The Head of OpenAI Says Investors Are 'Overexcited' and Uses the Word 'Bubble'

Sam Altman, whose company sits at the center of the AI boom, agreed that the market had entered bubble territory — while insisting the underlying technology is real and that OpenAI itself would keep spending enormously. Investors weighed a warning coming from the person with the most reason not to give it.

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, told reporters this week that investors as a whole had become "overexcited" about AI, and agreed with the framing that the market was in a bubble. "When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth," he said, drawing the comparison to the dot-com boom of the late 1990s — a period when the internet was genuinely transformative and also when enormous sums were lost on companies that deserved to fail.

It was a notable thing for him to say. Altman runs the company most identified with the boom, one reportedly valued in the hundreds of billions and spending far more than it earns, and his warning did not come with any suggestion that OpenAI would slow down — he said in the same breath that the company would invest trillions in computing infrastructure over time. The message, in effect, was that many AI companies are overvalued and will fail, that the technology underneath is real, and that OpenAI is on the right side of that line.

That is either candor or salesmanship, and probably both. Acknowledging a bubble costs a leader little when he is also saying his own company is the kernel of truth rather than the froth. But it fed a real and growing unease. Through the summer, more voices — economists, the MIT report, some investors — had begun asking whether the spending had outrun the returns.

The dot-com comparison is the one everyone now reaches for, and it is genuinely two-edged. The internet did change everything. It also wiped out trillions in value on the way, and most of the companies that rode the first wave did not survive it. Altman invoked it deliberately. Which half of the analogy applies to which company is what the next few years will sort out.