zlacker

>>snewma+(OP)
Doug Lenat, RIP. I worked at Cycorp in Austin from 2000-2006. Taken from us way too soon, Doug none the less had the opportunity to help our country advance military and intelligence community computer science research.

One day, the rapid advancement of AI via LLMs will slow down and attention will again return to logical reasoning and knowledge representation as championed by the Cyc Project, Cycorp, its cyclists and Dr. Doug Lenat.

Why? If NN inference were so fast, we would compile C programs with it instead of using deductive logical inference that is executed efficiently by the compiler.

>>symbol+nx
Exactly. When I hear books such as Paradigms of AI Programming are outdated because of LLMs, I disagree. They are more current than ever, thanks to LLMs!

Neural and symbolic AI will eventually merge. Symbolic models bring much needed efficiency and robustness via regularization.

>>nextos+BJ
If you want to learn about symbolic AI, there are a lot of more recent sources than PAIP (you could try the first half of AI: A Modern Approach by Russel and Norvig), and this has been true for a while.

If you read PAIP today, the most likely reason is that you want a master class in Lisp programming and/or want to learn a lot of tricks for getting good performance out of complex programs (which used to be part of AI and is in many ways being outsourced to hardware today).

None of this is to say you shouldn't read PAIP. You absolutely should. It's awesome. But its role is different now.