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How LLMs Are Reshaping Recommendation Systems

How LLMs Are Reshaping Recommendation Systems

Author: Software Engineering Daily August 18, 2026 Duration: 47:51
Software Engineering Daily
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News feeds and recommendation systems have long relied on deep learning architectures that score each candidate item independently. As LLMs have matured, they have opened up a fundamentally different approach, where a system can reason about content the way it reasons about language. However, that power comes with a fresh set of engineering challenges around cost, scale, and evaluation.

LinkedIn recently rebuilt its news feed to treat content recommendation as a sequence modeling problem. The general approach is to predict what a user will want next, much like an LLM predicts the next token in a sentence.

Tim Jurka has worked at LinkedIn for 13 years and is currently a VP of Engineering. In this episode, Tim joins Matt Merrill to discuss how LinkedIn re-engineered its feed, how the team combines LLMs with traditional signals, managing inference costs at massive scale, steering content quality using natural language policies, and more.

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The post How LLMs Are Reshaping Recommendation Systems appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.


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