Markets and Economy Finding silver linings in the market selloff
Despite last week’s selloff in software stocks and other momentum-driven areas, we believe the fundamental backdrop remains supportive.
Artificial intelligence may be under-hyped, given the cost, utilization, and commoditization achieved so far.
Artificial intelligence has shown enormous potential across education, business, science, and other fields.
Most companies are still figuring out how artificial intelligence can provide value for them and their customers.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has long since surpassed “next-big-thing” status. Society seems to recognize the possibility of generational change. The economy has experienced widespread experimentation and growing adoption across most industries. The market, driven by companies making large bets on AI, may have priced in a big payoff. Should we believe the hype?
Everyone’s talking about Artificial intelligence, even as few really understand it. Zack Kass is one of those select few. Kass, the former Head of Go-To-Market at Open AI, is among the world’s foremost authorities on implied artificial intelligence. His mission is to help businesses, nonprofits, and governments navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape. He joined the Greater Possibilities podcast after his keynote address at Invesco’s Breakthrough 2025, where he talked through his nuanced opinion on AI hype and other related topics.
Listen to the full interview here.
Discussing the future of AI with Zack Kass
In this special episode, we welcome Zack Kass, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) futurists, to discuss hype, hope, and the human experience in the age of AI. (Invesco Distributors, Inc.)
Brian Levitt
I'm Brian Levitt, Invesco's chief global market strategist. Today, I am bringing you a very special episode of the Greater Possibilities podcast. It's coming to you from Invesco's Breakthrough 2025 conference, where we just had the opportunity to hear from our keynote speaker, Zack Kass. Now, Zack joins us in our podcast studio so we can share his insights with our listeners.
Who is Zack? Zack is one of the world's foremost authorities on implied artificial intelligence. He played a key role in early efforts at commercializing artificial intelligence and large language models. Most recently, he served as OpenAI's head of Go to Market. And today, his mission is to help businesses, nonprofits, and governments navigate the rapidly evolving AI environment.
Our conversation today is brought to you by Invesco QQQ. QQQ tracks the Nasdaq 100 index, which is made up of the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq. That includes many of the innovative companies that are driving this AI conversation, as well as companies that are using AI in less publicized but interesting ways.
The opinions you’re going to hear in this conversation are Zack’s. And we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. So with that, let's start the conversation. Zack, thank you very much for joining us.
Zack Kass
Thanks for having me.
Brian Levitt
We're so excited to have you. I would say the biggest question that I get now from the investment community is about the hype around artificial intelligence. So I figured just a great place to start would be do you view all of this as overhyped?
Zack Kass
I think we should separate sort of what the questions you get asked versus the questions that I think about.
Brian Levitt
That’s a good point.
Zack Kass
Because I do think it's ... hype has to be framed in the context of do you think that a given investment is — and by the way, let's just define hype, right? In this case, I assume what people are asking is, is this overpriced?
Brian Levitt
Is it overpriced? Will it ever return anything? Will we ever use it to the extent that the businesses expect it to be used?
Zack Kass
Okay. That's great. So let's separate those three definitions of hype. One is, is this overpriced, such that I won't get, you know, ROI? Is this overpriced such that it actually goes to zero? And is there business value in the adoption of this? And on the first two, you are a better expert than I am. And I say this to basically anyone who studies the markets.
It's very hard for me to look at any given company and say, yeah, that company is priced well, or that company isn’t. And public markets are pretty good at pricing things, but even they make plenty of mistakes because information is imperfect.
What I think is more important and what I try to talk about is whether or not AI broadly is overhyped. And I would argue the answer is no. So if you're staring at a company, I don't know if you're staring at even an industry, I don't know. But if you're staring at the potential for this technology to radically change the human experience, then I argue it's probably under hyped still.
And the reason I think it's under hyped is because I don't think most people have fully processed what it means to have unmetered intelligence. And in the same way that describing a future of electricity to someone in 1920 who was starting to see the effects of power plants around manufacturing, around their neighborhoods, where they knew that it was coming.
