Inside LinkedIn’s generative AI cookbook: How it scaled people search to 1.3 billion users

LinkedIn is launching its new AI-powered people search this week, after what seems like a very long wait for what should have been a natural offering for generative AI.It comes a full three years after the launch of ChatGPT and six months after LinkedIn launched its AI job search offering. For technical leaders, this timeline illustrates a key enterprise lesson: Deploying generative AI in real enterprise settings is challenging, especially at a scale of 1.3 billion users. It’s a slow, brutal process of pragmatic optimization.The following account is based on several exclusive interviews with the LinkedIn product and engineering team behind the launch.First, here’s how the product works: A user can now type a natural language query like, "Who is knowledgeable about curing cancer?" into Link