RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif.—At the Code conference here, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos talked about how important intelligent agents and machine learning will be for the future of computing, along with his thoughts on where Amazon is going, the media controversies revolving around Donald Trump and Peter Thiel, and the importance of space exploration and development.
When it comes to intelligent assistants like Amazon’s Alexa assistant, which drives its Echo family, Bezos said artificial intelligence and natural language will be “gigantic.”
“It’s hard to overstate the impact it will have on society over the next 20 years,” he argued.
Bezos believes we are “on the edge of a golden era” when it comes to personal assistants, but “we’re just seeing the first guys up at bat.”
As far as assistants go, he expects entries from all of the major tech companies as well as hundreds of start-ups. Companies like Amazon have advantages because they have huge amount of data, but Bezos noted that humans learn in a different way; both are incredibly data and power efficient. He noted that people operate on about 50 watts of power, while the big AI systems such as AlphaGo require orders of magnitude more. Humans are doing something fundamentally different from the current shape of machine intelligence, he said.
Bezos talked about amazing progress in natural language and other areas such as computer vision, which he said are driven by new and better algorithms, vastly improved computing power, and huge amounts of data coming together to solve new problems. Voice interfaces won’t replace screen interfaces, he suggested, but will instead be used in other areas.
Amazon has two different SDKs: Alexa Voice Service lets you embed Alexa in your own device or app; and Alexa Skills Kit lets you teach Alexa new skills. Amazon worked on Echo for four years before it became a product, and now has 1,000 people dedicated just to Alexa and Echo ecosystem, according to Bezos.
Asked about privacy, he said companies need to be clear about what they are doing, and that means more than just putting something in terms and conditions that no one reads. He noted how Amazon greets you by name on the website, and shows you your past purchases, resulting in transparency and an explanation of the consumer benefit—the ability to recommend new products.
Amazon is not competing with UPS or the US Postal Service, Bezos said, but is interested in supplementing their services to handle the additional load at peak selling season. While Amazon recently made a big investment in delivery—now supplying about half of the “last mile” delivery in the UK and doing such deliveries in some markets in the US, Bezos said it’s meant to be a supplement to the capacity of the traditional delivery companies.
Amazon has opened a physical bookstore in Seattle and a second one in San Diego, and Amazon will probably open more. Brick-and-mortar efforts are an experiment to see how people discover books; stores have a small selection with all the titles face out, picked via data from Amazon, Bezos explained.
A large part of the conversation focused on Bezos’s new role as owner of the Washington Post, which he called the paper that is best situated to cover the capital city of the most important country in the world. For a long time, the Post was a very successful local paper, but the Internet hurt much of its market while making distribution easy, so it needs to become a national, and to some degree, global newspaper. It needs to go from making a large amount of money from a relatively few number of readers to making a relatively small amount of money from a much larger audience, Bezos said.
Asked about Peter Thiel’s funding of the lawsuit against Gawker, Bezos repeated a quote from Confucius—”Seek revenge and you shall dig two graves”—and said public figures need to have a “thick skin.” The US has the best free speech protections in the world because of the Constitution and cultural norms, and you don’t want to erode them, Bezos argued. Beautiful speech doesn’t need protection, ugly speech does.
“You don’t have to like it,” he said. But “You should let them say it.”
Regarding Donald Trump, who has criticized Bezos’s ownership of the Post, Bezos said it’s inappropriate for the GOP frontrunner to freeze or chill the media that is examining him. He noted how Katherine Graham, the publisher of the Post during the Watergate era, was threatened by the Nixon administration. “With Kay Graham as my role model, I’m willing to let any of my body parts go through a big fat ringer if need be,” he said.
As for Amazon’s business, there are three pillars: Amazon Prime, Marketplace, and Web Services.
Other areas that have the potential to develop into such pillars in the future include Alexa and its natural language processing, and Amazon Studios, which produces shows for Amazon Prime Video and the big screen.
Bezos doesn’t see Netflix as a competitor to Prime Video, because people will subscribe to both. Amazon has a different model because use of Prime Video drives people to renew their Amazon Prime service, and thus the company can sell them more items. “Because we have unusual way to monetize the premium content, we can charge less for premium content than we otherwise would have to.”
Asked why the Prime Video application wasn’t on Apple TV and why neither Chromecast nor Apple TV is available for sale on Amazon, and Prime Video isn’t available on those platforms, Bezos said he wouldn’t get into private business discussions. He did say Amazon has no problem with competitive devices, but wants the player to be on the device “with acceptable business terms.”
Bezos said he was proud of the company and its focus on great customer service, arguing the only way to do that is to have happy people. Instead of a work-life balance, he prefers a work-life harmony, because people who are happy at work are happier at home and vice versa. I was particularly interested in a program he said Amazon has started called Career Choice, where entry-level employees in its fulfilment centers can take classes—paid for by the company— in high-demand areas such as nursing, airplane mechanics, or commercial truck drivers.
On space and Blue Origin, which focuses on reusable spacecraft, Bezos discussed the desire to build the infrastructure that would dramatically lower the cost so that more entrepreneurs could do more things with space. Unlike Elon Musk of SpaceX (who will be at the conference later), Bezos said he’s not motivated by a “Plan B” idea of finding another planet in case something goes wrong on Earth. “I want a Plan B to make sure Plan A works,” he said.
Noting that energy and resources are more plentiful in space, Bezos said we will probably move most heavy industry into orbit, and rezone Earth for residential and light industry. But people should settle Mars “because it’s cool.”
