00:00 Speaker A
That big debate you hear right now, AI boom, AI bust. I mean, you had some very notable high profile investors, they were kind of throwing yellow flags. Some of them are saying they’re they’re hearing echoes of the dot-com era. I mean, what do you think?
00:15 Ayako
I started my career in the late 90s and lived through the uh dot-com bubble bursting and I will say that there are signs that there’s a lot of froth. You know, there’s some uh smaller cap names out there that are trading at hundreds uh times their earnings multiples and things like that.
00:36 Ayako
But I think when you look at some of the mega cap tech stocks that have led the charge in the S&P 500, they’re still closer to being more reasonably priced. They still generate strong free cash flow and we think that that’s going to continue. You also don’t have the 11 2000 sort of deadline that you had back in the 90s uh and like early 2000 in which everybody had to purchase all that equipment or else things were going to go heywire.
01:06 Ayako
Uh we have a little bit more of a runway for AI, I think, and I think we’re still in the early innings of building out that infrastructure.
01:13 Speaker A
As these tech earnings, Ayako, as they get reported and you’re going to be listening to these conference calls, I’m just curious as an investor, are there certain certain metrics or certain data points that you’re going to be studying to see to try to judge whether all this just historic AI investment and spend is paying off?
01:35 Ayako
I think it gets cloudier and cloudier as the spend is now more in private markets and private companies than it is in the public side. You’re seeing all these uh you know, announcements with Open AI and how that circularity is going around uh with Nvidia and AMD and Oracle and all that investments. I think the CAPEX from the hyper scalers are really going to be the metric that we all continue to watch to determine whether or not there’s continued spend uh for AI.
02:08 Speaker A
Ayako, it was great to have you here especially on set. Thank you.
02:11 Ayako
Thank you so much.
