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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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gravis on Saturday April 11 2015, @03:18PM
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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JNCF on Saturday April 11 2015, @05:14PM
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
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].
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday April 11 2015, @03:59PM
Michael Jackson, Ho Chi Minh, The Tooth Fairy, William Jefferson Clinton and Cindy Crawford.
(I actually know Cindy Crawford - but not _that_ Cindy Crawford.)
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday April 11 2015, @04:03PM
The general public is starting to clue in to that there are such things as "Algorithms" however most folks don't really understand what they are. I myself have never been able to come up with a better explanation than "an Algorithm is a general method of accomplishing a task on a computer", although, strictly speaking a computer is not required.
Someone is proposing to audit algorithms for various kinds of illegal bias such as sexism and racism. For example I have quite a whitebread name and an impressive resume, so I get lots of inquiries from recruiters. Suppose you replaced my name - and only my name - on my resume with a name that was stereotypically African-American, Hispanic or female then posted it on all the job boards. How many inquiries would you get?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Aichon on Saturday April 11 2015, @06:55PM
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad Amazon is making something like this available, since it'll spur others to do similar things, but of all the major sites I use that have recommendation engines, Amazon's engine is easily the least useful, despite my having provided it with ample data.
Buy a run-of-the-mill boxed set for a film trilogy, and you'll see the individual films, the ultimate collector's edition boxed sets, coffee table art books, video game spin-offs, video game guides, vinyl figurines, action figures, Legos, and soundtracks recommended to you. Never mind that you've marked "Not Interested" on every single art book, game guide, figurine, action figure, or toy that they have ever recommended to you, simply because those aren't things that interest you or that you've ever been interested in purchasing. And never mind that they know from your browsing history that you chose to purchase the cheap edition instead of the high-end one, so they're wasting your time with the recommendation of the collector's edition boxed set. Or that the individual films sold separately add nothing of value to what they know you already own. Oh, and that soundtrack? You actually purchased it in the same order with the boxed set, but because it's gotten a reprint with a new bar code in the last year, they think it's something new that you don't have, so they're recommending it to you again. Even worse, if you rate the boxed set as 2/5 to indicate that you didn't like the films, you'd expect that they'd stop recommending stuff in that vein. Instead, Amazon will fill your recommendations list with similar films of similarly crappy quality, and it will keep doing so, despite your marking each and every one of them as "Not Interested", until you tell it to stop using the original item for recommendations.
Not that I see any of that on a regular basis, of course. Though I suppose I bring it on myself, since I check my Amazon recommendations regularly and prune out things I'm not interested in, with the hope that it will get better. It hasn't. For every 1000 items I mark Not Interested in, I'd say there's five I already own and can rate, and just one that catches my eye.
Contrast that with Netflix, which I'd peg at something more like 1 in 3. Netflix is hardly perfect, but it manages to dig up a lot of stuff that I'm interested in, and on those occasions where I use their Max virtual assistant [techcrunch.com] on the PS3 version of the app, which leads to my watching films I've generally never even heard of before, I find that I'm pleasantly surprised far more often than not.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by darkfeline on Saturday April 11 2015, @09:14PM
Whenever AI comes up, there's bound to be someone claiming AI is stupid. But it makes no sense to apply human values of intelligence to AI.
Consider the following hypothetical comparison between an average human driver and the AI of a self-driving car. We humans may think that the AI is stupid for not noticing a fidgety looking man standing on the sidewalk who suddenly flings himself onto the road. "AI will never be as smart as humans!" Yet the AI might certainly think the average human driver is stupid for rubbernecking at every construction project, police car, and pretty man/woman passing by, and the AI has a much lower accident rate than the average human driver. Tell me, who is really more "intelligent"?
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