Milliseconds to Match: Criteo's AdTech AI & the Future of Commerce w/ Diarmuid Gill & Liva Ralaivola

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guests are Diarmuid Gill and Liva Ralaivola, CTO and VP of Research and Head of the AI Lab at Criteo, the advertising technology company that powers much of the personalized advertising that we experience on the open Internet. I'm also joined by my longtime friend and teammate, Alex Persky-Stern, who took over for me as CEO of Waymark some three years ago now, and has since formed a partnership with Criteo that brings Waymark's AI-powered commercial creation product to Criteo advertisers. We begin with an explanation of how modern digital advertising works and the value that it creates for society. Personally, I tend to emphasize that without the commercial recommendation systems that allow businesses to affordably reach their target customers, a lot of the long-tail small businesses and niche products that we enjoy today simply wouldn't be viable at all. Dermot and Liva, for their part, focus on how ad tech delivers more relevant, engaging experiences and supports free access to information, as well as emphasizing how easy it is for individuals to opt out of personalization systems.
From there, we dive into how it all works. Criteo has been in business for more than 20 years, and while their AI techniques have naturally evolved with the field, most fundamentally from the earlier era of handcrafted features to the modern era of deep learning, the one constant has been their need for incredible speed. From the time your browser requests a web page, Criteo has just milliseconds to locate your profile among the billion or so in their system, and in light of what you're doing right now, decide which one of many millions of products to recommend, and also how much to bid in a real-time auction. It's a deeply challenging problem that requires lots of pre-computing, but the upshot is that they've developed a highly modular system, powered by multiple foundation models, that supports prolific experimentation on top of cached user and product embeddings.
Beyond the core tech, we also discuss Criteo's new partnership with OpenAI, which though still in its infancy, they expect will complement ChatGPT's broad world knowledge with accurate real-time product inventory information. They tell the story of the company's European roots and share their commitment to privacy, their sense that European compliance burdens are overstated, their decision to use the same Euro-compliant tech stack globally, and their passionate belief in the European AI ecosystem and talent pool. They also explain why they are confident enough in their moats to publish a lot of their research, and how this helps them attract and retain talent well enough that they're still comfortable publishing the AI Lab's full 50-person roster to their website.
We trade ideas regarding the role that generative AI will play in the expansion of the advertising market and evolution of personalized creative. And they share their admittedly speculative thoughts about how the fundamental value exchange of advertising might change as human time becomes more valuable, and AI agents take on more product discovery and research work. Overall, I think this episode is both an informative look at how modern AI techniques are being used to make high-value commercial recommendations under extreme constraints, and a useful corrective for those who deny the ways in which cutting-edge advertising enriches modern life. With that, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Diarmuid Gill and Liva Ralaivola of Criteo. Diarmuid Gill and Liva Ralaivola, CTO and VP of Research and Head of the AI Lab at Criteo, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Diarmuid Gill** (3:41)
Thank you, Nathan. Pleasure to be here. Hi.
Thank you.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:44)
Excited for this conversation. Also excited to welcome my longtime friend and teammate, Alex Persky-Stern, who's the CEO of Waymark, which we had been building together for a number of years before he took over for me as CEO a few years back. Longtime listeners have heard many asides about Waymark, and Alex is the guy running the show there now. Happy to have Alex here today because Criteo is obviously in the advertising business and bringing a lot of AI to the advertising business in various ways, and Waymark, under Alex's leadership, has partnered with Criteo to provide some creative solutions as part of that whole package and go into market together. Lots to get into. I wanted to start with something that I saw recently that caught my attention and I want to get your take on it. It was, I'm sure you've seen this, a Bernie Sanders sit down across the table with, I believe Claude, having a voice conversation.
It was a bit of a strange tone. It felt a little dated to me in some ways, but the subject of the conversation was Bernie saying to the AI, what do you think Americans need to know about how their data is being collected and how companies are profiling them and how that's all being used? It had an ominous overtone to the whole thing.