Within the wake of the U.S. 2024 presidential election, one truth turned clear: Disinformation proliferated on-line at a startling fee, shaping Individuals’ views about every candidate in addition to a various set of subjects, together with public well being, local weather change, and immigration. Generative AI – with its capacity to provide deepfakes in seconds and its propensity to hallucinate information – solely stands to exacerbate the issue.
Factiverse, a startup that participated in TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield 200 in October, is bracing itself for the onslaught. The corporate, which received greatest pitch within the Safety, Privateness, and Social Networking class, has developed a business-to-business software that gives reside fact-checking of textual content, video, and audio. The corporate’s pitch: to assist companies save hours of analysis and mitigate any reputational danger or authorized legal responsibility.
The Norwegian startup remains to be in its early phases; Factiverse has raised round $1.45 million in pre-seed cash since launching in 2020. But it has already begun working with each media and monetary companions, together with one of many largest banks in Norway, in keeping with Factiverse CEO and co-founder Maria Amelie.
Factiverse even supplied reside fact-checking of the U.S. presidential debates that was utilized by a number of media companions, Amelie stated.
“We’re not an LLM (massive language mannequin). We’ve constructed a special kind of mannequin based mostly on info retrieval,” Amelie instructed TechCrunch.
As a former know-how journalist and printed creator, Amelie has first-hand expertise within the warfare in opposition to information. She labored with Factiverse co-founder and CTO Vinay Setty, who’s affiliate professor in machine studying on the College of Stavanger, to launch the startup with a B2B focus.
Factiverse’s mannequin is educated on prime quality, well-curated, and credible knowledge from dependable sources and fact-checkers world wide, in keeping with Amelie, and never the “junk meals knowledge” that generative AI is educated on.
“We prepare our AI mannequin to intuitively suppose like somebody who has lots of expertise with researching info,” Amelie stated.
The mannequin, which is predicated on machine studying and pure language processing, is ready to determine claims and search the net in actual time – all the things from serps like Google and Bing to AI serps like You.com to tutorial papers.
“Essentially the most enjoyable half is that we’re not displaying you no matter comes up first on these serps,” Amelie stated. “We’re really proposing to you what sources are essentially the most, or traditionally have been essentially the most, credible in your matter…We really look into the area in correlation to the subject, and typically even who’s being quoted in an article.”
As of immediately, Factiverse says it outperforms GPT-4, Mistral 7-b, and GPT-3 in its capacity to determine fact-check worthy claims in 114 languages. The corporate’s mannequin additionally outperforms LLMs on figuring out the veracity of a declare. Amelie stated Factiverse’s success fee is round 80% and the purpose is to enhance as the corporate onboards new clients world wide.
“We’ve got sufficient funding to be one of the best, however we’re right here within the U.S. to develop into the quickest,” Amelie instructed TechCrunch. She additionally famous the corporate desires to boost a seed spherical in 2025. “We’re in search of clients and buyers who wish to spend money on belief and credibility,” she stated.
