Hello and welcome to Market Domination. I'm Josh Lipton live from our New York headquarters. There is just minutes to go now to the closing bell. Stocks are mixed here as bonds continue to sell off and AI jitters escalate. Yahoo Finance's Ines Ferre has the very latest. Ines.
Josh, mixed stocks and off the lows of the session, I should add. If we take a look at the Dow right now, it's down about two-tenths of a percent, but really trimming losses over the last half hour to hour, I would say. Also, the Nasdaq 100 right now just above the flat line. And then the S&P 500 is wavering just around the flat line again off those lows of the session as we have seen bond yields relaxing just a little bit. We did see a climb in long-dated bonds with the 10-year Treasury moving up and also the 30-year moving to its highest level. That yield to its highest level since 2002. You can see it there at 5.60. The 10-year at 5.26. Make no mistake, bond yields is really what Wall Street is eyeing right now as we have seen these yields going higher. The market hasn't fallen off a cliff yet, but certainly it is raising eyebrows on the street. Taking a look under the hood, we are watching energy that's under pressure. This is because oil is down today. Also, materials is down and consumer staples, but you've got utilities that's higher and consumer discretionary higher as well. Over on the NASDAQ 100, a little bit of a mixed picture here. You can see on the left-hand side of the screen, Apple, Alphabet's down, Nvidia, but then you've got Amazon, SpaceX, Meta that are higher. And then just taking a look at crypto, we have been seeing Bitcoin up about 2.10% over the last 24 hours, hanging around that $84,000 or $83,000 level per token. And as I mentioned with commodities, a surprise that you saw bond yields going higher today, yet you are seeing oil going lower. Usually when you see oil going lower, you see those yields easing a bit, but look, you've got WTI that's down more than 3%. Brent crude also down about 2% for the session, Josh.
All right, thank you Ines. Appreciate it. Well, fears around AI risk mount. President Trump is meeting with tech leaders for a crucial AI summit. The CEOs of Meta, Nvidia, Palantir, Google, and Anthropic were all in attendance. Yeah, our finance's Ben Werschkul is tracking all this. You know, Ben, I mean, first of all, just the visual of that, Ben, was that was something else, man. I mean, some of the biggest heavy-hitting tech CEOs on the planet, all just standing there. It was impressive to look at and see. What do we know about what was actually being talked about there, Ben? What were the discussions?
Well, we know from the discussions, President Trump just spoke briefly to reporters a couple minutes ago and underlined his position here that there is no interest from his administration in any sort of government regulation of even with the growing worries of AI danger. The term from the president just a few minutes ago was self-regulation. He said there was agreement between his team and all those CEOs that were gathered with him that there should be, in his words, tremendous self-regulation, i.e. not getting involved. And as the sort of had almost a day-long kind of bear hug of he had this meeting with CEOs and he's talking about releasing an executive order later this afternoon further on the issue just underlining his focus here that AI needs to grow unfettered partly in terms of a rivalry with China but partly just because he's supportive of the technology as he pushed forward. As you mentioned there was a lot of CEOs in attendance. President Trump was flanked by Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX and then Jensen Huang of Nvidia on the other side. A range of folks around the table there, but Trump kind of arguing that they all were in agreement about limited. Notably, Dario Amodei was at the table there as well. No word on what his involvement there was. He of course set off a lot of this debate talking about pacing the frontier, but President Trump definitely was trying to show a unified frontier, CEOs and his administration unified on kind of AI full speed ahead and that they can handle the dangers themselves.
And we do have a vote scheduled in the Senate tomorrow. I think I guess this is a bill around pushing data centers to pay more to local communities. What would that do and what are the prospects there? What do you think?
Absolutely. Yeah. So this meeting today, the sort of formal agenda of this meeting today was about beginning a conversation about AI regulations. Speaker Mike Johnson was also in attendance and he called it. That is a much longer term and based on President Trump's comments right now just unclear what if anything Washington wants to do on this. There is this vote you mentioned tomorrow. It's called the Ratepayer Protection Act. This is about local communities and the data centers. The worries that they're going to drive up prices and drive up electricity bills. What this bill would do is basically push local utilities to consider data centers in their rate making. It's got an uphill battle partly because the critics say that it just doesn't do enough. This is being pushed. Democrats are opposed to this bill saying this is the word they use is voluntary. The word they call it they call it a fraud suggesting it's going to have a hard time getting to 60 votes but there is a vote scheduled tomorrow. We've seen a variety of comments in the last few hours. Thom Tillis of North Carolina as one example talks about how he didn't think this bill, even if it passed, would do a lot. And moderate Democrats echoing the party line that they're not on board with this bill. It's going to have a hard time getting to 60 votes, but this is kind of the only thing that Washington can move on at this moment on AI and it seems to have a hard time getting past tomorrow for certain.