Right, the combustion engine or the steam engine was giving way to something more interesting, but hadn't yet fully seen what it would do. Right. There is still a lot of gas and kerosene, and a lot of people just didn't have power or electricity. It's pretty remarkable to consider that we're probably there with AI.
I think what's most interesting is not the argument about a given company or even a given market, but the fact that we are building very smart machines that are getting exceptionally cheap to run. And if all of the GPUs, by the way, went away tomorrow, you could run GPT 4 on your CPU. We actually have enough compute on Earth to power a ton of inference already.
So if we stopped making scientific progress on the model and if we stopped building the frontier, I think GPT 5 and 5.1 could do a lot . And if we stopped building data centers, the CPU could actually be a pretty impressive inference fallback. That, to me, signals that something way more profound is happening here than whether or not, you know, ChatGPT grows to 2 billion users or 3 billion.
Brian Levitt
And it's grown its base very significantly.
Zack Kass
And I don't think it's overhyped. And this is my answer.
Brian Levitt
You know it’s funny as you talk about it, it reminds me of my first week, freshman year at the university, 1994, where I did not hand in a homework assignment. And the reason I didn't hand in a homework assignment is because it was assigned over email. And I remember being told that I needed to have an email account, but I never did it. Which tells you a little bit about my personality, but it's the same thing you're talking about with regards to electricity. I didn't realize what was coming.
Zack Kass
Yeah. And again, to me it's studying these markets is about studying the proliferation and the cost and the utilization and the commoditization of AI is not even a subsidized game. It's real. We are massively in fast compressing these models. And the implications are going to be pretty incredible.
Brian Levitt
I've already noticed a pretty significant benefit. But it doesn't necessarily change how efficient I am at my — well, it changes how efficient I am at my job. I'm not sure what else it frees me up to do. Right. So I can use these models to do research quicker. So I'm already seeing benefits from it. But those feel like small potatoes compared to what's likely coming. What are some of the things that excite you that may be coming?
Zack Kass
So on an individual basis, I think what we're seeing right now in the younger generation, I think is, is a good bellwether. Now, this is what I'm going to say is going to be viewed probably. I mean, there's somewhat of a hot take here because people stare at Gen Z in particular. Great, people stare at Gen Z in particular, and they say, well, look what's happening with a younger generation.
Look at the, you know, my theory of Idiocracy, which says that someone will eventually discover they don't need to critically think in order to survive, and they will start doing it less. And a lot of the idiocracy that we're seeing in Gen Z, because there is a declining rate of literacy and motor dysfunction actually presenting Gen Z is less likely to, ride a bike and swim.
That's scary. And I agree, it's bad. And also Gen Z is overperforming in ways that we had never seen a generation over perform. And what I basically think is happening is we're observing this new k curve, cognitive k curve, where if you want to do nothing, you can. You can do absolutely nothing and live, you can subsist.
And I don't think that's an AI feature. I actually think that's an economic feature. I think abundance allows for optionality. And we have to acknowledge that optionality means some people will abuse it. But what's really cool about watching Gen Z right now and many parents can attest to this, is the younger generations are overachieving in ways that we have not seen them before. Multidisciplinary overachievement because of technology. They're exploring business, science, arts, sports in new, incredible ways because they have access to technology you and I couldn't have fathomed. And now we are ungating for many young people, what we used to gate in the form of education and technology and classes and coaches by just saying, what do you want to learn? What do you want to be great at?
That is an incredible marker to me of what will happen on a personal achievement and over performance basis. And that alone, I think, stands as sort of a very good lens into how we are going to see AI improve people's personal capacity for achievement.
On a business basis. It's going to look a little similarly, but different. Whereas I think AI is actually going to help us drive down the cost of doing business, which creates this massive diffusion event. And what I think is going to happen is we are fast tracking towards a world where exceptionally regulated environments, where we policy things that way will maintain very expensive prices, and worlds where technology can, will actually diffuse most things.
And the last thing I think AI does in the pretty near future, I think we're going to have major scientific breakthroughs. And I, you know, people have been talking about this a while, but I think we're getting much closer than people realize to things like fusion, custom gene therapies, custom antibiotics, a lot of material and particle sciences improvements. I mean, Willow chip, quantum. I mean, my backyard in Goleta, California, quantum just got very real. And this is in large part due to improvements in our ability to do incredible testing at scale through AI.
