Amazon hires expert in artificial intelligence
Amazon has hired an expert in artificial intelligence to improve its services and compete against its competitors. Alex Smola, a former research alumni of Google and Yahoo, is a top machine scientist at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and will run the company's Cloud Machine Learning Platform at Amazon Web Services. His new role is described as having "the task to make machine learning as easy to use and widespread as it could possibly be".

Now Amazon has recruited a leading expert in the field to up its game. Alex Smola, a top machine learning scientist at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and research alum of Google and Yahoo, is moving over to run the "Cloud Machine Learning Platform" at AWS, he wrote in a post.

To pitch its cloud storage business, Google is leaning on its artificial intelligence features. Amazon, the market leader, is too .

Alex Smola tweet

His cursory description of the role — "with the task to make machine learning as easy to use and widespread as it could possibly be" — echoes Google's stated strategy. Both companies are competing for businesses to pay for their cloud services and for researchers with AI expertise.

My favorite nugget of Smola's announcement: He only posted his full statement, intended just for CMU, because it leaked on Weibo, the social network in China, where machine learning is the rage and where Silicon Valley biggies want to be.

—By Mark Bergen, Recode.net.

CNBC's parent NBCUniversal is an investor in Recode's parent Vox, and the companies have a content-sharing arrangement.

