How I came up with this product idea
by patrick2Well... a long time ago I had built a web scraper to download 50-70k news articles a day and didn't know what to do with it.
I used to read the New York Times, but eventually my schedule got too busy to keep up with it. I'd read a couple news articles a day - which would give me a solid understanding of those few topics but I didn't have a good broader sense of what was happening in the world.
With the lack of time, I decided to use Google News more. I could quickly jump into and articles as I went which was nice - but then one day I was using the Google News app a and kept hitting paywall after paywall!
That's when I realized I could just make my own news feed - a free newsfeed with no requirement to sign up filled with articles that were quick and easy to read! And so, 80-20 News was born!
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2
Interesting and really well done.
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Thanks!
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1
I don't understand. Are the stories summarized/reworded manually by you? By an AI? Or are they just copying text from the actual articles.
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2
I'm parsing several articles for each story and using AI across those to generate the summaries.
I'm using AI for abstractive summarization, that is generating summaries that are novel, using GPT-3. Interestingly, PEGASUS, Google's abstractive summarization models which I had started with, had a problem of making up numbers which isn't great for the news! GPT-3 handles numbers much better.
I'm sourcing several articles for each story so as to give less biased and more accurate news!
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This is cool! If you're looking to monetize at any point, a newsletter might be an interesting route with the tool you've built. You could do a weekly round up of sorts and build an audience around it, with sponsorships a possibility in future.
If that's of interest, ofc :)
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2
Thanks Mo, that's a great idea!
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