AI is impressive because we’ve failed at semantic web and personal computing
15 hours ago
- Plain full-text search cannot answer complex queries like the one about a flag animal and historical dates, but ChatGPT can.
- The success of LLMs is partly due to our failure to organize information with proper structure.
- The pattern of abandoning structure and relying on search has become dominant in products like Google Drive, e-commerce, and documentation.
- The Semantic Web and personal computing with structured semantic connections never fully materialized.
- If knowledge were stored with rich semantic linking, simpler algorithms could answer queries with far fewer computational resources.
- LLMs like ChatGPT are brute-force workarounds that infer structure from chaos, rather than elegant design.