zlacker

A similar failure of GOFAI was ABBYY's (a Russian company which was for a long time market leader in OCR software) monumental (multi decade long) attempt of creating advanced translation software entirely based on complex formal grammar parsing.

The story behind it is really interesting. This article was written by someone who worked at ABBYY:

https://sysblok.ru/blog/gorkij-urok-abbyy-kak-lingvisty-proi...

The piece is in Russian but can (ironically) be read in good English by using e.g. the Google Translate feature inside Chrome. Which is of course entirely based on machine learning.

The story is essentially similar to Cyc: symbolic AI/logical AI/GOFAI can produce initially impressive results (ABBYY was way better than early forms of Google Translate), but symbolic approaches doesn't scale well. Big Data + machine learning wins out eventually. The piece above mentions a 2009 piece from Google which put forward this thesis. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data":

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

Note that 2009 was significantly before the existence of large language models, transformers, or even AlexNet.