“Prompts can be used to draw images but we wondered: what if we could use them to improve our content feeds?” writes AI maker Philippe Beaudoin, referencing the text-to-image tech you’ve either tried yourself or seen all over Twitter. Beaudoin takes that concept and applies it to your reading feed in his new app, Waverly.

How to customize a feed: With Waverly, you can create your own “waves,” or feeds of articles related to a niche topic that interests you. Or you can follow waves created by others, like “Understanding Consciousness” or “Parenting for New Parents.” From the time you create a new Wave with a prompt (i.e. what you want to read), you’re training the AI to recognize what kind of content you’re interested in. Then you can continue refining the original prompt, or you can do other things that help train the AI, like save articles from the internet into your wave to read later.

The tech: Waverly uses prompt engineering to generate your feed. If you’ve tried ChatGPT or one of the aforementioned image products, you’ve taken part in this concept already. Your input (or prompt) contains instructions or examples that convince large language models (LLM) to produce the content you want. As with any of these products, you might not get exactly what you want out of your first prompt so you might have to refine it, but since prompts are often only a few words or sentences, doing so is quite easy.

Beaudoin, who previously founded ElementAI and was an ex-Googler on the Chrome ML team, has big ambitions along with his co-founders. They believe prompt-driven algorithms that are driven by your intentions and your own plain words will help fight misinformation and echo chambers online.

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