We are living in a time defined by the emergence of advanced AI systems. While the technology has a storied history, something changed in November 2022. The release of ChatGPT kicked off a technological race of historic proportions, ushering in an era of larger models, "agentic" AI, and always-on intelligence.
But AI is not just technology. It is politics and economics. And right now, the stock market is telling a very interesting story. Today, Nvidia boasts a market value of $4.4 trillion USD. To put that in context: this single company is now worth approximately the entire GDP of Germany, and it surpasses the economies of Japan and the UK by a nice margin. Meanwhile, giants like Microsoft and Alphabet are each worth around $3.5 trillion USD, and private players like OpenAI are announcing massive – trillion scale – deals that are starting to feel like everyday occurrences.
In this episode, we dive into the numbers behind the hype. We are doing a 101 on AI economics to focus on the one word increasingly used to describe these massive valuations: Bubble.
To guide us through the ins and outs of bubble economics and AI, we are joined by Stuart Mills, economist at Leeds University.