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Encyclopaedia Britannica Seeking $1B Valuation in IPO
- paxys 3y ago> 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 3y agoI feel like Melingo was just created for the valuation bump. There's next to no information about it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- beejiu 3y agoChecking Ahrefs, melingo.com gets an estimated 36 sessions per month. Encyclopaedia Britannica is positioning itself not only as a tech firm, but an AI firm. What's going on?
- dpflan 3y agoThey are an information company, authoritative and trusted. They must be positioning themselves with data as a service, like the recent Reddit contract.
- wolverine876 3y ago> They must be positioning themselves with data as a service, like the recent Reddit contract. Britannica has a contract with Reddit? I tried searching around online but didn't find anything.
- internetter 3y agoNo. Reddit entered a 60 million dollar AI contract with google.
- internetter 3y agoI mean, Ahrefs puts my traffic at half that, and my analytics report 20k sessions this month (not that it's high, but it's certainly not 15). No clue where Ahrefs gets those numbers from.
- nickpsecurity 3y agoWe need high quality data to train foundational models. Many of us thought textbooks, encyclopedias, etc were a great way to start. I have a list of names of every type of encyclopedia set on eBay for that exact reason. One was Britannica.
- gentleman11 3y agoI like the idea of an encyclopaedia company being so profitable and/or valuable
- wolverine876 3y agoI 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 3y agoLuminaries 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 3y agoIt would be nice to have contributions from multiple luminaries on the same topic, sometimes as collaborations
- wolverine876 3y agoYes, that would be great. A debate even, though that would be an odd format in an encyclopedia. In Britannica the way it is now, I've noticed that related topics are sometimes written by experts with different viewpoints, and where they overlap you can see the contours of the terrain, so to speak.
- justinclift 3y agohttps://archive.is/HrwTp https://archive.is/HrwTp
- justinclift 3y agoHmmm, an AI that only uses factual encyclopaedia data for its training set. If they can also completely eliminate hallucinations, they could be onto something useful.
- ipsum2 3y agoIf you train a language model on a factual dataset, it will still hallucinate.
- justinclift 3y agoThat's why I specifically said "if they can also eliminate that...". Sure it won't come from just having a good data set... they'll need to do other stuff as well. Hopefully not impossible. :)
- skissane 3y agoOne technique which reduces hallucinations, is to augment the LLM with a database of facts (such as the text of an encyclopaedia). You take the prompt, and you do a semantic search on the fact database (RAG, retrieval augmented generation) to find sentences/paragraphs/documents which relate to the prompt, and you add them to the prompt. Another related approach is function-calling, where instead of just doing a query based on the text of the prompt, you let the LLM analyse the prompt and come up with search terms, and then allow the LLM to do a search for the terms it has chosen. You can prompt and fine-tune the LLM to cite all its claims to the fact database. Another approach that can help, is after you generate the response, you then submit the response to an LLM (even the same LLM), with a prompt to check it for errors (errors of reasoning, misrepresentation of citations, etc). Often, LLMs can do a decent job on catching their own errors, including hallucinations. The more advanced an LLM is, the less likely it is to hallucinate, and the more likely it is to pick up on its own mistakes. Llama-7b hallucinates a lot more than GPT-4, and is far less likely to detect itself doing so. You can't make an LLM foolproof, but you can't make humans foolproof either. Humans "hallucinate" too – e.g. students write essays with erroneous claims, cited to sources which never actually make those claims.
- kibwen 3y agoStrange to learn that this is a private company, I'd always assumed that the Encyclopedia Britannica was produced by the UK government, in the same vein as the CIA World Factbook.
- lupire 3y agoAnd like Federal Moving and Storage, and National Tree Service?
- BoiledCabbage 3y agoOh that's wild. That never crossed my mind, but given the name it seems like it should have.
- wk_end 3y agoGiven how long it's been since EB was at the peak of its commercial and cultural import, it's hard not to worry that this isn't just another example of Vampire Capitalism looking for a way to enrich itself while sucking a once great company dry.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jgalt212 3y agoIt's a great resources almost never on SERP page 1. I hope they invest money in good SEO b/c there's some much garbage out there that EB deserves more love. And many things you look up don't change and the article written in 1980 is better than the LLM version written in 2024.
- wolverine876 3y agoIt's often in the top 5 or 10 at DuckDuckGo.
- karaterobot 3y ago> Founded more than 250 years ago I wonder what the oldest company to go public is. This isn't easy to Google, because search engines want to give you the public company which is the oldest, even though that's not the same thing. I see this article about Birkenstocks, which company is apparently almost 250 years old. Surprising! But it does not mention Birkenstock being the oldest company at the time of IPO, so there must be an older one. https://www.npr.org/2023/09/13/1198324691/birkenstock-ipo-stock-clogs https://www.npr.org/2023/09/13/1198324691/birkenstock-ipo-st...
- wolverine876 3y agoI'd look for a business in a trade that goes back to ancient times, is in demand today, and needs capital. Maybe something more institutional, like a academic institution? A hospital? Also, I'd look in a country with both large securities markets and a long history (i.e., not the US). Maybe Japan, Italy, or France?
- sanswork 3y agoHudson Bay Company was ~340 years old when it IPOd.
- DaedPsyker 3y agoI don't know if this is the answer but Fiskars is an old company, founded 1649, which is publicly listed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiskars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiskars
- paulddraper 3y agoI believe the record is 613 years, by Stora Kopparbergs Bergslags AB, a Swedish mining company. It was founded in the 13th century as Stora Kopparberg (first record is a private stock sale in 1288). It went public on the Stockholm Stock Exchange in 1901. Today it's known as Stora Enso Oyi, following a merger with the Finnish company Enso in 1998.
- lvl102 3y agoCompletely off-topic but this post made me think about those Encarta discs growing up.
- paulddraper 3y agoI remember
- SuperNinKenDo 3y agoI fail to see how becoming beholden to stakeholders will make an encyclopaedia a better publication. A real shame. Feels like nothing is sacred anymore.
- paulddraper 3y agoThis might surprise you, but encyclopedias aren't the most lucrative game in town.
- SuperNinKenDo 3y agoWell, exactly?