All right, Ben, thank you. Appreciate it. Anthropic IPO perspectives leaked according to reports from Reuters. The filing revealing yet more warnings about AI risk referred to quote existential risk to humanity. How are tech investors thinking about all this? Join me now. I got Pat Walravens, Citizens' head of technology equity research. Pat, I'm actually going to call an audible here because let's talk about OpenAI that's making headlines right now as we speak. One big headline, I don't know if you saw this, Pat. All right. These are AI agents. They're going to work on tasks for you. I guess Pat, connect to it sounds like thousands of apps. I'm just curious. You saw Sam Altman make that news, right? Did you think Pat, well, that's a real opportunity for software. That's a risk. Maybe that's both. Talk me through it.
The first thing I, first of all, thanks for having me on, Josh. It's great to be here. The first thing I thought was, so I started with Grokbot. So, I do have Grokbot on my phone. I connected it to a phone number, which by the way is a fascinating thing.
What do you think so far? You impressed?
It's fantastic. It's fantastic. The very first use case I had of my Grokbot with a phone number and there's a company called Bandwidth that you can get a phone number for it, right? Was I was running late and so the you're at the top of your Grokbot there's a chief of staff. So you have my chief of staff, right? So I tell my chief of staff, please call Aaron who I'm having dinner with. Let him know I'm running a half an hour late. Have him order me a particular cocktail and if the waitress comes around for our orders, get me a nice piece of fish. And then I'm off and running doing things I'm not really thinking about. I get to the restaurant, there's a cocktail sitting there and I go, 'Aaron, did you get the call?' And he goes, 'Done, Mr. Yeah.' And he goes, 'Yeah.' And I go, 'What did it say?' It said, 'Hello. This is Pat's Grokbot, chief of staff. I'm calling to let you know he's running late. Can you order him a drink? And if the waitress comes around, get a...' I go, 'That's fantastic.' And you can also have it ask questions. So, when I'm, you know, I'm in New York today and I've been seeing clients and I demo it for my clients. I say, 'What's your mobile?' I have my chief of staff call them and say, you know, Pat really enjoys doing business with you. He appreciates our relationship. Will you come to the Citizens Technology Conference in March, right?' And they either say yes or no. And then I get a text back on my phone as to whether or not a client is going to attend our technology conference.
So, this is saving you what time? It's time. It's energy.
It's so great. It's so great. It saves time. It really smooths out communications with people if they're willing to pick up the phone. Okay. So, all right. So, you have Grokbot and get back to your dots. You have Muse, right? Now, we have Dots. So, there's more and more of these consumer agents. You can't get them all to do a phone number yet. The phone number is really fantastic. Our telephone network is going to be burned up by agents. The next billion users of the telephone networks are going to be agents, right? So, we got ways to go to figure that out. People aren't going to pick up the phone over and over again when they have an agent calling them. Your agent is going to start answering the phone from another agent, right? And how all that is going to get resolved, we don't know yet. And it's moving so fast. The big takeaway from all this for me is the technology is moving faster than the human's abilities to absorb it. Yeah, when you watch what was going on at the OpenAI dev day today, I mean, it's just remarkable, but it's so much. And the same thing is true in enterprises, right? It's just it's going faster than the enterprises can safely implement.
Well, I want to get to that. A question I had as you were talking there, I was thinking, Pat, if you have these agents and they can kind of work across dozens or hundreds of thousands of apps, who ultimately owns that customer relationship? Like, is that Sam Altman? Is it the software company? How do you think about that?
I own that customer relationship and I can tell you who's going to win. You want to hear who's going to win?
Yeah. Give it to me. Who takes the gold?
Yeah. Who takes the gold is who delivers a product that I trust that is safe. And the more we get that message across the better. Right. Because what is... Can I just ask you when you say safe? Like what does that actually mean in practical terms? What is safe? I mean, when you read the disclosures from some of these AI labs about, you know, we were training something and it's a future version of the product and we had to do this evaluation, it broke out of the evaluation and it hacked into Hugging Face in order to try to get the answer to the... that is not safe. Okay, that is not safe. And so we got to slow down so that we can put guardrails around these products.
Well, now you're into a hot debate here and you find yourself into it on at odds with, you know, the president of the United States and others by I think Jensen Huang's with him. I think Mark Zuckerberg they'll say, you know what, we have guardrails. We have safety in place. It's called liability. You screw up, you screw up Sam Altman. You screw up Dario Amodei. And you know what? You've got verdicts and settlements and insurance costs. You're going to get wrecked, man. What do you say to that? That they argue that's your guardrail.
