AUSTIN, Texas — Austin-based Otherweb is on a mission to use its software to streamline the delivery of news content without the noise.
“There is a lot of information in this world but somehow at the end of each day people are consuming junk,” Alex Fink, the CEO and Co-Founder of Otherweb, said. The Otherweb is a platform that aggregates news, commentary, podcast research, studies, and everything we can get our crawlers on.
Otherweb’s crawlers are 20-cutting edge models that use AI to detect misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and what Alex calls, “plain ol’ junk.”
“I just started noticing that the information around me is becoming worse and worse,” Alex said. “And most people I talk to are consuming junk at the end of every day. And so, I thought that’s pretty dangerous if we don’t find a way to improve the quality of information people consume, their actions will become bad as well.”
Alex says Otherweb was also born out of his childhood experience.
“I actually have this vivid childhood memory of when I was four years old in the Soviet Union of my parents locking themselves in the bathroom, turning the radio on at 4 a.m. to listen to the Voice of America because that was the only way we could get real information about the world,” Alex said. “But because they were more informed than everybody else, then we got a head start and we managed to leave early.”
It was in the early 90s when the Soviet Union was collapsing. Armed with information about impending violence and a coup, Alex’s family fled to Israel.
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Alex says people can customize Otherweb for how they consume news.
“We help them by aggregating hundreds of sources into one place so they can essentially skim through hundreds of articles per day, select the ones that are most interesting to them based on the summaries we generated,” Alex said.
For light news consumers, there is a more bite-size mode for the stream of information.
“We managed to create a cleaner version of it where they can just find out what’s happened,” Alex said. Maybe spend five minutes per day and that’s it.
And Otherweb provides what it calls a nutrition label for each site.
“Nutrition labels are essentially the outputs of all our AI models that analyze every article and learn something well-defined about it. Like, is the headline clickbait or not? Or does the article have offensive content or not? And we want to give that to people so that they can make a quick decision before they consume something, whether they want to consume it, just like you do with food.”
Now that we’re in another presidential election year, Alex says it can be hard to between the good news outlets and the bad ones.
“And so even the good outlets are facing immense pressure to turn what they’re printing into slightly more clickbait material,” Alex said.
Right now, Otherweb focuses on printed articles or published text articles, video feeds are not part of the program yet. But Alex says his mission is to aggregate from the left, the right, and middle to create a balanced perspective on the news and life experiences.
“I think the most important thing that I’m trying to convey to people is we’ve been paying attention to what we put into our mouths because we think it’s really important to be healthy,” Alex said. “But I don’t think people pay attention to what they put into their brains, and I hope they start.”