US Says Framework for TikTok Deal Reached

21:35He has to meet several very ambitious milestones in order to get all of that money. But if he does succeed in doing that, it could make him the world's first trillionaire. And there's no one else who would come anywhere close to that level as of right now. And boy, have we talked about that pay package at length.

21:56Time now for talking tech and first up, Sony Pictures. Demon Slayer was the most popular film at the box office this weekend and it is set a new high for the Japanese anime genre. It earned$70 million in the US and Canada, having already grossed about$280 million worldwide going into the weekend. Plus, Snap has a new operating system for augmented reality glasses, signaling the company is getting closer to launching a consumer version of the device next year. Now, SnapOS 2.0 includes an overhaul browser and updated AR apps. Snap is competing with the likes of Meta, Apple, and Google in the space.

22:29And Xiaomi, well, it's aiming to take on Apple with its latest smartphones, coming out later this month. Currently, Xiaomi only has a sliver of the premium smartphone market globally, but it is well-positioned to make gains in China, where the release of Apple's iPhone Air has been delayed, Ed.

22:47Caroline Hyde:Okay, I'm going to bring you a story that broke late Friday. Apple's Robbie Walker, one of the iPhone makers, most senior artificial intelligence executives, is leaving the company. That's according to sources. Walker's exit adds to an exodus of executives and engineers from Apple's AI division. Going to bring in Bloomberg's global consumer tech managing editor Mark Gurman. The story broke Mark. What was this executive's function and role that makes it so notable that it's the latest and another departure from Apple? Walker was in charge of Siri. It's as simple as that. Yeah, he was leading Siri for the last several years, but he was demoted out of that role in the spring when Apple realized that it would need to delay its new Apple intelligence upgrade for Siri for upwards of a year.

23:34And after that, Walker was removed from his position. His boss, John Gene Andrea, was removed from overseeing both Siri and Apple AI robotics teams. and more recently Walker has been overseeing a team known as Answers Knowledge and Information. It's called AKI internally. This is a new team spun up under Walker and this group is responsible for helping build a new AI-based web search tool that's coming next year designed to compete with both perplexity, people going on to perplexity to do searches, right? You've seen Google traffic go down on Apple devices in favor of some of these AI apps. So Apple wants some skin in that AI web search game.

24:20So he's been leading that or parts of that. And so his departure is quite notable. And more broadly, he's on the senior staff of John Gianandria. He's one of a few people who are leading the company's overall AI initiative. And of course, time and time again, you, many others have been talking about how Apple is seemingly behind on the generative AI fight, but they're trying to remind us all of their prowess when it comes to innovation from what things look like, feel like. Talk to us about the product innovation they've been talking on. Yeah, you know, Apple on this last keynote, it didn't allow any distractions.

24:55It didn't raise prices. It didn't talk about tariffs. It didn't talk about shipment delays. It didn't talk about AI. It focused just on the core competencies. That's hardware. That's design. that's engineering. None of the distractions were there. All the focus is on these new devices coming out on Friday, except as you mentioned, the iPhone air delay in mainland China, which is a whole other story. But for all intents and purposes, Apple's focusing on what it needs to focus on. And it's probably setting itself up for a very solid holiday period. Another really well-read set of reporting from Mark Gurman.

25:31We thank you. All things power on.

25:38Caroline Hyde:Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. Two technology stories as told through the markets. The first, Alphabet parent of Google has joined the$3 trillion market cap club, joining Apple, Microsoft and NVIDIA. The market's talking about the idea that that antitrust ruling went in its favor, not having to divest Chrome is a big catalyst. But remember in earnings, Google Cloud Platform really taking market share. So there's momentum in that name, but it's a milestone in technology history. The other big one, and actually this is the most read story pretty much on the Bloomberg Terminal and on the website, is about BYD.

