The Prediction API gives developers access to Google's own machine learning algorithms to analyze data and predict outcomes. The service is free for up to six months depending on usage.

The Google Prediction AI provides access to Google's AI tools that it uses internally for  a range of classification and prediction tasks.

It basically is a REST style API to a general purpose pattern recognition engine. You can upload some data, which can be unstructured text or numeric, to Google Storage for Developers. You then perform a supervised learning stage and finally you can use the trained model to classify new data.

For more detailed information on the API see:

Google gets into AI with an API

Until recently it has been in a closed beta and essentially getting to use it was by invitation only. Now it looks as if a paid for service is the next step. It currently still isn't clear if Google are going to throw the service open to all - at the moment you still have to apply for access.

After the free period Google will charge:

• $10 monthly fee per project. A project is defined by a unique key on the Google APIs console.
• The monthly fee covers 10,000 additional predictions per month. Beyond that, predictions cost $0.50 per 1,000 predictions. If you intend to make more than 40,000 predictions per day, please contact us. Google Prediction has an absolute limit of 60,000 predictions per day.
• $0.002 per MB trained (maximum size of each dataset: 100MB)

You can monitor your use of the service and configure it via the Google API console.

The bottom line seems to be that there is a profit to be made from AI - well there is at least for Google.

More information

http://code.google.com/apis/predict/

Google gets into AI with an API

Google API Console