RESEARCH

I've followed Gary since reading his 2019 book Rebooting AI and while I focus much of my work on building AI tools that help lawyers and believe in the benefits of using AI in a law practice, Gary's regular reality checks on the limits of the technology are not to be dismissed. This post was a pleasant surprise as it suggests the field is starting to improve in the ways Gary's been urging for years. Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) Claude Code is not AGI, but it is the single biggest advance in AI since the LLM. But the thing is, Claude Code is NOT a pure LLM. And it’s not pure deep learning. Not even close. And that changes everything. The source code leak proves it. Tucked away at its center is a 3,167 line kernel called print.ts. print.ts is a pattern matching. And pattern matching is supposed to be the *strength* of LLMs. But Anthropic figured out that if you really need to get your patterns right, you can’t trust a pure LLM. They are too probabilistic. And too erratic. Instead, the way Anthropic built that kernel is straight out of classical symbolic AI. For example, it is in large part a big IF-THEN conditional, with 486 branch points and 12 levels of nesting — all inside a deterministic, symbolic loop that the real godfathers of AI, people like John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky and Herb Simon, would have instantly recognized.* Putting things differently, Anthropic, when push came to shove, went exactly where I long said the field needed to go (and where @geoffreyhinton said we didn’t need to go): to Neurosymbolic AI. That’s right, the biggest advance since the LLM was neurosymbolic. AlphaFold, AlphaEvolve, AlphaProof, and AlphaGeometry are all neurosymbolic, too; so is Code Interpreter; when you are calling code, you are asking symbolic AI do an important part of the work. Claude Code isn’t better because of scaling. It’s better because Anthropic accepted the importance of using classical AI techniques alongside neural networks — precisely marriage I have long advocated. It’s *massive* vindication for me (go see my 2019 debate with Bengio for context, or to my 2001 book, The Algebraic Mind), but it still ain’t perfect, or even close. What we really need to do to get trustworthy AI rather than the current unpredictable “jagged” mess, is to go in the knowledge-, reasoning-, and world-model driven direction I laid out in 2020, in an article called the Next Decade in AI, in which neurosymbolic AI is just the *starting point* in a longer journey.* Read that article if you want to know what else we need to do next. The first part has already come to pass. In time, other three will, too. Meanwhile, the implications for the allocation of capital are pretty massive: smartly adding in bits of symbolic AI can do a lot more than scaling alone, and even Anthropic as now discovered (though they won’t say) scaling is no longer the essence of innovation. The paradigm has changed. — *Claude Code is plainly neurosymbolic but the code part is a mess; as Ernie Davis and I argued in Rebooting AI in 2019, we also need major advances in software engineering. But that’s a story for another day. — https://nitter.net/GaryMarcus/status/2042987819333738929#m

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