I think the product liability laws are going to have an incredibly important role to play here. And I think the last thing we want to do is create some sort of regulation that exempts these companies away from those laws. And those cases are coming. I wrote about it recently in one of the Microsoft notes. You might have seen it, you know, but there's this horrible, horrible situation with the family that lost their son, right? That was engaged in this really dark back and forth with ChatGPT. And you know, I remember those headlines. Yeah. And in OpenAI's defense, it said like a hundred times, get help, get help, get help, get help. Right? Not in OpenAI's defense. When you read some of the things that ChatGPT was saying to this kid, you're just like, I mean, that's insane, right? Those are crazy things to be saying to some teenager, you know, for those of us who have teenagers.
I guess the question then Pat though is, you know, it's easy to talk about well, you know, you need regulation but then to your point I don't know what the smart targeted regulation looks like that it'll catch a defective dangerous model but it won't like freeze an industry in place that could be enormously economically valuable and I'll be honest Pat I don't know if I perfectly trust Congress to get that right. I mean we've all watched Congress like try and grill executives from social media. Does that leave you with a ton of confidence, you know? Yes. Those are the folks we should put our trust in to get this, you know, bleeding edge technology, right?
We want to try to set up the incentives so that people do the right thing. Yeah. Right. And one of the incentives to get people to do the right thing is to realize if they don't do the right thing, there are consequences. And those consequences are civil. What happened to all the companies used to make asbestos? Right. Yeah. Right. But then those consequences can also be criminal. Right. And so when you make it clear, you know, what the consequences are of your behavior, that hopefully will help push things in the right direction.
I guess if I'm a software investor, the bigger picture question, let's see, Pat, we're talking 12 months from now. I hope we are. I mean, what would tell you all these agents, whether it's OpenAI or it's Meta, like what would tell you what would be the indicators? Hey, you know, this is actually this has proven to be a real tailwind for publicly traded software names or yikes, we got a problem. It's a risk. It's taking profits. What should I be watching for?
I mean, I think big picture. Yeah. And I cover enterprise software. We have a fantastic internet analyst, Andrew Boone, who you can come on to get all the consumer side of it. But big picture in the enterprise, look at what Microsoft is doing, right? We use Copilot at Citizens Bank and it's fantastic and it has access to all of my emails and all of my contacts but at the same time it doesn't give me access to things that are elsewhere in the bank that, you know, the software equity research analyst most certainly should not be seeing, right? And I am now spending 70% of my day in that product to learn, to write notes, to create cool graphs, right? And to prepare for my conversations with people like you and with my clients. So, you know, we have some examples of where it's working. I think what Microsoft is doing with Copilot is one really interesting one.
Let me before we go, I want to squeeze one ticker in there because it was dominate headlines. MongoDB. You covered that name. I know you like the name. So what did you make of that news? The co leaves. He's going to work for Zuck and Meta, the stock. I mean, I want your take on the news, Pat, but then did you look at that stock reaction, man, and think down like 20%. Rocks, right? Did you think that was fair? Was that overblown? What do you think?
So I was at the analyst day today and the timing of this is amazing. So it's really difficult. So analyst days today in New York on Thursday, CJ Desai who is by the way he was at ServiceNow before who was the president, CEO and a board member of MongoDB notified the board that he was leaving right and he's taking the enterprise platform role at Meta. It's incredible this new business AI platform that Zuck. Yeah. Yeah. On Thursday. The board meeting happened on Saturday. Yeah. Right. Yeah. A weekend board meeting. And then luckily for MongoDB, they have Dave who has been the CEO for the past 11 years and has been gone almost a year, right? Who's still on the board who is able to step right back into that role on interim basis. And he presented this morning at the analyst day.
And were you impressed by what you heard in terms of growth, strategy?
Yeah. Yeah, he's fantastic. He's always been fantastic. He's fantastic again. The only thing you would have liked to have heard is I'll stick around for another 5 years and he's not signing up for that. Right. So, the challenge now is it's a very good business. It grew 30% last year. There's a lot of tailwinds. But the challenge now is we have Dave for this interim period, but now we got to go find a recruiting, you know, a head hunting firm. Got to find a new CEO and then we got to go through that process all over again. That is not optimal. But still, bottom line, it's an outperform. You're telling your clients this is a buy here. Yeah. And down 20%. That is an opportunity that you should take advantage of.
Pat, so good to see you, especially on set, man. Thank you. It was great.
It's my pleasure. It's nice to be here.
Coming up, we dive into the latest Fed speak. That's next on Market Domination.
Big batch of Fed commentary coming out today. Our finance correspondent Jennifer Schonberger is here with the details. Jen.
