Amazon hires Carnegie Mellon machine-learning expert as Google expands its own AI initiatives

Both Amazon and Google are advancing their efforts in machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence that lets computers learn without being explicitly programmed. It's often associated with cloud computing, because it requires the considerable computing power the cloud makes easily available. Amazon's efforts will get a boost when Alexander Smola, a professor in the machine-learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, leaves that position July 1 to head Amazon's cloud machine-learning platform. Smola revealed his plans in this blog post. "This is a terrific task, and it was an offer that I could not turn down," Smola wrote.