A team led by former Twitter engineers is rethinking how AI might be used to assist people process news and knowledge. Particle.news, which entered into private beta over the weekend, is a brand new startup offering a personalised, “multi-perspective” news reading experience that not only leverages AI to summarize the news, but additionally goals to accomplish that in a way that fairly compensates authors and publishers — or so is the claim.
While Particle hasn’t yet shared its business model, it arrives at a time when there’s a growing concern concerning the impact of AI on a rapidly shrinking news ecosystem. News that’s summarized by AI could limit clicks to publishers’ web sites, which suggests their ability to monetize via promoting would even be reduced.
The startup was founded last yr by former Senior Director of Product Management at Twitter, Sara Beykpour, who worked on products like Twitter Blue, Twitter Video, and conversations, and who spearheaded the experimental app, twttr. She had been at Twitter from 2015 through 2021, growing her position from software engineering to that of a senior director of product management. Her co-founder is a former senior engineer at each Twitter and Tesla, Marcel Molina.
The premise behind Particle, as Beykpour explained last month, is to make it easier to maintain up with news using AI.
“Sometimes it seems like headlines are all we now have time for. We also want to know more, but faster,” she wrote in an introduction to the startup on Threads. “We’re within the early stages of using AI to rework the best way we interact with news.”
Using Particle, news readers are offered a fast, bulleted summary of the story, with information pulled from quite a lot of sources. Nevertheless, when announcing the private beta, Beykpour noted that readers can either use the summary to get on top of things or can decide to go deeper to “study how a story has unfolded over time.”
The venture-backed startup has raised a complete of $4.4 million in seed funding from Kindred Ventures and Adverb Ventures, in addition to various angel investors, including Twitter and Medium co-founder Ev Williams and Behance founder, Scott Belsky. The round closed in April 2023.
Remarked Belsky on X, “Particle has grow to be a every day app for me. It synthesizes the numerous articles (and angles) on any news topic, surfaces the important thing points as objectively as possible, and enables you to dig further across many dimensions. Within the era of abstraction ahead, great example of every day AI,” he wrote.
Particle offers a demo of its technology for logged-out users via its website, where articles are featured together with their summary, timestamp as to once they were last updated, and, in a small section at the underside, the sources they draw from.
These sources pull from across the political spectrum and include big-name publishers like The Latest York Times, CNBC, the AP, ABC, CNN, Breitbart, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Politico, Fox News, USA Today, The Each day Caller, Latest York Post, The Hill, and others. International outlets are also pulled from, when relevant, the demos indicate. Nevertheless, each bullet point just isn’t linked to its original source or sources, which makes it difficult to fact-check the accuracy of the AI summary without delving into all of the articles. (Key terms are, nonetheless, linked.) We noted, too, that the photograph accompanying a news summary is watermarked with the publisher’s logo.
Image Credits: Particle
The top product will likely differ, provided that Particle is just now launching its private beta for testing and intends to supply a mobile app in the long run, because it’s hiring for a senior iOS engineer.
An analogous model of leveraging quite a lot of news sources after which employing AI to summarize, was recently employed by Artifact, the now-shuttered startup from Instagram’s co-founders. In its case, Artifact’s team curated the news sources upfront based on aspects related to their integrity and quality. For instance, the outlet needed to be quick to make corrections, when flawed, and be transparent about their funding. We’re hoping to speak in additional detail about how Particle vets its sources closer to a public launch.
One other AI-powered news app, Bulletin, also recently launched to tackle clickbait together with offering news summaries.
Given the interest on this space, what could make Particle stand out is its founding team. Arriving from Twitter, the co-founders have experienced what a real-time news ecosystem seems like, and have the technical and product experience to construct a high quality product. Whether or not publishers who feel that AI is eating into their space will feel “fairly compensated,” nonetheless, stays to be seen.
Adverb Ventures co-founder and managing director April Underwood praised Particle in a post on LinkedIn concerning the firm’s investment:
“We got the possibility to back them just as we were completing our very first close for Fund 1 — we had to attend for our first capital call to hit to wire them the cash!” she said on Sunday, adding that Adverb closed its $75 million Fund I just a few months ago. “Sara and Marcel are the sort of founders we dreamed of backing after we got down to construct a brand new early-stage firm. They’re going after a giant problem space. They’ve got the abilities to tackle big problems at a high level of product quality. And so they can attract other talented folks to hitch them, and together invent a future consumers don’t know to ask for (yet),” Underwood wrote.
In an email with TechCrunch, Underwood explained the chance ahead:
By way of the space, we consider AI goes to the touch every aspect of individuals’s digital lives at work and at home. Couple that with the pre-existing conditions at play here — it’s hard to search out breaking news from sources you possibly can trust, and the social media landscape is rapidly evolving — and you might have to consider that the best way people eat news goes to be different a couple of years from now. Sara and Marcel are uniquely qualified to assist people get the news they need in a contemporary way.
Beykpour tells TechCrunch that the thought for Particle got here about because there are loads of challenges around how people get news and stay awake so far with what’s happening. Nevertheless, the corporate remains to be talking to publishers about what they would want to feel fairly compensated by a model where AI is summarizing their work.
“Truthfully, we’re figuring that out. We’re talking to and dealing with publishers now to determine what the appropriate model is,” she says. “But my goal here is to make it fair.”
Investor Steve Jang, who has known Beykpour for 15 years, said he was excited to back her and the team’s efforts in exploring how AI can improve the news reading experience.
“The advantage of AI is that it will possibly do certain things that no existing human being can do,” he explains. “It will possibly take all of the known history of knowledge and data that’s publicly available and synthesize it to provide help to understand more completely what is happening on a specific topic…it will possibly accomplish that much by way of making a natural language experience that is instantly consumable and comprehensible. It will possibly do many things around supplementing the secondary discovery — the investigation that you just might wish to do to know more deeply,” Jang continues.
“So AI on this case is a mixture of LLMs that principally do loads of the labor to offer you that completeness, comprehension, and depth immediately — that was really hard to do, previously,” he adds.
The corporate expects to have more news to share on that front within the months ahead. Within the meantime, Particle’s beta sign-up form is here.
Originally published 2/26/24. Updated after publication with additional comments from Underwood and Jang. Updated, 2/29/24, 8:30 a.m. PT with additional funding details.
