mwelt's comments

Comparing "rigid formal grammar-based models" (whatever that might actually mean for now) to machine learning is like comparing apples to bananas. The former one is a rigorous syntactical formalization, aimed at being readable by machine and humans alike. The latter one is a learned interpolation of a probability distribution function. I do not see a single way to compare these two "things". Nevertheless, I may guess, what you actually are trying to say: Annotating data by hand (the syntax is completely irrelevant) is inferior to annotating data by machine learning. And this claim is at least debatable and domain-dependent. There are domains where even a 3% false-positive rate translates to "death of a human being in 3 out of 100 identified cases", and there are domains where it's to much work to formalize every bits and pieces of the domain and extracting (i.e. learning) knowledge is a feasible endeavor. I have experience in both fields, and I dare to say, that extracting concepts and relations out of text in a way that it can be further processed and used for some kind of decision process is way more complicated than you might imagine, and GPT-3 et al. do not achieve that.

As you put the word Reasoning in quotation marks, I might misunderstand your bottom line here (I am Autistic, so please do not get quirky on natural language semantics), but the bare statement: "Reasoning can be added to any conventional database" is just not right. Reasoning is a well-defined notion from logic, that is based on formal languages, semantics and a relation called entailment (inference in proof theory) respectively. None of that does natively exist in a database. In the literature, there are two well-known ways for integrating a notion of reasoning into a database. Firstly, Datalogic was invented to create recursive queries. Datalogic's relation to reasoning was a side-effect, and it only covers a fragment based on horn clauses. On the other hand there's OWL-DL a (limited) fragment of OWL, that encodes some kind of reasoning via query expansion on vanilla SQL-Queries. So maybe you can elaborate on the notion of "using views, and sometimes custom indices to add reasoning to a conventional database".