Bad news - Skynet gains self-awareness on August 29th
Good news - lots more streaming movies From Wired:
Netflix Is Building an Artificial Brain Using Amazon's Cloud
Nothing beats a movie recommendation from a friend who knows your tastes. At least not yet. Netflix wants to change that, aiming to build an online recommendation engine that outperforms even your closest friends.
The online movie and TV outfit once sponsored what it called the Netflix Prize, asking the world's data scientists to build new algorithms that could better predict what movies and shows you want to see. And though this certainly advanced the state of the art, Netflix is now exploring yet another leap forward. In an effort to further hone its recommendation engine, the company is delving into "deep learning," a branch of artificial intelligence that seeks to solve particularly hard problems using computer systems that mimic the structure and behavior of the human brain. The company details these efforts in a recent blog post.
With the project, Netflix is following in the footsteps of web giants like Google and Facebook, who have hired top deep-learning researchers in an effort to improve everything from voice recognition to image tagging. But Netflix is taking a slightly different tack. The company plans to run its deep learning algorithms on Amazon's cloud service, rather than building their own hardware infrastructure a la Google and Facebook. This shows that, thanks to rise of the cloud, smaller web companies can now compete with the big boys - at least in some ways.
I don't see this as being a solution for a neural network program, it is simple pattern matching. Amazon does this already -- the more stuff you look at and buy, the closer they hone their recommendations to you. It is fun to look at a couple of items that are wildly different from your normal scope of interest and see their recommendations totter off the rails for the next couple iterations.
