Effort News and AI-Driven Journalism with Brian Chau – #121

Steve Hsu (0:03)

This message is for some friends at Mechanize, a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough encoding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring. See the links in the show notes. Compensation is extremely competitive for technical roles, $300,000 to $500,000 per year in salary, plus additional benefits and equity compensation. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example, a research engineer position focused on alignment. This person will build evals that test for misaligned model behavior, salary $500,000 a year.

Puzzle maker. This person will design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs cannot yet solve. The salary component of compensation is $300,000.

Mechanize understands that my readership and my listenership on this podcast is highly selected. There is a very good chance you will be interviewed if you apply via the link in the show notes.

Brian Chau (1:20)

This might be a Manifold exclusive, Breaking News, but the Epstein Files Transparency Act was almost entirely written by AI. We did a big scan using pan-gram of all of the bills. We found around 6.5 percent of bills were written by AI, but of all of them, the only one that is now law, the only law that rules us, that is written almost entirely by AI, is the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Steve Hsu (2:11)

Welcome to Manifold. My guest today is Brian Chau, a former math and coding prodigy who's all grown up now, and trying to change the world. Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian Chau (2:25)

Great to be here, Steve.

Steve Hsu (2:27)

Now, Brian, I've known you for a long time. I think, like, maybe when we first met, were you still in college or you had just finished college?

Brian Chau (2:33)

Yeah, I think so. I was right on the tail end.

Steve Hsu (2:37)

Yeah, you had a podcast, and I think we recorded some long episodes on your podcast. And then, since then, we kept in touch. And I think, did we only meet IRL in... We probably met at some conferences, like Less Online or Manifest. But then, like, I hung out with you at network school.

Was it... How long ago was it? It was, like, maybe earlier this year, so maybe 7 months ago.

Brian Chau (3:04)

I think it was 4 months ago, 5 months ago. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Maybe it was more than I thought. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Hsu (3:11)

So welcome to the show. I think of you as one of these super insightful younger guys who is very ejectic.

And the reason I invited you for this episode is I heard what you are doing with Effort News, which is your latest venture.

Brian Chau (3:26)

Yeah. It's been an amazing time since the launch. I was basically fooling around with a bunch of AI, actually like financial auditing tools. I was developing this and I was like, okay, well, what am I going to audit? Because at this point, I had left network school and no longer working for them. I didn't have any revenue back then, obviously.

I thought, okay, let's throw out some government databases. Then I found some really mind-breaking and ultimately incredibly successful stories. I started asking around, I thought surely someone must know about these stories and it was just crickets on all of them. No one had reported on this, it was brand new stuff.

At that point, I thought, okay, I have to do this full-time and I was just sprinting 24-7 up until our launch. Then it's been an amazing time since, just like every week, you get a ton more traction.

Steve Hsu (4:24)

You launched a month ago, early August, is that right?

Brian Chau (4:26)

Yeah, we launched almost exactly a month ago as of recording. So it was on August 10th was our launch.

Steve Hsu (4:34)

Got it. Before we get into Effort News, because I think maybe we've whetted the audience's appetite a little bit. Let's just go back and talk about Network School, because the last time I saw you, which was earlier in 2026, we were both on this little island off the coast of Singapore where Balaji Srinivasan had established a thing called Network School. It was on this artificial island, which was built by byproduct of the Chinese property bubble of five or 10 years ago, and was almost like a ghost city, like 10 percent occupancy in this huge apartment complex right on the beach facing Singapore. There's a four or five-star hotel there, which Balaji had converted into Network School.

For people who don't know about it, Network School is a place for entrepreneurs and digital nomads to lock in, be very healthy, super large gym, healthy food available all the time, and you can just lock in and work on your startup, or just learn, attend events, and stuff like that. So Brian, you were an NS employee, right?