People have ridiculed GPT-5, the newest large language model release from OpenAI, since the second it launched, with many users complaining that it’s dumb, boring, and not as good as the last LLM that the company released. Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, has some comforting words for those who may be concerned about the direction his company is headed: AI is a bubble, and oh, also btw, my company is about to spend the GDP of France to build out our AI infrastructure.
That seems to be the gist of what Altman said during a dinner held in San Francisco on Thursday with a group of journalists and other OpenAI execs, according to The Verge. During that casual conversation, Altman admitted that his company’s latest software release had been bungled, but promised that the future was bright for his company, as well as his industry.
“I think we totally screwed up some things on the rollout,” he said. “On the other hand, our API traffic doubled in 48 hours and is growing. We’re out of GPUs. ChatGPT has been hitting a new high of users every day. A lot of users really do love the model switcher. I think we’ve learned a lesson about what it means to upgrade a product for hundreds of millions of people in one day.”
At the same time, Altman appears to agree with critics of his industry who have called it a “bubble” akin to the early internet. “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI?” Altman said. “My opinion is yes.”
For quite some time, critics and commentators alike have wondered whether the excitement around the AI industry is due for a precipitous collapse. Some recent industry moves—like a very unfortunate stock day for datacenter and AI infrastructure startup Coreweave—have added to such concerns. Many onlookers have noted that, so far, AI is a money pit, with companies hurling vast sums of cash at the industry while dreaming of one day, somehow, turning a profit.
During his conversation with journalists, Altman added: “When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” Altman said. “If you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was a real thing. Tech was really important. The internet was a really big deal. People got overexcited.”
Whether AI is a bubble or not, Altman still wants to spend a certifiably insane amount of money building out his company’s AI infrastructure. “You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future,” Altman told reporters.
It’s this truly absurd scale of investment in AI that spurs the casual onlooker to wonder what it’s really all for. Indeed, the one question that never seems to get raised during conversations with Altman is whether a society-wide cost-benefit analysis has ever been run on his industry. In other words, is AI really worth it?
This single question could easily be pared down into a variety of more specific questions. For instance, one good question might be: Is it really worth spending trillions of dollars just to create a line of mildly amusing chatbots that only give you accurate information a certain percentage of the time? Or: Wouldn’t trillions of dollars be better spent, like, helping the poor or improving our educational system? Also: Are chatbots a societal necessity, or do they just seem sorta nice to have around? How much more useful is AI than, say, a search engine? Can’t we just stick to search engines? Do the negative externalities associated with AI use (a massive energy footprint, alleged reduced mental capacities in users, and a plague of cheating in higher education) outweigh the positive ones (access to a slightly more convenient way to find information online)?
I understand these questions may sound somewhat obvious in a way, but it’s also unclear whether anybody has actually asked them yet. Hopefully, at the next casual SF dinner with Altman, somebody will bring them up. Gizmodo reached out to OpenAI for comment, and we’ll update this post when we receive a reply.
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