--- title: "Ebay" description: "eBay Tech shares some insights into the obstacles the eBay engineering team faces on a daily basis." --- # Ebay > eBay Tech shares some insights into the obstacles the eBay engineering team faces on a daily basis. ## Articles ### [Enter eBay’s 2024 University Machine Learning Competition](https://yomu.fyi/post/enter-ebay-s-2024-university-machine-learning-competition.md) - Company: [Ebay](https://yomu.fyi/company/ebay.md) - Author: eBay News Team - Published: May 6, 2024 - Type: Announcement eBay’s 2024 University Machine Learning Competition invites U.S. college and university students to form teams and tackle a yearly ecommerce challenge, with top participants offered a shot at a 2025 summer internship at eBay. This year’s task focuses on eBay Motors: building a model that identifies which vehicles are compatible with particular parts and accessories. Participants must extract “fitment” information from listing titles, item specifics, and descriptions in the eBay Parts and Accessories categories, where noisy or extraneous data makes the task difficult. The competition is in its sixth year; last year, 1,439 students from 206 universities competed across 887 teams, and several winners later moved into full-time eBay roles. ### [Introducing Shop the look: eBay curating personalized outfits with AI](https://yomu.fyi/post/introducing-shop-the-look-ebay-curating-personalized-outfits-with-ai.md) - Company: [Ebay](https://yomu.fyi/company/ebay.md) - Author: Raul Romero - Published: Apr 9, 2024 - Type: Announcement eBay introduces Shop the look, a generative AI-powered fashion feature that curates personalized outfit carousels from customers’ shopping histories. Interactive hotspots reveal similar items and outfit inspirations, combining new and pre-owned apparel and luxury goods. The experience uses images, items, decades of data, customer insights, and billions of images to adapt recommendations as tastes change, while supporting wardrobe visualization and exploration. It is available on iOS for US and UK shoppers who viewed at least 10 fashion items in the past 180 days; Android is planned later this year. eBay says the feature was developed with its Responsible AI team and RAI Principles, and plans further personalization plus possible expansion beyond fashion. ### [eBay's Responsible AI Principles](https://yomu.fyi/post/ebay-s-responsible-ai-principles.md) - Company: [Ebay](https://yomu.fyi/company/ebay.md) - Author: Lauren Wilcox - Published: Mar 8, 2024 - Type: Announcement eBay sets out principles for developing and using AI-powered customer tools and services while addressing safety and community needs. Its framework covers reliability, safety, security, inclusivity, equity, fairness, accountability, lawfulness, privacy by design, and transparency. The company says it rigorously tests AI technologies, protects confidential data used to train or operate systems, includes measures to avoid excluding groups, and applies quality and safety checks to datasets. It also calls for human oversight throughout development, launch, and monitoring, risk-based decisions, regulatory compliance, and privacy-focused design using state-of-the-art methods. For users, eBay says transparency may involve disclosures within an experience or broader communication, depending on lifecycle stage and the audience. ### [Cutting Through the Noise: Three Things We've Learned About Generative AI and Developer Productivity](https://yomu.fyi/post/cutting-through-the-noise-three-things-we-ve-learned-about-generative.md) - Company: [Ebay](https://yomu.fyi/company/ebay.md) - Author: Senthil Padmanabhan - Published: Feb 29, 2024 - Type: Explainer eBay describes three tracks for generative AI developer productivity: adopting a commercial offering, fine-tuning an open-source LLM on internal data, and building a knowledge base. Because no single metric is reliable, the exercise combines surveys with Git, DORA, Flow, code-quality, and performance measures. In a 300-developer Copilot A/B test, the treatment group had 27% code acceptance, 17% faster pull-request creation-to-merge time, and 12% lower Lead Time for Change; Sonar quality was unchanged. eBayCoder, based on Code Llama 13B and trained on eBay code and documentation, is presented as useful for software upkeep and broader context. Its internal GPT uses retrieval-augmented generation to answer questions from distributed sources, but early results remain preliminary and nonsensical answers require feedback and RLHF. ### [Podcast: Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov on AI, the Future of Shopping Online, and the Value of Building In-House](https://yomu.fyi/post/podcast-nitzan-mekel-bobrov-on-ai-the-future-of-shopping-online-and-th.md) - Company: [Ebay](https://yomu.fyi/company/ebay.md) - Author: eBay News Team - Published: Feb 28, 2024 - Type: Announcement eBay Chief AI Officer Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov discusses his role, artificial intelligence’s changing landscape, and eBay’s position in ecommerce. He says the company’s powerful private cloud, combined with integration with public cloud providers, supports AI at scale and in real time. As a two-sided marketplace, eBay can apply AI to sellers and buyers through a magical listing tool for complex specifications, assistance finding hard-to-find items, and image generation that improves and expands user-provided visuals. For buyers, it can also interpret a vehicle problem, identify needed items and options, and present them without requiring a search through listings. Looking ahead, Mekel-Bobrov describes AI shopping assistants as category-informed chatbots that may act autonomously toward desired outcomes rather than merely execute assigned tasks. ### [Meet the Winners of the 5th eBay University Machine Learning Challenge](https://yomu.fyi/post/meet-the-winners-of-the-5th-ebay-university-machine-learning-challenge.md) - Company: [Ebay](https://yomu.fyi/company/ebay.md) - Author: eBay News Team - Published: Feb 15, 2024 - Type: Announcement The 2023 eBay University Machine Learning Challenge brought together 1,439 students from 206 universities in 887 teams to develop solutions for real-world ecommerce problems. The winning team, NullPointer, comprised five graduate students from universities across the United States and earned summer internships at eBay. Its project used Named Entity Recognition (NER) to identify, extract, and label named entities—including people, places, brands, and sizes—in a dataset of 10 million eBay Germany sneaker-category item titles. At eBay, NER is commonly used to automatically extract key information from listings and search queries. The event recorded its largest turnout yet, and students can register for the next competition via EvalAI in late spring. ### [New Social Caption Generator Uses AI to Help Sellers Post More Easily](https://yomu.fyi/post/new-social-caption-generator-uses-ai-to-help-sellers-post-more-easily.md) - Company: [Ebay](https://yomu.fyi/company/ebay.md) - Author: eBay News Team - Published: Dec 18, 2023 - Type: Announcement For eBay sellers, social media promotion can make listings more visible, but composing effective captions may be difficult. Its new generative AI feature adds a “Use AI Caption” button in the Social page of Seller Hub, where it drafts item-focused posts with hashtags and emojis. Sellers can ask for rewrites, manually keep or remove those extras, and publish posts containing listing links and item images. The capability is fully available in the US, UK, Germany, and Australia for sharing individual listings, categories, promotions, and stores, while an announced auto-posting option will later automatically publish new listings when they go live. The company reports a positive response from early users. [Newer posts](https://yomu.fyi/company/ebay.md)