Recommendation Algorithms

“I think people assume that there's a much more detailed semantic understanding of everybody's interests and preferences in the algorithm than there is. Most of what's really driven the progress in the world of recommenders over the last five, 10 years have bee…”

“And also I think there is something these companies will have to eventually do is that we know there's an algorithm, which is controlling what we're watching, but you need to figure out how to break it because we don't want to keep consuming the same thing. We…”

“Once you optimize for clicks, the most click-baity content starts rising up to the top. You get lots of racy content, lots of girls in bikinis, lots of listicles about 10 horrifying skin diseases, and so on.”

“I think what actually AI will enable is not that you bring your own algorithm, but you will be able to talk. You will be able to communicate with the algorithm.”

“You're asking for a recommendation algorithm that will drive all the readers to you, but you're also asking to own your list, and I think that's kind of a contradiction in terms, because if what you're saying is, I want somebody to open the app and have the ap…”

“So it's actually one of the applications that I first tried to support in Spark was you know, the recommendation algorithm he was working on.”

“They paid a million dollar bounty, and they wound up looking at the code, and there were hundreds of separate models that were then boosted together, and they said there's no way we can do it.”

“We were using one of our recommendation algorithms just recently in a catalog sort which we newly put in, and it showed a 20% lift in conversion on, like, full size purchase.”