Images and Inspiration With AI: Pinterest’s Jeremy King

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:02)
How does one image-based platform use AI and machine learning to continually inspire users? Find out on today's episode.

**Jeremy King** (0:11)
I'm Jeremy King from Pinterest, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:17)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, professor of analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:35)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG, and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:03)
Welcome.
Our guest today is Jeremy King, head of engineering at Pinterest. Jeremy, thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

**Jeremy King** (1:10)
It's great to be here. Thank you very much.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:11)
It's always good to start with an overview. Maybe tell us a bit about what Pinterest does and what you do at Pinterest.

**Jeremy King** (1:20)
Pinterest is, we like to say, the destination on the internet for inspiration. We have hundreds of millions of people that come to us every day to figure out what they want to wear, what they want to do this afternoon, or what they want to make for dinner, or how to decorate their kid's cake, or remodel their kitchen.
So we want to build a platform that allows anyone to create a life that they love. It's a great place to work with that kind of mission, and I have a lot of people who, when I tell them where I work, get pretty elated about their own Pinterest boards and what's going on in the world.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:51)
Great. Tell us more about working at Pinterest.

**Jeremy King** (1:53)
Yeah, I've been at Pinterest now, the head of engineering, for just over four years, and just like any leader, I'm trying to figure out how to unblock my team and hire great people, and I tell people all the time that when I came to Pinterest, I was just so impressed with the level of talent. It's a relatively small team. We have 4,500 employees in the world and about 1,400 engineers, and as a result, competing against some of the biggest companies in the world, this team has to be extremely high caliber. We have some of the best graph database people in the world. We have the best computer vision people in the world.
These people are really fun to work with.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:28)
None of that so far you've mentioned artificial intelligence. So what role does artificial intelligence play with those 1,400 engineers?

**Jeremy King** (2:36)
Yeah, that's an excellent point. One of the things that is true at Pinterest and now at many other companies is Pinterest was actually born with machine learning and AI from the base. It doesn't exist without it.
Talking about AI and ML separately from Pinterest is almost like a misnomer. It really doesn't happen without it.
Nearly everything that we do touches our machine learning systems. We do millions of inferences every second. Every single request comes all the way back to the graph and publishes back out a very specific use case to every single person. It's not cached. Every person has a specific result. I mentioned that we have about 1,400 engineers. We have about 350 machine learning engineers.
As a percentage, when I tell other CTOs that I work for, they're like, that's a really high percentage of machine learning people compared to my company. That's true also on the data platform side. We have a wonderful leader, Dave Burgess, who runs our data platform. You can imagine our data platform is about as important as any other part of our capabilities. I mentioned the graph, but it's also the normal SQL databases and the real-time systems that keep this thing running.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (3:45)
Jeremy, you said graphs a couple of times. What's a graph?

**Jeremy King** (3:49)
Essentially what a graph is, is if you take an entity, an object, and you say what's related to that object. In this case, we're using a nearest neighbor graph, which we've written lots of documents on, which is saying, hey, I have an image in this case, and I have another image that's related to this image.
That allows me to build this network of images.
The reason the graph works at Pinterest is because every pin is essentially added to a board, which essentially makes it a node and a graph. It continues to increase the graph. It allows you to, unlike a SQL database or a relational database, where you have to tag indexes and indices, the graph can be indexed. Essentially any image could be indexed to any other image. It allows you to do searches on things that are related incredibly efficiently. That's the power of Pinterest.