The half-life of AI knowledge

The article argues that AI knowledge decays at different rates across layers: tools and products last months to a couple of years, techniques a few years, architectures five to ten years, and core ideas decades. It cites examples such as OpenAI's Agent Builder shutdown, the expiry of chain-of-thought prompt phrasing, and the long lineage of gradient descent (1847) and backpropagation (1986). It recommends learning threshold concepts so new releases read as variations on ideas already understood.