As artificial intelligence accelerates the creation of content, the internet has entered an era defined less by scarcity and more by saturation. Millions of new posts, research papers, and media artifacts appear daily, making discovery, not creation, the primary challenge. For Lior Alexander, founder of AlphaSignal, this shift marked the beginning of his work.
Rather than asking how to produce more content, Alexander focused on a more fundamental question: how do people find what actually matters when everything is being generated at once?
From Research Lab to System Builder
Alexander’s path into AI began in 2017, when he joined the research lab of Turing Award–winning scientist Yoshua Bengio in Montreal. At the time, machine learning research was expanding rapidly, but access to meaningful insights remained limited.
“Hundreds of papers were being uploaded every week,” Alexander recalled. “There was no effective way to filter them. Even researchers inside the lab were overwhelmed.”
That experience shaped his thinking. Instead of focusing on model development alone, Alexander became interested in the infrastructure surrounding knowledge itself: how information is surfaced, ranked, and interpreted. He began experimenting with tools that could track research activity across the web, identify emerging signals, and surface them in a usable way.
That early system would become the foundation of AlphaSignal.
Building an AI-Native Media System
AlphaSignal was not designed as a traditional media company. From the beginning, it was structured as an automated system capable of detecting, ranking, and contextualizing information at scale. While most newsrooms rely on teams of editors and writers, AlphaSignal relies on software.
“I built the entire system myself,” Alexander said. “The ranking models, the data pipelines, the publishing workflows, the branding. I didn’t have a team or outside funding.”
The platform continuously scans technical papers, product releases, funding announcements, and research activity, identifying patterns that signal meaningful developments. Instead of reacting to trends after they peak, AlphaSignal aims to detect momentum early.
That approach has proven effective. The platform now reaches more than 250,000 subscribers, over 500,000 followers, and has generated more than 200 million impressions. It also became an early visibility engine for companies such as ElevenLabs and Lovable, helping surface them before they reached mainstream attention.
Operating Without a Team
Running AlphaSignal as a solo operation forced Alexander to rethink how media organizations function. Rather than scaling through headcount, he focused on automation and system design.
“I had to do everything: engineering, research, distribution, partnerships,” he said. “The only way to make that sustainable was to build systems that could operate without constant human input.”
This approach mirrors the broader shift he sees happening across industries: replacing manual workflows with intelligent systems capable of handling complexity at scale. In his view, the future belongs to organizations that treat information processing as infrastructure, not editorial labor.
A Model for the Next Phase of Media
Today, AlphaSignal functions less like a publication and more like an intelligence layer for the AI ecosystem. Its tools identify emerging trends, map technical progress, and help engineers, investors, and researchers understand where innovation is actually occurring.
Looking ahead, Alexander plans to expand the system beyond AI into other sectors facing similar overload, including finance, cybersecurity, and biotechnology. His long-term goal is to build what he describes as a “universal signal engine” — a platform capable of ranking relevance across any domain overwhelmed by information.
We’re entering a period where most content will be machine-generated,” he said. “The real value won’t be in producing more of it, but in building systems that help people understand what matters.
For Alexander, that challenge defines the next era of media, one where clarity, not volume, becomes the most valuable commodity.
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This story was published under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program.
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