Facebook is buying UK’s Bloombury AI to ramp up natural language tech | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is buying UK’s Bloombury AI to ramp up natural language tech

techcrunch.com

51 pointsmikece14 comments

I much prefer this kind of tech being developed in universities, but lately it seems that academia are losing ground to companies in terms of brainpower and sometimes even scientific output.

Not surprising, given the extreme salary differences between UK universities and top industry research labs.

Just wondering what would be the long term implications for universities.

Is there any particular reason why you prefer tech being developed in universities?

If the quality of the work being done is good and the results are worthwhile, does it really matter who paid for the room and the lights?

That should depend on the open-ness of the work, and whether it is accessible by others. Academic research is published in journals for people to read[1], whereas taking the example of Apple, they have a reputation for barely publishing any of their research (although it is improving).

[1] Although I acknowledge that there are currently significant barriers to access for many journalistic papers. But research locked away by a company is still far more inaccessible than publishing in a journal like Nature.

Edit: formatting

Well, as you say, the degree to which academic publishing is open is currently a matter of some debate. There have been moves, perhaps in some disciplines more than others so far, towards a more explicitly open-access publishing culture at the expense of the journal publishers whose contribution is also debatable these days, but there's a long way to go.

What I can say is that as someone who sometimes has an element of research as part of his work for industrial clients, a lot of the useful research material I've read recently has come out of industrial research labs, so they certainly do produce some good work, whatever is also coming out of academia.

Another relevant data point: the only software patents that have actually stopped me doing something recently (which I'd come up with entirely independently, BTW) were granted to major US universities prior to their researchers publishing papers.

Pretty much for every reason tech was more open and less user-hostile in the 80s and 90s.

In my opinion, companies should make hardware. Universities may develop tech that touches our data, and companies should stay far, far away from that.

That seems like a small purchase price given both FB’s need for detecting junk content. I would hope that any filtering system would have humans in the loop.

Likely an acquihire which also means that their “tech” isn’t that mature yet.

Typo in the headline--should be Bloomsbury.

What's the exit? I'm always interested to see how other people in tech get rich.

> Multiple sources say Facebook is paying between $23 million and $30 million to acquire Bloomsbury AI, in a deal that will see a mixture of cash and stock change hands. In one scenario, the startup’s investors will receive around $5.5 million, with Bloomsbury’s founding team in line for the remaining $17.5 million, paid in restricted Facebook stock. Either way, this represents a modest return for the bulk of investors, although EF — given that it invests pre-seed — is likely to have had a larger multiple.

They could have just asked Google.

Yeah, in return for the data.

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