Tag Archives: sql

Hey Database! Go Fine Tune Yourself

Everyone expects AI prices to go down in the long term. But in the short term, we have three things going on. Token prices keep dropping, hurray for that. Subscription fees are going up and dumping their all you can eat plans for volume based pricing. There more you use, the more you pay. I guess that’s fair. Third, hardware component pricing is going up and big companies are borrowing billions to build the greatest and latest AI data centers. What’s going on? Are we in the pets.com era of selling $40 dollars worth of dog food for $20 bucks and making it up in volume? The real question is, how do we close this giant chasm of a value gap?

Molham Aref argues that enterprises must make agents smarter and cheaper. We have to solve two problems at the same time: making agents smart enough to handle real business decisions, and ensuring they are cost-effective enough to scale enterprise-wide. It sounds simple enough on the surface, but… it’s not. I’m going to talk about one of the ways we are doing that. But before I start, about six months ago, Greg Diamos and Naila Farooqui at RelationalAI wrote a blog post “Introducing Superalignment for Relational Databases“. If you haven’t read it yet, please take the time to do it now or you may be a little lost on what follows. There is a line in there people sometimes overlook, even thought it’s literally highlighted in bold:

The training dataset is the database itself.

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Declarative Query Languages are the Iraq War of Computer Science

It’s Memorial Day weekend in the United States. Some people are staying home, others are observing the holiday quietly and others still are using it as an excuse to party because they have seemed to have forgotten that the entire world is once again at war. At war with a tiny enemy, so small some people think it’s a hoax. The worst part is the enemy is in each other, our friends and neighbors. But Memorial day is not about remembering the wars, but rather remembering the fallen. To remember those who gave all. Whatever you may think of war, all are terrible, some were necessary. I never served, so that’s about all I get to say about that.

About 14 years ago Ted Neward wrote a very long blog post on “The Vietnam of Computer Science”. There is a follow up, and a short summary by Jeff Atwood as well. If you have never read them, I ask you to do so now…and with that, I believe Query Languages are the Iraq War of Computer Science.

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