Cathie Wood says a U.K.-founded company is “one of the best AI companies in the world.” That’s DeepMind, an artificial intelligence research lab acquired by Google in 2014 and founded in 2010. It now operates as Google DeepMind. “DeepMind … is one of the best AI companies in the world and has been very important, I think, to Google’s evolution,” Wood, Ark Invest’s founder, told CNBC’s ” Squawk Box Europe ” on Wednesday. DeepMind has embarked on research in areas such as robotics, deep learning and neuroscience. It has projects such as AlphaFold, which can predict 3D models of protein structures. This year, Alphabet said it’s merging DeepMind with an internal Google Research team called Brain . It’s a move designed to bring two groups focused on AI closer together as the battle for AI heats up. Google is racing to compete with Microsoft and other tech companies in AI, with Microsoft already making huge strides with its investment in OpenAI. Wood said Wednesday that the “AI revolution is upon us and is going to change everything” despite fears that there will be a repeat of the dotcom bubble bust in the 1990s. “I think whenever there’s a lot of excitement about a new technology and capital flows aggressively into the space, mistakes are going to be made,” she said. “But we do believe it is an enormous opportunity. And I think a lot of people are comparing what’s happening now to the tech and telecom bubble. We don’t think it’s anything like that. The technologies were not ready back then. And the costs were way too high,” Wood added. Ark Invest on Wednesday acquired British thematic exchange-traded fund issuer Rize ETF for £5.25 million ($6.5 million), marking the company’s first venture into the European passive investment market. Wood’s flagship $8 billion Ark Innovation ETF (ARKK) fund is up more than 30% in the year to date, and has Tesla , Coinbase and Zoom in its top holdings, as of June 2023.
