Peter Thiel: “AI in 2024 is like the Internet in 1999”

On the technology side, I would say that I think the AI breakthroughs are important. They're going to have an enormous impact on our society in very different ways. But as investments, they're very, very treacherous. At this point, the rough analogy is that AI in 2024 is like the Internet in 1999. It's clearly going to be important, big, transformative, have all kinds of interesting social, political effects, maybe even effects about how humans think about themselves. But on a business level, it's very, very treacherous. There are a lot of different Internet businesses that failed, and even the ones that succeeded. It was quite a roller coaster. Amazon was the leading e commerce site in 1999, it was $113 a share. By October of 2001, it was $5. You had to wait till the end of 2009 to get back to the 99 level and then it went up 25x from there. So if you'd held it from December 99 to today, you would have made 25 times your money, but you would have first lost 95% and then if you bought it in October 2001, you would have made 500 times your money or so. So in some sense, Amazon was the obvious Internet company to invest in. And even that was quite a roller coaster. And my suspicion is that that's roughly where we are in AI. It's correct as a technology, but then extremely bubbly and crazed as a company building thing or as a sector to invest.