Quotes

When we do GenAI strategy sessions, it sometimes helps to provide a relevant quote to set the context for a discussion.

Knowledge Representation

Representation is the hardest part of AI. - Jeff Hawkins

This quote guides most of my research in AI and knowledge representation. You can think of this as a metaphor for the famous 1976 book by Niklaus Wirth:

Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs

The Hawkins quote covers some of the fundamental topics of computer programming. In summary, many hard problems in Computer Science and AI become easy when you pick the right data structure or the right representation of knowledge. Forcing all data to fit into tabular structures is often a recipe for failure.

Unconnected Data

Unconnected Data Is a Liability - Kendall Clark

This quote gets to the heart of the question, what is the value of connected data? With all the focus on data privacy and regulations like GDPR, we know that there is clear legal issues for every bit of data you have about your customers. Even their product search and web usage logs can provide information about your users, and in many countries that are part of the EU, not knowing you have data about your customers can cause billions of dollars in fines.

What this tells us is that any company that gathers customer data needs to connect this data in a customer 360 database. Graph databases are often the most scalable way to do this.

Unconnected Data Is a Liability: StarDog Blog from 2018

Predicting the Future

Never mistake a clear view for a short distance. - Paul Saffo

This is sometimes stated as:

Never mistake a clear view of the future for a short distance.

I think this quote embodies many of the best practices in enterprise data strategies. We often have a strong intuition about where an industry is going. For example, I know that as graph databases become more popular, there will be new custom silicon that is optimized to perform graph query traversal at scale. However, I am not so naive that I think I know when these chips will be available for production. But the actual date is not as important as the direction to move your strategy. IT strategies need to expect that CISC hardware will become obsolete for most scalable analytic workloads.

Innovation at the Seams of Technology

Innovation occurs at the seams of technology. - David Canter

The full version is:

As a technology generalist, I have found that tremendous innovation occurs at the seams of technology domains.

This quote came about when I was interviewing David Cantor for a blog I was writing on machine learning hardware benchmarking. He said it almost as an off-hand comment so I asked him if I could quote him. I use this quote in many of my keynote speeches.