Encyclopedia Britannica Is Now an AI Company
(Monday December 23, 2024 @05:40PM (BeauHD)
from the new-lease-on-life dept.)
- Reference: 0175742155
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/12/23/211253/encyclopedia-britannica-is-now-an-ai-company
- Source link:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo:
> Once an icon of the 20th century seen as obsolete in the 21st, Encyclopedia Britannica -- now known as just Britannica -- [1]is all in on artificial intelligence , and may soon go public at a valuation of nearly $1 billion, according to the [2]New York Times .
>
> Until 2012 when [3]printing ended , the company's books served as the oldest continuously published, English-language encyclopedias in the world, essentially collecting all the world's knowledge in one place before Google or Wikipedia were a thing. That has helped Britannica pivot into the AI age, where models benefit from access to high-quality, vetted information. More general-purpose models like ChatGPT suffer from hallucinations because they have hoovered up the entire internet, including all the junk and misinformation.
>
> While it still offers an online edition of its encyclopedia, as well as the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Britannica's biggest business today is selling online education software to schools and libraries, the software it hopes to supercharge with AI. That could mean using AI to customize learning plans for individual students. The idea is that students will enjoy learning more when software can help them understand the gaps in their understanding of a topic and stay on it longer. Another education tech company, Brainly, recently announced that answers from its chatbot will link to the exact learning materials (i.e. textbooks) they reference.
>
> Britannica's CEO Jorge Cauz also told the Times about the company's [4]Britannica AI chatbot , which allows users to ask questions about its vast database of encyclopedic knowledge that it collected over two centuries from vetted academics and editors. The company similarly offers chatbot software for customer service use cases. Britannica told the Times it is expecting revenue to double from two years ago, to $100 million.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/encyclopedia-britannica-is-now-an-ai-company-2000542600
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/business/dealbook/britannica-artificial-intelligence.html
[3] https://news.slashdot.org/story/12/03/13/2255247/after-244-years-the-end-for-the-dead-tree-encyclopedia-britannica
[4] https://www.britannica.com/chatbot
> Once an icon of the 20th century seen as obsolete in the 21st, Encyclopedia Britannica -- now known as just Britannica -- [1]is all in on artificial intelligence , and may soon go public at a valuation of nearly $1 billion, according to the [2]New York Times .
>
> Until 2012 when [3]printing ended , the company's books served as the oldest continuously published, English-language encyclopedias in the world, essentially collecting all the world's knowledge in one place before Google or Wikipedia were a thing. That has helped Britannica pivot into the AI age, where models benefit from access to high-quality, vetted information. More general-purpose models like ChatGPT suffer from hallucinations because they have hoovered up the entire internet, including all the junk and misinformation.
>
> While it still offers an online edition of its encyclopedia, as well as the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Britannica's biggest business today is selling online education software to schools and libraries, the software it hopes to supercharge with AI. That could mean using AI to customize learning plans for individual students. The idea is that students will enjoy learning more when software can help them understand the gaps in their understanding of a topic and stay on it longer. Another education tech company, Brainly, recently announced that answers from its chatbot will link to the exact learning materials (i.e. textbooks) they reference.
>
> Britannica's CEO Jorge Cauz also told the Times about the company's [4]Britannica AI chatbot , which allows users to ask questions about its vast database of encyclopedic knowledge that it collected over two centuries from vetted academics and editors. The company similarly offers chatbot software for customer service use cases. Britannica told the Times it is expecting revenue to double from two years ago, to $100 million.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/encyclopedia-britannica-is-now-an-ai-company-2000542600
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/business/dealbook/britannica-artificial-intelligence.html
[3] https://news.slashdot.org/story/12/03/13/2255247/after-244-years-the-end-for-the-dead-tree-encyclopedia-britannica
[4] https://www.britannica.com/chatbot
I'm glad Brittanica survived (Score:3)
by xack ( 5304745 )
I've got a collection of paper encyclopedias that I aquired just as Wikipedia was overtaking the rest of the encyclopedia market. AI and websites may be "smart", but a book can last for centuries. I still expect Wikipedia to lose to Britannica in the long run, with Wiki constantly having donation banners that are just as bad as ads on other sites.
That's a bit of a shift (Score:2)
Moving from a business with products based on facts, to one that produces hallucinations?
Re: (Score:2)
> That has helped Britannica pivot into the AI age, where models benefit from access to high-quality, vetted information. More general-purpose models like ChatGPT suffer from hallucinations because they have hoovered up the entire internet, including all the junk and misinformation.
They have a brave interpretation of the hallucination problem, that's for sure, and it's doing a lot of work here. My call is that AI hallucinates because "colorless green ideas sleep furiously", but well, one has to try. It's not like things can get much worse for them.