News aggregator - 今天日头条

[ouyangjun]

I’m reading the book, “AI Superpowers” by 李开复 and he talked about a news aggregation site, driven by AI, called 今日头条 that has a valuation of something like $30B.  It got me interested in the site and I’m thinking of downloading the app and using it for my news.  Wanted to know if anyone has ever used it?  

 

PS - the book by 李开复 (Kai Fu Li) is a great read.  Starting his career at the silicone valley tech giants prior to opening his own his own VC in China, Li is somewhat of a rockstar as it relates to AI and tech in China.  

[Tomsima]

I have used it, but from what I remember it just seemed to aggregate endless amount of propaganda rather than actual news which I was interested in. Anyone correct me if its now any different...

[Publius]

It's only getting worse if you ask me. Also I think it's at least partly to blame for the upsurge in clickbait titles (to give you a taste: “因为这件事日韩要闹翻 日本扬言报复”, “无一例外！十九大后被查的77名老虎 都有两大问题”, "侠客岛：很多人都没注意政府工作报告加了这句话", "省委副书记撂狠话：谁干这件事 就砸谁饭碗", "新西兰遭澳籍公民恐袭后，澳大利亚居然还有人敢这么说话", “白萝卜不能和'它'同时吃，毒性很强，多数人还在吃！”, "越南姑娘第一次来中国，直呼：中国将这点改掉，就完美了").

 

字节跳动, the company behind 今日头条, is also responsible for creating the hugely popular short video sharing app 抖音/TikTok.

[StChris]

I'm not so much interested in the news aggregator, but the book sounds interesting. What is it about specifically? AI in the US and China?

[ouyangjun]

Good comments.  I wonder how much the propaganda/junk articles are correlated to clicking on said articles.  My understanding is that 今日头条 uses AI to get articles directly fed to you (no people behind the curation), so if clicking on said article will continue to feed said articles to your homepage.  The thing I found interesting was that their users spend upwards of 70 minutes per day on the app, which was largely driven by getting exactly the type of news they were interested in.  Considering I’ve not used the site/app I can’t say for sure, I’m only going off of what I read.

 

@StChris - the book is about AI in both China and America, the differences in approaches, development, and readiness for scale.  It’s a very good book. I’m only about 1/3 of the way through or else I’d give more of an overview.

[StChris]

@ouyangjun Thanks. I'm interested in the subject, so it sounds worth a read.