Primer.ai https://primer.ai/ are an interesting company. They use machine learning models to create workflows and tools to make text comprehensible at scale. As far as I was aware most of their revenue is coming from the non academic market, but there is clearly a sweet spot to be found in applying tools like this to the scholarly literature. Scholarcy https://www.scholarcy.com/ are hard at this, and semantic scholar released auto generated summaries on abstracts some time back (https://medium.com/ai2-blog/introducing-tldrs-on-semantic-scholar-f8310c51c1fb).
I'd just assumed that this was a demo to show what their technology could do, but not that it indicated strategy to play in the academic space.
I was intrigued today to see on their homepage that they are partnering with AAAS on https://www.sciline.org/ - which seems to be a portal to connect researchers to journalists.
It's increasingly the case that what is more interesting - from a commerical perspective - are audiences, and not content, and this looks like just one of those plays.
About Ian Mulvany
Hi, I'm Ian - I work on academic publishing systems. You can find out more about me at mulvany.net. I'm always interested in engaging with folk on these topics, if you have made your way here don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything you want to share, discuss, or ask for help with!