26:12Caroline Hyde:So BYD has seen its shares fall about 30 % over the last four months from all-time highs that were hit earlier in the year. And Caroline, what a reversal in story. We started the year talking about how BYD was overtaking Tesla in all these markets like Europe and Asia, not just with EV but hybrid as well. That chart says things have reversed a little. Tesla outperformance in recent weeks, BYD really slumping. Check it out on Bloomberg.com. You should. And also, look, let's talk more about China, in particular, the trade talks with China, because U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant said a framework to keep the TikTok app running in the United States has been reached, and that President Trump and Xi could speak to complete this deal.

26:52Though the terms of the blueprint are pretty unclear. Let's bring in Bloomberg social media reporter Alexandra Levine. What's really interesting, Alex, is we've been very close before. Remind us of how close we came about like six months ago. Well, we came extremely close back in the spring. I think it was a couple of weeks before the deadline had been reached. Vice President Vance said, we are very close on a high level deal. And then days before, President Trump basically said we are at the finish line. And then within days, the entire thing had all but imploded because talks over tariffs between U.S.

27:26and China had basically escalated. So even though it could potentially be an exciting week for TikTok and also for the roughly half the country that uses the app, there is still a lot that we don't know.

27:37Caroline Hyde:In the time that we've gone to air, there have been these headlines from China's side confirming that this framework's in place. So we have it from China and Treasury Secretary Besant. And basically, the negotiators for China are saying that this is a good framework for both sides, but that China won't sacrifice its principles for this TikTok deal. I noted earlier in the show that one of the reactions to the news was Oracle shares rising. Remind us, like, if a deal goes through, who is going to own and operate and run TikTok in the United States? So, again, the terms of the deal are still unclear.

28:08Oracle, though, has for many months been floated as one possible leading contender here among other U.S. investors. Oracle would make a lot of sense, potentially, because Oracle and TikTok have this pre-existing relationship. they had been working together in the past on something called Project Texas, which was essentially a program aimed at helping TikTok secure and separate all of TikTok's U.S. user data in the United States and keep it basically separate from ByteDance's global operations in China.

28:39Caroline Hyde:Bloomberg's Alexandra Levine, I have a feeling you'll be back to talk about a TikTok deal in the days and weeks to come. Thank you very much. Stormtroopers from Star Wars vlogging with a selfie stick, dogs hosting a podcast. Such AI-generated videos are taking over social media, substituting for news and other kinds of creative content all over our feeds. As we enter the early stages of machine-generated media, the debate has been centering around the impact on Hollywood. But what about its impact on social media? Bloomberg Businessweek editor Brad Stone takes a deep dive in an essay. It's hard to summarize, but basically everywhere on social media, there's AI generated video.

29:17Caroline Hyde:There are more tools than ever available to do this. And we explained the industries that are being hit, but you've penned it in some detail through some case studies. That's right. And Ed, you miss babies being interviewed. That's a new one these days. But look, this is an opening essay for our screen time issue. And I wanted to examine what I'm seeing and what a lot of my friends are seeing in their social media feeds. And it is really incredible. A Rubicon has been crossed. I think back to this summer when you had this video of bunnies bouncing on a trampoline everywhere on TikTok, everywhere on Instagram.

29:55People thought it was real. And then there was an examination in the comments how one bunny seemed to disappear. And in fact, it was a creation of a 22-year-old named Andy Kozofsky. He did it one night when he is bored. The key here is Google's tool VO3. What's different about VO3 is it's not only raised the bar in terms of video generation, but it has also raised the bar in terms of audio generation. You can enter in a few prompts, you can enter in a script, and essentially, you know, the dogs who are talking, the babies who are talking, not only are they saying the written dialogue, but their lips are moving.

30:32So it's really kind of a perfect deepfake. The 22-year-old basically made that bunny disappear on purpose to create the discussion around all of it, Brad. But what's so interesting is he's really strong on saying this is democratization as we see it. How much is it upending actual creators' work? How much are we seeing Hollywood adopt and embrace this or not, as the case may be? I mean, it's really starting on social media. We saw with the Hollywood strikes a few years ago a great resistance among the industry around the embrace of AI. Now we are seeing that begin to change. I mean, recently Amazon or a studio affiliated with Amazon announced that it would be finishing Orson Welles' film, The Magnificent Ambersons, using AI to recreate some lost scenes.

