[gmfawcett]

From the article:

> Our Lisp services are conceptually a classical AI application that operates on huge piles of knowledge created by linguists and researchers. It’s mostly a CPU-bound program, and is one of the biggest consumers of computing resources in our network.

CPU-intensive processing is exactly the kind of work that the BEAM is lousy at handling. Elixir would be a terrible implementation language for this kind of thing.