Brian Levitt
I want to draw on that point you were making about where the younger generation is getting better at things and learning quicker. A lot of people worry about this idea of mass unemployment. I get that question all the time. What are we all going to do for a living when there's a machine that can do many of the tasks that we currently do. How do you respond to that?
Zack Kass
First, I will start by saying that this is a particularly sensitive time to even talk about it. And so for those who are affected by layoffs or for those who are worried about it, I want to acknowledge that like what I'm going to say may sound callous, but I also am trying to point at what I think are facts.
Right now there are two trends that I think are particularly scary to people. One is like this sort of like weird undercurrent in the market that suggests that AI is massively propping up the actual market, and that GDP growth sans AI is actually flat or even negative. That discretionary income and consumer confidence is waning and has been for some time.
And that amidst that, companies, big corporations who employ lots of people are starting to say things like, we're going to hire less people because of AI. And there are a lot of reasons to stare at this and be pretty unnerved. I definitely acknowledge that. Amidst that backdrop, I actually think I want to tell a story that best explains how I view this issue.
In October last year, October 1st, 2024, the dockworkers went on strike. The longshoremen. Do you remember this?
Brian Levitt
I do remember.
Zack Kass
Harold Daggett, the head of the longshoremen, instructed his dock workers to walk off the ports on October 1st and shut down shipping in and out of the United States and basically brought the economy to a halt for a day.
Brian Levitt
Not only do I remember it, I wrote a paper about it. And the day the paper was about to go out, the strike ended. So I never used it.
Zack Kass
Ah just your luck.
Brian Levitt
Just my luck. Right.
Zack Kass
I would like to read the paper by the way. I also wrote a paper about it well after the strike ended, because I became fascinated when I watched him go on CNN on the morning of October 2nd, and he very calmly pointed at the camera and the American people, and he said, you have no idea how dangerous we are. I will cripple you.
And I remember I watched the whole thing start to finish and watched it over and over. And as you recall, I'm sure, you wrote a paper. His demands were neither more money or safer working conditions, which have been the two tenants of every labor union since we organized labor. His demand was new as far as labor unions are concerned, which is a guarantee from the ports that they would not automate their jobs.
And if you recall, the picket signs read robots don't pay taxes and automation harms families. I was pretty fascinated, so I sent him an email, a very long, thoughtful one. But I went and was able to meet with a bunch of, he did not want to meet with me, but I met with a bunch of the longshoremen and the results we’re going to publish in the book.
What I discovered in the process basically changed how I viewed this issue, and how I view the automation issue. For most of the men, it was clearly not an economic issue to them. It was an emotional one. They described the job as being core to their identity. They described it as a place they wanted their children to work.
One person we talked to said they were going to continue having children until they had a son, so that their son could join the union. And what I realized in the process is one of the questions I needed to ask was, and I asked each of them, who benefits economically if we automate the ports? And all of them without fail, reflexively, said the capitalist. They've been trained basically to say the capitalist.
Brian Levitt
The capitalists, management, the shareholders.
Zack Kass
And I said, okay, who are the capitalists? Well, it's the shipping companies, you see. It's the shipping companies and the port owners. They benefit economically. I said, well, who else might benefit economically? And my argument in exploring this question with them and anyone else is that it is in fact, everyone who benefits economically if we automate the ports, including eventually, the dockworkers and their kids.
And what I realized in exploring this and many other automation issues is that we all, all of us, wander the earth, every single day asking, when is this good or service going to be better, faster, cheaper? Without realizing that what we are asking is when is a human going to be extricated from the manufacturing of this good or service?
And we don't do it because we're jerks. We do it because we are conditioned to believe the world should get better, faster, cheaper. And if it doesn't, we are aggrieved. And what we forget every day, somehow in this automation debate, is that you and I and everyone else on Earth are descendants of people whose jobs were automated to our economic benefit.
Brian Levitt
Absolutely. And we've always known that good economies evolve, right? If you're going backwards or you're not evolving from agrarian to industrial to service to knowledge base, standards of living will decline.