Hey there, Josh. Yep, lots of Fed speak this afternoon. We just heard last hour from New York Fed President John Williams who sort of laid to rest the notion of an October rate hike saying that quote there's no need for urgency and we have time to gather more information. He sees only one more rate hike. He says what he calls later this year, which to me speaks to December time frame rather than later next month to return inflation in a timelier manner back to the Fed's 2% target. Now, we also heard from Federal Reserve Governor Michael Barr earlier today, who seems to be a bit more hawkish because he sees further interest rate hikes, plural, to get inflation back down to the Fed's 2% target in a more timely manner. He is looking at the same forces that John Williams is looking at but seems to think that the Fed needs a more aggressive approach and that is that higher energy prices seem to be sticking around for longer and could have far more far-reaching ripple effects. Also AI very much on the front burner sort of replacing tariffs as a focal point for near-term inflation for the Federal Reserve. We also heard from Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee who says, 'Listen, I'm one of the more optimistic members of the Fed' when referring to the dot plot implying that perhaps he doesn't see that many rate hikes, but he says we really need to make sure the inflation is coming back down to target and these things that seem to be temporary are actually temporary. He still thinks the Fed could cut rates at some point, you know, maybe 18 months from now. Back to you, Josh.
Jen. Before you go, the Trump administration launching this AI tool. What can you tell us about that?
That's right. The Trump administration launching a brand new website today called America.gov powered by artificial intelligence. Before you had to go to so many different government websites, go through multiple steps to apply for a passport, apply for Medicare, compare health care plans, apply to change your name if you just got married. And you had to fill out all these forms, go through multiple steps, maybe go to an appointment and wait on the mail. Well, now powered by two AI agents, Grok and Gemini, so Google and SpaceX's AI, users can now go to one website, America.gov, and ask questions in plain English, like, I'd like to apply for a passport, or I got married and I need to change my name. And that technology is going to comb and link all of the government websites into one. This has been developed by Joe Gebbia who was co-founder of Airbnb and now head of the White House's national design studio. And this website is seen as sort of a concierge for American citizens to the federal government. And Gebbia says he's confident that this website is going to operate well, that we're not going to see some of the infamous missteps that we saw, for instance, with healthcare.gov because it has been formed by a co-founder of Airbnb and has been in partnership with SpaceX and Google. Right now, you can only search for questions on how to do certain things, but early next year, 2027, they expect this is going to be fully operational. You can actually fill out forms, have tasks completed. So you no longer have to go through that fussy process if you want to get your passport. You just go to America.gov and you fill it out. And indeed, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier today that that is where they want the majority of Americans to apply for their passports going forward. So, I don't know, Josh, it's pretty cool if you check it out.
All right, great stuff as always. Thank you, Jen. Coming up, how much runway is left in AI trade? We dive into that next on Market Domination.
OpenAI stepping up its push in enterprise AI with new agents called Dots creating a more direct race with Meta. For more we want to bring in Ben Bajarin, co-founder and principal analyst at Creative Strategies. All right Ben let's just start right with that OpenAI developer conference. Talk to us about Dots. These are these new AI agents. What do you make of it Ben and what does it mean for Meta which OpenAI seems to be, you know, taking a direct shot at?
Yeah, I mean I think across the board there's interest in these let's just call enterprise or personal agents which actually we think is very helpful in eliminating some of the skill gap, being able to have something that essentially looks at what you're doing or anticipates what you need and can kind of help you use AI a bit more effectively. So we think there's a lot of upside there. We don't expect, you know, one agent to win them all. We think there will be a handful either in an enterprise context which might be attached to your software or your enterprise company platform or even in a personal sense. We think you could see several of these be winners. But at the end of the day, it's interesting because it's another way I think to get people to use AI more in their day-to-day. And right at the end of the day that also just means a whole lot more compute infrastructure needed as we scale these things not just for, you know, basic agentic tasks all the way down to personal or individual agentic tasks where everyone may have one or multiple of these in their lives for daily use.
I'm curious man which ones are you kind of experimenting with? Like are you playing around with Muse for example?
Yeah we have Muse, we have Instinct. We're going to try Dots as soon as we get access. We've had a little bit of early exposure to that. But I mean, you know, Josh, we try them all as early as possible, break as much as we can, push their limits. But I think having something that can go do things for you or anticipate things for you and string those workloads together in an automated fashion. I think a lot of people will find value on and that's why these are the first things I think you can look at and see real consumer value around AI. Not just shopping but I mean, you know, being able to book tickets or fix sheets for you or find some, you know, government document, right? These are the things where I think people can start onboarding with AI in a whole lot more meaningful fashion but we're very, very early obviously.
