What's up: Apple partners with Google on AI; Google-parent Alphabet becomes newest $4 trillion company; Meta's strategic AI hire; AI gets healthy.

Good morning. Ask any CIO and they’ll tell you that even in this era of “vibe coding” and AI agents, technology implementations are still hard.

They’re not alone.

Apple helped define the modern expectation of seamless technology, yet it has struggled to integrate AI at scale. On Tuesday the company announced that it would rely on AI models from Google, which itself only recently seems to have found its AI footing. More on that below.

The WSJ Leadership Institute’s Isabelle Bousquette tells a similar story of complexity at another tech giant, Netflix, which has been taking on live TV, a format nearly a century old, but still brutally unforgiving in the streaming age.

Since March 2023, Netflix has aired more than 200 live events. Many have gone smoothly. Others haven’t, including a November 2024 Jake Paul–Mike Tyson bout plagued by streaming failures.

“We’re still learning a lot,” Netflix Chief Technology Officer Elizabeth Stone told Isabelle.

Sticking to the original programming. Even as Netflix cements its status as an entertainment powerhouse, including a recent bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the company remains, at its core, a technology company.

Isabelle reports on how getting live right—where it either works or it doesn’t—required more than better infrastructure. It required a culture that rewarded stress-testing ideas, surfacing problems early, and learning quickly from mistakes.

“I didn’t quite grasp the complexity,” said Brandon Riegg, Netflix’s vice president for nonfiction series and sports, who began pushing for live programming after joining the company in 2016. “It quickly became apparent just how much of a lift that was from both a resource and an expertise and execution standpoint.”

Read on to see how what Riegg calls Netflix's culture of 'candor and feedback' helped propel its efforts.

Riegg sat down with the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Isabelle Bousquette to talk about how he navigated Netflix’s culture of “candor and feedback,” and ultimately turned live into one of the buzziest parts of Netflix’s content portfolio.

WSJLI: Did you have a sense of how challenging this effort would be when you started out?

Riegg: I didn't at first, and that was more my naivete over being at a streaming service versus a linear network where I worked previously. So I didn't quite grasp or comprehend the complexity. It was sort of building a whole other foundation that we were then attaching onto the streaming foundation.

WSJLI: How was your working relationship with the Product & Tech team throughout the process?

Riegg: I like to consider myself one of the content execs that is more proficient in speaking tech or engineering with our P&T teams. Definitely, we have a culture of candor and feedback here and I would sometimes be the sole content exec in these big P&T meetings. And I got a lot of edgy questions and things that they wanted to challenge me on.

WSJLI: What were you most challenged on?

Riegg: They would ask ‘why?’ a lot. One thing that had gone around that I addressed head on with everybody is they said, ‘this is requiring a lot of manpower and resources for something that at best is probably 1% of our output.’

WSJLI: How did you respond to that and get them on board?

Riegg: And I said, look, that's fair. I go, ‘but if we do our jobs correctly, that 1% can be bigger or more impactful than the 99%’. That was the thesis. But, when it comes to the creative, you can never have 100% certainty. We got off to a good start with the Chris Rock special, but I'd say the Jake Paul, Mike Tyson fight was the real tipping point where I think the people that were unsure of the initiatives suddenly realized the impact live programming could have.

Riding the success of its Gemini 3 model and a just-announced deal with Apple, Google parent Alphabet’s value topped $4 trillion Monday, WSJ reports. Four tech companies have traded at market capitalizations of $4 trillion, and now only Nvidia is still above that mark.

A recap. Google pulled ahead in the race to develop AI with the recent launch of its Gemini 3 model, which earned praise for its speed, intelligence and creative capabilities. Gemini now has more than 650 million monthly users, up from 450 million last summer.

Also Monday, Apple announced that it will lean on the internet search giant for its AI foundational models, CNBC reports. “These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year,” Apple said.

With the deal it looks like the sluggish effort to upgrade the first-mover assistant for the post-ChatGPT era might become a reality, raising the question of what happens with OpenAI. The startup’s chatbot is integrated with Siri to tackle more complex questions.

