Pinterest releases artificial intelligence tool to buy items

Ever looked at an image and wanted to buy a specific item in it?

Well, starting tomorrow, Pinterest is releasing an artificial intelligence tool that utilizes deep learning that will allow you to search items within an image, find it, and potentially buy it, according to Pinterest's blog.

To use the function, Pinterest users can tap a search tool that will appear in the corner of pins. From there, users will be able to draw a box around the specific item they would like to search. So, if you're looking at a photo of a living room and are only interested in the lamp, you can single out that specific item.

Pinterest will then draw from its index to produce the same exact item or visually similar items.Pinterest also rolled out a buy button feature over the summer for Pinterest posts, meaning that users could theoretically search for an item in an image and buy it on the spot.

“Image representation coming from deep learning is much, much more accurate,” Kevin Jing, head of visual search at Pinterest, told MIT review. “Even this year there has been so much improvement.”

Pinterest is not the first to use deep learning for image searching purposes.

Google's TensorFlow, an artificial intelligence system made open source earlier this month, is scarily good at searching through photos because it can recognize places based on popular landmarks.

Deep learning works by searching through layers of data to recognize images. In regards to Google's TensorFlow, the system will look through data to determine what the picture is. It'll first look for basic characteristics, like the shape of the image, and then get more specific, such as whether it has paws indicating it's an animal. 

Pinterest's deep learning system will work similarly to determine what the image is and then scan an index to see if similar ones are available.

Footwear retailer Shoes.com is currently testing a deep learning tool in its Canadian store, according to MIT review. The system will allow you to continuously filter through boot styles to find the particular type you are looking for.

Source :Tech insider 

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Reddit Names Marty Weiner, Founding Engineer At Pinterest, Its First CTO

There are plenty of things on Steve Huffman's to-do list since returning to Reddit as its CEO. Having a gifted technical mind himself, currently doing double duty as Hipmunk's CTO, the need for a technical lead at Reddit was glaring.

The company has announced that it has hired founding engineer at Pinterest, Marty Weiner, as its first CTO in company history. Weiner spent over four and a half years at Pinterest, telling us that he and Pinterest's CEO, Ben Silbermann, have been hacking together since way before Pinterest was started. With Pinterest prepping for a potential public market debut at some point, we think, Weiner has stepped away and into a new role that is indeed a challenge.

In an email to TechCrunch, Weiner calls this the “hardest decision of my life” but that it was time to move on to something new. His list of things to tackle consist of building an engineering culture that will help with recruiting, expanding diversity and scaling Reddit's current infrastructure and processes.

Choosing not to discuss Reddit's recent community and executive issues, Weiner says he is focused on the future and “helping grow an already amazing team and building amazing tech.”

Reddit is just as excited to have him, as co-founder Alexis Ohanian told us:

As the founding engineer + architect of Pinterest, Marty's experience, leadership, and ability speaks for itself. With all the opportunities in the world open to him, we're amped to work with him to take Reddit to new heights.

Weiner's history with that team includes being introduced to Ohanian through his brother, eventually meeting regularly for coffee. Admittedly, he's still getting to know Huffman, who tells us:

Engineering is Reddit's largest team, and in order to build everything we'd like, we will need as many engineers and as much leadership as possible. He (Weiner) is supremely talented technically, deeply understands Reddit, and not only has a clear vision for how to build out the team–he has done it before.

I asked a few folks about Weiner and his technical chops, and was told by a few of them to check out one of his “Scaling Pinterest” presentations that he gave over the better part of a year. It's definitely worth the watch:

This is the type of approach that Reddit, which had over 195M unique visitors last month making it the #10 most trafficked site in the US (Pinterest is in the 16th spot), clearly needed. Not having an official CTO for ten years is pretty unheard of.

He says his goal is to build, as he calls it, the “dream machine”:

….an engineering org and tech stack that makes any new product idea at Reddit prototypable and shippable faster and better with every passing month.

If Weiner can successfully wade through the community mess that the rest of the executives can now focus on, there's no telling what Reddit can evolve into from a technical perspective. Maybe it'll even get a redesign one day…

…probably not.

Source  : TechCrunch 

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The incredibly humble way Pinterest celebrated its first million pins

Yash Nelapati helped build Pinterest from scratch. He joined the startup as its founding engineer way back in January 2010, before the site launched in beta that March.

He fondly remembers holing up in an apartment with cofounders Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp, hustling away on idea initially described to him as a new way to let people collect stuff on the web. 

As is the case with most startups, friends and family of the three young men comprised Pinterest's initial userbase.

But, it didn't take too long before the site started gaining some real traction. 

Nelapati laughs when he tells Business Insider about what happened when Pinterest hit one of its first huge landmarks in 2011, finally seeing its millionth pin uploaded into the system. 

"I expected us to have a feast or that we would do something really cool," he recalls. "But Ben just bought five bagels and one breadstick, laid them on the table and said, 'Hey, time to celebrate!'"

That was Pinterest's style: Humble, hard-working, and charging on to the next milestone every time it hit one.

With that attitude, the site has since grown to more than 50 billion pins collected by more than 70 million monthly users. Nelapati, who still works there, is far from the only engineer now, and works alongside more than 200 others around the world. Pinterest scored an $11 billion valuation for its last Series G fundraise.  

That modest celebration is just one of the many early-days memories Nelapati holds dear.

While still in that Palo Alto apartment, he, Silbermann, and Sharp would catch each other up on their progress every morning around 9:30 AM. Nelapati remembers one particularly brutal day when Silbermann came back from meetings in his efforts to raise money, feeling discouraged. To cheer up, the three decided to spend the afternoon playing tennis and drinking beer. Pinterest eventually merged the two traditions and still holds a Friday happy hour ever week where everyone meets up and gets invited to ask Silbermann questions. 

There's other traditions that still live on too. Whenever Nelapati used to deploy new code, Sharp would stand behind him blasting "Push It" by Salt-n-Pepa and dancing around. 

"Even today, whenever we ship something, the people who worked on it come and pin their project to this big board we have in the office, while Evan is playing Salt-n-Pepa," he says.  

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