Recently facebook has made headlines for fake news and the chaos created by them, many governments have issued warnings for the same. So what’s facebook plan now?
Facebook is close to acquiring London-based start-up Bloomsbury AI to help it combat fake news as well as other content issues. Facebook is reportedly paying between $23 million and $30 million to acquire the company and that a mixture of cash and stock will change hands.
Specialisation and goal
Bloomsbury AI specialises in natural language processing (NLP) technology and has developed an AI called Cape, which can read text documents and answer questions about their contents.
The company’s stated goal is for their AI to [eventually] be able to answer any question that requires reading better than a human. One of the firm’s angel investors in William Tunstall-Pedoe, an expert in AI who helped develop Amazon’s Alexa.
Bloomsbury artificial intelligence
Bloomsbury’s investors include the VC firm Fly Ventures, Seedcamp, IQ Capital, UCL Technology Fund, and the UK taxpayer-backed London Co-Investment fund. It was also selected by Entrepreneur First, a London-based company builder which invests in tech start-ups.
When it comes to handling fake news, none have put a braver face than Facebook. With trillions of user posts, Facebook realized that manual fact-checking wouldn’t do any good to solve the fake news problem. Facebook turned to artificial intelligence to arrest this problem. Artificial intelligence is being leveraged to find words or even patterns of words that can throw light on fake news stories.