The one thing that I question that seems a little bit different this time is that there was always some level of retraining or reeducation for people to move into new and better and higher paying and more service knowledge oriented jobs. What happens when the service and knowledge... do we get to a point where everything has then been automated, or AI has taken on most of the tasks? Where does the demand come from in society?
Zack Kass
The book that comes out in January pays homage to John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in 1930 a paper titled The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. You may have read this. I've read this now over 100 times. I can recite it word for word, in which he said, I must now disembarrass myself to describe a future in which I will certainly not live to see, one in which we have solved the economic problem, and be faced with something more profound.
The Godfather, or the father of modern macroeconomics, was describing a world where automation would actually force us to solve a spiritual issue. And I'm not trying to be flippant. I'm not trying to be esoteric or philosophical. I do think we should be honest about the fact that if we automate most work, we're going to be faced with a different problem, and it's not going to be how do we put more and better food on the table?
It's going to be, what do we do with our time? And my point right now is I actually think that's the new issue. Now the path getting there is wonky, and it's wonky for two reasons. All jobs do not automate at the same time.
Brian Levitt
Right.
Zack Kass
And policy is going to protect a ton of jobs. So when people are like, okay, what job is going to automate first I'm like, show me the weakest union because policy and policymakers are going to protect, as the longshoremen got protection, jobs that actually serve only those who are doing the work. There are huge cartels in the United States in terms of power, very small in terms of size.
Ophthalmologists. I mean, I take aim at them constantly. The reason that it is so complex to get eyecare, and the reason that glasses and prescription glasses are so expensive is because there's a policy that way. And the automation embedded in a lot of industries that allow us to do things more inexpensively may not come.
And so what I think we have to be honest about is two things. The distribution problem that we are facing, which I think could last 20 to 30 years. I am certain that there will need to be backstopping when industries actually automate at uneven paces, and that may be UBI, it may be something else. But on the horizon very clearly is something that I think is much more interesting, which is a space in which we do different work.
I also think, God, we have to have the humility to remember that most of the work we do today, we could not have described 50 years ago.
Brian Levitt
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I remember answering questions early in my career. What are we going to do when nobody works in the manufacturing sector? If we don't build anything, what are we all going to do? And it's been very clear. I mean, we're sitting here today with a near 4% unemployment rate. Right? We've created new jobs. We've created new industry.
Brian Levitt
Standards of living improve.
Zack Kass
The Indian economic miracle which happened very quietly. India achieved food safety, you know, 10 years ago. Happened because of the proliferation of electricity and the internet, and it pulled an enormous swath of the global population out of poverty at a time where people assumed it could never happen. And I remind people that it is not necessarily government intervention that they seek. It is technological intervention, and obviously it needs to be regulated. And I'm not a AI maximalist. But I do think we need to start reframing this conversation around the challenges that humans will face, not on an economic basis, but on an emotional one.
Brian Levitt
And just to put a finer point on that, I mean, I've always loved looking at the statistics. A lot of people kind of have this idyllic view of the 1950s in this country or in this world when something like 60, 70% of the world lived in abject poverty. Today, those numbers are less than 10%. So we've seen how this works across societies.
Zack Kass
Rosy retrospection to me, is something that I actually... There are, you know, there are a lot of biases in there, 100, over 100 biases in the human brain, all of which are a genetic predisposition that you cannot do much to, to eliminate your bias. You just have to acknowledge it and see it. One of the funny things about machine bias is that I have to remind everyone, eliminating bias in the machine makes the machine inoperable. You want a machine that operates with bias. You just want to be able to explain the bias, which humans can't do. We're not very good at unpacking all of our experiences, all of our genetic predispositions that tell us why we believe a certain thing.
So we wander the earth with this tacit agreement that you have biases and I have biases, and we just don't talk about them. One of the things that really amazes me is the degree to which very smart people are willing to romanticize the past.
Brian Levitt
Romanticize the past.
Zack Kass
The rosy retrospection issue.
Brian Levitt
The only thing better about the past was I was younger.
