Pinterest starts using deep learning to recommend Related Pins

Pinterest today is announcing that it's now using a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning to recommend Related Pins, one of the most important features of its app for saving images and other content to boards. Related Pins, which appear below pins on Pinterest's web and mobile apps, are what they sound like -- pins that Pinterest thinks are related to the current one. This builds on Pinterest's use of deep learning -- which generally involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data, such as pictures, and then getting them to make inferences about new data -- for visual search, which lets users select regions of images and then find visually similar pins on Pinterest. Deep learning also lets Pinterest users tap on dots that appear above objects in an image to find pins with similar objects. Pinterest has experimented with using deep learning for Related Pins as far back as mid-2015.