai can do. Interesting. I mean, maybe people are looking at what drove some of the revenue beat and they're looking at FX, but they're also looking at TikTok inclusion. Have you decided that the risk of being banned is just off the table and you're going to really be starting talking about this client once again? Oh, there's always risk, though it seems that from what we're hearing from public sources that, you know, a deal has basically been structured.

42:35And, you know, there's obviously caught up in trade negotiations. But at this point, it seems like the ban has been postponed several times. And so we're not seeing anything that suggests that that's going to change in the near future. You do that content delivery for them. It's interesting that security is where a lot of your growth and, as you say, the most part of your revenue has been coming from. What insecurity is driving that growth? Where are people coming to you? Yeah, we have the market-leading solutions for web app firewall, for bot management, for API security, for stopping ransomware with segmentation.

43:17And, of course, the attack rates have been going way up. The penetrations have been going way up. And we have the solution that stops the damage caused by those attacks. So if the ransomware gets in, we identify it quickly. We don't let it spread. And that protects our customers. So they don't have these huge costs associated with being shut down by ransomware. Of course, generative AI in many ways making the field of security ever more evolving and nimble is what's crucial, Tom. What I'm also so interested in is the way in which you're thinking about education here in the United States, skills in particular, and upskilling.

43:53This is something that the U.S. government is calling for a lot, and particularly in the era of generative AI. How are you seeing the skill set and the pool of talent? Is it good enough for you? It's going to change with Gen.AI. We're seeing tremendous efficiencies across most job types at Akamai so that our employees can do more in the same amount of time by leveraging Gen.AI. And I think you'll see training. We're doing training ourselves so that employees will change maybe how they do certain things. And they'll be more efficient by learning how to use the Gen.AI tools. I think it's really very exciting and it probably is going to be a sea change over time in education.

44:37Tom Layton of Akamai, it's always great to have you on after your numbers. Thank you very much for joining the show. Stay well. Meanwhile, coming up, Tesla, well, it is disbanding the team that was meant to give it the computing muscle in the AI race. It's an Ed Ludlow scoop. We'll get behind it with you next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

45:05For decades, Samsung was the world's leading memory chip maker, but the tech giant was recently surpassed by small arrival SK Hynix. So how quickly can it reassert itself in the AI race? Our Bloomberg Originals team took a deep dive into this. When you're out shopping for 7 megawatt offshore wind turbines, you think Samsung, right? Well, probably not. The brand is much more famous for its phones and flat screens. But arguably, the most important drivers of South Korea's biggest family business are these things. And for the first time in decades, the company's got a massive problem here. Samsung is under assault from all sides and they are getting stretched thin.

45:44Samsung is in this position of playing catch-up and that's difficult to do if you don't have growing revenue, if you don't have expanding profitability. And unfortunately... The chip profits tumble. Big disappointment. The semiconductor division reporting operating profit of$400 billion. Totally missed analyst projections for$2.73 trillion. Samsung shares have whipsawed in value since their 2020 peak and tanked in 2024, while long-standing rival SK Hynix surged. The crisis is easy to miss amid all this. The ultra-experience is ready to unfold. But behind the cats and choreography, Samsung's hidden struggle threatens its national identity amongst a population that relies on it like no other.

46:35It is probably the most influential company in Korea because of the importance to the economy. And maintaining that influence may hinge on a piece of technology you probably own, but have never even seen.

46:52Catch the full episode at Bloomberg.com, on YouTube, or on the terminal. Now, one company depending more on Samsung for its future AI chips is Tesla. And we've got some updated reporting from our own Ed Ludlow. Tesla is disbanding its Dojo supercomputer unit, and its leader, Peter Bannon, is leaving the company, as it depends more on third-party hardware suppliers. It's all according to sources. Now, the team, as we told you yesterday, had lost workers to Density AI. It's a competing startup founded by former dojo executives. Let's get more of Bloomberg's Max Chafkin. Ed, busy on his travels. And Max, we turn to you as Elon, Inc., Helmer.

47:27What do you make of this move away from making its own hardware in the AI chip space? I mean, it's definitely a setback because Tesla, of course, somewhat famously, likes to make everything. That's kind of Elon Musk's whole thing. He's tried to make a vertically integrated auto manufacturer that makes Tesla very unusual and also has been trying, you know, obviously desperately to pivot towards AI. So this is a setback. I will say it's a setback that I think people saw coming to some extent. In 2024, during an earnings call, Musk sort of started to tamp down expectations, said they were going to rely on two paths for training its AI models.

48:13One would be this Dojo thing. The other would rely on NVIDIA chips, the same very expensive chips that everyone is essentially using to train their models. So it is it's a setback, but maybe but but I don't think it's devastating. I think what is maybe more troubling is just losing talent. Right. We're in the middle of this AI talent war. Tesla historically has been very competitive. Of course, the stock for a while was just exploding and it has been fairly stagnant over the last couple of years. And I think you're seeing that, right? There are startups out there and these kind of very large privately held companies like OpenAI and Anthropik that are just throwing huge sums of money at developers.

49:01And you're seeing Tesla clearly struggle a little bit to keep up and retain. And Density AI now forming as a new startup to take on the world of hardware and AI, Max. Briefly, I mean, Elon responded saying it doesn't make sense to have two different avenues for chips and AC15 and A16 they're going to continue with. But more broadly, this was thinking of the way it set itself apart for the future of supercomputing being vertically integrated. Morgan Stanley thought it would be$500 billion added to the market cap. Yeah, and all those estimates, of course, look silly. And I think you have to ask yourself, there are lots of estimates like that around Tesla and its AI ambitions, few of which are really realized yet.

49:45And it does make you wonder, like, should we revisit some of those other assumptions? You know, people talking about valuations in the trillions. You know, look, Elon Musk said this was a moonshot. I think it was kind of a moonshot because the truth is NVIDIA dominates this market, the market for training chips. and Elon Musk took a crack, but wasn't able to get there. Bloomberg's Max Jafkin. Tune in to Elon Inc. It's weekly. We thank you so much. Now that does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech. Quick check in on the markets for you. We're off by 8 tenths percent on Bitcoin, digital gold, but real gold, flat, but boy, we can potentially see some tariffs on gold bars affecting Switzerland in particular.

50:24Keep an eye on that story. NASDAQ 100 up by 8 tenths percent. A new record high, folks. Check out our podcast. You can find it on the terminal. This is Bloomberg Tech.

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51:38Everyone's talking about how AI is transforming work, especially in sales. While the landscape shifts, one thing remains the same, the thrill of closing a deal. Whether it's a gong or a confetti machine, every team has its celebration rituals. Adio is designed for that moment. It's the agentic CRM that turns customer signals into actionable insights, helping you close deals faster with revenue agents and automations working around the clock. You'll have everything you need to scale your go-to market efforts. Elevate your wins with Adio. Start your free trial at adio.com slash iHeart.