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Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM

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68 points rbanffy | 2 comments | 20 Nov 24 17:11 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Animats ◴[20 Nov 24 20:40 UTC] No.42197882[source]▶
The 1980s AI "boom" was tiny.

In the 1980s, AI was a few people at Stanford, a few people at CMU, a few people at MIT, and a scattering of people elsewhere. There were maybe a half dozen startups and none of them got very big.

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nyrikki ◴[20 Nov 24 21:07 UTC] No.42198110[source]▶
Quite incorrect, even smaller colleges like in Greeley Colorado had Symbolics machines and there are threads of Expert Systems all throughout the industry.

The industry as a whole was smaller though.

The word sense disambiguation problem did kill a lot of it pretty quickly though.

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1. Animats ◴[20 Nov 24 21:14 UTC] No.42198186[source]▶
Threads, yes. We had one Symbolics 3600, the infamous refrigerator-sized personal computer, at the aerospace company. But it wasn't worth the trouble. Real work was done with Franz LISP on a VAX and then on Sun workstations.

There were a lot of places that tried a bit of '80s "AI", but didn't accomplish much.

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2. nyrikki ◴[20 Nov 24 21:23 UTC] No.42198262[source]▶
2/3 of the fortune 100 companies used Expert Systems in their daily operations and knowledge bases survived.

I don't know how that can be dismissed as nothing.