We asked economists what they think about the AI boom. The results were sobering.
There’s no bulletproof way to identify an investment bubble before it happens, or even while it’s happening. We can only pinpoint bubbles in hindsight, after they’ve already burst — and lost a lot of investors a lot of money.
But when people look back on bubbles of the past, like the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s or the housing bubble of the mid 2000s, many recall a vague feeling that something was off.
It’s no secret that many experts have that feeling right now about the current AI boom. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the head of the world’s most prominent AI lab, has sounded the alarm. “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes,” Altman said in an August interview with The Verge.
Should you make investment decisions based on those kinds of feelings and opinions?
I don’t know. I’m just a guy who writes a Substack newsletter about stocks. I don’t have any groundbreaking insights that conclusively prove that we are or aren’t in an AI bubble.
But I did ask financial economists at more than a dozen universities across the United States about it, and their responses were striking: