Super Knowledge

Source Knowledge vs Intelligence from William Bryk.

In response to Ilya Sutskever, William Bryk argues that superknowledge, rather than superintelligence, poses more technical challenges. He mentions the world is far shorter on knowledge than intelligence, qualified as a dangerous situation.

Intelligence is bottlenecked by knowledge

**Intelligence** is reasoning over an input. **Knowledge** is retrieved from a data repository. - We built an intelligence based on knowledge.

AI models have high intelligence but limited knowledge. That’s why LLMs are often combined with a search engine.

LLM brings the intelligence (correctly answer to a request), and the search engine brings the knowledge (search the knowledge).

What’s superknowledge?

Superintelligence - a system that can handle extremely complex reasoning requests. Superknowledge - a system that can handle extremely complex retrieval requests.

Should be achieved when there exists an API that can handle any knowledge request over available information, no matter how complex. Superknowledge gives everyone comprehensive knowledge of anything as quickly as they want.

Superknowledge unblocks progress

Progress is a constant cycle of learning what's out there and trying something new.

Superknowledge eliminates any bottlenecks to the constant cycle of learning and searching to focus on trying something new.

Superknowledge prepares us for superintelligence

Superknowledge doesn’t just accelerate us toward an advanced future; it also accelerates us toward a safer one.

Knowledge underlines everything in our society - what problems we care about, how we act toward others…

Our current knowledge is scattered across billions of webpages with no tool powerful enough to organise it all. It’s hard to become well-informed on any issue - we never know what knowledge we’re missing.

When people aren’t well-informed, they make the wrong decisions, cause inefficiencies and cause real problems.

Problems:

  1. If AI systems multiply problems and aren’t well-informed too, then we’ll have thousands more intelligences operating over the same incomplete knowledge. AIs will interact with billions of people and perform actions on their behalf. Highly intelligent but misinformed = dangerous combination.
  2. Building superknowledge requires an organisation with the right incentives. Exa has a usage-based revenue model (and not an ad-based revenue model, which is wrong). So Exa is highly incentivised to give users full control to retrieve whatever knowledge they need.
  3. It’s hard to build it. Need to design novel machine learning architectures in a novel research field while building a novel search business.

Why niches matter?

Source Why niches matter from Mac Budkowski.

Niches move the world forward

The common idea behind niches is simple:

  • create spaces to connect people interested in a particular niche and make a communities that flourish
  • the becoming community help to take humanity to new heights
  • that pationated peoples about a domain; learn and do project together

Niches work even if they are distributed

  • they travel; offer their services; teaching; educate;
  • manage to keep the group together by focusing on things they had in common

Niches are natural

We evolved in tribes. This means that we like to belong, have some common background, and bond over shared experiences.

  • forme mini-tribe based on our interests and passions
  • probably have more in common with someone across the world then a relative of our family
  • can be overwhelming and hard to get noticed

You can heard; build your reputation; move this domain forward

What kind of niches exist?

  • Based scope - you might not become the best programmer in the world because there are 20 million others competing for this title - but the world’s best expert in a particular open-source library - yes
  • Based tribes - you might not become the world’s best biologist, but you can be the best biologist among your friends or in r/BiologiaBrasil.
  • Based on intersections of different domains - it’s hard to be the world’s electronic music DJ - but become the world’s best person who combines the love of anime; music and podcats like Akira The Don.

Finding your niches

You can focus on what you do the best and stand out easier; feel less competition; become part of a more cosy environment; and really make a mark in a specific area or community.