What do you make of folks who say, you know, I kind of want to experiment with these agents, right? I want to give Muse a test drive but I maybe have some privacy concerns. I hear people talking about that. I'm curious what you make of that. Or do you think Ben some people, a lot of people just say, you know what, I will sacrifice privacy for convenience?
Yeah, I mean I think the privacy part is not going away. I think there's a strong case to be made that these things get a lot more valuable when you, you know, let them log into your services or to some degree give them access. I mean, we don't think everybody day one's going to start giving these things banking or financial access, but areas where you might use a website or a service, right, to do some shopping or some commerce, you're hearing stories come out, right, pretty frequently around it helping people with trouble tickets or customer support, getting refunds for plane tickets, things like that. So there's a lot of low-hanging fruit, but I do think there will always be that security, that privacy, and it's going to come down to who you trust, right? Is it a service provider? Is it a vendor? Is it a brand where you are comfortable using commerce or doing banking? Are they the ones that will provide this to you and you need agents to just work across those things? But I think security and privacy, you know, continues to remain a pretty central, you know, mindset as you pointed out. But like I said, I think there will be vendors who have more trust in the ecosystem that I think can get consumers to use these things backed by security and privacy that's inherent to their platforms.
Ben, the other name I want your take on that made news this week. I want your take I haven't heard it yet. Nvidia kind of two big pieces of news, right? Boosting its buyback by $150 billion. Massive. But what about this new Nvidia software, Ben, this AI safety platform? Just explain that to the audience, the viewers in simple terms, Ben, and then I want your response to it, what you made of it.
Yeah. No, we think this is one of the most interesting things, right? Right now, I look at it as kind of a conceptual way where we can go and do a little bit more of a safety or an agent harness. There's a number of ways Nvidia has implemented this, but essentially what it's doing at its core is observing the reasoning of any model and that's being done by a third party independent model watchdog per their, you know, nomenclature. But essentially you have an independent model whose sole job is to just look at the reasoning of the agent and then see if at any particular way it starts to go off the rails or might start reasoning that it should go do something that it shouldn't. And again across an enterprise spectrum, this can be set with very specific enterprise permissions policies so that it knows that it has the right to do these things and do those guardrails. But that is a pretty clever approach other than just looking at the outcome. Is the outcome okay? But actually, you know, having an observer of the reasoning and doing so with a very specific approach is actually a fairly novel approach. And we think conceptually that has legs to have a lot more of these safety harnesses that we need from agentic AI.
What is your general take then on the kind of AI safety fears that are voiced by OpenAI and Anthropic? I mean do you in general Ben do you hear those and think okay that's fair and true? Do you think it's overblown? Do you think it's cynical? What is the Ben Bajarin take?
Yeah, I mean I think it's fair. I mean again I think if you talk to folks in infosec and cyber security, you know, you hear a lot of very scary logical conclusions if this does get out of hand. I think you need to have something that has very hard permissions, hard policies, hard security and the kinds of things that allow these agents to not go rogue and go hack things or go try to get into software that they don't have access to. Again, this is something that can be solved through software, right? And this is one of those things where it's like, oh, we have no idea how to do this. Like, sure, bring awareness to it. Let's make it cognizant, understand the problem, and then start to put guardrails around these things so that we can go and fix them. But the reality is, right, that it can get out of control, and agents do have a lot of power. And a lot of case in a lot of enterprises, agents are running right now ungoverned. And so I think we need to rein that in and have a standard process where we can do better governance, better deployments with these types of security. And then more importantly from a cyber security standpoint, equip governments, equip enterprises to defend themselves against frontier hacks, whether that comes from a model that went rogue or actual attackers that I think becomes a much more significant problem, you know, that an AI enhances over time.
Finally, Ben, before we let you go, listen, if you want to do AI, you need memory chips. Micron's earnings report on deck. I'm just very curious, Ben, what are you listening for there? Is it ASPs, pricing power? Is it just overall demand? What's on your radar?
Yeah, not demand. We think demand remains continually strong. We still hear DRAM is structurally constrained in many different ways and that's not going away. I think there's two things. I think one we're looking for is gross margins, right? This is a huge debate. Can gross margins stay up at the rates that they are or do we need to see some normalization so it doesn't feel like, you know, price gouging in a movement. So I think that will be super interesting because that's one thing to track over time is to see if margins should marginalize. The other one is just continued conversation around LTAs. I think the debate around memory keeps coming back to how long can this stay structural or does it go back to cyclical in some capacity and LTAs are going to be the thing around the confidence of these long-term agreements. How much is guaranteed in capacity that I think will give investors more confidence that this is a much more longer and structural cycle than people realize and we think LTAs, you know, remain plus some margin integration across that remain the best signals to look for for the length of this cycle.
