OpenAI’s ‘Trust Us’ TIME cover raises an old warning for AI bulls

OpenAI’s founders are on the cover of TIME magazine’s Sept. 7 issue, arms crossed beneath the headline “Trust Us.” For AI bulls, it is a milestone. For contrarians, it is also the kind of mainstream cultural moment that has marked the late stages of past market manias.

The idea is known as the magazine-cover indicator. Popularized by forecaster Paul Macrae Montgomery, it holds that when a general-interest magazine puts an investment theme on its cover, the story may already be overowned, overdiscussed and overbought.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has become the public face of the AI boom that has shaped tech, venture capital and risk-taking across markets since late 2022.

AI has been central to stellar rallies across emerging technologies over the past three years. Bitcoin $BTC$78,718.34 bottomed out with tech stocks in late 2022 with the debut of ChatGPT and both have been on a tear since then. While $BTC has pulled back to $80,000 from $1236,000 in October, it remains substantially above lows under $20,000 seen in 2022.

"Trust us bro' doesn't work anymore. Time for someone checking what the AI is actually doing to humanity," one X handle said, referring to the Sept. 7 cover.

Several handles voiced a similar opinion. Adam Ghaida, founding engineer of AI-powered personal assistant Orchid, said that "Trust Us is probably the most ominous title they could've picked."

These concerns are not without reason. Non-business magazines and newspaper covers have a history of serving as contrarian indicators, marking tops in industry trends or their market valuations, as noted by late Paul Macrae Montgomery, a renowned stock and bond market forecaster who created the Magazine Cover Indicator.

The Magazine Cover Indicator

Montgomery noted decades ago that by the time a general-interest magazine puts an investment theme on its cover, most of the excitement is already baked in. In other words, the idea has become overbought in both financial and societal terms.

He set three conditions for the signal to count. The cover must appear in a mainstream magazine rather than a trade or business title, it must feature a widely understood idea, and the theme must already have seen a significant price run-up. Time's cover on the OpenAI founders checks all three. AI isn't just widely discussed worldwide, it has also pulled in billions of dollars in investor money, VC funding, and capex spending.