Odd Lots - Cathie Wood on What Comes Next in AI and Big Tech

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

Markets have been selling off, with shares of tech companies like Nvidia down almost 20% so far this year. But even before the recent selloff, DeepSeek rattled the AI market and sparked questions over how US platforms will compete and actually monetize their technology. Despite all these hurdles, some investors remain tech optimists. Cathie Wood, the founder, CEO and chief investment officer of ARK Investment Management, is one of the most prominent, with ARK's Innovation Fund heavily invested in companies like Tesla, Coinbase and Roku. In this conversation, recorded live on stage at Bloomberg Invest, we discuss Cathie's view of potential opportunities in the space, and why she's expecting the Trump administration to create a Reagan Era-esque "golden age" for investors.Read More: Cathie Wood Sees Trump Era as ‘Golden Age’ for Wall StreetCathie Wood May Have Lost $14 Billion. But She’s InterestingOdd Lots is coming to Washington, DC on March 12! Get your tickets for our Jones Act debate here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, Oddlots listeners, we're coming to D.C. We're finally doing it, Joe. It's going to be our first live show in Washington, D.C., our nation's capital. It's also finally going to be the time where we actually talk about the Jones Act. We've been talking about doing the Jones Act episode of Oddlots for a long time, and it's become this recurring joke that we've never done on. But we're going to do it in grand style because we're going to be doing it live in D.C. And it's actually going to be a debate.

Yeah. So we have Sarah. Fuentes from the Transportation Institute. She's going to be taking the pro side. And we also have Colin Graebow of the Cato Institute. He'll be taking the against side. It's going to be really interesting to see how all of that shakes out. In addition to that, we're going to 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 Con. We're going to be talking about mergers and acquisitions and all that stuff. So it should be a really fun night.

want to come and join us for that evening. It's going to be on March 12th at the Miracle Theater. Go to Bloomberg.com forward slash oddlots and you can find the link to purchase tickets. We hope to see you there. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. Joe, I love it when we do live events. It's very fun. Sometimes there's audience participation, which is great. We get to, you know, 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 wanted to interview for

quite a long time. I like doing live events, for sure. But, you know, I also love the comfort of my headphones, not having to worry about how I look. I do get nervous about guests showing up. Oh, I get nervous about that. That's always, and they've always showed up. We've never done a live event where the guest didn't show up. Oh, you're going to jinx it now. I know. But that's right. But on a Tuesday, March 4th, we were down at the Bloomberg Invest conference and we got to interview Kathy Wood. That's right. So Kathy Wood, famously the founder and CEO of Arc Invest, famously an investor in some pretty big tech names like Tesla. So we got to ask her, you know, questions about Elon Musk and things like that. And basically just hear what she thinks is coming down the pipeline in the upcoming

years in terms of technology. She's very optimistic, Joe. 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 Kathy. So the big story in markets right now is a widespread sell-off in the past couple of days. But even before, we saw something specifically focused on AI. And the worries seemed 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? Actually, we were aware of Deepseek, R-1. 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 helped 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 Deep Seek. And I think yesterday another one came out, Kung Fu. Oh, I totally missed that one. I love trying the new ones. I'll try it. I'll try it tomorrow. Right now, we're recording this March 4th.

When the market sold off, there was this concern like, oh, will the greater efficiency mean at the margins, less demand for chips or less impulse to build out data centers. And there's no like hard evidence of that, but, you know, there's, you know, the big tech company's enormous KAPX budgets every single year. And they're throwing out these unbelievable numbers. There are hints here and there. Have you observed anything tangible, say over the last several weeks, that to you suggest that there is some change at the margin, deep seek aside in how much businesses, hypers, et cetera, are throwing at AI right now? have not seen any change in momentum. There's no evidence of a slowdown. The power of these models is profound. And if anything, we just had a conversation with one of the largest LLM. We're under an

