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Launch HN: Shaped (YC W22) – AI-Powered Recommendations and Search

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Launch HN: Shaped (YC W22) – AI-Powered Recommendations and Search

#1
Hey HN! Tullie and Dan here from Shaped (https://www.shaped.ai/). We're building a semantic recommendation and search platform for marketplaces and content companies.

There’s a sandbox at https://play.shaped.ai/dashboard/home that you can use to explore demo models and evaluate results interactively. And we have a demo video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toCsUYQnJ_g.

The explosion of online content, driven by both individuals and generative tools, is making it harder than ever for users to sift through the noise and find what's relevant to them. Platforms like Netflix, TikTok, and Meta have set a high bar, proving that personalized experiences are key to cutting through the clutter and engaging users effectively.

Despite advancements in AI and semantic infrastructure like vector stores, building a truly relevant recommendation or search system is still extremely difficult. It's not just about deploying the latest LLM—the difficulties lie in creating the infrastructure to orchestrate the components seamlessly. Consider the challenge of continuously fine-tuning models with fresh data while simultaneously serving real-time personalized recommendations to millions of users. It requires a delicate balancing act of speed, scale, and sophistication.

Our goal is to empower any technical team to build state-of-the-art recommendation and search systems, regardless of their data infrastructure. Here's how we eliminate the friction:

Solving Data Challenges: We integrate directly with your data sources—Segment, Amplitude, Rudderstack, and more. We handle the complexities of real-time streaming, ETLs, and data quality robustness, so you can get started in minutes.

Leveraging Cutting-Edge Models – we utilize state-of-the-art large-scale language, image, and tabular encoding models. This not only extracts maximum value from your data but also simplifies the process, even with unstructured data.

Real-time Optimization: Unlike vision or NLP tasks, recommendation system performance hinges on real-time capabilities—training, feature engineering, and serving. We've architected our platform with this at its core.

We're already helping many companies build relevant recommendations and search for their users. Outdoorsy, for example, uses us to power its RV rental marketplace. E-commerce businesses like DribbleUp and startups like Overlap have seen up to a 40% increase in both conversions and engagement when integrating Shaped.

A bit about us: Tullie was previously an AI Researcher at FAIR working on multimodal ranking at Meta. He released PyTorchVideo, a widely-used video understanding library, which contains the video understanding models that power systems like IG Reels. Dan led product research at Afterpay and Uber, driven by how behavioral psychology influences user experience.

We've been heads down building Shaped for quite a while, so this launch feels like a big milestone. We'd love to hear your feedback – technical deep dives, feature requests, you name it. Let us know what you think!

Re: Launch HN: Shaped (YC W22) – AI-Powered Recommendations and Search

#2
How do you measure quality? And, can users game that quality?

I think that's the hardest thing on any recommendation or search system. It's really hard to do without using money as a neutral measure of value. And, without a good measure of quality - it's unclear that the system is optimizing the right metrics (without cannibalizing others).

Re: Launch HN: Shaped (YC W22) – AI-Powered Recommendations and Search

#3
This seems like a tough build vs buy sell. For a lot (most?) companies, the search/recommendation system isn't necessarily optimized for the customer's search. Instead, it's a way to maximize revenue via preferred placement or inject ads. This almost always leads to a gigantic if/else chain of bespoke business analyst driven decisions for the marketplace.

How are you going to allow folks to influence the system? Or do you see your system integrated behind their pseudo-recommendation engine?

Re: Launch HN: Shaped (YC W22) – AI-Powered Recommendations and Search

#4

This seems like a tough build vs buy sell. For a lot (most?) companies, the search/recommendation system isn't necessarily optimized for the customer's search. Instead, it's a way to maximize revenue via preferred placement or inject ads. This almost always leads to a gigantic if/else chain of bespoke business analyst driven decisions for the marketplace. How are you going to allow folks to influence the system? Or d…

Can you tell me what industry your viewpoint is from? My viewpoint from another industry is also about maximizing revenue - but if/else statements have no part, it's data-derived.

Re: Launch HN: Shaped (YC W22) – AI-Powered Recommendations and Search

#5

How do you measure quality? And, can users game that quality? I think that's the hardest thing on any recommendation or search system. It's really hard to do without using money as a neutral measure of value. And, without a good measure of quality - it's unclear that the system is optimizing the right metrics (without cannibalizing others).

Thanks for the first question!

We run online A/B tests to objectively measure quality against our ranking algorithms and other baselines. As you mentioned it's crucial that the measure of quality for these tests chosen is fair and correlates with the topline business objective. E.g. if you just evaluate clicks then the system will show click-baity content and overall perform worse.

To handle this, we make it really easy to define different objectives and experiment with how it changes results. So although we don't claim to solve the issue directly, we believe that if users can quickly experiment with different proxy objectives, that'll be able to find the one that correlates with their topline objective quicker.

Re: Launch HN: Shaped (YC W22) – AI-Powered Recommendations and Search

#7
Congratulations on the launch. We've weighed up algolia, in house, type-sense etc and so I'd would have been very keen to know more, but asking for us to integrate before knowing the pricing is a tough sell.

Would highly recommend having at least an estimated pricing calculator so we can determine if its worth our time to install.

Re: Launch HN: Shaped (YC W22) – AI-Powered Recommendations and Search

#8

This seems like a tough build vs buy sell. For a lot (most?) companies, the search/recommendation system isn't necessarily optimized for the customer's search. Instead, it's a way to maximize revenue via preferred placement or inject ads. This almost always leads to a gigantic if/else chain of bespoke business analyst driven decisions for the marketplace. How are you going to allow folks to influence the system? Or d…

The build vs buy decision does come up, but like you mentioned, the product direction of Shaped is to be primitives for search and recommendation, allowing users that want to build use Shaped to empower them to build quicker (e.g. integrated behind their psudo-recommendation engine). In truth we have multiple abstractions to Shaped allowing more technical teams to integrate like this, or less technical ones to have more of an end-to-end integration experience.

The other related market trend we think about here: recommendation is going through a similar journey to what search did 10 years ago. Search at some point was more build leaning, but over time the technology became democratized and then companies like Elastic and Algolia had offerings that pushed search to lean towards buy. We're seeing recommendations going through the same revolution now that the technologies and system design (e.g. 4 stage recommenders) are more solidified. It's the data that makes these systems unique between companies not the infrastructure or algorithms.

Re: Launch HN: Shaped (YC W22) – AI-Powered Recommendations and Search

#10

Congratulations on the launch. We've weighed up algolia, in house, type-sense etc and so I'd would have been very keen to know more, but asking for us to integrate before knowing the pricing is a tough sell. Would highly recommend having at least an estimated pricing calculator so we can determine if its worth our time to install.

Thank you!

Would love to chat, we've had several customers come over from Algolia and they've seen significant uplift. I can share more if you want to message me at tullie@shaped.ai.

Our pricing is competitive with Algolia's to give you an idea there. We really wanted to get pricing calculator done get before this post but ran out of time. Keep an eye out over the next month for it to come up!

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