> Basically every academic AI researcher in history was doing what you described.

That is not true. Alan Turing did not view things that way, his test would say that a dog has zero intelligence. Neither did any of the MIT Lispers. And neither do Lecun or Sutskever or Sutton! They are all focused on human intelligence. None of them are even slightly concerned about an AI which is intelligent before it learns any language.

> the only thing in 80 years that actually seems to work at any useful level

This isn't true either! Mathematica / Maple / etc are "old-fashioned AI" and they obviously work. The Lisp expert systems were also useful, though less so than an LLM.