There may soon be a new kind of artificial intelligence in town, one that uses a novel approach to thinking that could save massive amounts of computing power and money.

The AI that most people use every day, like ChatGPT, Claude or Google Gemini, relies on large language models that can work through difficult problems step by step. While this may ultimately give us the answers we are searching for, the process can increase response times and use a lot of computing power.

So scientists at AI company Pathway decided to test an alternative approach. The research and technical foundations of the team’s work are in a paper posted on the arXiv preprint server.