Lily Jamali
Every month, hundreds of millions of users flock to Pinterest looking for the latest styles. One page titled "the most ridiculous things" is filled with plenty of wacky ideas to inspire creatives. Crocs repurposed as flower pots. Cheeseburger-shaped eyeshadow. A gingerbread house made of vegetables. But what would-be buyers may not know is the tech behind this isn't necessarily US-made. Pinterest is experimenting with Chinese AI models to hone its recommendation engine. "We've effectively made Pinterest an AI-powered shopping assistant," the firm's boss Bill Ready told me. Of course, the San Francisco-based tastemaker could use any number of American AI labs to power things behind-the-scenes.
But since the launch of China's DeepSeek R-1 model in January 2025, Chinese AI tech has increasingly been a part of Pinterest. Ready calls the so-called "DeepSeek moment" a breakthrough. "They chose to open source it, and that sparked a wave of open source models," he said. Chinese competitors include Alibaba's Qwen and Moonshot's Kimi, while TikTok owner ByteDance is also working on similar technology. Pinterest Chief Technology Officer Matt Madrigal said the strength of these models is that they can be freely downloaded and customised by companies like his - which is not the case with the majority of models offered by US rivals like OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT.
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