Descriptions:
Diarmuid Gill, CTO, and Liva Ralaivola, VP of Research and Head of the AI Lab at Criteo, join Nathan Labenz on the Cognitive Revolution to explain how one of the internet’s largest advertising technology platforms uses AI to deliver personalized recommendations in milliseconds. Criteo processes real-time bids across roughly one billion user profiles in the time it takes a browser to load a single web page — a latency constraint that shapes every architectural decision the company makes.
The conversation covers Criteo’s evolution from hand-crafted features to deep learning, and how the company has built a modular foundation model architecture where pre-computed user and product embeddings serve as reusable signals across many downstream tasks — a design that mirrors strategies used by major financial AI systems and allows prolific experimentation without retraining from scratch. Gill and Ralaivola also discuss their nascent partnership with OpenAI, which aims to combine ChatGPT’s broad world knowledge with accurate, real-time product inventory data.
Additional topics include why Criteo publishes research openly (including their full 50-person AI lab roster) as a deliberate talent moat, how European privacy compliance shapes their global tech stack, and the guests’ predictions for how generative AI and autonomous agents will reshape advertising as human attention becomes scarcer. The episode also features Alex Perster, CEO of Waymark, whose AI-powered commercial creation platform has partnered with Criteo to deliver creative solutions to advertisers.
📺 Source: Cognitive Revolution “How AI Changes Everything” · Published May 09, 2026
🏷️ Format: Podcast
