I went to an elite investor forum in London. Everyone was talking about the outlook for AI, jobs, and Elon Musk.

• I went to SALT London, an exclusive investor conference, on Wednesday.
• The big topics of the day included the AI boom, the job market outlook, and Elon Musk’s predictions.
• Business Insider singled out three speakers whose comments stuck with me.

I attended the second day of SALT London, the alternative investments conference hosted by Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital at The Chancery Rosewood hotel in Mayfair, where rooms can cost $3,000 a night.

Across the day, however, three topics dominated: the ongoing AI bubble debate, how the job market will develop as AI grows, and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

Keep reading to see what some of the biggest names on the SALT stage talked about:

One of Peter Thiel’s core lieutenants said the AI bubble is close to bursting

“At some point the music will stop,” Jack Selby, a managing director at Thiel Capital and the managing partner of VC firm Copper Sky Capital, told the SALT audience.

Selby said the AI business is “outrageously” capital-intensive given the cost of the microchips, data centers, and other infrastructure needed to run models. AI executives have resorted to “outrageous, fanciful storytelling” to raise the money required, he added.

He said it’s “pretty astounding” that debt markets are continuing to fund the AI buildout. If he had to pick an over-under on when the “euphoric” AI “momentum market” would finish, he said he “would take the under before the end of this year.”

Selby questioned why Anthropic is hustling to raise money from public markets, when the maker of AI chatbot Claude is “basically a bank” given it makes more money from interest on its cash than from its business.

Anthropic’s amended S-1 filing this week showed it earned $2.4 billion of interest income in the first nine months of this year, while its operating loss was around $1.3 billion over the same period. It held around $96 billion of cash and cash equivalents at the end of September.

“They have more money than they know what to do with, so why in the world are they rushing to go public?” Selby asked.

The ‘biggest job creation program in the history of the world’ is coming

“I think when SpaceX and Tesla probably merge, you’re going to see Musk start to tell stories about what I believe will be the biggest job creation program in the history of the world,” Finegold said.

“I think the narrative has to change from taking your jobs to creating new jobs for people,” he added.

His firm has built a platform, Curation Connect, where investor relations teams can use AI video tools to turn regulatory disclosures into films and explainer videos at a fraction of the cost of hiring a media agency.

Cybersecurity will be ‘bigger than AI,’ argued Stephanie Link of Hightower Advisors

During the discussion, Link pointed to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s April letter to shareholders, in which he said the e-commerce giant has over 1 million robots working in its fulfillment centers and that it’s only in the “early stages” of leveraging the technology.

“If I think AI is in the third inning, and cyber’s in the second inning, I think we’re not even at the batter’s box on robotics,” she continued.

Read the original article on Business Insider