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During the nearly 45-minute conversation on-stage, Bezos addressed the search for a city to build out its second headquarters — a new facility that is expected to create 50,000 jobs and cost $5 billion.
“Ultimately the decision will be made with intuition after gathering and studying a lot of data — for a decision like that, as far as I know, the best way to make it is you collect as much data as you can, you immerse yourself in that data but then you make the decision with your heart,” Bezos told Isaacson.
The comments came toward the end of a wide-ranging interview about data, decision-making, technology and education. Bezos noted that he still keeps his “Jeff at Amazon” email address, despite not being able to read every email these days. That’s because he believes that anecdotes can help improve data.
Some decisions, however, have to be made with the gut instead of data, he said. An example is Amazon Prime.
“Every spreadsheet showed it was going to be a disaster,” he said.
Bezos revealed that there are “somewhere around 10,000 or 12,000 people” who work on Alexa and Echo at the company.
“It is technically one of the hardest things — not that just that we’ve ever done — that’s ever been done. It is … ASR — automatic speech recognition, that’s super hard. Natural language understanding, that’s super hard. Every time you curse at Alexa, she gets better — so don’t stop.”
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