Pinterest has engineered a way to serve its photo-sharing community more of the images they love.
The social-image service, with more than 400 million monthly active users, has trained bigger recommender models for improved accuracy at predicting people's interests.
Pinterest handles hundreds of millions of user requests an hour on any given day. And it must also narrow down relevant images from roughly 300 billion images on the site to roughly 50 for each person.
The last step - ranking the most relevant and engaging content for everyone using Pinterest - required a leap in acceleration to run heftier models, with minimal latency, for better predictions.
Pinterest has improved the accuracy of its recommender models powering people's home feeds and other areas, increasing engagement by as much as 16%.
The leap was enabled by switching from CPUs to NVIDIA GPUs, which could easily be applied next to other areas, including advertising images, according to Pinterest.
Normally we would be happy with a 2% increase, and 16% is just a beginning for home feeds. We see additional gains - it opens a lot of doors for opportunities, said Pong Eksombatchai, a software engineer at Pinterest.
Transformer models capable of better predictions are shaking up industries from retail to entertainment and advertising. But their leaps in performance gains of the past few years have come with a need to serve models that are some 100x bigger as their number of model parameters and computations skyrockets.
Huge Inference Gains, Same Infrastructure Cost Like many, Pinterest engineers wanted to tap into state-of-the-art recommender models to increase engagement. But serving these massive models on CPUs presented a 100x increase in cost and latency. That wasn't going to maintain its magical user experience - fresh and more appealing images - occurring within a fraction of a second.
If that latency happened, then obviously our users wouldn't like that very much because they would have to wait forever, said Eksombatchai. We are pretty close to the limit of what we can do on CPU basically.
The challenge was to serve these hundredfold larger recommender models within the same cost and latency constraints.
Working with NVIDIA, Pinterest engineers began architectural changes to optimize their inference pipeline and recommender models to enable the transition from CPU to GPU cloud instances. The technology transition began late last year and required major changes to how the company manages workloads. The result is a 100x gain in inference efficiency on the same IT budget, meeting their goals.
We are starting to use really, really big models now. And that is where the GPU comes in - to help make these models possible, Eksombatchai said.
Tapping Into cuCollections Switching from CPUs to GPUs required rethinking its inference systems architecture. Among other issues, engineers had to change how they send workloads to their inference servers. Fortunately, there are tools to assist in making the transition easier.
The Pinterest inference server built for CPUs had to be altered because it was set up to send smaller batch sizes to its servers. GPUs can handle much larger workloads, so it's necessary to set up larger batch requests to increase efficiency.
One area where this comes into play is with its embedding table lookup module. Embedding tables are used to track interactions between various context-specific features and interests of user profiles. They can track where you navigate, and what people Pin on Pinterest, share or numerous other actions, helping refine predictions on what users might like to click on next.
They are used to incrementally learn user preference based on context in order to make better content recommendations to those using Pinterest. Its embedding table lookup module required two computation steps repeated hundreds of times because of the number of features tracked.
Pinterest engineers greatly reduced this number of operations using a GPU-accelerated concurrent hash table from NVIDIA cuCollections. And they set up a custom consolidated embedding lookup module so they could merge requests into a single lookup. Better results were seen immediately.
Using cuCollections helped us to remove bottlenecks, said Eksombatchai.
Enlisting CUDA Graphs Pinterest relied on CUDA Graphs to eliminate what was remaining of the small batch operations, further optimizing its inference models.
CUDA Graphs helps reduce the CPU interactions when launching on GPUs. They're designed to enable workloads to be defined as graphs rather than single operations. They provide a mechanism to launch multiple GPU operations through a single CPU operation, reducing CPU overheads.
Pinterest enlisted CUDA Graphs to represent the model inference process as a static graph of operation instead of as those individually scheduled. This enabled the computation to be handled as a single unit without any kernel launching overhead.
The company now supports CUDA Graph as a new backend of its model server. When a model is first loaded, the model server runs the model inference once to build the graph instance. This graph can then be run repeatedly in inference to show content on its app or site.
Implementing CUDA Graphs helped Pinterest to significantly reduce inference latency of its recommender models, according to its engineers.
GPUs have enabled Pinterest to do something that was impossible with CPUs on the same budget, and by doing this they can make changes that have a direct impact on various business metrics.
Learn about Pinterest's GPU-driven inference and optimizations at its GTC session, Serving 100x Bigger Recommender Models, and in the Pinterest Engineering blog.
Register for GTC, running Sept. 19-22, for free to attend sessions with NVIDIA and dozens of industry leaders.
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
09/10/2026
September 10 2026, 06:00 (PDT) Dolby Expands Dolby OptiView Platform with New Capabilities at IBC 2026
New Sports Intelligence helps providers better unders...
07/10/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, today announced the latest Long-Term Supported (LTS) release of Dalet Flex. Build...
