The biggest names in tech descended on San Francisco last week for Morgan Stanley’s annual TMT Conference, armed with record earnings, soaring stock prices, and an AI arms race minting new fortunes at historic speed. But between the fireside chats and investor panels, one question kept surfacing that no amount of compute spend could answer.
“What will our kids do?”
Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas flagged it as the single most common investor question he fielded throughout the conference. For all the breathless optimism about large language models and agentic AI, anxiety about what this technology means for the next generation of workers pervaded a room full of some of the world’s most powerful business leaders. (In January, The Wall Street Journal called Jonas “the Wall Street star betting his reputation on robots and flying cars,” noting that he is the bank’s “global embodied AI strategist,” the first position of its kind for the investment bank.)
Sam Altman just said the quiet part out loud
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told conference goers he can envision one or five people running an entire company—and said that transition has compressed to the next few years. He had been even blunter at a separate summit in India just days before: “The world is not prepared…. We are going to have extremely capable models soon. It’s going to be a faster takeoff than I originally thought.”
