Why is Feedly pushing unusable AI?

Feedly’s odd upsell and how to assess if AI ‘works’

When I log in to Feedly a pop up tells me to use the ‘AI’ feature. Whenever I add a new feed, I’m told I should be doing some ‘AI’ instead.

I too have had enough of those two letters being thoughtlessly shoehorned into every product more advanced than a toaster.

But since I’m in the early stages of building, Zacusca, which is in the same space, I should try the offering from Feedly, one of the most established feed readers. How bad can it be?

So what is Feedly AI?

So I clicked their little pop-up.

It slides out an article.

The article tells us about ‘Ask AI’. It’s on-demand report writer. It’s basically OpenAI, Perplexity and Google’s deep research.

Tellingly, all four brands use finance in the first example in their marketing material. But as a free tier Feedly user that’s not what I’m here for.

‘AI feeds’

No, as a free tier user I just want to stay on top of the things that matter to me. And fortunately for me, Feedly is here to curate the best of the internet for me using those two magic letters.

My guess at how it’s built

They likely use ‘embedding models’ and/or a ‘named entity recognition’ layer too.

If they are using embeddings search then they’re probably doing some embedding arithmetic, which is the nice trick that if you staart with ‘King’, subtract ‘male’ and add ‘female’ you get ‘Queen’.

For named entity recognition it’s the same logic you use in Excel.

How to judge AI

Before we try it, how do we know if Feedly’s AI ‘works’?

Companies want you to judge their AI by the flashy demo, number of buzzwords in their blog post or that its logo looks the part.

But if you want to judge whether it ‘works’ you conduct an ‘evaluation’.

It is childishly simple:

1. think of a task to give the AI,
2. think of what good or bad performance on the task looks like,
3. get the AI to do the task
4. look at the result and write down whether the performance was good or bad.

Let’s judge Feedly’s AI Feeds

So in my case:

1. Task: I want to stay in touch with professional road cycling
2. Performance: Excellent performance means showing me Inner Ring’s review of ‘The Amstel Gold Race’. Inner Ring is a niche, top quality publication. And the Amstel Gold is an important race that just happened.
3. Do: I asked Feedly AI feeds for ‘pro road cycling’.
4. Result: ...

…the result was surprisingly bad

Feedly, seriously, given how hard you’re pushing this, I expected more.

Instead of a recent race report from the crème de la crème of cycle blogging I got some speculation about rule changes from Bike Radar, a fairly middle-of-the-road publication.

When using the #cycling tag I got the governing body's attempt at shortform video.

No better than I could have found on DuckDuckGo.

And that’s it. I see half another result from Bike Radar. But I can’t see anything else without upgrading.

Even a query about media and AI Feedly’s own industry is uninspiring.

With only one and a half items to judge by, how do I know if their $107.17 is worth it?

Fine, let’s trial ‘Ask AI’

Following the ‘trial’ link from the article … a broken form.

Yes it’s broken because my browser refuses to be tracked.

But it’s going to take them 20 minutes to tell me whether I’ll have the privilege of using their other AI features before they jack it to $1.6k a month.

Am I wrong?

What am I missing here? Why is Feedly pushing its AI features everywhere if they’re unusable before paying?

The best argument is that they’re showing it to personal tier users who then think ‘Wow, what a wonderful feature, I should recommend my employer pay.’ But after seeing it do so poorly, why would anyone recommend it?

I am being a little unfair

Feedly works pretty flawlessly for normal feed reading.

I also don’t doubt that their enterprise tier ‘Market Intelligence’ and ‘Threat Intelligence’ are excellent features. They have a huge dataset, plenty of experience and…well just look at the logos on the marketing page.

So obviously their AI features are not entirely ‘unusable’. (By contrast Zacusca remains genuinely unusable in many places.)

But Feedly is an established company pushing free tier users to shell out for ‘AI’ without being able to use it. And I think it’s fair to criticise bamboozling users instead of letting them verify that the magic ingredients make their product better than the alternative.

If you do think I'm wrong and unfair, do tell me. (If you're not an LLM you can figure out how pretty easily.)