Amazon built X-Ray using its expertise in language processing and machinelearning, access to significant storage and computing resources with Amazon S3 and EC2, and a deep library of book and character information.
EBay labs employs economists, machinelearning and machine vision experts, data miners, natural language processors and human computer interaction specialists.
Creating software that can write long-form narratives is very difficult, full of all sorts of interesting artificial intelligence, machinelearning and natural language problems.