On recommendation
- From embeddings to IDs to what you watch next
Generative recommenders are going into production. How a video becomes an embedding, then a semantic ID, and how a Transformer uses those IDs to choose what you'll watch next.
3 min reads likes comments - Describe the music you want
"Sad songs for a rainy drive" beats any genre taxonomy. Natural language is becoming the way people ask for music, and it changes what a music recommender has to understand.
2 min reads likes comments - Recommendation as next-token prediction
A new paper turns every item into a short code of semantic tokens, then has a Transformer generate the code of what you'll want next. The item vocabulary finally describes what things are.
2 min reads likes comments - Meta's worst day was TikTok's best
Meta lost over $230 billion in market value in one day after Facebook's first ever drop in daily users. The interest graph beat the social graph.
2 min reads likes comments - Listening sessions are sentences
Treat each song as a token and each listening session as a sentence, and recommendation starts to look like language modeling. What that framing gets right, and what it misses.
2 min reads likes comments - You can't skim a song
Why music recommendation is a different problem from video or news recommendation: sequences, repetition, passive listening, and the difference between a skip and a mood.
2 min reads likes comments - Joining YouTube Music: the recommendation is the product
I've started as an engineering manager at YouTube Music. Why music, and why I think the next few years of music discovery will look very different.
2 min reads likes comments - Reels is a clone. That's fine
Instagram launched Reels the day before the TikTok executive order. The format is a commodity now, and the question is whose recommender learns fastest.
2 min reads likes comments - The embedding table is the model
Facebook open-sourced DLRM, its deep learning recommendation model. It shows what big recommenders actually look like: mostly memory, with a small network on top.
2 min reads likes comments - Musical.ly is now TikTok, as predicted
ByteDance merged Musical.ly into TikTok this week. A short follow-up to what I wrote in November, and what the feed tells you about the product.
2 min reads likes comments - Watch the recommendation engine, not the lip-sync
ByteDance is buying Musical.ly. It looks like a Chinese news company buying an American teen app. It's really a recommendation engine buying a global audience.
2 min reads likes comments - Apple bets on human DJs. I'd bet on the skip button
Apple Music launched with Beats 1 and human curators. Three weeks later, Spotify ships Discover Weekly. Two theories of music discovery.
2 min reads likes comments