Neurosymbolic

That’s not even considering approaches that move away from deep learning—neurosymbolic AI, pure expert systems, or even fundamentally new paradigms—which would break the logic of scaling.

Now, however, the computer-science community is pushing hard for a better and bolder melding of the old and the new. ‘Neurosymbolic AI’ has become the hottest buzzword in town. Brandon Colelough, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park, has charted the meteoric rise of the concept in academic papers (see ‘Going up and up’). These reveal a spike of interest in neurosymbolic AI that started in around 2021 and shows no sign of slowing down.

Expect to hear a lot more about neurosymbolic AI, which attempts to merge existing data-driven neural networks with rules-based symbolic AI.