Having worked with the "original" Watson, I saw first hand how the system stumbled upon a particularly stupid but hard problem as it tried to scale.

In 2014, I saw a demo of the original Discovery Advisor, which was at the time the closest commercial equivalent to the "Jeopardy system." This demo took in Wikipedia as a corpus, and a question was asked: "what country produced the greatest amount of wheat in 2012?" The system returned a list of countries as answers, so it wasn't quite nonsensical, but it was clear the answers were incorrect. The answers were countries like "England," "Norway," or "Zimbabwe." This system also returned passages from Wikipedia as supporting evidence, but the passages weren't about wheat production. Instead, they were about quotes that contained the word wheat... such as "let's cut the wheat from the chaff."

So of course, some smart-alec in the room Googles the same question, and this was before Google had the ability to return factual answers to factual questions, so instead we got a list of web results. The top result, interestingly, was a Wikipedia article titled "Wheat Production by Country." Opening that article presented a table that clearly showed that China produced the greatest amount of wheat in 2012.

Unfortunately, that Watson system at the time didn't read information from tables. I'm not sure if it does now, but I do know that reading data from tables in a manner that can be easily integrated and scaled within a broader semantic processing system is quite difficult. I'm not as focused on the space as I once was, so I'm not sure if the problem has been well solved yet. If not, I'd say it's a worthy area to invest in a solution.

Pretty slick but I think calling it "The most comprehensive knowledge platform" is a slight exaggeration. I searched for a few random topics ("urban planning", "pianos" and "bitcoin") and bitcoin was the only one to have a (lengthy) article.

I also don't understand the incentive for users to contribute to a knowledge base that is then being sold: https://golden.com/pricing

Really great to see some actual non incremental innovation happening in the search space.

When looking at Golden's value prop, it becomes clear that Google has actually been somewhat, ehm, lazy when it comes to making search better, relying almost 100% on UGC to provide answers instead of trying to structure them in a concise way.

Very curious to see where this leads!

Lots of promise and a nice front end, but I'm struggling to see where after three years an example of high value knowledge in this platform is.

For example on the top topic AI most of the sections are unfilled / or lightweight aside from a list of companies with minimal contributions over the last few months: https://golden.com/wiki/Cluster%3A_Artificial_intelligence-J...

There is nothing on AI ethics (indeed this is the only thing on ethics: https://golden.com/wiki/Ethics-BJW8)

Looking at some comments above that maybe crypto was the angle I looked at a few articles and under Ethereum it says that the Constantinople release date was still to be determined (actual release date was 28th February 2019).

It seems there is a decent amount of company data in there (a la pitchbook, crunchbase), but in terms of practical, useful knowledge that is authoritative per the front page, what are some good examples now there?

This particular field is difficult. Other than Google (through Search and also its acquisition of Metaweb), no other company has managed to achieve tremendous revenue with a knowledge base product alone. Cyc, Wolfram Alpha, the original IBM Watson (the expert system, not the ML APIs borrowing the brand) are all surviving but not thriving.

I didn't understand Golden's value prop when they raised last year, and wrote a post explaining why [1]. I don't understand it now either.

[1] https://medium.com/bloated-mvp/golden-is-a-bloated-mvp-27971...

I feel I might be too jaded to comment on this, so let me just preface this as the view from outside silicon valley

> our vision to build an extensive database and graph of knowledge for humanity, including practical commercial tools and community features to aid discovery and decisions.

So you, and your, what? half dozen phds? want to produce a graph of human knowledge. Okay fine. That's a lofty goal, let's set you up like Harry Seldon and check in on you in a thousand years. Oh! You're going to do the almost impossible and have practical commercial tools in our life time. Ok.

Look, I'm not saying that Golden is going to be unsuccessful, it's probably going to be very succesful, they've got those guys that backed that misogynistic online frat house behind them, so there's a certain level of assured successs. I just question why blatantly lying about your goals is a pre-requisit for funding in silicon valley.

Good for Jude, he's one of the few people that is always about knowledge and not the flavor of day discussion.

Are we in the year yet where Marc Andreessen joining a board is seen as a negative thing for bro culture problems? Not yet?

Congrats!

Now what, without marketing speak, does it do?

Serious question, are they building another FreeBase?

Tried searching for Bach, first result besides a bunch of companies (?) is a Canadian product designer. Johann Sebastian Bach isn’t even in the first page of search results somehow.

Reminds me of metaweb.

hadn't heard of it. Sounds like the semantic web or Wolfram Alpha. It's very ambitious and I think almost like an AGI type problem, because parsing human queries to the point where the system can actually reason about semantics, and on its own create ontologies and relationships of everything you find on the web that are actually useful and accurate is difficult.

I wish the pricing/business model supported niche wiki creation. I want to put together a broad public knowledge base about a niche product segment, that connects common data elements for companies and products with deep technical models of the products themselves. Golden's tooling looks super useful, but too expensive for this use case.

Sometimes I wonder how critical it is for an early-stage startup to have a great .com domain name.

If Golden had a harder-to-type domain name, would they get the same level of momentum and SEO juice?

The lack of clear use case reminds me of Qwiki 10 years ago.

Is the name a reference to Dune’s “Golden Path?”

Isn’t this just a proprietary wikipedia?

Is this another Cyc? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

tried searching "election" and didn't really get any useful information

Congrats Jude! Super star CEO.

Congrats Jude & Team!

Very cool!

Congrats Jude and co.!