SVP AI/Personalization at Spotify. Formerly Director of Machine Learning at Google and Netflix, BBC R&D and Centre for Digital Music at QMUL.

San Francisco Bay Area
Joined May 2008
Yves Raimond retweeted
A year ago, we shared our plans to protect artists and listeners from spam, impersonation, and deception in the age of AI. One idea has guided those plans: human artistry comes first. Since then, our teams have been working hard to make that real. We looked closely at the tracks listeners were skipping, ignoring, or telling us they didn't want to hear. We’ve made numerous updates to our recommendation system to remove slop and spam, and ensure we’re highlighting music made by authentic, human artists. This year alone, we’ve taken 50M+ slop and spam tracks out of recommendations. That work builds on the tools we’ve launched over the past year, including Verified by Spotify, AI Persona badges, AI Credits, and Artist Profile Protection, to give artists more control and listeners more context. Artists should be able to trust that their name and their work are theirs. Listeners should be able to trust what they’re hearing. There’s more to do, but today we’re recapping the progress we’ve made keeping Spotify a trusted place for artists and listeners.
5
4
19
1,675
Today we announced that Taste Profile (Beta) is now expanding to Premium listeners 18+ in the U.S. Spotify has always been built around your taste, and now we’re bringing our latest advances in personalization to more listeners. Taste Profile gives listeners a brief interpretation of how Spotify understands their taste across music, podcasts, and audiobooks, and lets them shape what they see next on their home page. It’s another step toward making Spotify feel more personal, more transparent, and more in listeners’ control! More information here: newsroom.spotify.com/2026-09…
7
261
Yves Raimond retweeted
Parents everywhere: starting today, you have more control over how kids & family music shapes your Spotify experience. You can now choose whether the music you play for your family influences your Taste Profile, recommendations, playlists like Discover Weekly, or even your Wrapped results.
21
27
5
368
275,679
We just launched Xirp, a vendor-neutral agentic development environment. One place to manage agent sessions across @ClaudeDevs, @GeminiApp CLI, and @OpenAI Codex. 1,300+ @Spotify engineers already use it. Now it's available for you to try. Learn more at xirp.spotify.com.
634
821
1,237
11,543
5,269,131
As #KDD2026 is starting today, I’m excited to share three papers our team will be contributing. Together, they perfectly illustrate where Spotify's personalization is heading, scaling up our ability to help users discover the artists and creators they'd love, whilst being fully in control: being language-based, the recommendation algorithm stops being a black box. Deploying Semantic ID-based Generative Retrieval for Large-Scale Podcast Discovery at Spotify [arxiv.org/abs/2603.17540]. This paper describes an LLM-based generative retrieval system (GLIDE) for podcast discovery, leveraging soft-token prompting for long-term user representations, instruction tuning, and Semantic IDs for catalog-grounded generation. A Unified Language Model for Large Scale Search, Recommendation, and Reasoning [arxiv.org/abs/2603.17533]. This paper describes a unified LLM-based personalization framework (NEO) that can tackle a wide range of recommendation, search and generation tasks within a single decoder-only model. Stochastic Primal-Dual Decoding for Multiobjective Generative Recommender Systems [arxiv.org/abs/2607.19357]. This paper describes a lightweight inference-time decoding algorithm to support multi-objective slate generation, formulating decoding as an online constrained optimization problem.
5
258
Favorite use cases for me are to soundtrack a particular moment, change or translate the vibe mid-way through a session, or turn up discovery / new artists I haven’t listened to yet. Or the ability to learn about a new topic through relevant podcasts by simply asking!
Just say the word 🎙️Eligible Premium users can now talk to Spotify to discover, learn, and listen in new ways.
275
Yves Raimond retweeted
Even a knight’s quest deserves a great soundtrack. See how Spotify music editor JJ used Prompted Playlist to bring his medieval adventure to life.
18
14
62
108,176
Yves Raimond retweeted
Introducing Reserved. Concert tickets held just for you based on your listening 🎫 Stay tuned – Reserved tickets are coming to Premium users in the US.
615
2,393
1,993
21,574
2,592,726
Yves Raimond retweeted
We announced Reserved by Spotify today. I have wanted to crack this one for years! You know the feeling. 10am, you're glued to your phone, ready to buy tickets, and somehow you're already behind 10,000 people in the queue. It can feel like the fans who care the most end up missing out.
