Hedge Funds Decode Global Economy via Ships, Satellites
Hedge fund: To infer economic activity and the capacity of global supply chains, we track shipping manifests and buy satellite imagery. Average gamer:
Alibaba's CoInteract Improves AI Product Videos with Interaction Geometry
Many of the eCommerce product showcase videos you now see on Instagram and TikTok are AI-generated. It's generally fairly easy to tell because the hands may be mangled, the faces don't retain consistency throughout, and/or the person in the video...
LLMs Excel as Judges, Not Just Generators, Says Netflix
Many projects aimed at integrating LLMs into consumer-facing product features focus on generating content, which I think is mistaken. The power of LLMs for consumer-facing tasks is often better invoked through systems that rank, sort, classify, etc. at scale according...
Snap's Subscription Model Isn’t a Viable Benchmark for Meta
$SNAP’s subscription product is not a useful benchmark for $META’s in estimating potential subscription revenue. First, Meta already has a subscription product: Meta Verified. That’s the most direct opportunity for establishing a conversion baseline. It’s low. One might also look...
SpaceX Reports $100M Q1 Ad Revenue Dip
From the SpaceX S-1: X saw a $100MM decrease in advertising revenue in Q1, due to an "overhaul of the Company's advertising platform which impacted ad sales for a short period of time during the rebuild." https://t.co/emjCmlkAMG
Walmart Boosts Ad Relevance by Prioritizing Semantics over Clicks
How Walmart improved sponsored search by prioritizing semantic relevance over engagement Candidate retrieval in ad / RecSys systems often uses a user's historical engagement data as a proxy for relevance. But researchers at Walmart argue that this approach is incomplete in...
Amazon's Precise Ad Personalization Outshines Generic AI Ads
Amazon’s advertising advantages To the extent that consumers detect the AI-generated nature of ads — or even care about the provenance of ads in the first place — through genericity or contextual irrelevance, Amazon is certainly well-positioned to mitigate that penalty...
First-Price RTB Bidding Requires Joint Causal Value Learning
Can causal value be learned jointly with auction mechanics in a first-price RTB setting? A new paper from researchers at NYU and elsewhere argues that RTB bidding in first price auctions is fundamentally a causal inference problem, not simply an auction...
AI Advertising Splits Into Creation, Management, Targeting, Measurement
Components of AI-enabled advertising From my perspective, AI-enabled advertising pertains to the AI-enriched mechanisms used to generate advertising creative and to serve it to users: in other words, how ads are created, how ad campaigns are managed and optimized, how ads...
Looking for Underrated Analysts On
Please suggest underfollowed analysts / researchers writing about: - economics of AI (excluding semis/infra) - digital marketplaces - commerce - advertising I'm looking for people with differentiated thinking / perspectives, especially independent bloggers or podcasters. Please tag them or link their work.
Ad Stack Rebuilt Around Generative Retrieval
Fantastic new (from April) paper from Kuaishou on GR4AD (Generative Recommendation for ADvertising). Kuaishou has made several important recent contributions to generative recommendation systems, particularly with its OneRec architecture. But GR4AD advances a more radical proposition: that the modern advertising...
Programmatic Ads Now Drive over a Third of Spotify Revenue
Interesting data point from Spotify’s $SPOT earnings call last week: more than 1/3rd of its advertising revenue is now generated from “biddable” (programmatic) buying. https://t.co/iO6L7ngsmh
Compute Scarcity Hits Frontier Models Harder than Weaker Ones
This only applies when 1) the price increase is the same for both products in absolute terms and 2) the products are direct substitutes. Frontier models generally consume materially more inference compute than weaker models. Compute scarcity doesn’t affect all models...
AppLovin Q1 Revenue Jumps 59%, Net Income Surges 67%
AppLovin $APP released its Q1 2026 earnings: revenue of $1.842 BN (+59% y/y), Net Income from continuing operations of $1.206 BN (+67% y/y), Q2 revenue guidance of $1.915 BN - $1.945 BN.
OpenAI Rolls Out Ad Tools, Targeting SMB eCommerce
ChatGPT launches a CAPI, a pixel, and self-serve "It’s not hard to imagine how the ad platform evolves from here. OpenAI is almost assuredly building a platform in the image of Meta’s, which means it will cater the platform to...