OpenAI Chairman Says a Dot-Com-Like Bust Wouldn’t Be All Bad

In many ways, Stanford University is a monument to trillion-dollar success stories, with buildings named after Microsoft Corp.’s Bill Gates and Nvidia Corp.’s Jensen Huang. But as Bret Taylor leans back in his chair at an outdoor cafe just off the main quad, the chairman of OpenAI and co-founder of artificial intelligence startup Sierra Technologies Inc. is fixating on how those stories can suddenly go horribly wrong.

Bret Taylor at Sierra Technologies’ office in San Francisco.

Photographer: Christie Hemm Klok for Bloomberg Businessweek

Studying computer science on this fabled California campus as a sophomore in 1999, Taylor lived through the euphoria of Web 1.0, when expensive Sun Microsystems workstations lined student labs ...