Nvidia – open-source auto-ontology (github.com)
227 points by campervans 9 hours ago
dstu 6 hours ago
This may well be very useful, but Claude has ruined me and I have a visceral reaction to ‘gates’ in the opening sentence and couldn’t get any further. If a tool is worth building and sharing, surely it’s also worth writing a brief summary of what it’s supposed to achieve in your own words?
ahartmetz 5 hours ago
The sentence is near incomprehensible without knowledge of the Claudish robolect. (Here I made up a word. Hopefully its comprehensibility isn't gated too much on language nerdery.)
frxx 5 hours ago
I will add Claudish robolect into my language immediately, thank you.
Tade0 3 hours ago
It's particularly load-bearing to a non-native English speaker such as me.
It looks a lot like English, but it doesn't have the same rhythm human English has. It's as if a human tried and failed to be concise.
BobbyTables2 2 hours ago
idiotsecant 3 hours ago
BobbyTables2 2 hours ago
Hear ye, who speaks of the Pompatus of Claude…
torben-friis 4 hours ago
"reliability gates agentic analytics" is quite a garden path sentence, at least to the eyes of a non-native speaker.
svnt 3 hours ago
The more common english term is “held back” instead of gated.
And nvidia probably doesn’t want to say “probabilistic responses including hallucinations preclude reliable ai analytics”
As it is the sentence communicates very little. Things are unreliable for a lot of different reasons. Hardware? Software? Users? Intentional and required use of RNGs? Claude presumes the reader has all the same weights activated.
FrustratedMonky an hour ago
mycall 3 hours ago
As a native speaker, I read this as "This controls enabling or disabling of all analytic features used by AI model loops"
Now there are times when I let the model keep its own docs in its own language, for its own future reference; but, it is not intended for human distribution due to its odd selection of words and phrases (aka slop).
wccrawford 3 hours ago
Roark66 an hour ago
I read this whole readme and I have no freaking clue what this does beyond "searchable knowledgebase". How about providing some use cases?
brap 3 hours ago
Thank you! After reading the very first line I just had to check the HN comments:
> Agents can retrieve documents and query databases, but reliability gates agentic analytics: a revenue metric answered faster is worth nothing if the number is wrong.
Absolutely no human would ever write this kind of slop. I have no idea what this even means. Is this really the first thing you want users to read?
I wish people would take a fucking minute to at least figure out what their main selling point is and just write it, you know, like we used to.
SubiculumCode 44 minutes ago
Agents can retrieve documents and query databases, but retrieval reliability limits the utility of agentic analytic abilities: a revenue metric answered faster is worth nothing if the number is wrong.
Just adding a few words takes it so far...
c-fe 4 hours ago
i had exactly the same issue. That first sentence triggered the bad experience i had with claude opus 5.0 interactions and i just closed the page immediately.. All of the PRs that I have seen with "gates"... it really impacts me
mihaelm an hour ago
Opus 5.0 lingo left a lasting psychological damage on developers' psyches. And some good memes related to it.
thunky 2 hours ago
> Claude has ruined me and I have a visceral reaction to ‘gates’ in the opening sentence and couldn’t get any further
So what you're saying is: because you've used Claude so much, you don't want other people to use it. And you reject them for using it.
A bit hypocritical don't you think?
sampullman 2 hours ago
There's a difference between using Claude and sharing its unfiltered output.
arthur-st an hour ago
What they're saying is that if something is not worth the time needed to write it, it's not worth the time needed to read it either.
thunky an hour ago
dstu an hour ago
I’ve never shared Claude text output with another human without explicitly flagging it as such. I believe my ability to communicate effectively in my own words is a large part of the value I offer and Claude’s writing (at least in relation to code) is so convoluted and malformed that I wouldn’t dream of attempting to pass it off as my own.
It has a utility in the same way that raw ingredients have a utility in a kitchen. The chef doesn’t just drop a messy pile of uncooked meat and vegetables onto your plate and tell you to figure it out. That’s exactly what people are doing when they vomit out a bunch of impenetrable slop and expect the reader to do the hard work of comprehending it on their behalf.
You can’t expect others to care about what you’re saying if you’ve not spent a moment considering how best to say it. The reader’s time is no less valuable than your own. If you think composing a readme for your project is worth zero minutes of your time, that’s the appropriate amount of time for readers to allocate to it.