NDA, so I can't talk about which one, providers. And it's clear that nations, educational systems and enterprises are all, say, we have got to do this. This is transformational in so many ways. Many are talking and thinking about productivity and efficiency, but others are thinking about deep research, especially with the new reasoning models and deep research is one of them

and are just blown away by the results that we're getting. So I'm not seeing any slowdown at all. So you mentioned the fact that DeepSeek is open, source, and that was a big differentiator between it and some other models. I know you're a big fan of open source. How do you incorporate that aspect into, I guess, an investment analysis? And also, did Open AI make a mistake by not going open source? Well, we've been tracking closed models and open source for ever since the chat GPT moment. And what you'll see is the closed models have been ahead.

of the open source models. But if you look at the slope of the line of the performance improvement, open source is actually a steeper slope. So the reason I love open source is it is helping along the competition, helping the movement along, helping it go faster.

And I think that open source, nipping at the heel of closed, is a very good thing. So, you know, Well, Chad GPT came on to everybody's radar, I guess late 2022. And I think objectively, anyone who spends any time with these tools in a sense just absolutely jaw-dropping, right? Are you surprised, however, that we're like this far into it?

And the tools are so in some sense extraordinary, but we can talk about some of the flaws and limitations. And yet we really haven't seen much of a macro impact from their use. We haven't seen some sector of the economy. the labor force get laid off. We haven't seen some major surge in measured productivity gains, although that's infamously hard to measure. Are you surprised in any sense by the existence of the technology

and what seems like sort of a modest macro impact? So I do think productivity has been boosted to some extent. And you're right. It's very difficult to measure this. My background's economics, and in the 80s, productivity was a big question, mark and we saw how flawed the measurements are and probably still are. So I can only tell you the rate of uptake is so much, is that enterprises are seeing a difference. Maybe if they're not laying people off, they're not hiring them. And that's because these AI tools are making their own, especially

engineers, so much more productive, right? So you just don't have to hire that next person. If you've seen the number of coding employees in the United States has dropped like a cliff. I mean, off a cliff. It hasn't dropped like a cliff. It's dropped off a cliff. And I don't know if you've seen that chart. So that very much has happened as engineers just become more and more productive. You know, one of the things that we're wondering is, okay, what part of the software stack will this, the traditional software stack, will this impact. And we think the AI revolution, what we see already losing share to some extent, it is still growing, but losing share is software as a service. And, you know, I think we're all paying

very close attention to the revenue growth dynamics of these companies. A Salesforce.com, revenue growth isn't picking up. In fact, it continues to decelerate. I think it's next quarter will be, I think, 7% down from 9%. That's not what's supposed to happen here. And so I think that might be what you're referring to. Wait a minute. Where are the top line dynamics? Where are they coming from?

Well, I think we have a lot of entrepreneurs in a lot of garages or in R&D centers who are creating the next big thing. And, you know, we look at two profound ramifications of AI that we understand we've been researching them for so long. The largest AI project on Earth is Robotaxies, autonomous driving networks. We think that's going to drive $8 to $10 trillion in revenue globally in the next five to 10 years, up from zero now. So that's called embodied, embodied AI. The most profound application of AI, we believe, is going to be in health care. And the convergence of sequencing technologies, artificial intelligence, and new technologies like CRISPR gene editing are already

curing diseases. Sickle cell disease and beta thalcemia cured. CRISPR therapeutics has that cure. It is generating revenue now. People find this one very hard to believe. because it hasn't happened before, but the R&D explosion in health care is like nothing I've ever seen. And we think we're going to return to the golden age for health care. I started in the 80s when Genentech had taken off

and created the golden age for health care back then. Returns to R&D back then were in the 30% range. Today, for the broad-based pharma biotech field, the returns are down. the 4% range. We think with all of these new tools and the incredible productivity being added to research and discovery in the healthcare space, we're going back to the Golden Age where returns on R&D could be 30, 40% plus. Since you mentioned robotaxies, we've got to talk about Tesla.

Of course. Obviously a big component of your portfolio. Elon Musk seems very busy nowadays, to put it mildly. As an investor, do you worry at all that he is perhaps distracted from ostensibly the day-to-day running of the company? We've been getting this question practically since the beginning. So Tesla and then he starts all these other companies, right? And people are saying, does that not concern you? So I'll answer that first.

