Elon Musk’s social network X (formerly known as Twitter) last night released some of the code and architecture of its overhauled social recommendation algorithm under a permissive, enterprise-friendly open source license (Apache 2.0) on Github, allowing for commercial usage and modification. This is the algorithm that decides which X posts and accounts to show to which users on the social network.The new X algorithm, as opposed toto the manual heuristic rules and legacy models in the past, is based on a “Transformer” architecture powered by its parent company, xAI’s, Grok AI language model. This is a significant release for enterprises who have brand accounts on X, or whose leaders and employees use X to post company promotional messages, links, content, etc — as it now provides a look at how X evaluates posts and accounts on the platform, and what criteria go into it deciding to show a post or specific account to users. Therefore, it’s imperative for any businesses using X to post promotional and informational content to understand how the X algorithm works as best as they can, in order to maximize their usage of the platform. To analogize: imagine trying to navigate a hike through a massive woods without a map. You’d likely end up lost and waste time and energy (resources) trying to get to your destination. But with a map, you could plot your route, look for the appropriate landmarks, check your progress along the way, and revise your path as necessary to stay on track. X open sourcing its new transformer-based recommendation algorithm is in many ways just this — providing a “map” to all those who use the platform on how t …
