Subvolts take Reddit's AI chief details advanced recommender systems and the vital role of human content. Nov 10, 2025 - Developers
- Learn about advanced recommender system architectures and the challenges of balancing user experience with advertiser needs.
- Business
- Understand how AI drives user engagement and ad relevance on large consumer platforms and the ethical considerations involved.
- Everyday users
- Discover how AI shapes the content and ads you see on social media and why human interaction remains important.
This episode features a key AI leader from a major social platform discussing practical AI applications and ethical considerations.
From Rabbit Holes to Recommendations: Reddit’s Vishal Gupta
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From Subvolts
Summary and analysis by Subvolts editorial, AI-assisted.
Reddit engineering manager Vishal Gupta discusses how the platform uses AI for user experience and ad relevance. He explains the evolution of recommender systems from basic filtering to deep learning and LLMs. Gupta also explores AI ethics, balancing user needs with advertiser goals, and the enduring value of human conversation for AI training.
Reddit uses AI to suggest content and ads you'll like, moving beyond simple methods to complex systems. The episode explains how this works and why real human conversations are still crucial, even for training AI.
This episode offers insights into how a major social platform leverages advanced AI, including LLMs and multimodal understanding, to enhance user engagement and advertising. It's for anyone interested in the practical application of AI in consumer-facing products and the ethical considerations involved. The discussion on recommender systems and the balance between human and AI content connects to ongoing work at frontier labs exploring user interaction and content generation.
- HostSam Ransbotham
- HostShervin Khodabandeh
- GuestVishal Guptaengineering manager, machine learning, Reddit
- Guest: Vishal Gupta, engineering manager, machine learning at Reddit
- Show: Me, Myself, and AI
- Length: 25 minutes
- AI Evolution: Recommender systems evolved from collaborative filtering to deep learning and LLM-based systems.
- Guest Experience: Decade of experience at DeepMind, Google, and Twitter.
Vishal Gupta, engineering manager, machine learning at Reddit, joins the podcast to explain how the social media community platform uses artificial intelligence to improve user experience and ad relevance. Much of the advertising work relies on increasingly sophisticated recommender systems that have evolved from simple collaborative filtering to deep learning and large language model–based systems capable of multimodal understanding.
Vishal and Sam also explore the philosophical and ethical aspects of AI-driven platforms. Vishal emphasizes the importance of balance — between exploration and exploitation in recommendations, between advertiser goals and user experience, and between human- and machine-generated content. He argues that despite the rise of AI-generated material, authentic human conversation remains vital and even more valuable as models depend on it for training. Read the episode transcript here.
Guest bio:
Vishal Gupta is a seasoned engineering leader who leads multiple artificial intelligence and machine learning teams at Reddit in the ads domain. He has a decade of experience working on cutting-edge machine learning techniques at companies like DeepMind, Google, and Twitter. Gupta is passionate about applied AI research that significantly contributes to a company’s top and bottom lines.
Me, Myself, and AI is a podcast produced by MIT Sloan Management Review and hosted by Sam Ransbotham. It is engineered by David Lishansky and produced by Allison Ryder.
We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments may be used in Me, Myself, and AI materials.
- collaborative filtering
- Vishal Gupta
- A method for making recommendations based on what similar users like.
- deep learning
- Vishal Gupta
- A type of machine learning that uses complex neural networks to learn from data.
- large language model (LLM)
- Vishal Gupta
- AI systems trained on vast amounts of text data to understand and generate human-like language.
- multimodal understanding
- Vishal Gupta
- AI's ability to process and understand information from different types of data, like text, images, and audio.
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Questions people ask
- How does Reddit use AI for ads?
- Reddit uses sophisticated recommender systems, evolving from collaborative filtering to deep learning and LLMs, to improve ad relevance and user experience.
- What is the role of human content in AI?
- Vishal Gupta argues that authentic human conversation remains vital and valuable, even as AI-generated content rises, because AI models depend on it for training.
Page generated Oct 19, 2026. Summaries are Subvolts' own; the audio, artwork and notes belong to MIT Sloan Management Review.