Add Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos to the growing list of people calling Wall Street’s AI craze a bubble. During a conversation at Italian Tech Week, Bezos said the artificial intelligence hype cycle is pushing investors to spend billions on both good and bad ideas.
Despite that, Bezos said he believes AI is a very real product that will impact companies across industries and society more broadly.
“When people get very excited, as they are today, about artificial intelligence, for example … every experiment gets funded, every company gets funded,” Bezos said. “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 bad ideas.”
“So that’s also probably happening today. But it doesn’t mean that anything that is happening isn’t real.”
Bezos’ Amazon is one of the largest investors in artificial intelligence technologies. The company is constructing data centers to meet customer demand for AI services and builds its own chips to train and deploy AI applications.
AI companies have benefited handsomely from the AI boom. Chip leader Nvidia (NVDA), for instance, saw its stock price jump a staggering 1,350% over the past five years, sending its market valuation to $4.6 trillion.
On Thursday, OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) became the most valuable privately held company at $500 billion after current and former employees offloaded some $6.6 billion worth of shares to outside investors, according to Reuters.
Bezos added, however, that the excitement around AI has also led investors to make investments they might not otherwise jump into. During his discussion, the former Amazon CEO cited an example of a group of investors pouring billions into an AI company comprising six people without a product yet valuing the firm at some $20 billion. He didn’t disclose the name of the business.
Despite that, Bezos said AI will have a positive impact on companies worldwide.
“The biggest impact that AI is going to have is that it is going to impact every company in the world. It is going to make their quality go up and their productivity go up,” he said.
Bezos wasn’t the only one to signal bubble trouble at Italian Tech Week. Goldman Sachs (GS) CEO David Solomon also pointed to significant froth in the market.
“Whenever we’ve historically had a significant acceleration in a new technology that creates a lot of capital formation and therefore lots of interesting new companies around it, you generally see the market run ahead of the potential, because there are going to be winners and losers,” he said during a conversation at the conference.