30/09/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/09/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/09/2026
The An Evening with Emerson, Lake and Palmer tour brings one of rock's most iconic bands back to the stage. These performances seamlessly blend live foota...
30/09/2026
Schibsted Media, one of Norways largest and most influential digital media publishers and content producers, has invested in mixers and digital signal processor...
30/09/2026
Big Blue Marble announces the addition of live multiview channels to Cloud Video Kit, its broadcast-grade video processing platform. The feature is powered by A...
30/09/2026
Leading video software provider Synamedia today announced that Telekom Slovenije, Slovenia's largest provider of telecommunications and TV services, is open...
30/09/2026
PODCAST EXPO 2026 Recorded Using Blackmagic Design Workflow
Brie Clayton September 29, 2026
0 Comments
Conference featuring 24 sessions over two days ...
30/09/2026
IBC2026 Show Report
David Kirk September 29, 2026
0 Comments
The International Broadcasting Convention has long been Europe's equivalent of the US...
30/09/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/09/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/09/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/09/2026
Mavis has launched Mavis Camera 8.2, the latest release of its professional camera app for the iPhone and iPad. This update brings support for iPhone 18 Pro and...
30/09/2026
How to Shop Well Now starts Monday at 9.35pm
on RT One and RT Player
On the...
30/09/2026
Building on nearly a decade of co-engineering, CoreWeave has built NVIDIA compute, networking and software into a cloud purpose-built for AI that's still re...
29/09/2026
Oak View Group (OVG) has announced Cisco as an Official Technology Partner, with plans to standardize infrastructure across its venue network on Cisco solutions...
29/09/2026
SportsNet Pittsburgh (SNP) won three honors at the 2026 Mid-Atlantic Emmy Awards.
Program awards went to Bucs BP in the Sports Program Live category (produced ...
29/09/2026
The Professional Women's Hockey League has announced home openers for all 12 teams for the 2026-27 season, along with a broadcast partnership with CBC under...
29/09/2026
Manifold technologies has been recognized as a contributor to the Media eXchange...
29/09/2026
FuboTV has announced My Local Sports, allowing subscribers in select markets to add their local regional sports network (RSN) as an add-on to a Fubo Sports subs...
29/09/2026
Asian News International (ANI), a wire agency and video news provider based in India, has deployed Grass Valley's AMPP Media Operating System and Framelight...
29/09/2026
South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has deployed Ikegami UHK-X600 cameras as part of an upgrade to IP-based production infrastructure. The deployment ...
29/09/2026
REMI, REMCO models will drive the bulk of the broadcaster's NHL productions ...
29/09/2026
Three years in, the facility is supporting more centralized race production, com...
29/09/2026
NBC, Peacock, and NBSN are carrying all four Wild Card series with a production ...
29/09/2026
19 Nonfiction Projects Across All Stages of Production to Receive More Than $1 million in Support as Documentary Film Program Approaches 25th Anniversary
LOS ...
29/09/2026
Two new plug-ins launch alongside updated bundles
Zynaptiq have just announced the launch of two new plug-ins, alongside new and improved versions of two of...
29/09/2026
All-in-one bus processor revealed
Wes Audio's ng product range has come a long way since it was first introduced, and now includes a tasty selection of ...
29/09/2026
eds3_5_jq(document).ready(function($) { $(#eds_sliderM519).chameleonSlider_2_1({ content_source:......
29/09/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/09/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/09/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/09/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/09/2026
Ikegami announces that the South African Broadcasting Corporation, SABC, has chosen Ikegami UHK-X600 camera systems as part of an advance to IP-based operation ...
29/09/2026
Blendkit Offers 20% Discount to Celebrate Crossing 150K Asset Milestone
Brie Clayton September 29, 2026
0 Comments
Blendkit, the largest 3D asset libr...
29/09/2026
Interactive streaming specialist Ease Live supported more than 76.5 million fan sessions across three major European media operators during this summers FIFA Wo...
29/09/2026
Ease Live has added support for VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) to its graphical overlay technology, opening up new ways for broadcasters, streamers and rights...
29/09/2026
Rise AV has announced the launch of the inaugural Rise AV Awards, a new global awards programme celebrating the women, advocates and organisations across the AV...
29/09/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/09/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/09/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/09/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/09/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/09/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/09/2026
Clear-Com announced that First Baptist Nashville has upgraded its production communications with a Clear-Com intercom solution as part of a comprehensive sanct...
29/09/2026
Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K Captured Action Shots for Sketch
Brie Clayton September 28, 2026
0 Comments
Camera's portable design and dynamic range...
29/09/2026
Kean Production Services Deploys AJA ColorBox to Deliver Consistent, Accurate Co...
Pinterest has engineered a way to serve its photo-sharing community more of the images they love.