Zack Kass
Yeah, well, by the way, there were some... I think you can argue that on some basis. There were definitely times of, you know, certainly in the recent past there were times with more international stability.
Brian Levitt
Closer community maybe people think about.
Zack Kass
Totally. But also I'm like, look, we should probably acknowledge that we didn't do things particularly well at a point in history, and that it's okay to look forward at all the other solutions to the problems that we face today, including but not limited to, device addiction, which is, I think, our sugar or our cigarettes which we will solve because we have a history of solving these problems.
Brian Levitt
I couldn't agree with that more. And speaking of which, when you talked about earlier about vaccines or the ability to get a hold of the diseases that now currently plague us, can you walk through how that may work? What is the potential of artificial intelligence?
Zack Kass
Basically any novel sciences where we are clearly rate limited by human intelligence. And unmetered intelligence presents the opportunity not to print a million more oncological researchers, of which, by the way, today there are 10,000. But to answer the question, what if 10,000 oncological researchers were 10,000 times more productive?
And the sort of un shackling of novel science, I think is really just not being priced that well today. I think for many people it's so philosophical, it's unbelievable. What we're observing is the rate at which we can make novel scientific breakthroughs is accelerating. And critically, the rate at which we can link them together.
And so in the case of, for example, like vaccine exploration is one, but in this case, the genetic therapy that cured baby K.J. in May was developed by Crispr and AI, wherein they were able to test by multiple orders of magnitude and speed, the right target and the right solution for that target. And so now what's happening is...
We're creating worlds where very rare diseases can actually be solved because you no longer need a massive sample size. You used to need massive sample size and money in order to do things. And now you're seeing these incredible progresses in very, very rare disease. I mean, I won't name a name, but a dear friend of mine is doing some incredible work to cure a disease that, in his family, a very rare disease and only 20 families in the world seem to carry.
And they're making exceptional progress because they were able to do far more with 20 scientists than they could have ever done 10 years ago with 5000.
Brian Levitt
It's so promising. It's so exciting to hear you talk about that. Is there anything within this space that concerns you?
Zack Kass
Well, sure.
Brian Levitt
Is this the Terminator?
Zack Kass
First, let's extrapolate long enough. I actually think one of the things that we should start being honest about is that we are approaching, we will approach soon a moral quandary. Like when did we start playing God? When does genetic testing and genetic therapy actually start to, you know, it's like, oh, you want your child to be taller or smarter, right? Or both. Yeah, yeah. My case, I only got one.
Brian Levitt
You're pretty tall. I don't know. So which one? Which one were you suggesting?
Zack Kass
That’s nice of you. I was referring to myself as a Neanderthal. But we are going to start to wade into some interesting territory where we have to start asking, are we doing this to improve the human experience or are we doing this for vanity?
The other issue I have is, I'm exploring this idea of automation boundary. There is this very important theory of virtuous friction, which is some things are hard and that's good. Lots of things are hard and that's bad. Walking a mile to get clean, drinking water is bad. That is vicious friction. But working really hard in college to get grades so that you can prepare to be an adult is good. And when people talk about, oh, ChatGPT and cheating, I'm like, the point is not that it's cheating. The point is that right now we have homework that doesn't comport to the current world. And so students aren't actually stretched. We're losing the virtuous friction that used to exist to prepare people for adulthood. That is one of the most immediate things that I worry about.
The Terminator, which lives on sort of another end of it, I worry less about. I spend a lot less time concerning myself with malicious or maligned superintelligence. I think it's far more theoretical and science fiction than it is anything else. But if I had to rank order my deepest concerns. One is Idiocracy, which we talked about a percentage of the population deciding they don't have to critically think so they don't do it.
One is dehumanization. A percentage of the population finding more interest in a virtual or digital reality than a physical one. To be honest, those are recessive traits. Those people don't procreate. It may in fact happen, but I do think we've known for a while that our happiness function is time with friends and family and physical community, and we will continue to pursue it.
I think we solve it. The third is identity displacement. We talked about that and the fourth is bad acting. And what I don't think we appreciate just yet is that while cancer research is going to accelerate, so too will low resource bad acting. And for every individual trying to do something amazing with AI, an individual is going to try to do something bad.
