Facebook has disclosed that it has acquired London-based artificial intelligence firm Bloomsbury AI, which specializes in natural language processing.
According to a post from the official Facebook Academics page, the company says Bloomsbury’s “expertise will strengthen Facebook’s efforts in natural language processing research, and help us further understand natural language and its applications.”
Anonymous sources said that Facebook will be paying between $23 million and $30 million in its campaign to regain the trust of users and investors.
Bloomsbury AI produces natural language processing technology (NLP), and the firm recently developed an AI with the ability to read documents and answer questions in relation to their contents. Dubbed “Cape”, the technology is set to eventually “be able to answer any question that requires reading better than a human,” in alignment with the company’s stated goal.
The acquisition could potentially begin to tackle the platform’s blatant moderation issues, as well as fighting fake news. The move follows Google’s purchase of Deepmind, a British AI company that specialises in developing problem-solving programs.
