Last Thursday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters at a private dinner that investors are overexcited about AI models. "Someone" will lose a "phenomenal amount of money," he said, according to The Verge. The statement came as his company negotiates a secondary share sale at a $500 billion valuation—up from $300 billion just months earlier.

Sam Altman says the AI boom feels like a bubble — here’s what that means, what’s driving the hype, and why some startups may not survive.

Many fears of an AI bubble had hit a fever pitch at the start of this year when Chinese start-up DeepSeek released a competitive reasoning model.