Particle is a novel app that uses artificial intelligence to organize and summarize news

You could say this is a complicated moment for online news. There are efforts to undermine the First Amendment, dominant platforms not generating traffic like they once did, the complexities of an ever-changing advertising business, and so on. Perhaps most notably, artificial intelligence is developing, with platforms that pull news from the internet extracting it into a lot of half-true informationand then share it with anyone who asks your chatbot about what’s novel. This fight happens Particlea novel platform that several former Twitter product leaders have been working on for a long time, which aims to make it easier for users to find and understand news. With lots of AI.

Particle’s plan is to apply AI to do two particularly useful things. First, it organizes many articles and stories into collections that the platform calls “Stories,” so you can get a lot of information and perspectives on everything you read about. Some of the articles on Particle include over 100 news articles, as well as X posts, a section with the most relevant quotes on the topic, and more. That’s a lot of stuff.

Particle also uses artificial intelligence to summarize all articles right at the top of each article page. By default, it offers the bulleted list of information you’d expect from ChatGPT, but you can customize the output in a number of ways using what the app calls “summary styles.” You can select “Opposing Sides” to read roughly two perspectives on Trump’s proposed novel cabinet, for example, or select “Explain It Like I Was 5” to read about the latest developments in the Gaza Strip in the simplest way possible. The Particle app even lets you rewrite your headline in different ways to make it simpler or funnier (or, in my experience, mostly just more confusing). You can also just ask a question directly and the Particle AI bot will try to answer.

This type of AI organization and summarization is available everywhere in the app. When you first download Particle, you can swipe through the headlines in the Tinder app to let you know what you want to see more of and less of in your feed. You can also follow specific publications or journalists and see their stuff more prominently. Particle tries to unravel the political leanings of each article and publisher, both to advocate for a one-sided message and to try to strike a balance.

Particle is a nice-looking and incredibly informative app, and in my experience as a beta tester, it’s a pretty useful way to quickly review gigantic issues. It’s also full of the same ideas that many other companies have tried and failed. Apps like Circa haven’t been able to build an audience and business based on the same type of broadly useful summaries and aggregations. Discors had some nice structure ideas it wasn’t much either. Both Snapchat and Facebook once had news aggregation dreams but abandoned them. There just isn’t much evidence that such an app can work.

Of course, Particle knows all this. Sara Beykpour, the company’s CEO, has spent over a decade at Twitter and understands the complexities of exchanging information on the Internet. Its co-founder Marcel Molina also spent years working on some of Twitter’s timelines and other services. They both believe that the emergence of artificial intelligence will make it possible to do these things better and on a larger scale. Particle says it has found ways to significantly reduce AI-related hallucinations and inaccuracies – some of which require human editorial oversight – and has struck deals with Reuters, Time, Fortune and other companies to share their content. Making these trades and executing them correctly will be key to keeping Particle sturdy.

In the midst of a heated election and on the Internet, where information and disinformation abound and are almost impossible to tell apart, Particle believes it has found a way to break through. And he hopes that’s what people want.