Milliseconds to Match: Criteo's AdTech AI & the Future of Commerce w/ Diarmuid Gill & Liva Ralaivola
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 we experience on the open internet.
I'm also joined by long-time friend and teammate Alex Persky-Stern, who took over for me as CEO of Waymark 3 years ago, 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 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.
Diarmuid and Liva, for their part, focus on how ad tech delivers more relevant, engaging experiences and supports free access to information, as well as 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 hand-crafted 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 - out of many millions of products - to recommend, and how much to bid in a realtime auction.
It’s a 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 with 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’re 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 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 commercials 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 Criteo's Diarmuid Gill and Liva Ralaivola.
Watch now!
Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution,
Nathan Labenz