> Are we stuck in a rut with recommender systems because we focus so much on machine learning and so little on search and exploration?
There are definitely limits to ML recommendation algorithms which must necessarily optimize for a single one dimensional metric. But our tastes and interests are multidimensional, and have structure beyond a feature vector. Why can’t we have recommender systems that are similarly more sophisticated, that we have more control over, that we can tune ourselves? I wrote about some related thoughts here: https://yeetgenstein.substack.com/p/on-the-music-snob
I love this line:
> Are we stuck in a rut with recommender systems because we focus so much on machine learning and so little on search and exploration?
There are definitely limits to ML recommendation algorithms which must necessarily optimize for a single one dimensional metric. But our tastes and interests are multidimensional, and have structure beyond a feature vector. Why can’t we have recommender systems that are similarly more sophisticated, that we have more control over, that we can tune ourselves? I wrote about some related thoughts here: https://yeetgenstein.substack.com/p/on-the-music-snob