Maarten Sukel - Jounai.nl: Playing with New Tech to Reinvent the News | PyData Amsterdam 2024

Built Junai.nl - an AI-driven news platform that automatically generates news articles and podcasts from ~50 trusted sources using LLMs, without human intervention

Tech stack includes:

• Backend: Java/Spring Boot
• Frontend: Vue.js/Nuxt.js
• Azure Container Apps for deployment
• OpenAI APIs for content generation
• Structured LLM output validation using Pandera

Cost optimization:

• Current operational cost ~$80/month on Azure
• API costs under $2/week
• Costs reduced by switching to smaller models
• Image generation discontinued due to high API costs

Key technical implementation details:

• Uses Jaccard similarity for article deduplication
• Server-side rendering implemented for SEO
• Automated deployment via GitHub Actions
• Simple clustering for related content
• Multiple AI “personalities” for different content types

Challenges faced:

• Cultural localization of AI-generated content
• Legal considerations around content sourcing
• Cost management with scaling
• Quality control of AI outputs
• Speech synthesis quality in Dutch

Lessons learned:

• Importance of data validation and testing
• Benefits of experimenting with new technologies
• Value of small-scale projects for learning
• Need for careful prompt engineering
• Importance of structured output validation for LLMs

Future considerations:

• Potential for local model deployment
• Expectation of decreasing API costs
• Need for better cost optimization at scale
• Possibility of multilingual expansion
• Focus on maintaining truthful and objective reporting