Cristos Goodrow is VP of Engineering at Google and head of Search and Discovery at YouTube (aka YouTube Algorithm).

This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon.

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Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

00:00 – Introduction

03:26 – Life-long trajectory through YouTube

07:30 – Discovering new ideas on YouTube

13:33 – Managing healthy conversation

23:02 – YouTube Algorithm

38:00 – Analyzing the content of video itself

44:38 – Clickbait thumbnails and titles

47:50 – Feeling like I’m helping the YouTube algorithm get smarter

50:14 – Personalization

51:44 – What does success look like for the algorithm?

54:32 – Effect of YouTube on society

57:24 – Creators

59:33 – Burnout

1:03:27 – YouTube algorithm: heuristics, machine learning, human behavior

1:08:36 – How to make a viral video?

1:10:27 – Veritasium: Why Are 96,000,000 Black Balls on This Reservoir?

1:13:20 – Making clips from long-form podcasts

1:18:07 – Moment-by-moment signal of viewer interest

1:20:04 – Why is video understanding such a difficult AI problem?

1:21:54 – Self-supervised learning on video

1:25:44 – What does YouTube look like 10, 20, 30 years from now?