Encyclopedia Britannica Is Now an AI Company 39
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 -- is all in on artificial intelligence, and may soon go public at a valuation of nearly $1 billion, according to the New York Times.
Until 2012 when 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 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.
Until 2012 when 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 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.
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"Valued at..." Which means that the moment that someone tries to collect some of that and make it money, the value will drop.
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Because, of course, the only facts worth knowing are the ones that were discovered in the last financial quarter, or something.
Re:Wikipedia (Score:4, Informative)
Possibly. Possibly not. A quality encyclopedia is better at editing than Wikipedia, and leaves out a lot of utterly useless stuff which otherwise forms the bulk of Wikipedia. Also the references in Encyclopedia Britannica actually exist, unlike the collection of broken web links in all the Wikipedia articles.
Skeptical (Score:4, Informative)
The tendency to rewrite history and basic scientific articles to fit a political narrative since 1980 is a good reason to be skeptical.
I'd like a critical and reasoned discussion of contemporary topics and not just using a large set of agenda based research to prevent discussion of encyclopedia articles.
Research sources for encyclopedia articles need to be evaluated for scientific quality (no self-reported surveys, AI sentiment analysis, or microfraction of a group's social media posts), freedom from an overt agenda based bias and, in turn, not be based on earlier sources of questionable scientific quality.
Encyclopedia article authors also need to have proven as a knowledgeable person in the subject and not a producer of agenda based research or agenda based books.
And the building blocks of encyclopedia articles should not be solely based on 20 year research studies of the social status, views, political beliefs or trends of a prior generation. More modern research should be done to reevaluate the outdated scientific research especially in political topics or social sciences.
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The tendency to rewrite history and basic scientific articles to fit a political narrative since 1980 is a good reason to be skeptical.
Tell me, what's so good about the blatant biases and political narrative of the 50s, 60s and 70s that you wish for them to be set in stone forever?
Britannica does that old timey fact checkin thing (Score:3)
Wikipedia has made every enclocpieda obsolite
No. Britannica is fact checked far beyond Wikipedia. It would probably be somewhat safe to let an AI learn from it, unlike Wikipedia.
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Britannica made mistakes and is out of date for a lot of things. Not a good idea to let AI learn from it.
Britanica is not stuck at its last printed 2010 version, it's gone digital. Try their chat bot, it seems pretty current. Their "New on Britannica" shows they are still adding topics.
When playing with the chatbot note whether it is showing an answer from Britannica or Chat-GPT. If their system doesn't come up with an answer they seem to check Chat-GPT.
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I'm sorry, but it seems like your request is beyond the scope of what I can assist with. If you have any other questions or need information on a different topic, feel free to ask!
thats what i got....
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"There are no American troops in Baghdad!". "Hey Encyclopedia Brittanica, where there American troops in Baghdad on April 8th 2003". "No. According reliable sources, the ministry of information of Iraq, there were no American troops in Baghdad on April 8th 2003".
Britanica answered your question correctly (Score:2)
It is totally useless for AI to "learn from it" because it will not gain any new knowledge, which an encyclopedia should. Google has the algorithm to scrape EB and tell me what's in it. No AI can enter new knowledge. "There are no American troops in Baghdad!". "Hey Encyclopedia Brittanica, where there American troops in Baghdad on April 8th 2003". "No. According reliable sources, the ministry of information of Iraq, there were no American troops in Baghdad on April 8th 2003".
No, Britanica actually answered correctly.
"where there American troops in Baghdad on April 8th 2003
Sources:
Iraq War: The 2003 conflict
Iraq: Post-9/11 tension and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq
Baghdad: Baghdad in modern Iraq
This Day in History: April 9
Yes, American troops were in Baghdad on April 8, 2003. U.S. forces had advanced into the city and were conducting operations in the heart of Baghdad around that time. By April 9, resistance in Baghdad had collapsed, and U.S. soldiers took control of t
That's a bit of a shift (Score:2)
Moving from a business with products based on facts, to one that produces hallucinations?
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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.
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While I agree that without true understanding LLLMs are going to hallucinate some of the time, the sheer amount of nonsense used to train ChatGPT and Gemini must be a problem if accuracy is important in a response to a prompt.
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"Hallucination" is the wrong word. It is based upon the idea that there is "intelligence", of which none exists. There's very advanced and capable pattern matching, but not intelligence. Better to just call it a bug for what it is. Or a probabalistic outlier.
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If you want to be nitpicky, "delusion" would be a better word. But yes, that implies *belief*, however philosophically that implies a lot of stuff happening under the covers that isn't there -- a model of reality. As I understand it what the model does is generate a plausible looking response, which is something people do too, but it's not like have an actual belief.
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Maybe it's about improving the quality of the hallucinations. Android dreams and electric sheep and all that.
I'm glad Brittanica survived (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm glad Brittanica survived (Score:4, Informative)
If they cut out the crap they have enough money to indefinitely fund their hosting off interest earned. Per their own website, they spend over twice as much paying for the fundraising efforts as they do hosting. I suspect they could survive just fine at only 5% of their budget. The other 95% is just because they have the money and they can.
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Salaries aren't necessary? Even if they get content for free, there's still a lot of work maintaining a site that serves up eighteen billion page views a month.
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Also I suspect that the majority of references in Wikipedia are broken.
We had World Book growing up, which was sold door to door when I was a toddler. That was a piece of crap. Even when I was ten I realized that it was woefully out of date and not very well written and that it had a whole lot of opinions.
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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.
You're right. A book can last for centuries. But printing all of them on paper, cannot. We were half the current population less than half of one century ago. Not sure why you’re talking in centuries. I doubt consuming trees for that purpose will remain legal past this century. For billions more reason.
A quick test... it's not very helpful. (Score:2)
ChatGPT: What are non-market practices?
Answer: a long description of all the various aspects about non-market practices.
Britannica: What are non-market practices?
Sorry, the Britannica knowledge base does not contain this information.
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Given the last printed edition was revised in 1974, you wouldn't find "Internet" in it either.
Wikipedia says 2010 last printed version (Score:2)
Given the last printed edition was revised in 1974, you wouldn't find "Internet" in it either.
Wikipedia says: "Encyclopædia Britannica ... The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition. Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia."
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So it knows nothing since 2010. Let's train an AI on more than a decade old information...
Wrong. They continue to work on the encyclopedia. They just don't print it anymore, it's an online service. They offer a sampling of things recently added.
https://www.britannica.com/new... [britannica.com]
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they finished updating the printed version in 2010 like you said
No, I did not say they finished updating, I said it was the last printed version. I also said it continued as an online version, and provided a linked to their "New Articles" page.
A quick test ... you are clueless (Score:2)
Britannica: What are non-market practices?
Sorry, the Britannica knowledge base does not contain this information.
Actually, Britannica answers with:
"Non-market practices refer to activities and systems that operate outside the traditional market framework, where goods and services are not exchanged through buying and selling using money. These practices can include barter systems, ecosystem services, and government interventions to address market failures.
Barter Systems: Barter involves the direct exchange of goods or services without using money as an intermediary. It is one of the oldest forms of commerce and i
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That is just bullshit (Score:2)
Unless they plan on making really crappy content now, regular search is all you need for their stuff.
Excellent! (Score:3)
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Coming back for this (Score:2)