Encyclopedia Britannica is now an AI company

Once a 20th-century icon, considered obsolete in the 21st, the Encyclopaedia Britannica — now known just as Britannica — is all about artificial intelligence and could soon go public at a valuation of nearly $1 billion, according to New York Times.

Until 2012 when printing is completethe company’s books served as the world’s oldest continuously published English-language encyclopedias, essentially collecting all of the world’s knowledge in one place before Google or Wikipedia were a thing. This helped usher Britannica into the AI ​​era, where models benefit from access to high-quality, verified information. More general purpose models like ChatGPT suffer from hallucinations because they have cluttered the entire internet, including all the junk and misinformation.

Although it still offers an online edition of its encyclopedia as well as the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Britannica’s biggest business today is selling online learning software to schools and libraries, software it hopes to power with AI. This could mean using AI to personalize learning plans for individual students. The idea is that students will enjoy learning more when the software can help them identify gaps in their understanding of a topic and stay on it longer. Another education technology company, Cleverlyrecently announced that responses from its chatbot will link to the exact learning materials (ie textbooks) they refer to.

CEO of Britannica Jorge Causa also said to times for the company Chatbot Britannica AIwhich allows users to ask questions about his vast database of encyclopedic knowledge that he has collected over two centuries from vetted academics and editors. Similarly, the company offers chatbot software for customer service use cases.

Britannica told the Times it expects revenue to double from two years ago to $100 million.

A company in the field of selling educational books whose fortunes have gone in the opposite direction is Chegg. The company has seen its share the stock price plummets almost in step with the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT as students canceled their subscriptions to the online knowledge platform.

Like the rise of Wikipedia before, many people seem to appreciate the accessibility and convenience of ChatGPT, even if they know it can’t be fully trusted. Chegg has long had an online Q&A platform for homework help, where users can pay to post questions and get answers back. But during the pandemic, he saw an influx of new users, had contractors answer new questions, and just couldn’t keep up with ChatGPT. Users complain that Chegg solutions are too often wrong, especially when submitted by other users rather than professionals.

Perhaps Britannica’s prestige brand and heritage will help it succeed in this new era where chatbots are still prone to returning the wrong information. It seems schools are at least willing to pay for access to something they are more confident about.