The writer is co-founder and co-chair of Oaktree Capital Management and author of ‘Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side’
My recent exploration into large language models has taught me not to think of an AI model as a search engine that retrieves data and regurgitates it. Rather, it’s a computer system that is capable of synthesising data and reasoning from it.
Sceptics question whether AI can ‘‘think’’ for itself, given that it ultimately relies on reconfiguring what people have already figured out and applying it to new data and other fields. But isn’t that also how the human brain expands its capabilities? Is AI’s way of growing, learning and “thinking” really different from ours? In terms of economic output, this philosophical distinction may not even be relevant.