Ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger spoke to CNBC earlier this week, ruminating on a variety of topics, including AI. When asked whether he thought the tech industry was in the middle of an AI bubble, he responded:
"Of course. Of course we are. We're hyped, we're accelerating, we're putting enormous leverage into the system.
"That said, I don't see it ending for several years. I do think we have an industry shift to AI, as Jensen has talked about and I agree with this, businesses are yet to really start materially benefitting from it. We're displacing all of the internet and the service provider industries as we think about it today. We have a long way to go."
Fears around AI being an economic bubble, like the one that caused the dot-com crash in 2000 or the global financial crisis in 2008, appear to be at the front of many industry minds of late.
OpenAI's Sam Altman recently commented that he thought "someone [was] going to lose a phenomenal amount of money" due to overinflated AI company valuations, mere weeks before announcing another megabucks deal with Broadcom—while Jamie Dimon, the head of JP Morgan recently said that "the level of uncertainty in most peoples' minds should be higher" regarding the stock market as a whole.
And then there's the former leader of the UBS commodities strategy team and market analyst, Julien Garran, who recently stated that the AI bubble is "17 times the size" of the one behind the aforementioned dot-com crash. Oh, and one more for good measure: The International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England have recently warned of a potential "sudden correction" in markets as a result of overinflated AI company valuations.
All of which is downright cheering, isn't it? And for those of you feeling a sense of schadenfreude towards AI companies potentially receiving their economic comeuppance, know this—market sectors don't exist in a vacuum.
Both the dot-com disaster and the 2008 financial crisis were primarily caused by individual markets plunging in value as their respective bubbles burst—and both significantly damaged the worldwide economy as a result.
For Gelsinger's part, he doesn't appear to think AI companies are due to receive an eventual market correction for a while to come. He went on to extoll the potential benefits of Snowcap, a company of which he is a board member, which is planning to develop AI chips for "extreme performance and energy efficiency", which Gelsinger seems to think might help AI be a more profitable enterprise in the years to come.
"To me there's a set of technologies on the horizon, some of which we're driving, like our Snowcap, where we're promising to be 100X better in power performance", says Gelsiner. "Meaning a gigawatt datacenter, I can do it in 10 megawatts and deliver the same AI performance. Not just Snowcap, but a whole range of disruptive technologies, and I think they start materialising in the latter part of the decade."
"I do think, in that sense, nothing is changing this path for several years."
Cool. In the meantime, however, the AI bubble debate rages on. Certainly, the takeaway at this point seems to be that it's a "when, not if" situation, and what it looks like when it eventually arrives, no one really knows. However, looking at previous bubbles, I can't help but feel we're going to be in for some tough economic times ahead when this one eventually pops.
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