[chillacy]

I don’t have enough knowledge to evaluate the idea that symbolic AI would scale as well as deep learning (or could I say statistical models in general?), but what has held back symbolic AI if not for the difficulty of making it work? Surely someone out there has tried in the past 5 years if the reward is that great.

[dreamcompiler]

It's mostly because symbolic AI is not fashionable. Most AI practitioners under 40 (and VCs) seem to think AI is DL and only DL.

[jedharris]

Google, Apple, etc. tried to make symbolic AI work for their problems but found it had intractable problems. Google fairly publicly transitioned to a deep learning approach for translation which greatly improved their results. Apple is still struggling to make the transition for Siri's question answering.

[chillacy]

How might symbolic AI become fashionable?