Maven, co-founded by Stanley, Blas Moros, and Jimmy Secretan, was soft-launched in January and publicly debuted in May. Despite its small user base compared to other social media platforms, it has received positive feedback from early users. However, Stanley acknowledges the challenge of attracting more institutional investors without a clear path to return on their investment. He is considering a subscription model to maintain Maven's ideology and is also open to the possibility of selling its data to AI companies in the future.
Key takeaways:
- Kenneth Stanley, a former OpenAI researcher, has co-founded a new social media platform called Maven, which prioritizes serendipity over objectives.
- Maven uses an open-ended AI algorithm that evolves to seek novelty, and does not feature likes, upvotes, retweets or follows, and there’s no way to amplify content to the masses.
- Stanley believes that open-endedness is essential to artificial general intelligence (AGI), a type of AI that aims to match or surpass human capabilities across a range of cognitive tasks.
- Maven raised $2 million in 2023 in a round led by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and is considering a subscription model for future monetization.