I’ve been working on Ginormous News for the past few months out of a desire to be more informed about global events. I felt that I was being siloed into only seeing specific news stories due to my consumption of primarily English language media, and I decided to build something to help tackle this issue.
The system operates using Whisper for multilingual transcription and a combination of frontier LLMs. I make an effort to have the stories be as grounded as possible in original quotes from the broadcasts, in an effort to reduce hallucinations, and avoid errors due to the model’s lack of recent world state due to knowledge cutoff date.
These are the very early stages for this product, but I’ve been learning about events in the world I wouldn’t otherwise have heard about.
One question I am often asked is, why radio?
Radio is a particularly interesting medium for a few reasons.
For one, radio is extremely accessible. While news sites have become more and more restricted with paywalls and sign up demands, radio is broadcast globally, for free.
Second, compared to the endless feeds and SEO-boosting articles of today’s online news cycle, radio has comparatively little information output at any given moment. If you think about it, since the advent of radio, the effective mental bandwidth that it can use has been fixed. There are only so many tokens of information that can be fit into a 24 news stream that is comfortable to listen to as a humans.
Given the fewer tokens per minute, and the linear nature of radio’s storytelling, this means that the broadcasters must be talking about what is most important at any given moment. This means that it is a source of news that is much easier to process, and has much less noise to signal.
This was built out of a personal need, and as such, I am completely fine paying out of pocket to receive this level of detailed briefing every morning. Given that it is a negligible extra cost to share it out to additional users, I plan to keep this briefing free for all for the foreseeable future.
Take a look and let me know what you think!