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The rapid emergence of China’s DeepSeek artificial intelligence group is “bullish” for the sector, said billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen, who blamed Monday’s tumble in tech shares on misinformation.
“Our view is that what happened with DeepSeek is actually bullish because it advances the move to artificial super intelligence, and that’s coming and it’s coming quick,” he said at a hedge fund conference in Miami, referring to AI models that may one day have better cognitive reasoning than humans.
His hedge fund Point72 recently launched a new strategy that focuses on trading AI assets, including hardware such as semiconductors. The strategy, which is named the Turion Fund, had raised about $1.5bn, Cohen said.
At the Global Alts conference in Miami, Cohen added: “There are a lot of people out there who talk who haven’t done the work, and they can misinform investors and they can misinform the public and we saw a little of that yesterday.”
The high-profile hedge fund manager largely brushed off the market rout on Monday, which included Nvidia — widely considered the leader of AI stocks — falling about 17 per cent.
The slide in stocks was triggered by a new model unveiled by DeepSeek, which claimed a technological breakthrough that cost far less to develop than the models engineered by US rivals. Nvidia’s share price rallied almost 9 per cent on Tuesday as investors dipped back into the stock.
Cohen said his view on AI — and its influence on the market — skews longer term. Instead of focusing on this week’s stock moves, he said AI was a “massive shift” and would affect “everybody, and how they conduct their lives and how they do business”.
“There are going to be moments where people are going to doubt it like yesterday and there’s a lot of people who own these stocks who perhaps don’t know what they own and why they own it,” he said.
Cohen stepped back from trading at his hedge fund last year, but remains chief executive at the firm, spearheading its business strategy and helping to manage talent.
Like competitors Citadel and Millennium, Point72 is a so-called multi-manager hedge fund, employing 185 investing teams focusing on a variety of trading strategies in equities, macro and computer-driven trading. He also owns the Mets baseball team in New York, which has consumed more of his time in recent years.
Cohen, 68, told attendees at the Miami conference: “I had this vision of being 70 still behind screens and I was like, that doesn’t make sense.”
