[HN Gopher] Encyclopaedia Britannica Seeking $1B Valuation in IPO
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Encyclopaedia Britannica Seeking $1B Valuation in IPO
Author : marban
Score : 28 points
Date : 2024-03-18 14:51 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| paxys wrote:
| > Chicago-based firm's units include Merriam-Webster, Melingo AI
|
| I'm guessing it's the last two letters that are going to get them
| that valuation.
| internetter wrote:
| I feel like Melingo was just created for the valuation bump.
| There's next to no information about it.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I like the idea of an encyclopaedia company being so profitable
| and/or valuable
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I hope this funds contracting top authors for the Encyclopaedia.
| If you check an article's authors, you'll see that many are
| written by experts in their field (professors, high-level
| practicioners, etc.) and some by leading people in their field.
| In the past they were written by people like Einstein and Freud.
| And often articles by leading experts can be very engaging,
| written with a personality and point of view (though they seem to
| cover all sides).
|
| But it seems like many of those authors are long retired, maybe
| dead, and I wonder how old their contribution is (Britannica
| seems to update it). And many articles say they are written by
| the 'Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica', though maybe that
| always was the case.
|
| I have nothing against the editors, but an expert in that domain
| will have perspective, insight and current knowledge (i.e., not
| yet in textbooks) that is impossible to match, imho. I'd love to
| see them again hiring leading people to write.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Luminaries like that also have their hobby horses and
| grievances that may color their writing. The editors are people
| doing a lifelong work of curating all kinds of information,
| including through primary sources such as papers in peer
| reviewed scholarly journals, such as those written by the
| contributors you mention. So it stands to reason that there is
| a core contributed by a leader in their field at the time,
| which is subsequently maintained by the editors and
| contributors.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| It would be nice to have contributions from multiple
| luminaries on the same topic, sometimes as collaborations
| justinclift wrote:
| https://archive.is/HrwTp
| justinclift wrote:
| Hmmm, an AI that only uses factual encyclopaedia data for its
| training set.
|
| If they can completely eliminate hallucinations, they could be
| onto something useful.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| If you train a language model on a factual dataset, it will
| still hallucinate.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| Do you think the reason hallucinations occur in LLMs is because
| the training data includes the hallucination? You are very
| wrong. Hallucinations are not a training data problem, at least
| in the way you are implying.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Are hallucinations really only a problem with "non factual"
| training data? Looking at all the made up library methods that
| ChatGPT uses in the code it produces, it made me think this is
| a general LLM/GPT problem.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| Yes, weirdly, often the hallucination is how I would have
| liked them to expose the API.
| observationist wrote:
| Just because it's printed in a book doesn't mean it's any more
| factual than any other source of information. Many studies and
| reviews have found Wikipedia to be more accurate overall than
| Encyclopedia Britannica. In fact, because it's in a book, it's
| harder to correct, and more insidious because of opinions like
| the one you just expressed.
|
| In both cases, you should not treat the information as
| canonically or authoritatively accurate or factual. Biases,
| gaps, outright lies and fabrication exist in any large
| collection of human writing.
| breck wrote:
| > Many studies and reviews have found Wikipedia to be more
| accurate overall than Encyclopedia Britannica
|
| I'm not doubting this, but do you have citations?
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I realize this isn't the most unbiased source, but it does
| have lots of citations with studies comparing Wikipedia and
| Britannica.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia
| HankB99 wrote:
| That will be interesting. I suspect that the hallucinations
| come from combining unrelated data in ways that stretch
| reality. However, using the general Internet as a source of
| Truth seems like it was never a good idea.
| fcsp wrote:
| I took a brief look at their online article about the British
| empire. While it does briefly mention Jamaica requiring
| "conquest" in the origins section, it seems mostly oblivious to
| the consequences of the empire's "commercial ambitions" for the
| local populations. Not sure that would form a great "factual"
| source of truth to train an AI on.
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