Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos on Wednesday dismissed concerns of a looming artificial intelligence bubble, telling CNBC that the big investment will ultimately help advance the technology in the long term.
“Even if there’s a bubble, you don’t have to worry about it, because the bubble is driving investment, and a lot of the investment is going to be very healthy,” Bezos told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in an interview on “Squawk Box.”
Record valuations and transactions driven by huge investments in AI are fueling the AI boom, leading some to wonder if this is due to a bubble that is about to burst. On the other hand, hyperscalers like Amazon microsoft and google We continue to invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure, with spending expected to exceed $700 billion this year.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also warned that investors may be getting “too excited about AI.” The ChatGPT maker’s chatbots have sparked a generative AI boom, ballooning in valuation to more than $850 billion and billions of dollars earmarked for data center development.
Bezos acknowledged that the excitement around AI is “funding all sorts of experiments,” including potentially bad ideas.
“Because investors at this point have not yet learned how to distinguish between good ideas and bad ideas,” Bezos said. “But that’s okay, because the good ideas are going to pay for all the losers.” “So from a civilizational and social point of view, this kind of industrial cycle can actually be very healthy because it moves technology forward.”
Bezos, who will step down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 and remain chairman, likened the frenzy surrounding AI to the biotech bubble of the 1990s. At the time, excitement around technology caused a market frenzy that was followed by a crash.
“A lot of investors lost money on certain things, but we should keep all the life-saving drugs they invented,” Bezos said.
Bezos said he has spent much of his time working on AI at Amazon, rocket company Blue Origin and a new startup called Project Prometheus.
Project Prometheus, which launched in November with $6.2 billion in funding, is led by Bezos and former Google X executive Vik Bajaj. The company focuses on building AI models for physical tasks such as engineering, manufacturing, and drug design.
Bezos did not provide details about the startup’s goals, but said Project Prometheus is building an “artificial general-purpose engineer” that makes it easier for engineers to design physical objects. He described the system as a “very modern version” of CAD (computer-aided design software).
Bezos said he chose to establish Project Prometheus as an independent company rather than merging it with Amazon or Blue Origin. Because Project Prometheus “deserves its own special focus.”
“That in itself is a big idea, and having a separate company allows Prometheus to focus on a lot of things,” he said.
