The easy AI use cases are running out - Neo4j used Stranger Things data to show what comes next

With the final season of Stranger Things arriving, Neo4j has done something that may sound frivolous but turns out to be an interesting use case. It built HopperGraph, a system that analyzes fan theories from Reddit to predict which are most likely to prove accurate. The project draws on 150,000 posts, organized into 234,000 nodes and 1.5 million relationships – data points and the connections between them – and the methodology required to make it work has direct parallels to problems enterprises face with their own data.

Stephen Chin, Vice President of Developer Relations at Neo4j, explains that the project was designed to showcase graph database technology – databases built specifically to store and query relationships between data – in an accessible way. But the challenges his team encountered, and how they solved them, speak to broader questions about how organizations should architect AI systems when simple similarity search isn't ...