Campbell Brown has spent her career chasing accurate information, first as a renowned TV journalist, then as Facebook’s first, and only, dedicated news chief. Now, watching AI reshape how people consume information, she sees history threatening to repeat itself. This time, she’s not waiting for someone else to fix it.
Her company, Forum AI — which she discussed recently with TechCrunch’s Tim Fernholz at a StrictlyVC evening in San Francisco — evaluates how foundation models perform on what she calls “high-stakes topics” — geopolitics, mental health, finance, hiring — subjects where “there are no clear yes-or-no answers, where it’s murky and nuanced and complex.”
The idea is to find the world’s foremost experts, have them architect benchmarks, then train AI judges to evaluate models at scale. For Forum AI’s geopolitics work, Brown has recruited Niall Ferguson, Fareed Zakaria, former Secretary of State Tony Blinken, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and Anne Neuberger, who led cybersecurity in the Obama administration. The goal is to get AI judges to roughly 90% consensus with those human experts, a threshold she says Forum AI has been able to reach.
Brown traces the origin of Forum AI, founded 17 months ago in New York, to specific moment. “I was at Meta when ChatGPT was first released publicly,” she recalled, “and I remember really shortly after realizing this is going to be the funnel through which all information flows. And it’s not very good.” The implications for her own children made the moment feel almost existential. “My kids are going to be really dumb if we don’t figure out how to fix this,” she recalled thinking.
What frustrated her most was that accuracy didn’t seem to be anyone’s priority. Foundation model …