Amazon founder says AI is a 'bubble', but it could be beneficial

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos believes that artificial intelligence is an "industrial bubble," but still thinks that new technologies can have real benefits for humanity, CNBC reports.

The term "bubble" is usually used during periods of inflated stock prices or company valuations. For example, startup OpenAI was recently valued at $500 billion, surpassing even Elon Musk's SpaceX, which was previously the most valuable startup in the world.

On Friday, during Italian Tech Week in Turin, Exor CEO John Elekann asked Bezos if there were signs that the AI industry was in a bubble. In response, the Amazon CEO said it was "a kind of industrial bubble."

In his comments, Bezos outlined some key characteristics of bubbles. Among other things, he said that when they occur, stock prices "are disconnected from the fundamentals" of the business. Another factor, he said, is that people get very excited about certain things, as is happening now with intelligence.

"The good ideas and the bad ideas. And investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas. And that’s also probably happening today. But that doesn’t mean anything that is happening isn’t real. AI is real, and it is going to change every industry," Bezos said.

The Amazon CEO also gave the example of a six-person company that received billions of dollars in funding. According to Bezos, this is "very unusual behavior." He did not specify which company. However, he believes that even such industry bubbles can be positive. He gave another example - the biotech and pharmaceutical bubble of the 1990s, which led to the development of drugs that now save thousands of lives, even though many of the companies at the time went bankrupt.

"The [bubbles] that are industrial are not nearly as bad, it can even be good, because when the dust settles and you see who are the winners, societies benefits from those inventions," Bezos said. "That is what is going to happen here too. This is real, the benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic."

Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has previously stated that the AI industry is in a bubble. He even compared AI to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. In addition, Baidu CEO stated that 99% of AI startups will disappear in the future.