How Bridgewater Is Building an Artificial Investor
Co-CIO Greg Jensen was an early financial backer of OpenAI and says he wrote Anthropic’s first outside check. The AI investment effort he leads now manages about $4.5 billion.
For more than a decade, Bridgewater’s co-CIO Greg Jensen has been thinking about when machines might make for better investors than humans.
“When will machines write the rules, not just support the rules?” Jensen recalled asking himself in the early 2010s. “When will their intuition actually be better than human intuition?”
At the time, the technology could do “great pattern matching,” Jensen said, but “there was nothing like intuition.” The pieces he believed an artificial investor would need—reasoning, ways to diagnose its conclusions, and methods for working with limited data—had not yet come together.
So Jensen went looking for them.
That search led him to OpenAI, then a little-known nonprofit that would become the face of the AI boom, where he became an early investor around 2016. Later, after a group of researchers he knew left OpenAI to start a new company called Anthropic, he wrote the company’s first outside check.
By late 2022, the year ChatGPT went mainstream, Jensen thought the missing pieces were finally coming together. The following year, Bridgewater created AIA Labs, short for Artificial Investment Associate, a separate research and investment unit tasked with building what the firm calls an “artificial investor.” It started with six people.
Bridgewater kept the group apart from Pure Alpha, its flagship macro strategy. The separation was intended to give the team room to rebuild the investment process around AI—and to keep the new systems from simply reproducing the views Bridgewater’s investors had already developed.
“I don’t want a copy of us,” Jensen said. “We’re so flawed. We’re so bad at so many things. I want something better than us.”
The assignment was broader than finding a new way to analyze data. AIA was supposed to take on more of the work an investor performs: gathering information, developing an explanation for what was happening in an economy or market, testing that explanation and turning it into an investment view.
AI, as it evolves has been, and will be more than ever, an amazing thought partner and, in many ways, thought leader in investment decision making. Decision making solely in one’s head, the way most investors still do it, is obsolete.
Ray Dalio October 2024
AIA was not built around a single model or trading strategy, according to a person familiar with the effort. Instead, it combines Bridgewater’s causal time-series models with specialized and frontier language models, along with systems designed to test and diagnose their outputs. The broader goal is to generate insights across markets, economies and trading strategies.
Bridgewater tested the strategy with its own money first, beginning with roughly $100 million inside Pure Alpha in late 2023. The firm opened it to outside investors in July 2024, attracting almost $2 billion.
In March 2025, Bridgewater CEO Nir Bar Dea said the fund was producing “unique alpha that is uncorrelated to what our humans do.”
Today, AIA is no longer a six-person experiment. The unit has grown to more than 75 scientists, engineers and investors, according to the person familiar with the effort. The strategies now manage about $4.5 billion. AIA Macro has returned 11.3% annualized since inception, with returns that have shown low correlation with markets and other managers, including Bridgewater’s Pure Alpha.
Bridgewater has started using AIA’s systems inside Pure Alpha to accelerate research and systematize investment ideas, the person said.
A Bridgewater spokesperson declined to comment on the hedge fund’s AI efforts.
Read on for how Bridgewater went from writing investment rules by hand to letting an artificial investor manage billions.