Ben as always great to have you on the show. Thank you buddy.
Thanks for having me man. Good to see you.
Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sozzi spoke to Dan Ives, Yorkville Partners senior managing director, about the health of the AI trade earlier today. Here's what he had to say.
Dan, what do you think about this Anthropic?
Look, I mean this is the event everyone's been waiting for. Now look, in terms of the leaks and things like that, that's obviously, you know, a head scratcher, but look, I think it all comes down to like when they file, how investors ultimately play this name because I think the big focus is going to be more about the growth and what the trajectory looks like over the next few years because look, they're at the centerpiece of the AI revolution trade. And you think about Dario today with Trump and many other leaders at the White House. Look, it speaks to this tug of war we're going to see between safety and growth.
Dan, you think they come public?
I mean, I think it's probably the same chance that you're mentioning more than the bar. Well, I mean, I'm trying to think like why would this even leak if they were not trying using this as some form of trial balloon on a reception on a potential reception in the public markets? And then you've been at this game a while. Who even leaks this stuff? Look, I mean, things have happened in the past like where we've seen some things like this, but look, I think it just comes down to like you go back to the Dario essay, the safety, we have to slow things down. There have been a lot of things that have gone on where I think it's confused investors because it's sort of talking out of both sides of the mouth. I think the reality too is that just going back to like the Dario essay to today, Jensen, Nadella, you know, obviously Karp, you know, I think many have come out pretty strongly against the concept of what Dario was talking about and what is there a moral issue here? The risk factor section for Anthropic reportedly saying their technology is an existential risk to humanity. I like I've never seen anything like this before. How could I put money into a company that might kill me and my family? Like there's definitely unprecedented, right, in terms of a risk factor like that. But I would I mean like they're not similar but we just even go back to like Taiwan Semi and right I mean you know me and you that have covered that for so many decades like that's another name like there's a risk like, you know, in terms of like geopolitical in terms of Taiwan but I think investors they understand that this is a risk again I continue to view this as kind of a shock or risk relative to what I believe is something where guardrails will be put in. Technology always goes ahead of the regulation and but I do think there's some alarmism that's going on here as well.
Dan, $518 billion in obligations for Anthropic. Are they too big to fail?
Look, I think Anthropic is the hearts and lungs of the AI revolution trade and that goes for OpenAI as well. I think part of I almost view it as me being like, you know, looking at it the wrong way or misguided or whatever. When everyone talks about the circular financing trade and that's some sort of negative doomsday view I view it differently. I view it as you are essentially building out a new economy over the next 10 years in terms of the AI economy from data centers to chips to GPUs and for the first time in 30 years US is ahead of China when it comes to tech. Anthropic's at the center of that. I do actually think for tech them going public is bullish for the broader tech trade, more transparency and I think that's something that investors will crave and look just like we saw SpaceX, it comes down to what reception will be because on the private side, it's different than when public investors because there's a market, there's demand, there's buyers and sellers, and I think that that's a healthy process.
I think Anthropic would have liked to go public a couple months ago. Now we have CoreWeave delaying its IPO. What's the signal from that to the average investor?
I personally wouldn't put a stat that signal to this. I mean that's my I mean it's look there's going to be there will be some choppiness in IPO market, you know, just given what we see depending on different areas of tech but when it comes to the AI trade and when you talk about micro crime you talk about just overall growth and where this is going like size is my view like we're only 15% through the spending the 4 to 5 trillion that's going to happen and it's hard for an investor to just not pay attention to that or not participate in that. But I still believe this is a 1997 moment, not a 2000 bubble moment.
Well, Dan, if we're only 15% through and Anthropic wipes us all out, I mean, there's no more to get through.
Look, if that happens, at least I want to, you know, be in a Corvette, you know, driving, you know.
There you go. You're getting my Yahoo of the day, man. You're getting my Yahoo yodel of the day, Dan. I know you love the Yahoo yodel. Another big story this week. I want to go to Micron. My heart wants to go to Micron, but I'm not. I'm going to go back to Nvidia because I haven't seen, this has been a big week of firsts for me, I should say. I've never seen a prospectus leak like this very important company. Never seen a buyback out of what Jensen did in Nvidia. My question to you is this. What's next for Nvidia? We're always looking for what's next. And I always I think we were expecting this bullet from Jensen. We were expecting a big buyback. Like what does next year look like for this company?
Be about physical AI. I think that will be the holy grail for Nvidia because when you think about robotics and physical AI that will be multitudes more than the spending that we're seeing today. I think when you talk about the buyback and what they're doing on the safety side and even what he's done with Karp in terms of sovereign AI he's laying out the platform of basically they're building a sort of the runway, the airport for what ultimately AI is going to look like not just in terms of enterprise and consumer but I think physical AI and I think it just shows the confidence because the reality is investors continue to underestimate the scale and scope of what's happening. I'm not saying there aren't risks that the safety issues, data center worries in terms of midterm elections but you can't fight the trend.
