Ray Dalio

Raymond Dalio (born 1949) founded Bridgewater Associates out of his New York apartment in 1975 and built it into the world’s largest hedge fund. His bestselling book “Principles” codified the systematic, rules-based decision-making that made Bridgewater famous — an approach that turned out to be unusually compatible with machine intelligence.

The artificial investor

Dalio began pursuing the idea of an “artificial investor” at Bridgewater around 2012, encoding the firm’s investment principles into expert systems. That lineage culminated in AIA Labs — short for Artificial Investment Associate — and the AIA Macro Fund, launched in July 2024 with roughly $2 billion from clients and machine-learning models drawing on systems from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity. The fund returned 11.9% in its first full year and has reportedly grown past $5 billion in assets, one of the clearest demonstrations that AI can run institutional money. Bridgewater’s equity portfolio has likewise leaned heavily into AI-linked stocks such as Nvidia, Microsoft and Alphabet.

Riding the boom while calling the bubble

Dalio has simultaneously become one of the boom’s most-quoted skeptics. In a November 2025 CNBC interview he estimated markets were at “about 80%” of the euphoria that preceded the 1929 crash and the 2000 dot-com bust, and in a January 2026 reflection posted to X he wrote that the AI boom was “in the early stages of a bubble.” Characteristically, he does not counsel abandoning the technology — his framework treats bubbles as a normal phase of transformative build-outs, and he has kept his firm and his personal portfolio invested through the froth.

Dalio stepped back from Bridgewater in stages — leaving the CEO role in 2017 and the board in 2025 — but remains one of the most influential macro voices in finance, and his bubble calls move markets even as his creation trades on AI.