[ckarmann]

Does Amazon pretends to do AI? They are just offering a platform to do your own Machine Learning. I don't think they ever said their search engine was doing anything smart.

EDIT: scrap that, I didn't mean Alexa, which is doing AI obviously, but the search engine of Amazon's retail website.

Anyway, NLP is hard and everyone sucks at it. Think about it: just building something that could work with any <N1> <preposition> <N2> or any other way to express the same requests would mean understanding the relationships of every possible combinations of N1 and N2. It means building a generalized world model that is quite different from simply applying ML to a narrow use case. Cracking that would more or less mean solving general AI which probably won't happen soon.

[5cott0]

alexa, downvote this.

[Der_Einzige]

ML and AI are the same thing

You're right the NLP is hard, but not everyone sucks at it.

[bartread]

> ML and AI are the same thing

Not actually true. ML is one area of study within the field of AI. Thanks to marketing departments and slightly shoddy journalism these two things are now casually treated as equivalents, but they're really not: ML is still very much a subset of AI.