Sam Altman admits we're in an AI bubble, rejects sex chatbots

If you've felt that the sheer amount of cash pouring into artificial intelligence lately feels completely unhinged, you are not alone. Even the person running the most hyped company in the space agrees.

In a candid interview with The Verge and a select group of reporters, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that the tech world is currently navigating an AI bubble. When asked if investors are overexcited about AI, Altman gave a blunt answer: yes.

The dot-com playbook all over again

Altman did not sugarcoat the current market frenzy, directly comparing it to the late-1990s tech run-up. In his view, history shows that massive bubbles usually crop up around a genuine technological revolution. The internet was undeniably real, AI is equally transformative, but smart money inevitably goes wild over that core truth.

What Altman finds particularly irrational right now are the soaring valuations handed to seed-stage ventures. He called it outright insane that startups with little more than three people and an idea are pulling in billions in early backing. Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence and Murati's Thinking Machines are just two high-profile examples of ex-OpenAI talent raising massive sums almost overnight.

Someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money in the fallout, Altman warned, though he maintains that the broader economic payoff will still be a net positive once the dust settles.

Crushed servers and a trillion-dollar roadmap

Despite preaching caution to everyone else, OpenAI has no intention of hitting the brakes. ChatGPT now boasts 700 million weekly active users, making it the fifth most visited site globally. Altman fully expects it to leapfrog Instagram and Facebook in short order, trailing only Google and YouTube.

That meteoric rise comes with a harsh reality: OpenAI's infrastructure is completely maxed out. Altman confessed that the company actually has more capable, advanced models sitting in-house that it simply cannot deploy because server capacity cannot handle the traffic. To escape that bottleneck, Altman expects OpenAI to spend a staggering trillion dollars on custom data centers in the not very distant future.

He also touched on internal stumbles, freely admitting OpenAI totally screwed up elements of the sudden GPT-5 rollout that sidelined GPT-4o and triggered subscriber backlash. Looking ahead, Altman made it clear ChatGPT will avoid anime-style romantic companions, while teasing plans to build brain-computer interfaces to take on Elon Musk's Neuralink and expressing interest in buying the Chrome browser if regulators force Google to divest it.

Why it matters

Altman's bubble confession might sound humble, but we think it functions as a masterclass in narrative defense. By publicly calling out irrational startup valuations while simultaneously pledging trillions in compute spend, Altman is effectively pulling the ladder up behind him.

For everyday builders and seed-stage founders, this marks an inflection point. The era of raising nine-figure rounds on a slide deck and an API key is slamming shut; if a product doesn't deliver immediate, defensible utility, it won't survive the coming squeeze. Meanwhile, users are caught in the middle, left waiting on frontier capabilities that companies physically cannot afford to host.

Economically, the stakes are wild. Renaissance Macro Research notes that AI capital expenditures added more to US GDP over the past two quarters than all consumer spending combined, with big tech lining up 364 billion dollars in 2025 alone. When an entire economy becomes this leveraged to data centers and silicon, a market correction won't just hurt reckless venture capitalists; it will reshape the tech hierarchy for years to come.