44 posts
Every day, Meta’s recommendation platforms handle billions of user interactions, generating rich temporal signals that capture individual preferences and intent across products, ads, and content. In our 2024 post on sequence learning for ads recommendations, we showed how modeli…
Meta’s Generative Ads Recommendation Model (GEM), the foundation model behind ads recommendations across Instagram and Facebook, now trains at LLM scale on several thousand of the latest-generation GPUs. This post goes into the details on how we achieved: doubling end-to-end (E2…
Hierarchical Interest Representation is a research area for Meta Ads. We’re exploring an upstream representation layer over the universe of Ads entities – users, advertisers, products, services – learning unified embeddings that connect users’ inferred interests with the breadth…
TL; DR At Meta’s scale, a few milliseconds of latency degradation can have a significant negative impact on ads performance. When a Linux kernel upgrade risked regressing latency across Meta’s ad serving fleet, we turned to sched_ext — the upstream, BPF-based extensible scheduli…
Over the past several years, model capabilities and training dataset sizes have experienced exponential growth. During the past year or so, the time between new-frontier-model releases has gone down from months to weeks. Reliable and fast access to storage is important to both t…
This year marks Meta’s 10th consecutive year as a sponsor of the Python Software Foundation (PSF), the charitable organization dedicated to advancing, supporting, and protecting the open-source Python programming language and the community that sustains it. Python is one of the…
Privacy controls — systems that enforce retention, access, allowed-purpose, downstream-sharing, or anonymization policies — require a reliable understanding of data to function. Before such a control can operate effectively, it must know exactly what it is looking at. This can b…
Smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta Vanguards need to pack enough energy to power features like cameras, speakers, AI workloads, and even a display. But it all has to fit into the glasses’ temple arms. So how do you place a battery with enough power to run a pair…
Adopting AV1 for real-time communication at Meta has been a multi-year effort spanning codec selection, device eligibility, rate control, and error resilience. We’re sharing the technical and operational challenges while deploying AV1 and expanding coverage, and how we addressed…
We’re introducing Instantaneous PowerLoss Storm, a new testing paradigm within Meta’s infrastructure for handling and mitigating instant or zero-notice power loss in our data centers. We’re sharing: how we built readiness to tolerate instant failures into our existing systems wi…
We’re introducing SilverTorch, a reimagining of recommendation systems that unifies all retrieval components for user generated content under a unified architecture. SilverTorch shows up to 23.7x higher throughput compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. It’s also showing 20…
On its face the new Friend Bubbles feature looks simple enough. It highlights Reels your friends have watched and reacted to. But sometimes the features that seem the most straightforward require the deepest engineering work. On this episode of the Meta Tech Podcast, Pascal Hart…
Meta’s data ingestion system, which our engineering teams leverage for up-to-date snapshots of the social graph, has recently undergone a significant revamp to enhance its reliability at scale. Moving from our legacy system to our new architecture required a large-scale migratio…
We’re rolling out version 1.1 of Labyrinth, the encrypted storage system and protocol that secures messages and history on Messenger. Labyrinth 1.1 enhances the reliability of end-to-end encrypted backups with a new sub-protocol that helps messages survive the loss of a device,…
The HSM-based Backup Key Vault Meta’s HSM-based Backup Key Vault provides the foundation for end-to-end encrypted backups for WhatsApp and Messenger. The system allows people to protect their backed-up message history with a recovery code, ensuring that the recovery code is stor…