“The new A.I., known as Reinforce, was a kind of long-term addiction machine. It was designed to maximize usersā engagement over time by predicting which recommendations would expand their tastes and get them to watch not just one more video but many more.
Reinforce was a huge success. In a talk at an A.I. conference in February, Minmin Chen, a Google Brain researcher, said it was YouTubeās most successful launch in two years. Sitewide views increased by nearly 1 percent, she said ā a gain that, at YouTubeās scale, could amount to millions more hours of daily watch time and millions more dollars in advertising revenue per year. She added that the new algorithm was already starting to alter usersā behavior.
āWe can really lead the users toward a different state, versus recommending content that is familiar,ā Ms. Chen said.”
via “The Making of a YouTube Radical” by Kevin Roose in the New York Times