Amazon is using AI in almost everything it does

CNN's Rachel Crane goes inside Amazon HQ to see how Amazon uses AI to improve customer experiences, from cashier-less stores to Alexa's new tricks.

"Amazon probably uses AI more extensively than any other company in the world today," Pedro Domingos, a University of Washington professor and author of The Master Algorithm, told CNN Business. "Amazon is a company that wants to do everything, and in AI it has found a technology that is good for everything."

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33 Comments

    1. I disagree. Google is far and beyond, most advanced in terms of AI/ML technology by any company right now. There is a reason Google Assistant is way smarter than Alexa. Google has been investing in this field for a long, long time.

      I don’t know how many people know that Amazon is developing a robot to serve or assist in people’s home. They are trying to make Alexa in real life.

      Google on the other hand also has a upper hand in robotics. Remember, Boston Dynamics and dozens of other robotics company that Google bought in around 2013? Google sold BD to SoftBank in 2016 and Andy rubins, co-founder of Android left google in 2014 and around that time Google dismantled their robotics division which was under him.

      There are rumors that Google is working on making a robot to serve or assist people in home. This may very well be real life Google Assistant. Let’s see who makes it first and who makes it better than other

    2. Mechanics is needed also Amazon need to pay more in taxes. Amazon gets tax break to create more jobs but using AI can anyone say more waste less, work.

  1. just when you convince yourself your future accounting job wont go away you end up on a video like this

  2. reality is they dont want to pay employees , they want all profit for themselves.. people are blind and greedy who use them

  3. What exactly is the purpose of this? Are we as human beings so utterly lazy that we need to build a robot to open the blinds and put on coffee?

    1. Every generation says this about the next generation. It’s just progress, nothing more, nothing less. My dad still thinks solar panels are a gimmick because he remembers the Carter administration putting them on the White House during the gas crisis.

  4. “The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I’m not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast—it is growing at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year timeframe. 10 years at most.” —Elon Musk

    1. Josh Tenenbaum of MIT has a really good talk where he describes the current challenges of a truly “thinking” machine. Right now we have seen a breakthrough in pattern matching but having machines understand the context of the patterns being matched is still non-existent. The fact that we are even having realistic conversations about the specific programming work to accomplish such a task demonstrates to me that the clock has now started on real AI and we are looking at perhaps a 10-20 year timeframe before a limited viable prototype is created. This doesn’t mean it will be conscious, only that it will be too complex for us to be capable of distinguishing the difference.

  5. Most important thing he said- they have so much more DATA now. Big data. Everyone spying on you WITH YOUR PERMISSION (because no one reads terms of service and privacy notices).

  6. This is one of the major strategies to make a huge profit by reducing costs. Reducing administrative cost and warehouse cost. Majority of the people are losing jobs just because of AI development. In future, the net worth of the billionaires will boom like never ever, but we will still suffer.

  7. As a programmer myself I find it frustrating when these companies pretend like this tech isn’t going to eliminate jobs. Of course it is, most of today’s robotics and AI are being designed to be general purpose, as in adaptable to new scenarios. Unlike specialized robotics and programming of the past, most of this tech is going to not only be built to replace existing jobs but also the majority of “new” jobs that may be generated from it’s implementation. Yes, some human-based jobs will be created, but the ratio will be somewhere around 1-2 new human jobs for every 10 jobs the technology replaces. I think this will be a good thing long term but it’s important to be honest about it, instead these companies have decided to lie or mislead so they don’t have to be part of the hard discussions about the future of work.

    1. Care to give me your crystal ball ? If that is the case, how come the unemployment rate is lower than it was 50 years ago?

    2. ​@Thadius Sean – As I said previously, the new technology being developed today is increasingly becoming general purpose, unlike the specialized tools of the past. Unemployment numbers reflect the past. I don’t want to be a doomsayer. I don’t believe that self-aware machines are arriving anytime soon. I’m just concerned that the public statements I hear from most tech companies are not the opinions I hear from the actual programmers who build this stuff behind closed doors, quite the opposite in fact.

      The goal of modern programming is complete automation, not tooling to assist human labor. We are dealing with a new type of tech that has really only been heavily funded and pursued in earnest over the past 8 years. ASICs, high-end GPUs and SoC hardware combined with deep learning algorithms and cheap sensors has provided us programmers with a way to teach computers a kind of “muscle memory” in the form of neural network pattern recognition. Although the core algorithms most of this AI is old, we never had the compute power to effectively use it, now we do and the applications for it are going to surprise people even more than they already have. Self-driving platforms, speech recognition and medical scan analysis is just the tip of the iceberg.

      That’s just my opinion, I could be wrong but I don’t think I am being unreasonable on this one.

    3. @Shane Skull New technology have always created jobs that we did not know were possible. We can often very easily see the types of jobs that will be affected or gone from technology, but we are poor predictors of the type new jobs that would arise. Because we only have the past as a reference point. If anyone could predict the type of new jobs that would arise in the future from disruptive technologies, I would be very impressed. A correct investment in those fields in its infancy would make you a very rich person. AI would still be very specialized to certain tasks. AI still requires human wisdom to program. An increase in employee productivity, will always lead to higher wages, and higher discretionary income. We would not have half the entertainment industry we have today, without the gains in productivity we have from technology.

      I don’t really see the “AI being general purpose” would be very useful at all in commercial purposes. Specialized AI will always trump General Purpose AI.

      I feel you’re a bit overly pessimistic.

  8. Watching all these ingenious people and their works ended up making me feel dumb. 🙂 LOL I ain’t that easy either.

  9. Amazon is so clever in saving money
    Like business is online so less staff need when they open retail shop they used AI .

  10. Okay! You made my Alexa give me a horrible joke for the day! When is Alexa’s voice recognition going to be put in place? This is madness.

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