Your Ontological Core
As the AI revolution rapidly evolves, organisations need to focus on strengthening their core. This involves gaining a deep, ontological understanding of exactly what your business is all about.
A useful way to conceptualise large generative models is to liken them to lossy compression. For instance, the llama-7b model has compressed approximately 10 terabytes of web text down to a 140-gigabyte file of floating-point numbers. The model weights in this 140 GB file can be viewed as a numerical, coarse-grained distillation of the web's text. This pales in comparison to the compression achieved by the latest multimodal models like GPT-4 and Gemini. The key takeaway is that the effectiveness of this compression relies upon the latent connective structure of the training data. The better the connective structure, the better the compression.
It's imperative for organisations to realise that they must undergo a similar process internally to survive in the rapidly approaching new world. Each organisation will need to compact and consolidate its core; it needs to distil the essence of what makes it unique.
For most organisations, this compression process isn't about developing fancy new transformer algorithms; it is about data and people. The key is integrating these two aspects, enabling your teams to connect and structure their data in a meaningful way, thereby making it more 'compressible'.
There are pragmatic techniques organisations can use here: they can connect their data by giving each data point a URL and structure their data by linking these URLs to concepts in shared ontologies. Linked Data compresses very well, and you can use it to finetune a private model that reflects your organisation's identity. This is your solid core. Your solid core projects out holographically onto the surface boundary of your organisation, and in an AI-driven world, it will increasingly come to define you.
There's an urgency here. Organisational data is often in disarray. If you wait around until a generalist AI can come in and clean up the mess for you, you'll probably have waited too long. By that point, external AIs with solid cores will easily penetrate your weak organisational boundary.
A strong core creates a strong boundary. Your organisation will need a strong boundary for what is coming next. So, for goodness' sake, stop whatever it is that you are doing right now and focus on consolidating your core!
⭕ The Semantic Layer: https://www.knowledge-graph-guys.com/blog/the-semantic-layer
⭕ LLM Compression: https://www.knowledge-graph-guys.com/blog/the-great-compression
⭕ The Free Energy Principle & Data Connectivity: https://www.knowledge-graph-guys.com/blog/data-connectivity-and-the-free-energy-principle
⭕ LLM + Ontology: https://www.knowledge-graph-guys.com/blog/llms-ontologies
