Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. In this episode, we talk about collective intelligence, human

computation, and really the mapping out of knowledge with data ontologies in particular and how

data ontologies enable scalable knowledge creation, both in philosophical terms and also in a very

real practical way in terms of, for example,

a doctor making a diagnosis for a patient.

Joining us on this episode are Luis von Anne, founder of Recapsia and Duolingo, known for his work

on human computation.

He's the first voice you'll hear.

Jay Komarnanii, founder of Human DX, the Human Diagnosis Project, Vijay Pande, A16Z's general partner from the bioteam,

who has also founded Folding at Home, a distributed computing project for disease research, jumping in,

and moderated by A16Z's Malinka Wallaliaade.

So what exactly is a data ontology anyway?

Ontology is basically a way to add order to a huge amounts of data. You can think of Wikipedia

as a huge ontology. You can think of, you know, even Google search as some sort of very large

ontology. A lot of the things that are, quote, unquote, called AI, or artificial intelligence,

a lot of times are just fancy ontologies.

They're used in medicine.

They're used in almost every aspect of our lives.

The idea of an ontology actually originally comes from philosophy.

And really, it's the philosophical study of the nature of being and kind of what is real and what isn't real.

The famous philosopher Wittgenstein, really talks about how

the limits of language are the limits of our world. And the way that we actually encode, structure,

...