And the good news is we know how to solve for this. I actually, what I remind everyone is the world was so scary when we started moving things across the West. The reason that we introduced capital punishment during the Wild West is because it was the only way that we could effectively scare robbers and barons from actually not raiding all the covered wagons.
And it turns out if you raise the cost of doing a bad thing to a high enough point, then you can actually limit the behavior. We're going to have to artificially do that, because the actual cost of doing bad things is coming down.
Brian Levitt
If history tells us anything, it reminds us that any problem you identify in the current moment, there's always a solution that is not identifiable to you at the current moment. Seems like that's exactly what you're suggesting.
Zack Kass
Yeah, except maybe the meaning of life.
Brian Levitt
Well, that's a whole deeper conversation.
Zack Kass
Death and taxes I suppose.
Brian Levitt
Death and taxes. Well, it sounds like we may be living longer, but that's also another conversation for another day. I want to conclude by asking you, what do you think that businesses right now are getting right or wrong with regards to artificial intelligence?
I see statistics that say that many businesses are deploying it, but they're not exactly sure how to be deploying it. And there's this 95% number that's hanging out there that 95% of businesses report that they're not necessarily sure they're getting any benefit from it. To me, that seems incredibly high and it seems almost impossible to believe, just given even the smaller tasks right now that I can ask artificial intelligence to accomplish. So how do you respond to that? And what do you tell business leaders?
Zack Kass
So the MIT report actually found that 95% of pilots fail. So it's not that 95% of businesses don't see success with AI. It's that 95% of pilots inside of businesses fail.
Brian Levitt
Okay.
Zack Kass
And on an adjusted basis, it basically came out to about half of businesses were seeing success with AI on some basis, but that a lot of their pilots were failing.
Brian Levitt
Pilots being their workers.
Zack Kass
Sorry. Pilots being their attempts to solve problems with AI.
Brian Levitt
Oh, okay. So I'm not a pilot. There's a group that has a pilot going on.
Zack Kass
That's right. A pilot in this case would be a test. Invesco tries to do a thing with AI and it doesn't work.
Brian Levitt
Okay.
Zack Kass
Now my response to this is pretty simple. My issue with this study, this MIT study, is that it failed to do two things. It failed to actually describe the cost of these pilots, and it failed to describe the value of the successes. And that makes it a pretty inconclusive and incomplete study that basically is meant to capture headlines, which it did very well.
My argument is for a long time, software was very expensive to deploy, it was expensive to buy, was expensive to deploy, and a 5% success rate in software would have been very bad. I'm not sure that's actually still true, and I don't know how pilots are defined in this case, but I actually think that a 95% failure rate might be perfectly tenable in a world where the 5% success rate is providing incredible lift to the business, and the 95% failure rate is actually not really costing much.
And that's sort of my response to this, which is unless you can define what the value of this is, it's pretty tough. At the same time, Wharton released a study that said, actually, 75% of companies are seeing high ROI from their AI efforts, which sort of speaks to this issue. And I do think it is a who knows right now.
But I will argue this. Most companies are getting right the sort of new sense of urgency, and most companies are getting wrong this frenetic attempt to buy every tool. There is this mad dash to buy lots of software right now. I think the software is going to end up being fairly either obsolete or, misplaced inside of an organization.
And I think what we're going to see is this sort of consolidation event in SAS and AI, in AI products, once companies realize that they can do a whole lot more with a lot less. The other thing I would say is leaders need to be way, way more clear about setting a vision. Too many companies right now are like, look, we're just going to cut cost.
And I'm like, yeah, to what end? What are you actually trying to accomplish here? One, your employees need it. Two, your vendors need it, but three, your actual company needs to know what it's trying to do with AI if you’re actually going to have any success. And what I argue if you're unsure what you should do, the easiest place to start is describe a world where your customers have more access to more of your goods and services. Describe simply a higher access environment through whatever means you want.
Expanding your TAM, lowering the cost of the service, improving the actual service itself. But start with saying we want more people to have access to our products and services. What plays out is actually pretty impressive.
