I had a conversation the other day with someone whose main take was the only way forward with ai is to return to symbolic ai.
Now I think symbolic AI is more likely to remain a tool that LLM-based systems can make use of. LLMs keep getting better and better at tool use and writing scripts to solve problems, and symbolic AI is a great tool for certain classes of problems. But symbolic AI is just too rigid to be used most of the time.
In other words, while experiments are important, I believe we can get a lot more distance from thinking deeply about what we already have.