Shaped Blog
Explainable AI
Explainable AI is increasingly important as it helps users understand the decision-making processes of machine learning models, ensuring fairness, addressing potential biases, and complying with regulations.

Not your average RecSys metrics Part 2: Novelty
This blog post discusses the importance of novelty in recommendation systems and how it can improve user experience by providing diverse and unexpected suggestions.

Not your average RecSys metrics. Part 1: Serendipity
Let’s go beyond standard machine learning performance measurements and explore at how we can create Serendipity in a high performance recommendation system

How much data do I need for a recommendation system?
If you’re interested in recommendation systems but not sure whether you have enough data this blog post is for you!

Twitter's Open Source Algorithm - Unveiling the code, but not the secrets
Twitter has recently unveiled its open-source recommendation algorithm, aiming to offer users greater transparency into the process through which the platform selects and organizes content for display on their timelines.
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MovieLens to Production in Minutes
Learn how to use Shaped to build a personalized movie recommendation with the classic MovieLens dataset!

Evaluating recommendation systems (ROC, AUC, and Precision-Recall)
You probably have heard of terms like ROC, AUC, and Precision-recall, they show up in data science articles on Medium, machine learning tutorials, and academic papers are full of them. But why are they so important and what do they actually mean? Today we will dive into the specifics of those essential metrics, and explain how they work and their importance in the world of machine learning and recommendation systems.

Real-time Segment and Amplitude Connectors
Shaped is excited to announce that we now support real-time data streaming connectors for Amplitude and Segment.

Shaped 1.0: The fastest way to personalize your product, platform or marketplace
We’re excited to announce Shaped’s 1.0 release! This launch adds a new level of polish to our APIs, and docs while continuing to improve the performance for your personalization models. It’s now easier than ever to create your own personalization AI using state-of-the-art large language models and real-time streaming technologies.
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GPT-4: A New Milestone in Scaling Up Deep Learning
OpenAI has released its latest natural language processing system, GPT-4, which promises to be even more advanced and capable than its predecessor, GPT-3. GPT-4 is built on the same deep learning approach as the previous models but leverages more data and computation to achieve greater sophistication and accuracy.

Breaking Down Toolformer
Take a look at our discussion on Toolformer — Meta AI's recent approach to fusing large language models (LLM) with external APIs. This might be the start of a new programming paradigm that combines zero-shot machine-learning methodology with traditional software interfaces.

Size Isn't Everything - How LLaMA democratizes access to Large-Language-Models
Recently, Meta announced the release of a new AI language generator called LLaMA. While tech enthusiasts have been primarily focused on language models developed by Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI, LLaMA is a research tool designed to help researchers advance their work in the subfield of AI. In this blog post, we will explain how LLaMA is helping to democratize large language models.

Evaluating recommendation systems (mAP, MMR, NDCG)
Imagine you’re shown two ordered feeds of product recommendations from separate algorithms. In the first one (A) you’re shown: Nike sneakers, Adidas shorts, and an Apple Watch. In the second one (B) you’re shown the order: Apple Watch, Adidas shorts, and Nike Sneakers. -- Which feed is more relevant to you?

Sounding The Secrets Of AudioLM
Dive into the inner workings of Google AI’s awesome language modeling approach to audio generation!

Shaped is now SOC 2 Compliant
Shaped is SOC 2 Type 1 certified and compliant, a significant milestone in our journey to provide secure and trustworthy products to customers. This certification demonstrates our commitment to our customer’s data security, providing third-party attestations of our company’s security and compliance standards.

Do Large Language Models (LLMs) reason?
In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), enabling significant advancements in language understanding, text generation, and more. With the help of memorization and compositionality capabilities, LLMs can perform various tasks like never before. They're already at the core of several products used by millions of people, such as Google's search engine, Github's Copilot, and OpenAI's ChatGPT!

The Secret Sauce of Tik-Tok’s Recommendations
Dive into the inner workings of TikTok’s awesome real-time recommendation system and learn what makes it one of the best in the field!

