One Man's Dream of Fusing A.I. With Common Sense

The ultimate goal, in Dr. Ferrucci's view, is that A.I. becomes a trusted "thought partner," a skilled collaborator at work and at home, making suggestions and explaining them. Elemental Cognition, founded in 2015, is taking measured steps toward that goal with a promising, though unproven, hybrid approach. Its system combines the latest developments in machine learning with a page from the A.I.'s past, software modeled after human reasoning. Newer machine learning programs are remarkable at pattern recognition and predictions, far more powerful than in the "Jeopardy!" They pore through millions of words and word patterns, and generate the most likely interpretations.