AI Drug Dealer Warns of Overdose… While Pitching Investors on a $1 Trillion Crack Expansion

I can’t tell if Sam Altman is trolling us, running a Jedi mind trick, or secretly auditioning for Impractical Jokers… but the man just went on record saying AI is in a bubble.

This, from the same guy who lit the fuse on the whole thing when he launched ChatGPT, got every Twitter bro hooked, and then stapled a $19.99 monthly subscription price on their new addiction. The guy whose company is reportedly worth $500 billion right now… despite not expecting to make an actual profit until 2029. It’s like Zuckerberg admitting Instagram is a giant waste of time. Or Satoshi Nakamoto reappearing just to tell us crypto’s a scam. Or CNN and Fox going live together to say, “Yeah, we exaggerate a bit to juice ratings… but hey, it’s for a good cause” (the cause being huge margins). Point is, you don’t expect the guy running the show to call his own product a bubble while pocketing investor checks bigger than what some Fortune 500 companies make in a year.

“When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” Altman told The Verge. “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes.” I guess he’s trying to say: AI is a bubble, but it’s also the most important bubble of our lifetime. Kind of like saying yes, that hot sauce will destroy my stomach… but also, pass me another taco.

Altman even compared the hype to (wait for it) the dot-com bubble of the late ’90s… when the Nasdaq lost 80% of its value because a bunch of startups had no revenue, no profits, and names like Broadcast.com, which Yahoo bought for $5.7 billion before quietly pulling the plug a few years later. And he joins a crowded room of AI bears banging the same drum. Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai, Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio (of course), and Apollo’s Torsten Slok have all warned of the same thing. Slok even said today’s AI hype might be bigger than the internet bubble. Which is wild, because at least Broadcast.com made Mark Cuban a billionaire.

And if you look at the numbers, OpenAI is on track to hit $20 billion in annual recurring revenue this year. Not bad. But they’re still blowing cash like a Dave Ramsey caller who just financed a jet ski at 23% APR (they don’t even have a truck to haul it). And in the same breath, Altman says OpenAI is preparing to spend trillions on new data centers. Trillions. Imagine explaining that to your accountant: “Yeah, still not profitable, but go ahead and book us for a few trillion in server barns.” Meanwhile, the rollout of GPT-5 hasn’t exactly silenced critics, with many saying it feels less intuitive than GPT-4, forcing the company to quietly restore access to its older model. Not exactly the flawless “next-gen” leap people were expecting.

So are we in a bubble? Probably. Have you seen an IPO lately? Doesn’t matter if it’s Figma, CoreWeave, Circle Internet Group, or some vending machine with “AI” spray-painted on the logo… Wall Street and Robinhood traders lose their minds for 48 hours, then reality hits it in the mouth and the stock trades like a bank stock in the middle of the Great Financial Crisis. But here’s the thing about bubbles: they don’t always end in total disaster. Amazon got obliterated in the dot-com crash and still grew into a trillion-dollar empire. Altman clearly thinks OpenAI will follow the same path.

Still, when the guy leading the hype parade randomly admits, “Yeah, this might be irrational,” it makes you wonder if we’re all just extras in an episode of Impractical Jokers. Also makes me wonder if this is just getting ahead of the market knowing what’s coming so when the bubble pops and investors finally wake up to reality and that all these valuations make the dot com boom look rational… then Sammy can say, see I told you guys (as he raises another $100 billion from Softbank).

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Robinhood and Amazon as mentioned in the article.