Cathie Wood says humanoid robots will be the ‘biggest of all’ AI opportunities
An Optimus bot from Tesla on display during the 2024 World AI Conference & High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance at the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition and Convention Center on July 7, 2024.
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Ark Invest founder and Chief Executive Cathie Wood on Tuesday singled out the potential for artificial intelligence to accelerate the development of humanoid robots.
Speaking to CNBC on the sidelines of the Future Investment Initiative (FII) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Wood said machines that resemble people in size, shape and movement could represent one of the biggest AI opportunities.
“I know a lot of people are worried about all [the] ‘AI hype,'” Wood said. “But as we’re looking to the future, especially with embodied AI, which is all about robotaxis and transforming the world of transportation completely — and then healthcare, which is probably one of the most profound applications of AI, we think that this investment will pay off.”
She added: “I think the chaser is going to be humanoid robots. And I think that is going to be the biggest of all the embodied AI opportunities.”
AI-powered humanoid robots have long captured the public’s imagination and companies have been scrambling to produce machines that can revolutionize sectors from healthcare and personal assistance to retail.
Investors, however, have traditionally been skeptical about the emerging technology, particulalry when it comes to delivering economically justifiable performance in real-world settings.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a big fan of the concept. Indeed, the tech billionaire said last month that Tesla’s Optimus robots would eventually make up around 80% of the electric vehicle maker’s value.
Wood’s ARK Artificial Intelligence & Robotics UCITS ETF’s top holdings are Tesla (9.16%), Palantir (7.02%) and AMD (6.14%).
Productivity gains
“What I do think is, on the enterprise side, it is going to take a while for large corporations to prepare themselves to transform it’s going to take a company like Palantir going into the largest enterprises and really restructuring them in order to really capitalize on the productivity gains that we think are going to be unleashed by AI,” Wood said.
“In the consumer space, the consumer loves all of this, you know, and I think we’re all looking forward to our personal assistants doing our shopping for us,” she continued. “I am really excited about not just shopping, but how much my productivity as an individual is going to increase with AI. It already has in terms of research.”
Wood, who also warned about the short-term potential for an AI-related “reality check,” said elevated Big Tech valuations will make sense over a five-year time horizon.
Beta Technologies shares surged more than 9% after air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility announced an up to $1 billion deal to buy motors from the Vermont-based company.
Eve, which was started by Brazilian airplane maker Embraer and is now under Eve Holding, said the manufacturing deal could equal as much as $1 billion over 10 years. The Florida-based company said it has a backlog of 2,800 vehicles.
Shares of Eve Holding gained 14%.
Eve CEO Johann Bordais called the deal a “pivotal milestone” in the advancement of the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, technology.
“Their electric motor technology will play a critical role in powering our aircraft during cruise, supporting the maturity of our propulsion architecture as we progress toward entry into service,” he said in a release.
Mateusz Slodkowski | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday announced AI-enabled software designed to help clients better understand and recover from outages.
DevOps Agent, as the artificial intelligence tool from Amazon Web Services is called, predicts the cause of technical hiccups using input from third-party tools such as Datadog and Dynatrace. AWS said customers can sign up to use the tool Tuesday in a preview, before Amazon starts charging for the service.
The AI outage tool from AWS is intended to help companies more quickly figure out what caused an outage and implement fixes, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, told CNBC. It’s what site reliability engineers, or SREs, do at many companies that provide online services.
SREs try to prevent downtime and jump into action during live incidents. Startups such as Resolve and Traversal have started marketing AI assistants for these experts. Microsoft’s Azure cloud group introduced an SRE Agent in May.
Rather than waiting for on-call staff members to figure out what happened, the AWS DevOps Agent automatically assigns work to agents that look into different hypotheses, Sivasubramanian said.
“By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” Sivasubramanian told CNBC ahead of AWS’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia has tested the AWS DevOps Agent. In under 15 minutes, the software found the root cause of an issue that would have taken a veteran engineer hours, AWS said in a statement.
The tool relies on Amazon’s in-house AI models and those from other providers, a spokesperson said.
AWS has been selling software in addition to raw infrastructure for many years. Amazon was early to start renting out server space and storage to developers since the mid-2000s, and technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Oracle have followed.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, these cloud infrastructure providers have been trying to demonstrate how generative AI models, which are often training in large cloud computing data centers, can speed up work for software developers.
Over the summer, Amazon announced Kiro, a so-called vibe coding tool that produces and modifies source code based on user text prompts. In November, Google debuted similar software for individual software developers called Antigravity, and Microsoft sells subscriptions to GitHub Copilot.
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