Now Anyone Can Tap the AI Behind Amazon's Recommendations

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. 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. Now, as these tech giants advance the state of the art, there's a movement afoot to bring machine learning to the business world at large.