AI is all about data, and the representation of the data matters strongly. But after focusing primarily on 8-bit integers and 32‑bit floating-point numbers, the industry is now looking at new formats.

Any data that does not fall into the traditional field structure (alpha, numeric, dates) of a relational DBMS. Examples of complex data types are bills of materials, word processing documents, maps, ...

Microsoft on Thursday leaned more heavily into its support for “data types” within Excel, going beyond the staid concept of numbers and formulas to embrace a huge variety of elements that could reside ...