Elon Musk Makes Part of X Algorithm Open Source, Says It Sucks

Elon Musk is delivering on his promise to open up X’s recommendation algorithm.He’s making the code publicly available, a step towards a truly open-source platform. He initially pledged this in 2022,releasing a code snapshot,but it wasn’t consistently updated.

This new release is a significant improvement. Musk plans to update the code repository in four weeks, as he announced. However, it’s not a complete picture yet.

Musk stated he’d release all code determining organic and advertising post recommendations. That hasn’t happened. Currently, Grok sorts the “Following” feed by default, though users can switch to a chronological “recent” view. The grok algorithm itself isn’t included in this release.

Moreover, X’s “For You” and “Following” feeds contain ads. Musk intends to open-source the ad-serving algorithm too. So, ther’s still more code to come. This release is a start, but X isn’t fully open source—yet.