Netflix moves into deep learning research to improve personalization

Google isn’t the only company looking to make lots and lots of computers function more like human brains. Netflix research engineers Alex Chen, Justin Basilico, and Xavier Amatriain talked about ways the movie-streaming company has been experimenting with the construction of artificial neural networks using Nvidia graphic processing units (GPUs) running in Amazon Web Services’ vast public-cloud infrastructure. In other words, these new methods could do things like improve your video recommendations by mimicking how your brain works. Such work entails making inferences based on the data that’s available, whether it be a photo, a video, text, or something else. It also suggests commercial value (aka video recommendations) could be closer than we might think.