The AI Boom Is Bigger Than Anyone Thinks | Dan Ives

Dan Ives is a Partner and Senior Managing Director at Yorkville Ives. In this conversation, we break down where value is building in the AI trade, Dario's warnings about AI, regulatory capture, and whether OpenAI and Anthropic are in more trouble than people realize. We also discuss the White House AI meeting, sovereign AI, the US vs China race, and his new Ives Ultra Fund. ======================= Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates investment strategies across Stocks, Commodities, ETFs and Crypto. Whether you’re rotating into AI & Gold, allocating to the S&P 500, or accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public executes your plan 24/7 without ever taking custody of your assets or funds. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com, and start your FREE automated trading strategy! ======================= Lava is a global platform for bitcoin financial services. Spend with Lava Card and earn up to 5% back in bitcoin with every purchase— all with no annual fee, no FX fees, and zero spread. Plus you can borrow against your bitcoin at the lowest rates, earn yield on cash, and move fiat or stablecoins globally. Get started at ⁠https://www.lava.xyz/POMP⁠ https://www.lava.xyz/POMP ======================= This episode is brought to you by Investor Health — clinician-prescribed protocols for weight, metabolism, energy, and longevity, delivered to your door in 48–72 hours. No office visits, no referrals. Plans start at $149/mo. Learn more at ⁠http://www. InvestorHealth.com/pomp⁠ http://www. InvestorHealth.com/pomp. Investor Health is a telehealth platform, not a medical provider. Compounded medications are not FDA-approved. Individual results may vary and treatment requires evaluation by a licensed provider. ======================= 0:00 - Intro1:12 - Where's the value in the AI trade?2:32 - Dario's AI warning & regulatory capture5:15 - Are OpenAI & Anthropic in trouble?11:04 - Trump's White House AI meeting13:51 - Open source vs closed source AI15:32 - Token price war & the Anthropic IPO22:33 - How to invest in the AI trade25:04 - Personal AI agents & consumer AI26:31 - Why tech is ignoring macro headwinds30:36 - The Ives Ultra AI Fund33:21 - Data, sovereign AI & the future of work

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:56Speaker 04

  For some of myself, it's covered tech my whole career. Three and a half million air miles, so many times like in Taiwan, in Korea, you see them building fabs 18 hours a day with one bathroom breaks. Then I land in Newark Airport, there's a fistfight at the Dunkin' Donuts, and you wonder why we're 17th in math. Now, for the first time, US is ahead of China when it comes to tech. You don't want that to end.

• 1:22Speaker 05

  What's going on, guys? Today, we've got Dan Ives on the podcast. Dan is the Partner and Senior Managing Director at Yorkville Ives, and he's here to talk all about the AI trade. We talk about the sectors that he's interested in, the sectors where he thinks value is going to accrue, and maybe some areas where you should be cautious. We talk about the private AI model labs. Where's pressure coming from? Or is AI actually going to kill us all? What happened at the White House meeting? And then we even get into what's going on with all the personal systems that have been coming to the market. Dan's got some very unique thoughts on the AI trade, and I think that if you watch this, it's going to make you a smarter investor in the market. And then Dan finally finishes up, and he talks about the Ives Ultra Fund. It's a brand new fund that he's brought to market. It trades under the ticker IVAI, and I think people are going to be very interested to see how they can hold a public stock and get exposure to the leading private AI companies.

• 2:07Speaker 05

  Here's my latest conversation with Dan Ives. All right, Dan, AI trade obviously was super hot earlier this year, then got a little cooling off in the summer, but it feels like it's starting to come back here a little bit. And we have the private companies that are knocking on the door of going public in Anthropic, OpenAI. But the public stocks, where do you see value through the end of the year? How are you thinking about the AI trade today?

• 2:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, look, I think the demand, I think it's starting last quarter. That's where it changed because the monetization you saw specifically with Microsoft and the other hyperscalers, I think that was an inflection point quarter. I think now a lot of it is around the second, third, fourth derivatives. And of course, memory stocks were there, but I think you're seeing it across infrastructure with Dell, with Cisco. I think with cybersecurity stocks, you're starting to see it play out. Look, take a step back. We're less than 15% through what the spending trend is going to be in the next three to four years. It's $4 to $5 trillion. For every dollar capex, there's a $5, $6 multiplier across the rest of tech. So I think we're going to go through these sort of ebbs and flows,

• 3:11Speaker 04

  the regulatory capture, the Dario essay. I mean, some of these things will continue to sort of get in the way to some extent in the near term of the trade. But I just continue to believe we are in the early days of what's going to be a multi-year tech bull market. And the first time in 30 years, US is ahead of China when it comes to tech.

