本字幕由机器自动生成仅供参考
[Music]
Hi I'm Carl Azuz for CNN 10.
we've got something special lined up for
you today this show
is centered on a single big topic
because in the business world
there are few bigger topics than amazon
in 1995 the company had launched as a
retail website that sold books
and not much else from there well it's
grown a bit
amazon sells most of the stuff you can
buy at a mall at a grocery store and
a lot of other types of stores too it
offers online content
cloud computing movies music and it not
only still sells books
it helps people publish them today
amazon is one of the top five most
valuable companies on the planet
it's worth more than one and a half
trillion dollars and it grew that big in
a relatively short amount of time
its founder jeff bezos is the richest
person on the planet
with a net worth of more than 180
billion dollars according to the forbes
business magazine
however the company he founded has seen
its share of bumps in the road
amazon has been criticized in the past
for what it paid its employees
three years ago the average salary for
an amazon employee was
twenty eight thousand dollars per year
that was twenty thousand less than the
average yearly salary in america
amazon has raised its minimum wage to
fifteen dollars an hour for all
employees since then
as people spent more time shopping
online and less in retail stores
the infamous amazon effect occurred in
america with
thousands of physical stores shutting
down and tens of thousands of retail
jobs lost
and while alexa amazon's virtual
artificial intelligence assistant has
found a place in many homes in recent
years
privacy advocates have raised concerns
about smart speakers because
they're always listening as a company
amazon is
massive even as other businesses laid
off employees last year because of the
effects of the coronavirus pandemic
amazon grew tremendously hiring half a
million people in 2020
increasing its workforce to more than
one million two hundred thousand
it's a complicated company like some of
the challenges it's faced
it's also changed the way the world buys
goods
welcome so i've been here amazon goes
the ultimate grab-and-go
shopping experience literally grab it
off the shelves and go you use the app
to enter the store
once you're in you can put the phone
away and you shop the rest of the store
just like you would any other store with
one key difference
when you're done you could just walk out
nothing is simple about the technology
behind this cashier-less store
the amazon go market uses artificial
intelligence to monitor what you've
reached for on the shelf
and to make sure you're charged for what
you walked out with
and nothing else what we had to do
unique
in this use case was build the sensors
the cameras all these cameras
the cameras the cameras in the ceiling
we had to build a specific machine
learning algorithms
the problem that we have to solve in
amazon go is who took what
when i take this item off the shelf
it's in my virtual cart when i put it
back the item goes back
it's an easy problem to solve when you
have a single person in the store but
when there's multiple people
a lot of products if you look around
look very similar to each other
right so that's where the challenge
comes in
[Music]
the amazon go store is by no means the
only place where amazon
uses ai we've got hundreds of teams
working on
artificial intelligence programs across
amazon artificial intelligence like
machine learning
powers the simplicity that we always
want to offer to our customers
whether it's fulfilling orders or
delivering packages
those teams are working constantly to
improve the customers experience
inside amazon's warehouses ai is hard at
work
these are amazon robotics drive units
once a customer actually purchases an
item either on their mobile app on their
computer or laptop the system identifies
the pod where the item is actually
located in a field
and the bot maps out the most efficient
way through using machine learning
to get that pod which has that item that
that customer purchased
to the associate so there's some people
out there that will hear
uh robots machine learning ai and think
jobs they're going to be gone what we've
actually determined when we've actually
deployed our solutions
in our fulfillment networks is that we
actually are relying a lot more on our
associates
we've increased their efficiency and it
really gives them the ability to work on
different tasks
and we've actually grown our associate
employmentsacross the globe to date
alexa order dog biscuits and of course
[Music]
the ai tool you're most familiar with
here's what i found
is always learning new tricks achieving
what alexa is right now
is a super hard challenge going from
thatto the future um i would like alexa to
respond to the
your mood your sentiment your feelings
as expressed in your speech
the one key advantage we have is we now
have so much more data
so is it a big challenge yes are we up
to that challenge
heck yes an evolution of alexa is it
still in its infancy
is it a toddler now or is she a teller
now an adolescent
teenager certainly hasn't graduated from
college
no a.i hasn't graduated from college
overall
right and i think ai as a field is in
its infancy
think of it as a older toddler
you know who's going to grow up to be an
adult that just stuns us with her
brilliance
right is where we are
is amazon a monopoly well it's not
really an easy question to answer
first you have to understand what the
core tenant of jeff bezos's business
philosophy is
patience go back to the original letter
that jeff bezos wrote investors in 1997
he wrote that investors to amazon
shouldn't expect
amazon to operate like most companies
because amazon wouldn't judge itself by
short-term profits you know anything
that almost every other company cares
aboutonly the long-term and bezos and amazon
stayed true to that its first few years
amazon barely made a profit it invested
billions of dollars back into the
business and it just kept growing and
growing and growing and growing
and now that patience has paid off with
incredible profits over the last few
years
we all know in some level what a
monopoly is we've played the game
but in the context of antitrust law it's
a specific thing it's meant to stop a
company from forming
that can dominate the market in such a
way that competition is impossible
those who do not think amazon is a
monopoly say that because
amazon is offering its customers lower
prices it can't possibly be an
anti-trust case
those low prices are a benefit to
consumer welfare and it would be
impossible to regulate exactly
how low is too low for prices the load
starof antitrust enforcement is how
are consumers affected do consumers pay
more do they have less choice
then it's time for the antitrust cops to
get on the beat
this is david balto he worked on
antitrust cases for the justice
department and the ftc for years
and is skeptical about amazon being a
monopoly when consumers are paying less
and have a greater amount of choice
which seems to be the simple message
from amazon's business model
there's not a reason for intense
anti-trust scrutiny
but some say that business model is a
directthreat to customers this is lena khan
she's a lawyer who has really helped
shape the debate around
amazon and anti-trust law to people like
her amazon's willingness to sustain
massive losses isn't just a savvy
business moveit's an example of predatory pricing
so predatory pricing is when a company
prices
a good below cost and is doing so
basically in order to drive out its
competitors so that
it is able to kind of enjoy a dominant
place in the market
all of those things are a really high
bar for the government to prove and
because of that a successful case on
predatory pricing hasn't been litigated
in decades that's not for a lack of will
we certainly at the ftc and the clinton
administration
had predatory pricing investigations but
at the end of the day you have to
convince yourself
that consumers would be better off if
you stop these practices
and that's like looking for a unicorn
but to those who do think amazon right
now is acting as a monopoly
the government's view of predatory
pricing is outdated
the reality is with tech companies you
have a marketplace where that is winner
take all
so if you're a facebook or an amazon or
google your main goal is to try and
acquire as many users as possible
at the very earliest stages because once
you have a lot of users it's going to be
much more difficult
for rivals to divert users away from you
and so in that scenario
predatory pricing actually becomes very
rational it's important to note that
the question of predatory pricing is
really only one of the questions
surrounding amazon
there are also concerns about just how
large amazon has become
as a business so in addition to be an
online retailer
it also is a huge content producer is a
book publisher it has a huge
cloud computing service the fact that
amazon is involved in all these
different lines of business
positions it to use its dominance in the
online space
in order to benefit its other lines of
businesses and i think that's something
that's really problematic
what we want from a consumer's
perspective
is for those people who provide services
for us
to use the bargaining leverage of having
all thosecustomers to lower costs as much as
possible
and that's fundamentally what amazon has
done so whether amazon has an unfair
advantage over its competitors whether
it's a monopoly
all those things are an open debate but
what is
not a debate is right now amazon is
winning