AI

“All the dough seems to be moving more towards quant, more towards artificial intelligence, more towards data scraping, all these kinds of things. And I just think that's a tough game to win. It's kind of like an arms race. And some folks can do it. I think at …”

“If you look at the publication of AI research, probably two X has come from China as opposed to the US.”

“Well, the moment you say that you're not going to have an AI business that has an involvement with some aspect of the Defense Department, particularly if it's defense-oriented, and you say that we just won't touch it because of our values, the moment you stop …”

“And that's why when people talk about the trade war with China, the paper was specifically said, this is not about soybeans. This is about censors in everything. And it's a race to artificial intelligence supremacy. It's about intellectual property.”

“I say to people regularly, I don't think there'll be bonds and everything will be free in 30 years. I say it not as a fact or as a guess, but it's something I do believe is coming because of my belief in the impact that nano and three D printing and artificial…”

“The reality is, as much as we're excited about this era of AI creating new knowledge and ensembles of models, understanding complex systems, for the most part, we're pretty far away from that, and the reality is a lot of AIs are, like, fairly simple statistica…”

“You want to work in industries where the payoff is really high. So I think of like convex and concave payoffs, where if you get it right, it's really valuable to you. But if you get it wrong, it doesn't really matter. So again, going back to medical use cases,…”

“And what's really gonna happen in that era, which we're sort of starting now, is You get an ensemble of AI techniques, so you might have like a Bayesian system and a neural network and a bunch of other stuff that work in concert together to understand a system…”

“We only get one chance to develop an intelligence greater than us, and if you do it wrong, it's the end of things, and there's a very, very good chance we're going to do it wrong, just judging by how rarely we as a species get things right the first time.”

“In financial markets, the vast majority of what happens is just noise. And so you have to be very careful to not try to find a signal in the noise when there isn't one. We've had some real success doing things with machine learning and AI, but equally we've se…”

“They took their best and brightest, and they've been working on AI. They've been working on cybersecurity. Our best and brightest have been creating apps and games.”

“So hardware would need to be cloud connected, would need to have AI built into it, and would need to basically replace all existing physical devices over time. And so that was a megatrend. It would take 2030 years for that to fully play out.”

“And there will be people that do that. There will just be less, because some of that analyst work is going to be replaced by artificial intelligence.”

“When the story's written about Ukraine, especially on drones and AI and open source data, It's really going to be a game changer and a real inflection point in these industries.”

“You can always get registered investment advisor, but at one percent of assets, it turns out to be a pretty significant cost. And although that's a business that has boomed, I think in the long run, it's going to turn out to be too costly relative to the value…”

“So we capture all of our internally generated data. So we record and transcribe our research meetings. We try to record and transcribe as many calls as we can. Every research report that we're doing, we're trying to do the next step of making those reports mac…”

“Ended up with us doing kind of a full AI effort at Vulcan, where we, you know, had eight people at the peak, and we're spending a lot of money, but just added a ton of value.”

“And I actually am pretty optimistic that they will remain Even if computers were replacing people as money managers, and we're doing all the trading, and that's because the nature of what causes the inefficiency, it's human, but I think the computers will mimi…”

“I believe that it's likely that the artificial intelligence dealing with a sample size of close to one on a particular oddball transaction may not know what to project.”

“I'm going to use it loosely because I'm not convinced it's AI the way they're promoting it, but there are certain automations of reading data that can be used by the ops team. We'll call it AI, but using AI to read K-ones, using AI to read capital calls, but m…”

“We have this incredible data set across all of these paper portfolios going back since inception. And we're now using AI to replicate what we would have been buying based on the historical algorithms of what we were doing. Now that doesn't drive it to be in th…”

“Most of what people call AI we consider not AI.”

“We're looking at some things in AI. We've been generally under impressed by some of those things recently.”

“So we don't really use it to pick investments. We use it to time the deployment of capital. When we get money into the fund, we use it for that timing. And we use it also now increasingly to minimize trading.”

“I think AI, for example, is sustaining. I think blockchains are disruptive. Blockchains are very, very hard to respond to.”

“I'm still a little suspect on this. AI can do that for you. You can say, tell me what an 18 to 24 year old would think about this brand or this product, and the AI will tell you. I'm still old school enough. I want to do the survey. I want to ask actual people…”

“Sports, sports will be the one last place for traditional entertainment where you are guaranteed to feel the humanity. No one will want to watch robots play basketball.”

