It's one of the most common and minor annoyances of modern life: You plop down on the couch at the end of the day, finally with a few minutes to watch one of the dozens of amazing shows or movies you have access to thanks to the age of television and the advent of streaming, and you start browsing. Instead of watching anything, you spend an endless night opening apps, aimlessly browsing endless rows of tiles that all look the same. Eventually, you give up and watch The office again.
In This episode of The VergecastWe look at why movie and TV show recommendations are so complicated, and whether ai could make them better. If Spotify can create endless playlists of music you'll like, and YouTube and TikTok always seem to have the perfect thing ready to go, why can't Netflix, Hulu, or Max seem to get it right?
It turns out ai can help at least a little. Because the models at OpenAI, Google, and others have taken in so much information about movies and shows (not just their title and genre, but all the synopses, reviews, summaries, and more from around the web), they can synthesize that information and find connections between titles that were previously hard to find. And as context windows get larger, these models can actually take in and understand an entire movie at a time, opening up entirely new ways to understand them.
Ultimately, though, recommendations are a human problem. Because we’re all human. What you want to watch and why you like what you like are far more complicated things (and vary far more) than even the best model can understand. As a result, the idea of sitting down, opening Netflix, and having the exact title appear immediately isn’t going to become a reality any time soon. So rather than hoping for the best, we’re investigating ways to use ai tools right now to get to your content at least a little faster. Because watching movies is great; scrolling through too many of them is seriously overrated.
If you want to learn more about everything we discussed in this episode, here are some links to get you started:
