Meta's GEM

Back in March 2025, Meta published an interesting blog post highlighting their innovation in their ad infrastructure. One such key innovation was their Generative Ads Recommendation Model or GEM.

GEM, the largest foundation model for recommendation systems, is essentially a massive reorganization and upgrade of the AI that runs advertising on Facebook and Instagram. It is described as the “central brain” for ads recommendation. The aforementioned blog post had an intuitive explanation of what GEM is about:

“Imagine having a super brain that can read an entire library of books in seconds, understand the relationships between all the characters, remember every single detail, and connect the details into an understanding of the sequence of events a person goes through across all types of activities. That’s what GEM does for Meta’s ad system: catalogs, analyzes, and connects trillions of pieces of information, making it incredibly intelligent and effective. With GEM, Meta’s recommendation system learns from an enormous amount of data, recognizes subtle patterns, and provides the most relevant ads to the right person at the right time with low latency.”

I will expand more on GEM and the implications behind the paywall.

In addition to “Daily Dose” (yes, DAILY) like this, MBI Deep Dives publishes one Deep Dive on a publicly listed company every month. You can find all the 64 Deep Dives here.