Consensus AI investment spreads career risk, not investment risk: test commitments against your own business

Wall Street usually rewards being right differently from everyone else. On AI, almost everyone is making the same bet together.

Semafor's business newsletter tallies it up. Nvidia's US$500 billion consortium includes the four largest alternative asset managers in the world and six of the top eight. Blackstone and Apollo are jointly providing billions of dollars for Anthropic to buy compute. Anthropic's AI-for-the-real-world consultancy raised US$1.5 billion from Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, General Atlantic, Leonard Green and Apollo. Nearly every big private equity firm not on that list is backing OpenAI's competing version. Goldman, as Semafor puts it, is in both.

Brookfield's chief executive explains the crowding simply: there is enough to go around, and he expects winners and losers within the trade. The newsletter's writer is less sure those are different bets. The writer sees an "IBGYBG" trade, a Wall Street phrase that made it into the US government's postmortem on the 2008 crash: I'll be gone, you'll be gone. Everyone wins if it works, even if nobody looks like a standout genius. Everyone loses if it doesn't, but nobody looks like a standout moron. The writer adds that the last time private equity clubbed up on deals too big for any one firm to handle, the result was some of the worst buyouts in history.

I think the point reaches well beyond investors. Consensus spreads career risk. It does not reduce investment risk. An executive team that commits to an AI programme because every peer is doing the same is buying comfort as much as capability, and the two can be hard to tell apart in a board paper.

The useful question is not whether AI investment is justified. It is whether your own commitments reflect an assessment of your business, or the comfort of doing what everyone else is doing.

Source: Semafor Business, "Undifferentiated geniuses" (6 October 2026), https://lnkd.in/gDyuZ2iB

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