Thursday, March 12, 2026

Citadel Ken Griffin pauses the AI ​​hype

Citadel Ken Griffin pauses the AI ​​hype

It’s been greater than 18 months since ChatGPT’s debut sparked a rally that helped AI chipmaker Nvidia reach a market cap of $3 trillion in June. But billionaire investor Ken Griffin is not buying into the hype surrounding the technology – no less than not yet.

Speaking to Citadel’s latest class of interns in New York, the founder and CEO acknowledged that artificial intelligence has reached a “tipping point” with the introduction of huge language models, but doubted that LLM-based tools like OpenAI’s own ChatGPT would turn into more beneficial over the subsequent three years than the highest talent he recruits directly from universities.

“For a number of reasons, I am not convinced that these models will achieve such a breakthrough in the near future,” Griffin said on Monday, based on comments reported from CNBC.

As evidence, the Citadel boss cited self-driving cars which have difficulties in so-called edge cases that lie beyond the bounds of statistically normal traffic events.

Most autonomous vehicles are trained by feeding them images with data about their surroundings: for instance, a pc can tell if what’s crossing the road is a small child or simply a rubber ball. However, there are sometimes cases where a self-driving automobile is faced with a situation it has never seen before and it behaves incorrectly since it lacks human intuition.

“Machine learning models work much better where there is consistency,” Griffin explained his skepticism.

The Citadel founder has historically focused on AI as a tool to extend human productivity quite than replace it. Last month, he told attendees on the Milken Global Conference that while AI has sparked huge investments in data center infrastructure and semiconductor chips like Nvidia’s for AI training, AI’s impact on the business world stays small.

That’s partly because executives don’t yet understand most effectively harness the facility of artificial intelligence. All they know is that they should communicate it to investors like Griffin.

“When I ask the question, ‘Tell me how you use AI in your company today,’ I get a big smile and really enthusiastic responses,” he said. said“that have almost nothing to do with AI.”

“Intelligence at doctoral level”

While Citadel’s highly talented staff has helped it run certainly one of Wall Street’s most successful hedge funds, OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati believes her team could have an enormous say in whether knowledge economy staff like Griffin’s Citadel staff can proceed to outperform their GenAI tools in the longer term.

In a speech two weeks ago to students at her alma mater, Dartmouth College, Murati said OpenAI’s LLM, a style of neural network often called a Generative Pre-trained Transformer, has evolved rapidly in only a couple of years.

While GPT-3 was, based on them, comparable to a toddler by way of intelligence when it debuted in 2020, the present GPT-4, released in March 2023, is already at a sophisticated highschool level.

“In the next few years, we will be studying intelligence at the Ph.D. level for specific tasks,” she says. said.

Since GPT-4 has already passed qualification tests for the practice of diverse professions, including the bar examinationone could argue that Murati is downplaying the facility of their technology. It stays to be seen whether Griffin will change his mind concerning the value and value of human labor once Murati introduces GPT-5.

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