Why One Of Finance's Most Powerful Leaders Says AI Left Him "Depressed"

"I went home one Friday, actually fairly depressed by this (rapid AI progress) because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society," Citadel Founder and CEO Ken Griffin recently shared during a conversation at the Stanford Business School.

Griffin is widely considered one of the most powerful and influential leaders in modern finance. The boss of the most profitable hedge fund in history said the rapid progress AI has made in the last few months has him worried as there are clear signs that AI can execute in days what would take a high-value human months. 

"In the last few months, there has been a step change function in the productivity of the AI toolkit. It is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago." 

The billionaire hedge fund boss is not alone in voicing concerns about AI's social impact. Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei has repeatedly warned that increasingly capable AI systems could cause significant disruption to society.

Also read: Humans May Lose Control As AI Starts Building Itself, Warns Anthropic

Griffin went on to add that he's witnessing the rapid change play out at his own organisation, adding that these are not just mid-tier white collar jobs where the disruption is taking place. 

"Work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months, being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days. So these are not mid-tier white-collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high-skilled jobs being automated by agentic AI," he said. 

Simply put, Agentic AI is an autonomous form of AI where the system can plan and execute tasks by itself without any human guidance or intervention.

As AI is getting more capable with each passing day it is moving from being an assistive technology to an autonomous technology where it does not need humans.

The Rude Jolt

Till recently, Griffin was of the view that Wall Street's AI boosterism was "garbage". Just earlier this year at a panel of the World Economic Forum in Davos, he said that while AI might look impressive on the surface, the moment you dig beneath it, "it's all garbage."

The turning point came after Griffin saw first-hand the kind of rapid AI deployment and productivity surge that was taking place at his own company. "When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to be man-years of work being done in days or weeks, it's like, wow, that's the first time I've seen real impact in our four walls," he said.

Rajeev Rastogi, Vice President, Machine Learning at Amazon, one of the most respected names in AI in India and globally had told this writer earlier this year that a lot of the work across companies would be replaced by AI. "Today we do a lot of things in every company that are done manually. It will all be replaced by AI so it could be the same use case but also doing it with a lot less cost and with a lot less effort."

Ankur Nigam, Managing Partner, Dumbledore Consulting, a veteran of the finance industry who's been at the intersection of tech and finance for over 20 years, told NDTV that it's natural for business leaders to feel torn and "depressed" in a scenario such as this.

"The fact that AI can make 80 people redundant in a team of 100 is a no-brainer decision to make from a financial perspective.  But the fact that the manager knows their family scenario and how badly some of them need the job is something AI will probably never be able to handle," Nigam said, as industries across the world push to increasingly automate to cut costs and increase productivity.

Hope For Humans

Nigam added that it's the "autonomy" part without human layers which is the real concern. 
"While AI will take into account the obvious factors and data, the missing element, at least in the foreseeable future, will be the human angle."  

Amazon's Rastogi agrees: "You can't just trust AI. There has to be a lot of human oversight because AI models do hallucinate, they are not perfect."

Rastogi firmly believes just as many jobs disappear because of AI, many other new jobs would be born too.

"AI is definitely a disruptive technology, there is no question about it. It's at the same level of the internet or the steam engine before that, cars... every time there is a disruptive technology new jobs get created," he said.