Brad Gerstner stands out in the corporate arena, renowned for his adept leadership and investment insights. As the driving force behind Altimeter Capital, he has steered the tech-centric investment firm to great heights since its foundation.
Gerstner is also, like many in the financial world, interested in where artificial intelligence (AI) is headed, as this year, Wall Street has been buzzing with excitement due to AI’s significant advancements, which has notably caused a surge in buying interest. As a testament to this growth, Nvidia, a key player in the AI industry, saw its market cap surpass the $1 trillion mark. Another significant indicator of AI’s sweeping influence is the rapid success of ChatGPT. This innovative chatbot, renowned for its ability to generate human-like responses from written user inputs, gained global recognition and set a record by becoming the quickest software to gain widespread adoption in history.
Bigger
At CNBC Delivering Alpha Investor Summit last Thursday in New York, Gerstner had this to say about AI’s future: “AI is going to be bigger than the internet, bigger than mobile and bigger than cloud software.”
The esteemed tech investor likened the AI surge to the “super-cycle” reminiscent of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. However, he also warned that such super-cycles often start with mixed feelings and uncertainties.
“You have to get comfortable with two simultaneous but competing truths. On the one hand, we probably overestimate in the very short term, which leads to price inflation,” said Gerstner. “But much like the internet in ’98 and ’99, where there was overpricing in the short run, we dramatically underestimated the impact it was going to have over the … decade.”
Tone of Optimism
Gerstner expressed his optimism for the upcoming years, anticipating the conclusion of the Federal Reserve’s tightening cycle. He believes that the next two to three years will be particularly promising, attributing this to the halt in rate hikes and the onset of one of the most significant tech booms in history. Additionally, he mentioned that the IPO pipeline appears to be robust for the upcoming three quarters.
