Opinion | Is the A.I. Boom Just Vibes?


Yeah, OpenAI, for example, is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but it’s pretty hard to buy a share in it. It’s not publicly traded. That’s just the valuation you get when they get new investors from venture and elsewhere. One sense that’s enormous — I mean, Goldman Sachs has been built up over a century, and OpenAI, which was built up over the last decade, is more valuable than Goldman Sachs. On the other hand, 10 percent of the world is using OpenAI, is using ChatGPT. And that’s just amazing. Five years ago, basically zero percent of the world was using it, and now 10 percent of the world is using it. Now, a much smaller percentage of the world is actually paying for ChatGPT. And that’s the big question. Is, one, is 6, 7 and 8 going to be a continued things like iPhones have become where there’s small design changes and the camera gets better. Or are going to be, profound changes in the way that 3 and 4 were. We don’t know the answer to that. And then second, it’s not just that you need the innovation, it’s that you also need to be able to profit from the innovation. And if large language models become like a commodity where there’s three of them that are absolutely amazing, but they’re basically all the same, it’s very hard to price a commodity at something higher than the marginal cost of delivering that service. How much of this — I know this is the impossible question for the economist — but how much of this is just vibes? Psychology definitely is a big driver in markets. There’s something enormous going on here. This is not Pets.com. Pets.com was part of the dot-com bubble. It had barely any revenue, barely any business plan, and yet had a pretty high valuation. These are companies that already have quite high revenue, enormous numbers of customers, enormous upside. And then how do you quantify all of this? Well, you add the genuinely large thing with some vibes. And maybe that’s where we are today.



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