Ask HN: Will there ever be a resurgence of interest in symbolic AI?
Employee of Cycorp here. Aside from the current ML hype-train (and the complementary unfashionability of symbolic AI), I think the reason symbolic AI doesn't get as much attention is that it's much more "manual" in a lot of ways. You get more intelligent results, but that's because more conscious human thought went into building the system. As opposed to ML, where you can pretty much just throw data at it (and today's internet companies have a lot of data). Scaling such a system is obviously a major challenge. Currently we support loading "flat data" from DBs into Cyc - the general concepts are hand-crafted and then specific instances are drawn from large databases - and we hope that one day our natural language efforts will enable Cyc to assimilate new, more multifaceted information from the web on its own, but that's still a ways off.I (and my company) believe in a hybrid approach; it will never be a good idea to use symbolic AI for getting structured data from speech audio or raw images, for example. But once you have those sentences, or those lists of objects, symbolic AI can do a better job of reasoning about them. Pairing ML and symbolics, they can cover each other's weaknesses.