OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor believes the artificial intelligence industry is in a bubble, but says that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In an interview with The Verge, Taylor was asked whether he agreed with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s prediction that “someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money in AI.”
Taylor said both statements can be true: AI will drive massive economic transformation in the long run, but today’s surge of funding and startups means some investors and companies will inevitably lose money.
“I think it is both true that AI will transform the economy, and I think it will, like the internet, create huge amounts of economic value in the future,” Taylor explained. “I think we’re also in a bubble, and a lot of people will lose a lot of money. I think both are absolutely true at the same time, and there’s a lot of historical precedent for both of those things being true at the same time.”
Related: Do Foundation Models Still Matter? Why AI Startups Are Moving Beyond Pretraining
Taylor, who also runs AI agent startup Sierra, compared the current AI boom to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. While many internet startups failed, the companies that survived went on to define the modern economy. “All the people in 1999 were kind of right,” Taylor said, suggesting that even if today’s bubble bursts, AI will still deliver on its long-term promise.
