Expert systems actually work and, while we don’t normally even call them “expert systems” any more, are important in basically every domain – “business rules engines” are generalized expert system platforms, and are widely used in business process automation.)
Despite how well they work, and early optimism resulting from that about how much further they’d be able to go, they ran into limits; it is not implausible that the same will turn out to be true for LLMs (or even transformer-based models more generally.)
> We’re at the beginning of LLMs, and systems which use LLMs as components. This is the fun time for the technology. Ten years out, it will be boring, like Java.
…and expert systems. (And, quite possibly, by then they will have revealed their fundamental, intractable llimitations, like expert systems.)