How Maven’s AI-Driven “Chance Network” Can Make Social Media Interesting Again

Everything in society can seem geared toward optimization, whether it’s standardized testing or artificial intelligence algorithms. We are taught to know what outcome you want to achieve and find the path to get there.

Kenneth Stanley, a former OpenAI researcher and co-founder of a new social media platform called Maven, has been preaching for years that this method of thinking is counterproductive, if not downright harmful. Instead of prioritizing goals, Stanley says we should prioritize chance.

“Sometimes, in order to find the stepping stones that will lead to the things we care about, we need to step away from the path of the goal and onto the path of the interesting,” Stanley told TechCrunch in a video interview. “Chance is the opposite of finding something through lenses.”

The idea of ​​seeking novelty in oneself grew out of an algorithmic concept that Stanley studies and calls openness, a subfield of AI research on systems that “keep producing interesting things forever.”

“Open systems are like artificially creative systems,” Stanley said, emphasizing that humans, evolution and civilization are also open systems that continue to build on themselves in unexpected ways.

This algorithmic vision transformed into a life philosophy for Stanley. He even wrote a book about it in 2015 with his former doctoral student Joel Lehman called Why greatness can’t be planned. The concept took off, making Stanley an international focal point for the bold idea that, in reality, you can just do things because they’re interesting, rather than because you have to achieve a stated goal.

But in 2022, while leading an openness team at OpenAI, Stanley said he was “brimming with discontent” and “had this epiphany” where he decided to stop talking about bringing openness to a wider audience and start doing something about it. .

What if, he wondered, he created a “chance network,” a system set up to increase the probability of chance, so that other people could benefit from it?

So he quit his job and began creating Maven, a social network built around an open AI algorithm that evolves in search of novelty. When signing up, users select a series of topics to follow – from neuroscience to parenting – and the algorithm shows them posts that match their interests. Today’s social media algorithms also show you things you might find interesting, but the difference is that they are optimized to maximize user engagement, often by boosting sensationalist content, in order to create more advertising impressions and revenue. Maven, on the other hand, doesn’t just show you the most popular articles on topics you find interesting. The algorithm shows you posts based on how likely you are to find them engaging.

Perhaps most revolutionary, Maven removes the current social media setup: there are no likes, upvotes, retweets, or follows, and there is no way to amplify content to audiences. masses.

Instead, when a user posts something, the algorithm automatically reads the content and tags it with relevant interests so that it appears on those pages. Users can increase the chance slider to go beyond their stated interests, and the algorithm that runs the platform connects users with related interests. So if, for example, you’re following conversations about urban planning, Maven can also suggest conversations about public transportation.

And while there’s no way to follow people on the platform, you can see and connect with other people who follow topics that interest you.

In many ways, Maven appears as an antidote to today’s social media, where the “objective paradox is on full display” as people rush to create sensationalist content that will attract more attention and popularity.

“Echo chambers and toxicity and the amplification of narcissism and personal branding have gotten totally out of control, so people are losing their soul and turning into brands,” Stanley said.

The addictive qualities of social media, the detrimental effects on the mental health of adolescents and adults, and its ability to polarize nations are well documented. According to Stanley, these are the unintended consequences of ambitious goals, the result of popularity being an indicator of quality.

“And then you get all these other things because once you have popularity, you have perverse incentives,” he said.

Stanley noted that Maven users can report inappropriate content or misinformation when it appears, and that its AI actively monitors content that is highly inflammatory, offensive “or worse.” He said Maven can’t fix the nastiness of human nature, but by removing incentives for sharing such content, Stanley hopes it could change the “overall global dynamic of how people behave.” .

Some social media companies have tried to combat such incentives in the past. In 2019, Instagram tested hiding likes to curb comparisons and hurt feelings related to the popularity of content. X, formerly Twitter, is also preparing to make likes private, but for less healthy reasons. In a very Elon Musk-inspired line of thinking, X’s goal is to create more engagement by allowing people to privately like “edgy” content they wouldn’t otherwise like to protect their image public.

Maven is less interested in connecting users with the audience and more focused on connecting them with what’s interesting.

The problem of monetization

Stanley and his co-founders – Blas Moros and Jimmy Secretan – soft-launched Maven in late January. The platform debuted publicly in May alongside a Wired feature that Stanley said gave Maven a top-trending spot on Product Hunt and generated thousands of registrations.

This is still a small number compared to other new entrants in the social media space. Bluesky, launched in 2021, has 5.6 million registrations. As of January 2024, Mastodon had 1.8 million active users. Farcaster, a new crypto-based social protocol that just raised $150 million, has had around 350,000 signups. All of these new networks will need to grow significantly if they are to be considered successful.

It remains an open question whether Maven will be able to expand its user base without the very toxic qualities that we love to hate, but which nevertheless lead us back to the cesspool that is social media.

Maven raised $2 million in 2023 in a round led by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, Stanley told TechCrunch. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, also participated in the round. Stanley said Williams and Altman invested because, like many of us who have become attached to Maven’s almost too-gentle-for-this-world philosophy, they think the world and the Internet need something like this.

And indeed, Maven’s idealistic hope of connecting people to interesting ideas is a breath of fresh air that smells of the early 2000s, when the internet was a place for connection and exploration. Sentiments from the platform’s early adopters are mostly positive and optimistic, as many came to the platform for authentic, serendipitous interactions and the promised lack of toxicity.

But will idealism be enough to attract more institutional investors later, when Maven wants to expand?

“I think the challenge we face is that in the future it will become an increasingly difficult way to raise money,” Stanley said, emphasizing that investors won’t throw away millions unless there is a clear path to achieving a return on investment.

“I just need to find the right investors to move forward and quickly achieve a sustainable business model,” he continued, mulling over the idea of ​​a subscription model that would enable Maven to keep its ideology intact.

There are of course other ways for Maven to generate revenue. Advertising is one way, but one that appeals less to Stanley because of its link with virality and sensationalism.

Ultimately, Maven could also potentially sell its data to companies like OpenAI that train their algorithms on reams of data. OpenAI signed a deal with Reddit earlier this month to train its AI on the social media company’s data. And Maven’s value proposition from an AI perspective isn’t just in the content of the platform: it’s also the open algorithm that runs it.

Stanley told TechCrunch that he believes openness is essential to artificial general intelligence (AGI), a type of AI that aims to match or exceed human capabilities in a range of cognitive tasks. Openness is “such an important aspect of intelligence,” Stanley said. “It’s like this creative, curiosity-driven aspect of being human.”

“Data is interesting from an AI perspective because it is data about what is interesting,” Stanley said, noting that current AI models lack an intuitive understanding of what is interesting and about what isn’t, and how that may change over time. However, even though the data has potential value for AI, Stanley said Maven has not entered into any agreement with any company to grant access to this data.

And while he said he wouldn’t rule out the possibility in the future, he would think very carefully about the implications of sharing such data.

“That’s not the goal for me,” he said, noting that he’s not convinced it would be a good thing for neural networks to be completely open, because that could make everything completely useless. creative effort on the part of humans.

“I really wanted to create this global serendipitous community,” he said. “It’s not like I intend to use Maven to create open AI or anything like that. I just wanted to create something for people because I started to feel like everyone was going to be talking to chatbots more and more and we were going to be less and less connected with other people. And I was contributing to it as an AI researcher.

“There’s something about this idea of ​​a random network that made me feel morally better, like I could actually contribute to people being more connected rather than less.”