When it comes to making bold predictions that pay off, there is probably no bigger of a whale in tech circles than Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster. A regular fixture on Bloomberg, CNBC and Silicon Valley power confabs, Munster first made a name for himself as the tech analyst who predicted that Apple would become the world’s first publicly-traded trillion dollar company—many years and hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap—before it finally crossed the heralded threshold in August 2018. Since then, Munster’s bold calls on companies such as Tesla, Alphabet, Meta (META) and other members of the so-called “Magnificent Seven” have become a lodestar for everyone from institutional players on Wall Street to day traders on Main Street looking to cash in on the tech boom.
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As of late, the “Alien Founder” investor has been sounding off on the massive disruption and upheaval that is coming in the wake of the artificial intelligence (A.I.) revolution. Observer sat down with Munster for an expansive interview in which we talked not only about the euphoria that the emergence of A.I. is having on equity markets but how the transformative impact of this new technology will repercuss across society, negatively affecting our mental health, and decimating certain professions (like Munster’s own job as a stock picker) while making those of creatives like writers and editors immensely more valuable.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Observer: Gene, obviously A.I. has dominated headlines the last couple of years. But just before we get into it—it’s said that there’s no such thing as a ‘dumb question,’ but there may indeed be such a thing as a ‘dumb analogy,’ and maybe I’m about to make one. (Laugh) But let’s go back to, say 1995 or 1996, and we’re on our computers, using AltaVista to do search and almost no one had any idea that there was going to be a Facebook or an eBay or any of these other things that would eventually be so transformative in terms of the future of the Internet. And I feel like maybe that is where we are with A.I. right now—like we’re just in the foothills and we have no idea about what’s to come.
Gene Munster: I think you nailed it. We are in 1996. It’s not 1993 when the talk of the Internet was just kind of bubbling up; we’re a little bit further along now with A.I. There are products out there like we had in 1996. You mentioned AltaVista and there was the Netscape browser. There was a kind of shimmering of........