The Funnel: From Millions to One

Podcast: Clown Cast · Joey Musselman

Opublikowano: 2026-10-15

Every recommender system that works at scale has the same shape: a funnel. Joey explores YouTube's 2016 paper on recommendations—the paper that switched YouTube from optimizing for clicks to watch time—and breaks down the funnel architecture that lets systems rank millions of items in milliseconds. This is episode one of Learning Recommender Systems, a series on how recommendation engines actually function. 00:00:00 - YouTube's 2016 recommendation paper 00:01:32 - The core problem: ranking millions in milliseconds 00:03:03 - The funnel structure 00:07:45 - What recommenders learn from 00:11:15 - Walking through a user's complete journey 00:13:01 - How scrolls become tomorrow's training data --- Sources & further read...