Wall Street Wants AI Firms to Start Going Public

Since ChatGPT was released in 2022, a long list of artificial intelligence startups have begun building generative AI services for consumers and businesses, raising billions of dollars from venture capital firms and big tech companies in the process. Now there’s increasingly clear demand on Wall Street for these firms to go public, and several of them are apparently looking into it. “I’d say that the majority of the companies that are truly pure-play, AI-focused are still mostly financing themselves in the private markets,” Michael Harris, global head of capital markets at NYSE, said on Tuesday. “But we have seen a handful of companies that are at least exploring going through the process.”

Jamie Dimon, like so many before, just compared the transformational impact of AI to the steam engine. The metaphor has not only become a cliché, Parmy Olson writes in Bloomberg Opinion, but paints an oversimplified and overly-rosy picture of how this technology will reshape society. The effects of perfecting steam power pale in comparison with the changes that the next technological development will bring, she says. For an apt comparison, there’s a very different revolution to look at.