{"id":193679,"date":"2025-10-06T17:08:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T17:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/193679\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T17:08:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T17:08:10","slug":"sam-altman-warns-that-ai-industry-is-due-for-a-spectacular-implosion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/193679\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Altman Warns That AI Industry Is Due for a Spectacular Implosion\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is doing what he does best: warning of AI-related doom<\/a> that he doesn\u2019t sound all that pressed about.<\/p>\n

Last week, while touring one of OpenAI\u2019s mammoth data centers being built in Abilene, Texas, Altman had a pretty casual outlook when he was asked about a bubble that could financially decimate<\/a> the entire industry.<\/p>\n

\u201cBetween the ten years we\u2019ve already been operating and the many decades ahead of us, there will be booms and busts,\u201d Altman ruminated, as quoted by The Associated Press<\/a>. \u201cPeople will overinvest and lose money, and underinvest and lose a lot of revenue.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll make some dumb capital allocations,\u201d he conceded \u2014 but assured that \u201cover the arc that we have to plan over, we are confident that this technology will drive a new wave of unprecedented economic growth.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the kind of blas\u00e9, bromidic talk you\u2019d expect to hear from a coach of a sports team that\u2019s on a historic losing streak. Oh yes, \u201cthere\u2019ll be ups and downs\u201d \u2014 and your eyes glaze over. You forgive them, though, because, well, what else are they going to say? That everything\u2019s going down the toilet?<\/p>\n

But Altman commands a half-trillion-dollar startup that\u2019s the tip of the spear for an out-of-control AI gold rush. Pretty much the entire world economy is tangled up in the hundreds of billions of investment<\/a> being poured into the industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Illustrating just how all-devouring AI is, here\u2019s this worrying statistic provided by the Wall Street Journal<\/a>: in the US, capital expenditures for AI contributed more to growth in the economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending, according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s hardly an exaggeration to suggest that if the AI bubble bursts, it could take the whole economy down with it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And the omens are everywhere if you look for them \u2014 the most looming being the fact that the biggest AI firms haven\u2019t demonstrated that they can turn a profit<\/a> with the tech that everyone is banking billions of dollars on revolutionizing productivity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But nonchalant doomsaying is Altman\u2019s specialty. And it\u2019s not the first time that he\u2019s warned about an AI bubble. In August, he outright said we were in one<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,\u201d Altman told reporters, as quoted by The Verge<\/a>. \u201cAre we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s also warned for years that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs<\/a>, cripple society by drowning it in misinformation<\/a>, or perhaps cause a Terminator-style apocalypse<\/a> that lays waste to the human race.<\/p>\n

Of course, when Altman makes these prophecies about AI, he\u2019s also hyping it up. And perhaps part of why he can seem so nonplussed about impending catastrophes, financial or existential, is that he\u2019s convinced that his company will be the one that comes out the other side stronger.<\/p>\n

Right after warning of a bubble in August, Altman acknowledged that \u201csomeone\u201d will lose a \u201cphenomenal amount of money,\u201d but that, of course, \u201cwe don\u2019t know who.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on OpenAI: Producer Announces New Movie Will Be Directed by an AI Entity<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is doing what he does best: warning of AI-related doom that he doesn\u2019t sound…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":193680,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-193679","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193679\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}