ince Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, many people have claimed the algorithm change ruined the platform. Musk, now admitting the “algorithm is dumb and needs massive improvements,” has made the algorithm open-source.

In an X post announcing the plan a couple of weeks ago, Musk said the repository would be updated every four weeks and include comprehensive developer notes so people could easily identify what changed. With Monday’s launch, Musk said making the model open-source would allow users to see the company struggle in real-time as it attempts to improve the model.

Specifically, the open-source GitHub repository contains the X algorithm that determines what shows up on your “For You” feed on the platform — the content you find organically on your homepage.

The model overview in the repository details how the algorithm works. A high-level look shows that the algorithm takes into account both in-network content (content from accounts you follow) and out-of-network content (discovered through ML-based retrieval), then ranks it using Phoenix, a Grok-based transformer model that predicts engagement probabilities for each post. However, if you dive deeper into the repository, you can learn exactly how it works, and people are taking to X to post the breakdowns of their findings.

The bigger impact, however, is that this is the first social media platform to openly post its proprietary algorithms, which helps with transparency, as users can learn exactly why information is being served up to them and even suggest tweaks to popular issues. Open-sourcing the model also helps spur innovation, as developers trying to launch similar platforms better understand and potentially learn how to do so on their own. Twitter is not a stranger to copycats, with the X rebranding sparking competitors such as BlueSky and Threads.