Sam Altman says ‘yes,’ AI is in a bubble

In the far-ranging interview, Altman compared the market’s reaction to AI to the dot-com bubble in the ’90s, when the value of internet startups soared before crashing down in 2000. “When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” Altman said. “If you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was a real thing. Tech was really important. The internet was a really big deal. People got overexcited.”

He added that he thinks it’s “insane” that some AI startups with “three people and an idea” are receiving funding at such high valuations. “That’s not rational behavior,” Altman said. “Someone’s gonna get burned there, I think.” Over the past year, we’ve seen several AI startups, including Safe Superintelligence, led by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and Thinking Machines, founded by ex-OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, raise billions of dollars.

“Someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money. We don’t know who, and a lot of people are going to make a phenomenal amount of money,” Altman said. “My personal belief, although I may turn out to be wrong, is that, on the whole, this would be a huge net win for the economy.”

Even if we may be in an AI bubble, it seems Altman is expecting OpenAI to survive the burst. “You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future,” Altman said. “You should expect a bunch of economists to wring their hands.”

Additional reporting by Alex Heath.