by ELLIOT GOODELL UGALDE
When OpenAI’s Sam Altman told reporters in San Francisco earlier this year that the AI sector is in a bubble, the American tech market reacted almost instantly.
Combined with the fact that 95 per cent of AI pilot projects fail, traders treated his remark as a broader warning. Although Altman was referring specifically to private startups rather than publicly traded giants, some appear to have interpreted it as an industry-wide assessment.
Tech billionaire Peter Thiel sold his Nvidia holdings, for instance, while American investor Michael Burry (of The Big Short fame) has made million-dollar bets that companies like Palantir and Nvidia will drop in value.
What Altman’s comment really exposes is not only the fragility of specific firms but the deeper tendency Prussian philosopher Karl Marx predicted: the problem of surplus capital that can no longer find profitable outlets in production.
Marx’s theory of crisis
The future of AI is not in question. Like the internet after the dot-com crash, the technology will endure. What is in question is where capital will flow once AI equities stop delivering the speculative returns they have promised over the past few years.
That question takes us directly back to Marx’s analysis of crises driven by over-accumulation. Marx argued that an economy becomes unstable when the mass of accumulated capital can no longer be profitably reinvested.
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