Amazon ‘Machine Learning’ Service Employs Powerful, Intelligent Predictive Engine

It might not be obvious to many of Amazon's customers, but there is a lot of machine learning that goes on in the background. In one of its simplest forms, the suggestions you see on the front page of Amazon after browsing for a while, or after making a purchase, are the result of this learning. Buy the latest Metallica CD? Then you might want the latest Megadeth one, as well.

Given the complex algorithms Amazon has on hand, and the amount of successful machine learning it has under its belt, the time has come for it to share some of the love. Well, for a cost - but a modest one.

With Amazon Machine Learning, you're able to create an account and begin taking advantage of Amazon's algorithms to create and fine-tune models that can be used to generate predictions en masse. Like Amazon's many other cloud services, the sky's the limit here - it's completely scaleable.

As mentioned above, pricing is kept modest, costing $0.10 per 1,000 predictions if part of a batch, and $0.0001 per prediction in real-time. Other costs that tie into this are storage, although once again costs are likely to remain low there given these models are not going to be that weighty.

Amazon gives a couple of pricing examples. If you're to generate 890,000 real-time predictions in a given month, the bill would be $89.00, plus $0.001 per 10MB used ($7.44 over 31 days). Not too bad!