this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024

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Encyclopedia Britannica Is Now an AI Company (gizmodo.com)

submitted 5 days ago by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to c/technology@lemmy.zip

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The 200 year-old company may soon go public on the back of AI-powered education products.

top 16 comments

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 48 points 4 days ago (3 children)

More general-purpose models like ChatGPT suffer from hallucinations because they have hoovered up the entire internet, including all the junk and misinformation.

Incorrect. ChatGPT hallucinates because that’s how LLMs work. Hoovering up misinformation is a separate problem.

A company in the space of selling educational books that has seen its fortunes go the opposite direction is Chegg. The company has seen its stock price plummet almost in lock-step with the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as students canceled their subscriptions to its online knowledge platform.

Incorrect. Chegg is a cheating platform. It is the opposite of a knowledge platform.

Why is Gizmodo paying people to write articles who apparently know pretty much nothing about the subject they are writing about?

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 9 points 4 days ago

Because they know their audience.

[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago

Having bad information in your dataset surely has to increase the odds of hallucinations though.

[–] Cuervo@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

that's not completely fair ; they could have done their research (using ai)

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 3 points 4 days ago

I read some of the author’s other articles. They have a habit of regurgitating highly suspect claims from press releases or company self-descriptions as if they were reality.

OpenAI is confident in o3, and offers impressive benchmarks—it says that in a Codeforcing testing, which measures coding ability, o3 got a score of 2727. For context, a score of 2400 would put an engineer in the 99th percentile of programmers. It gets a score of 96.7% on the 2024 American Invitational Mathematics Exam, missing just one question.

There’s also the article which claims that AI puts the entire power grid at risk, and then when you read the article, you learn that in order for that to be true, you need to lump AI in with crypto mining, other datacenter expansion, electric cars, and climate control for people’s homes.

[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 52 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

I miss the days when you could just do a thing and as long as you made more money than you spent, just keep doing it. Now the line must always go up, no matter what. And if your business model isn't profitable enough they'll just shut down 200 years of tradition without a second thought.

[–] then_three_more@lemmy.world 8 points 4 days ago

Surely companies have always adapted and changed products. They're not exactly able to make much of encyclopedias anymore when they're main competitor is free to use and has volunteers writing and editing it.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

I think that profit ship sailed for EB long ago.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 37 points 4 days ago

Encyclopaedia Britannica—now known as just Britannica— is all in on artificial intelligence, and may soon go public at a valuation of nearly $1 billion

All in on enshittification, like everyone else.

[–] TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works 19 points 4 days ago

Wikipedia is just like valve lol
do literally nothing and your opponents will kill themselves

[+] jagermo@feddit.org -11 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I mean, this makes sense and could actually be a positive thing to look stuff up

[–] Cuervo@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 4 days ago

considering the nature of an encyclopedia - short, knowledgeable articles on practically every topic - what's the difference except to invite errors and snazz things up ?

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io -3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

How dare you say something insufficiently negative about the stuff everyone hates.

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The downvotes are for the naïveté of the statement. Many people here use LLMs every day and have stated so in other threads. We just don't think this is necessarily a proper use case given that you're dealing with factual information. You can see as much in other comments on this thread pointing out the hallucinations.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Whereas I use LLMs every day, have actually written code that uses them, and I understand that they're perfectly fine dealing with factual information when used in the proper framework. You'd be using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in an application like this.

The "but hallucinations!" Objection goes in the same bin as "they can't do fingers." It's an old concern that's had a lot of work done to resolve it but that the general public haven't bothered to keep up with.

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

“they can’t do fingers.” It’s an old concern

Have you seen those gorilla hands, though? Yes, there are five fingers there but everyone got fucking man hands. lmao

It seems RAG helps mitigate but doesn't eliminate hallucinations yet. Not to mention it's quite expensive and has trouble extracting information based on abstract concepts. It sounds promising but it's not the silver bullet I'm being sold on.