8 ms·

As someone who has done research in the field, I can tell you - this is the future of search, and the key to true AI. Once we have a knowledge graph of the wor

by mikek 14y ago

As someone who has done research in the field, I can tell you - this is the future of search, and the key to true AI. Once we have a knowledge graph of the world, you will be able to ask questions and get answers, not documents. This will allow so much more automation - personal assistants like Siri will be able to "book me a room in San Francisco with a view of the ocean" or "give me a list of the schools all the children of American presidents went to" and so on. There is an arms war here between Bing and Google - we can thank Microsoft for pressuring Google into making this happen sooner than they otherwise would have.

ralfd 14y ago
Bing? I Use it not much, have they done something in that direction? I like WolframAlpha.
- cglace 14y ago
  They bought powerset a few years back and they did that.
sukuriant 14y ago
Just to be nitpicky, don't you mean "the key to true", expert-system based AI? Or, are you going the "human intelligence is a clustering system; therefore, true AI would have a similar method" route? Both are valid, I'm just curious.
joe_the_user 14y ago
I'm not sure if I would want to say "a knowledge graph of the world" is the "key to true AI". I think the situation is closer to "true AI is the key to a usable if situationally depend knowledge graph". Because the world doesn't have single knowledge graph that you can learn and use in all situations. Certainly, you can find a lot of common instances where the average works but once you're past that, you need the kind of understanding of language that present day systems are far from having.
- jasonwatkinspdx 14y ago
  "Because the world doesn't have single knowledge graph that you can learn and use in all situations." The logical way to overcome this via a "data first" brute force approach is to build personalized knowledge graphs of every potential customer. Which is in effect what every statistically sophisticated large business is attempting.
nostrademons 14y ago
Isn't this exactly what people thought in the 80s? Building knowledge into a computer of the relationships between entities in the world will let you write expert systems that work like humans?
- mindcrime 14y ago
  Yes, and I - for one - am not convinced that that approach has been proven wrong so much as it just hasn't been realized yet, for whatever reason. If I had to guess, I'd say that "whatever reason" is some combination of not having sufficient hardware, and not fully understanding knowledge representation and reasoning algorithms well enough yet. Of course I could be wrong, but I think there's a good chance that a lot of "Good Old AI" stuff is still valid, but that it was just too early for it then. Maybe it still is, time will tell.
  - wamatt 14y ago
    It's not wrong. Past failure is not guarantee of future failure. Elon Musk and the electric car industry is one example.
    - jonmrodriguez 14y ago
      "past failure ... the electric car industry is one example." Actually, electric cars were popular before gas cars were. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle#The_rise_of_the_electric_vehicle_in_America http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle...
      - wamatt 14y ago
        Interesting thanks! But I think your argument falls down, when we inspect the merit of the world "popular". Electric cars, have never been mainstream.
- JackC 14y ago
  I read at some point that a lot of interesting theoretical AI research was abandoned in the 80s, because the results (like expert systems) got good enough that they had commercial applications, and the focus changed from research to perfecting existing products. No idea if that's true, but it suggests that there might be room to pick up where people in the 80s left off. Especially given that computing resources and data archives are somewhat improved since then.
david927 14y ago
The Semantic Web is truly the all of those things -- but this is not that. My guess is that this will just end up as a sharpened version of the data section of Wikipedia results that we have now. Why? Because they are selling it without mentioning why they won't fail where every other attempt has. There are huge difficulties in this. Have they turned a corner on the research that changes something? I don't see it in what they've so hinted at so far.
- azov 14y ago
  Google is sitting on an enormous pile of semantic data that dwarfs anything that any AI project could possibly use 20 or even 10 years ago. Of course it does not guarantee that they won't fail as well, but it sure gives them an edge.
  - irickt 14y ago
    Yes, like the HTML web this web of data grows by network effects. The "Semantic Web" was only ever a data model and exchange formats - a standard to guide independent efforts. Now, of course, a lot of that data will be protected by the internet giants for their competitive reasons, but the standards still provide the interoperation at the edges.
  - bergie 14y ago
    It also appears that SEO is finally the thing that gets people to actually publish semantically-marked data, so they'll get some of this more easily in the near future. http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/google-s_rich_snippets_will_lead_us_into_semantic_web/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/google-s_rich_snippets_will_lead_u...