For whatever it’s worth, I also cancelled my Claude subscription recently and shifted back to OpenAI solely because I find its outputs far more readable. I’ll even accept a slight hit on model performance as a trade-off. If I’m unwilling to read Claude-speak when I’m being paid an hourly rate, you can be sure I’m not reading it for free.
thunky an hour ago
scirob 4 hours ago
yes pls linguists track these word overuses and help us get rid. Everytime someone says Gate IRL i lose my train of thaught
ks2048 2 hours ago
Is that first diagram also pure slop? I would have to understand more of what they're doing to confidently say it is, but it seems odd.
All the four nodes on the right side have either only incoming or only outgoing arrows.
FrustratedMonky an hour ago
Typical marketing blocks in a power point. Not everything is AI slop, anymore than marketing has been 'slop'.
What? now I can't draw boxes and arrows without it being slop?
ks2048 an hour ago
aniviacat 3 hours ago
And yet it still contains what looks like human error, e.g. the "Software Components" table mixed up the columns for the database.
antonvs 3 hours ago
That's much more like an agent error than a human error.
It's quite common for LLMs to mix up values between columns in a table. It's often referred to as a structural hallucination, since it can happen with all kinds of relationships that form structures, not just columns in a table.
grey-area 2 hours ago
bsenftner 4 hours ago
Seriously? This is a professional assessment?
> If a tool is worth building and sharing, surely it’s also worth writing a brief summary of what it’s supposed to achieve in your own words?
Next the complaint will be any such description looks like AI slop.
antonvs 3 hours ago
Yes, it's a professional assessment. This page is 100% unedited slop, and it's unprofessional to publish something like this under the pretense that it's fit for human consumption.
singpolyma3 3 hours ago
We cant use single English words in their normal sense now without being told it's Claude?
antonvs 3 hours ago
Read the rest of the page. This is 100% unedited slop.
chrsw 3 hours ago
More like, sometimes when you publish slop it gets called out as slop.
moffkalast 2 hours ago
Thanks Claude. /s
fnordpiglet 27 minutes ago
I’m struggling to see why this is better than OWL/RDF and SparQL. Given the breadth and depth of semantic web knowledge in the corpus they do an amazing job discovering well established ontologies and building new ones on presented data and querying it with sparql. In fact better than almost anything I’ve seen. What an irony that the semantic web after all these years is likely to find a real use - it’s original one in fact.
grey-area 8 hours ago
Fixing unreliable agents by adding more unreliable agents. It's a shame we can't do something about the tendency of LLMs to give more weight to their weights than to the data they're analysing.
I guess it all comes back to the fact that they don't have a clear division between data they have learned about the world, instructions and data under analysis.
You can ask them only to consider the 5 facts in front of them, but they won't do that, and cannot do that.
IanCal 6 hours ago
> Fixing unreliable agents by adding more unreliable agents.
Depending on how you combine imperfect systems, you can lower or increase error rates.
> data they have learned about the world, instructions and data under analysis.
I don't think there really is a clear distinction between these things though.
And I don't mean this in a gotcha way - these things apply to people too. Not that that means they're like people, but we have successfully built enormous systems out of fallible people, and other imperfect things.
The goal is rarely "eliminate all errors" but "have a thing that's useful, given a possibility of things going wrong".
zbentley 2 hours ago
> I don't think there really is a clear distinction between these things though.
Computer systems, though, can have that distinction. If you read data supplied by the user, and then process it via behavior in code, and process that result against administratively-set data in the database, the separation between user-supplied data, administratively-configured data, and instructions (code) is extremely clear. Even if you are doing something that could be nondeterministic, e.g. incorporating randomness or doing sentiment analysis or whatnot.
I don't think the oft-repeated "AI is fallible just like humans are" applies here. Computer systems are an area where that separation can be achieved. We know this because we've achieved it a lot. LLMs, powerful as they are, are a massive step back in that regard. Their benefits might outweigh that compromise, but it is, as they say, "worth naming" anyway.
IanCal an hour ago
grey-area 6 hours ago
Depending on how you combine imperfect systems, you can lower or increase error rates.
