The article is full of hype but nell is a serious project. Tom Mitchell is one of the pioneers of machine learning as a field, and there's still interesting res

The article is full of hype but nell is a serious project. Tom Mitchell is one of the pioneers of machine learning as a field, and there's still interesting research coming from his lab. Information extraction is not a new thing, and even unsupervised information extraction has more than one competing approach, although obviously none of them solves "the real problem". NELL attempts to do unsupervised information extraction over time, correcting itself as it goes. How successful it can be depends fundamentally on the algorithms behind it (and I'm not familiar with them), but given the state of the technology the most likely thign to happen is what they describe in the paper, which is having a huge database with a ridiculously unimaginable number of true relations in it but also a bigger-than-you'd-like number of plain ridiculously false relations. It's definitely not something that can solve AI.