Jeff Bezos dismisses AI bubble concerns, sees long-term benefits

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos shrugged off concerns of a looming artificial intelligence bubble on Wednesday, telling CNBC that the massive investments will ultimately help push the technology forward in the long run.

"Even if it does turn out to be a bubble, you shouldn't worry about it because the bubble is driving investment and a lot of the investment is going to turn out to be very healthy," Bezos told CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin in an interview on "Squawk Box."

Record valuations and deals driven by hefty investments in AI have fueled the AI boom, leading some to wonder if it's the makings of a bubble that will eventually burst. Meanwhile, hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google continue to invest billions on AI infrastructure, with spending expected to cross $700 billion this year.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also warned investors may be "overexcited about AI." The ChatGPT maker, whose chatbot kickstarted the generative AI boom, has seen its valuation balloon to more than $850 billion and it's earmarked billions for data center development.

Bezos acknowledged that the excitement around AI has meant that "every experiment is getting funded," including potentially bad ideas.

"It's because investors at this moment haven't learned yet how to discriminate between good ideas and bad ideas, and that's OK, because the good ideas will pay for all of the losers," Bezos said. "So from a point of view of civilization, of society, these kinds of industrial cycles can actually be very healthy because they drive the technology forward."

Bezos, who stepped down as CEO of Amazon in 2021 and remains its executive chairman, likened the fervor around AI to the biotech bubble in the 1990s, when excitement around the technology led to a market frenzy, followed by a crash.

"A lot of investors lost money on certain things, but we still got to keep all the life-saving drugs that they had invented," Bezos said.

Bezos said much of his time across Amazon, his rocket company Blue Origin and his new startup, called Project Prometheus, has been centered on AI.

Project Prometheus, which launched in November with $6.2 billion in funding, is led by Bezos and Vik Bajaj, a former Google X executive. The company is focused on building AI models for physical tasks, including engineering, manufacturing and drug design.

Bezos declined to share more specifics on the startup's objectives, though he said Project Prometheus is building an "artificial general engineer," that would make it easier for engineers to design physical objects. He described the system as a "very, very modern version" of CAD, or computer-aided design software.

Bezos said he opted to establish Project Prometheus as a standalone company, rather than folding it into Amazon or Blue Origin, because it "deserves its own special focus."

"It's its own big idea, and Prometheus, you can get a lot of focus by having a separate company," he said.