Cade Metz

But there may be a disconnect between the money that's being spent now and what is possible just a few years down the road.

What if there's no moon landing?

Or what if only one company lands on the moon?

Or what if only two land there and the rest are left hanging?

This is a situation where even if somebody wins, a lot of people are going to lose.

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said as much during a dinner I attended here in San Francisco this summer.

He said, rhetorically, are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI?

In my opinion, he said, yes.

He acknowledged that a lot of this spending

was at least in some ways irrational.

And he said that there would be losers in this scenario.

After this dinner, which made headlines across the country and across the world, a lot of people started using the word bubble.

And when I talk to people here in Silicon Valley and financial analysts and tech historians about this moment we're living through, what they often point back to is the dot-com bubble of the late 90s and 2000s, when early internet technologies showed enormous promise and the Valley started to invest enormous amounts of money in it.

Well, for people who live through the bubble, what they often think of is an enormous number of startups that were created and that went public and had huge valuations, even though they had little or no business model, certainly no revenues.

And then when the market crashed, when people decided that the spending was getting ahead of what was possible, a lot of those companies went out of business.

Companies like Cosmo that delivered goods straight to your door.

Pets.com, which sent you pet food.

There are famous examples of this, and that's often what people think of.

But underneath that,

And this is where the analogy really holds up to today.