  Since the advent of Large Language Models a few years ago, they have often
been considered the de facto solution for many AI problems. However, in
addition to the many deficiencies of LLMs that prevent them from broad industry
adoption, such as reliability, cost, and speed, there is a whole class of
common real world problems that Large Language Models perform poorly on,
namely, constraint satisfaction and optimization problems. These problems are
ubiquitous and current solutions are highly specialized and expensive to
implement. At Elemental Cognition, we developed our EC AI platform which takes
a neuro-symbolic approach to solving constraint satisfaction and optimization
problems. The platform employs, at its core, a precise and high performance
logical reasoning engine, and leverages LLMs for knowledge acquisition and user
interaction. This platform supports developers in specifying application logic
in natural and concise language while generating application user interfaces to
interact with users effectively. We evaluated LLMs against systems built on the
EC AI platform in three domains and found the EC AI systems to significantly
outperform LLMs on constructing valid and optimal solutions, on validating
proposed solutions, and on repairing invalid solutions.