Then we'll bring in the government overlay. The reason it doesn't concern us is Elon Musk is probably the inventor of our age, but who understands that we're in the midst of the most profound convergence among technologies really catalyzed by AI. And he understands that the name of the game in terms of who's going to win all this through all of this are those. companies that, number one, have deep domain expertise. They take AI seriously and they're investing in it. And perhaps most important, they have data that no one else has, proprietary data. Think of all the data spewing out from all of these companies. Even Neurlink, that's biological data. And the most prolific data explosion out there is in the healthcare space. We have 37 trillion cells in our body, and they turn over every quarter.

And now we have something called single cell sequencing that we can combine with AI to unlock the secrets of life, health, and death. And that's what we're going to do. He understands that. Neurrelink's a part of this. Okay, overlay in the government sector. I agree. He's doing something certainly for his country.

I know he believes that. He's tweeting a lot, that's for sure. He's tweeting a lot. He always has tweeted a lot, right? He always has tweeted a lot. Anyway, so he's, I think what we have found with his companies and we own in our venture fund, the private ones, as well, of course, as Tesla.

And as we go through the quarterly reports and dialogue with management, critical to us is that he is keeping his eye on the technology balls that are his competitive or barrier to entry. And what Elon is expert at doing is if there's a bottleneck, he'll go in there and blow it up. And he will use first principles thinking. And he's surrounded himself by business people and engineers who want to work on the hard projects in the world, the hardest projects that are going to help transform the way we live

and work and so forth. Doge is another big project. It's not his full-time job, even though one would not know that. But we have talked to our counterparts, and we aren't talking to Elon as much these days, but to other very important decision makers. And they're really not skipping a beat. Now, the politics of what's going on have hit sales. And so, yes, that is true. That is why, and we knew that was going to happen. So there are a couple of calls this year, actually probably three. We knew Model Y was going to be completely refreshed, largest selling car in the world.

That is beginning to happen throughout the world. And if the Model 3s refreshes any indication, this should work out very well. Perhaps more important is the lower cost car that they are going to put out in the first half of this year. So $30,000 or less, and think less, especially with different credits, this is going to open up Tesla to a whole new market.

As Elon says, and people don't believe him in this political dynamic, but its problem is in demand. there are people who have been waiting for a car, they just can't afford it, and they're very excited to have their first Tesla. So that's the second thing. The third thing, and we've watched this very closely, as you all know, autonomous.

We do believe, while they're launching in Austin in June, another important milestone, now analysts have to integrate into their models what autonomous will mean for Tesla. And so anyone who's been viewing Tesla as an EV manufacturer is going to have to go back to the drawing board and realize that the gross margins of its autonomous network, its autonomous platform,

will be in the 70 to 90% range, whereas their EV gross margins are in the mid-teens right now. That's a double tape. This is turning into a software-as-a-service market, model. And that finally, I think, will bring technology investors and analysts into the stock. They understand SaaS and how different the model is compared to an EV model. And the other thing about the AI opportunity in Autonomous is it's winner-take most. And we do believe that Tesla will will be in the, is in the poll position here in the United States.

Anyone who's tried a Waymo car, as I have in both San Francisco. Big Waymo fans. Big Waymo fans. Big, big fans. If you look in Big Ideas 2025, which is our annual report, you will see why, and kudos to Waymo, I agree, it's a delightful ride. But in terms of the economics for Waymo, their car is uneconomic, totally uneconomic. economic. It's going to be very difficult for them to scale without deciding to lose a lot of money.

And you'll find that delineated in big ideas, 2025. Since you mentioned the stock and the idea of tech investors coming back, let's talk about tech stocks because obviously they've gotten really hit hard over the last week. But overall, you know, there was that furious post-election rally, sometime, you know, various peaks in things in December, there's been this decline. What's going on? Is there a macro story behind the tech sell-off? When you look at how the market's behaved, what's your answer? Well, I think, I mean, fear and greed is a constant trade-off.