You think Jensen responds to the Pope?
Look, I mean with Jensen, you know, never say never, but I just look I but I just think like Jensen's he's the adult in the room. Like the reality is like he is someone I don't care where it is, what country, every like when he talks, everyone listens, right? And I think it just he has the best perspective and balanced perspective of what's happening in AI.
Coming up, how one company is developing humanoid robots that do dangerous jobs. That's next on Market Domination.
Robots may be the future of difficult and dangerous work. Foundation Future Industries is testing humanoid robots that could potentially work on battlefields doing dangerous jobs before soldiers are sent in. Now got Mike LeBlanc, Foundation Future Industries co-founder. Mike, it's great to see you. Maybe start here, Mike. I heard your company was testing humanoid robots in Ukraine. Mike, maybe start there. Walk us through that. How exactly were those humanoid robots being used over there, Mike? For what task, what purpose?
You know, Ukraine, I think the place that Ukraine's going to take in history of the West is going to be the initial place that robots were really tested in war. They have a mandate to take off as many people off the battlefield as possible and to replace them with robots. And so we had a lot of people reaching out asking us about putting our humanoids out there. Our robots right now are the only ones that can actually, you know, potentially unlock all the weapons and vehicles and all the spend cost that they have on human shaped people in the past. And so all the tests now have been focused very much on terrain, logistics, reconnaissance, very, very kind of simple tasks. But I think the belief is that the robots are eventually going to be able to pick up guns. They're going to be able to drive vehicles and really pull humans off the battlefield.
And just so I understand it, Mike, your robots in Ukraine, were they navigating, you know, making decisions on their own, Mike, or no? There was still a human being remotely controlling all this?
In all the dynamic tasks for anything warlike, anything for the military that we've done, it's all a human controlling it right now. We do have robots that work autonomously when they're doing working in manufacturing, but right now it's still very much human in the loop. And it gets very, very tricky of whether the Ukrainians are going to stick with that or not, but we really leave it to the militaries and the commanders to make those decisions.
Maybe a simpler question, Mike. Why does the robot, you know, need to be shaped like a human? Like couldn't a smaller, cheaper robot on wheels do the same thing or no?
So there are lots of different form factors going on the battlefield right now. You've got drones, you've got unmanned ground vehicles, which look like ATVs that go out. So you have all the different form factors that are going out to fight armies, but you still have things like steps, you still have things like doorknobs, and everything that we've built for the military up until now. Every heavy machine gun that you need to set up, every vehicle that you need driven, all of those were made to be compatible with a human form factor. And so having a human-shaped robot really unlocks the potential of those.
When you talk, Mike, about eventually maybe giving one of these humanoid robots a weapon, what's the case for that, Mike? What's the advantage of that on the battlefield?
Well, you know, I was a Marine Corps officer for 13 years, and so to me, anything that you can do to replace the 19-year-old from Louisiana going out on that battlefield is worthwhile. Today, when you look at a lot of the tasks that the military is doing, a lot of them are walking around with guns. That's just the case. It's a lot of patrolling. Whether it's combat patrols, whether it's just, you know, setting a cordon around a house, any of these things, you really have a gun. You're ready to protect against what comes. And you have very simple directives that you're giving to young people to do this. So, if there's any possibility of us taking those people off and putting robots on, we're going to build into it.
Who would decide though, Mike, in that hypothetical you're describing, and who would decide, you know, whether the robot fires that weapon? Is there a robot or do you think no, there's always going to have to be some human service member decide, okay, that robot can now pull that trigger?
Well, already we're seeing with electronic warfare, right, that is the counter to drones. So, that will be the counter to robots, too. If you have robots that are trying to go out and attack an enemy, they're going to try to block that signal. And so, even today on the battlefield, you have drones that are already making decisions of what to do, right? They're hoping that they can identify a target. They're hoping that they can attack that target once it's out of a human's control. And so I think that boundary has already been passed and we'll see a very similar thing for humanoids.
It's interesting though, Mike. I mean, let's say, you know, if a humanoid makes
A mistake when it fires that weapon, a mistake, a civilian for a terrorist. Who, Mike, ultimately is accountable, responsible for that?
