Pinterest CEO praises open-source AI for delivering ‘tremendous performance’ at lower cost

Artificial Intelligence

Pinterest CEO Bill Ready has voiced strong support for open-source AI models, calling them a key factor in reducing operational costs while boosting performance across the platform’s expanding visual AI capabilities. Speaking during the company’s latest earnings call, Ready said open-source AI has proven to deliver “tremendous performance” at a fraction of the cost of proprietary systems.

Pinterest, best known as a visual discovery and shopping platform, uses AI across multiple touchpoints– from personalised recommendations and multimodal search to ad targeting and its recently launched Pinterest Assistant, an AI-powered shopping and discovery tool. As investors pressed for clarity on Pinterest’s AI-driven commerce ambitions, Ready emphasised the company’s strategy of leveraging a mix of proprietary and open-source models to maintain both innovation and cost efficiency.

“One of the really interesting things we’re seeing is tremendous performance from open-source models specifically tuned for Pinterest’s visual AI use cases,” Ready told investors. “Given current market rates and per-token costs, we’re seeing orders of magnitude reduction in cost with comparable performance compared to leading proprietary models.”

He added that Pinterest plans to integrate more open-source AI systems into production, noting that they deliver competitive accuracy and reliability at a small fraction of the cost of major model providers. “We feel really good about the value we’re delivering to users, our ability to align that with monetisation, and our ability to control those costs effectively,” Ready said.

The discussion came amid cautious financial guidance, with Pinterest forecasting weaker fourth-quarter revenue between $1.31 billion and $1.34 billion, slightly below Wall Street expectations of $1.34 billion. The company cited the impact of U.S. tariffs on home furnishings as a contributing factor, sending shares down over 21%.

Looking ahead, Ready said Pinterest is also exploring agentic shopping, AI that can make purchasing decisions on behalf of users, though he noted that the company is taking a measured approach. Pinterest already supports “push-button” purchases through its Amazon partnership but wants to see whether users are comfortable letting AI “push the button for them.”

For now, Pinterest’s focus remains on improving its Pinterest Assistant, which blends AI with user intent and taste data drawn from boards, collages, and saves. The company is also rolling out AI-curated boards that combine human expertise with algorithmic insights, a hybrid model Ready believes captures Pinterest’s unique value in the evolving AI commerce space.