Everything in society can be geared towards optimization – be it standardized tests or artificial intelligence algorithms. They teach us to know what result you want to achieve and find the way to get there.
Kenneth Stanleycalled a former OpenAI researcher and co-founder of a new social media platform Maven, has been preaching for years that this way of thinking is counterproductive, if not downright harmful. Instead of prioritizing goals, Stanley says we should prioritize peace of mind.
“Sometimes, to find those stepping stones that lead to the things we care about, we have to get off the goal path and onto the interest path,” Stanley told TechCrunch in a video interview. “Serendipity is the opposite of finding something through goals.”
The idea of seeking innovation for its own sake began as an algorithmic concept that Stanley called open endeda subfield of artificial intelligence research about systems that “just keep producing interesting things forever.”
“Open systems are like artificially creative systems,” Stanley said, noting that humans, evolution and culture are also open systems that keep building on themselves in unexpected ways.
This algorithmic insight morphed into a life philosophy for Stanley. He even wrote a book about it in 2015 with his former Ph.D. Joel Lehman Because greatness cannot be planned. The idea took off, making Stanley something of an international focal point for the cheeky idea that you can actually do things because they’re interesting, rather than because you have to complete some goal.
But in 2022, while leading an open-source team at OpenAI, Stanley said he was “seething with resentment” and “had this plateau” where he decided to stop talking about bringing openness to a wider audience and instead start to do something about it.
What if, he wondered, he created a “serendipity network,” a system designed to increase the likelihood of serendipity for other people to enjoy?
So he quit his job and set out to create Maven, a social network built around an open AI algorithm that evolves to seek innovation. When signing up, users choose a range of topics to follow — from neuroscience to parenting — and the algorithm shows them posts that align with their interests. Today’s social media algorithms also show you things you might find interesting, but the difference is that they’re optimized to maximize user engagement, often boosting compelling content, to generate more ad impressions and revenue. Maven, on the other hand, doesn’t just show you the most popular posts on topics you find interesting. The algorithm displays posts based on how likely you are to find them attractive.
Perhaps most revolutionary, Maven does away with the current social media setup – no likes, upvotes, retweets or follows, and no way to promote content to the masses.
Instead, when a user posts something, the algorithm automatically reads the content and tags it with relevant interests so it appears on those pages. Users can turn on the serendipity slider to branch out beyond their stated interests, and the algorithm running the platform matches users with relevant interests. So if, for example, you’re following conversations about urban planning, Maven can also suggest conversations about public transit.
And while there’s no way to follow people on the platform, you can see and connect with other people who follow topics that interest you.
In many ways, Maven feels like an antidote to today’s social media, where the “objective paradox is on full display” as people fall over themselves to create impressive content that will garner more attention and popularity.
“Echo chambers and toxicity, narcissistic reinforcement and personal branding have gone completely out of whack, causing people to lose their souls and become brands,” Stanley said.
The addictive properties of social media, damage to mental health in adolescents and adults and ability they polarize the nations it is well documented. These, Stanley says, are the unintended consequences of ambitious goals, the result of making popularity a substitute for quality.
“And then you get all these other things because once you get popular, you have perverse incentives,” he said.
Stanley noted that Maven users can flag inappropriate content or misinformation when it appears, and its AI actively monitors for highly inflammatory, offensive “or worse” content. He said Maven can’t fix the unhappiness in human nature, but by eliminating the motivations behind sharing such content, Stanley hopes it could change the “whole overall dynamic of how people behave.”
Some social media companies have tried to combat such incentives in the past. Instagram in 2019 tried hiding likes to limit comparisons and hurt feelings that come with content popularity. X, ex-Twitter, is getting ready to make likes private, but for less wholesome reasons. In a very Elon Musk-inspired line of thinking, X’s goal is to create more engagement by allowing people to privately like “edgy” content they otherwise wouldn’t in order to protect their public image.
Maven is less interested in connecting users with audiences and more focused on connecting them with what’s interesting.
The monetization problem
Stanley and his co-founders – Blas Moros and Jimmy Secretan – launched Maven in late January. The platform made its public debut in May along with a Wired a feature that Stanley says has given Maven a top spot in the trend Product hunt and brought in thousands of entries.
These are still small numbers compared to other newcomers to the social media space. Bluesky, which launched in 2021, had 5.6 million registrations. From January 2024, Mastodon had 1.8 million active users. Farcaster, a new crypto-based social protocol that just raised $150 million, has counted around 350,000 signups. All these new networks will need to grow significantly if they are to be considered successful.
It’s still an open question as to whether Maven will even be able to grow its user base without the highly toxic properties that we love to hate, but nonetheless drag us back into the cesspool that is social media.
Maven raised $2 million in 2023 in a round led by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, Stanley told TechCrunch. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also participated in the round. Stanley said that Williams and Altman invested because, like many of us who have been endeared by Maven’s almost-too-sweet-for-this-world ethos, they believe the world and the Internet need something like this.
And indeed, Maven’s idealistic hope of connecting people with interesting ideas is a breath of fresh air that smacks of the early 2000s, when the internet was a place of connection and exploration. The sentiment from early adopters on the platform is mostly positive and optimistic, as many came to the platform for genuine and honest interactions and the promised freedom from toxicity.
But will the idealism be enough to attract more institutional investors later when Maven wants to grow?
“I think the challenge we face is that going forward, this becomes an increasingly difficult way to raise money,” Stanley said, noting that investors won’t throw in millions unless there’s a clear path to a return on their investment.
“I just need to find the right investors going forward and get to a sustainable business model quickly,” he continued, pondering the idea of a subscription model that would allow Maven to keep its ideology intact.
There are, of course, other ways for Maven to bring in revenue. Advertising is one path, but one that is less appealing to Stanley because of how much it is tied to virality and sensationalism.
Maven could then also sell its data to companies like OpenAI that train their algorithms on datasets. OpenAI earlier this month signed a deal with Reddit to train its AI on the social media company’s data. And Maven’s value proposition from an AI perspective isn’t just the content on the platform – it’s the open-source algorithm that runs it.
Stanley told TechCrunch that he believes open-endedness is necessary for artificial general intelligence (AGI), a type of artificial intelligence that aims to match or surpass human abilities in a range of cognitive tasks. Open-endedness is “such an important aspect of being intelligent,” Stanley said. “It’s like this creative and also curiosity-based aspect of being human.”
“Data is interesting from an AI perspective, because it’s data about what’s interesting,” Stanley said, noting that current AI models lack an intuitive understanding of what’s interesting and what’s not, and how that can to change over time. But while the data has potential value for AI, Stanley said Maven has no agreement with any company to grant access to that data.
And while he said he hasn’t ruled it out in the future, he would think very carefully about what the consequences of sharing such data would be.
“That’s not the point for me,” he said, noting that he’s not convinced that it would be a good idea for neural networks to be completely open because that might render people’s creative efforts completely pointless.
“I really wanted to create this global peaceful community,” he said. “It’s not like I have a side plan that we’re going to use Maven to build open source AI or something. I just wanted to create something for people because I started to feel that everyone will be talking to chatbots more and more and that we will be less and less connected to other people. And I contributed to it as an artificial intelligence researcher.”
“Something about this idea of a serendipity network made me feel morally better, like I could contribute to making people more connected, not less.”
