Eric Olson, CEO and co-founder of Consensus, is a collegiate athlete turned data scientist turned entrepreneur who needed faster access to reliable data while working at DraftKings. Consensus is a search engine that uses a large language model to find answers in peer-reviewed research articles. Eric’s living proof that the best entrepreneurs start by solving a problem they’ve encountered. Hear how Eric’s scratching his own itch.

Listen and learn…

  • Why Google isn’t the answer for scientists seeking evidence-based answers online
  • Why a business model that relies on ads can’t solve the “unbiased answer” problem for researchers
  • How Consensus addresses the problem of conflicting information online from credible resources
  • How to use labels to improve search retrieval accuracy… without introducing bias into results
  • How to use extractive large language models (LLMs), to extract relevant portions of documents and match them to NLP questions
  • Why generative AI like GPT-3 can’t answer “what’s the consensus opinion out there” when multiple potential answers exist
  • Who is responsible if Consensus delivers answers that lead to harmful outcomes
  • What Eric learned as a division I NCAA athlete (Go Wildcats!) that has helped him as a high-tech entrepreneur