As Sam Altman called it in his recent dinner, within the AI boom or bubble – there will be winners and losers. Some people soar like Amazon came out of the time of dotcom. Others may have flounders like pets.com.
In the late 1990s, the stock market reached new heights and was driven by the rise of digital-first companies. The Dot-Com bubble eventually burst, sending companies like Webvan and Etoys.com into bankruptcy. That era also produced some of the high-tech mammoths that we still use today, like Amazon and eBay.
Openai Chairman Bret Taylor believes ERA and AI Boom have a lot in common. On the “ACQ2” podcast, he said the dot-com boom is often memorized only for businesses left in Kura Rub after the bubble burst.
“When you say dotcom, people come back to failure,” Taylor said. “If you look at the S&P 500 now and see the amount of value from the companies created within it, you can in fact argue that almost all the vibrancy and hype has been completely justified.”
Twenty-five years later, some of the “magnificent seven” tech stocks can be traced back to that period. Amazon was released in 1997 and overcomes the .com bust. Google was founded during the boom, but was not published until then. Some Mark Microsoft's 2001 antitrust ruling was at the top of the bubble.
“In fact, it changed commerce in a basic way,” Taylor said. “It changed the financial system in a basic way. It changed everything.”
AI has supported the market in a similar way. VCs pour billions into AI startupsand Big Tech is investing tens of millions of people in AI infrastructure, talent and related CAPEX. In July, Nvidia was established beginning A company that achieves a market capitalization of $4 trillion, behind the demand for AI companies' GPUs. Morgan Stanley recently predicted that AI productivity could potentially win the S&P 500 to up to $16 trillion.
Due to market enthusiasm, some skeptics called AI a bubble and compared it to the previous dot-com era. Tech Guru Erik Gordon told BI.
Altman himself compared AI to the bubble at a recent dinner attended by reporters.
“When bubbles occur, clever people get overly excited about the core of the truth,” Altman said. “Are we at a stage where the entire investor is overly excited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen for a very long time? My opinion is yes too.”
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“Someone will lose an incredible amount,” Altman said he has received massive investments in connection with AI startups, including “three people and ideas.” “I don't know who we are going to make incredible sums of money. My personal belief is that while I may turn out to be wrong, overall, this is a huge net victory for the economy.”
Taylor makes a similarly positive spin on the bubble question, comparing it to the dot-com boom. He referenced a joke about the word “agents” were using too much.
“You have a lot of snake oil,” he said.
But there are also real sustainable companies that Taylor predicts to stick. Naturally, he pointed out the earthquake growth of the CHATGPT. ChatGPT, with 100 million users just two months after the app's launch, remained dominant in the App Store.
Taylor also pointed to AI software companies that serve the B2B market, such as Lovable, a vibe coding platform for creating apps and websites.
“I think there's a very realistic value created here,” he said.
