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American billionaire Ken Griffin, the founder of hedge fund Citadel, said investors are “almost certainly” in an artificial intelligence bubble, even as he predicted the technology will create a golden era for entrepreneurs.
Griffin made the remarks on Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Dani Burger at Citadel’s annual Future of Global Markets Conference in New York.
He said bubbles tend to accompany major shifts in the economy. “Any radical transformation of our economy is generally intertwined with a bubble,” Griffin said.
He pointed to the dot-com era as an example, saying the companies that survive a bubble often become market leaders for decades. He added that he wished he had held on to his Amazon stock at the time.
Griffin said corporate America has been uneven in its ability to get value from AI models. Finance teams are now reviewing what they pay companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI to see whether the spending is lifting productivity, he said.
He also said competitive advantages across corporate America are being eroded at breathtaking rates, as AI tools make it easier for small teams to challenge established companies. That shift, he said, will make this a golden era for entrepreneurs, even as it disrupts white-collar jobs.
His comments come as investors grow uneasy about how long it will take heavy AI spending to show up in profits. Chip stocks have sold off in recent weeks, and shares of AI cloud provider CoreWeave fell more than 15% over two days earlier this month.
The sell-off has hit some of the world’s richest people. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison recently lost $15 billion in a single day as fears over AI-related debt weighed on the software maker’s shares.
Griffin’s tone was more upbeat than earlier this year, when he was sharply critical of the technology. He described much of AI’s output as “garbage” at the World Economic Forum in Davos and said in May at Stanford University that it left him feeling depressed, according to reports at the time.
His remarks also come ahead of a series of large AI listings. Anthropic is expected to file documents for an initial public offering in the coming weeks, in what could be one of the largest IPOs ever. Griffin said Anthropic’s long-term success will depend on proving its models are must-have tools across industries.
The AI boom has driven a sharp rise in tech fortunes this year. Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell passed Mark Zuckerberg to become the world’s fifth-richest person this week, with a fortune of $241 billion. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, pledged $10.5 billion in SpaceX shares to American children on Monday.
Griffin founded Citadel in 1990. The Miami-based firm is one of the world’s largest hedge funds, and its affiliate Citadel Securities is among the biggest market makers in U.S. stocks.
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