Why Agentic Systems Need Ontologies — Frank Coyle, UC Berkeley

Frank Coyle discusses the inherent flaws of purely probabilistic LLMs in agentic systems and proposes a neuro-symbolic solution. He advocates for wrapping LLM tool-use loops with external ontologies and validation mechanisms (like RDFS, OWL, and Pydantic) to provide logical guardrails, preventing common, critical errors that probabilistic reasoning alone cannot reliably avoid.