Pinterest, Inc. said it is planning to invest $4 billion in AI through an Amazon company over the next half a decade, months after it announced laying off less than 15 percent of its workforce.
The visual search engine and social media platform is renewing its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), tapping the latter to train large language and vision-language models for personalized visual search and AI-assisted discovery, both companies said in separate statements on Thursday.
The heavy investment in AI marks the visual search platform’s largest infrastructure commitment in its history, after announcing last January that it would undergo a global restructuring to focus more on AI-related initiatives.
Under this renewed partnership, Pinterest would use Amazon’s computer chips called Trainium, which process enormous amounts of data. A single Trainium chip, for example, could do trillions of calculations per second to train machine learning models.
Pinterest would also expand its use of another Amazon computer chip called Graviton, which was designed for cloud computing to help companies run their apps faster. Graviton, which is already powering roughly a third of Pinterest’s infrastructure, would run more of the systems that aid in discovery.
The historic investment, which would be spent over the years to 2031, marks another milestone in a partnership that began in 2010. AWS said Pinterest is one of its longest running clients.
“Pinterest is building some of the most advanced visual AI systems on AWS,” said David Brown, senior vice president of compute and machine learning services at the Amazon company. “AWS compute and purpose-built silicon like Trainium and Graviton give Pinterest the price-performance to train and run AI models at massive scale across both training and inference.”
Matt Madrigal, Pinterest’s chief technology officer, said the company is heavily investing in AI to improve on what the app does best, making discoveries “more personal, visual, and actionable” for more than 600 million active users worldwide.
“This expanded commitment with AWS gives us the compute flexibility, hardware optionality, and infrastructure efficiency to accelerate our AI vision for the next generation of visual discovery on Pinterest,” he said in a statement.
Besides its implications on jobs and the quality of work, AI has also been strongly but subtly changing consumer behaviors from how they shop to how they search. In October last year, Pinterest launched its Pinterest Assistant, an AI that can make personalized recommendations, or as Pinterest previously described it, “like a best friend suggesting the perfect new look.”
