Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd speaking to the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro about injecting artificial intelligence into dating apps:
“[Garcia-Navarro] How are you imagining A.I. functioning in this next iteration of the app?
[Herd] Let’s say we could train A.I. on thousands of what we perceive as great profiles, and the A.I. can get so sophisticated at understanding: “Wow, this person has a thoughtful bio. This person has photos that are not blurry. They’re not all group photos. They’re not wearing sunglasses. We can see who they are clearly and we understand that they took time.” The A.I. can now select the best people and start showing the best people the best people and start getting you to a match quicker, more efficiently, more thoughtfully. The goal for Bumble over the next few years is to become the world’s smartest matchmaker. This is beyond love. We have a friend product with a very broad member base, and it’s really beautiful.
[Garcia-Navarro] [..] when we’re discussing the human heart and people’s desire for actual connection, I do wonder if having A.I. mediate is actually what people want.
[Herd] [..] I don’t want an A.I. to be my therapist, personally. I want to talk to a real person who has heart and understands. However, where I do think A.I. is unbelievably beneficial — it can condense and summarize information like I’ve never seen before. So if you were to build toward a future where you have the human matchmaker and you have the human dating coach at your fingertips through our product, but find a way to use A.I. to read your profile and to extrapolate different learnings from you — loves weekends in the countryside, loves to be outdoors, huge hiker. Where A.I. is brilliant is that it can learn patterns. It can then scan hundreds of profiles if not more and it can say, “Hey, I think you should meet this person because they have similar values.” That’s where the sorting and the machine learning can be really powerful.
[Garcia-Navarro] [..] What about opposites attract? What about finding people that you would never think you had anything in common with but it works?
[Herd] [..] Half of the people I’ve spoken to throughout my career that met on Bumble, they said, “I would have never thought I would like this person in real life but there was something about their photo, and I just swiped right.” Serendipity will take on a life of its own. However, what I will say is that I think opposites attract but opposite values don’t attract. You can like sweets and they can hate sweets. You can wake up early and they can go to bed late. It doesn’t matter. These are lifestyle choices. These are quirks. I personally have never met a couple that stayed the course when their values didn’t align.”
Full interview, L Garcia-Navarro, New York Times, 2025.5.10