Martin Chavez, vice chairman and partner of Sixth Street Partners and former chief information officer of Goldman Sachs, characterized AI as “just more software.” In his view, it will not be able to predict the direction of the S&P 500.
Chavez spoke today alongside the co-founder of quantitative hedge fund Two Sigma, David Siegel, at the Bloomberg Invest conference.
“We've been bringing more software into finance for a really long time, and there have been all kinds of breakthroughs and all kinds of problems,” said Chavez. “It is statistical pattern matching, It is extremely powerful and it's interesting, but I do not see AI achieving what some would call the holy grail.”
"Everybody wants to know where the S&P is going to be in six months … I can’t [tell you] and neither can the AIs. And at the risk of getting too technical there is a really profound technical reason why the AIs, I think, are not going to do that, predicting the stock market."
Two Sigma’s Siegel agrees that the excitement surrounding artificial intelligence is likely overblown.
“AI has been having an impact for decades. This stuff isn't brand new," said Siegal. "The hype is absolutely remarkable."