Bezos Preaches About Playing With Matches… As Amazon Dumps $86B of Gasoline on the AI Bonfire

Bezos: spends $86 billion on AI projects this year alone

Also Bezos: “Honestly, too much money is being wasted on AI right now.”

Amazon’s bald (and newly bearded leader), Jeff Bezos, is now the latest billionaire to say the AI craze looks a heck of a lot like a bubble. But don’t short your GPUs just yet… he also swears the tech is “real” and will eventually strongarm its way into every industry.

Speaking at Italian Tech Week (because of course he was on an Italian stage looking like he just ordered the Amalfi Coast on Uber Eats), Bezos said bubbles always make dumb stuff look like genius ideas. “Every experiment gets funded, every company gets funded,” he told the crowd. To put it another way: that one AI startup that was trending on reddit for writing sexts in Old English is getting the same checks as startups actually building enterprise software. But go ahead and keep telling me that AI hasn’t reached an insane phase.

(Source: CNBC)

He even roasted the madness with an example: investors handing billions to a six-person startup without a single product but a $20B valuation. (We’re officially at the “forget revenue, forget debt… but dude, what if it scales?” stage of venture capitalism.) Yeah a lot of people are going to be cooked very soon.

But then Jeff put it in reverse like Terry (probably after his PR handler gave him the universal “cut it” hand signal). Turns out, bubbles aren’t all bad. They make everyone overbuild like crazy, and when the smoke clears, the few survivors are usually monsters. He pointed back to the biotech bubble of the ’90s… most of those labs went belly-up, but the ones that lived ended up curing diseases. Bezos’ bet? AI plays out the same way. Most startups will burn through VC cash like it’s kindling, but the winners will be massive… driving productivity, quality, and who knows, maybe even inventing an AI that answers customer service calls in less than 45 minutes (we can only hope).

Meanwhile, Amazon isn’t exactly practicing restraint themselves. They’ve shoveled $86B this year into AI chips, GPU farms, and data centers for AWS. Although, if anyone were to spend responsibly in this AI craze I think we can have some faith that Amazon would be a grown up in the room.

Bezos also isn’t the only one throwing ice water on AI’s sky-high valuations. Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon (yes, the same guy who thinks he’s Avicii) told the same conference that the hype cycle always runs faster than reality.

(Source: Fox Business)

So Bezos joins the growing list of billionaires saying the quiet part out loud… before immediately backpedaling into contradictions. The takeaway? Yes, it’s a bubble. Yes, dumb money is flying into dumb ideas. But also yes… AI will still end up being the biggest thing since Bezos himself figured out shipping books from a garage could bankroll rockets and megayachts.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Amazon and Uber as mentioned in the article.