Who decides what AI tells you? Campbell Brown, once Meta’s news chief, has thoughts
Key takeaways
- 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.
- The idea is to find the world s foremost experts, have them architect benchmarks, then train AI judges to evaluate models at scale.
- Brown traces the origin of Forum AI, founded 17 months ago in New York, to specific moment.
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 Tech Crunch s Tim Fernholz at a Strictly VC 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.