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posted by martyb on Saturday April 11 2015, @12:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the now-let's-work-on-human-intelligence dept.

A recent Wired article tells us about the progression of the Amazon product recommendation algorithm.

Amazon helped show the world how machines can learn. As far back as the late ’90s, the company’s online retail site would track every book, CD, and movie you purchased. As time went on, it would develop a pretty good sense of what you liked, serving up product recommendations its code predicted would catch your eye.

It wasn't rocket science. It was an algorithm. But it worked. And in the years since, the field of so-called machine learning has evolved in enormous ways, with the likes of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft training enormous networks of machines to identify faces in photos, recognize the spoken word, and instantly translate conversations from one language to another.

On Thursday, Amazon unveiled a similar machine learning service, pitching it as a way for any business to use the AI tech the company has spent years developing inside its own operation. Known as the Amazon Machine Learning Service, it’s designed for software developers “with no experience in machine learning,” AWS head Andy Jassy said on stage at a mini-conference in San Francisco.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Gravis on Saturday April 11 2015, @03:18PM

    by Gravis (4596) on Saturday April 11 2015, @03:18PM (#168962)

    As time went on, it would develop a pretty good sense of what you liked, serving up product recommendations its code predicted would catch your eye.

    it's been my experience that amazon makes tons of recommendations only after you buy something. i spent lots of time trying finding the right item and only after i bought it, suddenly it was suggesting items like it. "oh i see you bought a new cellphone yesterday, would you like to compare some cellphones?!"

    it needs to learn while you are searching and improve the results. honestly though, they need to merge all their duplicates items and/or ban sellers who make duplicate entries.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by JNCF on Saturday April 11 2015, @05:14PM

    by JNCF (4317) on Saturday April 11 2015, @05:14PM (#168987) Journal

    I occasionally buy things from Amazon, but not frequently. My experience is the same as yours; after I look at or buy a given item, it recommends that item and similar items to me. That being said, I may not be the best data set for Amazon's recommendations. The more we buy, the easier we are to predict.

    I remember reading a (Wired?) article that said that Amazon has shipment hubs that they keep packages in, and that they pre-emptively ship products to hubs near a given customer if they are predicting that the customer will purchase the product soon. This allows them cut shipping times drastically for frequent customers whose behavior is easy to predict, sometimes getting products delivered the same day they're ordered. Other times they guess wrong, and the product sits on the shelf at a given hub for a while. Sometimes they make the decision that give the product to the frequent customer as a "gift," which saves Amazon the cost of shipping it back to their main hubs and ingratiates the customer by giving them something that they probably actually wanted.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by davester666 on Saturday April 11 2015, @11:27PM

    by davester666 (155) on Saturday April 11 2015, @11:27PM (#169136)

    yeah, both amazon and ebay are stupid. yesterday, I buy hour-meters for some equipment I have. today, I get an offer to buy one for 5% off. and it keeps happening with most stuff I buy.

    I'll even get offers to buy another one of what I just bought for MORE than what I paid for it. I bought a new fuel pump for my truck for $25 [retails locally for about $500] from Amazon. Next day I get an offer to buy another one for only $110. I understand the pricing, as from the fedex label inside the box, Amazon had received the pump from the manufacturer a year ago, and they just were dumping it because they didn't want to stock it anymore and just sold it for the cost to fedex the box to them [plus shipping costs to me].