The Minimal Ontology Principle

In a LinkedIn post, Animesh Kumar articulated an interesting way to look at LLMs.

Paraphrasing, every LLM carries a 𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲: some understanding of business concepts, how those business concepts relate to each other, and other knowledge that it uses to provide you with answers.  That understanding is distilled from millions of documents. Your information platform doesn't need to re-explain all this.  What your information platform needs to explain is the DELTA between what the LLM already gets right and what you consider the perfect answer.

Kumar sees this as the "inversion of traditional data governance".  Instead of a governance committee deciding upfront what everything means, you let the AI's misinterpretations surface which concepts actually need formal definition. The area of confusion the LLM experiences is the methodology.

This is a clever idea.  This idea also helps you understand how to understand the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence.


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