Well, in principle yes one system can compensate for another, in practice, errors tend to compound and combine in interesting ways, not go away, particularly in systems like this which are unpredictable and generate slightly different responses each time without human intervention. They are not reliable in the way we're used to considering and don't work well without supervision from careful humans at present.
I don't think there really is a clear distinction between these things though.
Yes your second point is an interesting one - the divisions between these things are arbitrarily imposed on the world, but we do have these distinctions for a reason, even if they are not completely objective.
I do think this is a significant problem specific to LLMs though (that I at least see when using them) - we don't have a way to constrain them in what knowledge they consider. This can be a bonus (they are good at connecting faraway bits of maths in interesting ways), but it can be a significant problem when asking for a summary of a data - confabulations and data from outside the context easily leak into the output of the LLM. That is undesirable behaviour and we have no reliable way to constrain it.
I'm not sure that this particular effort is going to help because it doesn't change or constrain the behaviour of the actual machines and the behaviour is the problem, not the data they are fed.
IanCal 5 hours ago
Roark66 an hour ago
Yes, also I hate the direction "frontier" is taking now. Opus 5.5 may be better in agentic coding and reverse engineering, but it has regressed greatly in instruction following.
You can give it instructions and 5k tokens later it will do exact opposite you told it to.
another-dave 2 hours ago
> Fixing unreliable agents by adding more unreliable agents.
I think the 'reliability add' is from how it's presented back to the user. If you can trust the agent to at least say what tool it called, then you can mark a chart as being the canonical output of "get_projected_profit" tool vs "get_realised_profit" tool and everyone knows it hasn't come down to the current dice roll of randomness what the agent itself did this time.
filoeleven an hour ago
They are attempting to fix an inherent problem with the technology via epicycles.
podgorniy 4 hours ago
Reliable TCP was built on top of unreliable IP. Our body chemistry is another example of unreliable non-deterministic processes creating more deterministic outcomes. Yes, yes, it's all different. The common idea is the same: we can get reliable results out of unreliable systems.
latentsea 5 hours ago
> You can ask them only to consider the 5 facts in front of them, but they won't do that, and cannot do that.
Has training them to do it been tried and proven to fail?
grey-area 5 hours ago
I don't know enough about it, would welcome a more informed opinion on that, as a user it's the biggest issue with using them long-term IMO. Perhaps it is fixable somehow, and perhaps 'cannot do that' is a bit strong, what I meant was the current iteration of LLMs cannot do that.
mirekrusin 6 hours ago
I still prefer my own, simple and more functional CAVE lang [0]
smartmic 5 hours ago
Is this similar to Datalog where you have facts and rules?
mirekrusin 5 hours ago
Yes, and few other useful concepts beyond just Datalog.
timini 5 hours ago
why would i use this over some rdf / owl / sparql thing?
i want to use these semantic / KG tech but i find them so confusing!
mirekrusin 4 hours ago
because it doesn't suck :)
it's local first, agent-friendly tooling; you have single cli to access it (mcp is there as well if that's your thing)
everything is persisted in simple local text files that you can actually read (or sqlite database if you don't care / have more data)
ie there is no integration, k8s-style nonsense etc, you can just use it on project or on your system user level and know exactly what's there, you have control over it, you can delete it, move it, extract parts you find useful and move on etc
because it has first class support for uncertainty
evidence is first class concern
supports evolution of belief (statements can be revised, retracted etc. without destroying history)
knowledge is executable (rules, actions, automations – all operate on the same claim model)
it works well for knowledge that keeps changing (including support for querying knowledge as of some past time)
it's great for llm sessions, ie. simple things like comment on a claim being part of a claim itself, which means it appears when working with knowledge, which allows to support weird/human/natural-language aspects that are not directly part of the model
...
rdf/owl/sparql is great for large, public, structured datasets (ie. medical, scientific or some regulatory, standardized ontologies)
cave is great for evolving knowledge, ie. in most cases i use it by just dropping it in and forgetting about it – i don't care how/what llm will model, i just care it'll solve some problems faster when aiding itself with it as a tool; if i want some structured dataset out of it i may occasionally ask it to model it around homogeneous schema i can extract, but in most cases i really don't care
Catloafdev 29 minutes ago
I tapped out at the AI-isms in the readme.
Nvidia, I get you're all-in on AI, but please at least find a human to write some copy. It's both overly verbose and entirely lacking of important info at the same time.
