On Tuesday, January 20, 2026, X open-sourced its "For You" feed algorithm, powered by the same transformer architecture as xAI's Grok model. 🙌
Rather than following manually crafted rules, the system filters and ranks posts using an AI model based entirely on your past interactions. Content with higher scores shapes your personalized feed, boosting positive actions like likes and curbing negative ones such as blocks. 👍👎
The algorithm gathers potential posts from two sources: in-network (people you already follow) and out-of-network (new discoveries from across X). To keep things fresh, it removes recently viewed content and posts from blocked accounts before scoring.
After scoring, deleted or inappropriate posts are filtered out, and content variety is maintained by preventing repeated posts from the same creator. This ensures your feed stays both relevant and diverse. 🔄
Elon Musk tweeted, "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."
All the code is live on GitHub and will be updated every four weeks, inviting developers and curious users to peek under the hood and help shape the future of social feeds. 🔍✨
Reference(s):
X open-sources feed algorithm, with AI-driven scoring at its core
cgtn.com
