Pinterest cut AI costs 90% by gutting a frontier model's vision layer

At 620 million monthly users, calling a frontier model for every image recommendation isn't a strategy — it's a bill. Pinterest CTO Matt Madrigal solved it by gutting Qwen3-VL's vision layer and rebuilding it with proprietary embeddings, cutting costs 90% and boosting accuracy 30%. Madrigal’s team has been heavily investing in customizing open-source models “foundationally in-house.” “If you've g
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VentureBeat
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