The online movie and TV outfit once sponsored what it called the Netflix Prize, asking the world’s data scientists to build new algorithms that could better predict what movies and shows you want to see. And though this certainly advanced the state of the art, Netflix is now exploring yet another leap forward. In an effort to further hone its recommendation engine, the company is delving into “deep learning,” a branch of artificial intelligence that seeks to solve particularly hard problems using computer systems that mimic the structure and behavior of the human brain. The company details these efforts in a recent blog post.

eep learning remained on the outskirts of academia until the mid-aughts, when computers were finally powerful and affordable enough to begin doing some practical work. Although today’s largest neural networks mimic only about one percent of the human brain, according to Engineering and Technology Magazine, modern deep learning algorithms can detect faces in photos, learn your tastes and habits, and, to a certain extent, understand what you say.

Ref: Netflix Is Building an Artificial Brain Using Amazon’s Cloud – Wired