- The AI craze in stocks will look like a miniature version of the 2000s dot-com bubble, UBS's Art Cashin said.
- Wall Street investors is all in on the AI hype, with players in the space seeing their stock soar.
The artificial intelligence euphoria that's gripping the stock market will come to resemble a miniature version of the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, according to UBS's Art Cashin.
In an interview with CNBC on Thursday, market veteran pointed to the surge in AI-related stocks over the past several months, with Nvidia, Microsoft, and other tech stocks jumping as firms integrate AI into their product lines. Nvidia shot up 27% on Thursday after posting stellar earnings in the last quarter and giving hugely upbeat guidance , largely due to enthusiasm for the company's artificial intelligence chipsets.
"I think AI is going to be a new mini-version of the dot-com," Cashin said. "Everything you hear, it's going to have an AI inflection, everything from new drugs and medicine, to predictive natures of all types. This is going to be interesting."
Wall Street's interest in artificial intelligence has boomed with the popularity of ChatGPT, the buzzy AI bot that can spit out sophisticated responses to questions about seemingly anything.
The massive hype has led some commentators to warn AI may be a bubble, and that some AI firms are overvalued in a way that's similar to the speculative bubble in internet stocks in the early 2000s.
But investors appear to have shrugged off that possibility, with few signs that the artificial intelligence hype slowing down. Tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Nvidia, and Amazon have surged as they rush to compete in the AI arms race and roll out their own ChatGPT competitors. The five companies collectively have growth their market cap to $9 trillion, or roughly 25% of the total value of the S&P 500.