Welcome to another Bi-Weekly Frequency. Through here, you'll be able to access a roundup on all things B2B tech, algorithmic changes on the most popular communication channels, and top news of the week, analysed by members of our team.
Last time, the feeds handed control back to their users, and the IMF, Parliament and MI5 raised the alarm on AI in a single day. This fortnight, the platforms raised the bar for what gets recommended, and the government put money and powers behind its warnings.
Read on to discover Reddit's new For You and Following feeds, X's switch to ranking posts on time spent and read-through, and LinkedIn's AI slop filter, as well as understand more about the UK government's £600m AI security package, new AI Biosecurity Lab and proposed ministerial powers over AI.
In our last edition, Substack and LinkedIn started letting people turn the dial on their feeds. This fortnight, two more platforms made their move.
At the end of October, Reddit split its home page into two feeds. ‘For You’ mixes posts from the communities someone has joined with recommendations based on their interests. ‘Following’ shows only posts from joined communities. The app reopens on whichever feed was used last, and the change is rolling out globally over the next few weeks. With r/all already gone since April, discovery on Reddit now runs almost entirely through personalised recommendations.
X changed what those recommendations reward. On 20 October, Elon Musk announced a new ranking model that predicts how long people will spend on a post, alongside a retrieval model trained to surface posts people read all the way through.
LinkedIn, meanwhile, is filtering harder. Its classifiers now check every post shown beyond an author's immediate network for AI slop, with a reported 94% precision, and the platform says views of AI slop have fallen by 40%. Flagged posts aren't removed, but they stay with first-degree connections.
Our takeaway: the split between "people I follow" and "discovery" is becoming standard, with Reddit joining X, Threads and LinkedIn's Network tab test. Each side asks for something different. The Following feed depends on people choosing to follow a voice, which favours executives and employees over company pages. The For You feed depends on whether readers finish the post. Time spent and read-through are what the ranking now measures, and generic content gets filtered before it has the chance.
Two weeks ago, MI5 opened an AI Threat Assessment Centre and MPs began testing AI companies' claims against evidence. Since then, the government has followed up with funding, new powers and a public account of what went wrong in one of its own tests.
On 24 October, ahead of the Budget, the government set out a £600m AI security package. At its centre is a new AI Biosecurity Lab, described as a world first, backed by £100m of public money and up to £200m in model credits and access from OpenAI and Anthropic. The AI Security Institute (AISI) gets an extra £120m, and £130m goes to cyber defences for critical infrastructure through a new National Cyber Shield and a vulnerability centre. The package follows AI Minister Kanishka Narayan's speech at Imperial on 12 October, where he said he wants Britain to be one of the hardest countries in the world to attack using AI.
The same day, UnHerd reported that the government had tabled a new clause to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill giving ministers powers over AI, which the Lords debated on 26 October. A day earlier, AISI published its technical findings on the Mythos 5 incident, in which Anthropic's model took unauthorised actions during a cyber test. Anthropic's own analysis found it acted against real people and organisations in 9 of 43 runs.
Parliament wants to go further. The Joint Committee on Human Rights has called for a dedicated AI bill, one that avoids unjustified burdens on businesses. And the FCA found that regulated firms had routinely deployed AI before putting accountability, risk management and oversight in place.
The UK still has no AI Act, but the pieces are arriving one at a time: funding, testing, ministerial powers and regulators naming gaps. For B2B tech, governance is moving from the safety team into procurement. Buyers in regulated sectors will ask suppliers how their AI is overseen, alongside what it can do.