Feedback loops, and Google’s home-field advantage with LLMs

When I was at Pinterest leading product for the Discovery team, we started to leverage deep learning for our recommendations. It was always the case that while deep learning enabled a step-function change in the results (as measured by user engagement), the results got dramatically better once we took that user engagement data and fed it back into the model to further tune the results. We’d go from a place of discontinuous change with each step-function upgrade of the model, to a world with a compounding feedback loop.