31:22So it's beginning to seep out. But, you know, we're looking at the dog podcast right now. That's a Montreal company called Dog Pack App. They're trying to market themselves. and they've got dogs talking. It's kind of cringe. The humor is very dad joke, but people are responding to it. You kind of see it everywhere on social media right now. Who doesn't love a dad joke? Brad Stone, brilliant opening piece. We're all so excited about screen time. Thanks very much indeed. Meanwhile, coming up, we're going to be talking about startup liner sciences. It's aiming to turbocharge scientific discovery with guess what?

31:55Using AI, of course. We'll talk to the CEO about the latest funding round. It's big. There's a Series A. This is Bloomberg Tech.

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34:12Caroline Hyde:Startup Lila Sciences has just closed a$235 million Series A funding round. The company aims to create what it called scientific superintelligence by developing AI that runs thousands of scientific experiments at once. Let's bring in Jeff on Malthouse, the co-founder and CEO of Lila Sciences. That is an eye-catching series A. And I think the best place to start, Jeff, is just with the basics of explaining what it is Lila wants to do. Because, you know, maybe the money gives credibility. It gives you the news headline, but there's a very specific focus that you have. Yes, first of all, thank you for having me.

34:55Lila's mission is the reason for this fundraise. Our mission is scientific superintelligence to solve humankind's greatest challenges. That is, of course, a lofty mission. But what it means is that we're trying to build a kind of beautiful mind that can be a polymath across fields of science, materials, chemistry and life, and become superintelligent within them by running the scientific method itself.

35:20Caroline Hyde:Jeff, we became accustomed in 2024 to these very large Series A's all over the world, actually, particularly those focusing on specific models. Why do you need that level of capital from the beginning? What is it that requires that capital to be deployed? Wade? Yeah, first of all, I realize that by saying scientific method, I've either given euphoria or PTSD to audience members that may have enjoyed or not their most recent science class. So what's special about Lila is the realization that AI is now positioned to be able to run every single step of the scientific method. Scientific method is the most valuable wheel that has ever existed.

36:05And the reason for scale capital is running the scientific method at scale is going to lead to scaling laws for scientific intelligence that will go beyond what's possible with scaling laws of the Internet and previous human knowledge alone. Jeff, it's interesting where you stand. We've just seen the interesting investors coming on board and the pension money, the big pockets wanting to put money to work. But ultimately, call me a cynic, we've had an awful lot of scientific AI companies coming in, offering a new world of medical advancement. Why are you different? It seems to be something about the lab.

36:40So the mainstay of scientific AI companies are sitting in a small niche of science focused on a specific application. The insight that led to Lila is the same kind of insight that led to the modern scaling laws and ascent of large language models and reasoning capabilities, which is that we no longer need to compartmentalize science into a whole bunch of tiny subdomains. But instead, one can build a single kind of mind that can operate across an immense diversity of scientific fields and pull new knowledge into that single mastery of the way that the world around us works. And we believe that this is going to open up incredible frontiers across those subdomains and between those subdomains in medicine, energy, new climate technologies, and a lot more.

37:36Caroline Hyde:Jeff, we started this conversation by saying that Lila focuses on running thousands of experiments at once using a single AI model. Is this you taking advantage of quantum computing to do that or accelerated computing or both? Primarily the latter for now, but if you will, a beautiful mind for science needs a new kind of body. And those who are training only on data sets of the past are going to hit a ceiling of scientific intelligence. And that wheel of the scientific method, of course, has been in human minds and hands for all of our existence. And we believe the paradigm of what you're seeing behind me allows science to ascend into a higher intelligence, higher scale and higher speed.