• 3:29Speaker 05

  When you see Dario come out and basically say, hey, we think that there's a 5% chance or 10% chance of AI killing us all. We must slow down. And you know, kind of all of these calls for essentially like, hey, government, regulate me harder. I've never heard a business that is serious talk this way. What's your general read? Are they sincere in this? Are they just trying to use it to slow down their competitors so that they can catch up? Or what's going on?

• 3:53Speaker 04

  I mean, 1910, like, ah, we can't go down this car route. We have to stay horse and buggy. These cars could kill you. I'm just saying, it's technology. Technology always goes ahead of regulatory. And I think some of it is, I call regulatory capture. Like, you go to the top floor and then you pull the ladder up. So I think there's some of that going on. And I think that's also why you had to have that sort of all hands on meeting, you know, with Trump at the White House, because you have to get everyone on the same page. Because the reality is going into a midterm election cycle, you know, talk like that, I mean, you've talked about it before. I think a lot of the tech industry, they created the PR nightmare, the black eye, that now they're contending with. But it's an arms race.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  And if we slow down, China accelerates. That's not a debate. So that's why every time, like in terms of like the politicians and the Beltway, many, you know, do you want people that are still using Blackberries and flip phones to ultimately be the ones that are, you know, the direction of innovation in this country? And I think that, look, it's not going to slow down. And I think you saw how stocks reacted. I think if you go back, like over the weekend, the Bears that have called 10 of the last two downturns, they're like, oh, my, because remember, the Bulls are usually watching football or hanging out with their family. The Bears in Saturday, that's usually where it peaks out. But then the reality is that you saw what Jensen talked about, what Nadella talked about, what Karp talks about in terms of sovereign AI.

• 5:22Speaker 04

  That's more what I view as like a very sort of middle of the road view. And that's my opinion. And this is not slowing down anytime soon.

• 5:33Speaker 05

  What I found interesting was, you know, right after the call for the slowdown or pacing, or whatever the hell they were saying, Zuck came out, and Zuck did not talk about slowing down. Zuck talked about, hey, it's our job to release products that are safe. And my general framework, but I want to hear if you agree with this or not, is the companies that are losing money, that have negative cash flow, they're the ones calling for the slowdown. The companies that are profitable, like the Facebooks, the Googles, et cetera, I don't hear them calling for a slowdown at all. And it almost feels like, depending on whether you can fund this with non-dilutive capital or not, is ultimately determining which side of the regulatory capture argument you're on.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, so regulatory capture, I agree on the regulatory capture, but maybe like a different angle. I view it as those leading the F1 race, Anthropic, OpenAI, you don't want others to catch up to you. The way that that could ultimately be called throwing sand in the gears.

• 6:28Speaker 05

  But do you think that they're leading?

• 6:29Speaker 04

  Like, I don't even think there's a question.

• 6:32Speaker 05

  Oh, I think I disagree. All right, go ahead.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  Good, good. It's good to disagree.

• 6:35Speaker 05

  I know. All right, I want to hear about this.

• 6:37Speaker 04

  When it comes to pure models and what they're doing on the enterprise, I think Anthropic and OpenAI have had the clear lead. Do I believe that there's a gap narrowing versus Meta versus Google versus others? Yeah, because, but you see, I view it as the value chain is going to be in the data. The models over time will become more commoditized. So I don't become as focused on open source models. What's happening in China? What Muse has done is actually just a positive for overall AI. So I view it differently rather than like the raising capital component. I view it more like you're way ahead in the race. Others are starting to catch up.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  I could argue like the Dario essay, that was 20% of that add to Meta's stock. Because Zuck looks at that and be like, okay, you're going to go right lane 55 miles, mini-bang, with the bumper thing and saying your kid was an honest student in third grade? I'll go in the left lane Ferrari and we'll gain share. And that's essentially what Zuck's done.

