What will happen first? Will AI kill your investments or kill your job? The competing stories about how the next big technological revolution will play out are putting markets in a spin.
Last year, the key debate in financial circles around AI centred on whether it was a bubble, whether the technology itself was genuinely useful and monetisable enough to justify the spectacular valuations of companies at its core.
It’s hard to overstate how obsessed investors were on this issue. At one point last summer, chipmaker Nvidia’s results day was considered on a par with the monthly US jobs report — the biggest beast of the global economic data calendar — for its role in setting market direction and maintaining the upward momentum in stocks.