The Berkshire Hathaway Co-Founder and CEO asks if people are ready to smartly use the power of artificial intelligence.
Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett spoke about the potential of AI at the company’s 2024 shareholders meeting. He mentioned the technology several times over the course of the nearly five-hour annual meeting (watch it here).
Buffett was careful to point out that his view on AI does not come from a tech perspective. "I don’t know anything about AI, but that doesn’t mean I deny its existence or importance or anything of the sort," he said. “I do think, as someone who doesn’t understand a damn thing about it, that it has enormous potential for good, and enormous potential for harm,” he said. “And I just don’t know how that plays out.”
On the one hand, Buffett sees AI transforming the world of work. When talking about the possible effects of AI on companies in Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio, Buffett noted that AI will certainly become a part of "anything that’s labor sensitive" and that it could "create an enormous amount of leisure time" for employees.
Qualitative change in scamming
On the other, one direction for AI that caught Buffett’s attention has been the possible use of the tech for scammers. In what has become one of the most shared quotes from the sage of Omaha from this year’s shareholders meeting, Buffett said,
“I mean, scamming has always been part of the American scene, but this would make me, if I was interested in investing in scamming, it’s going to be the growth industry of all time. And it’s enabled in a way. Obviously, AI has potential for good things too but I don’t know how you, based on the one I saw recently, I practically would send money to myself over and over in some crazy country."
Nuclear comparison
While Berkshire Hathaway’s two largest holdings, Microsoft and Apple (after selling off 13% of its holding in Apple in 2023) have an AI focus, it is still too early to fully understand the ramifications of the technology’s development. As he has done in the past, Buffett compared AI and nuclear technology:
"We let the genie out of the bottle when we developed nuclear weapons, and that genie has been doing some terrible things," he said. "The power of that genie scares the hell out of me. And I don’t know of any way to get the genie back in the bottle. And AI is somewhat similar. It’s part of the way out of the bottle."