• 7:41Speaker 05

  So I think that the private, large lab models are in way more trouble than people realize. And I'll give you two maybe examples. First is, my belief is that token consumption leads revenue. So if token consumption starts ramping aggressively, revenue follows. I believe that the revenue has been plateauing inside of these large language models, Anthropic in particular, mainly because the general intelligence approach is not nearly as valuable or large as people originally thought. Because I think the original thought process was, you're going to create the smartest model possible, and then everyone is going to use it for everything. Now, what's happening, though, is people are saying, wait a second, I want to own my own intelligence.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Sovereign AI.

• 8:27Speaker 05

  I want to have applied AI for this specific use case. And maybe I use them to get started, because it's easy for me to build some software, plug them in. But if you think, look at what we did with Sylvia. We started off 100% as a ChatGPT wrapper. Over time, we said, well, rather than use ChatGPT, let's switch over to Claude, it seems to be better. Our monthly compute expense went from zero to hundreds of thousands of dollars. We were one of the fastest month-over-month growing customers I think that Anthropic had. Great, they loved us. Then we said, wait a minute. Why are we using, from an architecture standpoint, model to do certain things? So there was literally a point where you would refresh the page on Sylvia, and you'd hit the model. Like, let's stop doing that, right? So you started to get smarter about like, when do we hit the model? How do we hit the model?

• 9:12Speaker 05

  But then over time, it eventually became, why don't we just train our own models? Why don't we build our own harness? Why don't we go and actually have the sovereignty so we're not having to use somebody else's intelligence? We can also, though, make it custom. So now we get better performance, we get better accuracy, we get lower cost, and we get less latency. So we're not going to give up on using them. We still use them for plenty of stuff. But the token consumption that they have from us versus what we're doing ourselves is shifting. And so on like a per customer basis, it seems like a lot of companies are saying, hey, I'm not going to go to zero with them, but actually, I'm going to use them less and less as I build my own stuff. And to me, that feels like a massive headwind that not a lot of people are talking about.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  So I think on some early adopt, no doubt. Look, sovereign AI and Karp talks about it, Jensen talks about it as well. Like, that, that's the golden goose. It's about companies now they've got their arms around, okay, that data we ultimately want to maintain, and we don't want models coming into that data to replicate our business and ultimately put us out of business. I think the difference is that when you look, look, 4% of companies have gone down the AI path just in the US today.

• 10:24Speaker 05

  Only 4%?

• 10:24Speaker 04

  4%.

• 10:25Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  So that, that's the difference on that. So in other words, if we were at 50% and that can, then I'd agree.

• 10:35Speaker 05

  So you think there's a lot of runway to go? We're still in the zero to one phase of just AI adoption in general. It's only the people who are on kind of the frontier, they're the ones who are starting to adopt sovereign AI, but that might be 0.1% penetration.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  And that's why so many CIOs that I talk to, okay, the ones that are very advanced, exactly where you are. And that's where like a sovereign AI, you talk about like what Palantir, Nvidia, some of the things even, you know, I think some of the infrastructure players are looking at. But when you think like, look, Europe, they're building blockbuster videos. You know, you think about what's happened in India, they're trying to figure out, do they go US-China? Middle East, very skewed toward US tech in terms of what we've seen there. So it's a two-horse race between US and China. When you think about why we're so bullish, it's about the numbers. Europe, eventually they're gonna, you know, once through the red tape, they'll ultimately embrace AI.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  Middle East, and then think about, you're gonna get to another sixty, seventy percent of enterprises that go after AI and adopt. That's still on the come. And then think about on the consumer side, that's just starting now with Apple finally actually having AI. You see what Meta's doing as well in terms of Muse. So my view is like, we still have another two, three years of just massive growth. And I think that's something that investors are still underestimating the scale and scope of.

• 12:01Speaker 05

  Now, when you see all these leaders come together in Washington DC, they meet with the president. Whether people like him or not, one thing I think everyone should agree on is that he's good at branding. And he says his artificial intelligence name sucks, I want to name it super intelligence. What are you gonna call it?