And I think after the election, the day after the election, the market started broadening out enormously, away from just the MagSix, towards our kind of stock. And the reasons for that include deregulation. Deregulation or regulation has been a menace for innovation generally, but even the FTC, not allowing M&A and not allowing strategic price discovery to say, hey, this new innovation is going to be worth a lot and we need it. Now the FTC is keeping the same merger guidelines. Pardon? The FTC is maintaining the merger guideline.

guidelines. So we haven't seen this big M&A with. Anyway, I think, I think we will see it. I think deregulation is critical to this administration's mandate, it feels. It's one of the most important variables, because if you think about what was going on before, no M&A, even if companies didn't compete directly with one another, they disallowed so much M&A that, you know, the big companies kind of could sit back fat, dumb, and happy, and their shareholders didn't want them to buy anything because that would take away from their own, whether it's share repurchases or profit or profit sharing and so forth. So I think that this administration is going to provide a really beautiful runway from a regulatory point of view

for innovation. And I feel that what is also behind this, as you might imagine, China with Deepseek, as we were talking about, okay, they're on our tail, right? Well, the Trump administration's extremely competitive and has China in focus, shall we say. So this is a good news thing. So let's do this. The other reason I think the market took off, or there are many reasons, but I think tax rates coming down broadly, which I think they will, as an offset to some of the tariffs, and I understand tariffs, I don't like tariffs, tariffs or taxes. But if you listen to Kevin Hasser, it seems there's a quid pro quo developing here where, wait a minute, in the early days of our country, all of government was funded by tariffs, all of it. And now very little of it. I think they might be into a little bit of a rebalancing game. And what the clue there is, in terms of tax rate reductions, what are the first ones they've announced?

tips, social security, and overtime. Those are very appealing to the lower to middle income demographic, right? I think lowering all tax rates is going to be much more acceptable with that kind of dynamic at work as well. He's looking out for the little guy like he said he would, right? And so I think as a student of Art Laffer, lowering tax rates deregulation is, we think, going to recreate something like the Reagan Revolution, but I think it's going to be bigger.

It's going to be bigger because there are five innovation platforms now, 14 different technologies, whereas back then it was a PC. It was the PC. Now we have five robotics, energy storage, AI, blockchain technology, multi-oemic sequencing, five at the same time, they involve, 15 different technologies, and they're converging. Autonomous taxi networks, convergence of robotics, energy storage, and AI. Those are each, each one of those has its own S-curve, and now they're going to be feeding one another.

I mean, I think the Reagan Revolution, and I was there, and it was so enjoyable, it was the heyday, golden age of active equity management, and I think that's coming back. I think it's coming back big time. I think this will dwarf that. And that was pretty good. I want to ask a sort of general question about your investing strategy. And I know you emphasize that you're making long-term bets on transformational technology like AI, which we've been discussing, or robo-taxies. I guess my question is, at some point, the promise of that world has to come to, forwerewerew. and actually be monetized.

Do you ever set yourself deadlines for positive returns, or is there a time frame you have in your mind for when this will pay off? So our investment time horizon is five years. What's very important about the way we do our research, the most important variable in terms of determining how quickly these technologies are going to scale, is units. Now, unit, so, and something called rights law. I don't know if you want me to go into it.

It's a relative of Moore's law. It's a way to understand how quickly the costs associated with each technology are falling. So we have had a good sense of all of these technologies, cost decline dynamics. What was one of the biggest things that happened over the last five years? unit growth plunged during COVID, and then we faced all of these massive supply constraints. That hurt the rate of change for some of our technologies. We're on the other side of that. We are on the other side of that.

