Investing never seems to get easier. One issue is markets appear to grow more efficient with time, but that isn’t the struggle we’re alluding to. Rather the power of ignorance. Early in your investing career, everything seems obvious, making it easier to act, buy or sell with conviction. With experience, however, you learn the countless ways money can be lost. You learn that nuance matters, and once obvious investments become riddled with question marks. At times, we envy the naivety of youth.
Nowhere is that tension between conviction and hesitation more visible than in today’s debate around artificial intelligence (“AI”). AI has consumed financial markets. To call it the most significant technological revolution since the dawn of the internet doesn’t feel like an exaggeration, it might even be bigger. By most accounts, we’re still in the early innings of adoption. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has gone as far as to call this “the next industrial revolution,” with AI’s addressable market encompassing the knowledge economy itself, the overwhelming majority of global GDP.
Countless market veterans see the makings of a bubble, while others see a once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity. For more than two years, we’ve struggled with this topic. We see the potential rewards but find it hard to shake our growing list of concerns. This commentary is our attempt to address the state of the market amidst the AI boom.