Kevin Duffy on technology waves

Technology waves are like hurricane warnings: those who go through them suffer from recency bias.  As the most recent experience is seared into their brains, they swing from underprepared to overprepared for the next one.  The internet altered the economic landscape, wreaking havoc on some and heaping fortunes on others.  (Many of the big winners, including Google, Facebook, Netflix and Salesforce, weren’t even public companies in 2000.)  No one can fault the current crop of high-tech CFOs for clamoring to ride the current AI wave.

~ Kevin Duffy, "Countervailing Forces," The Coffee Can Portfolio, p. 5, October 22, 2024

Brad Gerstner on ChatGPT

We've seen a big lift, the fastest growth at any company I've ever seen at OpenAI, so it's clear it offers value.  200 million weekly average visitors are saying about ChatGPT, "you're valuable enough to me that I'm going to open this thing every week... and I'm going to use it to help me with whatever task I need to complete."  If I look out onto my floor here, all my analysts - every single one of them - they have three screens in front of them and one of the screens is open to ChatGPT.  That is their co-pilot...

I've lived through four super-cycles.  We've lived through internet, lived through mobile, lived through cloud and now we're at the start of the fourth one which is AI.  I have zero doubt it will be bigger than any one of those, and maybe bigger than them combined over the next two decades.  When we go from computers and AIs that really co-pilot our lives to auto-pilot our lives.  They're going to be machines interacting with machines on things like airline maintenance that just do it better than humans.

~ Brad Gerstner, "Why This Investor Doesn't Just Dabble In the Market," The Meb Faber Show, 22:50 mark, October 4, 2024