Comment by mnky9800n
6 hours ago
I had a conversation the other day with someone whose main take was the only way forward with ai is to return to symbolic ai.
6 hours ago
I had a conversation the other day with someone whose main take was the only way forward with ai is to return to symbolic ai.
I used to think symbolic AI would become more important to modern AI, but I think that was just wishful thinking on my part, because I like it.
Now I think symbolic AI is more likely to remain a tool that LLM-based systems can make use of. LLMs keep getting better and better at tool use and writing scripts to solve problems, and symbolic AI is a great tool for certain classes of problems. But symbolic AI is just too rigid to be used most of the time.
What could intentional human input for that purpose accomplish that terabytes of data produced by humans can’t?
Novelty. No textual extrapolation of a historical encyclopedia can predict new discoveries by actual people working with their five senses.
This is not at all clear to me. Reminded of that joke of how "A month in the lab can save you an hour in the library", thinking about some of the best science in history, the researchers often had very strong theory-based belief in their hypothesis, and the experiment was "just" confirmation. Whereas the worst science has people run experiments without a good hypothesis, and then attach significance to spurious correlations.
In other words, while experiments are important, I believe we can get a lot more distance from thinking deeply about what we already have.
Intention I suppose.