38:26and the implications of that are that we're going to be able to pull inventions out of the future like has never been possible before. Well, when you start announcing some of the paying customers, you've got to come and tell us about it. Jeff von Maltzen, we appreciate it, co-founder and CEO of Lila Sciences. Now, let's talk about Mercado Libre, Latin America's e-commerce and fintech giant. He's just got a new CEO, Ariel Shefstein. We'll be taking on the reins next January after Marcos Galperin, who co-founded the company, led it to become the region's most valuable firm. Well, he's handing over the reins.

38:56And let's just hear about what the incoming CEO had to say when asked about his vision for the company for the next 10 years. He spoke in his first exclusive interview with international media as incoming CEO. I think we've done tremendous things over the first 26 years. But the opportunity for us in the next 26 are equally big or even bigger than what we've done in the first era of Mercado Libre. I think the opportunity to continue increasing the size of our e-commerce business through e-commerce penetration in retail is still very big in Latin America. Digital advertising is nascent in Latin America, and we are convinced that we can drive growth in that atmosphere.

39:41And last but not least, fintech, right? So financial inclusion in Latin America is still pending. And we can be the protagonists of the process of bringing more people into financial services across the region, as we have been doing over the last few years.

40:02The U.S. and the U.K. will sign an agreement to make it quicker for companies to build nuclear power stations, that the countries will use safety assessments of reactor designs from each other to fast-track their checks. The announcement comes as President Trump prepares to travel to Britain tomorrow with more economic deals expected to be announced. Already in Europe, doing deals is U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, exactly the person we want to talk to about the opportunity of nuclear, particularly in our world of AI. How quickly do you think it will be brought online in the U.S. or indeed the U.K.?

40:33Because your timeline is fast, it seems. It's aggressive, Caroline, and that's President Trump. You know, he came in all in on nuclear energy. And we will have reactors, these next generation small modular reactors, critical next year. In fact, I'm pretty confident we'll have one of them before July 4th of next year and several more during the year. Now, it's not the back end in electricity production, but it's the whole nuclear system running, demonstrating how it will work. I think this will expedite final permitting and sales and commercialization of the reactors. It's going to move fast. Not just fission, but fusion as well.

41:10How optimistic are you there? Eight to 15 years, I saw. Is that realistic? And how self-dependent would that make the U.S. for, what, five gigawatt designs that we're currently seeing just coming from Oracle and OpenAI alone? Super exciting. I worked on fusion energy in college 40 years ago. And we've seen steady progress for the last 40 years, mostly at the national labs, at the Department of Energy. But with AI and commercial fusion companies coming into space now, the pace of innovation is faster than ever before. I believe we will know the commercial pathways to fusion during the Trump administration.

41:49And as I said, I think we'll see commercial electricity from fusion energy on could be as fast as eight years. And I'd be very surprised if it's more than 15. It's coming. It's coming and it's exciting.

42:02Caroline Hyde:Secretary Wright, as you travel across Europe and head to the UK, what kind of instruction has the president given you to put these energy deals in the context of national security and defense? I think the president has talked from his campaign that his goal was prosperity at home and peace abroad. And he understands instinctively that both of those are intimately tied to energy. You need low-cost, abundant, affordable energy at home to lower costs for Americans and make businesses thrive. That's the same agenda overseas. Here I am in Europe. They're very, of course, shocked at what happened with the Russia invasion of Ukraine and their energy dependence on Russia.

42:46Everybody gets that was a mistake. They want to switch that dependence from Russia onto the United States. We are bringing them assurances we can continue to wrap up natural gas exports into Europe. as a safe, secure partner. And of course, there's huge enthusiasm for American nuclear technology over here. You want to get your energy and your key strategic inputs from your allies, not your adversaries.