38
36
23
1,108
112,779
Awesome talk by @protocol7 -- check it out to learn more about how we scaled up, well, everything, over the last few months :)
Spotify's Chief Architect just showed how they ship 4,5K deployments /day with Claude at Anthropic stage 27-minutes. free. By #1 music app dev "More than 99% of our engineers use AI coding tools. Adoption took off after Opus 4.5" Worth more than any $500 vibe-coding course.
2
434
Use your own agent to create and upload a Personal Podcast on Spotify: github.com/spotify/save-to-s… - daily briefs, audio deep dives, digests, etc.
Turn your daily briefing, notes, or plans into a Personal Podcast. Private, just for you, and saved to your Spotify library 🎧
5
307
DJ is now available in 4 new languages, and in 74 markets! And among these four, particularly happy to introduce Maïa, our new French DJ :) Please give it a spin, send requests, and share feedback! More details below
Bonjour! Hallo! Ciao! Olá! The Spotify DJ experience you know and love is now available in 4 new languages, and to even more countries worldwide.
4
256
We’re testing something that I’m very excited about - giving users literal control of the algorithm, using just the English language. You can write, iterate, tune and schedule your own unique playlist algorithm by writing a prompt, using any world information as well as all your own play history and data, like for example: ”Give me all the tracks that are trending in TV-shows right now, tell me which show and specific episode they are from, filter them by my taste and show only tracks that I’ve never listened to before. ” and then schedule it to update daily or weekly. It’s a lot of fun!
7
10
1
58
23,136
Yves Raimond retweeted
This is my team. I’m super excited to work on this stuff. If you are too, let’s talk: we’re hiring. newsroom.spotify.com/2025-10…
1
2
1
11
2,058
Seconded!
Favorite new ChatGPT feature: deep Spotify integration.
1
468
Google quietly released a powerful recommender systems library optimized for JAX and TPUs, based on Keras. It's called RecML. It has native support for SparseCore (latest hardware for handling large distributed embeddings)
10
117
6
1,068
68,004
Yves Raimond retweeted
Happy to announce that our team has just launched Gemini Personalization! This is a massive update to Gemini, which for the first time we bring your Google Searches to @GeminiApp. Just try it out, it is good to talk with an AI that truly knows us :) gemini.google/overview/perso…
4
7
30
1,971
Yves Raimond retweeted
I’m very excited to share our work on Gemini today! Gemini is a family of multimodal models that demonstrate really strong capabilities across the image, audio, video, and text domains. Our most-capable model, Gemini Ultra, advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 benchmarks, including 10 of 12 popular text and reasoning benchmarks, 9 of 9 image understanding benchmarks, 6 of 6 video understanding benchmarks, and 5 of 5 speech recognition and speech translation benchmarks. Gemini Ultra is the first model to achieve human-expert performance on MMLU across 57 subjects with a score above 90%. It also achieves a new state-of-the-art score of 62.4% on the new MMMU multimodal reasoning benchmark, outperforming the previous best model by more than 5 percentage points. Gemini was built by an awesome team of people from @GoogleDeepMind, @GoogleResearch, and elsewhere at @Google, and is one of the largest science and engineering efforts we’ve ever undertaken. As one of the two overall technical leads of the Gemini effort, along with my colleague @OriolVinyalsML, I am incredibly proud of the whole team, and we’re so excited to be sharing our work with you today! There’s quite a lot of different material about Gemini available, starting with: Main blog post: blog.google/technology/ai/go… 60-page technical report authored by th Gemini Team: deepmind.google/gemini/gemin… In this thread, I’ll walk you through some of the highlights.
237
2,341
633
12,494
3,906,175
5-6 years ago I was working on music generation at DeepMind, but let me tell you, this is... something else. Incredibly excited to be able to finally share what our team has been working on!
Thrilled to share #Lyria, the world's most sophisticated AI music generation system. From just a text prompt Lyria produces compelling music & vocals. Also: building new Music AI tools for artists to amplify creativity in partnership w/YT & music industry deepmind.google/discover/blo…
16
35
3
467
106,256