• 12:17Speaker 04

  Look, I mean, we still call it AI, but the point is like, forget the name thing. Trump basically had to get everyone in a room, be like, look, what's going on? And because you're going into a midterm election cycle, if you continue to be dystopian, talk negative, you know, about like what this could do to mankind, guess what? More data centers get shut down, it's becoming a huge, I think, it's becoming a huge debate, no matter what the town, what the state, what the city is. It's very important that you get everyone on the same page because every data center that gets shut down, China wins. And that is, I think, the most important part of where we are.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  You need more self-regulation rather than public, private, Beltway, talking points, grandstanding type stuff. Because I think that would be the most negative thing. My whole view is like, for someone like myself, it's covered tech my whole career. Three and a half million air miles, so many times like in Taiwan, in Korea, you see them building fabs eighteen hours a day with one bathroom break. Then I land in Newark Airport, there's a fistfight at the Dunkin' Donuts, and you wonder why we're seventeenth in math. Now, for the first time, US is ahead of China when it comes to tech. You don't want that to end.

• 13:42Speaker 05

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• 15:00Speaker 04

  And I think that's what Nvidia has done. I mean, you go back to the Hugging acquisition, I mean, that, because Jensen understands better than anyone. Forget it, like-

• 15:09Speaker 05

  He does feel like the biggest adult in the room by far.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  It's not even a question, he is the adult in the room. I actually think the two that understand it the most are Jensen and Karp.

• 15:21Speaker 05

  Interesting.

• 15:22Speaker 04

  Because they understand, just forget the, because everyone focuses on the models and they have a much more, I think, global view because of, I think, in terms of Palantir, what they ultimately work with in terms of enterprise, but specifically government. I think Jensen has the most global view. Jensen understands, open source you need just based on cost. Think about it, let's say phones, going back two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight. Let's say Apple priced the phones double where they were in two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight. Would you have one point five billion iPhones today? No, you have to make sure tokenization costs, the pricing, open source.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  That's why I think Muse also, just as a side note, is very important. And that's why, like, I think the most important person that has the best perspective is Nvidia. And he continues to sort of be the calming force. Even when we did the All In podcast, you know, right after the Dario essay soap opera on the weekend, and that was like such an important time for the market.

• 16:25Speaker 05

  Well, so this goes back to these large language models, right? I think everyone now has seen this chart where all of the token prices, they're pushing out on the frontier in terms of their intelligence, but they're coming down in price. And so you have this, essentially a price war occurring. So if you go back to, well, what is the revenue of a model lab? It is token price times token consumption equals revenue. So if you have consumption per customer dropping and you have token price dropping, it just feels like there's massive pressure. So then the question becomes, Anthropic was supposed to go public this year. OpenAI was and then came out and said they're not going to. Do you think we get the Anthropic IPO before the end of the year? You think so?

• 17:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, I mean, I think that's like, I'd be shocked if that doesn't happen. And then-

• 17:08Speaker 05

  Well, we've seen, take Aura Ring, those guys, they claim they were four X over-subscribed. They claim, you know, all of these great metrics going into the IPO. And then the night of, the night before, they basically pull it. I don't know what happened there, right? But it does feel like, and they blamed, by the way, market conditions, which is kind of like a nonsense thing, right? But fine.

• 17:28Speaker 04

  I couldn't get to the dinner because of the traffic.

• 17:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  We should definitely do it again.

• 17:33Speaker 05

  So, do you feel like Anthropic saying thing is like, maybe it's not an Anthropic problem, but they just say, look at the market and say there's too much here going into a midterm, let's not, let's not go out?

• 17:43Speaker 04

  I just think after the midterm, it happened. Look, to me, it's one, first, I think also, like, when it comes like public, it's always hard to compare because be like, this IPO got pushed, or that Anthropic is a, is a whole different game. Just because globally, and I think we saw this with SpaceX as well, the appetite to understand what the trajectory looks like. Now, look, do they have unique risk factors like mankind, you know, of course. But I do think we're going into a golden age for AI. We're going into a golden age where many of the private companies ultimately will be public. And I think that's healthy because for the overall tech trade, Anthropic and OpenAI being public is good.

• 18:29Speaker 04

  It's not bad, I think actually, and I think that's ultimately where it's going. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic being public are actually very good for the market.

• 18:39Speaker 05

  I agree, I just think that when I talk with people, there's this blind belief, these are amazing companies. And when I push on specifically people who aren't like analysts, why do you think they're a good company? They start talking about the quality of the product. And maybe my word of caution to people is just like, a good product does not equal a good company. You can have a good product and a good company. It is undeniable, the products are amazing, people love using them. But when you start to hear some of the data points that are coming out, you know, in terms of what's in the S1, you look at some of the kind of trends, I just think there's way more headwind than maybe people think because you're dealing with a, you're dealing with an industry where, look at Jev, right? Maybe as a good example.

