Why AI May Need Bitcoin

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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There is no assurance that Bitcoin will maintain its value over the long term. ARK strongly encourages any investor considering an investment in Bitcoin or any other digital asset to consult with a financial professional before investing. All statements made regarding Bitcoin are strictly beliefs and points of view held by ARK and or podcast guests and are not recommendations by ARK to buy, sell or hold Bitcoin. Historical results are not indications of future results.

**Rod Roudi** (0:50)
This has just been like one of the coolest things I get to do, Cathie, is you, especially in the team, have trusted me to curate some of my amazing, crazy out there friends, not you guys. You guys are my regular friends, Steve, Paul and Jesse.
But honestly, do you all platform this and have the discussion? You said it best, there's big time convergence happening across AI, energy and Bitcoin. And I think today we'll actually honestly, we may even touch on energy side, Steve, with the mesh networks and a number of other and the compute stuff that we were just discussing before we hit record. But I want to take a step back and just say, welcome to the Bitcoin brainstorm.
Cathie and the ARK team, we've been doing this for two plus years. Today's topic, we got Paul Itoi, we got Jesse Posner, as well as we got Steve Lee from Spiral. We're going to focus on Bitcoin and AI. I don't know where this conversation is going to go. All I know is, I've been in a rabbit hole and all I've been doing is in my buzz terminal and just vibe coding and working with the team. So I've pulled my head up to now have this conversation with all of you guys, so I'm super excited.

**Cathie Wood** (2:01)
And you know what? It looks like you've been vibe coding, Rod. It does, it does. There's something different. So we're going to bring you back to human life.

**Rod Roudi** (2:11)
Thank you, thank you. Cathie, I'll start it off with you, just because from your perspective, actually two years ago, folks want to go to, I believe it was episode two, and we had Paul on with us. We were talking about Bitcoin and AI. We were talking about machine to machine payments. We were talking about a number of different things.
One of the areas from an investor standpoint that I can't grok just yet is, are we looking at this in silos like Bitcoin, energy, AI, or are we truly looking at this in terms of a convergence right now? I mentioned this buzz platform, which we'll talk about, but I literally don't know which way is up right now. It's amazing as well as scary, if you will.

**Cathie Wood** (2:53)
Yeah. You're capturing the sentiment in the equity market. It's become very unstable around these convergences. I think last year when Elon Musk, it's probably nine months, I'm going to say now, he posted on X. I think my companies are converging more than I even expected them to. Then of course, soon thereafter, SpaceX bought XAI, and now there are rumors of SpaceX buying Tesla, so that it's completely integrated back into the chip with Terafab.
I think the reason this is feeling so chaotic is because really for the first time, well, in my career, we are seeing a number of S-curves hit their inflection points around the same time, and I think that's a big question though, especially when it comes to robotics.
So you have S-curves feeding S-curves and leading to the possibility of super-exponential growth. So not just growth like Amazon for 25 years, at roughly 25 percent compound annual rate. Nobody believed that was possible in the day. So that's exponential growth. Super-exponential growth is possible as these S-curves really feed each other. So I think a lot of the questions out there are around, okay, are we ready for primetime, especially in robotics and humanoid robots, I think being the biggest question. And that's what we're wrestling with in our brainstorms and our day-to-day meetings.

**Rod Roudi** (4:45)
I'm going to come back to that one, especially with your experience in Austin at the RoboTaxi.