In the near future, the homepages of news websites we browse daily may fully usher in the era of AI orchestration. The signs of this transformation have begun to emerge in a series of dynamics. Recently, Perplexity, a company focusing on the field of AI search, has put forward a plan that shocks the industry-with an offer of up to $34.5 billion, intending to acquire Google Chrome browser. This price even exceeds Perplexity’s own valuation of $18 billion, demonstrating its strong ambition to control the gateway of human information.
Perplexity’s bold move is just the tip of the iceberg for AI companies to compete for new information gateway. As early as 2024, the company launched a news aggregation function called “Discover”, which uses AI technology to capture news from the entire network in real time and present it to users in the form of structured pages. Users can not only get the latest news content, but also ask in-depth questions on hot topics and get instant answers. Echoing Perplexity is Particle, a company founded by former Twitter core team members that launched an AI news app in November of the same year. Particle’s official website declares: “News, be better organized.” Here, the organizers of news are no longer human editors, but AI.
Perplexity’s Discover page makes real-time information into an interactive question-and-answer form. Every piece of news contains a wealth of information waiting to be discovered. Particle, on the other hand, is committed to re-weaving scattered news reports into complete “stories”. Users can see multiple perspectives, key quotations and background of events in a single page.
This AI-native news product brings users an unprecedented reading experience. In the past, readers often had to jump back and forth between multiple media outlets to piece together the whole picture of news events. Particle directly address this pain point stating: “Understanding current events should be easier. So why is keepping up with the news harder than your job?” Now, with AI’ sophisticated curation, users can grasp the core and context of complex events in just minutes. From the perspective of product architecture, these AI news products are no longer simple link aggregations or summary lists, but “events” as the smallest unit reconstruct the organizational logic of information. Like an “editor-in-chief”, AI automatically identifies hot spots, gathers multi-source evidence, and generates interactive interpretations, knocking on the door of the human editorial department with a “friendly” attitude.
The rise of AI is reshaping the underlying logic of human access to information. The trend of “atomization” of information is becoming increasingly obvious. AI can disassemble complex news into the smallest factual units, and then dynamically reorganize them according to scenarios. At the same time, the “production-distribution-realization” process of traditional news is also undergoing profound changes. In the AI era, two key links of “verification” and “authorization” need to be supplemented to maintain accuracy and establish a fair profit sharing mechanism.
In this transformation, the division of labor between man and machine has been redefined. Standardization work such as basic fact reporting and data collation will be more undertaken by AI, while human journalists will focus on in-depth on-site investigations, value judgments in complex situations, and supervision and error correction of AI output. Journalists in the future may be more like “information product designers” who not only know how to collaborate with AI, but also control the integrity and verifiability of information.
