AI is impressive because we’ve failed at semantic web and personal computing
Rakhim in AI is impressive because we’ve failed at semantic web and personal computing:
AI is not a triumph of elegant design, but a brute-force workaround. LLMs like ChatGPT can infer structure from chaos. They scan the unstructured web and build ephemeral semantic maps across everything. It's not knowledge in the classic sense.. or perhaps it is exactly what knowledge is?
I thought this was a great take on AI.
What I will say is that all structured information requires understanding of the structure. Not just from the ones organising the information, but the ones trying to access it as well. Which is why:
…if all knowledge were stored in a structured way with rich semantic linking, then very primitive natural language processing algorithms could parse question like the example at the beginning of the article, and could find the answer using orders of magnitude fewer computational resources.
Was always going to give way to the brute-force workaround.
I think.