Cathie Wood on What Comes Next in AI and Big Tech

Joe Weisenthal (0:00)

Hey, Odd Lots listeners, we're coming to DC.

Tracy Alloway (0:02)

We're finally doing it, Joe. It's gonna be our first live show in Washington, DC, our nation's capital. It's also finally gonna be the time where we actually talk about the Jones Act.

Joe Weisenthal (0:13)

We've been talking about doing the Jones Act episode of Odd Lots for a long time, and it's become this recurring joke that we've never done. But we're gonna do it in grand style, because we're gonna be doing it live in DC, and it's actually gonna be a debate.

Tracy Alloway (0:28)

Yeah, so we have Sara Fuentes from the Transportation Institute. She's gonna be taking the pro side, and we also have Colin Graybaugh of the Cato Institute. He'll be taking the against side. It's gonna be really interesting to see how all of that shakes out.

Joe Weisenthal (0:43)

In addition to that, we're gonna be speaking with Blair Levin, who was around during the telecom bubble, and we have Andrew Ferguson, the new head of the FTC, the one who's replaced Lena Cohn. We're gonna be talking about mergers and acquisitions and all that stuff. So it should be a really fun night.

Tracy Alloway (0:59)

If you want to come and join us for that evening, it's gonna be on March 12th at the Miracle Theatre. Go to bloomberg.com/oddlots, and you can find the link to purchase tickets. We hope to see you there.

Cathie Wood (1:14)

Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Joe Weisenthal (1:16)

Podcasts, radio, news.

Tracy Alloway (1:29)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (1:34)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (1:36)

Joe, I love it when we do live events. It's very fun. Sometimes there's audience participation, which is great. We get to sit on stage and look important. And this week, we were on a very important stage. We were at the Bloomberg Invest Conference. This is our flagship conference of the year. And we got to speak to someone who I've wanted to interview for quite a long time.

Joe Weisenthal (1:59)

I like doing live events for sure, but I also love the comfort of my headphones, not having to worry about how I look.

Tracy Alloway (2:07)

I do get nervous about guests showing up.

Joe Weisenthal (2:09)

Oh, I get nervous about guests. And they've always showed up. We've never done a live event where the guest didn't show up.

Tracy Alloway (2:15)

Oh, you're going to jinx it now.

Joe Weisenthal (2:16)

I know. But that's right. But on Tuesday, March 4th, we were down at the Bloomberg Invest Conference and we got to interview Cathie Wood.

Tracy Alloway (2:24)

That's right. So Cathie Wood, famously the founder and CEO of ARK Invest, famously an investor in some pretty big tech names like Tesla. So we got to ask her questions about Elon Musk and things like that. Basically, just hear what she thinks is coming down the pipeline in the upcoming years in terms of technology. She's very optimistic, Joe.

Joe Weisenthal (2:46)

She's very optimistic. She expects to see a golden age of tech investing, a golden age for American business bigger than the Reagan era, as she called it. So take a listen to our interview with Cathie.

Tracy Alloway (3:00)

So the big story in markets right now is a widespread sell-off in the past couple of days. But even before then, we saw something specifically focused on AI. And the worries seem to come out of nowhere. Suddenly, everyone was talking about DeepSeek, this Chinese AI model, and we saw a really intense sell-off. Were you aware of DeepSeek before that day? And how big a problem do you think something like that is for USAI?

Cathie Wood (3:30)

Actually we were aware of DeepSeek, R1. I think the paper came out in December. So our analysts had poured over it and thought it was a very interesting model. I think the surprise and the question was around, wait a minute, did this take only $6 million to build this large language model?

And did they really do it on a high-end workstation? Are we going to need all this data center capacity after all? And I think with time we've learned that they did a lot of pre-training before. Apparently, they have a 50,000 cluster of GPUs, which help with the pre-training. Nonetheless, as some of our finest technology experts, Sam Altman and Jensen Wong, included, they commented, they were terribly impressed by the algorithm itself. And I think what we were impressed by is it's open source. Anyone can use it. So, here we go. Meta Platforms was really the open source platform, large language model. Now we have DeepSeek. And I think yesterday, another one came out, Kung Fu.