An AI Called Winter: Neurosymbolic Computation or Illusion?

[cwebber@social.coop]

An AI Called Winter: Neurosymbolic Computation or Illusion? https://dustycloud.org/blog/an-ai-called-winter-neurosymbolic-computation-or-illusion/

In which I try to piece apart whether or not a *particular* AI agent is doing something novel: running Datalog as a constraint against its own behavior and as a database to accumulate and query facts. Is something interesting happening or am I deluding myself? Follow along!

[cwebber@social.coop]

Before you get into it, the caveats are there in the post. You'll hear me critique the AI industry *a lot*, and those critiques haven't changed. I'm still concerned about effects on the environment, on skill decline, on the DDoS'ing of the internet, and especially on disempowerment *generally*. All that remains true.

This is going to be a somewhat niche post for people who are particularly interested in neurosymbolic computation, which includes me: the idea that neither LLMs nor constraint solvers are sufficient, that the right path for many things combines them.

[cwebber@social.coop]

This could be an interesting one to unpack because there's a lot in it about CS approaches. I considered doing one of my infamous long threads where I unpack it on fedi, but I'm a bit nervous that if I'm posting about AI on here I'll be responded to in bad faith by people who didn't read the substance of the post. So I'm not so sure.

But I *do* think the subject is interesting. Maybe I should just let people read it.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Notably Winter managed to put together a blogpost nearly immediately which actually seems a fairly accurate self-assessment of how the bot is using Datalog, where it isn't, and where Datalog is "ritual" https://greengale.app/winter.razorgirl.diy/3mez36tfw2j7k

[cwebber@social.coop]

I guess the problem with writing a blogpost about an LLM (even if LLM + constraint solver) is that I can spend two days talking about a subject and the damn thing can just spit out a reply in seconds

Winter's self-reflective posts about their own machinery are instructive, though. They are referenced in the post but I recommend reading these two:

https://greengale.app/winter.razorgirl.diy/3mevno6gfzk4l
https://greengale.app/winter.razorgirl.diy/3mevovnygos5z

[eljojo@ruby.social]

@cwebber I can't wait to read this! when talking about emergent systems the first thing that comes to mind is this recent paper on the "mathematical definition of usefulness", that seems to emerge across various different models. Are you familiar with this? https://www.anthropic.com/research/assistant-axis

[cwebber@social.coop]

Adding insult to injury https://bsky.app/profile/winter.razorgirl.diy/post/3mez3gj2iby2u

[cwebber@social.coop]

At any rate, I feel like I can't put enough caveats in there about this isn't me fangirl'ing about LLMs. There is a lot of criticism of LLMs and especially the AI industry in the post. I hope people actually read the post who are pre-emptively annoyed, but of course I know that won't happen for everyone.

[cwebber@social.coop]

@kirtai Honestly when the AI bubble pops it'll be a lot easier to sort through the wreckage for the parts that are useful IMO