OpenAI's Sam Altman sees AI bubble forming as industry spending surges

In this articleGOOGL your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNTOpenAI Co-Founder and CEO Sam Altman speaks at Snowflake Summit in San Francisco on June 2, 2025.Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty ImagesOpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks the artificial intelligence market is in a bubble, according to a report from The Verge published Friday. "When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited a kernel of truth," Altman told a small group of reporters last week."Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited AI? My opinion is yes

Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes," he was quoted as saying

His s add to growing concern among experts and analysts that investment in AI is moving too fast

Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai, Bridgewater Associates' Ray Dalio and Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok have all raised similar warnings.Last month, Slok stated in a report that he believed the AI bubble of today was, in fact, bigger than the internet bubble, with the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 more overvalued than they were in the 1990s

In an to CNBC on Monday, Ray Wang, CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Re, told CNBC that he thought Altman's s carry some validity, but that the risks are company-dependent. watch now21:5921:59Watch CNBC's full interview with OpenAI CEO Sam AltmanSquawk Box"From the perspective of broader investment in AI and semiconductors..

I don't see it as a bubble

The fundamentals across the supply chain remain strong, and the long-term trajectory of the AI trend supports continued investment," he said

However, he added that there is an increasing amount of speculative capital chasing companies with weaker fundamentals and only perceived potential, which could create pockets of overvaluation

The release of OpenAI's GPT-5 AI model earlier this month had also been rocky, with some critics complaining that it had a less intuitive feel

This resulted in the company restoring access to legacy GPT-4 models for paying customers.ing the release of the model, Altman has also signaled more caution some of the AI industry's more bullish predictions.Speaking to CNBC, he said that he thought the term artificial general intelligence, or "AGI," is losing relevance, when asked whether the GPT-5 model moves the world any closer to achieving AGI

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AGI refers to the concept of a form of artificial intelligence that can perform any intellectual task that a human can — something that OpenAI has been working towards for years and that Altman previously said could be achieved in the "reasonably close-ish future."Regardless, faith in OpenAI from investors has remained strong this year

In March, it had announced a $40 billion funding round at a $300 billion valuation, by far the largest amount ever raised by a private company

In The Verge article on Friday, the OpenAI CEO also discussed OpenAI's expansion into consumer hardware, brain-computer interfaces and social media

Altman also said that he expects OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on its data center buildout in the "not very distant future," and signaled that the company would be interested in buying Chrome if the U.S. government were to force Google to sell it

Asked if he would be CEO of OpenAI in a few years, he was quoted as saying, "I mean, maybe an AI is in three years