Elon Musk says Grok is starting to auto-translate and recommend foreign-language posts on X

Elon Musk announced that Grok is starting to automatically translate and recommend foreign-language posts on X. The update rolled out quietly over the weekend and his own post about it blew past 24 million views in hours.

It’s a pretty direct push to tear down language barriers and get more global stuff into people’s feeds without anyone having to tap a translate button.

Grok itself jumped in to explain how it works both ways. English posts get translated into Japanese or whatever for users set up that way, and foreign-language posts flip into English for the rest of us. Early reactions suggest that people welcome this change, or at least the idea behind it.

One longtime Taiwan expat said the upgrades feel mind-blowing because you can just type a reply naturally and forget the translation is even happening. Another user noticed their Japanese posts suddenly appearing in clean English for their American followers without them doing anything extra.

Nikita Bier weighed in right away, telling creators to post in their own language about their culture and daily life. He basically said be the next country that pops off. It lines up with bigger changes X has been teasing for months. Back in October the company first said Grok would soon steer the entire For You feed and let users straight-up ask it to tune what they see.

Last week they brought on Benji Taylor as design lead, and Bier confirmed the full Grok-powered algorithm overhaul is dropping this week. So it’s clear that the platform is ready to shake things up a bit.

On checking my X feed today, I did see a bunch of posts in Japanese, but to my disappointment, none of them were autotranslated, and none of the posts were even related to my interests. So personally, I’m not a big fan of this change, especially since it’s a change that adds no value to my feed. But with the Grok-powered algo coming soon, hopefully the recommendations improve.

The rollout still feels early and a little uneven. Translation quality has come a long way since X ditched Google years ago, but it’s not perfect yet and recommendations are basically hit-or-miss for now.

On the one hand, with this change, it seems like Musk and the team want to make the platform a true “global town square,” but on the other hand, recent changes like trying to limit creator payments for talking about things outside their country (thankfully paused), and the addition of geo-restrictions on replies and even country filters for the feed make it seem like the platform is still struggling to find a balance.

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