• 19:23Speaker 05

  Like, that wasn't on the chessboard three weeks ago. All of a sudden, zero to a hundred million dollar run rate in, you know, the first week and scaling. And I use our engineering team as a, maybe a pressure point for me. So I go ask them, I say, hey, how many of our queries are routing through various models? All of a sudden, Jev now, it's not fifty percent, but they're starting to use it. And they're starting to put it in places where previously you couldn't use one of the frontier models because it was cost prohibitive. And so you start to almost like, it's like death by thousand cuts, it feels like, and we're gonna get this huge fragmentation, which maybe to your point, that's why they're trying to pull the ladder up, is because that would solidify them as the centralized winners.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Well, so Anthropic and OpenAI, they've been very intelligent and smart, seen around the corner, building up the enterprise sales force, going after, because they recognized, I think, pretty early on, like, the consumer piece is not where they're gonna monetize, they're gonna monetize on the enterprise. But then it goes back to like, less than five percent of companies have gone down the AI path. Take a company, just given the amount of data they ingest, they start to go to AI, what that's gonna do from an incremental business perspective for Anthropic, for OpenAI. But for the overall industry, it speaks to-

• 20:40Speaker 05

  Well, even Meta, right? Muse for small business, they're all, you know, going that way.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  And that's a good example, like with Meta, like, everyone count them out, they're spending like nineteen years rock stars. You're not seeing the actual, you know, return. When you have three and a half billion users, you could be late, now look what's happening in the stock. Apple, same thing, right? Apple Barrish, those stocks, it should be like two hundred, two fifty. They don't get it because it's about the install base, one point five billion iPhones, two point five billion iOS devices. You're now a toll collector on the consumer AI highway. I just think, whether you're bullish on Anthropic, or Barrish, or OpenAI, take a step back, this AI trade is spreading, not just from memory to infrastructure,

• 21:28Speaker 04

  to a lot of even the traditional players, the HPs, the Dells, the Cisco. It's gonna go to energy, it's gonna go to infrastructure. And I think that is a very key theme. And I just think a lot of investors that, you know, have missed really every transformational growth stock the last twenty-five years, it's very, I think it's a- It's a part of the market where you have to be able to look out two, three years. Physical AI globally, what I believe is you're going to be US tech dominance. And what that means for innovation in this country. And I just continue also believe

• 22:07Speaker 04

  the taking jobs away narrative, just like the SaaS apocalypse, I think was way, way overdone. And I think now you're starting to see some of that play out. More jobs would be created by AI than taken away over the next decade, in my view.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  Easy, easy. And look, we see this inside of our company, there are more agents than humans. There are definitely jobs that we did not go hire for because the agents can do it. But because the agents are so productive, the company is growing faster than it would otherwise, which then leads to us being able to hire more people.

• 22:43Speaker 04

  And innovation in this country, it used to be like, if you want to do a startup, you gotta get seed funding this 20 million dirt. Now, because of the engineering horsepower that you could do, think about the innovation that now could happen in this country. And I just think it's, it goes back to like the White House meeting and big tech and where we are. Everyone recognizes like, this is a moment in time. And it is just very important. Like you do not put the brakes on. You put the brakes on, we will look back five, 10 years from now and be like, how did China get so ahead of us? And I think it's just, it's a very, very sensitive, like whatever, call it like hot button topic. But I don't

• 23:26Speaker 04

  really see any gray in terms of the direction that we have to go.

• 23:30Speaker 05

  So let's say I'm an investor, I'm looking at the entire public markets, and I'm saying to myself, all right, there's a lot here to unpack. I've got the Mag7, I've got the infrastructure, I've got all the data centers, I've got memory, I've got, you know, pure play AI. How do I think through allocating money, right? Is it put a certain percentage of my portfolio in AI overall? Or are these like different sectors, but like the entire economy now is AI? And so of course you've got to, you know, have it throughout your portfolio. Just like, how are you talking to me about this?

