Finance billionaire called AI “garbage”, but changed his mind and became “depressed”
Just months after calling artificial intelligence “garbage,” hedge fund Citadel CEO Ken Griffin now warns that the technology will profoundly reshape society — and says he went home “depressed” after seeing what it was really capable of.
Griffin, the hedge fund billionaire who runs one of the world’s largest financial trading firms, had long been one of the best-known AI skeptics in finance. As recently as January 22 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he said during a panel that while AI might look impressive on the surface, look a little closer and “it was all rubbish.”
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The change came quickly — and, according to Griffin himself, it had a strong impact.
What made you change your mind
Earlier this month, in a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Griffin described a personal moment of shock. “I have to say: I went home on a Friday really quite depressed,” he said. “You could see how this would have such a dramatic impact on society.”
The trigger was to observe what the AI was actually doing inside Citadel. Griffin said the technology had become “profoundly more powerful” than it was just a few months earlier, allowing the company to “unlock” a wider range of applications that it had previously been unable to explore.
The Stanford statements came shortly after Griffin participated in the Milken Institute Global Conference, where he said he had asked CEOs to share how they were using AI to transform their businesses — and said he had received “six or seven extraordinary reports” in response.
The reckoning for finance jobs
For Griffin, the most impressive evidence isn’t in programming or content production — it’s in high-level financial research. Work that Citadel previously assigned to teams with master’s and doctoral degrees in finance, and which took weeks or months to complete, is now being performed by AI agents in a matter of hours or days.
“Jobs that we would normally do with people with masters and doctorates in finance over weeks or months are being done by AI agents over hours or days,” said Griffin at Stanford.
He made a distinction between the more modest productivity gains that AI has brought to software engineering — which he said were between 15% and 25% — and the much more disruptive change that is happening in intellectual work and research. “When you see very high-level research being done by AI engines, it really opens your eyes,” he said.
Griffin’s change of stance draws even more attention because, until recently, he had been responding to Wall Street’s enthusiasm for AI.
At Davos in January, he warned that the prediction that 50% of entry-level jobs would disappear in five years was an “exaggeration used to justify spending on data centers,” according to comments posted on LinkedIn about his statements.
He also noted that data center spending in the United States could exceed $500 billion this year, suggesting that the investment narrative was moving faster than concrete results.
It was in this context that he stated that AI appeared to be “garbage” when examined beyond the surface. How a few months can change everything.
The broadest warning
Now Griffin points to something even higher on the skills ladder — the automation of jobs that once seemed protected by the barrier of advanced degrees and technical expertise.
His message to workers is both urgent and direct: adaptability has become the only truly lasting advantage.
“Success in your career will be defined by whether or not you are a continuous learner,” Griffin said at Stanford, “and AI will only make that even more important.”
It remains unclear whether young audiences will receive Griffin’s statements well. Almost as soon as he changed his mind, commencement speakers began to be booed by Gen Z audiences whenever they mentioned the benefits of AI.
