Jeff Bezos has fired back at those who are predicting that artificial intelligence (AI) will cause widespread job destruction. The Amazon founder argued that the booming technology will usher in a successful new era of civilisational wealth and human productivity. Bezos also spoke about his new $41 billion AI venture, Prometheus, dismissing the dark economic forecasts that have dominated Silicon Valley and global financial markets for some time now.“The people who are jumping to the conclusion that the jobs are all going to go away… I think these people are just wrong,” Bezos told the Financial Times, adding, “At root, all civilisational wealth is driven by invention. Six thousand years ago, somebody invented the plough, and we all got wealthier.”Instead of an employment apocalypse, Bezos believes that AI will actually create a labour shortage by spurring the creation of far more advanced new jobs than it eliminates.
AI job cuts: A divided silicon valley
Bezos’s optimism is in stark contrast to other prominent AI leaders who remain highly bearish on the future of human labour. Just this week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, whose company receives financial backing from Amazon, published a 10,000-word essay warning that AI could rapidly eliminate a large part of the global workforce and pose challenge greater than job cuts.Amodei went so far as to propose raising capital gains taxes to fund a government-backed universal basic income to protect citizens from a looming “jobs apocalypse.”
Jeff Bezos’ Prometheus building the ‘Artificial General Engineer‘
Prometheus, which was launched last November by Bezos and former Google executive Vikram Bajaj, is aiming for a much more complex breakthrough: building an “artificial general engineer”, while popular AI products available today rely on large language models (LLMs) trained on text. According to the report, the company is training its system on massive pools of real-world data to develop an understanding of physical laws and physics. The goal is to transform manufacturing and engineering by shortening physical design pipelines and eliminating the need for expensive, time-consuming physical prototyping. To feed this system data, Bezos and Bajaj are currently raising up to $100 billion for a dedicated holding company intended to acquire strategic stakes in traditional engineering and heavy manufacturing firms.
