Elon Musk Says X to Make Algorithm Open Source in Seven Days

Social media platform X will make its new algorithm public within seven days, including the code used to decide which posts and ads are recommended to users, Elon Musk said on Saturday.

“This will be repeated every 4 weeks with extensive developer notes to help you understand what has changed,” X owner Musk said in a post on the platform.

The billionaire did not say why he made X’s algorithm open source. He and the company have clashed several times with regulators over the content shown to users.

Some X users were previously complaining that they were receiving fewer posts from people they followed on the social media platform. In October, Musk confirmed in a post on X that the company had found a “significant bug” in the platform’s “For You” algorithm and promised to fix it.

The company is also trying to incorporate more AI into its recommendation algorithm for X, using Musk’s AI chatbot Grok.

Musk has promised in recent years that he would make some of X’s algorithms public, but follow-up has fallen short.

In September, Musk wrote that the goal was for X’s recommendation engine to be “all AI” and that the company would share its open-source algorithm approximately every two weeks.

“The fact that people are seeing improvements in their feeds is due to the increased use of Grok and other AI tools, not the actions of specific individuals changing the heuristic,” Musk wrote in October.

Musk wrote that the company is working to have all of the more than 100 million daily posts published on X evaluated by Grok, which will then present individual users with the posts that will be of most interest to them. “This will greatly improve the quality of your feed.” He added that the company plans to roll out the new features by November.

Grok’s image-making capabilities have recently come under fire from global regulators for a flood of AI-generated images sexualizing women and children in X. As of Friday, Grok told X users they would need a paid subscription to create and edit images. These features were first available on X for free with daily limits.

Indonesia blocked access to Grok following an investigation into its AI system producing sexual content. This week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer demanded Musk urgently “get his act together” over sexualized images of X. Technology Minister Liz Kendall warned on Friday that the government could “block access to services in the UK if they refuse to comply with UK law”.

European regulators in particular have increased their scrutiny of the company, focusing on misinformation, inadequate content moderation and lack of transparency.

In July, French authorities asked the company to share its algorithm as part of an investigation into allegations of bias and manipulation. At that time, X accused the investigation of being politically motivated and said he would not comply with the request.

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to the text.