Evaluating Recommendation Systems - Precision@k, Recall@k, and R-Precision
Imagine you’re given three movie recommendations from separate algorithms. In the first one (A) you’re given: The Terminator, James Bond, and Star Wars. In the second (B) you’re given: Cars, Toy Story, and Iron Man -- Which recommendation is more relevant to you?

Whisper 🤫 : A multilingual and multitask robust ASR model
Open-AI released Whisper, an open source speech recognition model with human level robustness and accuracy on English language. Trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web.
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Microsoft vs Google - ChatGPT taking over search?
If you haven't been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you've probably heard about the ChatGPT hype and how it's changed how people think of large language models (LLMs). You might not be aware that Microsoft and OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, have been working closely together since 2019 [1]; there are speculations that Microsoft intends to increase its investment by $10 billion [2].

Shaped vs. Algolia Recommend
Comparing Shaped with Algolia Recommend

Real-time Search, Session, and Similar Ranking
Today we’re excited to announce the release of several APIs and features that help you get the most from your Shaped ranking and recommendation models.

Asking ChatGPT about itself and the future of chatbots
OpenAI just released a new large language model fine-tuned for conversational AI based on gpt-3.5. We tried it out at https://chat.openai.com/chat and asked to write a blog post about itself, the results are amazing!
Why your feeds are getting worse over time
If you’ve ever browsed TikTok’s For You Page, Facebook Newsfeed, Instagram Reels, Youtube Shorts, or any “infinite” scrolling social feed you have been served personalized recommendations. These feeds use algorithms to find out what content will keep you browsing the feed. I’ve seen many people complain about how their personalized feeds get worse over time, recommending the same topic over and over, old content, or even things you already consumed.

Your browsing behavior is being modeled as a language
What if I told you that your web browsing is being modeled as a language in most of the web pages you visit? Let me show you why and how.

Day 3 of #Recsys2022: our favorite 5 papers and talks
The last day at RecSys 2022 started with a session on Sessions and Interaction, moved on to Models and Learning to finish with Large-Scale Recommendations. Here are our favorite 5 papers and talks of the day.

Day 2 of #RecSys2022: Our favorite 5 papers and talks
It’s been another fantastic day at RecSys 2022. Following the Women in RecSys Breakfast, the day started with a keynote from Catherine D’Ignazio and then throughout the day had the following sessions: Fairness & Privacy, Diversity & Novely, and Models and Learning I. Here are our favorite 5 papers and talks.

Day 1 of #Recsys2022: Our favorite 5 papers and talks
We just wrapped up a fantastic first day at Recsys2022 in Seattle. If you see the Shaped team come say hi. Here are our favorite 5 papers and talks of the day.

Shaped vs. AWS Personalize
Comparing Shaped with AWS Personalize

10 ways AI will change products and experiences in the next 5 years
The field of artificial intelligence is growing at an extraordinary speed. Check out some selected topics that we think AI will affect and be a big factor in the upcoming years.

A ranking model for every use-case!
Introducing Shaped's "Model API". A configuration API to Shaped's multi-stage recommendation system.

Exploration vs. Exploitation in Recommendation Systems

Yann LeCun: A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence
How could machines learn as efficiently as humans and animals?
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From Analytics to Action
A little less analytics, a little more action please.

Information Retrieval Systems, the precursors of Recommender Systems
Not sure about the differences between information retrieval systems and recommender systems? Don't worry, we got you covered.

Takeaways from the Nvidia Recommender Systems Summit 2022
This year’s recommender systems summit included a great set of speakers, each one sharing unique learnings on working with recommender systems.

Data-Centric AI for Ranking
Data quality and volume is what makes rankings algorithms at big-tech so seamless. How can you create the same experiences with the data you have? Data-centric AI may be the answer!

Shaped API Docs
We just released Shaped's API docs at: docs.shaped.ai

Why Airbnb Made Such a Big Deal About Categories
From Search based to Discovery first

$1.9M Seed Round
Shaped is proud to announce our $1.9 million seed round!

YC Demo Day W22
We just presented to 1500 investors at Demo Day W22!

Shaped is backed by Y Combinator
We’re excited to announce that Shaped is backed by Y Combinator as part of its Winter 2022 batch!