Well, I think this is an age-old question of philosophy of really agency in battle, right? And is it the king who set the war? Is it the commander who's carrying it out? This goes back to the Iliad. This goes back to Henry V. Really, when we're putting our 18-year-olds, our 19-year-olds out there with very basic rules of who they're allowed to shoot and who they're not allowed to shoot, decisions are being made willy-nilly all the time. And we have a very strong history of making a lot of mistakes on the battlefield. So I think that adding AI is actually going to put a lot more guardrails than people think.
And finally, I'm just curious, how much do your robots cost, Mike? And how many can you actually manufacture right now?
So right now we're selling the robots commercially for $100,000 per year per robot. So when they're replacing three people on a shift, that makes a lot of sense. In the military, we've worked with some different pricing primarily because our biggest objective is to get these robots out onto the battlefield, right? We want to get learning as fast as possible. And so we'll be making thousands of these next year and putting those hopefully on the battlefield where we can start iterating of what they're really going to do out there and what we need to build.
I read, Mike, Eric Trump is an investor and now an adviser as well. What does he bring to the table for you all?
You know, meeting Eric was really interesting. He had initially invested in us, but then would come by the office. He's very mechanically inclined. So he's actually, he can geek out about robots all day. But he's also very helpful in talking about building a very large robot factory that we're doing in Texas to build all these robots. And Andrew strategically talking about what we should be doing to capitalize the company.
Mike, great to have you on the show today. Appreciate your time.
Coming up, got you covered through the close on Wall Street. Don't go anywhere.
Stocks in a day lower here. Yahoo Finance's Ines Ferre has the very latest.
Josh, we are seeing that the Dow has ended the session down two-tenths of a percent but off the lows of the session. The Nasdaq composite just below the flatline, but you can see wavering throughout the day and the S&P 500 also down about two-tenths of a percent. We've been watching all day the Treasury yields, the long-dated bonds which had gone higher. So you're looking at the 10-year at 5.26, the 30-year easing just a little bit. It had been at its highest level since 2002. And this is what has some Wall Street analysts a little bit jittery about what's happening. But because we haven't seen these markets going down too much, but nonetheless, as those rates get higher, especially the 10-year, if it goes to 5.5, that's where markets could feel more pain. Taking a look at where we're at with the sectors, you've got utilities that's been in the green throughout the session. You've got energy that's lower. That's because oil prices have fallen today. And then over on the NASDAQ 100, a mixed picture with the Mag 7 with Nvidia, Alphabet, Apple, all lower, but you've got Meta jumping 3% and also Tesla down 2%, Amazon in the green. Over on the semiconductor space, do want to note that we are seeing a little bit of green with some of these semiconductors, especially Micron, which will be reporting its results tomorrow after the bell. So you've got Micron that's up more than 1% today. And then just looking at commodities, we have seen quite a bit of movement in the commodity space. Quite a bit of volatility when it comes to oil prices. You're looking one day it's up, but the next day it's down. Today down more than 3% for WTI, Brent also lower and gold after that big sell-off that we saw yesterday today up about 1%, Josh.
All right, thank you, Ines.
Well, for more on the impact of rising yields, we got Jeff Klinghoffer, Aeristo Pacific managing director and portfolio manager. Jeff, it's always good to see you. Let's just start right there on the market action today. Oil actually slipping here. Your benchmark 10-year though, Jeff, it's here at 5.25. What signal or signals do you think that is sending investors? What should we take from that?
Well, I think what the market is trying to tell us is look, the Fed has an inflation problem. Inflation is sticky. Growth is incredibly strong, but really what I think the markets are telling you is this Fed means business, right? I think what we're seeing is a transition in the market to take what the Fed is telling us at face value. Chairman Powell came in and he told us we have an inflation problem and price stability isn't 2.1%. It's not 2.4%. It's 2%. And so I think the big transition we're seeing in markets is that we might have to start looking at 2% as a ceiling rather than a floor. And in order to get there, this Fed still has some work to do, which means rates need to be higher because growth is so strong.
Yeah. On that point about growth being so strong, I mean, do you think, Jeff, is that why, listen, you can have this bond sell-off and you can see your 10-year hit 5.25, but the stock market kind of hangs in there. Is that because, okay, well, if the macro is so strong, that should be good for equities?
I think that's part of it, but I think that the equity side will also have a little bit of tough time digesting. The impetus has changed for this Fed. The past Fed was willing to tolerate a little bit of higher inflation to really protect the employment side. What we're seeing from this Fed is almost the exact opposite. They're willing to at least put a little bit of challenge into the employment market because they need to see growth come down. They need to see demand come down because they really have to hit on the inflation side. They worry about that price stability mandate. They worry that eventually future price stability won't be a given from markets, right? They're losing potential. They could lose credibility.
Is that what you meant, Jeff, when you talk about, okay, how this is, in your opinion, a fundamentally different Fed under Powell? Is that what you're driving at there?
