[jasonwatkinspdx]

The "AI Winter" was largely caused by people realizing building better logic, chess, or similar analytical engines proves to be a poor model for human like intelligence. The current renaissance is due to Machine Learning / Deep Learning based essentially on statistical models.

In the specific context of language there was a famous debate between Chompsky and Norvig that touches on these themes: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

I believe events of recent years have not been kind to Chompsky's side of this debate. I'm less bullish on large language models turning into AGI than many people here, but I think if we do develop AGI it's a certainty it will be a based on probabilistic models, not logically consistent formalisms alone.

[andrepd]

But also not probabilistic models alone, that's the point.