In fact, we're on the other side of three major headwinds over the last four years that really hurt our strategy. First was the boom bust associated with COVID and all of the excesses around that. Second, interest rates, very importantly, a response, 24-fold increase in little more than a year's time. That was a major shock to the system. Now, do higher interest rates always hurt our strategy? Not at all. In fact, 2017 and 18, we had some of our best years, one in an up year, one in a down year for the market when we were up.

interest rates growing up both years. I think we've just been through a very unusual circumstance. So we're done with the interest rate, headwind. And we're done, if you think about it today, the long bond yield hit 4.12%. I don't know where it ended, but who expected that a few months ago? That's telegraphing something, and I'll get into that in just one minute. But interest rates, they're not going up.

We do not believe they're going up. Second was the concentration in the market towards the MAG6. And that really started after 0809, this desire for large cap, lots of cash. And yes, touches something sexy like AI, right? So that went into overdrive. We've never seen a more concentrated market in our history, not even the Great Depression, which was a binary. Will this company survive or not back?

then. So to see the same kind of underlying fear and crowding into a few names tells me there's been a lot of fear out there. I think the first order impact of the election was, okay, some of that fear can dissipate. Now we have a whole new set of fears, but we can talk about that in a second. So we think that the market will, it has started and will continue to broaden out. This market, if it continued towards Mag6, not a healthy market. Just not, by definition. Two things happen after a major concentration, one of two things. Either a bare market like Tech and Telecom bust and early 70s, the end of the Nifty 50,

or the other four major episodes of concentration, the other four major ones ended up in bull markets that broadened out. We think that has started. there will be two and froze. Maybe the most important and surprising to many people of the headwinds, which we are no longer facing, is valuation. If you look at enterprise value to EBITDA, which is our chosen metrics, so the entire cap structure divided by EBITDA, which is not subject to financial engineering, you'll see that our portfolio, and we worked with S&P, adjusting for SBC and R&D, and we can go into that if you want.

Our portfolio basically hit a market multiple during the Yen-Carray trade unwind. And after these last few weeks, we're getting close there again. Relative to the S&P, our portfolios really are at the low point in terms of that valuation metric throughout all of our histories. The valuation headwind is gone.

I think what's shaking the market up right now is a recession. Now, we have been saying since the Fed jacked rates up so quickly that we've been in a rolling recession for the last three years. And housing, the housing market certainly agrees with that. Autos, punk, small businesses have been decimated. They couldn't get credit for a time there. Their net income is down 30% over the last three-ish years. So one sector after another gave way with small and medium business,

really that's the backbone of employment, right? The last shoot-a-drop is consumer. Walmart just telegraphed. We're beginning to lose the consumer. And Walmart had been saying high-end had been a source of their incremental surprises to the upside, Target and Best Buy today. So I think we're at the last leg, It is the consumer, and why is this happening?

I think the velocity of money is slowing down dramatically. And in fact, if you look at sequentially, it dropped in the fourth quarter, and it looks like it'll drop again. What does that mean? It means people are holding on to their money. Why? Well, about, I'm going to say, if you include federal, state, and local government and quasi-government in the health care and education space, we're probably looking at 30,000. 30% of the people out there saying, I don't know if my job is safe. Right.

And then you've got another layer of people out there in the higher income end of the spectrum saying, wait a minute, AI can do a lot of my job. What's going on here? And you see that with the coding, coding fall off. So you've got uncertainty right now. But what is this going to do? It's going to give President Trump's administration and change. Chairman Powell, all kinds of degrees of freedom, if we do have negative GDP growth,

we're already seeing long rates coming down. What's that telling us? Yep, real activities coming down. But I think the shocker going forward, consider the source. I've been saying this for a while, is that inflation is going to surprise shockingly on the low side of expectations. Kathy Wood, thank you so much for joining Ovalos at Bloomberg Invest. Thank you.

Thank you very much for inviting me. Thank you. That was our conversation with the CEO and founder of ArkInvest, Kathy Wood, recorded live at the Bloomberg Invest conference. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest, Kathy Wood. She's at Kathy D. Wood. And check out all of the writing that they do at ArkInvest. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armad Dashel Bennett at Dashbot and Kale Brooks at Kail Brooks. For more OddLod's content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLod, where we have all of our episodes and a daily newsletter that you can subscribe to.

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