AI's modern synthesis

Darwin’s ideas about natural selection and Mendel’s ideas about inheritance had both been circulating since the 1860s. Darwin’s ideas were controversial and fell out of fashion; Mendel was forgotten for years. It wasn’t until work in the 1920s-50s brought the two ideas together that biology had a clear idea of what was happening and how it happened.

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AI is currently very fashionable, but it’s disconnected from the stores of facts that computers have historically been so good at creating and maintaining. LLMs currently don’t retrieve accurate data, much less generate new knowledge. Their generative power needs to be synthesized with approaches that accurately model complex knowledge domains.