How Glance uses AI to transform 12,000 daily content feeds into personalized experiences, ET CIO

Mohit Saxena, CTO and Co-founder of InMobi Group

“/>Mohit Saxena, CTO and Co-founder of InMobi Group
The integration of artificial intelligence in content creation and transformation has become pivotal for companies looking to offer a highly personalized user experience. Glance – a digital platform delivering personalized content directly to users’ lock screens on smartphones – is at the forefront of this shift.

Launched by an Indian unicorn InMobi, a mobile advertising technology company, Glance gained popularity, especially in markets like India and Southeast Asia. It serves as a dynamic content ecosystem, featuring live events, games, and interactive experiences, in addition to traditional media content. Mohit Saxena, Co-founder and CTO of InMobi Group, offers a deep dive into how the platform uses AI to enhance user experience, scale content production, and ensure moderation and appropriateness of the content for a diverse audience.

AI at the heart of content transformation

Glance’s approach to content creation begins with a deep understanding of the user. Saxena explains, “We understand the user as a person, we try to understand their affinity, their liking, their preferences, and basically, we provide them the content which is so relevant to them.

This might sound simple, but with millions of users, each with distinct preferences, creating personalized content is like finding a needle in a haystack.Mohit Saxena, CTO and Co-founder of InMobi Group

The platform deals with a vast array of content from thousands of publishers, covering news, sports, entertainment, and more. The challenge is not just to pass on the news but to transform it into something unique and engaging for each user. “Sometimes pictures speak louder than words; sometimes video is better than an image,” Saxena notes. This level of customization is impossible to achieve manually, leading Glance to adopt AI and machine learning.

Two years ago, Glance integrated AI and ML into its content management system. Today, nearly 12,000 pieces of content are created, transformed and moderated on a daily basis through AI. These AI systems choose the best images, create headlines, and even generate short videos that capture the essence of an article. Saxena elaborates, “We use multiple models to figure out what is the best image that can describe this content and the best short video that can really capture the soul and essence of what the writer is trying to say.”

The use of AI has significantly enhanced user engagement on the platform, with some content achieving an 80% increase in engagement within a few days. The key to this success lies in AI’s ability to adapt and evolve rapidly, using a mix of cutting-edge techniques like CLIP (Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training) and stable diffusion, which allow Glance to create content that is both relevant and captivating.

AI-driven content curation

The scale at which Glance operates is set to expand even further. “I think within a month or two, the content will grow to 100,000 daily feeds, and possibly some time next year, it could be a million,” Saxena predicts. This growth is driven by the power of AI, which allows the platform to scale without merely “throwing people at the problem.”

The process begins with AI reading the entire article to understand its context fully. AI can quickly determine the most relevant images or even generate them when none exist , as was the case with Chandrayaan, India’s lunar mission.

I clearly remember that it was an AI-driven picture that we launched, and it had amazing engagement.Mohit Saxena, CTO and Co-founder of InMobi Group

GenerativeAI: A game changer

Generative AI is becoming an increasingly significant part of Glance’s strategy. “AI is now not only curating and moderating and selecting the best; it can actually generate,” Saxena states, underscoring the shift towards generative intelligence as a crucial tool in content creation.

One of the sophisticated tools used by Glance is “CLIP,” developed by OpenAI in collaboration with Berkeley University. “The full form of clip is basically Contrastive Language Image Pre-training,” Saxena explains. This technology enables the generation of images based on prompts without requiring traditional training on tagged data. “Once the model is trained enough, then I can say, ‘Hey, can you create an image of a dog eating food?'”

Despite its power, early versions of generative AI models had limitations, particularly in terms of cost and speed. “Initially, you are stuck at the limitation on the cost and timing,” but this is rapidly changing, with image generation times moving from minutes to seconds, and soon, milliseconds.

The technical backbone of Glance’s AI infrastructure

Glance’s ability to handle massive scale while maintaining personalized experiences is rooted in its robust AI infrastructure. The company’s engineers, many of whom come from backgrounds in global ad networks, have developed sophisticated systems that manage user data and interactions at scale. Techniques like distributed programming, clustering, and machine learning algorithms are used to manage the massive volumes of content and user data.

Saxena explains, “Handling scale is at some point dividing in a right way where you can divide the computation, while at the same point, you are clustering it together so that you can quickly figure out the related entities.” This balance of division and clustering is key to Glance’s ability to personalize content for millions of users while keeping the system efficient and responsive.

The challenge of moderation and appropriateness

With great power comes great responsibility, and for Glance, this responsibility is moderation. The platform must ensure that the content it showcases is appropriate for its diverse user base, which spans different cultures, age groups, and regions. Saxena acknowledges the complexities involved.

Moderation is a very responsible work. Because not only India, we are in the US, we are in Indonesia, there are so many cultural nuances, social fabrics, political scenarios, and religious sentiments to consider.Mohit Saxena, CTO and Co-founder of InMobi Group

Glance employs a combination of AI and human moderation to maintain high standards. While AI helps scale content creation, moderation remains a critical area where human judgment is essential. “At some point, we still believe that we are not at a place where you can completely leave it to the machine,” Saxena says, highlighting the importance of human oversight in ensuring the content’s appropriateness and accuracy.

The moderation process at Glance involves a three-step approach: source validation, transformation and generation, and finally, output validation. AI models assess the accuracy of content, and anything below a certain threshold is discarded or sent back for re-evaluation. “Any content that goes out using AI is 100% moderated and is the most accurate way of presenting some narrative, some article, some image or video,” Saxena assures.

Saxena admits that AI moderation is still not a “100% solved problem,” but it’s one of the most significant challenges the industry faces today. “As long as we have taken a more conservative approach– it’s better to not do things versus just do things which are not entirely right.”

While AI has come a long way, Saxena acknowledges that the journey is far from over. “AI, a lot is going to happen in the next two, three years,” he says, stressing the importance of staying ahead of trends. Glance collaborates closely with major players like Microsoft and Google, leveraging their AI models and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. “It’s just basically a collection of these models coming together,” he explains, highlighting the unique AI-ML ops that drive Glance’s content generation engine.

Glance’s use of AI is a significant leap forward in the way digital content is created, curated, and delivered. By leveraging advanced AI tools, Glance can provide personalized, engaging content at an unprecedented scale, while also ensuring that the content remains appropriate and accurate. As AI continues to evolve, Glance is poised to remain at the forefront of this transformation, shaping the future of content personalization in the digital age.