Why yes of course recommendation engines will get better with these improvements in machine learning. I&#x27;d even say that significant, noticeable improvements are not unlikely. Consider image classification, playing Go etc., where RNNs have advanced the state of the art from &quot;research interest&quot; to &quot;reliable product&quot; within a few years.<p>There may be some reasons why recommendation engines may not advance as fast:<p>- It&#x27;s always been more valuable than playing Go, allowing vastly larger ressources to be dedicated to optimizing the current models
- Image-processing and NLP both each profited from specific inventions (i. e. RNNs allowing position-independent feature detection in images).<p>I&#x27;m actually looking forward to a time where amazon can recommend me books based on the shoes I bought last year. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever seen a recommendation engine that impressed me.