Interesting work! AI-enhanced/powered UIs could have a lot of potential. I recently posted polygrid.com and zoomstock.com which are similar in some respects and very different in others, and also got basically crickets in response, so I wanted to give you some feedback that I hope will be useful:
1. I clicked your "Headline News" test drive link and it was all US presidential debate related content. I did see the timeline in the lower right corner, and when I tried a different random search the timeline changed substantially (from covering ~1h to several months). This made me believe that you fetch a small-ish number of items and show those and they cover whatever timespan they're from. Great. But with that few items, is there a point to having this wiz-bang interface? I can scan ~10-100 items in a list reasonably quickly. Seems like a more advanced interface like yours would be more useful with a lot more content being shown? I don't know if you could create group-bubbles (or if that would be useful), but maybe?
2. The bubble-to-bubble relationships are unclear. As a developer I get the BERT embeddings & force directed graph, but as a user all I see is a bunch of randomly distributed bubbles - understanding their relationships requires parsing them in detail, which is at odds with the presentation (= picture + text summarization).
3. I tried the "iran AND rockets" link, get 505 initial results, but clearly many fewer bubbles are shown. I'm extremely comfortable with zooming interfaces, and zoom around in yours a lot, but I don't see any more bubbles - where are the other items?
4. Bubbles work well with force-directed graphs, but not with text content. Yes, I can click to get the rounded rect, but I can move my eyes a lot faster than my mouse.
5. News is, for better or most likely worse, generally consumed in a "lean back" context (= mindless scrolling on various news feeds). Your interface is very much a "lean forward" experience - it is fundamentally premised on an active viewer taking charge. Boy do I wish we consumed news that way.
6. The videos don't really play when I click on the story. I have to then click on the little play button in the youtube player. When zoomed out the video is a little partially obscured thumbnail??
You're trying to do something very challenging. I love the creativity of your solution. Best of luck!