Thank you Toby Daniels for holding down the fort while I was away. I missed all of you and it’s good to be back. If you like this post, share it with one person you know who will appreciate the reference in the image.
Memory is more than a moat. It is the holy grail of AI product development and design. And like the holy grail, it is buried in the proverbial Canyon of the Crescent Moon, which, if you remember, was not easy to find.
And like that movie, a lot of people are looking for it by building their own treasure map, one pixel at a time.
Their map is made by hoovering up every atomic unit of data that can fit into a Supabase table. This why nearly every new AI product on the market is built on recording and saving everything in your life. Every individual interaction, document, email, utterance, and hiccup are all getting smashed into a personal corpus we then hand to the LLM.
Think about that. Inside that gigantic corpus is an ocean of contradictions. One document fights another document. One memory refutes another, and so on. It is the kind of complexity that makes poetry deep and probabilistic LLMs funny.
I like contradictions, and I like this moment in tech, but more than anything else, I like provocations.
PROVOCATION OF THE WEEK
Memory is not enough.
I did not come up with this provocation on my own. It comes from the website of Neal Mann, CEO and Co-Founder of NOAN, and an ON_Discourse member. We recently hosted a Group Chat that featured his company and what follows comes with his blessing.
Memory is messy. It is a stack of meaningless PDFs and half-drafted documents that no one in your company reads. Your company does not need more memory, it needs more facts.
NOAN is replacing the gigantic corpus of data that everyone else seems to be building with what they call a “fact layer.” Facts are curated, verified, actionable bits of certified information that look much smaller, more humble, and way more powerful than the biggest database on the web.
On its face, this seems like an obvious point that is hard to argue against. But if you go deeper and consider the fact layer as essential infrastructure for the AI era, you see something much more interesting. A company built on a fact layer is a company that can be run by agents.
That might be the wisest choice of all.
What’s Next
If you have thoughts, feedback, or a perspective worth sharing, reach out: chmiel@ondiscourse.com. You might see your reaction in next week’s edition.
ON_Member Events
ON_Group Chat: The Future of Newsletters
Thursday, August 27, 11-12pm
Zoom
Provocation: Who runs the newsletter when the agents do the work?
Description: Every publisher is asking the same question — how do you keep making the thing without drowning in the making of it? Most answers so far have been theoretical. This session goes practical: a live look at what it means when agents start handling the work between the idea and the send, what’s actually operational, what’s still breaking, and where humans remain invaluable in the loop.