'There's an AI bubble' - but what happens when it bursts?
The Story
The Times
4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 21 August 2025
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nvidia's the first company to be worth more than $4trilllion, developers are being offered salaries in the billions, and companies that don’t even have a product are securing investments beyond their wildest dreams. Yet there were reports this week that Meta could downsize its AI division. Our resident silicon valley watcher says there's an AI bubble, and looks back to the dot com boom and bust, for answers on what happens when it bursts.
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Guest: Danny Fortson, US West Coast correspondent, The Sunday Times.
Host: Luke Jones.
Producer: Olivia Case.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From The Times and Sunday Times, this is the story. |
| 0:06.0 | I'm Luke Jones. |
| 0:11.8 | The money keeps rolling in. |
| 0:14.1 | Meta just spent $14.3 billion to hire just one person. |
| 0:18.1 | And he's just 28 years old. |
| 0:19.5 | And $2 billion is pocket change for them. |
| 0:21.7 | No one wants to be the first to pull back because cutting comp doesn't just risk losing talent. |
| 0:26.8 | It risk signaling that you're losing momentum. A new milestone in the world of artificial |
| 0:31.8 | intelligence. Invita just became the first company to hit $4 trillion in market cap. |
| 0:37.0 | She created a company, got a $12 billion valuation, |
| 0:41.3 | and they don't even have a product yet. |
| 0:42.9 | It's almost like investors are saying |
| 0:44.1 | 100 million isn't enough to it to make it too. |
| 0:46.3 | Right, make it billions. |
| 0:47.3 | It doesn't matter. |
| 0:48.3 | Just spend as much as you can. AI companies are spending and raising more cash than ever, |
| 1:03.0 | with billions going on the best developers and ideas and company valuations spiraling out of control. |
| 1:10.0 | But as this justified, what's the impact on the rest of us if all of this comes crashing down? |
| 1:15.4 | And with reports that meta is downsizing its AI department, what's really going on? |
| 1:25.5 | The story today, is there an AI bubble? |
| 1:29.0 | And what happens when it bursts? |
| 1:37.2 | Let's get cracking. |
... |
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