Dan Loeb, the founder of New York-based hedge fund Third Point, says he underestimated how quickly AI would disrupt some businesses.
Speaking on Thursday's episode of the "Invest Like The Best" podcast, the billionaire investor said while Third Point had made successful bets against some companies affected by AI, the firm also misjudged AI's ability to upend parts of the market.
"But where we've made the mistake is that, we're controversial, but we thought we knew better that AI wasn't really going to, you know, affect this part of the infoservices business or these guys had proprietary information," Loeb said, adding that this has been a key "investment lesson" over the past year.
Third Point, founded in 1995, manages roughly $24 billion in assets. During the same podcast, Loeb dismissed talk of AI being a bubble, saying we've "barely scratched the surface."
Like many business leaders, Loeb said he's pushing his team to use AI, saying, "The only way to get good at this is just to use it." He pointed to Anthropic's Claude, saying it can make employees "very autonomous."
He added that Third Point has brought in computer scientists to help the team adapt to AI.
"We have experts that we have brought on that are native computer scientists that are kind of coming at this as expert AI people who are working on specific projects. They're coaching the team, but we're also encouraging everyone to use AI," he said.
He added that people across the organization are using AI to varying degrees. "Some people are running agents overnight and using tons and tons of tokens. Other people are probably more like me, just using it more for queries and things, but you know, we're all very involved with it," he said.
At companies large and small, AI is changing the nature of work and becoming a required part of the job.
As businesses seek returns on billions of dollars in AI spending, some are monitoring employee adoption and factoring AI use into employee assessments.
In February, several Google employees told Business Insider that their use of AI would be considered in upcoming performance reviews.
JPMorgan Chase has internal dashboards to track employees' use of AI tools, categorizing them as light, heavy, or non-users, Business Insider reported in March.
Disney has taken a similar approach. In April, Business Insider reported that the company uses an internal "AI Adoption Dashboard" to track token usage across tools like Cursor and Claude. The dashboard, which one staffer referred to as a "leaderboard," also displays the most active AI users.
But AI is advancing rapidly, and sentiment appears to be shifting. As Charles Rollet wrote for Business Insider earlier this week, the backlash to tokenmaxxing — using as many AI tokens as possible — has officially begun.
