Jeff Bezos explains Amazon’s artificial intelligence and machine learning strategy | GeekWire

Photo: Todd Bishop

Todd Bishop, co-founder and editor of GeekWire says, "Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos appeared this week at the Internet Association‘s annual gala in Washington, D.C., taking part in a wide-ranging discussion about the online economy, media coverage of Amazon, the company’s business principles, and even going off topic a bit to discuss his Blue Origin space venture."

Gala2017: Jeff Bezos Fireside Chat 

   

 “It is a renaissance, it is a golden age,” Bezos said. “We are solving problems with machine learning and artificial intelligence that were in the realm of science fiction for the last several decades. Natural language understanding, machine vision problems, it really is an amazing renaissance.”

So how does Amazon see this playing out? Here’s what Bezos said.

“Machine learning and AI is a horizontal enabling layer. It will empower and improve every business, every government organization, every philanthropy — basically there’s no institution in the world that cannot be improved with machine learning. At Amazon, some of the things we’re doing are superficially obvious, and they’re interesting, and they’re cool. And you should pay attention. I’m thinking of things like Alexa and Echo, our voice assistant, I’m thinking about our autonomous Prime Air delivery drones.

Those things use a tremendous amount of machine learning, machine vision systems, natural language understanding and a bunch of other techniques.
“But those are kind of the showy ones. I would say, a lot of the value that we’re getting from machine learning is actually happening beneath the surface. It is things like improved search results. Improved product recommendations for customers. Improved forecasting for inventory management. Literally hundreds of other things beneath the surface.

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Source: GeekWire and Internet Association Channel (YouTube)