Getting the software right is important when developing machine learning models, such as recommendation or classification systems. But at eBay, optimizing the software to run on a particular piece of hardware using distillation and quantization techniques was absolutely essential to ensure scalability. "[I]n order to build a truly global marketplace that is driven by state of the art and powerful and scalable AI services," Kopru said, "you have to do a lot of optimizations after model training, and specifically for the target hardware." With 1.5 billion active listings from more than 19 million active sellers trying to reach 159 million active buyers, the ecommerce giant has a global reach that is matched by only a handful of firms. Machine learning and other AI techniques, such as natural language processing (NLP), play big roles in scaling eBay's operations to reach its massive audience. For instance, automatically generated descriptions of product listings is crucial for displaying information on the small screens of smart phones, Kopru said.

Getting the software right is important when developing machine learning models, such as recommendation or classification systems. But at eBay, optimizing the software to run on a particular piece of hardware using distillation and quantization techniques was absolutely essential to ensure scalability. "[I]n order to build a truly global marketplace that is driven by state of the art and powerful and scalable AI services," Kopru said, "you have to do a lot of optimizations after model training, and specifically for the target hardware." With 1.5 billion active listings from more than 19 million active sellers trying to reach 159 million active buyers, the ecommerce giant has a global reach that is matched by only a handful of firms. Machine learning and other AI techniques, such as natural language processing (NLP), play big roles in scaling eBay's operations to reach its massive audience. For instance, automatically generated descriptions of product listings is crucial for displaying information on the small screens of smart phones, Kopru said.

Online retailer eBay is attempting to extend its machine language capabilities beyond automatic language translation to e-commerce uses designed to make product searches more relevant. As automation improves, the company said one goal eliminating the search box. Meanwhile, development cycles have been reduced as more machine learning libraries are released to the open source community. "As machines get better at decoding natural language, commerce should become increasingly conversational -- eventually rendering the search box redundant," eBay CEO Devin Wenig noted recently. Wenig added that the pace of machine intelligence development has quickened over the last year.