Is this simply a consequence of exponential growth in CS publications driven by machine learning or is there something really going on here?
The exponential growth in CS publication is much faster. This repository is simply a testament that CT is slowly ramping up.
It's meant to show what kind of expressive power and breadth current CT models have, which to my knowledge isn't something that's well-known outside of our niche community.
So ... yes?
And AGI is totally irrelavent here.
The OP GitHub site doesn't promote any material that introduces the concepts at all. The "survey" paper at the top is nigh-impenetrable. I'm sure the category theorists are having fun modelling machine learning, but it doesn't show how machine learning benefits from the category theory.
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- programming languages with semantics that are better adapted to specific problems (e.g. Rust's ownership);
- better compilers (see e.g. Haskell's supercompiler, which puts to shame `constexpr`-style features);
- better static analyzers (e.g. better type systems, abstract interpretation, model checkers).
In the case of Machine Learning, it might some day help us create Machine Learning that we can understand and trust better. Or it might fail. Or it might help us invent something different entirely, in 30 years.
I suspect that Apple is also using model-checking at various layers, but I have no proof :)
But it is my understanding that Rust's ownership traces its roots back to both linear logic (well, affine logic) and region-based resource management, both of which have formal semantics.
I haven't followed what got merged into GHC, but I remember seeing demos (and a paper) of a Haskell supercompiler during a conference many years ago, so it is something.
In my sleep-deprived brain, supercompilation is directly related to algebraic effects (although probably not in Haskell itself), which are themselves related to category theory. I could be wrong.
You're completely right that the repo doesn't promote any introductory material. CT is notoriously difficult to get into, and this repository wasn't meant to be a pedagogical one, but rather a list of all the relevant papers.
Though, I'll see about remedying this. I have a different repository that curates a list of (what I consider to be, as a CS major) relatively approachable CT introductory materials https://github.com/bgavran/Category_Theory_Resources
and it might be a good idea to add a pointer to it.
A lot of computer programmers who never studied Abstract Algebra or Type Theory before think that all of that is Category Theory because Haskell is their first exposure to all that, and Category Theory is a big meme in Haskell, thanks to Monad.