Junkee and Lexer founders team up for mystery AI product
Junkee Media founder Neil Ackland and Lexer founder Aaron Wallis have teamed up to launch Lokol (styled “lokol”), a consumer AI startup that aims to address the problem of individuality in the AI age.
Details of the actual product proposition for Lokol are vague, and Ackland is not willing to discuss what the pair are up to – but the venture’s first Substack post gives some clues.
Neil Ackland and Aaron Willis (Lokol)
“Earlier this year, after wrapping our respective chapters, our paths crossed once again and we started having some exciting conversations about this once-in-a-generation moment.
“We were both naturally drawn to the spaces where AI doesn’t have all the answers. The spaces where there will always be a need for a human-in-the-loop to apply a critical lens.”
Ackland is the co-founder of Sound Alliance, founder of Junkee Media, and for the last seven years has held senior executive positions at Ooh Media including chief content, marketing and creative officer. He left Ooh in May.
Wallis founded Lexer – a Melbourne-based retail Customer Data Platform – in 2008 after a career of technical agency roles. His company bio describes him as “either the most creative person in the technical team or the most technical person in the creative team”.
In his Linkedin post announcing the venture, Ackland said the pair had worked on his first startup, Inthemix.
“After years on different paths, we’re reuniting and back at it, building a BIG idea in that magical space between the improbable and the impossible. This time, with AI in the mix.”
According to the Substack post, the consumer product the pair are working on will be based on the observation that “AI has no taste” and needs to be combined with human judgment.
“Large language models are trained on an enormous and diverse corpus of online data, but that data is skewed, heavily toward content that is widely available, easily crawled, and highly duplicated – In other words, mass culture.”
The post itself stands in for the hybrid human-AI approach, having been partially generated by an “AI co-founder”, Tex.
Lokol’s ‘co-founder’, Tex
Ackland says in the post that Lokol will document its build publicly.
“What we are building exactly, will reveal itself in time. We are starting with the why, the why now, and the how.”
Mumbrella is standing by for more details.
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