The AI Curator: How X is Ending the Era of Crowded Timelines
If you have spent any time on X lately, you know the feeling of being buried under a mountain of posts you do not care about. Elon Musk and his team at xAI are finally trying to fix that. On Thursday, X launched a massive update that puts Grok, its “truth-seeking” AI, in charge of your content discovery. This is not just another small tweak to an algorithm. It is a fundamental shift in how the platform works. X is rolling out Grok-driven Custom Timelines, giving users over 75 curated, topic-specific feeds to choose from.
The goal here is to replace the messy, network-based “For You” feed with a system that actually understands what you are reading. Unlike old feeds that just looked at hashtags or who you follow, Grok reads and comprehends every single post. It uses semantic meaning to group content together. This means if you pin a “Cryptocurrency” or “Sports” feed to your home tab, you are getting posts based on actual topic relevance, not just keyword matches. Nikita Bier, the head of product at X, called this one of the biggest changes to the app in years.
The Sunset of X Communities
As Grok takes over the job of organizing the world’s conversations, some old features are heading to the graveyard. X announced that it plans to retire the X Communities feature on May 6. This move makes perfect sense from a business perspective. User-moderated groups are often messy and hard to scale. By moving toward AI-managed spaces, X can create cleaner, more organized environments that are much more attractive to advertisers.
Premium subscribers on iOS are the first ones getting a taste of these new feeds, with Android support coming very soon. You can pin up to ten of these AI-curated lists directly to your home tab. Google and Microsoft are also racing to integrate AI into every corner of their products, but X has a unique advantage. They have a live, 24/7 stream of human thought to train their models. Grok is moving from being a standalone chatbot into a persistent engine that powers everything you see on the platform.
Video, Sound, and the New “Imagine”
But Grok is doing more than just sorting your mail. The new “Grok Imagine” feature is a massive upgrade for creative users. You can now generate six-second videos with native sound directly from text prompts. If you have a static photo, you can ask Grok to bring it to life by describing the motion and atmosphere you want. It even supports short dialogue, allowing you to specify a tone like “whisper” or “excited” for your clips.
To keep things safe, xAI has implemented a “visual classifier” that identifies biometric markers in images. This is a direct response to the deepfake crises that hit the platform in late 2025. The AI now blocks requests to sexualize real people or create revealing clothing edits. It is a reluctant admission that even a platform dedicated to free speech needs some guardrails when the technology becomes this powerful.
The Rise of the Enterprise Vault
For business users, xAI is launching Grok Enterprise and a feature called Enterprise Vault. This is a clear shot at companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. The Vault allows companies to use Grok with total privacy. All data is encrypted with the customer’s own keys and is isolated from everyone else. xAI promises that it will never train its models on your company data.
This mix of consumer fun and high-level business security shows that Elon Musk wants X to be the “everything app” he has talked about for years. By embedding an LLM directly into the content distribution loop, X is changing the paradigm of social media. It is no longer about who you know, it is about what you want to learn. As Grok continues to evolve, the line between a social network and a personal AI assistant will eventually disappear.