Cristos Goodrow: YouTube Algorithm

Cristos Goodrow is VP of Engineering at Google and head of Search and Discovery at YouTube (aka YouTube Algorithm). This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”.  Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. 00:00 – Introduction 03:26 – Life-long trajectory through YouTube 07:30 – Discovering new ideas on YouTube 13:33 – Managing healthy conversation 23:02 – YouTube Algorithm 38:00 – Analyzing the content of video itself 44:38 – Clickbait thumbnails and titles 47:50 – Feeling like I’m helping the YouTube algorithm get smarter 50:14 – Personalization 51:44 – What does success look like for the algorithm? 54:32 – Effect of YouTube on society 57:24 – Creators 59:33 – Burnout 1:03:27 – YouTube algorithm: heuristics, machine learning, human behavior 1:08:36 – How to make a viral video? 1:10:27 – Veritasium: Why Are 96,000,000 Black Balls on This Reservoir? 1:13:20 – Making clips from long-form podcasts 1:18:07 – Moment-by-moment signal of viewer interest 1:20:04 – Why is video understanding such a difficult AI problem? 1:21:54 – Self-supervised learning on video 1:25:44 – What does YouTube look like 10, 20, 30 years from now?