Cathie Wood's Deep Dive: DeepSeek Reshapes AI, Bitcoin's Path to Global Reserve Asset, and Tesla's Autonomous Driving on the Horizon

Cathie Wood's Deep Dive: DeepSeek Reshapes AI, Bitcoin's Path to Global Reserve Asset, and Tesla's Autonomous Driving on the HorizonThe recent emergence of DeepSeek, an open-source AI model developed by a Chinese company, sent shockwaves through the global tech industry. Its low cost and efficient development approach have significantly impacted major US tech giants

Cathie Wood's Deep Dive: DeepSeek Reshapes AI, Bitcoin's Path to Global Reserve Asset, and Tesla's Autonomous Driving on the Horizon

The recent emergence of DeepSeek, an open-source AI model developed by a Chinese company, sent shockwaves through the global tech industry. Its low cost and efficient development approach have significantly impacted major US tech giants. Against this backdrop, Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood gave a media interview, sharing her unique insights on DeepSeek, AI, cryptocurrencies, Tesla, and other trending topics. Below is a full interpretation of the interview transcript:

I. DeepSeek: An AI Cost Revolution and US Tech Competition

Wood began by discussing DeepSeek's impact on the AI market landscape. "DeepSeek has compressed the cost of training a large language model from $230 million to $23 million, fundamentally altering the barrier to entry for startups," she stated. "DeepSeek's open-source model will attract more companies, breaking existing market monopolies and creating a new competitive landscape." Ark Invest predicts that global AI computing power demand will surge from 230 EFLOPS in 2023 to 56,000 EFLOPS in 2030, and DeepSeek's low-cost advantage will play a crucial role in this rapidly expanding market.

However, while costs have decreased, the market hasn't immediately reflected benefits for smaller tech companies. Wood explained: "Market performance fluctuated last year, with large-cap tech stocks performing exceptionally well in the second and fourth quarters, while small- and mid-cap stocks were stronger in the third. There's currently some market maneuvering, but we believe market concentration will gradually expand to a broader market; we're already seeing signs of this in our portfolio." She further emphasized that excessive AI regulation hinders market development, likening the current stage of AI development to the early 1990s internet era full potential yet unrealized, and therefore unsuitable for excessive regulation.

Addressing concerns that Nvidia might repeat Intel's mistakes, Wood argued that the analogy is inaccurate. "Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem has amassed 4.3 million developers, and the advantages of its Hopper architecture in memory bandwidth and floating-point operations remain irreplaceable in the short term." However, she also noted that Meta's open-source Llama-3-405B supporting the AMD ROCm ecosystem, and Tesla's Dojo project achieving a 9.2 EFLOPS cluster performance, could reshape the competitive landscape and warrant continued attention. Ark Invest's contrarian increase in AI holdings is based on: first, the AI inference market is expanding at 217% annually; second, per-unit computing costs are continuously declining (training costs down 78% annually, inference costs down 91%); and third, application-level innovation is experiencing exponential growth. These certain trends underpin Ark Invest's investment strategy.

Wood believes DeepSeek's rise benefits the US by fostering competition, driving AI innovation, and ultimately benefiting society. A more open and competitive AI market will nurture more innovation and accelerate the adoption and application of AI technology. Increased competition will also better incentivize tech giants to continuously improve their technologies and services to meet the challenges posed by emerging competitors.

II. Tesla: Autonomous Driving Breakthrough and Robotaxi Market Outlook

Wood also shared her assessment of Tesla's autonomous driving technology. She personally experienced FSD V12.5 and reported a 34.6-mile, zero-takeover drive from Manhattan to Newark Airport. "Based on our tracked 3 million miles of test data, the takeover rate of V12.5 has dropped to 0.2 per thousand miles, marking the system's official crossing of the human driver safety threshold." She pointed out that Musk's mentioned Dojo supercomputer's real-time training capability has increased model iteration speed by 17 times, further accelerating the maturity of autonomous driving technology.

Facing the challenge from Waymo, Wood compared it to the Nokia versus Apple battle in the smartphone era. She believes Tesla's pure vision + neural network "smartphone" approach, leveraging the real-time data stream from 2.8 million vehicles, holds a significant advantage. "Daily new training data equals Waymo's annual collection; when the Robotaxi network is formed, this scale effect will generate an $8 trillion to $10 trillion ride-sharing market."

III. Cryptocurrency: From Digital Gold to Global Reserve Asset

Regarding Bitcoin, Wood believes it's undergoing a paradigm shift from "digital gold" to "global reserve asset." She pointed out that the institutional share of open interest in Bitcoin futures has risen from 17% in 2020 to 63%, with sovereign wealth funds also starting to allocate; the Norwegian oil fund disclosed holding 42,000 BTC last month. More importantly, tech companies are starting to use Bitcoin as a balance sheet tool, such as MicroStrategy holding 214,000 and Tesla also having strategic reserves.

Wood firmly believes that cryptocurrencies are the next internet revolution, and Bitcoin, as the leader, possesses unique advantages such as scarcity, security, and decentralization. "Over time, Bitcoin will be gradually accepted by a wider range of institutions and individuals, becoming an important part of the global monetary system." She believes the SEC will eventually approve spot Bitcoin ETF options contracts, leading to a structural expansion of the derivatives market. She predicts that a spot Ethereum ETF will be approved in the first quarter of 2025, creating a tiered system: Bitcoin ($1.4 trillion market cap) digital gold; Ethereum ($420 billion market cap) digital oil; Stablecoin ($160 billion market cap) digital dollar. This will attract over $10 trillion in traditional capital. However, she also notes that the biggest challenge currently facing the cryptocurrency market is a lack of understanding, requiring increased promotion and education.

IV. Strategic Positioning in a Shifting Regulatory Landscape

Wood mentioned Trump's plan to revoke Biden's AI executive order and increase AI R&D tax credits, which could potentially stimulate innovation among SMEs. "Excessive regulation caused the US to lag behind Huawei in the 5G race; we must not repeat this mistake." She noted that the number of AI startups incubated by Y Combinator has increased by 283% year-on-year, with 72% adopting DeepSeek-like architectures to reduce costs. She also criticized Europe's excessive regulation, believing it will limit the development of the European AI industry.

V. Investment Themes for the Next Five Years: Three Revolutions Driving Wealth Transfer

Finally, Wood summarized the investment themes for the next five years in one sentence: "AI restructuring productivity, blockchain restructuring trust, and energy storage restructuring resource allocation these three revolutions will create the largest wealth transfer wave since the 1920s." These three areas represent the future direction of technological development and possess tremendous investment potential. AI will improve productivity, blockchain will establish more secure trust mechanisms, and energy storage will solve energy problems; these three factors together are driving social progress and creating immense wealth.

In conclusion, Wood's interview highlights her keen insights into future technology trends and long-term investment strategies. Her interpretation of DeepSeek, Tesla's autonomous driving, cryptocurrencies, and AI regulation provides investors with valuable reference information. The "three revolutions" she proposes will shape the future economic landscape and bring significant investment opportunities.