June 20 (UPI) — Geopolitical tensions, a looming presidential election and the rise of artificial intelligence were top of mind Thursday at this year’s Forbes Iconoclast Summit.
Dozens of influential investors and business leaders convened at the third annual summit at New York’s landmark meeting venue Cipriani Wall Street to discuss the most high-profile economic issues of 2024.
Carlyle Group CEO Harvey Schawrtz said he sees AI as having three main utilities: how to make portfolio companies more competitive, how to make better and faster investment decisions, and how to run his own $425 billion firm.
“There’s no doubt you’ll have a change in how work is accomplished,” Schwartz said. “I think it’s pretty good when 23- or 25-year-olds write their own memos, but we are seeing very specific ways in freeing up employees to be able to think more.”
Forbes senior editor Alex Konrad interviewed venture capital investor Vinod Khosla about the increase in attention AI has received just in the past year.
Khosla, in regard to AI, said people tend to overestimate technology’s effect in the near term and underestimate it in the long term.
“Imagine a world without the Internet,” Khosla said. “Technology always surprises, and it’ll surprise again, probably at a larger scale than most people imagine.”
The United States so far has outpaced China in AI, and Khosla said he is optimistic but not complacent about maintaining that advantage.
While advocating for doing “everything we can” to maintain the lead over China, Khosla said he does favor of some regulations that would pit him against more accelerationist minds in Silicon Valley.
Dambisa Moyo, an economist and member of the U.K.’s House of Lords, said AI and the transition to cleaner, renewable energy are two “supercycles” in their early stages and that “it’s very hard to bet against the United States.”
Investor attitudes seem to be lightening despite fears last year over a potential recession. Andreas Halvorsen, co-founder and CEO of $48 billion hedge fund Viking Global Investments, touched on what he feels might be an unduly optimistic attitude toward the economy amid growing geopolitical concerns.
“I find it somewhat curious that we seem to believe we’re in a benign economic environment,” he said. “We’re talking about a soft landing at the same time as we’re very concerned about our geopolitical environment. To me, the two actually co-exist.”
Amid the backdrop of the contentious 2024 presidential election, Khosla broke with some of his pro-Donald Trump peers in elite tech circles and spoke candidly against the former president while on stage.
“Would you want your children to have the values that Trump has? Accused of rape, accused of lying, cheating?” Khosla addressed the audience. “That’s a very simple test for me.”
Pitched as “a gathering of the world’s most influential investors,” Forbes’ annual Iconoclast Summit brings together global investors, business leaders and market experts representing over $20 trillion in assets for discussions about the most pressing issues on investors’ minds.