Paul Tudor Jones says AI bull market has ‘another year or two to run’
Paul Tudor Jones said the AI-fueled bull market still needs to move forward, adding that he has been buying more related stocks recently as he looks for parallels with previous tech booms.
The billionaire hedge fund manager said recent developments in artificial intelligence are similar to the emergence of transformative technologies such as Microsoft’s initial software dominance in the 1980s and the commercialization of the internet in the mid-1990s, periods that led to years of productivity gains and market upheavals.
“I think Claude will be around January of this year when Microsoft came out in ’81,” Jones said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday.
Jones, founder and chief investment officer of Tudor Investment, likened the current phase of AI adoption to 1995, when commercial use of the internet accelerated with the release of Windows 95.
“Both of these were the beginning of productivity miracles that lasted four to five and a half years,” Jones said. “I’d say we’re at 50 or 60 percent in a sense. If I had to pick a term, we’ve got another year or two.”
The stock market has soared over the past few years due to optimism that artificial intelligence will transform industries and accelerate productivity growth. Megacap tech companies tied to AI infrastructure led the rally, helping the S&P 500 rise to repeated record highs as investors poured money into chip makers, cloud computing companies and prolific AI developers.
Jones said that while the development of artificial intelligence is still in its early stages, in terms of the bull market it continues to feel like 1999, about a year before dot-com stock prices peaked in early 2000. Once that ends, Jones said the market decline could be significant.
“Imagine the stock market going up another 40%. The stock market’s GDP will probably be good by 300%, 350%. You just know there’s going to be some…breathtaking type of corrections,” he said.
Still, Jones said he was adding to his AI investments, although he did not specify when the purchases were made or which stocks he purchased.
“I’m a macro trader, so I just buy baskets, and I can simply say, this is a crazy, crazy time. …I always like to find historical precedents,” he said.
Jones rose to fame after predicting the 1987 stock market crash and profiting from it. He is also president of Just Capital, a nonprofit that ranks publicly traded U.S. companies on social and environmental metrics.
