Building a 21st Century

 Building a 21st Century knowledge engine

In Neal Stephenson’s fifth novel The Diamond Age, a girl in some not-too-distant future is given a stolen copy of a very special educational device — “The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”.

This book is designed to deliver self-directed learning that adapts to the girl’s existing knowledge and take her on a journey to become a powerful and independent woman.If AI language models were a band, the past few months have been one of those “overnight success” moments. Years in the making, indeed two years since the GPT-3 model first emerged, the arrival of the simple ChatGPT user interface has made Open AI’s work a revelation.

Interface is everything, though. So it’s a perfect time to think about what a just right interface applied to a Large Language Model (LLM) AI can achieve in the years ahead.

There’s a lot of talk about its potential to destroy jobs, ruin education, and overwhelm the Internet with misinformation. All this and more is possible. I believe this is a true ‘next era’ turning point, set to be remembered alongside the arrival of the internet and then smartphones. And like those other technologies, it’s the ‘when’ of significant change that remains the big question.

What excites my noodle so much is how a shift in our search paradigm can create a new ‘knowledge engine’ experience that has been held back by the existing revenue model at the biggest search company in the world.

Here