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Teaching Gemini to Speak YouTube: Adapting LLMs for Video Recommendations to 2B+DAU - Devansh Tandon

Jul 16, 2025 · 22:51

Devansh Tandon, a Product Manager at Google leading YouTube's discovery system, details how YouTube adapted Gemini LLMs to power its recommendation engine for billions of daily active users. The team built SemanticID, a tokenization system that compresses video features into semantically meaningful tokens, creating a new language for YouTube content. They then continued pre-training Gemini on sequences of user watches to make the model bilingual in English and this video language. For generative retrieval, they prompt the adapted model with user demographics and watch history to output video recommendations as SemanticIDs, achieving 95%+ cost savings to serve at scale. Challenges include serving billions of users with low latency and handling video freshness—Taylor Swift's new music video must be recommendable within minutes. Tandon argues LLM-led recommendations are a bigger consumer application than search and hints at future interactive, steerable recommendations and even personalized content creation.

Moondream: how does a tiny vision model slap so hard? — Vikhyat Korrapati

Nov 14, 2024 · 19:26

Vikhyat Korrapati built Moondream, a tiny open-source vision language model under 2 billion parameters that matches LLaVA 1.5, a model four times its size, on VQA v2 and GQA benchmarks. He attributes this to focusing on image understanding over world knowledge and investing heavily in synthetic training data—a pipeline that generated 35 million images and used two orders of magnitude more compute on data than training. Key lessons: community engagement was critical, open-source builds trust, and safety guardrails should be application-layer, not baked in. He argues tiny models will dominate production due to cost and privacy advantages, and that prompting will replace custom model training for most vision tasks. Moondream raised a seed round from FullySysAscent and the GitHub Fund.