Hacker News Reader

Comment by alt227 | Hacker News Reader

Here we go, the start of LLMs plugged into everything. Do Netflix recommendations really need to use LLMs?

This post paints a very altruistic picture of how recommendations can be fed from user history, preferences, device and environment context etc. However they make no mention of needing to advertise content from paid clients, promote new releases, and increase views on certain underperforming content. I'm assuming that once their fancy LLM spits out some user recommendations, they are then run through another process to 'commercialise' the results before displaying them to the user.

View on HN

Why would they not try make money as a business?

Also, if "The Odyssey" is coming out and and you know I love Nolan, and Netflix is getting paid to promote it, would you rather them NOT recommend that to me?

These types of things are natrually constrained. If you send me too many ads, or bad content, I leave. So you are incentived to do a good job.

You could make the argument that you just need to be incrementally better than the other streaming service, but then you are giving away potential advantage and profit.

Netflix is way overfitted on short-term money like that, to make up for the fact that they have an extremely tiny library.

If that's true, people will leave for bigger libraries and netflix will have to rotate into quantity. That hasn't been the case so far (net flix is killing everyone in terms of subscribers/growth YoY), but doesnt mean it can't be, especially with the paramount merger potentially going through.

I think it's been a little bit proven that it's more about specific shows (friends, seinfeld, how to lose a guy in 10 days, etc) that just mass amount of quantity, but we'll see

You completely miss the point.

The point was that Netflix have written a massive huge technical blog post about how they are using a fashionable new technology to give better recommendations based on your data alone. However they have left out the most important part, how they squeeze their money making suggestions in to this.

A better blog post would have included that part to, but it goes to show that this post was never about technical prowess and always about marketing.

From that perspective, every technical blog post from a company is guilty of the same thing.

That was my point. There is nothing that companies do that is NOT to make money. I feel like that would be like saying the Attention is All You Need paper is disengenious because it doesn't explain how it will make Google billions more in search profit.

They don't pretend otherwise, the article clarifies that their LLM has to take into account "business constraints" and such (which gave me a pretty nasty impression as I read it).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com