Ideas & Field Notes

Stories from the Symbolia Labs Community

Dive into dispatches from our research sprints, reflections on policy and governance, and conversations with partners who are building human-centred AI in the field.

Featured

Next-Gen Capabilities

Five Capabilities Shaping the Next Generation of AI

July 2025

Artificial intelligence is edging toward a phase transition. The last decade showed that scale, data, and gradient descent can push a single frozen model impressively far; but also that a frozen model has, by definition, finished learning. The systems that will matter most over the next decade will be living systems: models that keep studying new material, decide what is worth remembering, negotiate multi-step goals, invent fresh problems when the old ones run out, and certify their own behaviour. We're on the cusp of a new paradigm, one defined by systems that are dynamic, trustworthy, perpetually learning, and more deeply integrated into the messy, ever-changing fabric of the real world.

Read the article

Alternate Paradigms

The Other AI Revolution

July 2025

While Large Language Models dominate the AI landscape, a growing group of researchers are exploring orthogonal paradigms. From physics-grounded inference and program synthesis to verified superintelligence and evolutionary model merging, these alternative approaches tackle fundamental limitations that scaling alone cannot address. This exploration reveals a diverse ecosystem of companies like Noumenal Labs, Ndea, Morph Labs, Sakana AI, and Liquid AI, each pursuing unique visions of intelligence that go beyond the traditional transformer architecture.

Read the article