Elon Musk says X’s algorithm will run fully on AI by November

xAI CEO Elon Musk has said that by November, the algorithm powering his social media platform X will run entirely on artificial intelligence (AI).

Musk was responding to a post by Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, who said the social platform is trying to help users move away from “the mainstream algo and the political crusades.”

In an X post late Friday, Musk, who acquired Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and rebranded it as X, said that the company plans to “open source the algorithm every two weeks or so” to help build it up into what users prefer. 

“By November or certainly December, you will be able to adjust your feed dynamically just by asking Grok,” the billionaire entrepreneur wrote.

Bier says X is working on improving the algorithm

Product head Bier had posted about the company’s plan to make the X timeline reflect users’ genuine interests instead of divisive content. 

“The goal for your X timeline is to get out of the mainstream algo and the political crusades and find your niche,” Bier wrote. “If you’re seeing gas station fight videos, your account is not ramped up yet. We are working every day to fix this.”

He reiterated that the company wants users to post about their passions and engage with “friendly, relevant people.”

The current “For You” feed algorithm rides on several signals to determine what appears in a timeline. Engagement with a post, such as likes and shares, is considered the determinant of which topics are to be displayed on the page, as does the user’s history of interacting with similar media formats, including videos and images.

Other factors include activity in specific topics or communities, signals from followed accounts, and trending conversations from hashtags or local events in the X account holder’s physical location.

Many users are unhappy with the platform’s recommendations for the “For You” page, some of whom are asking Musk to “undo whatever was done” after he bought Twitter, restoring it to how it was during former owner Jack Dorsey’s tenure. 

“Keep the ‘don’t ban people for being funny’ part. Before Elon, I regularly saw posts from my friends, we had inside jokes, and the timeline made sense. Now it’s an AI slop fest and my friends are nowhere to be found,” complained one disgruntled X account.

Musk refutes xAI fundraising reports

The announcement on X’s algorithm changes comes on the backdrop of chatter about Musk’s AI company xAI fundraising. As reported by Cryptopolitan on Friday, the startup is supposedly raising $10 billion from investors in a deal valuing it at $200 billion. 

The figures would take the company up from the $150 billion valuation in Musk’s last fundraising round weeks earlier, and a $6 billion raise last December. Earlier this year, Musk merged xAI with X in an all-stock deal that valued the AI startup at $80 billion and the social network at $33 billion. 

If true, xAI would join several AI startups garnering investments, including Anthropic, which recently secured $13 billion at a $183 billion valuation, alongside OpenAI’s secondary share sale that valued the company at $500 billion.

Later on Friday, Musk denied the news about a fundraiser, calling it “fake news” in a post on X. He said xAI was “not raising any capital right now.”

“We are the only company where the mission is truth,” Mr. Musk told his workers in a meeting held last Wednesday, The New York Times reported. “If you force the AI to lie or believe things that are not true, you’re at great risk of creating a dystopian future.”

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