Threads tests AI summaries for trending topics

Meta is borrowing a familiar playbook from Elon Musk to help people make sense of the noise on Threads.

On Friday, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri announced that Threads is rolling out a test in the U.S. that uses AI to generate summaries of trending topics in its "Trending now" section. If that sounds familiar, it's virtually identical to X's Stories feature powered by Grok, which digests fast-moving news and discourse across the platform.

Along with the AI summaries, Threads is testing an expanded list of trending topics and finally fixing search. Users will soon be able to search within custom date ranges and look up posts from specific accounts—basic tools that Mosseri himself admitted are "long-overdue improvements."

The Bluesky heat is on

The flurry of updates isn't happening in a vacuum. Threads has been sprinting to patch missing features over the past week, including rolling out custom feeds and adjusting its core algorithm to prioritize posts from people you actually follow.

The real pressure is coming from Bluesky. Following the U.S. presidential election and growing weariness over X's political shift under Elon Musk, Bluesky has exploded past 20 million users.

While Threads still boasts a massive lead with over 275 million monthly active users, market intelligence firm Similarweb reports that Bluesky is rapidly closing the gap in daily active users. Similarweb noted that if Bluesky maintains its current trajectory, it could eventually challenge Threads on everyday engagement.

Why it matters

For anyone trying to use Threads for breaking news, this is a massive upgrade. Clicking into a trending topic on social media is usually a miserable crawl through spam, repetitive jokes, and bots; having a concise AI summary at the top actually makes the trending section functional.

However, Threads will have to navigate the exact same landmines that X ran into. AI models are notoriously bad at parsing online sarcasm, bot swarms, and developing news situations. Grok has hallucinated wild headlines in the past, and Meta's AI will inevitably face the same scrutiny the first time it misinterprets a sensitive real-world event.

For the broader industry, it shows that the battle to replace Twitter is forcing Meta to move at startup speed. Copying Bluesky's custom feeds and X's AI summaries proves Meta is terrified of losing momentum, but relying entirely on competitors' feature lists won't be enough to give Threads an authentic cultural identity.