A team led by former Twitter engineers is rethinking how artificial intelligence can be used to help people process news and information. Particle.news, which went into private beta over the weekend, is a new startup offering a personalized, “multi-perspective” news reading experience that not only leverages artificial intelligence to summarize news, but also aims to do so in a way that amply compensates writers and publishers — or so is the claim.
Although Particle has yet to share its business model, it arrives at a time when there is growing concern about the impact of artificial intelligence on rapidly shrinkage News ecosystem. AI-summarized news could limit clicks on publishers’ websites, meaning their ability to generate revenue through advertising would also be reduced.
The startup was founded last year by a former Senior Director of Product Management at Twitter, Sara Beykpour, who worked on products like Twitter Blue, Twitter Video, and Conversations, and who pioneered the experimental twttr app. She was at Twitter from 2015 to 2021, rising from software engineering to senior director of product management. Its co-founder is a former senior engineer at both Twitter and Tesla, Marcel Molina.
The premise behind Particle, as Beykpour he explained last monthis to make it easier to follow the news using AI.
“Sometimes we feel like titles are all we have time for. We also want to understand more, but faster,” he wrote in an introduction to startup on Threads. “We’re in the early stages of using artificial intelligence to transform the way we interact with news.”
Using Particle, news readers are offered a quick bulleted summary of the story, with information pulled from a variety of sources. However, when announcing the private beta, Beykpour noted that readers can either use the synopsis to catch up or choose to dig in to “find out how a story developed over time.”
The venture-backed startup has raised funding from Kindred Ventures and Adverb Ventures, as well as various angel investors, including Twitter and Medium co-founder Ev Williams and Behance founder Scott Belsky.
Belsky remarked in X, “Particle has become a daily app for me. It compiles the many articles (and angles) on any news topic, presents the key points as objectively as possible, and allows you to dig further in many dimensions. In the age of abstraction ahead, great example of everyday AI,” he wrote.
Particle offers a demo of its technology for users logged out through it Websitewhere articles are presented along with their synopsis, the timestamp of when they were last updated and, in a small section at the bottom, the sources they draw from.
These sources come from across the political spectrum and include name-brand publishers such as The New York Times, CNBC, AP, ABC, CNN, Breitbart, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Politico, Fox News, USA Today, The Daily Caller, New York Post, The Hill and others. International outlets are also withdrawn from demonstrations where appropriate. However, each bullet point is not linked to its original source or sources, making it difficult to accurately check the accuracy of the AI summary without delving into all the articles. (The key terms are, however, linked.) We also noted that the photo accompanying a news summary is watermarked with the publisher’s logo.
Image Credits: Particle
The final product will likely differ, given that Particle is just now launching its private beta for testing and plans to offer a mobile app in the future as it hires a senior iOS engineer.
A similar model of leveraging a variety of news sources and then using artificial intelligence to summarize it was recently used by Artifact, the now-defunct startup from Instagram’s co-founders. In his case, the Artifact team pre-curated news sources based on factors related to their integrity and quality. For example, the store had to be quick to make corrections when it was wrong and transparent about its funding. We hope to talk in more detail about how Particle controls its sources closer to a public release.
Another AI-powered news app, Bulletin, was also launched recently to tackle clickbait along with offering news summaries.
Given the interest in 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 is like and have the technical and product experience to build a quality product. However, it remains to be seen whether publishers who believe AI is eating into their space will feel “fairly compensated”.
Adverb Ventures co-founder and CEO April Underwood praised Particle in a LinkedIn post for the investment of the company:
“We had the opportunity to support them just as we were completing our first close for Fund 1 — we had to wait for our first capital call to get their money back!” he said Sunday, adding that Adverb closed its $75 million Fund I just a few months ago. “Sara and Marcel are the kind of founders we dreamed of supporting when we set out to build a new early-stage company. They go after a large problem area. They have the skills to tackle big problems at a high level of product quality. And they can attract other talented people to join them and together invent a future consumer they don’t know to ask for (yet),” Underwood wrote.
In an email with TechCrunch, Underwood explained the upcoming opportunity:
In terms of space, we believe that AI will touch every aspect of people’s digital lives at work and at home. Coupled with the pre-existing conditions here — it’s hard to find breaking news from sources you can trust, and the social media landscape is rapidly evolving — and you have to believe that the way people consume news will be different. a few years from now. Sara and Marcel are uniquely qualified to help people get the news they need in a modern way.
Requests for comment from Particle were not returned. The Particle beta signup form is here.
— Sarah Perez can be reached at sarahp@techcrunch.com or 415.234.3994 on Signal.
Updated after publication with additional comment from Underwood. 2/26/24, 4:30 PM etc.
