- Point72 founder and New York Mets owner Steve Cohen spoke at iConnections’ Miami conference Tuesday.
- Cohen said Chinese company DeepSeek’s recent breakthroughs are good for the AI industry overall.
- “It advances the move to artificial superintelligence. And that’s coming, it’s coming quick,” he said.
Billionaire Steve Cohen isn’t worried that the US has lost any kind of AI race with China just because of DeepSeek’s recent breakthroughs.
The Chinese AI startup has vaporized hundreds of billions of market value from some of the biggest names in the S&P 500 with its open-source models. Still, Cohen — whose firm, $37 billion hedge fund Point72, has a fund dedicated to AI named Turion that’s expected to grow to $1.5 billion — believes “what happened with DeepSeek is actually super bullish” for the industry.
“It advances the move to artificial superintelligence. And that’s coming, it’s coming quick,” said Cohen, speaking at the iConnections conference in Miami.
Bumps in the road for the companies on the path to superintelligence are just that, he said — bumps in the road.
“There’s going to be a lot of winners here, and it’s going to be episodic. It’s not going to go in a straight line,” he said, according to a recording of his talk obtained by Business Insider.
While he’s optimistic about AI’s potential, Cohen said the overall market could slow down due to President Donald Trump’s immigration and trade policies.
Cohen, who has supported former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in the past, said Trump’s focus on “unleashing America” and shedding regulations has “a lot to like.” However, he believes the tariff and immigration policies proposed by the administration would slow growth this year.
“Tariffs are a tax, and that’s going to slow consumer spending,” he said. He thinks the economy will grow 2.5% in 2025’s first half but slow in the second half to around 1.5%, and the Federal Reserve will struggle to hit its 2% inflation target thanks to unemployment remaining low due to a severe drop in immigration.
“I would expect the market to top over the next couple of months if it hasn’t already topped already,” he said.
Wherever the market ends up this year, though, Cohen won’t be trading it, at least not for his firm’s investors. While he’s regarded as one of the greatest stockpickers to ever live, Cohen decided to step away from trading last year to focus on running his two companies, Point72 and Major League Baseball’s New York Mets.
“I describe it as being immersed in a video game, and it’s so immersive that you just forget what’s going on around you,” he said of trading, and without it, he’s able to focus more on the people at his companies.
“I’m 68 and had this vision of being 70, still behind screens. I was like, ‘That doesn’t make sense,'” Cohen said.
