On Thursday, Sam Altman said people should "expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars" building infrastructure to power artificial intelligence, while also drawing parallels between today's AI investment and the late 1990s dot-com bubble.
Economist Will Raise Concerns, But Altman Says ‘Let Us Do Our Thing'
Altman told reporters that OpenAI will need significant capital to sustain the development of advanced AI, reported Bloomberg.
"And you should expect a bunch of economists to wring their hands and say, ‘This is so crazy, it's so reckless, and whatever," he said, adding, "And we'll just be like, ‘You know what? Let us do our thing.'"
The OpenAI CEO also stated that the AI startup is exploring new ways to fund this effort. "I suspect we can design a very interesting new kind of financial instrument for finance and compute that the world has not yet figured it out," he stated, adding, "We're working on it."
OpenAI CEO Highlights The Massive Investment In AI Development
While speaking with the reporters over dinner, Altman also drew a comparison between today's AI frenzy and the dot-com boom of the 1990s, when "smart people" became "overexcited" about the internet, the report noted.
"Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited by AI? In my opinion, yes," Altman said, responding to a question from Bloomberg News.
He cautioned that valuations in the sector are "insane" and warned, "Someone's gonna get burned there." However, he also said that "society as a whole" will not regret investing heavily in AI.
OpenAI's Potential IPO And New Government Partnership
During the conversation, Altman said, "I do think we have to go public someday, probably," though he said he is not "well-suited" to be a public company CEO, according to the report.
He also described OpenAI now operating like four businesses: a consumer technology arm, a massive infrastructure unit, a research lab and a division focused on "new stuff" such as hardware and brain-computer interfaces.
Earlier this year, Altman joined SoftBank Group's (OTC:SFTBF) (OTC:SFTBY) Masayoshi Son and Oracle Corp's (NASDAQ:ORCL) Larry Ellison to launch Stargate, a $500 billion infrastructure initiative.
OpenAI also announced a new deal with the U.S. General Services Administration. Under President Donald Trump's AI Action Plan, federal agencies will get access to ChatGPT Enterprise for just $1 per agency for the next year.
Read Next:
Photo Courtesy: Meir Chaimowitz on Shutterstock.com