“AI and the glut of AI-generated content is now going to make proof of humanity much, much more important for UGC websites, because it will be really, really important, not just to keep down spam, but because users presumably want to see what humans have to thi…”

“We're using that AI to scrape data and coming out of PDFs into our models. And that allows us to avoid or at the place of using our resources for manual input, you're using it for actual analysis because the data is already in.”

“Law firms, consulting firms, hourly billing businesses that have armies of people doing things that the machines can do are That's over.”

“Alpha is going to get harder and harder and harder. It already has gotten harder. AI is going to actually speed up that as well. And so as investors thinking about beta is going to become more and more important over time and having the best beta you possibly …”

“So I would say that AI is characterized by tons of massive inflections and not enough insights.”

“I would argue that because of AI, it might be more like the fifties than 2000.”

“AI is a little bubblicious. We started to see a little bit of the potential fall that can happen if it turns out the thesis of AI is that you have to spend a hundred and eighty billion dollars on chips every 18 months. If that's not correct, maybe some of that…”

“People are just buying their share of time, and the more interesting plays from this point forward might be the verticals that sit atop.”

“We also know that when China enters the room, profits walk out, so there's not going to be any profit in AI forever.”

“In three years, certainly AI will be able to create a first or second run at our models. It might not be able to fine tune or drive a lot of the assumptions that we need the qualitative rich data that we're collecting, but to actually create and populate the E…”

“Most of those companies can't raise growth equity anymore because growth equity is running more towards AI than software.”

“If what we're really using AI for early is efficiency enhancements, that just means in the future, I'm going to be hiring less junior people because the junior people I have are going to be more efficient.”

“What we do is an apprenticeship business, and I don't think that AI's going to change that. Ultimately, the most effective are these interpersonal, how do you ask questions, hear the answer, and realize what the next question should be from what you've heard.”

“The CapEx will be overbuilt. Infrastructure, highways, all these things, you ultimately in a CapEx cycle, you just don't know if today you're in the third inning or eighth inning.”

“There will be a lot of companies that look like obvious winners of all this that I think will be obvious losers.”

“So today I would look at that same asset and I'd say, okay, higher multiple. Less diversified. More of a factor bet on AI and power. We've run the economy hot, tons of fiscal deficit problems. If I just look at that, and you didn't tell me the name was the S&P…”

“Our system can be monitoring that portfolio and analyzing what's happening with every one of those companies, every new piece of information that comes out. It can proactively go figure out what's the meaning of that. What other impacts does it have in other i…”

“And that's driven by an AI, maybe on your phone or a person's computer. And we're in the developmental stages of that. I'm most excited about that. It's going to be a sort of joke. It's like inflection point GPT. That's the next incarnation of this”

“The world, from our perspective, is going through an energy addition, not necessarily an energy transition, and I think AI is really amplifying that, in that we need more energy.”

“Part of the value, I think it makes the investment committee pick up their game a little bit, because we can put the memo into the model and get 10 questions in about one minute, and so you can ask the investment committee members, and whatever we paid for tha…”

“On the investing side, we obviously have exposure in the portfolio. We have invested in a lot of the big AI companies and we have exposure to them. Net though, we don't have as much AI exposure as the broader public markets. And that's a challenge from a relat…”

“We're building tools to really codify mode trajectory and culture into a model. How do you diagnose change in the company's mode? Look at it today. Put all this data in there, whether it's SEC filings, transcripts, sell-side reports, expert transcripts, and lo…”

“Caroline Dallas, who leads our sourcing, has been looking at different AI tools so she can surveil and understand signals of when someone might spin out so we can prepare ourselves even sooner.”

“In the same way that folks with data science backgrounds and AI knowledge are super in demand, the software programming space has hit a little bit of a soft patch. There's a lot of opportunities to hire great engineers these days.”

“And we think that's driven fifties to seventy billion of extra sales to Meta by adopting AI.”

“Is that a bubble in price? Probably. It's probably not a bubble in the underlying economic activity of the businesses. But Mag seven went from these dominant cash flow machines to taking all the cash flow and spending it in something that has an unknown ROI.”

“So I will say whether it's next year or the year after the year after, I would be shocked if there isn't a significant compression. Maybe starts with the valuations of private AI companies and significant down rounds, and maybe that has downstream effects beca…”

“That's what I'm mostly excited about, and that inference is gonna benefit the long-term pension fund investors. They're the ones that are managing assets over longer horizons, where inference, insight, have enough time to get priced.”

