X Revolutionizes Its Workflows with Grok AI: Extreme Personalization

X Unveils Personalized Timelines with Grok AI

Bluesky is no longer the only platform leveraging artificial intelligence to create personalized feeds. X recently announced the launch of its Personalized Timelines, a major feature powered by Grok, allowing users to explore over 75 specific topics through curated feeds. These feeds can be pinned directly to the app's home tab.

X presents this feature as one of the "biggest changes" made to the app so far. Grok's AI is used not only to create these timelines but also to customize them for each user, providing a unique and tailored experience.

Closure of X Communities

The announcement of Personalized Timelines coincides with the closure of X Communities, a feature that allowed users to create their own communities around various topics. However, this feature saw a decline in usage, prompting X to focus on the new timelines.

How Personalized Timelines Work

Nikita Bier, product lead at X, emphasized that these timelines work particularly well for topics with which users are already engaging. Unlike traditional methods that rely on signals like keywords or hashtags, Grok reads each post, understands it, and then adds topic tags. This capability is made possible by Grok's AI models, which is a property of xAI, the company that acquired X last year.

Availability and Access

At launch, Personalized Timelines are available only to Premium subscribers on iOS, with Android support currently in development. All levels of Premium subscription can access this feature. To use this new functionality, users simply need to scroll right past the "For You" and "Subscriptions" feeds on X, as well as any other pinned personal lists. Users can then tap the plus sign (+) to choose the personalized timelines they wish to pin to their home tab. Up to 10 topics or lists can be pinned.

Integrated Advertising

A notable feature is that the second position in each feed is occupied by an advertisement, suggesting that X has found a way to increase its advertising inventory. This is crucial as X's advertising activity has reportedly struggled since Musk's acquisition, with conflicting reports about the situation improving.

Diversity of Available Categories

The initial topics offered by X are broad and fairly standard, similar to those one might find on news sites. Categories include Business & Finance, Sports, Technology, Politics, Stocks & Economy, News, Science, Movies & TV, Food & Drink, Art, Real Estate, Home & Garden, Beauty, Education, Games, and many more.

Beyond the general sports category, there are also options to follow specific sports, including American football, baseball, basketball, boxing, soccer, golf, mixed martial arts, racing and motorsports, rugby, winter sports, ice hockey, tennis, cricket, Formula 1, cycling, and the Olympics. Esports are also included.

Pop Culture and Technology

Pop culture and technology topics also make up many of the available categories. Users can pin topics like celebrities, music, concerts, country music, dance, electronic music, fashion, pop, K-pop, J-pop, podcasts, hip-hop, and jazz.

With the Technology category, users can follow specific interests such as Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency — two topics that remain popular on X. There are also categories for themes that overlap with Elon Musk's various companies and interests, such as robotics, software development, space, and biotechnology.

Other General Categories

Other general categories include themes like anime, digital art, photography, career, pets, design, marriage & family, shopping, mental health, and more.

News Categories: War, Crime, and Elections

It is worth noting that the initial set of news-related topics starts with the conflict in Iran, crime, and elections topping the suggestions. While this likely reflects current conversations on X, it also serves as an example of how a product decision can influence the news people see. A clearer solution might be to organize the dozens of options into broader high-level categories, listed alphabetically, with subcategories appearing when each is tapped. This would allow X to significantly expand its "news" categories beyond these three major themes.

There may also be concerns regarding these timelines built by Grok, which was designed to be politically neutral and "truth-seeking," but has often tended to lean right or amplify misinformation in practice.

However, in our own tests, the personalized timelines did not seem to lean obviously right or left. In a handful of test scrolls, the feeds came from a range of media outlets such as ABC, CBS, CSPAN, AP, Reuters, AFP, Daily Beast, The Hill, Foreign Policy, Puck, The Atlantic, The Economist, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, Forbes, and the BBC (of which I do not have all subscriptions), accompanied by commentary from various analysts.

It remains to be seen whether these personalized feeds will radically change how people use X. For the most part, people tend to want to see things that interest them appear in their main algorithmic feed. But personalized feeds allow for the exploration of new interests or diving into topics only when they are relevant — like checking a sports feed when a game is ongoing. Coupled with the new "Snooze Topics" option for the "For You" feed, users can adjust their experience on X according to their preferences.