Dan McCreary: Jellyfish, Flatworms, and the AI-Ready Enterprise – Episode 1

Dan McCreary Dan McCreary has years of experience selling AI solutions to executives. He uses a metaphorical story to show the importance of making your enterprise as intelligent and nimble as possible. His story of the the evolutionary heritage of jellyfish and flatworms seemed to me like a great way to kick off this new podcast. We talked about: the importance of helping an executive audience visualize the benefits of any technical solution, in particular the role of storytelling that will help your message stick the jellyfish and flatworm metaphor that he uses to help executives visualize their competitive environment how a knowledge graph lets companies build internal maps of their company and environment how a knowledge graph can enable micro-personalization how adding precision to a model improves your ability to predict customer behavior his simple description of embeddings: a way that we find when two things are similar his take on the benefits of labeled property graphs over knowledge graphs the idea of "reference frames" articulated by Jeff Hawkins and how knowledge graphs come closest to modeling them how three main ways of representing data - neural networks, knowledge graphs, and reference frames - are all based on graph network models the importance of freeing data from spreadsheets to enable the full productivity benefits of AI his insight that knowledge representation is the hardest part of AI Dan's bio Dan McCreary is a solution architect focusing on AI and generative AI architectural patterns. In the past, he worked at Bell Labs with the creators of the UNIX operating system, with Steve Jobs at NeXT Computer, and founded his own consulting firm with over 75 employees. His background includes topics such as scale-out enterprise knowledge graphs, high-performance computing, and NoSQL databases. He is the co-author of the book "Making Sense of NoSQL" and is a frequent blogger on AI strategy. He has been closely following the growth of knowledge graphs and generative AI. He is a huge fan of GPT-4. Connect with Dan online: LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/SwK73iQ7_j8 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 1. As I was getting ready to launch this new show, Dan McCreary shared on LinkedIn a story that he uses to help executives understand why they need a smarter approach to their data and knowledge management. I always appreciate a good origin story - especially when I'm in the process of starting something new - so his comparison of the evolutionary heritage of jellyfish and flatworms resonated with me. I hope you like the story, too, as well as Dan's take on knowledge representation, which he thinks is the hardest part of AI. Interview transcript Larry: Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number one of the Content and AI podcast. I'm delighted to start off the series with Dan McCreary. Dan is an AI consultant based in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the US. Welcome to the show Dan, tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Dan: Thank you very much for having me. I have been working on the field of knowledge representation for most of my career. My background is - early on I did chip design for Bell Labs. I worked in the super computing industry, worked for Steve Jobs for a couple of years, and then I've been doing a lot of starting my own companies and consulting. And then I just recently left a Fortune five healthcare company where I ran a generative AI center of excellence there. Larry: Nice. Yeah, so you've been doing this stuff for a little while and that's why I wanted to start off. I've been thinking of launching this podcast for a couple months now, and I saw this article that you wrote that said, "Aha, there's my trigger here. Let's go." You wrote this brilliant piece that you've been kind of shopping around because just for everybo...