• 23:59Speaker 04

  It's about second, third, fourth derivatives. Like I, I continue to believe large cap tech is starting to like flex its muscles again. You look like Nvidia is a good example. Like those that continue to sort of, you know, defy, or they think it's getting tired, it's not a shiny new object anymore. You could argue that that stock is way cheaper today than it was six, 12 months ago. And you still haven't even gone into what's going to be the full wave of physical AI and where we're playing. Our Asia check show 13 to one demand. I mean, demand and supply 13 to one for chips in Asia. That's also why like AMD, if you look like what Lisa Su's done, they're just starting in terms of the chip

• 24:41Speaker 04

  size. I just think you have to own chips. You gotta own the hyperscalers. And I think you've seen specifically Microsoft, Amazon, Google, like reinserting themselves because of the install base. And it goes back to like less than 5% that have gone down the AI path, as more head down their path, that's bullish for the hyperscalers. The software, the SaaS apocalypse, I think was a fictional narrative. And I think there's a lot of these, if you look like from Salesforce to ServiceNow, of course Palantir leading in, I think that's one that's almost going to become a category changer, especially as the free cash flow ramps significantly. Cybersecurity, another example. Go back to like April, cybersecurity is done, Anthropic's eating their lunch, look at CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, Zscare, look

• 25:25Speaker 04

  at those stocks, now look at it. And then I think you have to even go further out and look like infrastructure and energy. My whole point is from an allocation perspective, you own the core names and winners and themes, but then you have to see where everything's heading. Like when, when, like, look at Tesla, like, when are they actually going to start to now transition from that EV player to ultimately robotaxis, autonomous, optimist? Once the transition happens, you've already missed it.

• 25:58Speaker 05

  Hmm. Personal agents are all the rage now. You've got, you know, the Grock box of the world who are kind of sort of personal agents, but then you've got Instinct, Muse, et cetera. How does that impact the AI market? And those are consumer. It seems like these businesses, at least Instinct and Zoc have both come out and said that they are not going to try to charge the consumer, they're going to find other ways to monetize. What do you just think about that as a sector and how investors should think about it?

• 26:23Speaker 04

  I think that's going to be like a whole nother area of investing. Because my whole point is like, you have to think about like the enterprise, then the consumer piece. Clearly, like the infrastructure, if it was the goal rush, those, the picks and shovels, like they're ultimately going to benefit on either side. But if you think about in the consumer, we're just now starting the consumer AI revolution. That's why I think Apple, the stock's doing what it's doing. And I think you start to see what I believe is going to almost be like a new category that comes online. We're going to be talking about stocks 18, 24 months from now, that we don't, we're not talking about today. But that's why it goes back

• 27:05Speaker 04

  to my view, like you don't have equilibrium till late 2028, early 2029 in terms of chips. And I think that's something, despite like 10-year oil, geopolitical, whatever the moment, the sort of, you know, the nervousness of the time, I think tech is going to continue to plow through and be the leader of this market.

• 27:28Speaker 05

  So that's interesting because the macro environment, almost everything is telling you, hey, top or headwind, right? You have interest rates going up, you have oil, you know, a hundred bucks or so, you've got 10-year over 5%. People are very nervous, home prices are, you know, quote, quote, falling, all this stuff that if I wanted to paint you a very-

• 27:44Speaker 04

  Key shaped economy.

• 27:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, if I wanted to paint you with just a very negative story, I could do it easily.

• 27:48Speaker 04

  But if I told you six months ago, we're sitting here in a new studio now, but like before the new studio. And I said, six months from now, oil 105, 110, 10-year 5.2, 5.3, Iran still going, I told you everything. And I said, okay, where do you think S and P and NASDAQ are? You probably would be off by 15%, lower.

• 28:13Speaker 05

  Hmm. I agree with that.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  Because it comes down, the market is telling you, we're in a fourth industrial revolution. The growth, I could argue the 10-year is there because of the growth and because we're going to be ultimately more and more debt raises, and because of the data center build out, and because of what we're seeing from a CapEx perspective. So I just think investors, you can, my whole career going back to late 90s, if I got caught up in like geopolitical, Europe's going bankrupt, the bottom line is like, I, my career would not be where it is today. So I'm just saying, it's very easy to get caught up in the bears,

• 28:54Speaker 04

  the catastrophists that have called 10 of the last two downturns to scare retail. And I think that always creates the opportunities.

