Design Instagram Feed using Generative AI
System design interview
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Introduction
The real world AI deployments are complex. We have done a video teaching the basics of such deployment here. But these days interviewers ask questions to get a sense of your knowledge about generative AI.
We need to design an Instagram-like feed using generative AI. In this task, a user should see posts ranked in a way that encourages more engagement. The user follows their friends on the platform, so we need to include all relevant posts from them. We also need to mix in trending posts from across the platform that align with the user's personal interests. We determine these interests based on the user's actions within the app.
Solution
The solution has two parts. First, we need to store the user's potential posts in the database, which we keep in a vector database. We also store trending posts in the same database. When it's time to generate the feed, we query the vector database to get a list of posts.
The second part of the solution is ranking. This is done by the model. Since we use a large language model, we treat the model's logic as a black box. We can use multi-shot prompting to explain to the LLM the types of posts the user has interacted with and ask the model to rank the given set of posts based on that information.
