Meta
Meta’s ads ranking systems process millions of candidates per second under millisecond latency budgets, creating tension between richer sequence models and efficient serving. The post presents a multi-stage architecture that moves long-history user modeling into asynchronous offline transformers, caches user-level embeddings, and combines them with fresh user and ad signals in an online ranking model. Dense tokenization places sparse features and behavioral sequences in one vocabulary, while target-aware multi-head attention learns higher-order interactions between historical behavior and the candidate ad. On real-world ads traffic, performance follows a log-linear relationship with compute across depth, enrichment, width, and sequence length, with balanced growth and diverse sequences identified as scaling levers. Together with broader model innovations, the approach contributed to a cumulative 6% conversion lift on Instagram, 3% on Facebook, and 3.5% lift in Facebook ad clicks, and serves as a core component of GEM.
amazon.science
Amazon announced 34 recipients from 30 universities for the Fall 2025 Build on Trainium: Responsible AI call for proposals. Part of a 110 million dollar credit initiative, the program funds academic research across new model architectures, machine learning libraries, optimizations, and distributed systems running on AWS Trainium hardware. The funded projects center on five key areas: AI safety and alignment, multilingual language models, representation engineering, sustainability with small language models, and deep learning for synthetic data generation. Awardees receive AWS Promotional Credits, access to more than 700 Amazon public datasets, assigned Amazon research contacts, and dedicated technical training resources. Highlighted efforts include parallelization strategies for trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts models scaling across 1,024 Trainium chips and inference optimization frameworks designed to enhance token efficiency.
Shopify
Frontier models can accelerate an AI product launch, but their serving cost and latency can become impractical as usage grows, while their weights do not learn from production failures. Shopify’s proposed flywheel captures low-quality conversations, defines quality with a rubric and calibrated judges, improves the surrounding harness through autoresearch, and then converts repaired trajectories into supervised fine-tuning and GRPO training signal. A panel of frontier reasoning models critiques failures, an arbiter produces repair instructions, and unresolved cases go to expert annotators; gist compression then shortens the agent’s static prompt without measured judge-quality loss. In production, the GraphQL agent serves up to 2,000 requests per minute and reportedly achieves a 96% serving-cost reduction versus an estimated frontier-model cost, with lower latency and higher throughput. The approach is presented as a continual-learning system that turns production experience into model-weight updates.