BG2 with Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner | NVDA, Chips, AI Compute Build Out, Impact of AI on Big Tech, Earnings & Macro Set-up | E03

**Brad Gerstner** (0:00)
Would you rather have an assistant with the intelligence of like Einstein, but they have no access to the internet, and they don't know anything about your history? Or would you like to have an assistant that's just above average intelligence, knows everything about you, and they can use the internet? Okay, you would choose that.
Hey, great to have you here in person.
I remember when you were right up this hill. You guys were over here. So I had a couple thoughts this morning. First, I got to take a ride in Full Self-Driving 12

**Bill Gurley** (0:43)
How was that?

**Brad Gerstner** (0:44)
It was mind-boggling.
I think this is going to be a bit of a chat-cheap-eaty moment for Full Self-Driving, but what it really, it just reminded me of the magic of this moment. Tesla rebuilding their models for how they do self-driving around imitation learning and all this interesting stuff going on over there.
I think they probably made more progress in the last 12 months than in the last seven years in terms of what's going on there. And it's going to be rolled out here. It's already rolled out to, I think, 5,000 people. And so people are going to start experiencing that. And I think we're having more and more of these moments because this substrate we're going to talk a lot about today, AI, and just the compute, like what it unlocks. The second in prepping for this pod was how bad you make my head hurt. You know, I was thinking about this. What I love about this pod is like, it's a forcing function. You and I talk all the time. You're always challenging me. We're always comparing notes. But now with a little bit of structure around it, every couple of weeks, we have to think about some topics. Today, we're going to talk a lot about, think AI and compute and chips and its impact on big businesses. And honestly, I liken it to an athlete, and they say, in order to be the best I can possibly be, maybe Kobe, I want to practice against the best. Oh, great cut. No, but it's like, listen, the reality is it's like running 10 miles a day to get ready for a big game.
If you're in this business and you're not exhausted with the analysis you're doing, the thinking you're doing, particularly at moments like these to try to gather this data and try to gather edge, then you're probably not going to end up on top of the heap.

**Bill Gurley** (2:25)
Yeah, I agree. And I think that having a topic or an idea that you want to fully flush out and be able to talk about causes you to place a few phone calls, read a few PDFs, and before you know it, you actually realize you've learned something you didn't know five days earlier.

**Brad Gerstner** (2:43)
It's a, I think the little, pull the screen back a little bit. I mean, you and I've talked, or interacted five, 10 times a day over the course of last week on these topics. And then we turn over a rock and we find more data, more information. We share that with one another. It leads to another conversation, you know, and the combined networks allow us to ask a lot of the smartest people in the world the questions we need to be asking to try to figure out this moment. So it's been a lot of fun, but it does give me a bit of a headache.

**Bill Gurley** (3:12)
Hopefully a good one.
So we remain kind of in our earning season. And so what's happened in the past few weeks that you think is super important?

**Brad Gerstner** (3:24)
Well, we have a few stocks that have run a lot. Meta, NVIDIA up 30, 40%, even with the pullback that we had today. But the truth is the NASDAQ hasn't really moved that much. I mean, I think we're up three or 4% through today. If you look at the median stock, I think it's up about 1%. In fact, I think we have a chart here just on the dispersion that we see in the NASDAQ. You know, and so remember last year was like this risk on moment, a mean reverting moment for all of technology.
And this year, we're really starting to see the winners and the losers. We have some software companies that reported after the bell tonight that are down a lot because they're not seeing the AI pull forward that may be an Amazon or a Microsoft. So that's my first takeaway. My second takeaway is, you know, against these higher prices for some of these companies, you know, the backdrop looks a little bit more challenging.