A team of former Twitter engineers is developing an AI-powered news reader that could help people access and process news and information easily.
The website called particle.news is currently in private beta with the developers inviting people to join the waitlist.
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Ex-Twitter Engineers Use AI for Streamlining News
In a Threads post, former Twitter employee Sara Beykpour shared that the website opened the first wave of private beta to select users. Beykpour introduced herself as the CEO and co-founder of Particle.
One of the main selling points of the website is streamlining and personalizing the news based on the user's interests. "Particle lets you understand more, faster - get up to speed with a bullet point summary, or go deeper and learn about how a story has unfolded over time," she added.
In addition, the CEO also shared that every publisher and author will be fairly compensated. According to Beykpour, the idea is to connect readers to writers and at the same time support them in the process.
Particle Starts as Venture-Backed Startup
Particle's arrival could be the answer to the rapidly shrinking news ecosystem. Recently, publishers have been complaining about AI summarization which lessens their ability to monetize via advertising.
In her announcement, the CEO shared that the startup has raised funding from Kindred Ventures and Adverb Ventures. In addition, Twitter and Medium co-founder Ev Williams and Behance founder Scott Belsky invested in the venture.
"Particle has become a daily app for me. It synthesizes the many articles (and angles) on any news topic, surfaces the key points as objectively as possible, and lets you dig further across many dimensions," Belsky testified.
Currently, Particle offers a demo for logged-out users wherein the articles are featured along with their summary, the number of articles written about the topic, and a timestamp.
The articles have been pulled from The New York Times, CNBC, CNN, The Guardian, and other big-name publishers.
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