OpenAI's Sam Altman warns of AI bubble

ChatGPT reaches more than 700 million people each week — and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks we may be in an AI bubble.

"When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth," he told a small group of reporters, including The Verge's Alex Heath, over dinner in San Francisco. "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. Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes."

A bubble is when the price of something rises above its actual value typically because investors become too excited. Think: the dotcom bubble, the cryptocurrency bubble, even the housing bubble of the 2000s. As Nasdaq says in its definition of a bubble, they're "often hard to detect in real time because there is disagreement over the fundamental value of the asset."

As NBC News reported, the AI bubble could be bigger than the internet bubble, according to a report from Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok. But not everyone agrees — Ray Wang, research director for semiconductors, supply chain and emerging technology at Futurum Group, told CNBC that while there might be an AI bubble, he doesn't necessarily see that reality. "The fundamentals across the supply chain remain strong, and the long-term trajectory of the AI trend supports continued investment," he told the news outlet. And, of course, it is much easier to point out a bubble from the other side.

Altman also told the reporters at the dinner that, while ChatGPT is currently the "fifth biggest website in the world right now," he soon expects it to beat out Instagram and Facebook for third. After that, he says, ChatGPT's growth challenges "get harder."

"For ChatGPT to be bigger than Google, that’s really hard," he said.

One of Altman's top priorities, Heath reported, is getting more GPUs so he can keep scaling OpenAI, bubble or not.

"You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future," he said.