The announcement should not come as a complete surprise. The two companies have been longtime partners, with Google providing the default search engine for Apple’s Safari web browser for years.

Nvidia says it will invest $1 billion in an AI drug laboratory with Eli Lilley, pushing deeper into drug discovery, a move that pushes the chipmaker deeper into drug discovery, an area long touted as a major beneficiary of its AI chips, even as the field has yet to deliver major, headline-grabbing breakthroughs.

Nvidia tells Bloomberg that the partnership will help its engineers better understand how labs actually function, from equipment to the day-to-day research tasks, knowledge the company says is critical to building more automated, AI-driven workflows.

The push comes as competition intensifies across AI-powered health care tools.

Days after OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT Health, rival Anthropic launched its own health care offerings, targeting hospitals and medical providers as well as consumers, NBC News reports.

Both allow users to connect their health records to the respective chatbots—with privacy safeguards in place—and OpenAI has recently taken another step in that direction, agreeing to acquire Torch for about $100 million in equity, The Information reports. The one-year-old AI startup lets users analyze their health data from health systems like Kaiser Permanente.

Meta Platforms is pouring so much money and talent (and, yes, even more money) into its AI pursuits that it has hired a former banker to help develop partnerships with governments to finance and deploy data centers.

The WSJ reports that former Trump adviser Dina Powell McCormick was named president and vice chair in a newly created role, tasked with helping guide Meta’s overall strategy and execution. Powell McCormick brings more than 25 years of experience, including 16 years at Goldman Sachs, where she was global head of the sovereign business.

At Meta, she will also work with longtime Meta executive Santosh Janardhan and Daniel Gross, a recent AI hire, who are leading a new initiative called Meta Compute, focused on securing the massive computing power Meta’s AI models require.

President Trump on Monday congratulated Powell McCormick in a social-media post, highlighting Meta’s savvy hire as it continues to deepen ties with the current administration.

The company’s single-minded AI pursuit is now leading Meta to make cuts to its previous obsession: the Metaverse, the concept that drove the company’s 2021 rebrand. The New York Times reports that Meta plans to cut about 10% of employees at its Reality Labs unit, which oversees virtual-reality headsets and V.R.-based social platforms. Reality Labs employs roughly 15,000 people.

AI chip fabricator Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is to expand its Arizona presence as part of a potential trade agreement in which the U.S. would lower tariffs on Taiwanese from the current 20% rate, WSJ reports.

OpenAI is set to air a 60-second commercial during NBC’s broadcast of Super Bowl LX, escalating its battle for users as rival AI companies gain ground, WSJ reports. Tech companies including Anthropic, Google and Perplexity collectively spent $333.6 million on linear TV ads promoting their AI offerings in the U.S. last year, a 43% jump from the prior year, according to estimates from ad tracker iSpot.

Google is dropping its AI Overview from certain medical queries after the Guardian found the service providing false and misleading information on liver function tests.

Some Trump administration officials and allies have expressed concern that the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell could imperil the president’s nominees in the Senate and rattle financial markets. (WSJ)

With the government shutting down the internet and throttling phone services, Iranians are leaning heavily on Elon Musk’s Starlink service to share videos of growing protests and the regime’s escalating crackdown with the world. (WSJ)

The Supreme Court of Panama is winding up deliberations that will decide whether a Hong Kong company can run two ports at either end of the Panama Canal, a decision closely watched in Washington and Beijing. (WSJ)

The federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota has descended on the stores and parking lots of Target, putting the hometown retailer in a tough political spot as it faces pressure from some locals to keep border protection agents out. (WSJ)

This February 10–11, technology leaders will gather in Palo Alto for The WSJ Technology Council Summit to explore the realities of enterprise AI, the evolving role of tech leadership and the urgency behind building meaningful, business-driving AI strategies. Join the Technology Council and be part of the conversations shaping the future of corporate innovation.

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The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.