Symbolic reasoning may still be alive…
Hallucinations, factual errors, a decrease in public interest, and a plunge in investment —all of these and more have been mentioned recently in news and comments that look like the harbinger of a serious setback for Generative AI. Some have even called for the demise of the AI “bubble,” something they “predicted a long time ago.”
In this post, I discuss how the current hurdles of Generative AI systems could be (have been?) mitigated with the help of the good old symbolic reasoning.
But let’s first explain those current hurdles.
Take, for instance, something as basic as arithmetic. I asked yesterday to ChatGPT how much is the cubic root of 123,456.78, getting 49.3989 as the answer. Then I asked ChatGPT to multiply 49.3989 by itself two times, supposedly getting back to my 123,456.78 number, and –no kidding– ChatGPT came with 123,456.78 as a result, supposedly verifying the correctness of its operation. I could have believed it, but just to be sure, I made the operation with a calculator and multiplying 49.3989 by itself two times got 120,545.73, which is almost 3,000 units away from the intended result. That means, of course, that the first operation (the cubic root) was wrong in the…