Britannica is now an AI company
Dec. 24th, 2024 09:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneThis is interesting.
The company who, up until 2012, published the book-form of the Encyclopedia Britannica, is now turning that huge trove of facts into an LLM engine with the goal of selling it as a service to the education market.
While this might seem as a bit of a snoozer, there's one very interesting aspect to this: AI hallucinations.
Most LLM models have hallucination problems, seemingly stemming from their snarfing up their training data from hoovering up the internet with all of its crappy and contradictory information. This is where Britannica shines: they paid a literal fortune over two centuries collecting vetted materials from recognized scholars using quality editors to compile it into a trusted source. Thus, the quality of their training model will be very, very high.
The question will be if their code that ingests this training model will still hallucinate. And we'll only see that with testing when it goes public and really gets pummeled. But I do like the idea: starting with a very high quality training set, I think it shows promise.
Though we still have the problem of AI systems consuming stupid godawful amounts of energy.
Britannica's encyclopedia is still available online, just not in a print edition.
https://gizmodo.com/encyclopedia-britannica-is-now-an-ai-company-2000542600
The company who, up until 2012, published the book-form of the Encyclopedia Britannica, is now turning that huge trove of facts into an LLM engine with the goal of selling it as a service to the education market.
While this might seem as a bit of a snoozer, there's one very interesting aspect to this: AI hallucinations.
Most LLM models have hallucination problems, seemingly stemming from their snarfing up their training data from hoovering up the internet with all of its crappy and contradictory information. This is where Britannica shines: they paid a literal fortune over two centuries collecting vetted materials from recognized scholars using quality editors to compile it into a trusted source. Thus, the quality of their training model will be very, very high.
The question will be if their code that ingests this training model will still hallucinate. And we'll only see that with testing when it goes public and really gets pummeled. But I do like the idea: starting with a very high quality training set, I think it shows promise.
Though we still have the problem of AI systems consuming stupid godawful amounts of energy.
Britannica's encyclopedia is still available online, just not in a print edition.
https://gizmodo.com/encyclopedia-britannica-is-now-an-ai-company-2000542600
no subject
Date: 2024-12-25 02:05 am (UTC)One of the first software programs I bought for the 386 was a Compton’s encyclopedia. This was a nod to the 1955 set I grew up with at home.