Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has reportedly called artificial intelligence an “industrial bubble,” on Monday. The term “bubble” refers to a period of inflated stock prices or valuations of companies that have disconnected from the fundamentals of a business. One of the most famous bubbles that burst was the 2000 dotcom crash where the value of internet companies went down rapidly.
Bezos brought it up when asked about it by Exor CEO John Elkann at Italian tech week in Turin. He laid out some of the key characteristics of bubbles, noting that when they happen, stock prices are “disconnected from the fundamentals” of a business. “The second thing that happens is that people get very excited like they are today about artificial intelligence,” Bezos added, and told the audience that during bubbles, every idea or experiment gets funded.
READ: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos launches crypto billionaire into space (
“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,” Bezos said. “But that doesn’t mean anything that is happening isn’t real. AI is real, and it is going to change every industry,” he added.
Bezos also gave the example of a six-person company receiving funding, something that would be very unusual in normal circumstances. He said that ultimately, industrial bubbles can be positive. He pointed to the biotech and pharmaceutical company bubble in the 1990s, which led to the development of some lifesaving drugs even though many companies eventually went bust.
“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 benefit 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.”
READ: Jeff Bezos net worth 2025: How much is the Amazon founder worth? (
Bezos added that while investors often have a hard time in the middle of excitement “distinguishing good ideas from bad ones,” AI is real, and is going to “change every industry.”
“We don’t know how long it will take exactly but that is very real,” he added.
Earlier at the event, Goldman Sachs chief David Solomon had warned that a lot of capital being invested in artificial intelligence will “turn out not to deliver returns,” although he said he was still unclear whether the tech market was in a bubble. “When the current cycle ends, there will be a lot of capital that was deployed that didn’t deliver returns. It’s not different this time. We just don’t know how that will play out,” he said.
Solomon also told the audience in Turin that AI’s ability to boost productivity was “very exciting,” predicting that the “business of work will be transformed by AI globally.” However, he also admitted he was “not smart enough to know” if investors’ excitement over AI had turned into a bubble.
