Last week, while appearing at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Palantir Technologies (NYSE:PLTR) co-founder Peter Thiel shared his insights on artificial intelligence, Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA), and ChatGPT-parent OpenAI.
What Happened: During the festival, Thiel drew parallels between the dot-com bubble of ’99 and the current state of AI, stating that the peak of the bubble was also the peak of clarity, as people realized the internet was going to replace the old economy.
He highlighted the difficulty of making specific investments during the dot-com bubble, using Amazon.com Inc.’s stock as an example. Thiel noted that even though Amazon’s stock was considered a “no-brainer” investment, it took a decade for it to return to its ’99 highs.
He then went on to say that currently, 80-85% of the money in AI is being made by one company, Nvidia. He described this as a “very strange” situation, as the majority of the profits are being made at the hardware layer, an area “Silicon Valley doesn't even know much about anymore.”
Why It Matters: Last week it was reported that Palantir partnered with Voyager Space to strengthen Voyager's defense segment by leveraging AI to analyze and improve flight and testing data for solid fuel thrusters.
Meanwhile, Nvidia briefly became the most valuable company on the planet when it reached a market capitalization of $3.46 trillion in June. At the time of writing, the chip giant was at number three on the list of the world’s most valuable companies with a market capitalization of $3.038 trillion.
Previously, Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, predicted that Nvidia’s market cap could soar to $4 trillion. He also described Palantir as the “purest AI name in the market in terms of use cases.”