From Rabbit Holes to Recommendations: Reddit’s Vishal Gupta
From Me, Myself, and AI by MIT Sloan Management Review
November 11, 2025 · 25 min · Season 12 · Episode 5
About this episode
Vishal Gupta discusses how Reddit utilizes AI to enhance user experience and ad relevance, while addressing the balance between various competing interests in AI-driven platforms.
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…
People in this episode
Host: Sam Ransbotham
Guest: Vishal Gupta
Topics covered
- artificial intelligence
- machine learning
- user experience
- advertising
- recommender systems
- ethical aspects of AI
Keywords
- AI
- machine learning
- recommender systems
- user experience
- advertising
- ethical AI
- human conversation
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Reddit, DeepMind, Google, Twitter, MIT Sloan Management Review
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