Get the latest tech news

o3 and Grok 4 accidentally vindicate neurosymbolic AI

Neurosymbolic AI is quietly winning. Here’s what that means – and why it took so long

One is the neural network or “connectionist” tradition which goes back to the 1940s and 1950s, first developed by Frank Rosenblatt, and popularized, advanced and revived by Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio (along with many others, including most prominently, Juergen Schmidhuber who rightly feels that his work has been under-credited), and brought to current form by OpenAI and Google.Such systems are statistical, very loosely inspired by certain aspects of the brain (viz. Instead, until very recently, the consistent move by mainstream machine learning had been to try to derive all that is needed from data, without any recourse at all to symbolic systems such as traditional computer code, databases, etc., aiming to replace explicit representation with black boxes. To the extent that we are stuck for now with untrustworthy LLMs that nobody can quite control, rapidly enshittifying the internet with botshit and replacing humans with systems that can’t be relied on, it is in part because we have spent too much energy pursuing the pure neural net black box approach, and not enough into looking at alternatives.

Get the Android app