Bloomberg Surveillance: The Future of AI Investment

Brad Stone, Bloomberg News Senior Executive Editor for Global Tech, shares his AI insights from the World Economic Forum in Davos . Wedbush's Dan Ives details his takeaways from the CES conference . Dana Telsey of the Telsey Advisory Group discusses the strength of the US consumer in the wake of retail sales data . Charles Schwab's Liz Ann Sonders ties in Led Zepplein with her markets outlook. Hosted by Tom Keene and Damian Sassower. Get the Bloomberg Surveillance newsletter, delivered every weekday. Sign up now: https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/surveillance Full Transcript: This is the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. I'm Tom Keane, along with Jonathan Farrell and Lisa Abramowitz. Join us each day for insight from the best and economics, geopolitics, finance and investment. Subscribe to Bloomberg Surveillance on demand on Apple, Spotify and anywhere you get your podcasts, and always on Bloomberg dot Com, the Bloomberg Terminal, and the Bloomberg Business app. He is definitive on Amazon of course, the Trophy book right now Amazon Unbound. Jeff Bezos The Invention of a Global Empire. He joins us from Davos, the meetings of the World Economic Forum at brad Thrilled to have you with Bloomberg Surveillance this morning. Let me cut to the chase. I see AI at Microsoft is countable, revenue, co pilot, azore all the rest of it. And I see a lot of other AI is smoking mirrors. How do you parse between legitimate artificial intelligence future and the makeup, the fantasy, the comedy of it. How do you parse? Oh? Boy, well, thanks Tom for having me. Hi Damien. Look, I've been covering Silicon Valley long enough that I've seen this story play out before. We're at the beginning of a hype cycle. There will be disappointment a lot of you know, the visions of Agi computers that reason that change our world, they seem far fetched, you know. There there we talk about a trough of dissolutionment that will happen. But you're right that there you know that there are real revenues, real benefits. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it was bringing its open AI powered co pilot to the office seat, so you know at twenty dollars a month, making it available small business as an individual users. That's real. Yeah, brtt I signed up last night. I was going to be reack. Can you see me, Damien? Can you see me do an artificial Intelli get out of the way. Fred. If I look at this, can you say that the Magnificent seven they seem to be away from the hype. How is the Magnificent seven going to create revenue and cash flow out of AI? Yeah? I mean they're the best position because they're they're they're selling the picks and shovels to all the miners. You know, this is Alphabet and Amazon and Microsoft running the world's most powerful cloud services and making basically AI available as a service to every university and startup in consumer goods company that you know wants to use these tools for a variety. It's it could be R and D could be customer service. So you know, even even though that'll be a work in progress there, the revenues will be real. My question for Santia Tom by the way yesterday was you know, do you control any of this. You're you're investors in open AI. You don't even have a board seat. You're like in the back of the bus with a seatbelt, and it's got such peculiar governance. And he said, you know, it's fine, we just want stability. So I don't know if I quite believe it. I think they're outsourcing a key competency. But they're in the cappards seat, the driver's seat because they did make that investment. I'm sure the Amazons and the Googles of the world wish that they hadn't passed up the open AI opportunity when they had the chance. Well, Brad, I appreciate you answering those two questions from that artificial personification of Tom Keen that wasn't really Tom Keen answering those questions, And my question for you is talk to me about deep fake videos X these platforms. What's to stop open AI and chat, GPT and all this artificial nonsense from mudding the waters ahead of the election? Yeah? Well, what it's funny because it is really the talk of the conference that you've got national elections in some seventy seven countries around the world. Half the world's population could head to the polls at the same time as this enormously powerful technology is made available to people, and what's to stop it from being missus? I know this is going to carry a lot of water with our listeners, but you know they are raising their right hand and putting their left hand over their hearts and saying, we're not going to allow our technology to be abusing. They really understand the risks. I mean, I mean do they? I think they do? They? I think they do because we've all seen this movie before and meta its reputation went through the meat grinder because social media was perverted. You know, yesterday, it's no surprise that Sam Altman's here. He spent time with us at the Bloomberg House, and before our interview, they posted a sta