HexDecOctBin 4 hours ago
I have a question for people with knowledge of both LLMs and GOFAI: Why can’t we use LLMs to write as many symbolic rules as needed to fit the data while keeping the ruleset reviewable and maintainable?
sudo-giusppe 4 hours ago
The amount of finite rules necessary (that the LLM will write) to handle the noise and complexity of real data generates such a dense graph that it breaks the premise of a human-maintainable and auditable system.
itishappy 2 hours ago
We can and do! Here's one you can help maintain and review!
hmokiguess 4 hours ago
Define reviewable and maintainable
igleria 6 hours ago
Was interested... but then realized it needs an NVIDIA api key?
matthieu_bl 5 hours ago
Shameless plug: we built our own open source equivalent of auto-ontology a few months ago, that doesn't require any API key but your LLM one (or none if you use your coding agent subscription)
igleria 2 hours ago
will check it out! also thanks to the others for the clarifications.
IanCal 6 hours ago
I've not tried running it but while it defaults to NVIDIA hosted endpoints but the readme suggests you can host those yourself if you want.
p_l 6 hours ago
You can self-host the LLMs involved, API key is only if you're using nvidia-hosted
monkeydust 5 hours ago
We spend a small fortune trying to get ontology right as it's so critical to real world success of enterprise AI. Curious if this could actually help us.
Hashtag-Ai 26 minutes ago
how to use it
einpoklum 6 hours ago
Open Source?
How about we start by open-sourcing the NVIDIA user-space libraries: libcuda, libcudart, libOpenCL, libnvtx, as well as nvidia-smi and the CUDA and OpenCL profilers.
podocarp 7 hours ago
I don't understand this ontology thing. What's the difference between this and a memory system plus skills to collect your enterprise's APIs and CLIs etc?
ForgotMyUUID 6 hours ago
Ontology is a so-called white-box approach for AI: all dependencies are clearly stated and formalised. If something does not work as you wish, unlike LLMs, in ontology world you can clearly diagnose where the system fails. I understood the NVIDIA's idea this way: we take unreliable LLM and make a "reliable" ontology using it. If you look back into history, Prolog , was exactly a sort of "memory system" or, better put, a human-friendly database. Ontology is a further development of this concept.
gb2d_hn 5 hours ago
What can an agent infer from this system that it can't infer from the codebase?
matthieu_bl 5 hours ago
IanCal 6 hours ago
One issue in a business is what does all the data actually mean? What are the various definitions and how do they relate to each other. What's a customer? Should that include people that have bought things, or anyone who is potentially buying? Do different systems use the same definitions, what are the columns, etc.
An ontology in this kind of context means a more precise machine readable spec of this and how it all relates to each other. You can totally build one by hand. The idea here is I think that it tries to figure it out itself and can take corrections over time, so you can ask natural language questions and get more reliable results rather than hoping an llm works out what "customers this month" means the same way each time over a wide span of data rather than having a much clearer API to work against.
gb2d_hn 5 hours ago
This is what the Matt Pocock /grill-with-docs solves. It helps to build a ubiquitous language that helps with domain modelling. This along with the codebase seems to help agents a lot. I'm not clear on how the Nvidia tool here improves on this, or how it is more reliable?
whatshisface 7 hours ago
A memory system is managed by the RL trained behavior, these systems use specific prompts and ordinary software to hardcode a policy. The RL version is usually more efficient, but it can't be improved or made more repeatable.
destepanov1 2 hours ago
Didn't expect Standard ML O_o
ex1fm3ta 2 hours ago
Nice is this Jensen Huang response's to Alex Karp recent statement on AI companies stealing people data with a subvention (token price) ? Because building ontologies is Palantir's core business.
bbor 6 hours ago
The readme seems to be written for enterprise project managers. Does anyone know what philosophy or academic ontology work this ties to, if any? I’m having trouble understanding the specifics, I’ll be honest…
antonvs 3 hours ago
This isn't really anything to do with ontology in the philosophical or academic sense, outside of computer science.
In software, an ontology is just a machine-readable definition of the entities in a system - their names, properties, relationships etc. This tool analyzes a system and produces such a definition for agents to use.
campervans 9 hours ago
Game changer for entreprise (technical) debt
HasanGilani 5 hours ago
Enterprise like technical debt