TLDR: LinkedIn has successfully deployed a new generative AI-powered people search functionality to its 1.3 billion users, a significant achievement three years after ChatGPT’s launch. This innovation allows for natural language queries, moving beyond traditional keyword-based searches to understand user intent and provide more relevant results.
LinkedIn has unveiled its generative AI strategies, detailing the complex process behind scaling its people search functionality to serve 1.3 billion users. This rollout, occurring three years after the advent of ChatGPT and six months following LinkedIn’s AI job search offering, highlights the inherent challenges in deploying generative AI within large enterprise environments.
According to insights from exclusive interviews with LinkedIn’s product and engineering teams, the implementation was a “slow, brutal process of pragmatic optimization.” The core of this new feature lies in its ability to process natural language queries. For instance, a user can now input a query such as, “Who is knowledgeable about curing cancer?” into the search bar.
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This represents a significant leap from LinkedIn’s previous keyword-based search system, which would have been limited to finding direct mentions of “cancer.” The generative AI-powered search aims to interpret the user’s true intent and context, delivering more sophisticated and accurate results across its massive user base.
