Former Twitter Engineers Announce AI-Powered News Summarizer, ‘Particle’

Screenshot via Particle News

A new player, Particle News, is stepping into the digital media ring, fresh from the minds of some of Twitter’s former engineers. This startup plans to rewrite the rules of news consumption with the help of artificial intelligence. Its surprising inception comes right on the heels of Artifact News—an AI-driven news app by Instagram’s founders—announcing it would shutter in February, just a year after its launch.

While Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger cited lackluster market opportunity as the reason for them “winding down” the short-lived Artifact, Particle News appears to be powering ahead.

The app intends to cut through the noise of the daily news flood by offering personalized news summaries, giving readers the gist of various stories through quick bullet notes. To find out more, users can expand on those snippets to see how a story has developed over time.

Particle co-founder Sara Beykpour, a former senior director of product management at Twitter, says it’s all about making news from various sides easier to digest.

“Particle brings you a streamlined, personalized, multi-perspective, and beautiful reading experience to help you catch up with the news you care about quickly,” Beykpour addresses in a Threads post, adding that it will help users “understand more, faster.”

Screenshot via Particle News (news thumbnails omitted)

“Sometimes it feels like headlines are all we have time for. We also want to understand more, but faster,” Beykpour previously explained.

Currently in private beta and accessible on a by-invitation basis, the app offers a public preview of its service on its website. You’ll see blurbs of real-time news about Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, and others that, when clicked upon, reveal updates in a distilled format.

Screenshot via Particle News

Readers could expand on these topics to see which publishers, typically dozens of them, the clippings were synthesized from.

Beykpour, along with co-founder Marcel Molina—who was a senior engineer at both Twitter and Tesla—is using their tech and real-time information chops to build Particle into a platform that delivers news in a snappy, yet rich, format. The company has bagged some prominent investors such as Twitter and Medium Ev Williams and Behance founder Scott Belsky.

Now for the not-so-good news: such methods of summarizing articles might mean less direct traffic for the original publications that feed the AI. While the startup hasn’t spilled all the beans on how it plans to make money and share the wealth with creators, it claims that it intends to fairly compensate authors and publishers.

Particle is stepping into a tricky landscape, trying to balance the convenience of quick news bites with the need to support the publishers behind the stories. As it gears up for a wider launch, how it tackles these challenges—and whether readers and publishers bite—will be the real story to watch.

The startup is planning to launch a mobile app, and it’s started putting out a call for a senior iOS engineer.

[via TechCrunch, screenshots via Particle News]