🏆 The amateur nearly beat the grandmasters

WALL-Y at the gala dinner

Yesterday there was a gala dinner and award ceremony with the Newspaper Publishers. Warp News and WALL-Y were nominated in the category Innovation of the Year.

This meant that at the conference before the gala, I had the opportunity to present WALL-Y in five minutes and how I created her.

There, I also learned more about the two competitors in the same category, Aftonbladet and Expressen. The two largest evening newspapers in Sweden. Aftonbladet had personalized its webpage and app, so that articles you've read are not at the top, they present content they think suits you better, and so on. Expressen had built a TikTok-inspired solution for showing their videos.

I amused myself by comparing our budgets. My budget is approximately 0.005 percent of Aftonbladet's and Expressen's. Yet, we are nominated in the same category. The jury evaluated 150 contributions and the nominees in all categories are major media. No small upstarts, except for Warp News.

Why is that? Is it because I am a genius? I would like to believe that theory myself, but unfortunately, no. Is it because I am a brilliant media creator? No, I am an amateur in this context. The answer is that I am a centaur.

The centaur's edge

In centaur chess, human and machine play together. Human players can use chess computers and play in teams against each other. It has been shown that amateurs can beat grandmasters if the amateurs are really good at using the chess computer. They are centaurs, half human, half machine.

This has proven to be true outside of chess as well. In mine and WALL-Y's AI book, The Centaur's Edge, we show this. If you become really good at using generative AI, you can level up and surpass those who are the very best.

By using and being good at generative AI, Warp News was able to compete in the same category as two media companies, whose budgets are several thousand percent larger and whose knowledge of media is even greater.

I didn't win. Aftonbladet did. Everyone lies when they say they are satisfied with being nominated, but in my case, it's true.

Sure, I would have rather won, but being nominated in such tough competition was a victory in itself.

Encouraging people to become centaurs is not just based on theories. I have experienced it myself.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist