Australia’s top global technology investors have long prided themselves on identifying the next leg of the artificial intelligence trade before the rest of the market catches on.
It helped them generate huge returns earlier this year from memory stocks like SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung Electronics, which make chips for the data centres powering AI. But hedge fund Minotaur Capital’s Thomas Rice is among a cohort of growth managers now betting on a new stage in the lucrative trade, and he is going all-in.
Rice pinpoints September 8 as the day when momentum started to shift after Facebook owner Meta Platforms released Muse, a personal AI agent that does everything from managing calendars and restaurant reservations to filling in forms, researching and online shopping.
The launch prompted a complete reshuffle of Minotaur’s portfolio, with Rice making 17 trades last month alone, more than triple the amount made in August, as he sold Micron, halved SK Hynix and opened six new positions.
One of those was Meta, which Minotaur started aggressively buying on September 15 and became the fund’s biggest position by the end of the month.
“Muse gives Meta the lead in consumer agents, which we think will be one of the most valuable and strategically important markets to own over the next decade,” Rice said.
“The internet’s biggest profits have gone to its gateways, the places people start, like Google for search and Amazon for shopping. An agent that books your flights and buys your groceries sits in front of all of them.”
Investment bank Citi estimated that Muse could generate more than $US27 billion ($39 billion) in revenue for Meta by 2030 as strong customer adoption and growing engagement solidify the platform’s first-mover advantage in the personal agent market.
Muse has already been downloaded more than 5 million times in the US and Canada since launching a month ago, a milestone that took OpenAI’s ChatGPT 56 days to achieve, while SpaceX’s Grok and Anthropic’s Claude hit the mark in 103 days and 492 days, respectively.
The strong debut sent Meta shares surging 27 per cent in September, its best month in nearly four years.
OpenAI launched its own personal assistant, known as dots, in late September and investors expect rivals, including Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, to expand their own agent offerings in pursuit of what many view as the next major consumer computing platform.
Fund managers say the explosive demand for Muse breathed fresh life into the years-long AI trade and soothed concerns about a tech bubble similar to the dotcom boom and bust period.