• Buying Tesla stock is the best way to add AI to a portfolio, Cathie Wood said Thursday.
• The Ark Invest chief expects the electric carmaker's share price to surge eightfold in five years thanks to investors' passion for tech like ChatGPT.
• "Tesla is one of the most profound AI companies out there," she said Thursday.

Buying Tesla stock is the one of the best ways investors can capitalize on the rise of ChatGPT and broader AI tech, according to Cathie Wood.

The Ark Invest CIO said Thursday that the electric carmaker's status as the top holding in three of her funds reflects its share price's potential to surge eight times due to its prospective status as an AI stock.

"Actually Tesla is one of the most profound AI companies out there – that's why it's at the top of ARKK, ARKQ, ARKW has a big position in it as well," Wood told Bloomberg TV. "It is not an auto company, it is a technology company."

A surge in investor enthusiasm about the intelligent language bot ChatGPT has fueled a rally in stocks like C3.AI and Buzzfeed in recent weeks.

Wood said that she expects the rise of AI to disrupt traditional tech players like Google parent Alphabet, which is currently developing a homegrown ChatGPT alternative called Bard.

"The world is changing incredibly quickly here," she said. "We're seeing this with AI of course, all the news around ChatGPT that's captured the public's imagination and captured businesses' imagination, it's happening very quickly, and our portfolios are very focussed on the future."

"The Nasdaq and other broad-based benchmarks are much more traditional – really, the names at the top of those portfolios are the companies that have done incredibly well over the years," Wood added. "We think many of them will be disrupted – and we're seeing questions already about Google and search."

But the Ark Invest chief feels Tesla is well positioned to take advantage of the rise of AI because it is looking to dominate the self-driving taxi market, which Wood has predicted will be one of the major transportation themes of the next decade.

"Autonomous taxi platforms, we believe, are the biggest opportunity in the next five to 10 years out there around artificial intelligence," Wood said.

Ark's current Tesla outlook is for the company's share price to rise to between $1,500 and $1,600 within the next five years – which would represent a near-eightfold surge from the $207 level it traded at after Thursday's closing bell.

Read more: Microsoft, Google, and Baidu are putting the final touches on their answers to ChatGPT. Here's what they have planned and what it means for investors.