The presentation discusses Spotify's approach to building a more connected and holistic system for content recommendation, utilizing machine learning models and data instrumentation.
- Spotify is building an encoder system that can encode a user's state into embeddings that are sensitive to actions and changes in satisfaction.
- They have built a simulator that can simulate user reactions to certain content, which is used to train the recommendation algorithm.
- A/B testing is used to compare agents trained on good simulators versus less good simulators.
- Spotify is transitioning to a more farsighted approach to content recommendation, optimizing for long-term fulfilling content diet rather than clicks or streams.
- They are investing in data instrumentation to understand how users interact with their content and to create reusable data sets.
- Spotify has shared machine learning models that provide information on user affinities, similarities, and clustering, which are useful for many different features.
- Machine learning models are created for specific use cases, such as Discover Weekly or search, and optimize for different goals.