Philippe Beaudoin wants to fix the internet. But what if the internet is a rigged game that can’t be fixed?
Element AI co-founder Philippe Beaudoin turned his attention from using artificial intelligence to solve a range of problems to one problem: cut through the “noise” and “distractions” of the modern internet.
With his new company Waverly, a startup he helped launch in 2020, Beaudoin has built a content discovery and recommendation platform for professionals.
But Waverly’s goals are more ambitious than curating content for career professionals. Beaudoin hopes the company will change the way people consume content on the internet.
The idea for Waverly began long before Beaudoin helped create Element AI, which was once seen as one of Canada’s best-known and fastest-growing startups before ServiceNow bought it for $230 million USD last year.
“Competing directly with a Facebook or a TikTok … It’s the opposite of what we’re trying to achieve.
Beaudoin first envisioned the need for Waverly in the 2010s while working at Google as a founding engineer of the Chrome machine learning team. The Waverly CEO worked at Google alongside American technology ethicist Tristan Harris (of Netflix documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’ fame), who later served as Google’s design ethicist and product philosopher.
“We’re actually quite in touch,” Beaudoin told BetaKit. “And … we’re both very conscious of the problem, but there’s no real solution floating around on how we can fix it.”
The problem Beaudoin refers to is the same one Harris laid out in his Netflix documentary: how algorithms designed by social media companies drive users to what is, at best, empty calorie content. They are deliberately designed to steal the attention of consumers, and are quite effective in influencing and manipulating them.
“At Google, I worked a lot on recommender systems and I felt there were some problems with it,” Beaudoin explained. “The problems I would say are usually related to how easily they distract me and others or how easily they steal my attention from the goals I have. And I felt that it was by design and the technology itself adds very few mechanisms to help me control it, to support me in my desire to be less distracted, my desire to keep my attention where I want to be. this.”
Now, after two years of developing and testing what Waverly calls the world’s first transparent AI-powered natural language analysis algorithm, the company has made its app available to consumers.
Waverly’s app uses natural language understanding (NLU) technology to curate content for users through what it calls ‘waves,’ themes or concepts that readers may be interested in. Through these waves, which also function as feeds, users can track specific industries , trends, and market insights.
Beaudoin founded Waverly with CTO Philippe Gagnon, who was a technical architect at video game developer Ubisoft for more than 17 years. The pair created Waverly with a lean team that currently sits at four full-time employees.
After participating in Real Ventures’ 2020 FounderFuel cohort, Waverly secured $1.25 million CAD in pre-seed financing from the accelerator, as well as Panache Ventures, Hike Ventures, Maple Leaf Angels, and unnamed private investors.
With such a small team and limited resources, it will be difficult for Waverly to try to beat the platforms that define the modern internet at their game. For his part, Beaudoin doesn’t seem interested in playing that game.
“Competing directly with a Facebook or a TikTok with the classic way they did it, which is to make their stuff so addictive that people keep using it, we don’t want to do that,” said Beaudoin. “It’s the opposite of what we’re trying to achieve.”
But for all Beaudoin’s talk about social networks, that have has become the primary source to consume information for many, Waverly is starting to rise higher in the tech stream – in effect, indexing its own version of the internet.
Waverly launches with its own content database of 10,000 indexed resources – including special publications, blogs, and newsletters (BetaKit is one of these resources). Beaudoin couldn’t say more than “we worked hard” when asked how Waverly identified these sources, but noted that the dataset continues to expand as users submit new sources.
Waverly seeks to combat the common challenges of the modern internet – distraction, misinformation, and disinformation – by betting on its users.
When asked if Waverly will be curating content or concepts, Beaudoin said, “I don’t think right now you’re going to put up a platform and not have any kind of oversight.” For now, however, new resources are added to the Waverly database without the company’s human curation. “We may have to be more cautious in the future,” Beaudoin added.
Care is definitely needed. Trying to play a different game than Google, TikTok, and Twitter doesn’t mean your strategy naturally avoids their pitfalls. The past 20 years of the internet have shown that the best intentions of organizing, sharing, and consuming content can be misused and abused.
Waverly is looking to combat challenges like distraction, misinformation, and disinformation by betting on its users. The company tries to do this in several ways: by offering content curated and driven by user intent; using NLU to understand user intent instead of tracking their every click and move; and ensuring that while people can choose to follow any content they want, they can’t flood Waves with other users of that content.
The (hopeful) result is a useful corner of the internet with effective herd immunity against misuse thanks to the active antibodies of its user base. For Beaudoin, that outcome is far superior to one built and run by big tech’s hidden algorithms. “Google preferences are designed with Google’s intentions in mind,” he added.
That said, the question remains whether Waverly is just making another system to do.
“That’s one of the main questions we ask ourselves,” Beaudoin said. ‘Is it always going to be an adversarial game?’” The CEO added that the company is committed to “empowering adversarial players.”
To that end, Waverly is smartly embarking on a B2B approach, getting professionals to use its platform first – hopefully through its Pro tier, which allows for unlimited personalized waves and other features. The company also offers a Business tier, which allows companies to create private waves for their teams, or publish them on the web.
“What we noticed in the exclusive beta is that the level of intentionality required by the algorithm works best with professionals,” Beaudoin said.
Professional knowledge workers can also limit the flood of misinformation, and give Waverly a favorable base of content, users, and revenue to build from.
A broader consumer push will be more difficult, driven by Waverly’s implementation, luck, and a hundred other factors. But Beaudoin believes consumers are in the early stages of seeking and demanding more control over their data and information.
“We’re already seeing some of that pressure but it’s very early, and as this pressure increases, as the consumer starts to demand that kind of control over their algorithm, we want to be ready,” he said. “We want professionals to develop our technology to the point where we are the best to provide that kind of solution to a wider audience.”