If you cannot share sensitive data with frontier models because your clients would go ballistic, you risk
being left behind. Unless, of course, you come up with a clever way to put the rapidly-evolving intelligence
of AI to work for you without ever needing to hand over your data...
I won't tell you specialized knowledge bases are the steam engines of an AI-based economy. Though I suspect they might be.
If you do too, yet you're unsure about how to turn the unstructured but hard-won knowledge of your human-focused business into
a highly-organized data-siloed engine of your own that can be intelligently queried with local AI,
here's downloadable software built to do just that.
From the desk of Stephen Carter, Ph.D.
If you're here because you have tested the evaluation version of Human Intelligence and you wish to purchase a license for it
and unlock the most useful features of the software, you can skip ahead and do so now.
Otherwise spend a little time with me as I try to get you across the finish line so that you can begin building the kind of
knowledge base that is likely to prove invaluable in the years to come as businesses become ever more dependent on the exchange
of curated intelligence.
"What Do I Get With A Lifetime License?"
Well, all the best stuff really, because that's what I left out of the evaluation version.
The lifetime license provides you with several nifty features that improve the quality of the knowledge bases you'll build
with Human Intelligence, and because of that they have the potential to be far more valuable to you and the audience
they serve.
Let's have a look at how working with Human Intelligence changes once you have a lifetime license.
Lifetime Usage Rights
First, and most importantly, a lifetime license gives you the right to use the software indefinitely. Well, technically the
license expires at the end of the century, but in software years, that's forever. And even then the software will keep
working if the technology that powers it still exists.
Human Intelligence is not free software, so if you are going to build something valuable with it you'll be wanting
to make sure you have the right to use the tool on which your asset is founded.
And don't forget that unlike software as a service, which you pay for month after month, and the availabity of which
is never guaranteed indefinitely (as SAAS businesses can change their terms of service, or disappear completely), this
software and any knowledge base you build with it, remains 100 percent under your control.
Both the software and the data live on your own servers. That means you cannot lose access to them.
A lifetime license affords you that expectation.
Better Extraction Strategies
Extracting data from complex documents is not an easy task.
But with a lifetime license you get access to several additional
extraction engines that can be used to pull images and tables from documents and keep them with their associated captions
so that they can be found as units when retrieved.
These additional extraction engines handle complex PDFs, Word documents, Open Office documents, and even Power Point presentations.
When you build your knowledge base with a richer underlying set of data you can expect your retrieval results to be
correspondingly richer and more revealing.
Protect Sensitive Data With Local Models
While you can integrate the evaluation version of Human Intelligence with a host of frontier models, this is much more of
a convenience measure than a sensible long-term strategy.
Frontier models can be retired. Their terms of use and token fee structure can change. They might even start behaving in different and
unexpected ways not fully compatible with your business.
In short, you have ZERO say in how frontier models might change over time.
You also don't know exactly what happens to your data when you send it off to a frontier model for interpretation, or to be transformed
into a searchable vector representation.
Local models on the other hand, though not nearly as capable as the frontier models, do not suffer from these control and privacy
concerns, as data sent to a model run locally on your servers never has to leave your company.
You might endure a speed penalty when you opt for using local models, but you do gain complete control over your data.
And if dealing with sensitive data is a real concern for you, then running your own local models is really the only
sensible approach here.
With a lifetime license you will be able to connect Human Intelligence to most locally-hosted OpenAI-compatible inference
and embedding models.
Next Level Querying
The ultimate motivation for building a quality knowledge base is that you get to query it in real time to extract information about
your business that otherwise would be rather difficult to do.
The evaluation version uses a fairly vanilla but effective form of RAG (retrieval augmented retrieval) to find information in your
knowledge base that is semantically similar to your query.
That approach works quite well for simple queries. But a more sophisticated strategy is called for when queries become more complex.
To handle these more nuanced queries Human Intelligence makes use of an Intelligent Retrieval strategy that involves
parsing the query into subqueries and finding the best matching documents for the subqueries before feeding the results to a chat
model for answer synthesis.
Intelligent Retrieval is one of the benefits of running the application with a lifetime license.
API Capability
Members can be added manually with the evaluation version. But if you want to add them programmatically in response to events outside
the domain of the application, you can do so with the Human Intelligence application programming interface, or API.
Currently the API is very limited in capability, but if programmatic member access is a priority, a lifetime license provides you with
an easy way to impement it.
"What If I Change My Mind?"
If you are still deliberating over whether or not you want to secure the right to use this software indefinitely, then I suggest
it's probably not a good idea. Not if you're unsure.
That's because this is not a get your money back offer.
All sales are final, as you should expect of a lifetime licensing offer.
It's the reason I went to the trouble of developing an evaluation version of Human Intelligence – one that you could install on your
server – is that I want you to be sure the software does what it is advertised to do before you commit to using it long-term.
In other words, the ability to build a knowledge base using a completely private strategy either strikes you as a valuable opportunity
well worth the asking price of a permanent license to do so, or it doesn't, and you should hold off until you're confident that it does.
So, if for some reason you have NOT already installed the software and spent time convincing yourself of its worth to you, please do that first.
Otherwise, if you are a serious knowledge base builder ready to implement the advanced capabilities of the software, I would love to have you
as my next Human Intelligence success story.
