Facebook Is Tackling Its Problems With Machine Learning, And Looking To London For Help

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook attends the Viva Tech startup and technology gathering at Parc des Expositions Porte de Versailles on May 24, 2018 in Paris, France. The VivaTech exhibition brings together nearly 1,800 startups alongside the largest international groups. Facebook has confirmed its purchase of Bloomsbury.ai, a London-based startup that's developed a machine-learning tool to analyze and answer questions about unstructured text. With its staff of five, according to Pitchbook, Bloomsbury had raised $1.9 million to date and become a leading expert in natural language processing, Facebook said earlier this week. The acquisition underscores how Facebook is willing to looking outside its walls to regions teeming with AI expertise for the machine-learning solutions to some of its biggest challenges. Bloomsbury was spun out of the tech incubator Entrepreneur First, and the path to commercializing its research was still hazy when Facebook scooped it up, according to TechCrunch, which first reported that Mark Zuckerberg's company was paying between $23 million and $30 million for the startup.