Blackstone's $1.3 Trillion AI Gambit Began With a Chance Bus Ride in China

Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman credits a 2015 encounter with Alibaba founder Jack Ma for reshaping the firm's entire investment strategy toward artificial intelligence. Seated next to Ma on a traffic-stalled bus in China, Schwarzman heard a prediction that would ultimately drive one of Wall Street's most aggressive AI buildouts: that machine learning would become "the most far-reaching technological transformation" in history. "I literally had no idea what he was talking about," Schwarzman recalled. "He gave me a quick tutorial."