Mosseri: Recommender systems rely on illegible vectors, not semantic profiles
Adam Mosseri · The rise of taste, human authenticity and judgment in an AI world | Adam Mosseri (Head of IG) · Jul 9, 2026 · at 34:42
Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, explains how recommendation algorithms actually operate under the hood to Lenny Rachitsky.
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“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 been You know, these large embedding models and these other techniques that basically produce artifacts that cannot be read by people. They're not legible. They're like giant vectors.”
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