AI, SQL, and the End of Big Data

In this episode of AI + a16z, a16z General Partner Jennifer Li joins MotherDuck Cofounder and CEO Jordan Tigani to discuss DuckDB's spiking popularity as the era of big data wanes, as well as the applicability of SQL-based systems for AI workloads and the prospect of text-to-SQL for analyzing data.

Here's an excerpt of Jordan discussing an early win when it comes to applying generative AI to data analysis:

"Everybody forgets syntax for various SQL calls. And it's just like  in coding. So there's some people that memorize . . . all of the code base, and so they don't need auto-complete. They don't need any copilot. . . . They don't need an ID; they can just type in Notepad. But for the rest of us, I think these tools are super useful. And I think we have seen that these tools have already changed how people are interacting with their data, how they're writing their SQL queries.

"One of the things that we've done . . .  is we focused on improving the experience of writing queries. Something we found is actually really useful is when somebody runs a query and there's an error, we basically feed the line of the error into GPT 4 and ask it to fix it. And it turns out to be really good. 

". . . It's a great way of letting you stay in the flow of writing your queries and having true interactivity."

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