Serious question, are they building another FreeBase?
Golden raises $14.5M Series A led by a16z and Marc Andreessen joins board
21–30 of 70 posts
Re: Golden raises $14.5M Series A led by a16z and Marc Andreessen joins board
#22Really 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!
I agree as well with google. When google first showed up, it was a breakthrough since the quality of the results were so good compared to what we are used to. Fast forward to today - more data, more websites and so on has resulted in new problems and I think Google has not kept up. Just because a website has been around for a decade or has 50,000 backlinks doesn't mean it is still good today. Information might be obsolete. Websites like this usually rank high in the search results page while being low-value. Meanwhile, higher-value websites that are more recent get lower rankings even though the quality is superior. Google is not able to make these connections. It seems like AI might be able to improve the quality of search results if applied correctly.
Re: Golden raises $14.5M Series A led by a16z and Marc Andreessen joins board
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately this was created because Wikipedia refused to keep articles on obscure altcoins so it’s very crypto heavy. That’s why a16z has jumped in I’d imagine—they very much drank the crypto koolaid and like the synergy. This was also why I could never really see this becoming a serious product. It’s an SEO trick for ICOs looking to hype themselves, a far cry from a knowledge base. Mismatched incentives will scre…
Interesting - didn't realize Wikipedia didn't allow such articles. But in general, Golden seems to have a very strong tech bias - which is fine, but limits what it can be used for.
"On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article."
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
Most altcoins are not notable by the Wikipedia standard of notability.
Re: Golden raises $14.5M Series A led by a16z and Marc Andreessen joins board
#24Really 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!
it’s more like a proprietary wikipedia than a google. at least that’s my impression playing around with it.
I could see this being used more for research type of work. Wikipedia is good for the high-level/popular topics but for very specific fields, there won't be anything significant. Think of areas like drug research.
Re: Golden raises $14.5M Series A led by a16z and Marc Andreessen joins board
#25Having 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.
Re: Golden raises $14.5M Series A led by a16z and Marc Andreessen joins board
#26Really 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!
Google has had various products and efforts over the years to do exactly that, so I'm not sure if "lazy" is the right word. Knol was doomed from the start because it foolishly went head-to-head with Wikipedia. Other efforts, like Freebase, were fairly successful, and knowledge graph today is pretty great for what it does, both as part of search results but even more so when powering their ML/vision/NLP APIs.
Looking through Golden's website they seem to want to do all of the same, but using their own (also user-contributed) content, aiming to make it accessible and valuable enough that companies will pay $1000 per month per employee (!) for it. I know almost nothing about the product so will hold off too much judgement, but that sounds like a pipe dream.
Re: Golden raises $14.5M Series A led by a16z and Marc Andreessen joins board
#27Is this another Cyc? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
Re: Golden raises $14.5M Series A led by a16z and Marc Andreessen joins board
#28Tried 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.
Mozart not much better, but more recent artist seem to score better, though the pages don't contain any content and the meta-information is also not great.
A search for Merkel delivers an arms company before Angela Merkel, GDP delivers some companies.
Relationships between persons don't seem to be present.
A search for Mercedes Benz doesnt deliver anything too great. Snowden requires an Edward to find him, NSA is a company, Chrome has no info.
Maybe I'm looking for the wrong terms, but it seems like they basically just imported companies from public domain and some random stuff on the side, which mostly is just the title of something.
Re: Golden raises $14.5M Series A led by a16z and Marc Andreessen joins board
#29I 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...
Re: Golden raises $14.5M Series A led by a16z and Marc Andreessen joins board
#30Reminds me of metaweb.
An attempt at an AI enhanced, suped up Wikipedia. Definitely in the model of Freebase. It'll end in a sell-and-bury exactly as Freebase did, for exactly the same reason: venture capital + knowledge service = only one possible eventual outcome. It's always just a matter of time before the money corrupts the service. The demand for an exit / return (outsized at that, typically) by the owners who have put up a large amo…
I think this is a reasonable prediction. To paraphrase something I saw on here recently: "in the long run, business model trumps culture". I think there are hundreds of directions the business could go (Freebase being one, the next Bloomberg another, a simple shutdown being the most likely route in VC startups). But I agree with your skepticism that in the long-run the "we're here to help humanity" ethos will take a back seat to the profit motive.
But all that being said, there's always at least a chance that the organization somehow bucks the trend. Or, even if the organization eventually becomes dominated by the profit motive in the long run, that's not to say that it won't build really beneficial things before that happens. Freebase eventually sold and stopped maintaining it, but it built a free database that anyone in the world could use (and still could use). It pioneered a concept. I don't know what Rap Genius is up to these days, but I thought their annotations ux was really innovative and I'm sure pioneered a whole lot of other sites. So even if an organization's mission eventually takes a back seat to profit, it can create ton of value along the way.
Personally I find this startup very interesting and am excited to see where they go.