Human investors who have tried to replicate Warren Buffett have mostly failed miserably, but now artificial intelligence is taking a crack at it. Investment startup Intelligent Alpha is working on launching the Intelligent Omaha ETF , with the ticker AIWB, that relies on AI to emulate the Berkshire Hathaway CEO's investment philosophy and create a portfolio of 25-30 stocks that it thinks Buffett might buy. So, how does it work exactly? The first step is to feed AI — three large language models GPT, Gemini and Claude — enough information for it to learn the essence of Buffett.
That includes any publicly available writings (Buffett's famous annual letters since the 1960s), any public interviews or statements he's made, as well as regulatory filings like the 13Fs that reveal Berkshire's public equity holdings. "If you give AI a bunch of information about how you want it to think and how you want to respond and think about the world, it will play that role perfectly in our testing," Doug Clinton, Intelligent Alpha CEO and founder, said in an interview. It remains to be seen how deeply AI could understand Buffett's unique investing style that has evolved significantly over seven decades.
He started out only buying "cigar-butt," dirt-cheap securities for quick profit and later, under the late Charlie Munger's influence, focused on quality companies with "wide moats" selling at fair prices. Now that Berkshire's market value approaches $1 trillion, fewer and fewer investments mov.