Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is becoming a CEO for the first time since stepping down from his post at Amazon in 2021. He is co-CEO of Prometheus, a physical AI startup.
Eva Marie Uzcátegui/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The way Jeff Bezos sees it, AI and the data centers that support the novel technology are like knives."You don't want to accidentally outlaw the knife because it can be used in a bad way," the Amazon cofounder said on CNBC on Thursday."Knives are important tools and yes, every once in a while they get misused by someone, but you don't say the solution to that isn't to say, 'OK, no more data centers, right? No more knives.' That's not a smart approach to regulation."Bezos said that government regulation has a lot of "reasonable" purposes, pointing to federal regulatory agencies like the FAA and the FDA ensuring public safety when people board planes or take prescription drugs."There's lots to be said for healthy government regulation to improve safety and products and so on," he said. "And I don't see why that won't be applied at some point to the kinds of new tools that are being built by AI."The balance, Bezos said, is not going too far."You want to regulate the application level," he added.














