• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

Pinterest has announced a partnership with GPU-manufacturer Nvidia, which will power a new layer of artificial intelligence (AI) in an effort to expand the social discovery platform’s automated shopping offerings.

The company's new AI layer combines Nvidia's hardware and Pinterest’s visual embeddings, designed to provide Pinterest’s teams with the ability to build and launch multimodal AI products without having to create an individual infrastructure for each offering.

According to the announcement, the partnership will “support a growing range of products that rely on both images and language, including visual search, content understanding and safety systems.”

By investing in Nvidia's hardware, Pinterest is attempting to not only expand its automated online shopping ecosystem, but to “deliver faster, smarter, and more personalized experiences” for the platform's user base, according to Kartik Paramasivam, Pinterest’s chief architect.

Right now, Pinterest supports over 80 billion monthly searches. In early tests, Nvidia’s contribution has enabled Pinterest Assistant -- the platform’s chatbot -- to run 25x more visual context per request.

“In benchmark testing, Pinterest saw average improvements of about 85x faster response startup and 7.3x faster overall latency when using precomputed visual representations instead of repeatedly processing raw images,” the announcement reads.

Onboarding 14,000 Nvidia GPUs to power its shopping ecosystem and search experience comes after Pinterest CEO Bill Ready called AI “a clear accelerant” for the business.

“AI is at the heart of our momentum,” Ready said in an earnings call last quarter, calling Pinterest as a whole “an AI-driven shopping assistant.”

“Over time, our goal is for nearly every lower funnel campaign on Pinterest to start in an AI-powered best practice setup with added controls for more complex buyers who need them,” Ready explained.

“Our near-term roadmap, including a simpler campaign creation flow, more sophisticated bidding, and more automated creative, is designed to drive the next leg of Pinterest Performance+ adoption.”