“The human beings in these organizations will become the co-pilot to the AI, rather than the AI being the co-pilot to the human beings, because they're gonna have all the data, and they're gonna have that customization available.”

“If those ROIs don't come to pass, I don't think the whole system is going bankrupt, but that clearly will have a weighing effect on the markets. Certainly the biggest hyperscalers will be okay, but that cascades down to many, many players, some of whom have go…”

“Today, just sitting here with AI, not even really ready for prime time, and you have very high, I think almost nine percent unemployment from college grads.”

“Agents are working well doing a lot of things, but they're 98%. They make mistakes. AI's not there yet for prime time, so we can't predict where it's going to go.”

“Australia is really well placed to be a beneficiary riding that wave of increased spending.”

“We got the launch in about a year, which was a reasonable time to build something from scratch, especially with the advent of AI. You didn't have to hire as many programmers.”

“The pricing is probably most distorted in the early stage about AI, because you look at these companies, and of course, no one has a crystal ball, but you're looking at something and saying, hey, this could potentially be a trillion-dollar outcome. The bet is …”

“This is a wimpy answer, Ted, but we're putting part of the bet in today, but we're making sure to have at least some diversification to sectors that may not be as clearly vibrant, but frankly have much better valuations.”

“We're, I think, in the very early days of AI. If ChatGPT is to AI as Netscape Navigator was, we're in year three of what should be a 20, 25, thirty-year really exciting cycle or trend.”

“I have never seen a new technological trend where at every level of the stack, the competitors are both public and private.”

“Is because it's becoming very clear, whether it's two years, three years, four years, that you're going to pick up the phone and call someone, and you're not going to be sure whether you're on the phone with a human being or not.”

“The only moments we're going to be able to trust as being genuinely human are the ones where there is a human in front of you, which means, in my view, that the companies that make those moments feel as human as humanly possible are going to win in the long te…”

“The invasion of chat and AI ruined my perfectly good bear market. I still got a bear market. It was way over 20% decline, but it wasn't the crushing of a super bubble that would have happened. Without the great investment associated, the capex associated with …”

“AI Moving at warp speed, involving a greater CapEx program than has ever happened before outside of war.”

“India right now is going through a very difficult period. It's got a double whammy now of being in the crosshairs of AI because of IT services and the huge part of their economy that that sector represents. It's got the risk that it's facing from the Iran war,…”

“That particular risk is one of the hugely cascading impact that would be felt across the portfolio because so much of the public and private markets are linked to the AI build out. There's no part of the portfolio that wouldn't be severely impacted by that.”

“I think the more competitive it comes from not just building the tool, but being willing to throw out the tool two weeks later because of how fast technology is progressing. And I don't even say that facetiously because Sherpa, Everest, those tools, we're lite…”

“Anybody who wants to take on a project with a tool that they have access to on an AI side, they can just jump in and do it without question, without permission, without any bureaucracy.”

“The technology is changing so quickly that in some ways it feels premature to put a big stake in the ground and make some big investment or process change when in a quarter from now, The tools that are available to us could look entirely different or 10 times …”

“That being said, the thing I'm most worried about is everything being called or becoming AI. Everything is adjacent to AI, but then if you start to talk about an investment thesis, or what is our exposure to AI, or how do we get more AI in the portfolio, you'r…”

“The thing about AI, we're no longer going to rely on the GPs or our money managers to tell us how the J-curve is operating. I can now look through our own portfolio and see where that J-curve is.”

“It seems to me this is the first time from an economic lens we've had a super cycle in 40 years. We had women coming into the workforce and brought new consumers in the 19 forties and fifties. Then we had the fall of the wall in 1989. It brought in the globali…”

“Industrial real estate is a huge beneficiary. It's simple things like AI as an accelerant to e-commerce growth. It's advanced manufacturing. How AI is accelerating that, particularly here in this country, as a driver of demand.”

“There are also a lot of other ways to play AI in real estate and infrastructure that get less attention, and that therefore have Better risk-adjusted return because you have a better basis on entry.”

“When AI comes up with anyone in real estate or infrastructure, it's immediately just data centers. There's no question that that is probably the single biggest beneficiary of the AI trend.”