OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor is not naive to the potentially mammoth consequences of a tech bubble, but he said the prospect isn’t without its benefits. The former Facebook CTO and current CEO of AI business platform Sierra shares the opinion of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that we’re in an AI bubble—but that’s not entirely a bad thing.
Altman echoed Taylor’s sentiments last month, warning of big winners and big losers from an AI hype cycle.
According to Taylor, it’s worth paying attention to the big winners of the dotcom era when drawing conclusions about the impact of a bubble burst and what it would mean for the tech industry.
“There’s a lot of parallels to the internet bubble,” he said.
“You start to look and you say, ‘Actually, if you look at the GDP of the world, how much has actually been created or influenced by the existence of the internet?’ One could argue that all the people in 1999 were kind of right,” he said. “It was as impactful on pretty much every measure.”
“Because of the amount of economic opportunity, you just end up with a ton of investors, and some companies will fail and some will succeed,” Taylor said. “If you look at the people who built out fiber in the early days of the internet, a lot of them went bankrupt, but that fiber ended up getting used, just by the next person or the private equity firm or whatever entity bought it.”
Taylor did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