- JPKab 14y ago
  I think that there are two things in their favor here: First, they are Google, and therefore possess huge quantities of data and the ability, courtesy of their uber map reduce prowess and ultra-fast custom hardware, to make sense of it. Second, they bought Metaweb (makers of Freebase) and with it some of the best semantic expertise out there. Toby Segaran is a brilliant dude. His O'Reilly book "Programming the Semantic Web" explains in 20 pages what most books take 150 pages to do: the concept of a URI based graph database and how it enables data to be merged from multiple sources and reasoned over with applications. I only hope Google open-sources some of their research here for the rest of us.
nextparadigms 14y ago
I think Google bought a company related to this technology 2-3 years ago. It's not like they saw Bing's Facebook integration last week and then decided to do this.
- spot 14y ago
  it was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaweb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaweb
myko 14y ago
I'd say thank Metaweb as it seems to be building directly upon their ideas. I'm not sure how much Bing has pressured Google to innovate in the search space (though I think Bing has got Google thinking more about design).
riffraff 14y ago
while I share your enthusiasm for the bright future ahead, there is a missing link between this and "book me a room in San Francisco with a view of the ocean", namely that data is behind closed doors. There is a bunch of data that google can use[1] because it is made explicitly available. But many sources don't want that. As an example, consider "book me flights for the cheapest route between lisbon and kiev". It is a trivial thing to do, provided you can get airline data. But you can't scrape ryanair's website because they willingly put counter measures in place (e.g. captchas) so you cant do that. [1] e.g. http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/ http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/
- felipemnoa 14y ago
  Once bots get smart enough there will be no captchas that can stop them. The only way will be to ban the IP where the bot is coming from, assuming you know which IP belongs to which bots. They could easily disguise themselves by using proxies. I guess my point is that if we get to the point were a bot can do generic requests without the aid of a human a captchas will probably not be able to stop it.
  - loverobots 14y ago
    You're assuming Google would do that and/or that it will be allowed to do that once sites find out. They are a lot of businesses who have zero incentive to give their data to Google. This "AI" is just scrapping and replacing wikipedia while serving ads.
- lihaoyi 14y ago
  Could the google bot take a captcha it finds and use it in one of it's own re-captchas? Essentially passing the burden of deciphering the text onto some unsuspecting human, it will be able to beat all captchas with ease!
  - heelhook 14y ago
    My stack level got too deep reading your comment.
tocomment 14y ago
Unless the hotel booking system has a captcha... I always try to mention his when people get over excited a out the semantic web. Most of the important stuff that we would like to automate we also insist that a bot not be allowed to do it. It's pretty scitzo in my opinion.
- barefoot 14y ago
  Presumably the booking would be done though an API.
moldbug 14y ago
I hope you enjoy your very pleasant, if initially surprising, stay in San Francisco, Cebu. Watch out for sea snakes! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco,_Cebu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco,_Cebu As someone who has done research in the field, did you read the Gizmodo review of Siri? http://gizmodo.com/5864293/siri-is-apples-broken-promise http://gizmodo.com/5864293/siri-is-apples-broken-promise The set of "knowledge graph" problems which is not, in fact, AI-complete, strikes me as much smaller than most doing research in the field would like us to think. I hope you won't try to argue that "book me a room" etc. isn't AI-complete. There's an uncanny valley there, and it's deep. You can use Siri for lots of trivial tasks in which bizarre failures are hilarious rather than disastrous, but booking hotel rooms isn't in that set. She can be the best secretary in the world 9 times out of 10 or even 99 out of a 100, but the other times she's an insane robot who wouldn't at all mind sending you to Cebu to get kidnapped by the MILF...
- mikek 14y ago
  These are still early days. Siri is slow and inaccurate. However consider it a preview of things to come.
  - joe_the_user 14y ago
    These are certainly the early days. SHRDLU was slow and inaccurate. In many way, it was an even impressive example of "things to come" (it could seem to understand some fairly complex figures of speech for example). The problem is that we're not sure example when these "things to come" will actually appear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU
boxein 14y ago
Actually Cyc is panned pretty hard as a complete waste of a perfectly intelligent researcher's time.
endtime 14y ago
>As someone who has done research in the field, I can tell you - this is the future of search, and the key to true AI. Having done research in this field doesn't qualify you to have authoritative opinions on search or AI. I don't necessarily disagree with you on search, but I don't see why a dataset would be the key to AI. AI is a function, not a dataset.