Brian Levitt
And the negativity around it reminds me of some of these terrible calls in history where, you know, with the Beatles, nobody wants to hear guitar rock anymore. With the advent of the internet, it's a flash in the pan. The iPhone wasn't going to sell well. So yeah, I always try to remind people when they're overly negative about something that seems pretty revolutionary to be mindful to put their negativity in place.
I really appreciate the positivity you bring. I really appreciate the excitement that you bring around this. I want to thank you very much for joining us on the Greater Possibilities podcast. You know, look forward to future conversations.
Zack Kass
Likewise. Thanks so much for having me.
Brian Levitt
That brings us to the end of this episode. Thanks to Zack Kass for joining us for this very special episode of Greater Possibilities, brought to you by Invesco QQQ.
Important information
You've been listening to Invesco's Greater Possibilities podcast. The opinions expressed are those of the speakers, are based on current market conditions as of November 12, 2025, and are subject to change without notice. These opinions may differ from those of other Invesco investment professionals.
This does not constitute a recommendation of any investment strategy or product for a particular investor. Investors should consult a financial professional before making any investment decisions. Should this content contain any forward looking statements, understand that they are not guarantees of future results. They involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. There can be no assurance that actual results will not differ materially from expectations.
All investing involves risk, including the risk of loss.
Past performance does not guarantee future results.
There are risks involved with investing in ETFs, including possible loss of money. Shares are not actively managed and are subject to risks similar to those of stocks, including those regarding short selling and margin maintenance requirements. Ordinary brokerage commissions apply. The Fund’s return may not match the return of the Underlying Index. The Fund is subject to certain other risks. Please see the current prospectus for more information regarding the risk associated with an investment in the Fund.
Shares are not individually redeemable and owners of the Shares may acquire those Shares from the Funds and tender those shares for redemption to the Funds in Creation Unit aggregations only, typically consisting of 50,000 Shares.
Before investing, investors should carefully read the prospectus/summary prospectus and carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. For this and more complete information about the Fund call 800-983-0903 or visit invesco.com for the prospectus/summary prospectus.
The Nasdaq-100® Index comprises the 100 largest non-financial companies traded on the Nasdaq. An investor cannot invest directly in an index.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, technology companies are sensitive to specific risks such as small markets, business cycle changes, economic growth, technological progress, obsolescence, and regulation. These companies may have limited products, markets, resources, or personnel, making their securities more volatile, especially for smaller start-ups. Rapid technological changes can adversely affect their results. AI companies often rely on patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets to protect their technology, but there is no guarantee these protections will be sufficient. Significant R&D spending does not ensure product or service success.
Gross domestic product (GDP) is a broad indicator of a region’s economic activity, measuring the monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced in that region over a specified time period.
A Pew Research study from 2020 showed that Gen Z is on track to be the best-educated generation yet, as they are less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to be enrolled in college than the generations before them.
More than 100 different identifiable biases have been reported in health care, according to a 2021 paper published by the National Library of Medicine.
The Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology comprises nearly 10,000 cancer specialists at hospitals, medical centers, and community clinics across the United States and Canada.
“Baby KJ” is a child who was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder and was successfully treated with a customized CRISPR gene editing therapy in 2025. The case was detailed in a study published by The New England Journal of Medicine.
Discussion about the MIT AI study and the success rate of AI pilot projects refer to “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025,” published in July 2025.
Discussions about the Wharton study refer to “Accountable Acceleration: Gen AI Fast-Tracks Into the Enterprise” published in October 2025.
Data on the percentage of the world in abject poverty sourced from the World Bank as of 2024.
The US unemployment rate in November was 4.6% according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Return on Investment, or ROI, measures the profitability of an investment relative to the money put in.
GPU stands for graphics processing unit.
GPT-4, 5, and 5.1 are versions of the artificial intelligence chatbot Chat-GPT
A K-curve describes an uneven trend in which different groups experience widely different outcomes.
The Willow chip is a quantum chip developed by Google. Quantum computing is an advanced computing method using quantum mechanics to solve complex problems.
UBI stands for Universal Basic Income, a government program that would provide regular payments to everyone, regardless of income or work status.
