
Facebook is buying UK’s Bloombury AI to ramp up natural language tech - mikece
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/02/thebloomsbury/
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amelius
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.

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Silhouette
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?

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b_b
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

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Silhouette
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.

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mark_l_watson
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.

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dogma1138
Likely an acquihire which also means that their “tech” isn’t that mature yet.

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cafard
Typo in the headline--should be Bloomsbury.

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

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dna_polymerase
> 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.

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KasianFranks
They could have just asked Google.

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amelius
Yeah, in return for the data.

