A new startup called Particle.news, which entered private beta over the weekend, promises a personalized, "multi-perspective" news reading experience that uses AI not just to summarize news but to do so in a way that fairly compensates its authors and publishers-or so it claims. Launched by a team led by former Twitter engineers, the project raises once again the question of how AI might assist people in sorting through news and information.

While it remains unclear exactly what business model Particle has, it comes at a time when many are growing increasingly concerned about the impact of AI on a rapidly shrinking news ecosystem. News summarized by AI will limit clicks to publishers' websites-that means their ability to monetize via advertising will be reduced, too.

The company was last year founded by Sara Beykpour, who was the Senior Director of Product Management at Twitter and came from experience in developing products like Twitter Blue, Twitter Video, and conversations. He is a founder member of the experimental app named twttr. He had worked at Twitter from 2015 through 2021, where he advanced his position from a software engineer to become a senior director in product management. His fellow founding member is Marcel Molina who has worked as a senior engineer for both Twitter and Tesla.

Idea, Beykpour last month explained, was to make news easier to follow with the use of AI.
"It sometimes feels like headlines are all we have time for. And sometimes, we want to know more, but faster," she said in an intro to the startup on Threads. "We're just in the early days of using AI to change the way we interact with news."

Using Particle, news readers receive a fast, bulleted summary of a story with information pulled from a variety of sources. However, when announcing the private beta, Beykpour noted that readers can either use the summary to get up to speed or can choose to go deeper to "learn about how a story has unfolded over time."

The venture-backed startup has raised $4.4 million in seed funding from Kindred Ventures and Adverb Ventures, besides a number of angel investors, which includes Twitter and Medium co-founder, Ev Williams and Scott Belsky who was founded Behance. According to reports, the round had closed in April 2023.

"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. In the era of abstraction ahead, great example of daily AI, " he wrote.

Particle publishes a demonstration of its technology on its site, making it accessible to logged-out users, featuring articles along with their summary, timestamp as to when they were last updated, and, in a small section at the bottom, the sources they draw from.

Such sources draw from both sides of the aisle and include big-name 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, among many others. International sources are drawn from where appropriate and based upon demos. However, each bullet point does not hyperlink to its original source or sources, so impossible to fact-check the accuracy of this AI summary without reading all the articles. (Key terms are, however, hyperlinked.) We also noted that the picture accompanying a news summary is watermarked with the publisher's logo.

The ultimate output is likely to be different, because Particle is launching its private beta only yesterday and is working on a mobile application in the near future, and it's actually hiring a senior iOS engineer.

Another similar model of aggregation of different news sources followed by AI-based summarization was employed recently by Artifact-the now-defunct startup from the co-founders of Instagram. In its case, Artifact’s team curated the news sources upfront based on factors related to their integrity and quality. For example, the outlet had to be quick to make corrections, when wrong, and be transparent about their funding. We’re hoping to talk in more detail about how Particle vets its sources closer to a public launch.

Another AI-empowered news app, Bulletin, also launched recently aiming to defeat clickbait in addition to news summaries.

With so much attention here, what really differentiates Particle could be its founding team. Coming over from Twitter, the co-founders have experienced firsthand what it's like to have a real-time news ecosystem - and they have both technical and product experience to build a quality product. Whether publishers who feel AI is "eating their lunch" will find them "fairly compensated," however remains to be seen.

Adverb Ventures co-founder and managing director April Underwood commented on LinkedIn about the company's investment:

"We got the chance to back them just as we were closing our very first close for Fund 1 — we had to wait for our first capital call to hit to wire them the money!" " she said Sunday, adding that Adverb closed its $75 million Fund I just a couple of months ago. "Sara and Marcel are the kind of founders we dreamed of backing when we set out to build a new early-stage firm," she said. "They're going after a huge problem space. They've got the skills to tackle big problems at a level of product quality.".

And they can bring other great minds in the room to join them, and in combination, invent a future consumers don't know to ask for (yet)," Underwood wrote.
In a mailer to TechCrunch, Underwood explained the opportunity at hand: In the space, we believe AI is going to touch every aspect of people's digital lives in both work and at home. Compound that with the pre-existing conditions being present here — it's hard to find breaking news from someone you trust, and the social media landscape is changing at such a breakneck speed — you have to think the way people are going to consume news in a few years is all going to be altered.

Sara and Marcel are uniquely positioned to help people get the news they need in a very modern way.

As Beykpour in TechCrunch, Particle came to be due to the fact there are so many shortcomings on the side of how one actually receives news and is updated as to what happens. However, the company is still discussing with publishers what they would need to feel fairly compensated by a model where AI is summarizing their work.

“Honestly, we’re figuring that out. We’re talking to and working with publishers now to figure out what the right 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 AI has is that it can do certain things that no existing human being can, he explains. It can take all the known history of information and data that's publicly available and synthesize it to help you understand more completely what is going on on a particular topic.it can do so much in terms of creating a natural language experience that is immediately consumable and comprehensible.".

It can do many things around supplementing the secondary discovery — the investigation that you might want to do to understand more deeply, Jang continues. So AI, in this case, is a combination of LLMs that basically do a lot of the hard work to give you that completeness, comprehension, and depth immediately — that was really hard to do, previously, he adds.