X's enduring gravitational pull

Driving the news: For his first post on X, Huang shared an open letter Friday advocating for open AI models. It was signed by Nvidia alongside several AI firms, including Microsoft and Meta.

• X notched another win when Zuckerberg simultaneously announced the release of Meta's frontier AI model on both X and Meta's rival platform Threads.
• Neither announcement was a one-off. Huang subsequently promoted Nvidia's Open Secure AI Alliance, while Zuckerberg has replied to posts and shared his Wall Street Journal op-ed as part of his new AI-optimism campaign.
• Before this month, Zuckerberg's account had been largely dormant since its creation in 2009, with one post each in 2012 and 2023.

Behind the scenes: An Nvidia spokesperson said Huang personally decided to finally post on X, driven by a strong belief in the importance of open models amid growing debate and the recent Hugging Face breach.

• Hugging Face relied on a Chinese open-weight model to analyze the attack after running into guardrails built into U.S. frontier models.
• Huang's X post was met with a flurry of positive engagement from other AI leaders and investors, from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to Social Capital founder Chamath Palihapitiya.
• Internally, Nvidia is pleased with the response to Huang's post and their experience on the platform so far, the spokesperson said.

What they're saying: "What I posted was too important to me, and too important to the industry and too important to the world. And so I overcame my shyness and put my first thing out on X," said Huang during a Y Combinator event.

Zoom out: Beyond tech and AI circles, X is also the go-to platform for other business and world leaders, especially when immediacy is important.

• French President Emmanuel Macron, no fan of Musk, is using X to personally thank countries helping combat the country's wildfires. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, another Musk critic, regularly uses the platform to share extreme weather alerts with residents.
• Bernard Arnault, the luxury brand titan leading LVMH, turned a six-part Le Monde investigation into his dealings into a positive PR bonanza with an amused, humorous response published on X.

Between the lines: X was the subject of many obituaries just a few years ago when it was acquired by Musk and rebranded from Twitter to X, but it's proved resilient and adaptive.

• X has tweaked its algorithm to improve feed quality by boosting visibility to mutuals and better segmenting audiences to serve more niches, head of product Nikita Bier explained in posts on the platform.
• It also continues to push back against AI-powered misinformation, reply bots and other low-quality content.

The big picture: Whether it's worth joining X hinges on one thing: Is that where your audience is?

• It's not just another corporate comms channel, but a place where leaders need to be "willing to share observations, engage with others and be comfortable being opinionated," said Natalie Cucchiara, senior vice president at Lot Sixteen.
• "Authenticity doesn't mean being reckless; it means sounding authentically like yourself, not like a corporate account."

Yes, but: The platform's "X is for everyone" attitude also extends to xenophobic and racist views, and Musk still frequently uses X to push his politics and lob insults at critics.

• "Ultimately, X is a reflection of the internet. And that means you will see the full spectrum of human thought. And sometimes the most outrageous takes will catch fire," Bier said in a post this month.

The bottom line: Sharing a platform with Musk and his views is the price of admission to engage with heavyweight world leaders.