Kurt Cagle: Staying on Top of Developments in AI – Episode 6

Kurt Cagle(AI-generated image) Kurt Cagle has been reporting on and participating in the tech world for several decades. He's never seen anything like the pace of change around AI. His advice for staying ready to work with AI: stay nimble, pay attention to what's going on, don't get tied to any one technology, and always bear in mind that your work will have an impact. We talked about: his interest in the intersection of AI and knowledge graphs the rapid and vast advancements in AI tech, especially recent developments at OpenAI [referring to the product announcements in early November, not the Sam Altman excitement later in the month] how building AI products in the current environment is "like building a luxury hotel on top of quicksand in an earthquake zone" the impact of open-source and component-based thinking in the AI ecosystem and how those dynamics are democratizing AI how a Disney character can help you understand LLMs how tokenization work the difference between how a query to a typical database works and how vectorization identifies things that are similar how knowledge graph technology can help solve some of the problems in the LLM space his advice for staying ready to work with AI: be nimble, pay attention to what's going on, and don't get tied to any one technology Kurt's bio Kurt Cagle is managing editor of The Ontologist, Generative AI, and the Cagle Report, and is a thirty-year veteran in the knowledge management space with twenty-five books and several Fortune 500 clients and government agencies. He lives in Bellevue, Washington with his family and cats, where he likes watching the rain fall. Connect with Kurt online LinkedIn kurt dot cagle at gmail dot com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/enaZSqj5vkM Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 6. Developing software has always been challenging. AI takes things to a whole new level. Kurt Cagle says the current pace of development in the generative AI world is "like building a luxury hotel on top of quicksand in an earthquake zone." Kurt has reported on and participated in many eras of technology advancement, but he's never seen anything like this. His advice for thriving in uncertain times like these: stay nimble, pay attention to what's going on, and don't get tied to any one technology. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number six of the Content and AI podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show Kurt Cagle. Kurt, he's the editor for The Ontologist. He's a managing editor for the Cagle Report. He's been a technologist for more than 35 years. He's written 25 books. He's been blogging for 20 years. He knows one or two things about AI, so welcome, Kurt. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Kurt: Thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate it, Larry. I am busy in AI land and in the intersection of AI and knowledge graphs, and have been trying to find out where the two meet and otherwise contributed to one another. I do run a small consulting company. I have a Calendly account if someone wants to contact me directly for setting up an open office hour, and always looking for opportunities. Thank you very much. Larry: Yeah, cool. Well, and speaking of opportunities, we met through the knowledge graph community which I've been involved with for a few years now, and as the LLM explosion of the last year has come along, I've been like, "Where's the connection between these?" And all of a sudden, the last, I don't know, few weeks it almost seems... We're recording this on November 7th, just for people's reference because you need an anchor in this rapidly changing thing. This episode probably won't air for a couple more weeks, but we're recording this on November 7th and just either today or yesterday, OpenAI announced a bunch of new product featur...