Bill Gates says we're in an AI bubble similar to the dot-com bubble (www.businessinsider.com)

Bill Gates told CNBC’s Squawk Box that we’re in an AI bubble—more like the dot‑com boom than 17th‑century tulip mania. He stressed that unlike pure speculation, today’s frenzy sits atop genuine technical progress: “AI has been the biggest technical thing ever in my lifetime,” he said, and its net value could mirror the internet’s long‑term impact. Still, Gates warned many startups are overvalued, will burn capital, and ultimately won’t survive—echoing the dot‑com pattern where a few winners reshaped the world while many “me‑too” firms failed. For the AI/ML community this is both a caution and a validation. The technical foundation—models, data infrastructure, and compute—drives real value, but market excess can lead to poor capital allocation and costly operational mistakes (Gates pointed to commitments to expensive data centers and electricity as concrete risks). The comment aligns with other industry concerns (including OpenAI’s Sam Altman) about investor overexuberance, yet counters critics who say valuations fairly price AI’s transformative potential. Practitioners and investors should therefore focus on durable technical differentiation, efficient compute and data strategies, and business models that survive a market correction.