Some impressions from my remote participation at #AAAI2024: #LLMs have become inescapable, but many researchers are just using them as a building block. Others do some praise of LLMs, then tell what they are really interested in, and then continue their praise of LLMs. In particular, LLM critics is sometimes wrapped into praise. Nevertheless, the panel about impact of LLMs has been very good and the talk by #PascaleFung about LLM hallucinations clearly exposed the limitations of those systems. ⤵️

The invited talk by #LeslieKaelbling has been excellent. She was able to find a justification of many classic #AI ideas within the current discourse and gave a robot demo that had some of the spirit of the good old demo of #Shakey the robot.

The invited talk by #YannLeCun has been interesting in the sense that he is opening up to ideas such as online optimization (i.e. at the time of acting).

I also liked the panel in honor of #DougLenat and the information that was given about #Cyc. ⤵️

Nevertheless, I felt that there have been less presentations at #AAAI2024 about classic #AI topics such as #ConstraintSatisfaction, #KnowledgeRepresentation and #Reasoning, #Planning, #Scheduling, #Search and so on. I only hope that these topics will not end like rule-based systems, which are nowadays used in many business applications, but largely ignored in academia. On the positive side, there has been a good number of presentations about economic paradigms and game theory.