Curioze - Personal News Desk for Everyone
We live in an age where truth is almost inseparable from the information. The relentless influx of social media consumption has almost made it impossible for a person to understand what's actually going on around them. A hell lot of noise.
Take for example i'm interested in premier league football, real estate, health and wellness, pop music. In the world and especially in north america. This now require me to go on to lengthy articles on different apps and websites and hours of mindless reading to get a sense. This shouldn't be the case.
In the age of ai and model that have live browsing capabilities. We are technically in a position to solve this at scale in a nuanced and concise way. with credible citations. All the news about topics that you care about will be delivered to you. this should be the future of news. of truth.
If we take a deep-dive to what constitutes as news. it's a report of information on important events. as we all can agree that what is 'important'? it's subjective. but traditional media and social media or n number of other news apps doesn't care enough for this.
the case for traditional media is either very abstract about the topics or very local. mostly the consumer doesn't have any control over the relevance of news or the topic being selected. but highly authoritative, multiple rounds of verification. heavily biased. and the event is mostly true even if the coverage is biased. Cherrypicking of what to cover or not is also not in favour of the consumer. Opinions disguising as news is also a downside.
Social media is tricky case. most information is untrue or half-true or speculative in nature. a loud minority taking over the narrative in all niches is what we can see across the space. Since the platforms turning from in favour of social graphs to content graphs, merely following accounts that we trust isn't enough to guard from misinformation. a recursive nature of algorithm also makes the user live in an echo chamber that operates in extremes. Since meta platforms, Youtube and other ugc content platforms have became so ubiquitously used, users of all generations are getting the most if not all informations from these platforms.
Other news aggregator apps are in a mess of manual curation of reports. Not getting the experience right. The abstraction and no real personalisation topics an Biases from the source. But fast and reliable on the infra side. Inshorts, LetMeKnow, DailyHunt are examples that have a decent number of active users.
This is not how it should be. The user should have control over the topics to a decent level of abstraction (Not football, but Premier League or La Liga). Each news should be relevant enough to show it to the user. The combination of topics and the usage should be taken in to the consideration on which news to deliver. Every news should have more than one citation and therefore minimising the bias and maximising the reliability. and a lot more.
Can this be done now? Yes.
We are in a time where we have llm models that are reliable enough to browse the web and get us any info that we need. Leading companies/labs like OpenAI's operator or startups like Manus AI are building research capabilities around this. The Perplexity. Answer engine is soaring example that this can be done at scale and finesse.
Newer reasoning models are promising well-thought out output for complex queries that beats the top % of humans in the space. by leveraging this we can do a much better job at delivering news to each individual in the world.
The north star is something like a personal news companion for everyone. that are increasingly excellent at separating signal from the noise. your signal.
The quirk behind the name is the rabbit-hole feature we have that let's the user go to a curious maze from a news to a fact, from there to another fact and so on, infinitely. producing a journey of curiosity from the topics that you love to new different worlds inside them.
This is just the beginning of the curve. Let's focus on the signal !
- Lazim
