What happens when you add machine learning to a database of 100 billion image-rich objects and ideas? Pinterest is already scratching the surface of a potential answer to that question with its AI-powered tools, including visual search and Pinterest Lens, but now it wants to dig deeper.
The company wants to join the ranks of industry giants Facebook and Google in accelerating the growth of artificial intelligence through open research and collaboration. To help it achieve that goal, it is launching a new group — dubbed “Pinterest Labs” — comprised of machine learning experts, whose investigations could help transform the way users discover ideas.
In the words of Pinterest chief scientist and Stanford associate professor Jure Leskovec: “As much as we’ve done, we still have far to go — most of Pinterest hasn’t been built yet.”
By working with the research community and universities — such as the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, University of California San Diego, and Stanford University — Pinterest Labs is hoping to build the AI systems for some of its integral features. These include the “taste graph,” the technique used by the company to map the connections between pins, people, and boards in order to surface relevant ideas for users. The company is also hoping machine learning can help it to provide personalized recommendations faster.
Those interested in its work can keep up with the research group on its dedicated website, and by attending its public tech talks, the first of which took place on Tuesday at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. Pinterest Labs will also share its findings with the academic community by publishing research papers and releasing its data to researchers.
Leskovec claims that Pinterest’s systems now rank more than 300 billion objects per day. In the last year, the platform has increased the number of recommendations it serves by 200 percent, while making them 30 percent more engaging.
Pinterest took a big leap in to machine learning with the launch of its Pinterest Lens tool at the start of this month. The machine learning system that powers Lens can recognize objects in photos, along with identifying their features, such as color, allowing users to snap images with their smartphone camera in order to discover and purchase related items on Pinterest.
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?