NEURO-SYMBOLIC AI

“Centaur AI” systems refer to the idea (going back to the 1950s) of AI systems designed to collaborate in a deeply symbiotic way with humans. The Institute strives to narrow the large current gap between today’s AI systems and this goal. Today’s dominant AI systems do not provide any fine-grained way for humans to understand and modify their innards, contributing to them in an essential way with their knowledge and preferences, rather than just selecting unknowably large datasets, hitting “go”, and hoping for the best. Further, the dominant mechanisms in those innards are alien-seeming and simplistic compared to human psychology and human ways to reason and solve sophisticated problems.

These mismatches between AI and human stand in the way of the potential for AI to reliably help humans solve their problems, great and small. We help to lead a growing movement around neuro-symbolic AI to develop the next generation of AI concepts and tools.