SAS is data and artificial intelligence software developed by SAS Institute.
TAM stands for total addressable market.
Invesco is not affiliated with Zack Kass or OpenAI.
The Greater Possibilities Podcast is brought to you by Invesco Distributors, Inc.
Hype can mean different things in different contexts. In terms of AI, hype might translate to market pricing and whether companies enjoying high valuations may ultimately deliver returns to justify them. The market may think so, and it has a pretty strong record at pricing companies, dot-com bubble notwithstanding.
Kass tends to take a broader view, instead looking at AI’s potential to radically change the human experience. “I don't think most people have fully processed what it means to have unmetered intelligence,” he said. “…We are building very smart machines that are getting exceptionally cheap to run.”
In that sense, AI isn’t over-hyped. It may actually be under-hyped, given the cost, utilization, and commoditization achieved so far. And the benefits being realized are just the beginning.
Potential AI benefits are showing up in expected and unexpected places. For example, younger generations are overperforming in new and exciting ways. They’re learning more quickly. “They're exploring business, science, arts, sports in new, incredible ways because they have access to [AI] technology,” Kass notes. “We are un-gating for many young people, what we used to gate in the form of education and technology and classes and coaches by just saying, ‘what do you want to learn? What do you want to be great at?’”
AI may also help drive down the cost of doing business. Consumers, and the companies that sell to them, are looking for better, faster, cheaper. In the long run, that could mean extricating humans from the production process. Automation will come for some jobs faster than others. Government policy will protect certain jobs over others. “We're going to be faced with a different problem,” as Kass sees it. “it's not going to be how do we put more and better food on the table. It's going to be, what do we do with our time?”
AI may lead to major scientific breakthroughs. By speeding up the research process and pulling insights from datasets too large and complex for humans to understand, research may advance further faster. “We're getting much closer than people realize to things like fusion, custom gene therapies, custom antibiotics, a lot of material and particle sciences improvements,” Kass notes. “This is in large part due to improvements in our ability to do incredible testing at scale through AI.”
A good economy evolves, and with it the standard of living improves. AI may hasten that evolution, though in what order and at what speed remain to be seen. Most companies are still figuring out where the value is for them. The urgency is there, but the tools to put it to productive ends are not. “There is this mad dash to buy lots of software right now,” as Kass sees it. “I think the software is going to end up being fairly either obsolete or misplaced inside of an organization.”
The hype, while largely justified, isn’t always productive.
Zack Kass’s newest book, “The Next Renaissance: AI and the Expansion of Human Potential,” is now available on his website: zackkass.com.
Despite last week’s selloff in software stocks and other momentum-driven areas, we believe the fundamental backdrop remains supportive.
We got some clarity on the two big risks we outlined in our 2026 investment outlook: Federal Reserve independence and an AI bubble.
If Kevin Warsh is confirmed as Fed chair, we don’t think he would prove as hawkish as markets seem to expect and his past actions seem to suggest.
Important information
NA5144709
Image: d3sign / Getty
Artificial intelligence, or AI, technology companies are sensitive to specific risks such as small markets, business cycle changes, economic growth, technological progress, obsolescence, and regulation. These companies may have limited products, markets, resources, or personnel, making their securities more volatile, especially for smaller start-ups. Rapid technological changes can adversely affect their results. AI companies often rely on patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets to protect their technology, but there is no guarantee these protections will be sufficient. Significant R&D spending does not ensure product or service success.
All investing involves risk, including the risk of loss.
Past performance does not guarantee future results.
Investments cannot be made directly in an index.
This does not constitute a recommendation of any investment strategy or product for a particular investor. Investors should consult a financial professional before making any investment decisions.
Invesco is not affiliated with Zack Kass or OpenAI.
The opinions referenced above are those of the author or Zack Kass as of Nov. 13, 2025. These comments should not be construed as recommendations, but as an illustration of broader themes. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results. They involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions; there can be no assurance that actual results will not differ materially from expectations.
This link takes you to a site not affiliated with Invesco. The site is for informational purposes only. Invesco does not guarantee nor take any responsibility for any of the content.