W
hich would you rather back with your money: artificial intelligence or natural stupidity? Do you stand with Demis Hassabis — a Nobel prizewinner and chief executive of the AI researcher Google DeepMind, who last week expressed cautious optimism that AI “will be ten times bigger than the industrial revolution” — or the losers venting cheap cynicism online?
I can’t pretend to be neutral about this, having suffered my fair share of abuse after reporting how AI prompted me to invest a little more than 2 per cent of my life savings in the software giant Microsoft (stock market ticker: MSFT) at $233 and $241 in January 2023.
Several pessimists said I was too late and predicted doom. Some of them might have felt justified, briefly, when the arrival of DeepSeek, China’s AI champion, wiped nearly $1 trillion off American tech giants’ stock market value last January. It’s early days yet, but those Microsoft shares were trading at $525 on Wednesday and are now the ninth most valuable holding in my 50-stock forever fund, so I really mustn’t grumble.
Less happily for society as a whole, it remains unclear whether the commercialisation of AI will lead to the “radical abundance” predicted by Hassabis or mass unemployment. Here and now, Alphabet (GOOGL) is extending its AI search facility to Britain this month, after launching in America and India.
