Charlie Munger

Charles T. Munger (1924–2023) was Warren Buffett’s partner of nearly half a century and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, revered for his acid one-liners and his “latticework of mental models” approach to thinking. He spent the last year of his life — the year ChatGPT set off the generative-AI gold rush — serving as the boom’s most quotable wet blanket.

A skeptic to the end

Munger told CNBC in February 2023 that AI carried “a lot of crazy hype” and was “a mixed blessing,” insisting it was not going to cure cancer. At Berkshire’s annual meeting that May, he allowed that robotics would see more use in the world but said he was “personally skeptical of some of the hype,” preferring old-fashioned intelligence. In October 2023 — appearing, with some irony, at Zoom’s Zoomtopia conference weeks before his death at 99 — he repeated that AI was getting a huge amount of hype and probably more than it deserved, joking that software creating more software meant “we’ve always had artificial intelligence.”

His skepticism was of a piece with his lifelong contempt for investment manias — he trashed cryptocurrency in far harsher terms — and it shaped Berkshire’s public posture: his partner Warren Buffett invoked the atomic bomb when asked about AI at the 2024 meeting, months after Munger’s death. Munger never argued AI was dangerous or immoral, only that the money chasing it had outrun the evidence.