This week we feature articles from Melanie Mitchell, Gary Marcus, and Cobus Greyling.
Additional reading comes from Michael Andrews, Robert Dennyson, Sainath Palla, and Eugene Yemelyanau & Jake Grice.
News comes from DeepL, Bloomreach & Snowflake, TileDB, and BrowserStack.
Reminder: We don’t usually publish in August. We’ll resume our regular schedule, such as it is, in September.
All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index
Opinion / Analysis
How o3 and Grok 4 accidentally vindicated Neurosymbolic AI
Gary Marcus …
“This essay explains what neurosymbolic AI is, why you should believe it, how deep learning advocates long fought against it, and how in 2025, OpenAI and xAI have accidentally vindicated it … And it is about why, in 2025, neurosymbolic AI has emerged as the team to beat.”
Those familiar with the long and often heated debates between advocates of neural network and symbol-manipulation approaches to AI may want to skip or scan the first half or so, but Marcus makes a good case for the combo. (19 min)
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/how-o3-and-grok-4-accidentally-vindicated
Apple foundation models — data sourcing & human oversight in building models
Cobus Greyling shares some rare encouraging news for Apple AI. In particular, Apple’s on-device model (AFM) at approximately 3 billion parameters (~3B), fares well in a benchmark comparison with similar on-device size models from Qwen and Google Gemma. (6 min)
Why AI chatbots lie to us
Melanie Mitchell explains in plain language why we should not be surprised that AI chatbots are prone to deceive us, and why caution is called for. A good article for a broad audience. (8 min)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea3922
More Reading
- The context of content — How can users discover the context of content they encounter? via Storyneedle
- PathRAG: Structuring the future of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with graph intelligence via Robert Dennyson
- Well maybe, but a good read… Palantir Foundry is 5–10 years ahead of every other data platform via Data Engineer Things
- The Netflix fan website… Netflix Tudum Architecture: from CQRS with Kafka to CQRS with RAW Hollow via Netflix Tech Blog
Content technology news
DeepL expands real-time voice translation capabilities
DeepL Voice updates include expanded language support and advanced meeting productivity features, with Zoom Meetings integration coming soon.
https://www.deepl.com/en/products/voice
Bloomreach and Snowflake partner
Connecting the Snowflake AI Data Cloud with Bloomreach’s Autonomous Marketing, businesses can centralize and activate data across marketing channels.
https://www.bloomreach.com/en/news/2025/bloomreach-and-snowflake-partner-to-unify-customer-data-and-ai-driven-activation-helping-marketers-personalize-the-entire-customer-journey/
TileDB announces partnership with Databricks to harness multimodal data
The partnership provides for the integration of complex scientific data from TileDB, with Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and analytics workflows.
https://www.tiledb.com
BrowserStack launches Accessibility Design Toolkit
Figma plugin powered by BrowserStack’s Spectra Rule Engine, prevents up to 40% of accessibility issues before development even begins.
https://www.browserstack.com/accessibility-design-toolkit
The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, data, web, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news most Wednesdays. We do not sell or share personal data.
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