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FollowLink pitches 'objective' news LLM and advances to county finale
Summary
FollowLink, led by Reid, presented an approach to build an open‑source LLM trained on a politically balanced dataset to generate 'objective' news; the team seeks $2.5 million for compute and scaling and placed third overall.
FollowLink presented a platform aiming to generate comparatively objective news by curating and rating articles across the political spectrum, then fine‑tuning a custom LLM on that balanced dataset. Founder Reid said the company is open‑sourcing its model and intends to partner with newsrooms and universities for testing.
"We're using an artificial intelligence platform that is going to be able to actually create objective news," Reid told judges, describing a workflow that includes building a labeled dataset, conducting political‑bias surveys and using consensus ratings to guide model training. He said the company has an MVP and is seeking $2,500,000 to cover compute costs and to scale institutional partnerships.
Judges questioned how the startup would operationalize objectivity metrics and how it would avoid the same bias pitfalls that affect existing LLMs; Reid described a political‑compass methodology and said the open‑source approach and a proprietary fine‑tuning layer would form the company's competitive moat.
FollowLink placed third in the regional competition and will move to the county finale; judges encouraged the team to demonstrate concrete evaluation metrics before pitching at the next round.
