From the developer's point of view, the AI should be invisible. We'd be very happy if people loved using the platform but where totally underwhelmed, indifferent, and/or unaware of the AI.
AI is an element of this in a number of ways. First, though, this is not a platform for writing AI applications. It's a platform for making it faster to write messaging, social, collaborate, productivity, etc. apps much faster than.
One way AI factors in involves finding a core set of primitives that can describe all software functionality. Programming languages and web frameworks are more granular than Dry and so they require you to write a lot more code. Dry has a higher level of abstraction than concepts like arrays, servers, divs, database tables, etc.
On the other hand, Dry is not just a template system that gives you a predefined set of application types like messenger, social network, discussion group, etc. that you can just specify. That's a higher level of abstraction and can be fairly limiting and brittle.
Dry's abstractions are in at a level that is between those two extremes; it lets your write a lot of apps without needing to be too granular.
There is research in AI called "Knowledge Representation and Reasoning" that identifies fundamental primitives that can express a wide variety of concepts and ideas. I've been a researcher in this field my whole career and was a professor in that area once. We've translated those results into software and have used them to develop a core set of primitives that let you describe the behavior of a lot of software.
I know that is all vague, but we'll start to be more precise and concrete over the next few weeks.
Part of how Dry works is that you give it a data model for your application (which can be quite complex) and we automatically generate the code for storing, retrieving, sharing, etc. that data. Normally for any cloud app that scales, this takes a fair amount of thought and expertise. We automate a lot of that without the programmer even needing to know it's happening.
Yes, I understand that point, but all you explain and all I read about Dry can be done with a bunch of handcoded rules and some constraints engine or solver. The scepticism comes from everyone calling everything AI just because it attracts press + investors. I would love to (beta) test your solution whenever you are ready anyway.
But I understand your reaction. I personally love AI and started working on it during the "AI winter" when everyone told me it was career suicide. I've been to AI conference where the keynote was on ordinary A/B testing, which Sir Francis Bacon invented ~400 years ago. Web developers have been using that for almost two decades, but it was presented as a new kind of AI magic just last year at a conference.
I majored AI as well in the AI winter, but now that it is hot again I still cannot see how it helps here, but I, as I too love AI, hope you show us something!
Even if you are correct about doing it with rules and a constraint solver, rule-based systems and constraint solving systems are all AI methods. Constraint solving especially is still a very active topic of AI research and something I myself researched once.
Yeah, I guess there is the sliding scale; I really find the term AI and now ML overused. For a subset of all these topics they are active research but for practical uses there are enough methods that have not been research for decade(s). Those I am referring to. As in the broad definition our MySQL auto optimizer is AI but they are just run of the mill algos everyone knows. Anyway; I am curious!
Yes, in a sense, all computing is AI. Alan Turing was explicit in his writings that he was trying to create machine intelligence and that he saw Turing Machines as a formalization of behavior he attributed to intelligence.
Best of luck with the launch, definitely interested in helping out with beta testing.
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