Elon Musk's social media platform X delivered on its promise to pull back the curtain on one of social media's most closely guarded secrets Tuesday, releasing the machine learning architecture that determines what posts appear in users' feeds.
We have open-sourced our new 𝕏 algorithm, powered by the same transformer architecture as xAI's Grok model.
We know the algorithm is dumb and needs massive improvements, but at least you can see us struggle to make it better in real-time and with transparency.
He promised updates would be "repeated every 4 weeks, with comprehensive developer notes, to help you understand what changed."
The algorithm retrieves content from two sources: in-network posts from accounts users follow and out-of-network posts discovered through ML-based retrieval, combining both through a scoring system that predicts engagement probabilities for each post.
"By exposing the Grok-based transformer architecture, X is essentially handing developers a blueprint to understand, and potentially improve upon, recommendation systems that have been black boxes for years," he told Decrypt. "This level of transparency could force other platforms to follow suit or explain why they won't."
“Creators can learn what works and adjust without blindly gaming the system, while clearer incentives benefit regular users and lead to better content,” he added.
These include engagement predictions based on user history for likes and reposts, content novelty and relevance with timely personalized posts scoring higher, diversity scoring that limits repeated authors, a balance between followed accounts and ML-suggested posts, and negative signals from blocks and mutes that lower scores.
X under scrutiny
