{"id":816826,"date":"2025-01-03T07:23:29","date_gmt":"2025-01-03T13:23:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/03\/norwegian-startup-factiverse-wants-to-fight-disinformation-with-ai\/"},"modified":"2025-01-03T07:23:29","modified_gmt":"2025-01-03T13:23:29","slug":"norwegian-startup-factiverse-wants-to-fight-disinformation-with-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/03\/norwegian-startup-factiverse-wants-to-fight-disinformation-with-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Norwegian startup Factiverse wants to fight disinformation with AI"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In the wake of the U.S. 2024 presidential election, one fact became clear: Disinformation proliferated online at a startling rate, shaping Americans\u2019 views<\/a> about each candidate as well as a diverse set of topics, including public health, climate change, and immigration.\u00a0Generative AI \u2014 with its ability to produce deepfakes in seconds and its propensity to hallucinate facts \u2014 only stands to exacerbate the problem<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Factiverse<\/a>, a startup<\/a> that participated in TechCrunch Disrupt\u2019s Startup Battlefield 200<\/a> in October, is bracing itself for the onslaught. The company, which won best pitch in the Security, Privacy, and Social Networking category, has developed a business-to-business tool that provides live fact-checking of text, video, and audio. The company\u2019s pitch: to help businesses save hours of research and mitigate any reputational risk or legal liability.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Norwegian startup is still in its early stages; Factiverse has raised around $1.45 million in pre-seed money since launching in 2020. Yet it has already begun working with both media and financial partners, including one of the largest banks in Norway, according to Factiverse CEO and co-founder Maria Amelie.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Factiverse even provided live fact-checking of the U.S. presidential debates<\/a> that was used by several media partners, Amelie said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not an LLM (large language model). We\u2019ve built a different type of model based on information retrieval,\u201d Amelie told TechCrunch.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a former technology journalist and published author, Amelie has firsthand experience in the war against facts. She worked with Factiverse co-founder and CTO Vinay Setty, who is associate professor in machine learning at the University of Stavanger, to launch the startup with a B2B focus.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Factiverse\u2019s model is trained on high-quality, well-curated, and credible data from reliable sources and fact-checkers around the world, according to Amelie, and not the \u201cjunk food data\u201d that generative AI is trained on.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe train our AI model to intuitively think like someone who has a lot of experience with researching information,\u201d Amelie said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The model, which is based on machine learning and natural language processing, is able to identify claims and search the web in real time \u2014 everything from search engines like Google and Bing to AI search engines like You.com to academic papers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most fun part is that we\u2019re not showing you whatever comes up first on those search engines,\u201d Amelie said. \u201cWe\u2019re actually proposing to you what sources are the most, or historically have been the most, credible on your topic.\u00a0\u2026 We actually look into the domain in correlation to the topic, and sometimes even who is being quoted in an article.\u201d<\/p>\n

As of today, Factiverse says it outperforms GPT-4, Mistral 7B, and GPT-3 in its ability to identify fact check-worthy claims in 114 languages. The company\u2019s model also outperforms LLMs on determining the veracity of a claim. Amelie said Factiverse\u2019s success rate is around 80% and the goal is to improve as the company onboards new customers around the world.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have enough funding to be the best, but we are here in the U.S. to become the fastest,\u201d Amelie told TechCrunch. She also noted the company wants to raise a seed round in 2025. \u201cWe are looking for customers and investors who want to invest in trust and credibility,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Rebecca Bellan covers transportation for TechCrunch. She\u2019s interested in all things micromobility, EVs, AVs, smart cities, AI, sustainability and more. Previously, she covered social media for Forbes.com, and her work has appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Mother Jones, i-D (Vice) and more.
\nRebecca studied journalism and history at Boston University. She has invested in Ethereum.\t<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n\t\tView Bio <\/svg><\/a>\n\t<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Rebecca Bellan
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In the wake of the U.S. 2024 presidential election, one fact became clear: Disinformation proliferated online at a startling rate, shaping Americans\u2019 views about each candidate as well as a diverse set of topics, including public health, climate change, and immigration.\u00a0Generative AI \u2014 with its ability to produce deepfakes in seconds and its propensity to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":816827,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22996,334],"tags":[10970,5736],"class_list":{"0":"post-816826","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-norwegian","8":"category-startup","9":"tag-norwegian","10":"tag-startup"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=816826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/816827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=816826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=816826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=816826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}