• 29:04Speaker 05

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• 31:34Speaker 05

  You recently priced a brand new financial product in the market. It is a special purpose investment fund, which is kind of like a SPAC, but it's an investment fund. $200 million raise. And my understanding is that you're going to take this, which is called the Ives Ultra Fund.

• 31:51Speaker 04

  IVAI.

• 31:52Speaker 05

  You're going to, the ticker is IVAI. You're going to take it and go invest in the private market. So it's a publicly traded permanent capital vehicle that'll have exposure to private companies. What are you going to look for to allocate capital?

• 32:05Speaker 04

  And it's the first public company ever to invest in private AI tech companies. Look, for me, so many people around the world, whether it's retail, financial advisors, whoever it may be, somewhere in an airport. How do you invest in private tech companies? Institutions is the big issue, right? There's SPDs, SPV2, SPV3.

• 32:28Speaker 05

  Boy, stop at three.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  It could go to, my whole view is to create a vehicle that you could own the leading private tech companies and give, instead of just a small club outside Silicon Valley that could own them. Why can't people in the public own these private tech companies? And that's what we're doing. I mean, it's gonna, you know, this is really kind of a Swiss army knife approach to trying to identify what that portfolio looks like, whether some of them are bigger players or well-known today, to some that like, who could be the next Palantir? Who could be the next model that, that ultimately drives this market? And that was really the origin, doing it with Partners Ed and Jeff Leathers.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  It, look, it was super exciting to do that because I just believe it's a new frontier.

• 33:18Speaker 05

  I think it's a very good idea. And also I think that you are the right person to go and find these private AI companies. And the blending of the public and private markets continues, right? Whether it's tokenization, whether it's funds like this, like we have seen this play out. And this just feels like another step in that direction.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  Well, it's like, why, if someone's like, you're in a private credit fund. Why can't you be in a private tech product where you own private AI tech? Look, it comes down to like, this is the new landscape. The reality is trillions of dollars are going to be spent in this sector. A lot of it's going to be spent by private company, on private companies that are leading it. And trying to identify that, and I think if you go back historically, it was a small group of people or companies that could buy these, that could buy these private companies. And I think it's just important where we are today to create a public vehicle that does that.

• 34:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's very, very interesting also to see the private companies, how fast they're growing. Like one of the companies, I'm an investor, is called Micro One. And Micro One is a data business. But the data business is, you know, Scale AI is like a data labeling business. These guys have some data labeling to them, but also they are going out and they're paying doctors and lawyers, et cetera, to go and actually create data for them to then go and sell through. They're now going to companies and they'll pay pretty large amounts of it. And I'll give you one that I'd never heard of before. Somebody emailed me this week and said, hey, will you license us the podcast? Because they want the data.

• 34:55Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 34:56Speaker 05

  I don't know if we're gonna do it. I have no clue what that even means. We haven't talked to them yet, whatever. But I was just like, oh, data is data. Like there's gonna be data all over the place that people are gonna try to buy up and use for all these different.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  Data is the new oil and gold. Like, why do you think Amazon put the gates up with Muse? Because the reality is that, and that's why sovereign AI is such an important dynamic, which you could say is negative for the model players, because companies are saying, okay, we want to have control of our data. We're gonna do it in our walls. And I think that's, see, different than the model players that are narrowing the gap. I actually think sovereign AI is more of the bigger debate.

• 35:42Speaker 05

  Why?

• 35:43Speaker 04

  Because companies are starting to get their sea legs. They're starting to understand like, okay, we gotta go full AI. We need these strategic paths. But is it just giving it and outsourcing it to an anthropic?

• 35:58Speaker 05

  There's no way that's gonna happen.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  So that's, so you go through evolutions, right? Like, it's no different than any technology. The technology, it's gonna take time for these companies to recognize, like, trial and error, what's the best path? And I just think like, that's gonna create so many more opportunities for other companies to monetize.

• 36:23Speaker 05

  I don't think people understand, the sovereign AI thing, right? Own your own intelligence, sovereign AI, what are you gonna call? Again, I just know the thing that we have seen. If we route a model or a query to our models on our hardware versus go to the frontier models, the cost savings is about 97%. But the cost is not the reason to do it exclusively. It's actually, the answers are more accurate. So what I always go back to, and to be honest, the first, when we first started going down this path, we have some very smart AI engineers and they were explaining to me what they thought was possible and all stuff. And you kind of have in the back of your head, dude, there's no way a team of six, seven, eight engineers is gonna be the trillion dollar company. And then they explained to me, well, let me show you how this works.

