The Parable of the Neuro-Symbolic Drowning Man #SundayHarangue# In this well known parable, a deeply symbolic man, beset by the rising flood of activations caused by deep learning, goes up his roof and prays for help from his Neuro-Symbolic God. When he eventually drowns in the activations and goes to the gates of AGI, he sharply upbraids his God for not saving him from the tide of deep learning. God looks at him exasperatedly, and says, *I sent you the LLM rescue boat that sailed over the activations with a symbolic (linguistic) I/O powered by the civilizational symbolic knowledge. You looked away saying you are waiting for neuro-symbolic help. *I then sent you a Verifiers/Harness helicopter rescue, that leveraged procedural symbolic civilizational knowledge in a "Generate-Test" fashion to further fortify the LLM boat. You ignored that too, saying you will surely get neuro-symbolic help. What the heck more were you waiting for exactly, my foolish child? 🤦‍♀️

Simon's Ant & the Model vs. Harness debate #SundayHarangue# I can't help but be reminded of Simon's 🐜 parable while watching the recent debates on whether the "intelligence" is in the model or the harness. In his Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert Simon introduced the world's smartest ant to AI. He asks us to imagine this ant make his way across a wind- and wave-molded beach. Looking at its path, we see irregular angular segments--not quite random walk, for it has an underlying sense of goal-directedness. He then challenges us to think about the origin of this impressive complexity: Is it from the amazing mind of this super-intelligent ant, or just a simply dead-reckoning ant faced with an incredibly complex (and yet hopefully ergodic) environment? 1/