Bridgwater replacing Staff with AI ?

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Here’s what we have lined up for you today -

1. Bridgwater replacing Staff with AI ?

2. Marc Andreessen does not believe in AI Unemployment

3. Stability AI and Top VCs viewpoint on investing in AI in a down market

4. The search engine for your life

Bridgwater replacing Staff with AI ?

The largest and probably most well known hedge fund in the world, Bridgewater is in the process of letting go of 8% of its staff. The hedge fund announced that they are reallocating their resources and doubling down on AI based investment tools moving forward.

Algorithmic trading is already commonplace in the finance sector and Bridgewater itself is considered to be a pioneer in developing in house computer programs for their trading strategies dating back as early as the 1980’s.

The reason why this is important is because the two announcements come in parallel, almost as if implying that they are confident that investment in AI tools can offload Bridgewater’s reliance on staff to guide their investment strategies.

We have already covered law firm Allen & Overy sign a big deal with Legal AI startup Harvey and Coca-Cola/Bain working closely with OpenAI. So this announcement from Bridgewater does not come as much of a surprise, but rather another proof point highlighting how AI is disrupting knowledge workers and the way they work.

Marc Andreessen does not believe in AI Unemployment

Talking about employment, Marc Andreessen, founder of A16Z (famous silicon valley VC firm) and inventor of the MOSAIC browser argues that AI unemployment will not happen.

His argument is straightforward, in most situations 99% of the economy is heavily regulated by the government. The ripple effects of disruptive innovation take far longer to reach these places and with time these industries only continue to form a larger part of the GDP (as the prices keep rising).

Hence, while “AI is going to have a profound (and almost entirely positive) effect on our society. It just won’t show up in the economy the way many people expect.” Regulated industries will be using AI, just not to replace humans but rather to augment their abilities.

Stability AI and Top VCs viewpoint on investing in AI in a down market

There is definitely a lot of FOMO and froth in the AI markets. Companies of all sizes are closing in investments as investors hunt for the next big thing in AI. Hence, this rumoured fundraise for Stability AI (creators of Stable Diffusion) at a $4 billion valuation is a reflection of how investors are approaching the AI markets in contrast to what the larger macro economic market landscape looks like. We’ve seen mammoth funding rounds for startups that don’t even have a clear business model (or product released) yet.

In the most recent episode of the All in Pod which also featured guest Brad Gerstner founder of technology investment fund Altimeter (large investors in Meta, Bytedance, Grab etc) the hosts discussed the approaches that VCs will be taking investing in the AI hype.

Here’s what they mentioned -

1. Spray and pray will continue to exist at the earliest stages. There will be a definite winner that will capture a large % of the AI market, but until then VCs will continue to invest in thousands of startups (all seemingly doing similar things), many will go extinct but a few will be generational.

2. Foundational AI companies (like Stability AI or OpenAI) will have massive funding rounds given how expensive it still is to create and deploy models at scale. The market dynamics will be a tussle between big tech that internally develops foundational AI vs Foundational AI infrastructure companies.

Product Watch Rewind AI -

The search engine for your life (quite literally for your digital life).

Around the industry -

1. ‘Evidence of a predictive coding hierarchy in the human brain listening to speech’

2. New paper from Microsoft that upgrades Stable diffusion. With GLIGEN you can specify "where" you want objects to appear in your output images.

3. AI caller scam posing as your loved ones

4. CNET let go of 50% of staff for AI ?

5. Fiery speech by Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on AI in a recent Townhall

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