by mikek 14y ago

ralfd 14y ago

Bing? I Use it not much, have they done something in that direction? I like WolframAlpha.

cglace 14y ago
They bought powerset a few years back and they did that.

sukuriant 14y ago

Just to be nitpicky, don't you mean "the key to true", expert-system based AI? Or, are you going the "human intelligence is a clustering system; therefore, true AI would have a similar method" route? Both are valid, I'm just curious.

joe_the_user 14y ago

I'm not sure if I would want to say "a knowledge graph of the world" is the "key to true AI". I think the situation is closer to "true AI is the key to a usable if situationally depend knowledge graph". Because the world doesn't have single knowledge graph that you can learn and use in all situations. Certainly, you can find a lot of common instances where the average works but once you're past that, you need the kind of understanding of language that present day systems are far from having.

jasonwatkinspdx 14y ago
"Because the world doesn't have single knowledge graph that you can learn and use in all situations." The logical way to overcome this via a "data first" brute force approach is to build personalized knowledge graphs of every potential customer. Which is in effect what every statistically sophisticated large business is attempting.

nostrademons 14y ago

Isn't this exactly what people thought in the 80s? Building knowledge into a computer of the relationships between entities in the world will let you write expert systems that work like humans?

mindcrime 14y ago
Yes, and I - for one - am not convinced that that approach has been proven wrong so much as it just hasn't been realized yet, for whatever reason. If I had to guess, I'd say that "whatever reason" is some combination of not having sufficient hardware, and not fully understanding knowledge representation and reasoning algorithms well enough yet. Of course I could be wrong, but I think there's a good chance that a lot of "Good Old AI" stuff is still valid, but that it was just too early for it then. Maybe it still is, time will tell.
- wamatt 14y ago
  It's not wrong. Past failure is not guarantee of future failure. Elon Musk and the electric car industry is one example.
  - jonmrodriguez 14y ago
    "past failure ... the electric car industry is one example." Actually, electric cars were popular before gas cars were. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle#The_rise_of_the_electric_vehicle_in_America http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle...
    - wamatt 14y ago
      Interesting thanks! But I think your argument falls down, when we inspect the merit of the world "popular". Electric cars, have never been mainstream.
JackC 14y ago
I read at some point that a lot of interesting theoretical AI research was abandoned in the 80s, because the results (like expert systems) got good enough that they had commercial applications, and the focus changed from research to perfecting existing products. No idea if that's true, but it suggests that there might be room to pick up where people in the 80s left off. Especially given that computing resources and data archives are somewhat improved since then.

david927 14y ago

The Semantic Web is truly the all of those things -- but this is not that. My guess is that this will just end up as a sharpened version of the data section of Wikipedia results that we have now. Why? Because they are selling it without mentioning why they won't fail where every other attempt has. There are huge difficulties in this. Have they turned a corner on the research that changes something? I don't see it in what they've so hinted at so far.

azov 14y ago
Google is sitting on an enormous pile of semantic data that dwarfs anything that any AI project could possibly use 20 or even 10 years ago. Of course it does not guarantee that they won't fail as well, but it sure gives them an edge.
- irickt 14y ago
  Yes, like the HTML web this web of data grows by network effects. The "Semantic Web" was only ever a data model and exchange formats - a standard to guide independent efforts. Now, of course, a lot of that data will be protected by the internet giants for their competitive reasons, but the standards still provide the interoperation at the edges.
- bergie 14y ago
  It also appears that SEO is finally the thing that gets people to actually publish semantically-marked data, so they'll get some of this more easily in the near future. http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/google-s_rich_snippets_will_lead_us_into_semantic_web/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/google-s_rich_snippets_will_lead_u...
JPKab 14y ago
I think that there are two things in their favor here: First, they are Google, and therefore possess huge quantities of data and the ability, courtesy of their uber map reduce prowess and ultra-fast custom hardware, to make sense of it. Second, they bought Metaweb (makers of Freebase) and with it some of the best semantic expertise out there. Toby Segaran is a brilliant dude. His O'Reilly book "Programming the Semantic Web" explains in 20 pages what most books take 150 pages to do: the concept of a URI based graph database and how it enables data to be merged from multiple sources and reasoned over with applications. I only hope Google open-sources some of their research here for the rest of us.

