I'm interested what the format of this will be (if it ever happens).
There's never just "an algorithm", there might be a model, there might be a bunch of feature extraction code, there might be a server that runs it all, but none of these would be that useful in isolation, it's likely that all would be needed to be able to get an accurate idea of the behaviour of the system. But, as Musk says – no one really understands it all, so even then is that really useful?
What may be more useful is releasing a set of policies, or product decisions about recommendations. Not necessarily code that implements them, but the ideas and values of the system and the people building it. The code would likely only be an approximation of that, but the policies/decisions are really the part most people can or will engage with.
Just because you can't run it doesn't mean it wouldn't be useful. This likely will give insight on the kind of modelling, experiments, goal function, deployment methods, resiliency etc. And you could easily reverse engineer policy decision with code(IMO), but other way is not possible.
I think reverse engineering the policy from the code will be hard – this is why no one really understands these systems in full.
However I think given the policy, assuming we trust that Twitter does in fact attempt to implement that policy, the code doesn't really matter. We wouldn't be able to run the code anyway, and bugs aren't really a problem compared to what the intention is, as Twitter would supposedly be constantly working to make the code match the policy.
There's never just "an algorithm", there might be a model, there might be a bunch of feature extraction code, there might be a server that runs it all, but none of these would be that useful in isolation, it's likely that all would be needed to be able to get an accurate idea of the behaviour of the system. But, as Musk says – no one really understands it all, so even then is that really useful?
What may be more useful is releasing a set of policies, or product decisions about recommendations. Not necessarily code that implements them, but the ideas and values of the system and the people building it. The code would likely only be an approximation of that, but the policies/decisions are really the part most people can or will engage with.