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Good morning. Is the AI bubble popping? The S&P 500 has fallen in each of the past four days, major investors like Peter Thiel have revealed they have unloaded their stakes in high-flyers like Nvidia, and even Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has acknowledged “there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this.” But all would be wise to remember that the AI bubble is a financial phenomenon, not a technological one. The assumption that they go together could be an expensive mistake.
We’ve seen it before. When the internet bubble popped in 2000—the S&P plunged 49% in 31 months—many people concluded, “You see? That internet thing was a big nothing.” Obviously they were wrong. The market had a seizure. Companies that were flimsily financed failed. But the technology continued to change the world.
Now AI, the next general-purpose technology after the internet, will transform the world even more than the internet did, regardless of the market’s mood. Business leaders must pull their eyes away from the sea of red flashing across Wall Street and stay focused on preparing their organizations for staggering changes. Here are three questions as thought starters, ranked at increasing levels of mind blowing:
–When will your company’s agentic AI disburse money all by itself? At Fortune’s latest Emerging CFO program last week, I asked three CFOs if they were letting AI do that already. Their answers ranged from “No” to “No!” But after thinking for a few moments, one of them said, “Within certain guardrails I think absolutely you’ll get there, especially on low-dollar, low-risk transactional type of things. I can certainly see that being a case.” Rethinking the impossible will have to become a habit.
–Are you prepared for AGI? Artificial general intelligence has no strict definition, but in the AI world it usually means intelligence greater than human intelligence. Experts generally estimate AGI will be achieved sometime between the late 2020s and early 2030s. As that day approaches, leaders face a challenge unique in history: how to run an organization in a world where humans are, as AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton has said, the second-smartest species on the planet.
–When will the one-person, billion-dollar company arrive? OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his tech CEO friends started a betting pool on the answer to that question almost two years ago, as mentioned in last Friday’s note. For them, it’s a question of when, not if. How would you bet? How would your organization fare against a competitor with just a CEO and a whole lot of AI?
So much of this sounds crazy, but it must be confronted. The bottom line is there will be winners and losers. As always with a new general-purpose technology, fearless imagination will win.—Geoff Colvin
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
