Jeff Bezos has never been shy of a bubble. At a tech gathering in Turin, the Amazon founder argued that today’s frenzy over artificial intelligence is more blessing than curse.
Unlike the banking excesses that culminated in the 2008 crash, he said, industrial bubbles leave something useful behind.
Fibre-optic networks from the dotcom era and breakthrough medicines from the biotech boom are his chosen examples.
Bezos recalled Amazon’s own bruising collapse in 2000, when its shares tumbled from $113 to $6 even as the core business kept expanding.
For him, that period showed how investor enthusiasm funds “every experiment” and how difficult it is to separate strong ideas from weak ones. The same, he suggested, is happening with AI. “This is real. The benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic,” he said.
In a rare public interview with John Elkann, chair of Stellantis and Ferrari, covered by the Financial Times, Bezos also painted a future in which millions live in space, supported by robots and solar-powered data centres.
“There has never been a better time to be excited about the future,” he declared.