About whether AI can turn plain English into structured, actionable data and back.
Has this happened?
Yes 83 (69%)Not sure 31 (26%)No 7 (6%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether AI can turn plain English into structured, actionable data and back.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
What i'm looking for from NLP is the classic holy grail i guess _(Ie, i know i'm asking a lot)_. To be able to translate english to and from actionable data.
A lot of companies like wit.ai are harnessing the power of machine learning, and having customers/users contribute heavily to this.
I'd love to see a service like OpenAI provide open source offerings to help the community grow language understanding together. Think of wit.ai, but fully open source and with the machine learned result downloadable - usable offline, licensed freely, etc.
Machine Learning for NLP has so many powerful private offerings, but i'm not aware of a single open source one. Especially one that you could run offline on your own servers.