Uber Early Investor Gurley: AI Bubble Reset Imminent, Wounded SaaS the Opportunity

According to 1M AI News's monitoring, Benchmark General Partner and early Uber investor Bill Gurley said on Monday that the AI wave is real, but a large number of people quickly getting rich has attracted more who want to get rich, "that's the cause of the bubble," and he expects a "reset" cycle is imminent.

Gurley cited economist Carlota Perez's theory in "Technology Revolutions and Financial Capital" to point out that "bubbles only occur when the wave is real." He advised investors to set target prices now for depressed SaaS stocks and "buy heavily" when the reset comes. The AI impact has already dealt a heavy blow to the software sector: Salesforce and ServiceNow have each fallen by about 25% this year, and an ETF tracking the software sector (code IGV) has fallen by about 20% year-to-date.

Referring to the massive capital consumption of AI companies, Gurley used his experience with Uber's $2 billion annual burn rate as a reference, saying that it already made him "highly anxious," and the burn rate of today's top model companies far exceeds that of the past. "God bless them," Gurley said when mentioning Anthropic and OpenAI, "this way of operating is too scary." Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft are expected to spend a total of about $700 billion on AI this year.