nextparadigms 14y ago

I think Google bought a company related to this technology 2-3 years ago. It's not like they saw Bing's Facebook integration last week and then decided to do this.

spot 14y ago
it was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaweb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaweb

myko 14y ago

I'd say thank Metaweb as it seems to be building directly upon their ideas. I'm not sure how much Bing has pressured Google to innovate in the search space (though I think Bing has got Google thinking more about design).

riffraff 14y ago

while I share your enthusiasm for the bright future ahead, there is a missing link between this and "book me a room in San Francisco with a view of the ocean", namely that data is behind closed doors. There is a bunch of data that google can use[1] because it is made explicitly available. But many sources don't want that. As an example, consider "book me flights for the cheapest route between lisbon and kiev". It is a trivial thing to do, provided you can get airline data. But you can't scrape ryanair's website because they willingly put counter measures in place (e.g. captchas) so you cant do that. [1] e.g. http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/ http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/

felipemnoa 14y ago
Once bots get smart enough there will be no captchas that can stop them. The only way will be to ban the IP where the bot is coming from, assuming you know which IP belongs to which bots. They could easily disguise themselves by using proxies. I guess my point is that if we get to the point were a bot can do generic requests without the aid of a human a captchas will probably not be able to stop it.
- loverobots 14y ago
  You're assuming Google would do that and/or that it will be allowed to do that once sites find out. They are a lot of businesses who have zero incentive to give their data to Google. This "AI" is just scrapping and replacing wikipedia while serving ads.
lihaoyi 14y ago
Could the google bot take a captcha it finds and use it in one of it's own re-captchas? Essentially passing the burden of deciphering the text onto some unsuspecting human, it will be able to beat all captchas with ease!
- heelhook 14y ago
  My stack level got too deep reading your comment.

tocomment 14y ago

Unless the hotel booking system has a captcha... I always try to mention his when people get over excited a out the semantic web. Most of the important stuff that we would like to automate we also insist that a bot not be allowed to do it. It's pretty scitzo in my opinion.

barefoot 14y ago
Presumably the booking would be done though an API.

moldbug 14y ago

I hope you enjoy your very pleasant, if initially surprising, stay in San Francisco, Cebu. Watch out for sea snakes! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco,_Cebu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco,_Cebu As someone who has done research in the field, did you read the Gizmodo review of Siri? http://gizmodo.com/5864293/siri-is-apples-broken-promise http://gizmodo.com/5864293/siri-is-apples-broken-promise The set of "knowledge graph" problems which is not, in fact, AI-complete, strikes me as much smaller than most doing research in the field would like us to think. I hope you won't try to argue that "book me a room" etc. isn't AI-complete. There's an uncanny valley there, and it's deep. You can use Siri for lots of trivial tasks in which bizarre failures are hilarious rather than disastrous, but booking hotel rooms isn't in that set. She can be the best secretary in the world 9 times out of 10 or even 99 out of a 100, but the other times she's an insane robot who wouldn't at all mind sending you to Cebu to get kidnapped by the MILF...

mikek 14y ago
These are still early days. Siri is slow and inaccurate. However consider it a preview of things to come.
- joe_the_user 14y ago
  These are certainly the early days. SHRDLU was slow and inaccurate. In many way, it was an even impressive example of "things to come" (it could seem to understand some fairly complex figures of speech for example). The problem is that we're not sure example when these "things to come" will actually appear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU

boxein 14y ago

Actually Cyc is panned pretty hard as a complete waste of a perfectly intelligent researcher's time.

endtime 14y ago

>As someone who has done research in the field, I can tell you - this is the future of search, and the key to true AI. Having done research in this field doesn't qualify you to have authoritative opinions on search or AI. I don't necessarily disagree with you on search, but I don't see why a dataset would be the key to AI. AI is a function, not a dataset.