At OpenAI's DevDay this week, OpenAI boss Sam Altman did what American tech bosses rarely do these days: he actually answered questions from reporters.
I know it's tempting to write the bubble story, Mr Altman told me as he sat flanked by his top lieutenants. In fact, there are many parts of AI that I think are kind of bubbly right now.
In Silicon Valley, the debate over whether AI companies are overvalued has taken on a new urgency. Sceptics are privately - and some now publicly - asking whether the rapid rise in the value of AI tech companies may be, at least in part, the result of what they call financial engineering. In other words - there are fears these companies are overvalued.
Mr Altman said he expected investors would make some bad calls and silly start-ups would walk away with crazy money. But with OpenAI, he told me, there's something real happening here.
However, not everyone is convinced. In recent days, warnings of an AI bubble have come from the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund, as well as JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon who told the BBC the level of uncertainty should be higher in most people's minds. And here, in what is often considered the tech capital of the world, concerns are growing.
At a panel discussion at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum this week, early AI entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan told a packed audience he has lived through four bubbles. He's especially concerned now given the magnitude of money on the table as compared to the dot-com boom. There's so much more to lose.
When [the bubble] breaks, it's going to be really bad, and not just for people in AI, he said. It's going to drag down the rest of the economy.
However, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which has minted its fair share of tech entrepreneurs, Prof Anat Admati says while there have been many attempts to model when we're in the bubble, it can be a futile exercise.
It is very hard to time a bubble, Prof Admati told me. And you can't say with certainty you were in one until after the bubble has burst.
AI-related enterprises have accounted for 80% of the stunning gains in the American stock market this year - and Gartner estimates global spending on AI will likely reach a whopping $1.5 trillion (£1.1 trillion) before 2025 is out.
OpenAI, which brought AI into the consumer mainstream with ChatGPT in 2022, is at the centre of the tangled web of deals drawing scrutiny. For example - last month, it entered into a $100 billion deal with chipmaker Nvidia, which is itself the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.
And as these increasingly complex financing arrangements get more and more common, the experts here in Silicon Valley say they may be clouding perceptions on AI demand. Some people aren't mincing their words about it either, calling the deals circular financing or even vendor financing - where a company invests in or lends to its own customers so they can continue making purchases.
Mr Kaplan says he sees a couple of telltale signs the AI sector - and therefore the wider economy - could be in trouble. In frothy times, he says, companies announce major initiatives and product plans that they don't yet have the capital for. Meanwhile, retail investors clamour to get in on the start-up action. The surge in AMD stock this week could indicate investors are trying to get a piece of the ChatGPT wealth machine.
Despite the risks, there's hope that the investments made now won't go to waste. The thing that comforts me is that the internet was built on the ashes of the over-investment into the telecom infrastructure of yesterday, said Jeff Boudier, who builds products at the AI community hub Hugging Face. If there is overinvestment into infrastructure for AI workloads, there may be financial risks tied to it. But it's going to enable lots of great new products and experiences including ones we're not thinking about today.
