The owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and a regular on the TV show “Shark Tank”, said AI is going to displace a lot of jobs, something that will play out fast, over the next 20 to 30 years. He said real estate is one industry that’s likely to get hit hard.
There is no way to beat the machines, so you’d better bone up on what makes them tick.
That was the advice of billionaire investor Mark Cuban, who was interviewed by Kyle Bass, founder and principal of Hayman Capital Management, in late October for Real Vision. The interview published Nov. 3.
“I think artificial intelligence is going to change everything, everything, 180 degrees”, said Cuban, who added that changes seen by AI would “dwarf” the advances that have been seen in technology over the last 30 years or more, even the internet.
“So, the concept of you calling in to make an appointment to have somebody pick up your car to get your oil changed, right – someone will still drive to get your car, but there’s going to be no people in transacting any of it”, he said.
Cuban says he’s trying to learn all he can right now about machine-learning, neural networks, deep learning, writing code and programming language such as Python. Machine language say, “OK, we can take a lot more variables than you can ever think of”, he said.
And AI is seeing big demand when it comes to jobs, he said. “At the high end, we can’t pay enough to get – so when I talk about, within the artificial intelligence realm, there’s a company in China paying million-dollar bonuses to get the best graduates”, said Cuban.
The U.S. is falling badly behind when it comes to AI, with Montreal now the “center of the universe for computer vision. It’s not U.S.-based schools that are dominating any longer in those areas”, he said.
The AI companies
As for companies standing to benefit from AI, Cuban said he “thinks the FANG stocks are going to crush them”, noting that his biggest public holding is Amazon.com Inc.
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“They’re the world’s greatest startups with liquidity. If you look at them as just a public company where you want to see what the P/E ratio is and what the discounted cash value- you’re never going to get it, right? You’re never going to see it. And if you say Jeff Bezos (chief executive officer of Amazon), Reed Hastings (chief executive officer of Netflix Inc.
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Cuban said he’s less sold on Apple Inc.
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though he said it’s trying to make progress on AI, along with Alphabet Inc.
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and Facebook Inc.
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. “They’re just nonstop startups. They’re in a war. And you can see the market value accumulating to them because of that”, he said.
But still, they aren’t all owning AI yet, and there’s lots of opportunities for smaller companies, he added..
On digital currencies and ICO
While Bass commented that he has been just a spectator when it comes to blockchain – a decentralized ledger used to record and verify transactions – Cuban said he’s a big fan. But when it comes to bitcoin
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ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, he said it would be a struggle to see them become real currencies because only a limited number of transactions can be done.
Read: Two ETF sponsors file for funds related to blockchain, bitcoin’s foundational technology
“So, it’s going to be very difficult for it to be a currency when the time and the expense of doing a transaction is 100 times what you can do over a Visa or Mastercard, right?” asked Cuban, adding that really the only value of bitcoin and ethereum is that they are just digital assets that are collectible.
“And in this particular case, it’s a brilliant collectible that’s probably more like art than baseball cards, stamps, or coins, right, because there’s a finite amount that are going to be made, right? There are 21.9 million bitcoins that are going to be made”, he said.
Cuban said initial coin offerings – fundraising for new cryptocurrency ventures – “really are an opportunity”, and he has been in involved in UniCoin, which does ETrade and Unikrm, which does legal sports betting for Esports and other sports outside the United States.
But he and Bass both commented about how the industry needs regulating, with Bass noting that ICOs have raised $3 billion this year, and $2 billion going into September. While many are “actually going to do well”, so many are just completely stupid and frauds”, he said.
“It’s the dumb ones that are going to get shut down”, agreed Cuban.
One problem: “There’s nobody at the top that has any understanding of it”, he added, referring to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Cuban ended the interview with some advice on where to invest now. He said for those investors not too knowledgeable about markets, the best bet is a cheap S&P 500
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fund, but that putting 5% in bitcoin or ethereum isn’t a bad idea on the theory that it’s like investing in artwork.
