🗣Jeff Bezos was asked about the AI bubble and answered with a story about...

🗣Jeff Bezos was asked about the AI bubble and answered with a story about people who lost everything. Bezos: “This is real. The benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic.” Society, rather than shareholders. The example he reaches for makes the difference exact. Elkann: “If we go back 25 years ago, when the internet was in that bubblish moment, no one would have predicted a lot of the industrial benefits. And the fiber, huge investments were put in infrastructure.” Bezos agrees, then adds the part nobody remembers. Bezos: “Yes, it’s a perfect example. That all of that fiber optic cable that got laid, and by the way, the companies who laid all that cable went out of business.” Two things happened at the same time. The cable went into the ground and stayed there. The equity went to zero and stayed there. No rational investor would have funded that much fiber. The demand did not exist yet, and the returns came nowhere close to justifying the spend. Mania funded it instead. Overbuilding is the one thing a bubble is reliably good at. Every mile of it is still in the ground. Netflix streams on it. The entire cloud economy runs on capacity bought at a loss by people who were wiped out before the payoff arrived. That is what a bubble actually does. It moves money from investors to the public and calls it a market correction. The datacenters going up now are the same shape. Concrete, power, and silicon that will outlast whoever is currently paying for them. The companies that won the internet built on top of what everyone else paid for. Amazon was one of them. @aipost 🏴