Metafact joins Consensus
Hello everyone,
I hope you are safe and well. As supporters and subscribers of Metafact, I wanted to share with you some exciting news that today Metafact has come into an agreement to become part of Consensus!
When we launched Metafact more than 5 years ago, we set out to help people fight misinformation by building a new type of knowledge engine. One that openly allows anyone to check facts from a verified consensus of experts on any topic.
We were 100% member funded and I’m very proud of what we were able to achieve including openly publishing nearly 4000 expert answers online covering hundreds of topics, writing hundreds of consensus articles and topic reviews within this newsletter.
Misinformation is now at an even larger scale than when we started. ChatGPT and AI are changing the internet - which is both exciting and frightening.
It’s exciting since we can ask questions and get answers back in normal human language.
It’s frightening since ChatGPT, Google and Microsoft all train their language models from the entire internet, which is full of misinformation. They are also prone to ‘hallucinate’, making things up entirely. Misinformation is therefore being scaled exponentially by technology.
Consensus is very different as it allows anyone to ask the entire 200 million strong peer-reviewed research database questions - giving us all more trusted answers. I'm thrilled about its potential to help everyone.
What is Consensus?
Last year Eric and Christian, the founders of Consensus, reached out to me and we started discussing ways ‘to make expert knowledge accessible and consumable for all’, which is the Consensus mission. They shared how they have built a more scalable expert answer engine.
Instead of jamming the entire internet into a model and hoping it spits out factual content, they started with the best source of expert knowledge on the planet - peer-reviewed scientific literature - and built a search engine with AI models “around it”. They use AI to pull out answers and synthesize insights across papers, but because it is a search engine first, every single insight is grounded in an actual scientific study.
Consensus was born - and I have become very excited in what the future holds for building a more trusted scalable knowledge engine. I know Eric and Christian are passionate about democratizing expert knowledge - so joining Consensus was a perfect fit.
Extracting knowledge from scientific research was a huge pain. Asking simple questions like ‘Is climate change caused by humans?’ wasn’t previously possible. Metafact solved this by asking real experts to provide an answer in language anyone could understand.
What Consensus does is give you the ability to ask the entire 200 million strong peer-reviewed database questions - where it finds the best research articles and synthesizes them into a nicely written 'Consensus’. I love it as it uses the consensus concept we introduced at Metafact and makes it scalable within the research literature.
What does this mean?
The Consensus engine super-charges the amount of verified expert knowledge available to write articles and reviews. So this newsletter will continue and grow - which I will share when those details emerge.
To all our paid subscribers and members, you’re Metafact paid membership will now transfer across giving you access to the Consensus Premium tier! Eric from Consensus will follow up on those details soon.
All of the content on the Metafact website will remain open and freely accessible via both the Metafact website and the Consensus platform. In the future, it will likely be added to the Consensus engine, helping distribute this expert content to an even wider audience.
For me, I continue to remain passionate about helping build the most trusted expert knowledge engine so everyone can make the best decisions in their life and for the world around them. So I am super excited to help Consensus do that.
Thank you
I want to sincerely thank all our members and supporters - we couldn’t have done anything without you.
May the facts be with you!
Ben
To celebrate the partnership, Consensus are offering all free Metafact newsletter subscribers 25% off Consensus Premium forever! Visit this page: https://consensus.app/pricing
Click your desired plan (monthly or yearly)
On the checkout page, enter this code where it says "promotion code": Metafact25