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

(Bloomberg) — Social media platform X will open its new algorithm to the public in seven days, Elon Musk said on Saturday, including the code used to decide what posts and advertisements are recommended to users.

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

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The billionaire didn’t say why X was making its algorithm open source. He and the company have clashed several times with regulators over content being shown to users.

Some X users had previously complained that they were receiving fewer posts on the social media platform from people they follow. 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 pledged a fix.

The company has also been working to incorporate more artificial intelligence into its recommendation algorithm for X, using Grok, Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot.

Musk has promised in recent years to make some of X’s algorithms public, but the follow-through has been spotty.

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

“To the degree that people are seeing improvements in their feed, it is not due to the actions of specific individuals changing heuristics, but rather increasing use of Grok and other AI tools,” Musk wrote in October.

The company was working to have all of the more than 100 million daily posts published to X evaluated by Grok, which would then offer individual users the posts most likely to interest them, Musk wrote. “This will profoundly improve the quality of your feed.” He added that the company was planning to roll out the new features by November.

Grok’s image-generation capabilities have faced criticism from global regulators over a recent flood of AI-generated images that sexualize women and children on X. As of Friday, Grok told users on X that they would need a paid subscription to generate and edit images. Those features were initially introduced on X for free with daily limits.

Indonesia blocked access to Grok after an investigation into the AI system’s generation of sexual content. This week, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer demanded Musk’s X urgently “get their act together” over the sexualized images. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall warned in a statement on Friday the government could “block services from being accessed in the UK, if they refuse to comply with UK law.”