Speaker 1: Joining me right now is Josh Pantani, CEO, Boosted AI. Josh, thank you for being with us. It's amazing how last week we were so excited about the 100 billion and then 500 billion to come to follow up on AI here at home, only to hear some stories, you know, I don't know that anybody's proven them to be true just yet with DeepSeek in China that they're just doing it in a big way for cheaper. What'd you make of it this morning?

Speaker 2: Yeah, a bunch of different thoughts. I mean, at a high level, it definitely is a cheaper model. Whether or not they trained it at a cheaper cost or not, the cost of inference, the cost of actually running it is impressively low given the capabilities that it has. So there's definitely, in my opinion, some major tech breakthrough that has happened there and it has big implications. I think the flip side is the market reaction to me almost seems opposite of how we're thinking about it. At a high level, if you can train models for cheaper, then that means that you can train more advanced capabilities for cheaper, which means there's more applications. If there's more applications, then there's more things you can automate. If there's more things you can automate, then I actually think that drives greater adoption of AI. I think in a world where China is catching up or close to us, I actually think ultimately we're gonna increase investment over here. And then, you know, in terms of it actually affecting adoption of open AI or Anthropic, I think it has almost no effect on them because at the end of the day, to be able to really use this in a commercial setting, you need to be able to trust the underlying technology. And I think one of the big problems with DeepSeek R1 is it has some very clear political biases. If you start asking it about things like China, you know, for our use cases, if you wanted to try to understand like, what is my portfolio risk to China, you can't really use it for things like that because it'll either refuse to answer or give very biased answers. And so, you know, at a high level, I think it drives acceleration, but I don't think it actually has very many negative impacts.

Speaker 1: So, I mean, we're maybe looking at this all wrong, right? That would be- So if you had a hundred billion, that's what you're saying. Like if you had a hundred billion dollars invested in AI, this, in your company, that now that's going to go a much longer way than you thought, and we should say, hooray. You know, and meantime, the NASDAQ's down 3%. So do you think that these are buying opportunities on names like NVIDIA and Broadcom and Marvell and Vistra and so on and so forth, or even just the triple Qs or something?

Speaker 2: Bob? Yeah, I mean, just focusing on, you know, NVDA in particular, the reaction there seems very odd to me. DeepSeek R1 was trained on NVIDIA chips and it runs on NVIDIA chips. And yes, it was a cheaper model of chips, but at the end of the day, if that is the new path that everything's going to drive for adoption, again, you're going to expect wider adoption of AI systems. You would expect that would also drive pretty big demand. And, you know, do we think that we're going to start accelerating less because China cuts up to us? Probably not. Probably there's going to be more acceleration. So yeah, I think there's some great buying opportunities today.

Speaker 1: Look, I mean, you know, a lot of people may not realize that it runs on the NVIDIA chips and it was trained by the NVIDIA chips. So NVIDIA may have a very big story here going forward. So, you know, at Boosted AI, using AI for our investment portfolios, AI can pick the stocks better or no?

Speaker 2: The way we think about it is more around workflow optimization. So, you know, let's say you wanted to track something like how this might affect your portfolio. In a traditional world, when something like R1 comes out, you might look at a few sell-side reports, do a few expert calls. With technology like ours, you could look at 3,000 companies earnings calls or sell-side data with 3,000 companies and just get a much deeper understanding of the kind of issue you're trying to do. So we think of it as more sort of accelerating processes that are still primarily driven by humans in most cases and less about sort of doing a better job and more just finding areas that machine can do, can sort of accelerate.

Speaker 1: You know, the thing is that the VIX here at 19-20 and it is creeping higher, but, you know, folks were saying, why isn't the VIX higher? I mean, we've seen the run to safety and treasuries and that's why yields are coming down. But tomorrow, are we gonna have all green and we may even forget this knee-jerk reaction?

Speaker 2: Well, I won't comment on exactly how the market's gonna react from day to day. That said, I'll say from our seat, we have seen some pretty massive acceleration of adoption. You know, Q4 last year was as big as the other three quarters all put together just for my company in particular. I think most AI CEOs are seeing the same kind of thing. So short-term reactions aside, I think there's a widespread adoption and that'll probably continue to accelerate in 2025.

Speaker 1: Tell me about Stargate. I mean, we had a lot of excitement last week when we were talking about open AI and the others. We said a hundred billion and then it'll be 500 billion total. Are we still on track for that? Do you think that's still an exciting prospect?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think what's interesting there, right, is the market seems to be reacting, assuming that there's somehow gonna be less investment here. But if in fact, this really is a Sputnik moment, if this is really like the space race kicking off, then again, I would actually expect to see more acceleration, right? If China's really this close to us, then we're not gonna take this sitting down. We're gonna accelerate our efforts here. So yeah, I can't speak to exactly what, you know, politicians are saying, et cetera, but I would expect you would continue to see increased investment. And that, again, will just be a positive. This thing will just accelerate across the board.

Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, let's leave it right there. Josh Pantony, thank you so much. CEO at Boosted AI. Great to see you. Appreciate it. A big day here for AI. Thank you.