Once an icon of the 20th century that is now considered obsolete in the 21st, the Encyclopedia Britannica – now known simply as Britannica – is betting on artificial intelligence and may soon go public with a valuation of nearly $1 billion, the New York Times reports.
Until 2012, when printing ceased, the company’s books were the oldest continuously published English-language encyclopedias in the world, essentially collecting all the knowledge about the world in one place, even before Google or Wikipedia appeared. This helped Britannica enter the era of artificial intelligence, where models benefit from access to high-quality, verified information. More general-purpose models like ChatGPT suffer from hallucinations because they have absorbed the entire internet, including all the garbage and misinformation.
While Britannica still offers an online version of its encyclopedia as well as the Merriam-Webster dictionary, its biggest business today is selling online education software to schools and libraries, which it hopes to improve with AI. This could mean using AI to customize curricula for individual students. The idea is that students will enjoy learning more when the software helps them understand the gaps in their understanding of a topic and stay with it longer. Another education tech company, Brainly, recently announced that its chatbot answers will be linked to specific learning materials (i.e. textbooks) to which they refer.
Britannica CEO Jorge Cause also told the Times about the Britannica AI chatbot, which allows users to ask questions about the vast database of encyclopedic knowledge gathered over two centuries from trusted scholars and editors. The company also offers chatbot software for customer service.
Britannica told the Times that it expects revenues to double from last year to $100 million.
Chegg, a company that sells educational books, has seen its fortunes go in the opposite direction. Its share price fell almost simultaneously with the growth of OpenAI’s ChatGPT as students canceled their subscriptions to the online learning platform.
Similar to how Wikipedia grew earlier, it seems that many people appreciate the access and convenience of ChatGPT, even if they know it cannot be completely trusted. Chegg has long had an online question and answer platform for homework help, where users can pay to ask questions and get them answered. But during the pandemic, it was flooded with new users, contractors started answering new questions, and it simply couldn’t keep up with ChatGPT. Users complained that the solutions on Chegg were too often wrong, especially when they were provided by other users rather than professionals.
Perhaps Britannica’s prestigious brand and heritage will help it succeed in the new era, when chatbots are still prone to providing incorrect information. It seems that schools are at least willing to pay for access to something they are more confident in.
