Pinterest CEO Promotes Open Source AI for High Performance, Lower Costs

During Tuesday's earnings call, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready emphasized the potential of open-source AI models to help the company manage costs while broadening its applications for visual artificial intelligence.

The image-based platform, often a starting point for consumers' shopping journeys, utilizes AI to drive numerous features. These include personalized recommendations, a multimodal search blending text and images, targeted advertising, and, more recently, AI-powered product discovery through its new Pinterest Assistant.

Investors, however, were keen to understand Pinterest's strategy for agentic commerce—where AI systems act autonomously for users—amidst the fast-evolving AI landscape. They questioned how this would affect the company's profitability and growth prospects.

This inquiry gained urgency following the company's third-quarter earnings report. Pinterest forecasted a weaker-than-expected holiday shopping season, attributing it to former President Donald Trump's tariffs and their adverse effect on the home furnishings sector. Consequently, fourth-quarter revenue is projected to be between $1.31 billion and $1.34 billion, slightly below the average analyst estimate of $1.34 billion. This announcement triggered a more than 21% drop in the stock price on Wednesday.

Despite these near-term revenue challenges, Ready outlined how Pinterest could expand its use of AI and large language models (LLMs) without significantly raising expenses. Beyond its proprietary models, already factored into costs, the company regularly evaluates leading commercial models against open-source alternatives and finds the latter highly promising.

"A particularly exciting development is the exceptional performance we're achieving with open-source models tailored for Pinterest's specific visual AI applications," Ready informed investors. "In early tests, fine-tuned open-source models deliver comparable results to leading proprietary ones but at a fraction of the per-token cost, representing an order-of-magnitude reduction in expense."

He stated the company intends to deploy numerous open-source models across its operations, which will incur only "a fraction of the cost" associated with major model providers.

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"We are confident in the value this delivers to users, our capacity to align it with monetization, and our ability to manage costs efficiently while executing effectively," Ready added.

Ready also discussed other AI considerations, such as agentic shopping. He noted that Pinterest already facilitates "push-button" purchasing through its Amazon partnership and will observe whether users desire AI to automate that step entirely.

For now, Ready highlighted that Pinterest's key strength is guiding users through their shopping journey—a capability it aims to enhance with the Pinterest Assistant. This AI companion converses with users, offering advice and recommendations by understanding their preferences through saved boards, collages, and comparisons with users of similar tastes.

Pinterest is also introducing AI-curated personalized boards, which Ready described as a fusion of expert human curation and artificial intelligence.