“I was minding my business,” Paul Tudor Jones began, “I went to this tech conference about two weeks ago out west.” The legendary macro investor wasn’t there to pitch trades—but what he left with deeply shook him.
“I just want to share with you what I learned there,” he said. “Chatham House rules so we can talk about the content.”
This wasn’t your average tech meetup. “It was a small one. 40 notables. But real notables like household names that you would recognize. The leaders in finance, politics, science, tech.” And one panel in particular featured “four of the leading modelers of the AI models that we’re all using today.”
Jones broke it down into three key takeaways. “One: wow, AI can be such a force for good, and we’re going to see it immediately in both health and education very quickly. It’s going to be fantastic.”
But the mood quickly turned. “Two: the neutral news. These models are increasing in their efficiency and performance between… on the very low end, 25%, on the high end, 500%. Every 3 or 4 quarters. It’s not even curvilinear. It’s a vertical lift.”
Then came this: “Thirdly—and the one that disturbed me the most—is that AI clearly poses an imminent threat, security threat imminent in our lifetimes to humanity.”
He recounted a chilling moment from the panel. “Someone asked them on AI security… what are you doing on AI security? And they said, the competitive dynamic is so intense… there’s no agency, no ability to stop and say, maybe we should think about what actually we’re creating and building here.”
Their answer? “I’m buying a 100 acres in the Midwest. I’m getting cattle and chickens, and I’m laying in provisions—for real.”
It didn’t end there. “One of the propositions was, there’s a 10% chance in the next 20 years that AI will kill 50% of humanity.” Jones continued, “I had just heard Joe Rogan and Elon Musk… Musk said there’s only a 20% chance that AI can annihilate humanity. Now I know why he wants to go to Mars, right?”
Jones ended up on the “agree” side. “All four modelers were on the agree side. One of the modelers says… I don’t know, 10% seems reasonable to me.”
And Jones, ever the risk manager, didn’t flinch from the gravity: “I’ve spent my whole life managing risk… and we just have to realize… we’re creating something that’s really dangerous. It’s going to be really great too, but we’re helpless to do anything about it.”
You can watch the interview here:
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