Sam Altman said investors are overexcited about AI and compared the enthusiasm to historical bubbles where a kernel of truth becomes overstated. He framed OpenAI as seeking distance from speculative frenzy, likening the company more to durable dot-com successes than failed startups. Market signals show traders buying downside protection, with Bloomberg noting increased interest in options hedges against a tech-stock plunge. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and analyst Selina Xu urged Silicon Valley to stop obsessing over superhuman AI. Schmidt had earlier portrayed AGI as potentially transformative, but he and Xu now call for reframing public messaging about AGI expectations.
Asked if "investors as a whole are overexcited about AI," OpenAI's Sam Altman answered "yes" to a group of gathered reporters, according to the Verge. Then he used that word. "When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth," he said. "If you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was a real thing.
It would be a mistake to read this as a major departure from Altman's wide-ranging and often inconsistent public musings about AI: His intention here, after a rocky rollout for his company's latest model, GPT-5, seems to be to situate OpenAI outside of a possible bubble, implying that his company has more in common with dot-com Amazon than with Pets.com or Worldcom.
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