Pinterest CEO Bill Ready announced on Tuesday's earnings call that open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models are delivering significant cost reductions for the company's visual AI applications while maintaining comparable performance to proprietary alternatives. This development supports Pinterest's ongoing expansion of AI-driven features across its platform.
The visual discovery platform utilizes AI to power core functionalities, including personalized recommendations, multimodal search combining text and images, ad targeting, and its recently launched AI-powered Pinterest Assistant for product discovery. Pinterest also introduced personalized boards curated with a combination of human expertise and AI.
The announcement follows investor inquiries regarding Pinterest's opportunities in agentic commerce—AI systems that act autonomously for users—and the potential impact on its financial performance amidst a rapidly evolving AI landscape. The company had previously projected fourth-quarter revenue between $1.31 billion and $1.34 billion, below average analyst estimates of $1.34 billion, citing the negative impact of tariffs on the home furnishings category. This projection contributed to a more than 21% decline in the company's stock on Wednesday.
Despite near-term revenue concerns, Mr. Ready emphasized that Pinterest could maximize its use of AI and large language models (LLMs) without substantially increasing expenditures. He stated the company regularly evaluates leading off-the-shelf models against open-source options, finding the latter particularly promising for Pinterest's specific visual AI use cases. "One of the really, really interesting things that we're seeing is that we are just getting tremendous performance from open source models specifically for Pinterest use cases on visual AI," Ready told investors. He added that early testing indicated "orders of magnitude reduction in cost with comparable performance using fine-tuned open source models versus leading off-the-shelf proprietary models," given current market rates and per-token costs.
Pinterest plans to integrate numerous open-source models for various applications, anticipating these will operate at a "fraction of the cost" compared to larger model providers. Ready also addressed agentic shopping, noting the company offers "push-button type buying" through its Amazon partnership and will observe user demand for AI to autonomously complete purchases. He highlighted Pinterest's core differentiator as guiding users through the shopping experience, a capability the AI Assistant aims to enhance by understanding user preferences based on their saved content and similar tastes.