43:10Caroline Hyde:When President Trump took office, he pledged to cut electricity price in half. Within 12 months for everyday American Secretary Wright, in the time since the president's been in office, electricity prices have risen 10%. Is he still able to make good on that election pledge? And how does he get there? Look, the president is a very ambitious, aim high guy. He is absolutely committed to lowering energy prices in the United States. We've seen that in gasoline and diesel and oil products. We're seeing screaming increase in U.S. natural gas production and prices there as well, not rising at all. Electricity grid's harder.

43:52It's just long timeframes, long timeframes change that whole system cost. But if you look at it on a micro scale, the president is ready to permit and we are permitting immediately electric generating capacity that will be less than half the cost of the stuff that was built under the Biden administration. So are we adding new capacity on the grid that's less than half the cost of the Biden administration? Absolutely. The president's adamant about that. For that to filter in for the whole grid cost to come down meaningfully, that will take some time. But rest assured, we're driving as hard and fast as we can.

44:28Secretary Wright, you've been driving hard and fast when it comes to, well, updating, it feels like, the Department of Energy's view on what to use when it comes to energy sources. And in particular, I'm thinking about the thought leadership. Back in July, you put forward what was a report. It was deemed about the threat of climate change and said basically it's exaggerated. Now, that working group has been disbanded. Many have been critical of some of the findings. Do you still stand by those findings that were ultimately saying a lot of the climate views were wrong about the speed at which the globe is getting hotter, at least?

45:04Actually, no dispute at all about temperature and sea level data. What we did was just popularize the data that the climate alarmists and the politicians don't want to popularize. 90 % of what's in our climate report is in the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change reports. I've been studying this issue for 20 years, so quite familiar with it. Five fantastic scientists produced that report. And, of course, environmental groups that don't want an honest, fact-based dialogue about climate change sued over a silly procedural thing about the paperwork for one of the five. And instead of fighting this in court, the climate scientists, I'm sure they'll still respond to the questions.

45:47We've opened a real dialogue about climate change, and that's exactly what we wanted to do. And I couldn't be happier about it. It's funny, I go on more and more shows talking about climate change, and no one wants to ask me any questions about climate change. I'll keep asking you, because why did your department undertake it in such a way? It seemed that the study wasn't following usual procedures like the OMB's guidelines on science reports. No, this is when you publish a technical paper, when you publish the paper, that's where the dialogue starts. We wanted to publish. This was from no scientists at DOE, although we did do peer review at DOE.

46:23These are five independent scientists that we said, please write a report. It just sort of summarizes the big picture about climate change so we can publish it, open it up for public comment. And we've got tons of comments. Lots of them are silly. But what you can see from the substance of the comments we've received is there's very little disagreement with the data we published on temperature data, sea level data, and models. People are complaining around the edges or mostly complaining around, yeah, but the future might be different. That's true. We don't know the future. But I heard 20 years ago the future might be different.

47:02We're just publishing the real data on sea level rise, on temperature increases, on the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which makes the planet greener, a little bit wetter. Climate change is a real thing, but it's just been so wildly exaggerated and misrepresented. And it's made the climate scientists that go on TV only the most dramatic, alarmist ones that make TV news. Most of the honest, sober ones are in the background. We're bringing them to the forefront. U.S.

47:34Caroline Hyde:Energy Secretary Chris Wright, currently in Vienna but continuing through Europe. Thank you very much for joining us on Bloomberg Tech. Just a quick update. NVIDIA shares have swung from a pretty notable decline to positive territory. You remember the story broke this morning that China's market regulator had said that NVIDIA violated anti-monopoly laws on the 2020 acquisition of Mellanox. That was a bargaining chip, pardon the pun, right, Caro, in the context of these U.S.-China talks that are happening. And it's a big week in that context. It is. And remember, it was a big week for NVIDIA stock last week.

48:05It added about 6%. So maybe there's just a bit of profit taking earlier today. That does it from this edition of Bloomberg Tech. But don't forget to check out our podcast, Find It On The Terminal, as well as online on Apple, Spotify, and iHeart. From New York and San Francisco, this is Bloomberg Tech.

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