Five months ago, Ken Griffin stood at Davos and called AI “garbage.” By May, he went home on a Friday “actually fairly depressed” about what the technology could do. Now he’s forecasting a “golden age of entrepreneurial activity” powered by the very thing he dismissed.
Speaking with Goldman Sachs’s Raj Mahajan at the firm’s Apex Global Family Office Symposium in New York City, Griffin laid out a vision where AI doesn’t just optimize existing businesses. It levels the playing field entirely. New companies, he argued, will be able to compete with entrenched incumbents faster and more effectively than at any point in modern history.
The symposium drew over 200 family offices from 19 countries.
At Davos in January, his dismissal of AI wasn’t some offhand remark. It reflected a genuine skepticism shared by a segment of traditional finance that viewed the technology as overhyped and underdelivering. The Stanford event in May represented the middle chapter, where the realization hit that automation wasn’t theoretical anymore. And by June, Griffin had landed on what he described as a “step change” in AI productivity, one where real-world applications had finally outpaced the noise.
Griffin isn’t talking about AI as a job killer. He’s talking about it as a productivity multiplier, a tool that makes smaller teams capable of doing what previously required armies of analysts and engineers.
