Elon Musk This week he emailed me some surprising details about his plans to use AI to extract and present news about X. I wrote him a letter after he tried out Grok, the X AI chatbot, and noticed that it did not link to the Time article he summarized. I clicked on the article and wanted to read more details, so I contacted them.
Musk said better quotes are coming, but he shared a deeper vision for the product, which he hopes will be built into a system that synthesizes news and social media reactions in real time. His plan is, in effect, to use AI to combine breaking news and social commentary on big stories, present a compilation live, and allow deeper dives through chat.
“As more information becomes available, the news summary will be updated to include that information,” Musk told me. “The goal is simple: to provide the most accurate and timely information possible, citing the most important sources.”
Achieving this goal will not be easy, but this bot with access to the X firehose could be a novelty. “Grok analyzes sometimes tens of thousands of X posts to present news summaries,” Musk said.
Already, Grok displays an up-to-date list of headlines and incorporates social responses into its summaries, including a chat about the Time article I was looking for about President Trump's chances for a second term. .Grok is many There is room for improvement and issues such as quoting and hallucinations need to be resolved, but if X is done properly it could be worthwhile.
“I actually came to Twitter for news and commentary,” Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Semafor and author of Traffic, told me.
Conversations about X make up the core, or indeed nearly all, of Grok's summaries. Musk said Grok does not directly look at the text of articles and relies solely on social posts. “It's a summary of what people think about X,” he says. “We definitely need to do a better job of showing relevant posts, like TIME posts that link to articles.”
Musk's approach sets Grok apart from other AI news summarizers, and while it will likely be more controversial, it also has an opportunity to satisfy users, publishers, and platforms alike. It starts with solid citations and gives users a way to dig deeper into the source material if their curiosity is piqued.
Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Company, which powers AI summarization in the Arc browser, said platforms, users and publishers can all win by being more proactive about citations. “People want trust in their data,” he said. “They want to understand where it comes from. And more importantly, if we do a good job of giving them what they want, they'll want it more.” So they're more curious. They want to read more.”
Similarly, Grok can be a gateway to news stories that people wouldn't otherwise see, giving them more reason to come back and engage. “I would never go to Time.com,” Miller said. “So if it was thrust upon me, I'd probably go read the Time magazine article. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to see it.”
Igor Babushkin, a technical staff member who works for Musk's xAI, said his team is focused on “making Grok understand the news purely from what is posted on X.” Regarding citations, he said, “News is often discussed in X, so it could lead to Grok referencing existing news outlets.” We're working on improving citations to ensure you know where the information in our articles comes from. ”
For publishers, exchanging value on social media has long been challenging, and this time is no exception. The work of news companies, like articles in Time magazine, drives the news cycle. In summary, performing work without noticeable linkbacks can cut off economic rewards and impair your ability to produce more. But despite the fallout for the industry, publishers are moving away from making a living off social media traffic. Social media traffic has always been volatile.
“As an editor in this essentially post-Twitter news environment, I would much rather see a platform feature my content than take up journalists’ time,” Semaphore’s Smith said.
Creating summaries from just X's posts, rather than the articles themselves, might insulate X to some extent from publisher lawsuits hitting AI companies. For example, this week eight newspapers sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The New York Times also sued OpenAI and Microsoft.
Daniel Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, which represents thousands of news publishers, said courts have ruled that the fair-use rules include commentary rather than original work. It is said that there is a tendency to However, when summarizing the original source using only her comments, she said, “It's a little too cute half the time.”
Under Mr. Musk, Mr. , indicating that he still considers news to be a core competency of X. This is a potential competitive advantage as competitors like Meta's Threads distance themselves from the news.
In a perfect world, original sources and commentary would blend into Grok, eliciting details from insiders, analysis from outsiders, and commentary from the herd. Twitter leaders have long dreamed of such a scenario. And perhaps, with the latest advances in generative AI, it's now worth trying again.
This article is from the Big Technology newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz.
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