Artificial Intelligence has long had the dream of making computers smarter. For quite some time, this vision has remained just that: a dream. With the development of large knowledge bases, though, we now have large amounts of semantic information at our hands. This changes the game of AI. Computers have indeed become smarter. In this talk, we present the latest developments in the field: The construction of general purpose knowledge bases (including YAGO and DBpedia, as well as NELL and TextRunner), and their applications to tasks that were previously out of scope, The extraction of fine-grained information from natural language texts, semantic query answering, and the interpretation of newspaper texts at large scale.