Gizmodo: “Once an icon of the 20th century seen as obsolete in the 21st, 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, according to the New York Times. Until 2012 when printing ended, the company’s books served as the oldest continuously published, English-language encyclopedias in the world, essentially collecting all the world’s knowledge in one place before Google or Wikipedia were a thing. That has helped Britannica pivot into the AI age, where models benefit from access to high-quality, vetted information. More general-purpose models like ChatGPT suffer from hallucinations because they have hoovered up the entire internet, including all the junk and misinformation. While it still offers an online edition of its encyclopedia, as well as the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Britannica’s biggest business today is selling online education software to schools and libraries, the software it hopes to supercharge with AI. That could mean using AI to customize learning plans for individual students. The idea is that students will enjoy learning more when software can help them understand the gaps in their understanding of a topic and stay on it longer. Another education tech company, Brainly, recently announced that answers from its chatbot will link to the exact learning materials (i.e. textbooks) they reference…”