A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox. Eric Schmidt, the billionaire former CEO of Google , has become known as “the AI whisperer” for his widespread predictions and warnings about artificial intelligence. Behind the scenes, however, Schmidt’s family office has been making dozens of bets on private AI startups. Schmidt’s family office, called Hillspire, has made investments in 22 private AI firms since 2019, according to data provided exclusively to CNBC by Fintrx, a private wealth intelligence platform. Last year alone, Hillspire made 13 investments in AI startups, which accounted for more than three-quarters of all of Schmidt’s startup investments. The dollar amounts of the investments aren’t disclosed, so it’s unclear how much Schmidt has invested in each company. And some of the investments were follow-on rounds for the same companies. Yet the funding rounds for the 22 companies that Schmidt has invested since 2019 total more than $5 billion, according to Fintrx. Schmidt’s bets include some of the largest AI startups, including Anthropic, Holistic AI and SandboxAQ. They also include smaller companies, like Swiss startup Optiml as well as Altera and Inworld AI. Schmidt has become one of the leading evangelists of artificial intelligence, having written one of the defining books on the technology, “The Age of AI,” with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher. He is also a leading voice on AI’s potential perils. Schmidt said in an interview late last year with ABC News that when a computer can learn and do everything, “that’s …
