Answer:

Shortly after the uproar over fake news and its potential impact on the US elections, Dean Pomerleau proposed using artificial intelligence to address the problem as a casual bet / dare to his friends and colleagues in the machine learning community on Twitter. The initial idea was inspired by the fact AI-based filtering techniques has been quite effective at conquering email spam - a problem that seems on the surface to be quite similar to fake news. Why can’t we address fake news the same way?

Dean was certainly not the first to have this idea. He quickly learned from others who joined the effort to organize the FNC that much fundamental research in AI, ML and NLP has been happening in recent years. The convergence of this groundbreaking research and the widespread recognition that fake news is an important real-world problem resulted in an explosion of interest in our efforts by volunteers, teams and the technology press. The FNC has grown dramatically since that initial bet between friends, to the point where it now includes over 100 volunteers and 72 teams from around the world. While the details of the challenge have evolved from that initial (rather naive) wager, the goal has always remained the same - foster the use of AI, machine learning and natural language processing to help solve the fake news problem.