The AI bubble debate: 13 business leaders from Sam Altman to Bill Gates to Mark Cuban weigh in (www.businessinsider.com)

Sam Altman’s comment that “we are in a bubble” crystallized a fractious debate among 13 business leaders about whether today’s AI boom is irrational exuberance or a lasting industrial transition. Voices like Gates, Bret Taylor, Jeff Bezos, Pat Gelsinger, Joe Tsai, Ray Dalio and Tom Siebel warn that frothy valuations, speculative data‑center builds and some overhyped startups will lose money — Siebel even calls the market “huge” and overvalued — while Altman and Gates still stress AI’s transformative importance. Opposing that view, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and AMD’s Lisa Su reject the bubble framing, arguing the market reflects a genuine shift from general‑purpose to accelerated computing; Mark Cuban and Eric Schmidt likewise say today’s public offerings and hardware uptake look fundamentally different from the dot‑com era. For the AI/ML community the disagreement matters because it shapes capital, infrastructure and product strategy. If a bubble bursts, expect reallocation away from speculative startups and overbuilt data centers; if AI capability continues to grow year‑over‑year, demand for GPUs, custom accelerators and cloud services will absorb much of the hardware buildout. Key technical implications: sustained model capability growth fuels demand for accelerated computing (NVIDIA’s runaway market cap is a symptom), enterprise adoption is still early (per Gelsinger), and the real risk may be “skins on models” and infrastructure built on spec rather than genuine product differentiation.