Welcome to closing bell. I'm Scott Wapner live from Post 9 here at the New York Stock Exchange.

This maker breakout begins with a new front in the battle for AI dominance. Devices as meta makes a stunning Apple advancement, all while Open AI lurks with its own ambitions.

We will discuss all of that with our experts today. CNBC tech reporter Steve Kovac and big technologies,

Alex Kanchowicz, Kovac and Kanchowitz, they are back. We'll do that in just a moment. We'll show you the scorecard here with 60 to go in regulation. It's been really a mixed day for stocks and not doing too much on either side of the plate today. today you can see the nasdaQ barely green while the Dow and the S&P are barely

red meta, though, is having one of its best days in months. On a report, it's ready to scale back

its Metaverse plans even further. Invidia, it is higher today. And a nice day for the banks,

too, as several hit new highs. We'll follow all of those. There's Wells Bank of America and J.P. Morgan just to name three. How about Salesforce today? It's up after its earnings. Snowflake, though, not good. Down 11%. And several of the AI power names are getting a bit of a jolt today, too. So we'll watch those like GEVernova of better than 5%. It does take us to our talk of the tape, the AI Battleground.

Let's welcome in Kovac and Kanchowitz for more on that. Steve, I begin with you.

Let's not start on the dialing back the Metaverse even further by Meta, but on this poaching of Allen

die and why that is so significant here for META and for Apple losing their

head of design for all these years. Yeah, sure. So Alan Dye, Scott, he was the user interface

designer. So basically everything you see on your iPhone, that liquid glass design that came

out in September. That's all him. But more importantly, Scott, he was the

designer behind the software of the Apple Vision Pro. I don't have to tell you how that turned out for

Apple, but the idea here is he's going to bring some of his other colleagues and acolytes over

from Apple. It's not just Alan Die. He's bringing some team members over as well, and to really step on the gas, so to speak,

on these AI gadgets over there at Meta and work on the design front on that.

I will also say that Apple is going to do is basically following Mehta's playbook here,

because we're expecting them about a year from now to have their own version of these AI glasses

very similar to the

meta rayband glasses that we talk about so much.

But this time, it's going to hinge on Apple intelligence.

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