Jeff Bezos Says AI Bubble May Burst but ‘AI Is Real’

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos reportedly said Friday (Oct. 3) that the artificial intelligence boom is an “industrial bubble” rather than a “financial bubble,” meaning that even if the sector’s share prices collapse, the technology’s benefits will remain.

Speaking at Italian Tech Week, Bezos pointed to the fiber-optic cable that outlived the dot-com crash and the life-saving drugs that remained after the 1990s biotech bust, the Financial Times reported Friday.

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

Earlier during the same conference, Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO David Solomon said that a lot of the capital being invested in AI will not deliver returns, but that it’s not clear if the tech market is in a bubble. Solomon added that AI will transform work.

“We are at the beginning of the movie not the end of the movie,” Solomon said, per the report. “I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next 12-24 months we see a drawdown in equity markets but that shouldn’t be surprising given the run we’ve had.”

It was reported Aug. 20 that tech stocks were driven down by fears the AI industry is overhyped after a report from MIT found that most organizations were getting “zero return” on their investments into the generative AI space.

“The story is spooking people,” a trader close to a multibillion-dollar U.S. tech fund said at the time.

Days earlier, on Aug. 15, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the AI market was in a bubble but that the technology is important.

“If you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was a real thing,” Altman said. “Tech was really important. The internet was a really big deal. People got overexcited. Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes.”

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