OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is doing what he does best: warning of AI-related doom that he doesn’t sound all that pressed about.
Last week, while touring one of OpenAI’s mammoth data centers being built in Abilene, Texas, Altman had a pretty casual outlook when he was asked about a bubble that could financially decimate the entire industry.
“Between the ten years we’ve already been operating and the many decades ahead of us, there will be booms and busts,” Altman ruminated, as quoted by The Associated Press. “People will overinvest and lose money, and underinvest and lose a lot of revenue.”
“We’ll make some dumb capital allocations,” he conceded — but assured that “over the arc that we have to plan over, we are confident that this technology will drive a new wave of unprecedented economic growth.”
It’s the kind of blasé, bromidic talk you’d expect to hear from a coach of a sports team that’s on a historic losing streak. Oh yes, “there’ll be ups and downs” — and your eyes glaze over. You forgive them, though, because, well, what else are they going to say? That everything’s going down the toilet?
But Altman commands a half-trillion-dollar startup that’s the tip of the spear for an out-of-control AI gold rush. Pretty much the entire world economy is tangled up in the hundreds of billions of investment being poured into the industry.
Illustrating just how all-devouring AI is, here’s this worrying statistic provided by the Wall Street Journal: in the US, capital expenditures for AI contributed more to growth in the economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending, according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
So it’s hardly an exaggeration to suggest that if the AI bubble bursts, it could take the whole economy down with it.
And the omens are everywhere if you look for them — the most looming being the fact that the biggest AI firms haven’t demonstrated that they can turn a profit with the tech that everyone is banking billions of dollars on revolutionizing productivity.
But nonchalant doomsaying is Altman’s specialty. And it’s not the first time that he’s warned about an AI bubble. In August, he outright said we were in one.
“When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” Altman told reporters, as quoted by The Verge. “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes.”
He’s also warned for years that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs, cripple society by drowning it in misinformation, or perhaps cause a Terminator-style apocalypse that lays waste to the human race.
Of course, when Altman makes these prophecies about AI, he’s also hyping it up. And perhaps part of why he can seem so nonplussed about impending catastrophes, financial or existential, is that he’s…
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