In 1997, Jeff Bezos mentioned why he selected books to promote on Amazon

Amazon could be a $1.5 trillion “everything store” as we speak. At first, it was simply books — and Jeff Bezos had a purpose for that hyper-specificity.

Bezos defined why he selected to solely promote books on his web site — not less than, at first — in a “lost” video interview recorded at a Particular Libraries Affiliation convention in June 1997, which resurfaced in 2019 when it was posted on-line by entrepreneur Brian Roemmele.

Out of all of the totally different merchandise you would possibly be capable to promote on-line, books provided an “incredibly unusual benefit” that set them aside, Bezos mentioned.

“There are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category, by far,” mentioned Bezos. “Music is No. 2 — there are about 200,000 active music CDs at any given time. But in the book space, there are over 3 million different books worldwide active in print at any given time across all languages, [and] more than 1.5 million in English alone.”

When Bezos launched Amazon in 1994, the web and e-commerce business have been nonetheless of their earliest phases. He knew it might take a while earlier than on-line purchasing grew to become ubiquitous, he mentioned, so he needed to start out with an idea that could not be replicated by a vendor with solely bodily places.

“When you have that many items, you can literally build a store online that couldn’t exist any other way,” he defined. “That’s important right now, because the web is still an infant technology. Basically, right now, if you can do things using a more traditional method, you probably should do them using the traditional method.”

Nonetheless, Bezos hinted on the firm’s potential for enlargement, noting that “we’re moving forward in so many different areas.”

“This is Day 1,” he added. “This is the very beginning. This is the Kittyhawk stage of electronic commerce.”

Bezos’ feedback in the course of the web’s infancy echo the best way tech leaders as we speak speak about synthetic intelligence. That features the Amazon founder himself, who’s at the moment backing a $520 million AI-powered web search startup that goals to tackle tech giants like Google.

“We’re at the beginning of a golden age of AI,” Bezos said in a 2019 statement. “Recent advancements have already led to invention that previously lived in the realm of science fiction — and we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible.”

Very like within the web’s early days, there is no set roadmap for AI’s future improvement — solely a mixture of optimism and cautiousness from many tech luminaries.

Invoice Gates has in contrast AI to nuclear power, for instance — calling each applied sciences “promising and dangerous” in a 2019 speech. Extra not too long ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s dramatic departure and return to his firm final yr reportedly stemmed from boardroom concerns over profit-chasing on the expense of AI security.

Even Bezos, who’s decidedly pro-AI, acknowledges its potential dangers. Nonetheless, he believes it will assist humanity construct “better medicines and better tools to develop more technologies,” he told podcaster Lex Fridman in December.

“Even in the face of all this uncertainty, my own view is that these powerful tools are much more likely to help us and save us, even, than they are to, on balance, hurt us and destroy us,” Bezos mentioned.

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