Netflix's new AI Search

What I'd been working on for ~2 years is finally out

I had so much fun building Netflix's new search experience alongside an incredible team! A personal story to drive home just how transformative these experiences can be:

A year ago, I was in the hospital recovering from a minor lung issue, with a catheter in me that restricted my ability to move around. All I could really do was watch TV, which bummed me out. Worse, watching crappy stuff was making me regret how I was spending my time.

I had the first prototype of this experience on my phone, and thought I'd search for something where I'd like the characters. That’s the one common thread about stuff I’ve watched that I’ve loved.

So, I decided to search for “comedies with great character development”.

One of the results was Atypical - a show about a teenage boy on the spectrum growing up and learning to become more independent, and his relationship with his parents and his younger sister. The show was uplifting, touching, funny, exactly what I needed at the time.

I would never have found out about the show through any other means - it’s not particularly popular to be recommended on Reddit or by blogs or frankly even the Netflix homepage.

It’s taken 2 years for this to go from a bunch of hacks at a hackathon (which I'll always get to brag about winning!) & other ideas to what you see in front of you. In that time we learnt so much - different user needs, how to put them together, infra, evals, even how specific roles in teams need to evolve. Getting such search systems to work well isn’t simply basic semantic search, or rewriting queries or, worse, asking ChatGPT to give the answers from its own knowledge.

To my former team - congratulations! I know it’s just the start and there’s still so much more you want to do on top of this. But this is a major milestone and it’s worth celebrating!

And thank you for introducing me to Atypical :)