[overfeed]

Good gods, I can't wait for a second AI winter. Maybe we'll come up with fundamental breakthroughs in a couple of decades and give it another college try?

For the folks who lived though it; were the Expert Systems boosters as insufferable in the 80s as the LLM people are now about the path to machine intelligence?

[dsr_]

No, because they mostly got military funding, not private equity.

ARPA would throw relatively large sums of money at you, but demand progress reports and a testable goal. Very little got rolled out based on hype. (Let's not talk about vehicle design.) If your project didn't show signs of working, or not enough signs of working, funding ended.

Anything which met goals and worked, we now think of as "automation" or "signal recognition" or "solvers", not "intelligent systems".