Sam Altman: AI Is a Bubble—But a Net Win

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman says the current AI boom has the signs of a bubble. In a wide-ranging interview with The Verge and other reporters on August 15, he said investors are “overexcited” and that the rush of money now flowing into tiny startups is often not rational. He compared today’s market to the late-1990s dot-com run-up, noting that bubbles tend to form around a real breakthrough that people get carried away with.  Altman said some young companies with “three people and an idea” are being valued at levels that make little sense, and warned that backers of a few of these firms will “get burned.” He also predicted big winners, arguing the frenzy could still deliver a net benefit: while individual investors may lose, the wider economy could come out ahead.  Recent fund-raising shows the scale of the hype, he said, pointing to companies such as Safe Superintelligence, led by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and Thinking Machines, started by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, that have secured multibillion-dollar rounds. That pace of investment, in his view, reflects both genuine promise and speculative excess.  Despite calling it a bubble, Altman sounded confident about his own company’s path. He said people should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on data-center construction “in the not very distant future,” a sign that he sees demand for AI models continuing to grow. He added that economists will likely “wring their hands” about the costs, but framed the spending as necessary infrastructure for the next wave of computing.  Altman’s comments arrive as economists and market watchers debate whether AI stock prices and private-company valuations can hold up. His view is that a correction is likely somewhere in the ecosystem, but that the long-term impact of AI remains significant. In short: the market may be overheated, but the underlying technology is real—and OpenAI plans to bet big on it.