• 37:08Speaker 05

  And so today we've come out and we've shown Sylvia is more accurate on tax, mortgage, credit cards, you know, these personal finance topics. But it is less about how many engineers you have or anything. It's, are you general or are you, you know, applied AI? And then what is the data set that you're able to use to get to that level of accuracy? The reinforcement learning, all the eval rubrics, like all of these components. And I just started to realize, I was like, if we can pull this off, dude, what is it gonna happen when these large companies start realizing, why don't we just do it ourselves? And they have hundreds, thousands of engineers. Like, this is going to completely change the way that people think about this technology being integrated into these companies.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  But it's a democratization of the technology. See, I don't view it as a, see, I view it as.

• 37:55Speaker 05

  It's empowering for the company.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  This is not just a duopoly. If it was, let's just say this was just OpenAI and Anthropic. And Nvidia was selling the chips. Like that, as a bull case in this market, that's not, you need democracy. You need data sovereignty. And I actually think like, this is actually like, like I said, it's third inning of this game, because it's not, those that say, oh, it's sixth, seventh inning. I mean, I go around the country so much, I look in the data centers and I just think, even if 10 to 15% get voted down, like, you're gonna have 800,000 data centers built in the next 12, 18 months.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  Like, that is, that's building the hearts and lungs of what's gonna be really a new economy that's building out in this, in this country.

• 38:49Speaker 05

  It's 100% a new economy. And I think that, I'll leave you with this. I recently was talking with some of the engineers and I said to him, I said, would it be offensive if I told you that I'm, I've now retrained myself over the last six months and I'm a software engineer? My entire career, I've been, you know, I was product manager at Facebook and like, understand product. I would never write in code, right? Even if, you know, I was building a WordPress site, it was kind of like you're hacking it together. I'm not a software engineer, I don't have a computer science degree, all this kind of stuff. And for people who are non-technical, who work with engineers, there's kind of like a bright line.

• 39:19Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 39:20Speaker 05

  You, you do not claim to do what they do because they are very special. They're the stars, you're the support staff, right? It's kind of the way I've always thought about it. But I said to him, I said, look, here's how I have started to think about this. And one of the engineers, probably one of our best engineers, said to me, if I was doing an interview to hire a software engineer, one of the first questions I ask is, show me what you've built. And he's like, and you have all this stuff that you've built. So he's like, the lines are blurring. Now, I'm not gonna go actually put software engineer like in my Twitter bio, right? You know, like bang my chest and become a software engineer now? But if that starts to become a skill that dummy me can use, what happens when that permeates throughout society and throughout the economy? And now all of a sudden productivity accelerates?

• 40:03Speaker 04

  But that's the whole, the whole point that the feds talked about is that no technology, the last 100 years has been a net job detractor. Or it's about productivity enhancement. And I just think sometimes as you're going through the storm, the turbulence, you can't see the other side. Sometimes I think it's very easy to get caught up in narratives in this market. And I think that's some of the dangers as an investor too, when you get too caught up. Because, because I see it from an end user, I see it from CIO, I see it in Asia, I see it from a chip. When you see the innovate, you see physical AI that's ultimately coming.

• 40:44Speaker 04

  And that's why, like, when you have adults in the room like Jensen kind of navigating it, I think that you just continue sort of, that's the yellow brick road to the success.

• 40:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's fascinating. Where can we, some people will find you online?

• 40:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Dives Tech, and again, I don't block hardly anyone, or LinkedIn. And no, look, I appreciate, look, this is just, it's an important time to sort of, you know, navigate the narratives and some of these white knuckle moments and make sure investors just don't get, you know, sort of caught up sometimes in the, in these barrels from the hibernation mode.

• 41:20Speaker 05

  I think you're doing a great job. I'm very excited about.

• 41:22Speaker 04

  No, thank you so much.

• 41:23Speaker 05

  IVAI is the ticker and we'll do this again. I'm gonna convince you to start doing this weekly.

• 41:29Speaker 04

  Hey, I'm here for it.

• 41:32Speaker 05

  All right, we'll see everyone soon.

• 41:33Speaker 04

  Thanks.