6 DeepMind's interesting new MEMO architecture (Banino et al., 2020) comes close to representing a 
database of records.  

 

 

 

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THE NEXT DECADE IN AI / GARY MARCUS 

them in everyday cognition is immense. And in fact, as I will discuss below, things are 
finally starting to change, with hints of a new, broader pragmatism that I hope will 
overcome prior dogma.  

The first major claim this essay is this: To build a robust, knowledge-driven approach to 
AI we must have the machinery of symbol-manipulation in our toolkit. Too much of 
useful knowledge is abstract to make do without tools that represent and manipulate 
abstraction, and to date, the only machinery that we know of that can manipulate such 
abstract knowledge reliably is the apparatus of symbol-manipulation.  

Alas, by themselves7, the apparatus of operations over variables tells nothing about 
learning.
The Next Decade in AI-