Bridgewater CEO Nir Bar Dea: our AI fund comes up with ideas humans don't
What's new? Bridgewater AssociatesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → CEO Nir Bar Dea told David Rubenstein that the firm's AI-driven fund now runs its investment process largely through AI. He said the fund "starts with AI generating insights and then doing everything up to execution with humans doing risk controls and oversight", adding: "the ideas that the AI is coming up with are different than the ideas that humans are coming up with."
How it got there: Bar Dea traced the effort back to 2012, when Bridgewater's Greg Jensen, whom he described as an early investor in OpenAI and Anthropic, began asking whether technology could generate ideas rather than only execute human ones. Bridgewater later hired a scientist who is now senior at Google DeepMind, and in 2023 concluded AI could "generate the ideas that create alpha". Bar Dea said both Pure Alpha and its AI-driven counterpart are closed to new investors and that the firm has been "returning billions of dollars over the last couple of years".
The warning: Bar Dea repeated Bridgewater's estimate that AI could "dislocate 18% of American labor" and called for regulating AI for safety and preparing society, "learning the lessons from what we failed to do with globalization." He also said the macro paradigm has shifted "from globalization to nationalism", with countries such as Japan, Canada and South Korea keeping more capital at home.
