Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, offered a thought-provoking perspective on artificial intelligence during his recent appearance at Italian Tech Week in Turin. According to him, AI is currently experiencing what he called an “industrial bubble.” By this, he meant that the present enthusiasm has created a marketplace where valuations soar independently of actual business fundamentals, where investors eagerly pour money into virtually every idea without careful discrimination, and where it becomes extraordinarily difficult to distinguish sustainable ventures from those destined to collapse. Despite this precarious environment, Bezos emphasized that such a bubble should not be dismissed merely as negative speculation; rather, it represents the type of overheated cycle that, over time, can bring about innovation and long-term benefits for society at large.
Bezos illustrated his claim by recalling Amazon’s own trajectory during the late 1990s and early 2000s. At the height of the dot-com boom, the company’s stock once traded at $113 per share, only to sink dramatically to $6 during the ensuing crash. Yet, as Bezos highlighted, despite market panic, Amazon’s underlying metrics—ranging from customer growth to revenue streams—were consistently improving. Employees faced anxiety, to the point that even their parents worried about the apparent implosion, but Bezos underscored this divergence between fear-inducing market signals and stronger-than-ever fundamentals as the very definition of a financial bubble: a disconnection between perception in the stock market and the tangible reality of a business’s performance.
He further explained that today’s AI sector demonstrates similar patterns of exuberance. For instance, entirely new and relatively small companies—with only a handful of staff and limited operational history—are attracting disproportionately large amounts of capital. To Bezos, this is a strikingly unusual dynamic, a hallmark of markets that have become overheated with speculative money in search of the next revolutionary breakthrough. Yet within this turbulence, he insisted, lies the promise of extraordinary transformation. While many ventures will ultimately collapse once the fever subsides, the genuine breakthroughs that endure will have profound and lasting consequences.
In his remarks, Bezos drew an analogy between the present surge of investment in AI and the biotech boom of the 1990s. That earlier frenzy also led to numerous failures, but it simultaneously gave rise to remarkable innovations, including drugs that have since saved countless lives. From his perspective, “industrial bubbles” differ from purely destructive financial bubbles. When they form around a fundamentally real and transformative technology, they can actually accelerate progress by directing capital, attention, and talent into areas that may otherwise have languished without such speculative enthusiasm. In this sense, bubbles can act as incubators, creating overcapacity that later enables extraordinary achievements once the excess has washed away.
Bezos expressed the conviction that artificial intelligence belongs firmly in this category of world-altering innovations. He reaffirmed that regardless of the current market distortions, AI is real and certain to influence every industry on the planet. The sweeping benefits it promises are, in his words, “gigantic” and will touch society in ways that can scarcely be overstated. From business operations to scientific research and from everyday tools to global infrastructure, AI will be woven into nearly every dimension of human activity.
At the same time, Bezos is not alone in sounding caution about the overheated nature of today’s AI market. Industry leaders and financiers such as Sam Altman of OpenAI, Joe Tsai of Alibaba, Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates, and Thomas Siebel of C3.ai have all acknowledged signs of concerning market inflation. Even David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, used the same conference in Turin to predict that investors currently carried away by AI enthusiasm should eventually expect a “reset” once valuations realign with reality. Yet for Bezos, parallels to past episodes like the dot-com crash are not reasons for despair but reminders that genuine innovation often persists regardless of the booms and busts that surround it.
Ultimately, Bezos urged entrepreneurs and investors alike to remain grounded in enduring principles rather than be swept away by short-term euphoria. Caution should remain, but so should optimism. As he succinctly put it, “reality is completely undefeated”—a striking reminder that while speculative cycles rise and fall, the underlying truth of a transformative technology like AI will endure long after the market turbulence has faded.
Sourse: https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-ai-is-a-bubble-benefits-will-be-gigantic-2025-10
